>Overdesign: American infrastructure is often overbuilt, not out of higher quality but out of agency turf battles, obsolete standards like NFPA 130 that have better foreign replacements, or scope creep.
>Poor procurement practices: there is improper supervision of private contractors, and things are getting worse as public agencies offload more risk to the private sector, which responds by bidding higher to hedge against the risk; there are also some one-bid contracts, for example the 7 extension in New York, leading to even higher costs.
> Poor project management: design review teams are usually understaffed and cannot respond to contractors fast, so there is little institutional capacity to build big projects. Wages for office workers are below market rate and hiring is difficult.
>Labor: in New York, the productivity of construction labor seems unusually low and wages high.
>NIMBYism: the United States makes it easy to sue, for example NEPA is enforced by lawsuit, whereas its Italian equivalent is enforced by the administrative state. Lawsuits in the US and other lawsuit-happy countries like Germany rarely win, but do delay projects, so there is defensive design, including unnecessary scope in order to buy off political support. Leah Brooks and Zachary Liscow have a paper on the growth in Interstate construction costs over the decades, blaming citizen voice lawsuits for the increase.
>Politicization of projects: the civil service is weak compared with both elected politicians and their unelected political appointees, and there is not much continuity in design.
One thing I think they missed, environmental impact studies (that aren't even associated with reduced environmental impact!) I remember Seattle's light rail project included 8 years of environmental impact review of a light rail extensions along routes that were planned along existing rail corridors!
Also, relating to overdesign, I think younger generations suffer from a cult of perfectionism. But perfect is the enemy of good. A streetcar might seem so much cooler, but a dedicated rapid bus can do more with less money!
That wasn't missed. That's what NEPA is implicitly referring to. Environmental protection legislation is usually structured to first require the developer to create an environmental impact report (EIR). Thereafter almost everything revolves around the EIR, including the regulatory agency review as well as the lawsuits. Environmental lawsuits invariably challenge the accuracy of the EIR, or the application of regulatory agency rules to an EIR.
An EIR is to environmental regulation what construction blueprints are to the building code. You need the paperwork, otherwise you just have a bunch of people shouting and pointing fingers and making wild claims.
The issue with EIRs is who gets to challenge the accuracy of an EIR. Imagine if any old interest group could challenge construction blueprints for accuracy in court. It'd be a nightmare. Well, in some jurisdictions, like California, pretty much anybody can challenge an EIR in court. By contrast, under the Federal NEPA and most state regulations, the parties with a right to challenge an EIR are few--e.g. usually just the government agency in charge of approving it and maybe any adjacent landowners potentially impacted.
I know somebody who is a low-income housing developer in California. According to her, the cost of compiling and getting approval of an EIR under NEPA is de minimis, with very low-risk if the reviewing contractor doesn't uncover any serious problems. By contrast, because almost anybody can challenge the EIR submitted under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), and do so without any risk of punishment for frivolous or vexatious challenges, one of her biggest risks and costs is dealing with CEQA. (Because nobody wants low-income housing near them, any remotely nearby upper-income neighborhood will instinctively challenge her EIR, causing mult-year, even multi-decade delays. And this is even when zoning boards and every other government agency are 100% behind a project.)
17 Years. Almost all of which was permitting and licenses. Construction took 11 months.
Meanwhile, when China needed to buy greater volumes of natural gas, they set up a purchase agreement to buy it from Turkmenistan and completed a 2900km pipeline project start to finish in just 22 months.
Obviously, we don't want to ignore civil rights, but it really is absurd that to build anything in this country requires you to retain half the state bar association for the inevitable endless NIMBY lawsuits.
1. It would add noise to otherwise comatose street 2. It would serve as a gathering ground for kids
Both are true complaints ( and to an extent I would even say valid ).
What happened was what seems to happen in similar cases. They were assured, the library would only remain so big, but those promises were quickly abandoned in ways not dissimilar to the way US handled Indian treaties.
It is VERY difficult to get shovel ready for a two bedroom house, let alone a new bridge.
What makes this even worse is that Seattle has extensive trolley bus (electric bus powered by overhead lines) infrastructure that works just fine, so they could have taken a trolley bus, put train wheels on it, and we would have had a faster and cheaper streetcar. Trolley busses are much safer for cyclists or anyone else sharing the road with the streetcar as the tracks pose a hazard to pretty much all other uses of the road.
I learned recently that part of why streetcars have been in vogue is that the Obama administration made a big push for them in order to have some visible progress on their transit plans.
I don't think this'd work quite as easily as you'd imagine. If you'd literally take a bus, take out its steering and replace its wheels with train wheels, the resulting contraption would have diabolical cornering abilities with regards to the tight curves typically encountered on streetcar networks.
Two-axle streetcars typically don't have a wheelbase much above 10 or 11 feet at most (and that's already pushing it – there's a reason why everybody moved on to vehicles with bogies or otherwise steerable axles), whereas modern buses have a wheelbase closer to 20 ft or so.
"The difference in costs often boils down to domestic state capacity: bureaucracies in East Asia and Continental Europe tend to be better-staffed and more empowered to make professional decisions. The details are naturally more complicated, but the pattern is nonetheless clear: the countries with the lowest infrastructure costs are also the countries where the state acts swiftly, with mechanisms that limit the lag between financing and construction."
The Atlantic has an article about exactly this happening in California[0] with increasing frequency, mostly fueled by NIMBYism.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/03/signature-...
It's mentioned in the NEPA discussion on page 9, and in the litigation discussion.
On the other hand, there are also deep corruptions behind large projects in China, but they get to move forward fast.
Things in the U.S. is strange, large interest groups (regulatory agencies, all kinds of big contractors, political parties) all want to take a piece from the big pie, but they don't care to move things forward. Maybe because everybody knows the things are overcomplicated anyway, and nobody is going to take the project away from them. If the heads of the large interest groups can take bribes (above millions) as those in China, I guess the projects can move much faster.
More, because bribe money is out of sight, the game becomes all about power, i.e. politics. So instead of all sides comes together to take money, they fight for power, political influence. So comes backstabbing, sabotaging.
In the old days, there were gangsters and big unions, whose lives were depended on those big projects, so they actively engaged in "persuading" politicians to push the projects and they resourcefully removed obstacles. Nowadays, gangsters are long gone, unions declined, politicians come and go, nobody is actively pushing those projects anymore.
This one may be especially relevant as the green line extension mentioned in the paper as possibly concluding in 2017 would've been under a new administration that especially worked to undo a lot of Obama era policies.
We need balance in all things.
I've seen the same kind of things happen in the private sector. A company with no in-house IT expertise regularly gets fucked over by their contractors. This is less common now but this was rather the norm 20 years ago, even for large enterprises.
This will not work, of course. Bogus disapprovals will be issued at the last minute, then likely taken to court, which again can take arbitrarily long.
Edit: yes, I get the different level of scale/need between them. My point is: big things can be done safely & responsibly without criminally wasting massive amounts of time.
1: https://www.seattlebikeblog.com/2015/06/19/18-missing-link-v...
It's an exception that got elevated to the highest priority. There must have been some efficiency gains as well but the prioritization part doesn't scale by definition.
That all said, 8 years is ridiculous. I have to wonder what work actually happened in those 8 years.
Just look at usual vaccine development schedules, or the timeframes the mRNA developers had planned to work on before covid as a comparison. Same thing: less resources available, less willingness to spend resources in support, no special priority given, more detractors (often understandably and legitimately) getting in the way of speed -> slower process
Construction, education, and healthcare costs have risen well above CPI for several decades, not just in the US, but in most developed countries.
That generates massive demand for dollars outside the US. Foreign countries obtain the dollars they need to buy oil by converting their currency to USD or by exporting goods/services to the US.
As a result, the value of the US dollar gets inflated and large parts of the US economy get "offshored" thanks to the favorable conversion ratio.
On the bright side, this system means you can import foreign goods very cheaply - but on the downside, it means exports are often not viable.
There are several industries in the US that don't reap large benefits from cheap imports. Education, healthcare, construction, and child care just to name a few.
I hope this adds some color to the phenomenon you've observed
A large hole is shot in your premise by the fact that the US is a wildly successful exporter of both goods and services.
There's very little evidence that the US Dollar has been too strong during the era you're referencing, save for a few brief periods of time. For example the USD was quite weak from 2004-2015, and yet education and healthcare soared in cost regardless. For most of the comparison history, the USD has not been far out of line with the value of the Euro in how they trade, and that's despite the US having a far more potent economy during that time than Western Europe.
The so called petro dollar (commodities linked dollar) has existed for most of the post WW2 era. And yet education and healthcare were reasonably priced until the late 1990s forward. The ramp in education costs is easily explained by the infinite backing of student loans by the US Government, that's a never-ending inflationary cycle caused solely by the Feds. When or if they remove that inflationary prop, the cost of higher education in the US will begin to stagnate or deflate.
It's real simple: pull the government inflation prop out from under education. Stop backing student loans so freely and to such a dramatic extent. What would happen? It'd instantly collapse, except for higher end private schools. What the universities could command in the way of prices would be obliterated overnight, they'd have to match what the students could actually afford in reality, instead of in govt-backed fantasy land.
Education and healthcare costs keep going up because the operators can keep charging more due to how those systems are structured. There's either not a competitive market to push down on prices at all (healthcare) or there's an infinite inflation prop being supplied by the Feds (education). Prices are soaring as entirely proper representatives of real inflation over that time, which you can see if you stack the USD against gold, oil, silver, platinum, housing, or new car prices over decades. It's everything else that is doing worse than real inflation, because there is generally plentiful market competition to push downward on pricing power.
A few years back, I had a chat with someone who helps developmentally disabled people with job training. The company she worked for billed the state $90/hour for her work, but paid her $15/hour. I'd love to know where the rest of that money went, because it certainly didn't go to those performing services, nor to their professional development, nor to disabled people.
Complacency in government contracts is standard, and you have to make noise before anything changes, and its work that does NOT scale. (Although I'd love to see standard data practices help reduce the time commitment required to do this kind of data activism.)
One of the best things you could do with this information is show up and yell about it at any and all public hearings. Anyway, I wish it was "sexier" to make trouble for local government that deserves it, but really its always a long paperwork slog.
I can tell you without looking, overhead and profit. Scheduling, billing, administration, legal, interfacing with the government all costs money. It’s likely the person being paid $15/hr has a total pay package that is higher than that as well.
And also, humans will tend to cheat when they can, and the longer lived a game is, the more specialized it becomes, and the harder it becomes to even recognize what is cheating and what is just "regular practice". You get something like "regulatory capture", but worse, because every element of the entire society captures another, forming a Gordian knot. Yet another path to Collapse, I'm afraid (probably a common one, I'd guess).
The key word here is "more empowered." If the state could just say "okay we're transplanting all of the people that live here out of the way so that we can put up a hyperloop, and these are the people who are going to do it, and we'll pay them this much..." infrastructure would move a lot faster, for much less money.
Because the US government tends to have far less authority over its citizens than Europe, and especially Asia, it has many free-marketish half measures that create the worst of all possible outcomes. Because the US has to pretend to be market-driven, by allowing private companies and unions to bid on projects, as well as offer people fair market values for their properties in the way of infrastructure, you get all sorts of problems. The main one is that the government is not a normal buyer, and completely throws most markets out of whack. Just look at the "cost plus" sort of funding schemes that have existed in aerospace contracts for decades, a concept that would never in a million years have existed in the free market.
I'm not saying that the European or Asian models are better, there are definite benefits to the liberties afforded to Americans...but it is without question far worse if the objective is timely and affordable infrastructure.
Not from what I've seen. The highway I drive every day is in the middle of an extensive refurbishment. The local government (I currently live in Europe) was given the option of shutting it down for a month, which was completely untenable, but in line with what I think the author was trying to get at. They were also given the option of keeping it running at full capacity and doing the construction work over a several year period.
They chose the latter, for obvious reasons, at a significantly higher cost, since the highway has to be rebuilt and demolished several times over to keep all lanes of traffic moving at all times.
The difference between here and the states is not the level of empowerment or the level of staff competence. They simply have a lot more money to work with, which lets them build to a higher standard of quality, do preventative maintenance on time, and refurbish or outright rebuild when it becomes necessary to do so.
I'm curious, what liberties do Americans have compared to Europeans? The only thing that comes to mind is owning guns, and I'm quite convinced that's a net negative, a tragedy of the commons (everyone gets theirs and the community suffers for it, as a whole).
Unfortunately, it looks like what was perhaps in need of a correction is being leveraged by the sort of authoritarian overcorrection that has been the downfall of more modern states than any other philosophy.
However, if it's worth anything, there are no capital requirements for starting a company with liability protection, which isn't the case in several European countries.
Americans also aren't required to register or deregister themselves with the local government whenever they move.
I can think of other examples (the lack of television taxes, religious taxes, &c). Again though, these examples depend a lot on each country, so I'm sure you can find exceptions for each of these depending on the European country you look at.
That is particular is definitely a tradeoff. The US did do it with things like the Interstate Highway System but I'm actually OK with Eminent Domain being difficult to exercise today.
Which in part resulted in the passage of NEPA and our current morass.
You have the patchwork of local, county, state and Federal government. You have the adversarial legal and regulatory framework. And you have a powerful "anti-government" ideology that fails to even understand that most projects happen through the cooperation of industry and the state. And on the other hand you have a "left" that wants to cheer sticking-it-to whatever given corporation rather than pushing sane regulation. And you have dysfunctional ideologies around both taxation and government spending. And NIMBYism but with the opposite being developers wanting no fetters at all, etc, etc.
While I appreciate the sentiment, I’m not sure that’s true:
- China is managed by corrupt elite since the last century
- Russia is completely corrupt (as was the USSR)
- India seems to have systemic corruption issues
- France politicians are well known for their corruption scandals
…
Imo, things would be more solvable if people reacted to what parties do rather then bs they say.
An example from my local city: our small city (33k pop) won a $10mil grant for downtown revitalization. The money is supposed to help stimulate small business growth in the downtown. The administration spends $1.1 mil tearing down a parking garage, another $600k building a parking lot on the same piece of land of the garage, and they've got their fingers crossed they can get a developer to build an apartment complex there, which means they'll have to tear up the parking lot. The cherry on top is knowing we also commissioned a report to study downtown parking trends, and know that even on the busiest day up to 80% of parking spaces are unused. But the administration celebrated the 10-12 construction jobs they created.
Anyone who has taken a basic economics course would recognize this as the Broken Window Fallacy, but our officials either don't know or don't care (my guess is the latter). Spend lots of money - create useless jobs - that's how a productive economy is supposed to work, right?
Is that where the money actually goes, though? Serious question.
> Labor: in New York, the productivity of construction labor seems unusually low and wages high.
That's why they want the money coming from the federal level even if it's just for some state infrastructure: the more "fly-over" state people pay for some SV vanity train line, the better.
It come down to two things, in my opinion. First is the nightmare that is Federal funding. The State administers the funding and has to take funding for multiple Federal programs a put it toward a given project. Ultimately they pass the paperwork off to the consultant instead of doing it themselves.
Second is the number of people in positions of power that are only in that position due to time spent with the State. These individuals are ineffective at their job (see point 1), and feel they have to justify their position by critiquing stupid things. One example is when we tried to use a different san serif font and column justification on a report. We got a stearns talking to about how ariel is the preferred font and left justified is the preference of the individual. This of course took a half hour meeting that likely cost north of $500 when you account for the wages of the engineers involved.
Simply saying that 6 billion dollar project will cost 400 million in Europe so a wastage of 5.6 billion is hilarious until they give detail breakdown of costs. Maybe they can come out and say all american companies, government authorities, public, politician/ political system are dumb or just corrupt. For now I will just say they are just repeating lazy, half-assed cliches and presenting it like a report.
From this report :
"Building back flexibly requires empowering low- and mid-level civil servants to work flexibly and at arms-length with private contractors."
What does this even mean?
Should they work closely? from far to maintain impartiality? just give them verbal directions with no written record to move fast? Or it is just put all good sounding words with no cohesive meaning at all.
In other countries, not only are there people employed by the state who do said project management and have the responsibility and expertise, but when outside PM work is required, it has to be done by a different entity.
Nothing to do with being dumb, everything to do with bad incentives.
https://cityview.ci.bend.or.us/Portal/Planning/StatusReferen...
Notices were put up, letters mailed, comments sought (I wrote in, in favor!).
All of that for a flagpole with a US flag right in the middle of the property.
Everybody seems to pick out the pieces that confirms their personal opinions about What's Wrong With America, where the truth in almost all cases is 'sorta, but it's more complicated and nuanced than that'.
It doesn't include units in the axes and the labels are just centered there. And what do those dots even represent?
America is also super litigious but I don't believe that contributes significantly to public works due to the limits on state and federal liability.
In other words, states with bigger and better-run governments have lower infrastructure costs.
I think a lot of waste and corruption is due to winner-take-all elections. A representative that represents one party has to answer to that party. If he does not represent its interests, they will elect someone else next time.
In winner-take-all elections, you vote for your least worst option and representing one perspective doesn't as matter as much. It's easier to sell your vote to lobbyists.
But people are convinced that our elections were implemented in the best possible way, so there is a reluctance to even weigh the options.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Five_Interchange
Ironically, though, the largest freeway interchange in the DFW area, actually 3 almost conjoined separate interchanges occupying a tremendous land area, is only 3 levels near the DFW airport north entrance. At the widest the freeway there is 7 lanes each way, plus 2 lanes of toll each way in the center for a total of 17 to 18 lanes of traffic. Yes, it still gets gridlock. You can see it here:
https://www.google.com/maps/@32.93809,-97.0628477,4001m/data...
We also changed the submitted title ('Why is American infrastructure so expensive?') to the actual title. Note the site guideline: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."
In short: Corruption.
The US over time loses its manufacturing and tooling capabilities. Most infrastructure work is custom. You can't build a bridge overseas, ship, and install it in the US. You can build the parts overseas. But it'll take a lot more time and resources to design and assemble them into a bridge in the US. So the final cost ends up being more.
I live in a neighborhood built in the 1980s. Up the hill, there are neighborhoods built in the 1990s and 2000s. After 2000s, houses look pretty much the same. The houses are more expensive. But the amount of custom design decreases over time. It's got more and more expensive to build custom things in the US.
I don't think it's possible to fix these infrastructure costs until we can fix the monetary policy. I think a new crypto system can provide a solution to this problem. Until then, we're stuck with cheap and unnecessary goods while our infrastructure is slowly deteriorating.
