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Comment by dagw | Hacker News Reader

outlandishly expensive infrastructure projects are in the US

As someone in Europe I wonder where this notion comes from. Just about every major (and several minor) infrastructure project I can remember in my lifetime, in any of the European cities I've live in, has been both late and wildly over budget

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Because it's true. Projects in Europe, especially big ones, often go over budget and are late. There are extremes like Berlin Brandenburg, but usually the price increase is in the order of 20-40%, which isn't too bad considering the complexity, and there's still good results in exchange. (E.g. Grand Paris Express will cost 50% more than originally planned (35 vs 22 billion euros), take a few years more, but it will result in 200km of all new fully automated, mostly underground, metro lines which will be amazing)

In comparison, in the US and Canada big projects are absurd. Take the Second Avenue Subway in New York - it's projected to cost $6 billion for 2.4km of track (no, that's not a typo, 2.4 km of track, really).

The California HSR is costing multiple times what similar projects in other countries cost (estimated to cost upwards of $100 billion, up from the original estimate of $40 billion for the first phase of 840 km; the Turin - Lyon high speed railway in more challenging terrain, including the longest rail tunnel in the world, is projected to cost around 25 billion euros for 270km, 1/4 of the price for 1/3 of the distance).

In fact there are lots of people and publications trying to understand why costs in US and Canada are so absurd compared to anywhere else in the world:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7b5mn/a-dollar100-billion-l...

https://www.vox.com/22534714/rail-roads-infrastructure-costs...

https://www.npr.org/2023/06/26/1184420745/why-building-publi...

https://www.marketplace.org/2022/03/28/why-does-transit-infr...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zzcy7Usw8y8

Case in point: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Brandenburg_Airport

This train tunnel below Malmö in Sweden was finished in 2010 six months earlier than planned and at a cost 10% below budget.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_Tunnel_(Malm%C3%B6)

That’s Scandinavia though.

Maybe I shouldn't paint all of Europe with the same brush. Although other comments are agreeing with my observation. And I agree that there's plenty to complain about in Europe too, but then still the total costs are often factors lower than in the US. It being outside of my professional field, I've found it quite hard to search the Internet for easily comparable numbers, but what I've been able to find over the years on cost per mile of road, or cost per meter of bridge, I've found sometimes a 10× difference between the US and the Netherlands (where I'm originally from). Maybe I'm confirming my biases, but I just don't think so.

Major infrastructure projects everywhere tend to be both late and wildly over budget, but the point is that in USA the initially budgeted cost (which is optimistic and doesn't get met) is outlandishly expensive even when compared to the actual wildly over budget cost of other places; what other countries say "wildly over budget" is still cheaper than a USA project that would get done on time below budget.

Similarly, just look at HS2 project in the UK, couldn't even get half way through the project before scrapping it.

i wonder that too (although we all know how intellectually comfortable it is to resort to tribalist thinking). human greed, inefficiency, and error is certainly not geographically restrained.

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