Design changes, underground tunneling problems and coordination with other agencies were some of the factors in the delays and cost increases. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority now envisions completion in December 2022 at a cost of $11.1 billion. Early estimates put the cost at $2.2 billion, then $4.3 billion in 2006 and $6.4 billion in 2008. Lengthy delays have also affected New York’s East Side Access extension of the Long Island Rail Road, which is supposed to cut up to 40 minutes off commuter time on the last segment, from Queens to Grand Central Terminal, with up to 24 trains per hour at peak times.Ĭonceived more than a half century ago, with a construction contract awarded in 2006, that project was supposed to be completed by 2011.
The job is now projected to finish in 2033 for $100 billion, though those estimates are dated and there is an $80 billion funding gap. When California voters approved a bond in 2008 for a high-speed rail system from Los Angeles to San Francisco, the project was supposed to cost $33 billion and be completed by 2020. “It is a lot harder to build projects here, and we are not as skilled at doing it,” he said. construction costs are higher than those in Western Europe and democratic nations in Asia, according to an upcoming University of California, Berkeley, analysis, said Ethan Elkind, a law professor and director of the school’s climate program. infrastructure was once rated the world’s best and now, “You know what we rank in infrastructure? Thirteenth in the world.” “A lot of projects are not delivering what they promised to deliver,” he said.
In California’s Inland Empire, the anger has turned to widespread action.īent Flyvbjerg, a professor at the University of Oxford who has studied scores of projects around the world, found that 92 percent of them overran their original cost and schedule estimates, often by large margins - in part, he said, because cost estimates are “ systematically and significantly deceptive.” Warehouse Moratorium : As warehouse construction balloons nationwide, residents in communities both rural and urban have pushed back.A Piece of Black History Destroyed: Lincoln Heights - a historically Black community in a predominantly white, rural county in Northern California - endured for decades.Bullet Train to Nowhere : Construction of the California high-speed rail system, America’s most ambitious infrastructure project, has become a multi-billion-dollar nightmare.The infrastructure spending plan is unlikely to rescue some existing infrastructure projects that are bogged down with problems.Īnd even with the new infusion of money, analysts say it will be tough to ramp up infrastructure progress as swiftly as envisioned in the current timetable.
The nation’s busiest passenger rail line, Amtrak’s Boston-to-Washington corridor, would get the biggest slice of a $66 billion rail package. The $1.2 trillion package has bold goals, directing the majority of $500 billion to highways, $39 billion to urban transit, $65 billion to broadband projects and $73 billion to electrical grids, among other items. And spending on infrastructure as a fraction of the economy has shrunk, giving local agencies less experience in modern practices. Legal challenges have grown stronger under state and federal environmental laws. Agencies have less internal technical talent. To the contrary, they signal the kind of cost overruns, engineering challenges and political obstacles that have made it all but impossible to complete a major, multibillion-dollar infrastructure project in the United States on budget and on schedule over the past decade.Īmerican cities and states were long renowned for some of the greatest bridges, water systems and freeways in the world, but challenges have grown more potent. Honolulu’s tribulations are far from a lone cautionary tale. The launch dates slipped forward and the cost estimates crept upward - at latest count, $11.4 billion, with a target completion date of 2031. Earlier this year, engineers realized that in some sections, the wheels were a half-inch narrower than the rails. Concerns over Native Hawaiian burial grounds stalled early construction, then problems with welding and cracks in the tracks appeared. The cost escalation since then has been an engineering marvel all its own. The $4 billion estimate in 2006 was hardly cheap, amounting to $200 million per mile. As Honolulu sprawled into new suburbs west of Pearl Harbor over the last two decades, city planners proposed an ambitious rail transit line that would sweep riders 20 miles into downtown.
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