Thirty years ago when you needed to install new computers in an office I remember it took us weeks to get the cable (Ethernet) installed because one contractor had to pull the cable and cut it at each workstation, another contractor had to come and put the connector on the cable and yet another had to come and plug the cable into the machine. Believe me we were tempted to sneak in one weekend and do the whole thing ourselves but were severely warned about the consequences. So what could have been done in a day by one or two guys took over a month because you couldn't even schedule the second service until the first was done. I imagine this kind of thing is everywhere when it comes to building real infrastructure.
Yes, my partner was a conference planner and whenever they had one in NYC in the Time offices their team wasn't allowed to adjust tables by themselves, everything had to be done by formal work order tickets and only union hands could touch anything, even equipment they owned and brought in themselves.
Coincidentally, this new infrastructure bill has union requirements for any EV work.
Maybe a US union thing. The reason why US unions (and also other workers) are so protectionist is that there are high risks connected with job loss. If you provide a good security net as a country, where people don't loose everything when they loose their job and can get back on their feet, people also don't go as far with shenanigans to keep their jobs. You rarely hear about this kind of things from unions in Europe.
It's more likely an elite capitalist thing. Some boss somewhere plays golf at an exclusive club with a regular foursome. He has some work to be done, and each of his three buddies get a slice. They have some friends that could also get a cut. The end result is the golden shower that trickles down. The shops might be unionized, but the contracts are signed at the clubhouse while a boy brings the single malt and cubans.
In real life it’s even worse. None of the suppliers actually show up, they ramp up the price and deliver a failing product. Then they all blame the previous guy.
30 years ago, I asked to see how the cable was made. In a hour I was making cable drops and running the cable. Using 25 conductor cable, configuring pins 2,3,7 it was nothing to cable 4 PCs in each of 2 offices in a day. Nevermind the cable ran across florescent lighting, etc. Later that week I learned to check the runs were less than a certain length from the computer room. But primarily I wrote software.
I was a management consultant ages ago and worked on large capital projects. In my experience (as the article mentions) it was a mix of:
1. Red tape & public "input"
2. Layers of contractors and subcontractors, each taking their slice
3. No real incentives for governments to be cost sensitive. Usually capital projects last well into the next administration.
4. Too many cooks in the kitchen and consultations
Yeah my first reaction to this was "Oh it's going to be the public". Because the US has strong rights and legal system basically anyone can come along and considerably screw up a project just by claiming some endangered bat is living in the path of it, or some economic harm will be done, or some community will be damaged, it's far easier to just to just stick planning notice on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard.'
A great example of this is in the UK where the main road going east to west from london to cornwall is a single carriage way with 2 lanes going past one of the country's most historic sites (stone henge). It's a fucking disaster. So the plan is to build a massive tunnel under stone henge to help traffic and remove the blotch on this area of historic importance. It's expected to cost £1.7Bn but it's already been completely tied up in legal fights, it was proposed over 25 years ago (when it was already desparately needed). Essentially plenty of people either don't want it built at all (presumably just accepting that we'll never ever be able to have economic in england west of stonehenge) or they want a tunnel that is several times longer than the proposal sending costs and construction time soaring.
What you could do, if you were Turkey, you could just built a 12 lane motorway and shove stonehenge a few miles north. It'd be cheaper.
Stonehenge isn’t that big. I don’t know what the surrounding area is like, but isn’t it an option to build the road around it? With compulsory purchases of properties along the way, if necessary.
These are all things, but they're things in other countries, too. France has strong unions and subcontractors and bureaucrats and all of that. And yet it costs less there.
On a recent episode of the Ezra Klein show, Jerusalem Demsas argued that part of the problem is that the bureaucrats in the US are too constrained in their powers, so e.g. when weighing an infrastructure project against wildlife protection laws, it's not a bureaucratic organisation making a final decision on how to proceed with minimal impact, but it's private organised interest groups litigating without any limits on re-litigation, and a ruling that does not necessarily weigh the public interest of having projects proceeding towards completion.
I think it's a mistake to think of european unions and american unions as "the same thing". Relationships with unions in the US seem much more adversarial than there, on average.
As you say, there are politics, labor relations, etc. in europe too - I wonder if they are just better at cooperating on this sort of project for some reason?
French bureaucracy has the expertise in house to do high level planning rather than having a subcontractor do it. They're also a lot more insulated than US bureaucracies from the vagaries of political turnover. And they're more often dealing with laws written ahead of time rather than things that can't be decided without a court decision.
My broad impression is that in the EU and the US, a given project is a "meal" that all the interests involved will take a cut out of.
But in the EU or elsewhere, the "cut" the interests will take is just financial, the project will be designed for cost-efficiency by competent architects and engineers and it's just that the different interests will be paid off with money to make things happen.
In the US, the spread-out state and administrative structure results in a situation where each interest gets it's cut through its ability to make some small change or demand some particular process. A lot of this involves a lot of adversarial relations, some of them intended to stop corruption but which actually result inefficiency and corruption (complex bidding processes legal repercussions for failure to adhere to bid etc. etc.).
California spending $3 billion planning ("planning") a high speed rail system is good example. A lot of that involved buying land whose value had inflated.
I have seen some public transportation work up close in the USA -- "me first" and competition between different teams ate up quite a bit of the (expensive) time.. lots of very competent, skilled people and also quite cynical and profit-seeking management. The actions of management were sometimes directly contradictory to recommendations by hard-working staff. Worse, management that tried to get things done quickly were pushed out by others who were better at looking good (or something else I dont know about).
The old expression "we have the worst system in the world, except for all the others" .. comes to mind
edit- I would like to point to NORESCO in particular as a sponge-like entity with a long history of failed, expensive projects and a long pipeline of new funding, based on what I saw with my own eyes.
The old expression "we have the worst system in the world, except for all the others" .. comes to mind
That's what (I think) Winston Churchill said about democracy (might be true there). But here, I think you can just say "we have the worst system". Period. The US has a variety of sectors (public works, health care, etc) which aren't just bad but fated to get worse and worse through both through the particular way US ruling interests deal with each other. Each solution introduces more pork interests since each solution follows the haphazard paradigm.
For example; I think Yimby ("yes in my back yard") proposals have aimed to facilitate development in at transit hubs, a worthy seeming cause. But since there's no California state transit plan, this approach has to define "transit hub" haphazardly - "there's currently a bus stop there". This allows those aiming to sink a development to do so by removing the bus stop. Or oppositely, allows someone to facilitate a development by adding an otherwise unneeded bus stop. I'm not sure if this approach was implemented but just proposal illustrates the inherent problem of trying to solve transfic/housing/development problems by tossing random legislation at them.
I think in-sourcing management expertise to the public agencies would save a lot of money. Management consultants are expensive and their incentives are in conflict with public projects.
In my experience with construction projects, legal costs and liabilities take the cake. Once something is in court, there is zero telling how long and how much money it takes to resolve.
Once the US had railroad companies that laid rail at a mile per day (mostly crap rail, but enough to count), that was when the incentives were all aligned, and a huge amount of resources were mobilized and ready to deploy.
Once the US pulled of the completely absurd task of putting a man on the moon and then returning him safely to earth, in less than a decade. All the incentives were aligned, it had public support, and a huge amount of resources were mobilized and ready to deploy.
We're not deploying huge resources on our infrastructure projects, we're piecemealing them. I've got a branch rail line going in at the end of my street. [1] The public input/planning process went on for years, and only now are they starting to relocate utilities, put up fences, etc. There's no one entity in charge of all the layers of the project, it's all hired contractors and inter-agency cooperation. It will be done, likely in 3 years or so. This line is a total of about 9 miles long for about $945 Million.
The worst part about it for me is the insidious nature of the funding they're using. They're doing "Tax Increment Financing" which means that any increase in property tax revenues theoretically caused by the "improvement" of my house go to pay off the construction bonds.
Let's say there is NO improvement, but inflation doubles taxes in the next decade. The town now gets the same dollar amount, but half of the funding it used to get, and the rest goes to the bond holders. This will strangle our schools which depend on local real estate taxes.
PS: Just across the state line is a defunct Country Club, which is in close enough to the station to qualify for "TIF" improvements, and the husband of the local State Representative pushing for the project, just happens to be the a real estate developer interested in said property.
> pulled of the completely absurd task of putting a man on the moon and then returning him safely to earth, in less than a decade
At a congressional allocation level, this was all pork, too. The vast majority of this project went to politically-connected contractors, subcontractors, etc. Not much has changed, except for one critical factor:
We were competent in the 20th century. All of the engineers, machinists, metallurgists, and yes, even management of the Apollo project had a job to do. Their personal political opinions, sexual proclivities, or social media clout had nothing at all to do with accomplishing the mission. And so, it got done.
Putting a man on the moon was relatively simple in comparison, actually.
All the resources focused down to a single task, a single vessel, and a single mission.
In comparison, there are countless jurisdictions and hundreds of millions of lives being effected, plus well established property lines that need to be redrawn all over the place.
I'm not saying I approve of how much it costs to do reasonable infrastructure related projects at all, but the meme of "things were so much better back then" has never not been old.
I am of the opinion that continuing to build out all these long 'runs' of infrastructure to serve a even more spread out populace is a dead end. Where I live we spent tens of billions expanding highway infrastructure, and it has not improved the lives of anyone meaningfully, traffic is as bad as its ever been.
We need to spend more money creating better metropolitan areas that people want to live in, rather than using tax payer money to support fewer and fewer people.
The particular project highlighted in the article isn't one of those, though. Somerville (one of the cities reached by the extension) has the highest population density in the state of Massachusetts, and I think it's something like top 20 in the United States by that metric. This is not an "even more spread out populace", it's linking a reasonably dense bedroom community to a regional commercial hub.
Somerville is not a bedroom community. It's not even really a suburb. It's more analogous to a city neighborhood that happens to be under different jurisdiction for historical reasons. You can walk from Somerville to fidelity's headquarters, Harvard, MIT, all the FAANG offices, Amgen/Biogen/AstriskGen, etc.
There's definitely stuff more far flung and less dense within the city limits of Boston and/or on the Orange and Red lines.
The suburbs kind of start somewhere in Watertown/Newton.
The closest bedroom community to Boston, moving west, is probably Worcester.
This is one of the key points. The US isn't just spread-out but oriented to solving it's problem by spreading out more. And this paradigm has effectively become unsustainable.
However, that's not the only factor at play here. Part of thing that makes spreading out the population look like a reasonable strategy is the mess involved in building in existing cities. A lot here is "soft" corruption - local government treats public grants as candy to give out to their friends and particular processes described in the article are just ways to do this.
A lot of things appear unsustainable because the income of builders is inflated with fed money. I don't think much will improve until a normal person can afford to build a house again.
> it has not improved the lives of anyone meaningfully, traffic is as bad as its ever been
The latter does not imply the former. If the increased infrastructure means that more people can live and work in an area, then even if the traffic for each person in that area is exactly as bad as it was before, it still helped those people who took the option to move there.
We do not build infrastructure that it might stay idle. Compare "we upgraded our internet to gigabit but we're seeing a similar utilization ratio, therefor the upgrade didn't improve the lives of anyone in the home".
Not really. Doubling your commute length is not an improvement. I have noticed places with heavier traffic tend to have shorter distances to your destination. So your total time is the same regardless.
Assuming the transportation is doing anything useful, which can be hard to gauge. Ideally, everyone would be conveniently near their workplace and the places they frequently shop.
NYC has much different issues with cost. You're paying for bad management that does long term projects as a series of short term projects and lets all the contractors go in between, for instance. You're paying the union for the right to use a tunnel boring machine, and you have an oiler watching your cranes because it's still 1910 and that's a full-time position. You're paying to move legacy infrastructure out of the way. You're paying to mine out cavernous underground subway stations through small shafts because apparently that's how America and America only designs the stations. I could go on.
> We need to spend more money creating better metropolitan areas that people want to live in, rather than using tax payer money to support fewer and fewer people.
I suspect the current trend is in the opposite direction. If self-driving cars ever become a real thing, it's all over for team urbanization.
If there was unlimited money, how would you even start to fix cities? A big part of the attraction to living in the 'burbs or beyond is cheap space and very little noise pollution.
> If self-driving cars ever become a real thing, it's all over for team urbanization.
Urbanization is more than just hatred of vehicles - Europe has managed to development walkable cities where cars are significantly less convenient than other modes of transport - even if the cars are automated they're going to continue to be suboptimal compared to well planned and zoned cities. At the heart of the issue is whether a city is oriented toward foot traffic or optimized for car storage - America leans the latter way and it's pretty darn weird since, outside of the central south (Arizona, Texas and such) - most people would prefer a ten minute walk to five minute drive.
Nearly all of the noise pollution in cities is due to cars and trucks. Reducing the number of cars and trucks on the road in cities by developing viable alternatives to driving (like walking and biking and light rail), allowing cities to build denser, and then restricting non-emergency, non-delivery car traffic in those dense areas would pretty much fix the affordable housing crisis and traffic and the sprawl problem all at the same time. All while keeping the city nice and quiet, and cheap.
Every time any land is going to be developed where I live (Denver/Boulder/etc.), there is always a thread on Nextdoor advocating for people to stop it by raising environmental concerns and putting in a ton of comments. If 1/10 projects get canceled due to individual objections that means a lot of time and money gets wasted. Another 4/10 projects might eventually get built but only after long drawn out discussions and after many iterations to address individual concerns making the project less standardized and more expensive.
The remaining projects that built aren't really infrastructure projects rather they are statement pieces. Instead of building a $200M subway station we build a $1B community gathering area that includes a subway station. The optimistic hope is that these larger projects will encourage public adoption and support for more of these types of projects but in reality their costs spiral out of control and construction takes far too long at which point the public is just tired.
It's things like this that make me yearn for the government of yore that just fucking did it, no questions asked i.e. the federal government laying out the interstate highway system. They didn't care it tore apart neighborhoods, they did it because if they didn't, the evil Soviets would eventually build a better highway system and the US couldn't have that embarrassment. A shitty motivator? Sure, but it was a motivator. Now in the 3 decades since the end of the Cold War, what accomplishments has any government done that rivals what happened during the Cold War era? None.
But isn’t a lot of the bad infrastructure and urban sprawl a consequence of those very decisions? Perhaps a more considered approach would have worked better in the long term. For instance, in Amsterdam, local people fought back against plans to put highways through the city which has resulted in a much more pleasant urban environment.
The article hints at this NIMBYism. Many of the other things that factor in are not unique to the US. Government waste, bureaucracy, etc... are all things in other wealthy countries too, but NIMBYism and 'public input' seems to carry more weight in the US.
NYC recently opened the first stage of the Second Avenue Subway. This is a project that was initially started ~90 years ago and has been started and stopped multiple times in the intervening years. I believe the final version used none of the original tunnels however. It cost ~$6B for 1.5 miles of track [1]. The budget was padded at probably every level (eg [2]). There are a bunch of other contributing factors.
Now compare Crossrail [3]. This is a hugely ambitious project to build some 117km of track and 21km of tunnels under London in an east-west direction connecting Kent, Essex, Heathrow, central London and the Thames Valley. This was in the planning stage in the early 2000s (possibly earlier) and construction commenced in 2009 or so. It is near completion, only 2-3 years behind the original schedule (that I recall from 2003 at least) with cost overruns of around 20% (IIRC) coming out to ~17B pounds.
The UK and US are similarly developed industrialized nations. NYC and London are large cities with all the problems that entails. Actually, London is far worse because it's been for literally thousands of years, including some ~500 years of Roman occupation.
The scale of Crossrail (adjusted for cost) compared to the Second Avenue Subway is unreal. It's basically an order of magnitude.
The reasons for this are complex. There's no single determining factor. There is failure all the way from the Federal through the state and local governments as well as with the companies that build these things, the oversight of those projects, how the bids are awarded and the people who are actually doing the work. This should at least convince you that there is a problem and it's absolutely massive.
See also West Coast Mainline: "By May 2002, the projection of the program’s final cost had risen from £2.5 billion (in 1998) to £14.5 billion but had delivered only a sixth of the original scope."
Why aren't contracts to build the projects tightly written to avoid cost ballooning?
When a service is to be provided at a certain cost, it should be provided at certain cost. Some contingencies should be built in (if something gets discovered that was unexpected) but how on earth does every municipal project seem to have so much invested in budget oversight and contractors overbilling or needing overtime to make things happen.
If someone is painting my house, I get a quote for the job and the date it will be completed. I don't find myself paying them more unless its for something outside of what we specified together and they quoted.
Building on government contracts should be solid money but it seems like every time the taxpayer gets fleeced and the end result is barely functional/impactful.
Big projects have almost unlimited liability. The entities involved can get taken to court for pollution concerns, environmental concerns, get caught up in local politics. And once something is in the courts, the whole timeframe is completely up in the air.
One of the places I lived had Walmart wanting to build a Walmart Supercenter, and convert their current Walmart into a Sams Club. The non Walmart grocery store (which was garbage in terms of quality and service) and a Sams Club competitor tied up Walmart in court over the status of some endangered garden snake.
It was obvious nonsense, but it would have taken so long to untangle legally that Walmart said screw it and moved on.
Firm fixed contracts seem like the way to go, until you try it. What happens is you get a bunch of contractors in a bidding war trying to undercut each other until the actual bid is below cost. That's not sustainable so what happens then? The winner will cut every possible corner to try to make a profit margin and read the contract in the narrowest way possible so they can hit the government with a fat change order. Quality of the product takes a nose dive and final cost still isn't controlled.
On the other hand, time and materials contracts have exactly the problems you would expect.
I honestly don't know how these things should be done so that taxpayers get the most value for their dollars. But I do know it's more complex than just "fixed price contracts."
Those things have legal remedies, the US legal system has just decided that the investor class should be absolved of any risk or liability. If you intentionally underbid to win a contract, you've committed fraud and are supposed to go to prison to disincentivize the next guy. If you are a contractor and are incapable of giving a good faith estimate of your costs, you're supposed to go out of business. If you cut a bunch of corners to stay under budget and do not render satisfactory performance, you're liable for breach of contract (and are supposed to go out of business).
The first two options have been removed from the toolbox of American government almost entirely.
Maybe have the military operate as a contractor as well and any 'profits' they'd make go towards the general federal budget? At the least it's then a bid by an open party with incentives that should be aligned to public service to compare all the other bids against.
Where's the evidence that contractors will bid below-cost? Even if some do, they'll just go out of business, and the contractors who know how to do basic math will live another day.
For firm fixed price contracts you can write in requirements for passing independent inspections. And incentives for quality measures. For example I've seen road paving contracts that paid a bonus for achieving a certain level of smoothness. Of course writing a good contract requires deep technical and legal expertise which some local governments simply lack.
The contract should be ironclad on acceptable quality, consider including a term for longevity of the product in its acceptable state (bridge can't collapse in 10 years or something)
The US has one of the most well-funded legal industries and we are worried that we can't write a complicated and thorough legal contract to do work? Doesn't really make sense.
If the winner cuts the corners and doesn't deliver, they get sued in US's extremely thorough courts. I also think the bar for applying for these contracts should be higher. Firms with liquidity, track record, etc. get the best jobs.
Another model is having a government run project, with all the employees direct hires of the relevant government department. Though that has its own downsides.
One model I haven't heard of, is the government as general contractor, hiring and managing the subs directly. I could imagine a hybrid mode like this could work.
> Why aren't contracts to build the projects tightly written to avoid cost ballooning?
Because no legitimate construction firm will take on a project where they are saddled with 100% liability for overruns.
Not without very generously padding their estimated costs, that is.
Which will make them lose the initial bid.
A fly-by-night operator may want to take that project, and when things go sour, they'll leave you with a half-built bridge, and an empty shell of a corporation that you won't squeeze a dollar out of.
One alternative would be to have a public works department which does the work itself. It would hire people, plan, write specs, buy or lease equipment, buy materials, do the work.
That, however, would be socialism, so it can't be done, even though it's done on a smaller scale in every US city for issues starting at road repair and going on up.
This is what I'm also wondering. What is the point of making a contract in the first place if the price quoted is not binding? If the provider needs more material or manpower or whatever than expected, then it should be their fucking problem and not the clients. The possibility of unexpected stuff happening should, of course, also be taken into account in the initial price quote since the provider should be much better at estimating the probability of something happening than the client.
The problem when dealing with government or public works is that the provider simply isn't better at estimating that probability, since they aren't empowered to bulldoze ahead.
The contractor can accurately price in (and insure against) technical risks like the risk of accidentally striking a cable while digging, and they can mitigate this as well (looking at the quality of cable mapping data, using detectors etc.)
What the contractor can't factor in is all the (local) government politics and bureaucracy. Where things fall on the financial year calendar, whether they will have to spend the money before or after April, whether they will have to pause works because a resident legally challenges the works, whether the client has even asked for the right thing, or if it will emerge while planning the work that they have made major errors etc.
When dealing with a well-specified, fixed-scope piece of work, you are right - the provider should eat that. When dealing with an uninformed non-expert customer (i.e. most public sector or government contracts), nobody in their right mind would take on that risk, except some of the big government outsourcing contractors, who would all quote insane prices based on past "actual costs" after factoring in all the nonsense from previous work.
Moving away from cost-plus contract funding is something that is needed but is an enormous fight. Every government contractor loves cost-plus. Bid low on cost to get the contract then just keep amending the contract with added cost.
I agree that all government contracts should be fixed bid. It is wholly the contractor's responsibility to determine if they can be profitable on the contract or not. We should not be on the hook for added cost.
It's fine for most infrastructure projects to be firm fixed price (with bonus incentives for early completion or higher quality). But there are other projects for which cost plus is the only viable option. Sometimes there's so much technical risk and uncertainty that no sane contractor would even submit a fixed price bid.
As the article goes into detail, a big factor of costs ballooning is that the municipalities explicitly ask for much more stuff than initially planned - as you say "unless its for something outside of what we specified together and they quoted", which is the exact thing happening in the examples provided by the article.
You ask for A, get quoted $X; but if then after the public input (which, as the article states, can't be avoided or its suggestions refused, because votes and politics) you decide that you actually want A+B+C+D+E+F+G (it's not an exaggeration, it's common for the "add-ons" to require multiple times more work than the initially requested thing) then you're not getting that for $X no matter how you write the contract.
If someone is painting your house and halfway through the process you discuss with your family that it needs to be a different color (redoing the already painted parts) and the kids room also needs to be painted, and oh, they should fix the porch before painting it, that's going to result in cost ballooning far above the quote.
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This kind of job moating and threats is a union thing isn't it?
Coincidentally, this new infrastructure bill has union requirements for any EV work.
1. Red tape & public "input" 2. Layers of contractors and subcontractors, each taking their slice 3. No real incentives for governments to be cost sensitive. Usually capital projects last well into the next administration. 4. Too many cooks in the kitchen and consultations
A great example of this is in the UK where the main road going east to west from london to cornwall is a single carriage way with 2 lanes going past one of the country's most historic sites (stone henge). It's a fucking disaster. So the plan is to build a massive tunnel under stone henge to help traffic and remove the blotch on this area of historic importance. It's expected to cost £1.7Bn but it's already been completely tied up in legal fights, it was proposed over 25 years ago (when it was already desparately needed). Essentially plenty of people either don't want it built at all (presumably just accepting that we'll never ever be able to have economic in england west of stonehenge) or they want a tunnel that is several times longer than the proposal sending costs and construction time soaring.
What you could do, if you were Turkey, you could just built a 12 lane motorway and shove stonehenge a few miles north. It'd be cheaper.
> [...] and bureaucrats and all of that.
On a recent episode of the Ezra Klein show, Jerusalem Demsas argued that part of the problem is that the bureaucrats in the US are too constrained in their powers, so e.g. when weighing an infrastructure project against wildlife protection laws, it's not a bureaucratic organisation making a final decision on how to proceed with minimal impact, but it's private organised interest groups litigating without any limits on re-litigation, and a ruling that does not necessarily weigh the public interest of having projects proceeding towards completion.
As you say, there are politics, labor relations, etc. in europe too - I wonder if they are just better at cooperating on this sort of project for some reason?
But in the EU or elsewhere, the "cut" the interests will take is just financial, the project will be designed for cost-efficiency by competent architects and engineers and it's just that the different interests will be paid off with money to make things happen.
In the US, the spread-out state and administrative structure results in a situation where each interest gets it's cut through its ability to make some small change or demand some particular process. A lot of this involves a lot of adversarial relations, some of them intended to stop corruption but which actually result inefficiency and corruption (complex bidding processes legal repercussions for failure to adhere to bid etc. etc.).
California spending $3 billion planning ("planning") a high speed rail system is good example. A lot of that involved buying land whose value had inflated.
The old expression "we have the worst system in the world, except for all the others" .. comes to mind
edit- I would like to point to NORESCO in particular as a sponge-like entity with a long history of failed, expensive projects and a long pipeline of new funding, based on what I saw with my own eyes.
That's what (I think) Winston Churchill said about democracy (might be true there). But here, I think you can just say "we have the worst system". Period. The US has a variety of sectors (public works, health care, etc) which aren't just bad but fated to get worse and worse through both through the particular way US ruling interests deal with each other. Each solution introduces more pork interests since each solution follows the haphazard paradigm.
For example; I think Yimby ("yes in my back yard") proposals have aimed to facilitate development in at transit hubs, a worthy seeming cause. But since there's no California state transit plan, this approach has to define "transit hub" haphazardly - "there's currently a bus stop there". This allows those aiming to sink a development to do so by removing the bus stop. Or oppositely, allows someone to facilitate a development by adding an otherwise unneeded bus stop. I'm not sure if this approach was implemented but just proposal illustrates the inherent problem of trying to solve transfic/housing/development problems by tossing random legislation at them.
Wouldn't that imply the US system has better execution, not just higher costs?
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Once the US pulled of the completely absurd task of putting a man on the moon and then returning him safely to earth, in less than a decade. All the incentives were aligned, it had public support, and a huge amount of resources were mobilized and ready to deploy.
We're not deploying huge resources on our infrastructure projects, we're piecemealing them. I've got a branch rail line going in at the end of my street. [1] The public input/planning process went on for years, and only now are they starting to relocate utilities, put up fences, etc. There's no one entity in charge of all the layers of the project, it's all hired contractors and inter-agency cooperation. It will be done, likely in 3 years or so. This line is a total of about 9 miles long for about $945 Million.
The worst part about it for me is the insidious nature of the funding they're using. They're doing "Tax Increment Financing" which means that any increase in property tax revenues theoretically caused by the "improvement" of my house go to pay off the construction bonds.
Let's say there is NO improvement, but inflation doubles taxes in the next decade. The town now gets the same dollar amount, but half of the funding it used to get, and the rest goes to the bond holders. This will strangle our schools which depend on local real estate taxes.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Lake_Corridor
PS: Just across the state line is a defunct Country Club, which is in close enough to the station to qualify for "TIF" improvements, and the husband of the local State Representative pushing for the project, just happens to be the a real estate developer interested in said property.
At a congressional allocation level, this was all pork, too. The vast majority of this project went to politically-connected contractors, subcontractors, etc. Not much has changed, except for one critical factor:
We were competent in the 20th century. All of the engineers, machinists, metallurgists, and yes, even management of the Apollo project had a job to do. Their personal political opinions, sexual proclivities, or social media clout had nothing at all to do with accomplishing the mission. And so, it got done.
We're not that people anymore.
All the resources focused down to a single task, a single vessel, and a single mission.
In comparison, there are countless jurisdictions and hundreds of millions of lives being effected, plus well established property lines that need to be redrawn all over the place.
I'm not saying I approve of how much it costs to do reasonable infrastructure related projects at all, but the meme of "things were so much better back then" has never not been old.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/post-tribune/ct-ptb-n...
These are the new Metra coaches, BTW:
https://chi.streetsblog.org/2021/01/13/metra-board-chooses-n...
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We need to spend more money creating better metropolitan areas that people want to live in, rather than using tax payer money to support fewer and fewer people.
There's definitely stuff more far flung and less dense within the city limits of Boston and/or on the Orange and Red lines.
The suburbs kind of start somewhere in Watertown/Newton.
The closest bedroom community to Boston, moving west, is probably Worcester.
[0]https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme/
Here is here video about The Growth Ponzi Scheme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IsMeKl-Sv0
However, that's not the only factor at play here. Part of thing that makes spreading out the population look like a reasonable strategy is the mess involved in building in existing cities. A lot here is "soft" corruption - local government treats public grants as candy to give out to their friends and particular processes described in the article are just ways to do this.
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The latter does not imply the former. If the increased infrastructure means that more people can live and work in an area, then even if the traffic for each person in that area is exactly as bad as it was before, it still helped those people who took the option to move there.
We do not build infrastructure that it might stay idle. Compare "we upgraded our internet to gigabit but we're seeing a similar utilization ratio, therefor the upgrade didn't improve the lives of anyone in the home".
That is a clear improvement.
I suspect the current trend is in the opposite direction. If self-driving cars ever become a real thing, it's all over for team urbanization.
If there was unlimited money, how would you even start to fix cities? A big part of the attraction to living in the 'burbs or beyond is cheap space and very little noise pollution.
Urbanization is more than just hatred of vehicles - Europe has managed to development walkable cities where cars are significantly less convenient than other modes of transport - even if the cars are automated they're going to continue to be suboptimal compared to well planned and zoned cities. At the heart of the issue is whether a city is oriented toward foot traffic or optimized for car storage - America leans the latter way and it's pretty darn weird since, outside of the central south (Arizona, Texas and such) - most people would prefer a ten minute walk to five minute drive.
The remaining projects that built aren't really infrastructure projects rather they are statement pieces. Instead of building a $200M subway station we build a $1B community gathering area that includes a subway station. The optimistic hope is that these larger projects will encourage public adoption and support for more of these types of projects but in reality their costs spiral out of control and construction takes far too long at which point the public is just tired.
GPS?
NYC recently opened the first stage of the Second Avenue Subway. This is a project that was initially started ~90 years ago and has been started and stopped multiple times in the intervening years. I believe the final version used none of the original tunnels however. It cost ~$6B for 1.5 miles of track [1]. The budget was padded at probably every level (eg [2]). There are a bunch of other contributing factors.
Now compare Crossrail [3]. This is a hugely ambitious project to build some 117km of track and 21km of tunnels under London in an east-west direction connecting Kent, Essex, Heathrow, central London and the Thames Valley. This was in the planning stage in the early 2000s (possibly earlier) and construction commenced in 2009 or so. It is near completion, only 2-3 years behind the original schedule (that I recall from 2003 at least) with cost overruns of around 20% (IIRC) coming out to ~17B pounds.
The UK and US are similarly developed industrialized nations. NYC and London are large cities with all the problems that entails. Actually, London is far worse because it's been for literally thousands of years, including some ~500 years of Roman occupation.
The scale of Crossrail (adjusted for cost) compared to the Second Avenue Subway is unreal. It's basically an order of magnitude.
The reasons for this are complex. There's no single determining factor. There is failure all the way from the Federal through the state and local governments as well as with the companies that build these things, the oversight of those projects, how the bids are awarded and the people who are actually doing the work. This should at least convince you that there is a problem and it's absolutely massive.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Avenue_Subway
[2]: https://jalopnik.com/heres-the-most-damning-report-yet-on-wh...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossrail
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29491371
https://www.sebokwiki.org/wiki/UK_West_Coast_Route_Modernisa...
When a service is to be provided at a certain cost, it should be provided at certain cost. Some contingencies should be built in (if something gets discovered that was unexpected) but how on earth does every municipal project seem to have so much invested in budget oversight and contractors overbilling or needing overtime to make things happen.
If someone is painting my house, I get a quote for the job and the date it will be completed. I don't find myself paying them more unless its for something outside of what we specified together and they quoted.
Building on government contracts should be solid money but it seems like every time the taxpayer gets fleeced and the end result is barely functional/impactful.
Big projects have almost unlimited liability. The entities involved can get taken to court for pollution concerns, environmental concerns, get caught up in local politics. And once something is in the courts, the whole timeframe is completely up in the air.
One of the places I lived had Walmart wanting to build a Walmart Supercenter, and convert their current Walmart into a Sams Club. The non Walmart grocery store (which was garbage in terms of quality and service) and a Sams Club competitor tied up Walmart in court over the status of some endangered garden snake.
It was obvious nonsense, but it would have taken so long to untangle legally that Walmart said screw it and moved on.
On the other hand, time and materials contracts have exactly the problems you would expect.
I honestly don't know how these things should be done so that taxpayers get the most value for their dollars. But I do know it's more complex than just "fixed price contracts."
The first two options have been removed from the toolbox of American government almost entirely.
The US has one of the most well-funded legal industries and we are worried that we can't write a complicated and thorough legal contract to do work? Doesn't really make sense.
If the winner cuts the corners and doesn't deliver, they get sued in US's extremely thorough courts. I also think the bar for applying for these contracts should be higher. Firms with liquidity, track record, etc. get the best jobs.
One model I haven't heard of, is the government as general contractor, hiring and managing the subs directly. I could imagine a hybrid mode like this could work.
Because no legitimate construction firm will take on a project where they are saddled with 100% liability for overruns.
Not without very generously padding their estimated costs, that is.
Which will make them lose the initial bid.
A fly-by-night operator may want to take that project, and when things go sour, they'll leave you with a half-built bridge, and an empty shell of a corporation that you won't squeeze a dollar out of.
That, however, would be socialism, so it can't be done, even though it's done on a smaller scale in every US city for issues starting at road repair and going on up.
The contractor can accurately price in (and insure against) technical risks like the risk of accidentally striking a cable while digging, and they can mitigate this as well (looking at the quality of cable mapping data, using detectors etc.)
What the contractor can't factor in is all the (local) government politics and bureaucracy. Where things fall on the financial year calendar, whether they will have to spend the money before or after April, whether they will have to pause works because a resident legally challenges the works, whether the client has even asked for the right thing, or if it will emerge while planning the work that they have made major errors etc.
When dealing with a well-specified, fixed-scope piece of work, you are right - the provider should eat that. When dealing with an uninformed non-expert customer (i.e. most public sector or government contracts), nobody in their right mind would take on that risk, except some of the big government outsourcing contractors, who would all quote insane prices based on past "actual costs" after factoring in all the nonsense from previous work.
I agree that all government contracts should be fixed bid. It is wholly the contractor's responsibility to determine if they can be profitable on the contract or not. We should not be on the hook for added cost.
You ask for A, get quoted $X; but if then after the public input (which, as the article states, can't be avoided or its suggestions refused, because votes and politics) you decide that you actually want A+B+C+D+E+F+G (it's not an exaggeration, it's common for the "add-ons" to require multiple times more work than the initially requested thing) then you're not getting that for $X no matter how you write the contract.
If someone is painting your house and halfway through the process you discuss with your family that it needs to be a different color (redoing the already painted parts) and the kids room also needs to be painted, and oh, they should fix the porch before painting it, that's going to result in cost ballooning far above the quote.