I look around me and I see roads, bridges, trains, subways, etc. All over America. We couldn't have been that bad at it or we'd still be in the stone age.
If NYC is incompetent at building infrastructure in 2019, then NYC is incompetent at building infrastructure in 2019. Similarly, if one big project in CA has big cost overruns, then one big project in CA has big cost overruns. These are likely issues related to the particulars of these places as well as these particular projects.
I agree that NIMBYISM is a problem not only for building infrastructure, but housing as well. If the problem continues to get worse and we are facing decaying infrastructure, we may have to alter our laws to shift the balance we currently strike between property rights and the public's interest in having more housing and infrastructure.
Either way, someonesmind is exaggerating here. If our government screwed up everything it did, we'd all be living in huts, eating rocks and twigs, not being the most powerful and successful country in the history of the earth.
I think it was K1052 who explained how these contracts are negotiated. A lot of times or maybe all the time a contractor lowballs the bid, gets the bid, then as the the process moves along the trues costs of the project come through. And the contracts lack a cost sharing provision. So if some contractor wins the bid at 8 bucks, but the true cost will be 18 bucks. The tax payers typically pick up the 10 bucks in difference. Where the reality is the govt should be negotiating a cost sharing. So the contractor eats 5 bucks in cost for the 10 dollar override. It seems to be universal any govt contract is going to have cost overruns. A lot of them criminal imo.
Forgive me if I got the wrong person who explained that to me about a year go @K1052