Basically all of them, and at 1/2 to 1/10 of the cost. Spain, Italy, the Nordic countries, and Turkey are all much more efficient at building infrastructure than the US.
Wow it takes effort to be slower than Italy. :) There are some infamous cases here of highways taking decades to complete (and also some positive experiences such as an awesome high speed rail network).
I think it depends heavily on which infrastructure you're talking about though and what parts of the project you're considering. Some countries may be faster at obtaining permits and/or finding the money, and others may be faster at actually building the thing; my impression is that Italy absolutely sucks at the former, but some projects are also slowed down by the sheer amount of archaeological finds that you stumble upon when digging under Rome or Naples.
Yeah, we are much worse than Italy. There is basically no example of a major transit project in the US being done fast and on budget in the last couple of decades. Here in Maryland we are almost 5 years behind schedule building a light rail line through some suburbs: https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2023/01/19/pur.... For the same money, and in far less time, Copenhagen built an entire fully automated subway under the city.
Copenhagen is in Denmark how does that say anything about Italy?
Anyway, European countries have plenty of boondoggles. Germany’s Berlin Brandenburg Airport was a 30 year project requiring multiple legal battles etc. construction took 11 years where the initial €2.83 billion budget over ran to €6.5 billion due to massive design flaws, construction issues, poor management, multiple lawsuits etc.
Asia has similar issues, China for example does plenty of big infrastructure projects because its infrastructure is so behind, but it’s projects have massive issues. The Three Gorges Dam for example ballooned from $8.35 billion to $37 billion.
I’m pretty sure he’s aware of which country Copenhagen is in but was simply pointing out as an example a much harder large, complex project in a dense urban environment built in far less time.
The key thing to understand is that while other countries have some boondoggles, the United States does almost nothing else despite spending massive amounts of money. The Purple Line mentioned was ostensibly going to be cheaper due to a public-private partnership but that ended in delays and greater costs as those almost always do, and the same was true of a highway expansion Maryland was trying to do with an Australian partner, and just about every other major American road, rail, bridge, bus station, etc. project is similar. Even our bike lanes take ages to build for the relatively small amount of work.
I agree with the theory that much of this is due to hollowing out the civil service as a “cost savings” measure – these projects sound like what I’ve seen at large organizations where they want a software project without hiring developers so they bring in one consulting company to do the work, and after the first round of failures, a second to oversee the first. Even if everyone is actually acting in good faith it’s just inefficient when you have multiple parties and difficulties sharing or acting on institutional knowledge.
US does plenty of large construction projects without major issue.
One World Trade Center a public/private partnership started construction April 27, 2006 and opened on November 3, 2014 at the cost of 3.9 billion. Which is easily in line with similar projects around the world, even though it was much slower than such projects back in the 1920’s.
It’s a more complicated building than those 1920’s designs booth from modern standards + features like AC, but also because it was designed to survive an attack.
PS: The Copenhagen Metro has been a 28+ year project that’s gone well but it’s hardly that amazing on its own. Planning began in 1992, the first construction started in 1996, first line opened in 2002 and the project is still continuing with only 12.7 miles in operation. By comparison the DC metro system is currently 129 miles long of which about 50 miles are underground with construction starting in December 9, 1969 and the first 4.6 mile segment opening in March 27, 1976.
We’re talking about infrastructure projects, which tend to be harder because they have more shared points of contention – e.g. the one rayiner mentioned was repeatedly held up by questions like whether homeowners who’d illegally fenced public land into their backyards had some right to keep it, which had to be fought up to the highest court in the state. The NIMBYs also tried things like claiming that it was uniquely endangering a rare amphipod, unlike the houses and roads they did support, etc.
WTC did not have anything like that to worry about and an exceptional level of political will to keep it on schedule.
The design should have added time (since is was a new thing and thus who knows how long before they can design something that works - this may require building labs to simulate things in). Everything else should just be a month extra. There is more to do not, but you can put the AC in on lower floors while placing beams for upper floors. Plus we have a lot of automation that has been made before this, so a lot of labor should go faster. A taller building will of course take longer to build than a short one, but it should be years difference.
Italy had a corruption problem a few decades ago. They have done some major reform and things are better, but the reputation remains.
Note that Italy is not perfect. And like all cases of corruption it is worse in some areas than others. The construction costs project is about mass transit where Italy does fairly well, but they don't look at highways so we cannot say anything about how they do highways from the data here. (I'm sure someone reading this knows more than I do about Itally's highways and can comment)
I think it depends heavily on which infrastructure you're talking about though and what parts of the project you're considering. Some countries may be faster at obtaining permits and/or finding the money, and others may be faster at actually building the thing; my impression is that Italy absolutely sucks at the former, but some projects are also slowed down by the sheer amount of archaeological finds that you stumble upon when digging under Rome or Naples.