Why does it cost so much to build things in America?

“One reason the US isn’t very good at building transit cheaply is that it doesn’t practice.

“If you look at Paris or Seoul or Shanghai, they’ve been building [transit] pretty much nonstop for decades now. New York, on the other hand, built its subway at a breakneck pace until 1940 and then cooled it,” Goldwyn explained.

Agencies aren’t routinely in charge of building new things, so every time they do, it’s back to the drawing board.

“There’s a learning curve, almost with every city, when they’re introducing rail, because you don’t have a local knowledge base on how to do this,” explained Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program at UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment. “Whether that’s on the construction side or the oversight side or public management side. You do see a lot of cities stumble out of the gate when they’re trying to get their first projects done.”

 Then there’s the complexity of building across multiple jurisdictions. The federal government often provides funding for a project that requires multiple cities or counties to coordinate, all to complete a multibillion-dollar project unlike one they’ve probably ever accomplished before, often without a clearly defined leader — it’s like the most dysfunctional group project ever.”  

““Here in the United States, we as a country are not very accepting of disruption,” Goldwyn told Vox. In Los Angeles, workers constructing the Purple Line could only work weekends — thenCovid-19 hit, and stay-at-home orders made it possible for them to work 24/7. The result?

“They completed the project seven months ahead of schedule.””

“There are also myriad ways the US needs to streamline the process for developing transit projects. Lewis explained to me that European regulators were often shocked that American transit agencies have to go through their own process to get authorization to shut down a street or prepare an area for construction.

“A lot of the [processes] that we use here in the United States are too slow or too cumbersome and outdated. We need to make it easier to build more and better transit projects,” Lewis explained.”

“As the Action Committee for Transit, a local pro-transit organization, documented, residents of the wealthy DC suburb of Chevy Chase have led a decades-long crusade against the light rail project,which will benefit the entire region, by claiming that a “tiny transparent invertebrate” might be at risk. “When no endangered amphipods were found,” the detractors turned to other arguments. However, repeated references to the potential harm to the Columbia Country Club and also a public comment disparaging the needs of people in less affluent communities makes clear that much of the stated concern was likely never environmental or financial.”

“Any major project will incur harms on some group of people — construction can impede traffic, new structures can obstruct a view from your porch, things that reasonable people would agree are annoying or costly. But transportation projects have to go somewhereand one only has to look at the housing market to see the costs of allowing individual citizens to derail projects due to real or fabricated harms.”

https://www.vox.com/22534714/rail-roads-infrastructure-costs-america

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