It still baffles me how the United States is unable to do anything similar.
Our projects are half the size and double the cost.
http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-bullet-train-c...
Much of the cost difference is because we refuse to be efficient with our large government projects, but a lot of it is also due to the fact that we care at least a bit about stuff like poor people, endangered species, historical preservation, etc. Big infrastructure projects are a lot cheaper if you can just bulldoze whatever is in the way and not care about it.
She used to work for Caltrans and once I learned what she did it really shed a little light on why these big infrastructure projects can rack up such high bills.
As you said, if all we did was bulldoze and build we could probably build even faster than some of our foreign counterparts, but what we do is far from just bull doze and build.
This biologist, for example, explained to me that before new roads are built, an environmental impact assessment was done. I had heard of these but not how detailed they are.
They actually send biologists out in the field to tag and catalogue different species - all sorts of things from grizzly bears to salamanders. And not just tag and catalogue, but track them for long periods of time, often manually, to see how that particular species lives and moves about the environment. These are highly skilled and trained people who hike deep into remote areas and do this for weeks at a time.
It's a tough job to balance being competitive with the world while at the same time adhering to our principles.
I'm as enraged as the next guy when public projects take forever, but it made me genuinely happy to know someone is out there doing this kind of work. I can only imagine what other types of work are done during infrastructure projects that I can't even think of.
I think in the US, if we were faced with a similar choice (not that we have any city walls here, but imagine something of similar historical significance) we'd either put up with the much more expensive boring approach, or just decide we couldn't do the project at all.
Without such funds nothing would get done at all.
No, I don't think that. But I do think it's likely that the various levels of US government like to stake their claim to more autonomy compared to the various levels of government in Europe (particularly at the local level -- I'm sure the EU and national governments love to "get involved").