celebrate the opening of the long-awaited Second Avenue subway, Governor Andrew Cuomo said the project showed that government “can still do big things and great things.” What he didn’t say is that the project also shows that government can do really expensive things. The line, which so far consists of just three stations and two miles of track, is, at a cost of roughly $1.7 billion per kilometre of track, the most expensive ever built. And it will keep that record as Phase 2 begins, at a projected cost of $2.2 billion a kilometre.
Construction projects everywhere are subject to delays and cost overruns. Bent Flyvbjerg, a Danish economic geographer, has found that nine out of ten infrastructure mega-projects worldwide ran over budget and the same number finished behind schedule. But the U.S. is the world’s spendthrift. A 2015 study by David Schleicher, a professor at Yale Law School, and Tracy Gordon, a fellow at the Urban Institute, looked at a hundred and forty-four rail projects in forty-four countries. The four most expensive, and six of the top twelve, were American, the Second Avenue subway among them. In a study of transit construction costs worldwide, Alon Levy, a transit blogger, has found that they are often five to six times higher here than in other developed countries. [...]
Then, too, because most infrastructure decisions in the U.S. are made at the state or local level, involving multiple governing bodies, projects must also satisfy a wide range of constituencies. Political considerations are often as important as technical ones, and schemes that are initially well defined can end up like Swiss Army knives, fulfilling any number of functions. Long-suffering engineers call this “scope creep.” Washington and Oregon, for instance, spent years collaborating on plans for a new bridge on I-5, spanning the Columbia River. What started as a simple proposal quickly morphed into a full highway expansion (including the rebuilding of five miles of interchanges), along with a light-rail extension. The cost rose to more than three billion dollars, after which the idea was abandoned.
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