It took a year to build the Empire State Building, and 5 years to build the Hoover Dam yet current estimates for the Francis Scott Key bridge rebuild are near 10 years. Why is this? Have we regressed?
In: Engineering
Every answer here is some variation of “planning” or “safety standards” or “environment”. The answer is that, while all of those are different in degree from the past, the biggest issue is uncertainty because of lawsuits. You may expect that, to build a large project, you create a whole plan and submit it to a government office who provides feedback and when everything is good, you get a permit and get to start building. In functional countries, this is how it works. In the US, instead, there is no one-stop government office that gives you the go-ahead. Instead, there are multiple offices that require their own review, who can simply say they won’t sue you if you start building, but others till might—and many groups of citizens do.
Essentially, anyone can sue to stop the project at any time, for any reason. This is frequently done under the auspices of environmental review, but the actual objectives are varied. Some people don’t want it to be built, so they sue to make the project so expensive it never gets built. Some times labor simply wants more money, so they sue to delay the project until it’s financially better to just pay them to finish. Ezra Klein has dubbed it the “vetocracy”: https://www.vox.com/2020/4/22/21228469/marc-andreessen-build-government-coronavirus
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