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A big chunk of the problem is planning/political:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_Line_(Maryland)

> A March 2025 report by the Maryland comptroller's office found that permitting and legal fees for the project, originally budgeted at $6 million, had actually consumed roughly $800 million, thanks to two lawsuits and the contract renegotiations

Better tech cannot solve that on its own, the problem is not even there.

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That's still only 3% of the money per track length that we're talking about here.

My guess is that the indirect impact might have been in the tens of %. One of the biggest (if not the biggest) reasons for enormous construction costs is delays which make an efficient construction timetable impossible, and two lawsuits of course result in a long and enormously unpredictable delay.

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