But this is already the case -- nobody believes the price tags put on big government projects, at least in the US. You simply can't build something like the Ba

But this is already the case -- nobody believes the price tags put on big government projects, at least in the US. You simply can't build something like the Bay Bridge for $250 million. And the reason public works projects are so expensive is usually because they're big, things go wrong, and there's a political element. You can't predict everything that will go wrong, and you'll never remove politics from it. The problem isn't that huge public works projects cost a lot of money, it's that the estimation process is more about politics than reality. People building the Bay Bridge knew they could go find comparable projects and build an estimate that way -- they didn't do this because they were trying to come in at a certain price point, which means throwing a defendable methodology out the window. I'm not saying this is the way it SHOULD be done, but it's the way things are done. And if you try to do it differently, someone else will just underbid you and raise the price later.