[bryanlarsen]

That's not red tape. That's politics. Europe is notorious for red tape, yet can do large transit projects for an order of magnitude less cost than America can.

America needs more red tape. Red tape is explicit rules and procedures. In Europe you can make sure your project follows all of the explicit rules and procedures and then you can proceed. Nobody can come and try and stop you because you just say "I followed the rules", and continue.

OTOH in America the rules and procedures aren't explicit. They're embodied in court precedent (like the environmentalist who sued) and in gatekeepers like the county commissioners.

[reliabilityguy]

> That's not red tape. That's politics.

That’s literally the definition of red tape! How do politicians have this kind of power to stop the projects? Because there is a county/city/state law that grants them this power. It’s literally part of the procedure! In other words, some part of the process is not defined beyond “the council member has veto power for any construction in their district” (hello NYC!).

As a result, the whole process is not deterministic and ill defined due to red tape.

[SoftTalker]

> In Europe you can make sure your project follows all of the explicit rules and procedures and then you can proceed.

You can in America too, if everything you want to do falls within the current zoning you can build "by right" but the problem is that most projects need a variance here or there, even for something like the type of siding used and that is when all the political negotiation kicks in.

[mogwire]

> Every major project in America has undocumented costs to go along with the miles of red tape.

Along with would imply that they are not red tape.