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Stuttgart 21 is another one: https://www.dw.com/en/stuttgart-21-germanys-other-engineering-fiasco-goes-off-the-rails/a-41782621 https://www.dw.com/en/stuttgart-

• elcomet 7y ago
  I think it's just about the same everywhere. In France you hear the same stories. I think we are just bad at estimating costs and time.
  • empath75 7y ago
    Also the us. The subway extension to Dulles airport is years over due and well over budget. I don’t think it’s a problem with government. If you want these sorts of public good projects built, you need government to do it. Government doesn’t have the same incentives that private business does, and there are positives and negatives with that. A profit oriented organization would never have taken on projects of this scale.
    • roadbeats 7y ago
      Istanbul Airport was built in 3 years by private companies, it was opened this year and considered as biggest after the new Chinese airport being built.
      • phreeza 7y ago
        I wonder if it has something to do with construction company execs having more skin in the game in more authoritarian regimes.
      • empath75 7y ago
        All these things are built by private companies. The funding is the part that comes from government.
        • ncmncm 7y ago
          And the change orders. Don't forget the change orders.
      • rolleiflex 7y ago
        It also caused the deaths of 55 workers in the meanwhile, 30 of directly work related accidents and 25 of ‘natural causes’(?) http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/55-workers-died-during-istanbul-airports-construction-minister-140600 http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/55-workers-died-during-ista... Not only that, large parts of it remain under construction. I know because I’ve been there two weeks ago. There was raw cement residue sitting uncleared before passport control. The signage is half broken and half incomplete. Instead of signage they have temp workers shouting the names of connecting flights and you have to huddle over to that guy and hope to god he knows what he’s doing. Oh, and it takes 4+ hours to come to Kadikoy, the centre of the town on the Asian side. It might be less of a disaster than the Berlin-Brandenburg mentioned here, but only barely so.
        • roadbeats 7y ago
          I was aware of those issues while I was typing the comment. One of my cousins worked in the construction (as a worker), heard things from him, too. My point was about private companies building airports. If Turkish government built Istanbul Airport, would there be no deaths ? Worker rights definitely make difference. But in the context of new Berlin airport, it looks like the problem is more about being able to organize and being able to manage a huge project.
          • rolleiflex 7y ago
            I meant more in the vein of government having a large role in being the referee in these kind of issues. Had Istanbul Airport been built in Germany with the exact same private companies, I suspect it would have far fewer of a death toll, since the German government is much more aggressive in coming after workplace safety violations. So even if private companies are ultimately responsible, the government still does have a large role in keeping everything in check - a role Germany and Turkey failed in different ways. Sorry to hear about your cousin, though, I hope he managed to get out unscathed.
  • inferiorhuman 7y ago
    And in America we look at France as being able to build reasonably priced infrastructure.
    • ncmncm 7y ago
      It's true. Paris builds subway tunnels and stations for a third of what New York pays.
• NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  Politicans of all flavours, in all countries, for nearly all projects seems. Yet just about every IT, aircraft and building project etc in the private sector comes in on time and under budget. Oh, wait, it barely ever happens there either! Maybe it's large projects per se then. Maybe there's added risk when politicians and private sector interrelate.
  • TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
    My suspicion is it's too many cooks spoiling the broth.
  • repolfx 7y ago
    The issue is simply that accurate estimation cannot be done for complex projects, yet people who aren't engineers and especially politicians cannot psychologically accept this, so insist on setting fixed size budgets (which then inevitably turn out to be insufficient). A better approach would be to do what's done more in the tech industry - decide a project needs to be done, then allocate it a permanent percentage of total revenues with close supervision of the details, until it's completed.
    • NeedMoreTea 7y ago
      That's actually more like the approach taken in the past in the UK for huge infrastructure projects, or road and power station, sometimes via setting up a specific (nation or city) owned company that got funding rounds! Yes, projects turned out more expensive than thought quite often, but it didn't make headlines quite the same. It was managed to stay good value rather than expected to hit a precise penny-accurate budget. I think the modern tendency to seek cheapest bid, rather than best value, makes it far worse. In trying to save money time and again they end up spending far more...
    • ptero 7y ago
      > The issue is simply that accurate estimation cannot be done for complex projects I do not think so. There are plenty of previous examples with enough similarities to estimate costs to +/- 20% at most, usually better. A bigger problem may be that quoting wildly optimistic price is more likely to get a public project started, even though most parties understand that the actual budget and time will be very different. But as long as the project takes a long time those who gave original estimates / started execution have plenty of chances to move away. And then "well, when I was running it, things were different" is a decent defense.
• skrebbel 7y ago
  > If politicians get to call the shots in any way, it's going to run way over budget. Pretty much every single time. This is nonsense. It's just that infrastructure projects that get delivered on schedule and on budget (or somewhat close to that) don't make for equally pretty HN headlines. There's a lot of public infrastructure around. The vast majority of it was commissioned by politicians. The vast majority of it is just there, mentioned a few times in the local rag before commission and upon opening and that's it. Sure, I wouldn't be surprised if public spending is more often out of budget or behind schedule than private spending like you suggest. But even then, Berlin Brandenburg is an exceptional case and suggesting that excesses like it are inevitable when politicians were involved is just nuts. There's plenty of competent politicians.
  • merdreubu 7y ago
    >There's a lot of public infrastructure around. The vast majority of it was commissioned by politicians. The vast majority of it is just there, mentioned a few times in the local rag before commission and upon opening and that's it. Of course, because the most of the press doesn't do it's job. Here is a more banal example about public bathrooms in New York: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfAE5emMCs8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfAE5emMCs8 >Berlin Brandenburg is an exceptional case No, I wager is the rule.
    • nosianu 7y ago
      > No, I wager is the rule. Which you "proved" by carefully selecting a single anecdote?
      • merdreubu 7y ago
        >Which you "proved" by carefully selecting a single anecdote? I CAREFULLY SELECTED a single anecdote... did you miss the part where is detailed why toilets (as in more than one) and other government projects cost so much ant take such a long time to complete? What can I say, keep believing, comrade.
        • 7y ago
• bosie 7y ago
  Genuine question but have there been studies comparing public and private construction projects and whether or not both go overboard financially/time-wise?
• Barjak 7y ago
  >If politicians get to call the shots in any way, it's going to run way over budget. Pretty much every single time. I'm reminded of that $2M bathroom at a public park in NYC. This is the video. There's some libertarian editorialization, but the facts themselves are solid. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfAE5emMCs8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfAE5emMCs8
• bjoli 7y ago
  The store is the same everywhere. I find very little info about the New Karolinska hospital in English, but it ended up being several billion SEK more expensive than planned. The cost is spread out over 30ish years,but it has already cost 18bn SEK (1.8bn EUR).
• literallycancer 7y ago
  If you always give the contract to the company that offers the lowest price, don't be surprised that it eventually gets too low to cover the real costs. 80k for a project that likely consists of months of filing for permits, coordinating tens of people and machines? Sounds like a joke.
  • southerndrift 7y ago
    To expand on this: >After the prescribed date, the bids are opened and assessed, and either the "lowest cost" or "most economically advantageous tender" is chosen. The contract award must also be reported in the OJEU and be published electronically on Tenders Electronic Daily ('TED'). [1] It's difficult to choose the best offer if you are legally obliged to choose the cheapest one. This has led to a situation where all companies have to make cheap offers. The only way to make money is by invoicing bills for unforeseen work that wasn't covered by the original offer. The irony of the situation is that there was an offer by the industry to build the airport for a fixed price. But Berlin chose to build the airport by themselves because that was supposed to be cheaper. Well, Athens chose the other way: [2] > However, after delays and slow development, the project was revived in 1991 with the then government launching an international tender for the selection of a build-own-operate-transfer partner for the airport project, with Hochtief of Germany being selected. >In 1996, Athens International Airport S.A. (AIA) was established as a Public–private partnership with a 30-year concession agreement.[1] That same year, the €2.1 billion development finally began with an estimated completion date of February 2001. The airport construction was completed five months before schedule, but was delayed opening a month due to surface connections to Attiki Odos not being completed. The airport officially opened on March 28, 2001. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_procurement_in_the_European_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_procurement_in_the_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athens_International_Airport https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athens_International_Airport
  • thg 7y ago
    > If you always give the contract to the company that offers the lowest price, don't be surprised that it eventually gets too low to cover the real costs. It's a known problem no one seems to care about. The Swiss do it better: They throw the cheapest and most expensive offers out and pick a contractor from the middle price range. Seems to work well for them in most cases. > 80k for a project that likely consists of months of filing for permits, coordinating tens of people and machines? It was a small bridge for pedestrians and cyclists that was closed about 5 weeks before they took it down, which took the crane just a couple hours. It was a project as simple as it gets and they still went way over budget while also leaving half the bridge standing. I just wish I could say this was an outlier, but it's commonplace around here.
• DoreenMichele 7y ago
  If politicians get to call the shots in any way, it's going to run way over budget. Pretty much every single time. My son talks a lot about a study that showed optimists badly underestimated how long a project would take. So did pessimists, though their estimates were less egregiously wrong. Basically, if people are involved, you can assume that budgets and time estimates are hand-wavy, ballpark guestimates at best. Life will get in the way. Even people who truly understand that will fail to accurately predict just how much life will get in their way.
• lixtra 7y ago
  > Basically boils down to: If politicians get to call the shots in any way, it's going to run way over budget. Pretty much every single time. So it’s not a surprise that we find counter examples in strong democracies. The Gotthard Basistunnel was build faster than projected and about 30% cheaper [1]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel