[bluetomcat]

It's more of an American cultural trait. People are fearful and obsessed with safety. They can be vocal and overreacting for trivial stuff. They often act in a virtue-signalling manner and put stickers on their cars. Before anything gets done, millions of tweets and reddit comments have been written.

[vmfunction]

In US, safety is often tight to 'will we get sued for this' mentality that is associated with the corrupt legal system. This could also attributed to the over cost of building a train system in US vs other parts of the world.

[renhanxue]

Levy's research group calls this "adversarial legalism" and yes it does seem to be a contributing factor to high construction costs.