Yeah - I recently had a conversation with a biologist - a profession that I don't normally have the opportunity to interact with. She used to work for Caltrans

Yeah - I recently had a conversation with a biologist - a profession that I don't normally have the opportunity to interact with. She used to work for Caltrans and once I learned what she did it really shed a little light on why these big infrastructure projects can rack up such high bills. As you said, if all we did was bulldoze and build we could probably build even faster than some of our foreign counterparts, but what we do is far from just bull doze and build. This biologist, for example, explained to me that before new roads are built, an environmental impact assessment was done. I had heard of these but not how detailed they are. They actually send biologists out in the field to tag and catalogue different species - all sorts of things from grizzly bears to salamanders. And not just tag and catalogue, but track them for long periods of time, often manually, to see how that particular species lives and moves about the environment. These are highly skilled and trained people who hike deep into remote areas and do this for weeks at a time. It's a tough job to balance being competitive with the world while at the same time adhering to our principles. I'm as enraged as the next guy when public projects take forever, but it made me genuinely happy to know someone is out there doing this kind of work. I can only imagine what other types of work are done during infrastructure projects that I can't even think of.