The US funds infrastructure handsomely. In fact we probably even over-fund it.
Unfortunately we get very little back for all that funding. If you compare costs for rail and airports and bridges in the US to Europe or Asia, we pay for one bridge what other similar countries pay for three, four, or five bridges.
To some extent the more rules and oversight you put in, the more you chase out any "honest participants". I've seen it personally in federal contracting, the only participants who can get through the bidding process are the exact companies (like the big 5) who you don't want doing your project. The oversight and complexity of the bidding process chases out anyone who is not willing to spend half their time on meetings and contract overhead if that's what the customer is willing to pay for. It's the dead-sea effect but for contracting, if you chase out the good participants and then tighten the noose, you will just end up with worse and worse participant quality on average every time you repeat the process.
There's no easy answer.
Beyond that, we have a history of not making good on things like road warranties -- the state called in the warranty on I-275 back in the 90's and that caused the construction company to literally go bankrupt, so now there's a general reluctance to call in major warranty work. For instance, they haven't replaced the chunk of I-94 near the Indiana border that feels like you're in a paint mixer because the steamroller that did those few miles had a bad bearing, but everyone over there knows about it. It's getting replaced nearly a decade later in the next 6~18 months because that section just needs repaving in general now.
Seems like a fairly easy one, MDOT opens a few job reqs for road marking painting, buys some trucks, and paints lines on our roads. Private contractors makes a lot of sense in some situations, but this doesn't seem like one. MDOT knows how many roads need to be marked, how often, etc, why pay a private company to do so?
Not long ago I was listening to someone at one of those "big 5" companies complain about how new state rules were radically increasing the time it takes to pave a road while increasing costs, too. All with no quality difference in the end. As a tax payer, they were frustrated by it.
He's also expressed the inverse to me, that a lot of times they are trying to get the contractors to do things a specific way and the contractors just wanna rush through as fast as they can and get to the next contract. Sometimes, like in most engineering, there are reasons things need to be done a specific way, but building a road isn't really a collaborative thing, they just need to build it the way it was ordered.
I will add a fresh anecdote however. I was recently involved in bidding a project for a municipality, it was a FEMA mandated sewer improvement project. There was one respondent to the RFP (ours), that was substantially higher than the Engineer's Estimate. Aspects of the bid are still under review by state offices and FEMA, thus the bid was rejected, and the project will circle back for another round.
Was the bid high? Was the Engineer's Estimate low? Both? Why did no other contractors bid on the job?
There only being one respondent can certainly have pushed the price higher. I know for a fact that my portion of the work was estimated responsibly, but it was nonetheless expensive due to a tight schedule required by the city, and restrictions placed upon the work by proximity to residences and historic structures of concern.
Can the schedule be opened up to allow for less pressure? Can the specifications or restrictions be relaxed? What will entice other parties to bid? Can the review process by outside agencies be sped up to allow for the project to proceed? In my experience, such reviews always eat away at the project lead-up time, without respective time added to the schedule to allow the work to be performed. It's a lose-lose.
And I kinda lost what I was even going for here. Anyway, you can see any number of stumbling blocks that can be addressed, for one small sewer project. Expand this to public works across the country and imagine it.
A few years back a small single-story structure (~5000 sqft) was built near me. Every workday a plethora of workers would show up and make noise 8-5. Somehow took them the better part of a year to finish it. Really beggars belief.
Usually, these people are not permitted by the crane owner actually to perform any work on the crane at all.
By the way, salary for a master mechanic in NYC is around $150,000 p/a.
https://secondavenuesagas.com/2018/01/01/inside-times-deep-d...
Most people who complain about people standing around have no idea what is going on. Half of the time someone is moving materials they are completely empty handed going back to the pile for more materials. In some operations there is downtime where nothing can be done, but the need to do more work will happen soon enough that you can't send anyone to a different job (concrete work has a lot of this)
Maybe for a production-builder built tract house, although I bet a lot of those are built in parallel and not sequentially in order to maximize throughput.
But for a custom 5000sqft house, 150 days is a very tight timeline if you're not using pre-manufactured modular framing components like SIPs.
Even if you did build with modular framing, consider the amount of interior detailing required on such a massive living space (probably many bathrooms and a huge kitchen). That takes a lot of time.
It's almost like skimping on common human decency social services isn't actually saving anyone any money and just serves to perpetuate a gigantic industry of health insurers and pharmaceutical companies.