The author briefly touched on how it's also expensive in countries with similar law-systems like Canada and Australia. It may just be that our laws make it a lo

The author briefly touched on how it's also expensive in countries with similar law-systems like Canada and Australia. It may just be that our laws make it a lot easier for contractors to jack up government contracts. My personal opinion is that managers and regulators in Europe and South Korea are a lot more efficient because they have a lot more freedom to apply common sense and personal judgement without fear of getting sued over a stupid technicality in a contract dispute. Whereas in US & Canada it's common for companies to sue the government over a small/irrelevant technicality and win a big settlement. Thus regulators and contractors interpret rules as literally as possible in order to avoid this legal confrontation and I think it's precisely this that drastically reduces the construction efficiency of public projects. One thing that surprised me in Germany, both in Munich and Berlin was that while the central train & subway stations were quite grandiose (Hauptbahnhof's interior looks like something out of Halo), the stations in the periphery of the city were surprisingly quite "thin and light", built frugally with thin weather shielding and a minimal amount of materials. Whereas in Toronto it's the opposite. We built a $6Billion subway extension, with 6 stations at a billion each, all overbuilt in exactly the same standard. Only half of them actually have any population within walking distance and one is a complete ghost-town. The reason why this happened was because treating all 6 equally was safe and no one complained. It's not hard to see how you can provide the same service for 1/4 of the price.