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Because it's true. Projects in Europe, especially big ones, often go over budget and are late. There are extremes like Berlin Brandenburg, but usually the price increase is in the order of 20-40%, which isn't too bad considering the complexity, and there's still good results in exchange. (E.g. Grand Paris Express will cost 50% more than originally planned (35 vs 22 billion euros), take a few years more, but it will result in 200km of all new fully automated, mostly underground, metro lines which will be amazing) In comparison, in the US and Canada big projects are absurd. Take the Second Avenue Subway in New York - it's projected to cost $6 billion for 2.4km of track (no, that's not a typo, 2.4 km of track, really). The California HSR is costing multiple times what similar projects in other countries cost (estimated to cost upwards of $100 billion, up from the original estimate of $40 billion for the first phase of 840 km; the Turin - Lyon high speed railway in more challenging terrain, including the longest rail tunnel in the world, is projected to cost around 25 billion euros for 270km, 1/4 of the price for 1/3 of the distance). In fact there are lots of people and publications trying to understand why costs in US and Canada are so absurd compared to anywhere else in the world: https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7b5mn/a-dollar100-billion-l... https://www.vox.com/22534714/rail-roads-infrastructure-costs... https://www.npr.org/2023/06/26/1184420745/why-building-publi... https://www.marketplace.org/2022/03/28/why-does-transit-infr... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zzcy7Usw8y8 |