An obvious and common problem is just corruption. In many instances, the construction company will have personal ties with lawmakers, but let's pretend that corruption is a non-issue.
Another large issue is government bureaucracy. The process for proposing projects, winning bids, and being able to start work is a very long process which incurs increased staffing costs due to the time it takes to navigate red tape. This is one reason that government projects cost so much.
And I would speculate that issue is true throughout the whole system. With strong private property laws, fairly transparent government accountable in elections, employees with voices, and lawyers ready to do battle for any side of an issue, then there are many more considerations needed for any large project.
That said, there's a whole bunch of other good explanations in this thread. Very informative.
All sorts of reasons, but corruption (along-side organized crime) is a big issue in the construction industry. Imagine Oracle-style of service and business approach coupled with an npm-deep level of dependencies/middlemen whose palms need greasing and to have their cut of the project. Then on the other side you are boxed in by physics, thousands of regulations, zoning laws, complaints, city council, government bureaucracy.
I dont see a meaningful distinction between the causes you claim and what I said.
I agree third party litigation warrants highlighting, but I consider that as part of institutional inability to manage large projects.
Likelwise, I see high labor costs and unions as equavalent to lack of skilled labor and bloated labor costs.
At the end of the day, we are saying the same thing. Cost of workers is higher, the US uses far more workers, and the US legal and political systems are not condusive to efficient execution.
> it is a complicated web of poor contractor and consultant management, poorly coordinated work between different entities, viewing infrastructure projects as job programs, and over-designing projects from the start, among other problems.
I guess corruption falls under "among other problems"? Why can't we use that word in America? We all know the word. And we all know its force is alive and well here.
Aside from that, it's lack of accountability. Everyone knows - just like the MIC - once the projects starts you're free to bill your "cost overruns".
A huge part of the problem is that agencies can’t keep their private contractors in check. Starved of funds and expertise for in-house planning, officials contract out the project management and early design concepts to private companies that have little incentive to keep costs down and quality up.
It's a bit simplistic to blame only labour costs. Large, complex civil projects often have cost and schedule overruns because contractors know they're going to get paid anyway so are incentivised to make the project slower and more expensive.
Smaller, simpler projects don't tend to have the same issues because contractors know they can be replaced easily if they fail.
1) Employing only the cheapest contracting shops for several years and being baffled when all progress ground to a halt due to a mountain of spaghetti.
2) then deciding to rewrite
I'm not an expert, but it seems the mix of unions, politicians, kickbacks, corruption, favoritism, etc., leads itself to abuse.
Maybe, maybe if we just used something similar to the Army Corps of Engineers to handle all major infra construction in the US, keeping local politicians out of the fiscal and contractual aspects, then maybe we could get what we pay for. In the meantime, it seems like a bunch of backscratching and pocket stuffing --I mean, someone's making money.
Off the top of my head, two reasons construction projects are notorious for going over budget would be because of labour (union) costs, not to mention corruption (cf. Quebec's Charbonneau Commission).
Why single out weather? Lots of human activities are impacted by weather. What's the analogy to software?
Sorry, it wasn't really a thorough answer or intended as one.
Bad oversight: whoever's managing the project, doesn't understand the project. Not just, "I don't know how to read <some language>" lack of understanding, but "I don't know the difference between a spec and code". They don't specify terms that keep contractors in line which allow projects to run years and millions or billions over budget. Most of these contract managers aren't engineers, they may have engineers on staff, but it's not uncommon for those engineers to be employees of the same contractor that receives the benefits of the contract. The system is both incompetent and corrupted.
The companies receiving contracts that habitually run late and over budget are also some of the largest. Small contractors don't make it when this happens, but NG, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, they can survive the political fallout thanks to their clout.
If the companies have no oversight, and no accountability internally because they have no real concern for the other stakeholders (ie, the people paying them, the citizens/taxpayers), and the desire to make high quarterly profits, they'll rig the game by rent seeking, rather than completing a project effeciently and effectively and moving on to the next one. See NG and the maintenance of the JointSTARS aircraft as one such example. A rushed, but militarily valuable, project that had no maintenance plan in place, ends up contracted out to a company that destroyed one of the (few) planes and received no real punishment for it.
Thanks to the tenure-like nature of civil service, a large chunk of government employees are retired in place, new employees have no place to start (few positions opening), and those that get in have a terrible example in place and become retired in place after a handful of years themselves. They may start off dedicated to the job, and many do remain dedicated, but they are also frustrated by the processes involved and either quit or ride it out to retirement.
And regarding the platitudes, if companies and citizens (and consequently many of the elected and appointed officials) see profit as motive, rather than the future of the country or the society, then they make decisions based on that altered morality. Decisions based on short-term profit may not be harmful to long-term objectives, but they often are or are neutral to such objectives. A modern works project on the scale of the construction of the interstate system would likely never see the light of day, and if it did it would be mismanaged so as to never achieve its objectives.
Normally I type these up in emacs and copy them over, this is not a well formatted message, sorry about that.
Here's my simplistic answer to this in three words: incompetence, corruption, self-interest.
Having worked on a multiple construction projects and witnessed all 3 abovementioned aspects in various shapes and forms,I'd like to give a real life example. In the second largest city in Lithuania,a retailer got an approval to build a massive shopping center in the very center of the city.An agreement between the city council and the retailer was made and part of the project was to build a small bridge connecting the road outside the shopping center and a small island in the river alongside the road. The contract was won by a company that specialises in road and bridge building..So far so good. The works started. I used to go past the site on daily basis and often observed many people simply standing on the upcoming bridge and not doing much... Eventually a guy I used to know got a job with the company to work on that bridge project.Money was good..He quit after only a month.When I enquired what happened,he said that he is a man of work and can't stand idle. Even thought he tried his best,he couldn't stand the fact that he simply couldn't not work.On his first day,he went to the site manager and asked what he should be doing.He got told to collect a massive spanner and tighten 12 bolts on the metal construction.He returned to the manager in 45min or so and asked what's his next task.The site manager looked at him with anger and disappointment and said: look, it's your first day and you already making mistakes.I have given you a task for the whole day,not just for 45min..So now I now have to come up with something else for you to do.. Don't you ever do this to me again.You need to preserve your work,not rush with it.. Now scale it up to a massive underground project and you'll get the idea where the money is going to..
What are you going have consequences in the project management office of a gov contractor that probably has no real competition, besides maybe multiple years later when it's politically convenient? Fire the lower level union workers slacking off?
The fact every single major infrastructure project is a decade late and 3x over budget is just normal and tolerated by the people running the show across the US/Canada. The gov workers picking who wins these gov contracts (usually the same small set of companies) doesn't seem to care, despite extensive track records of the same behaviour. They probably have jobs lined up at these companies there afterwards.
It's only natural human behaviour to not put effort in if there's no consequences or risk in doing so. This is Public/private partnerships 101.
For #1 there were mayors literally obstructing the HSR project unless the agency chose a contractor from their town. Going back to your constituents and saying "I brought you the jobs I promised" guarantees reelection. The french offered to build the entire california hsr for a remarkably reasonable price but were turned down because local politicians wanted to score easy political points with their myopic base rather than provide infrastructure.
> A sinister part of the hassle and headaches are that sometimes they are designed to be so convoluted such that only certain favorite developers are even qualified to take up the project at all.
The apparently-lousy contractor is not just randomly inept. They are a product of high-level decisions to have a slow, inflexible hiring process, to replace lots of in-house expertise with contractors, and to award contracts in a way that emphasizes skill with the contracting process over skill at delivering useful results.
It’s essentially a political problem and a well-known CEO certainly has the clout to catch politicians’ ears.
They don't build it themselves they have contractors. The contractors make mistakes and there isn't enough resources to find/fix them all.
Much of the technical mistakes made by the contractors aren't due to poor engineering it's a lack of funding. Lots of the contracts put out are Lowest Cost Technically Acceptable due to budget problems beyond the control of the people making the decisions.
The core problem is the failure of the contracting agency to set requirements and stick with them. Once a contractor gets galloping requirements you get instant proof that better is the enemy of good.
Edit: Was this not an accurate summary of the key issues mentioned?
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