Why does it cost so much to build things in America?

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Why does it cost so much to build things in America?

This is why the US can’t have nice things.
By Jerusalem Demsas@JerusalemDemsas Jun 28, 2021, 7:00am EDT

As Congress argues over the size of the infrastructure bill and how to pay for it, very little attention is being devoted to one of the most perplexing problems: Why does it cost so much more to build transportation networks in the US than in the rest of the world?

In an interview in early June, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg acknowledged the problem, but he offered no solutions except the need to study it further.

Biden’s original infrastructure proposal included $621 billion for roads, rail, and bridges. His plan is billed not only as an infrastructure plan but one that would help respond to the climate crisis. A big part of that is making it easier for more Americans to travel by mass transit. The Biden plan noted that “America lags its peers — including Canada, the U.K., and Australia — in the on-time and on-budget delivery of infrastructure,” but that understates the problem.

Not only are these projects inordinately expensive, states and localities are not even attempting to build particularly ambitious projects. The US is the sixth-most expensive country in the world to build rapid-rail transit infrastructure like the New York City Subway, the Washington Metro, or the Chicago “L.” And that’s with the nation often avoiding tunneling projects, which are often the most complicated and expensive parts of any new metro line. According to the Transit Costs Project, the five countries with higher costs than the US “are building projects that are more than 80 percent tunneled ... [whereas in the US] only 37 percent of the total track length is tunneled.”



There’s no one simple reason for this. Experts are clamoring for the government to collect more data, but the complexity of the problem lends itself to complex solutions. Still, the stakes are high. NYU researchers noted the massive economic stakes, pointing to studies that show that building dense urban transit networks could increase aggregate economic growth by roughly 10 percent.

The goal is bigger than a single light rail line or a trolley; it’s about creating transit networks that allow people to navigate from home to work to play easily enough to give up their cars, thereby reducing pollution and congestion. It’s not enough that the nation’s richest states can afford to build one or two transit projects every couple of decades. Bringing down costs is paramount to achieve the climate and economic benefits that accompany transit projects.
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