> “The environmental process has become about litigation protection,” he said. “You’re going to get sued so you’ve got to go out and basically do process upon process, study upon study to make sure that somebody cannot find some toehold for litigation.”
Not to knock on the environmental regulations but I think this illustrates why big monolith projects tend be very difficult or to fail outright. In the U.S. the system is setup to completely de-risk large-scale construction projects. We want a large project with a huge footprint to have zero environmental impact, zero negative impact on any community, displace no workers, and benefit every potential stakeholder. No trade-offs allowed: either everybody wins or the project is not completed or even started.
So the era of big top-down monoliths may be over in the U.S. Local, low impact solutions like Seattle's Link light rail are the future.