There was a specific example that is indicative of why it costs so much here. He said, hypothetically, that a road project may have to purchase 5 additional fe

There was a specific example that is indicative of why it costs so much here. He said, hypothetically, that a road project may have to purchase 5 additional feet of land for the right of way in order to meet some standard like 12 foot lanes, doing this without thinking at all. That 5 feet may not have been needed if you sized the project to 11 foot lanes, but now it must be purchased from a variety of landowners, and each one knows that they can hold out for top dollar. And it's probably low-value land to them anyway if you're building a 5-lane road through it. This sort of thinking gets in the way of a lot of projects. I read at the time that Acela was proposed as a 180mph train, but the difficulty acquiring and building more right of way to smooth out turns, and the requirements for heavier parts to meet some safety regulations, meant that it could not approximate the speed of TGV. Instead, it goes 150 on some relatively straight sections and usually goes somewhat less. The special trainsets also cost more than European HSR trainsets. Why do government software systems cost so much? Many of the same reasons, and as the article points out for infrastructure, the players have a desire to fund big projects and act like they're "done" instead of funding little improvements all the time.