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It is most definitely a fair discussion to have, and the bidding/financing/contractual system for these projects really does need to change to have better incentives.

I just don't think your incentives would produce better outcomes, from my perspective it would make things worse.

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I will make no attempt to defend the specific recommendations I mooted. There is better work, in any case, in the academic domain on fixing our flawed civil-engineering auction processes.

The problems anyone campaigning for auction reform runs into are three-fold. One, it's a boring problem with boring solutions. Two, there are vested interests. And three, Americans suffer from a just-world bias when it comes to infrastructure [1]. The latter is apparent even in this thread. It's difficult to find solutions when people vigorously defend a clearly-flawed system.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis

For sure. I don't know how you overcome the inertia of our societies structure to head towards something that would likely be better for the majority of citizens. Which is a problem in many more domains that just civil works auctions.

I can see how the recommendation you mooted would improve incentives in some procurement domains. Large civil works isn't one of them however.

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