[bonzini]

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.

[rayiner]

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.

[Retric]

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.

[acdha]

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.

[Retric]

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.

[acdha]

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.

[skissane]

I wonder to what extent this is due to unique features of the US political system, which most other Western countries lack. One is that local governments are much more numerous and powerful in the US, while in most other Western countries they are fewer and less powerful, with many issues dealt locally in the US instead being centralised in state/provincial or even national agencies. Another is that having a presidential rather than parliamentary system (at both the state and federal level) tends to make the executive weaker, and the legislature and executive tend to have a more disjointed/competitive rather than cooperative relationship. Yet another is a very hard two party system combined with very weak party discipline within both parties, which the existence of primaries arguably contributes to. Is it plausible that some of these distinctives could make the US a much more difficult political environment in which to successfully pull off major infrastructure projects?

[Retric]

WTC had a great deal of will to build something, but also a lot of political meddling because it would be so iconic. You can read up on many of the details but by the initial plan was heavily altered by many stakeholders for to add office space, security concerns, etc.

For more classic example consider say the $252 million 2.8 mile Marc Basnight Bridge which started construction July 27, 2017 scheduled to be completed on February 2019 and actually opened on February 25, 2019. While huge it was politically uninteresting compared to WTC and much cheaper, so while it ended up on time and budget nobody paid much attention.

That bridge is much closer to the typical major project in the US than the kind of things people remember because they made the news and ran wildly over budget.

[bluGill]

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.

[Retric]

Where are you getting that should from? The base took a long time and was literally built like a bunker, but the actual floors went up at roughly 1 floor a week. However, there was a significant gap between all the glass on exterior being up and the building being ready for occupancy.

Part of this is tall buildings simply run into issues with workforce sizes. The same happens for developers building thousands of single family homes run into similar issues. They can build individual homes vastly faster than they can finish a large subdivision.

Elevators are also a bottleneck etc.

[Symbiote]

> still continuing with only 12.7 miles in operation

No, 23.7 miles are in operation. 12.7 miles is the amount that opened in the first stage in 2002.

Washington DC has a population greater than the whole of Denmark, and the DC metro was opened decades ago, so I don't think it's a useful comparison.

[Retric]

How are you getting those numbers? The original line M1 is 13.9 km. The total length of all lines adds up to 20.4 km counting the shared 7.7km section used by M1, and M2 once.

“The metro consists of four lines, M1, M2, M3 and M4. M1 and M2 share a common 7.69-kilometre (4.78 mi) section from Vanløse to Christianshavn,[3] where they split along two lines: M1 follows the Ørestad Line to Vestamager, while M2 follows the Østamager Line to the airport. The metro consists of a total route length of 20.4 km (12.7 mi),[3] and 22 stations, 9 of which are on the section shared by both lines.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_Metro

Also, the DC metro area is much larger than the area served by the metro system which is why the keep expanding it. In terms of actual daily riders the systems are surprisingly close, though DC gets swamped occasionally for things like Obama’s inauguration etc.

[bluGill]

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)