The best post I’ve read in a long time on the high cost of U. S. infrastructure is this one at RealClearPolicy. If its findings are correct none of the usual suspects is actually responsible for why it’s so expensive to build, improve, and maintain roads, bridges, tunnels, etc. in the United States. It isn’t any of the following:
- Land costs
- Non-labor construction costs
- Davis-Bacon wages or, indeed, labor costs generally
Grasping for explanations, they propose that the reason that building, improving, and maintaining our roads, bridges, and tunnels is expensive in the U. S. is due to our legal and political systems:
Many of the world’s most expensive projects are in the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand, which, like the United States, have common-law systems. So it might be that common-law systems provide legal protections for property owners — allowing more lawsuits over noise, smoke, and other nuisances, as well as limits on eminent domain — that increase costs by forcing the government to pay off opponents or to locate projects inefficiently to avoid angering property owners. But some non-common-law countries, like Germany, also have strong legal protections for property holders yet low rail-construction costs.
So it’s not that, either. Maybe it’s politics:
Political fragmentation may also be a culprit. Rail projects often have to run through many localities and states. Local governments frequently have difficulty contracting with one another, which can inflate construction costs by encouraging duplication rather than sharing resources.
A common solution to the problem of inter-local contracting is creating regional bodies, but these entities have their own problems — particularly in terms of accountability.
One factor they don’t explore which may be an indirect measurement of legal and political dysfunction is schedule overruns. I wonder how the conformity of U. S. highway, etc. construction compares with that of other OECD countries?
I have no direct experience of government building projects at any level but I do have substantial experience with government projects. My experience has been that politicians and other policymakers here are not willing to allow professionals to control their own specialties here. Is that different from other countries? I think it may be.
These articles never appear to consider the U.S. has notoriously crooked construction and government contracting industries. As always, for our elites there can be no mention of the “c” word.
And Americans understand that which is why their trust in their government is so low. Appropriately so.