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> I'm also somewhat doubtful of cost-of-labour explanations. Wouldn't it be rational for some organizations to pay a lot more to get people to work longer hours if that's all that's going on? (It would almost certainly be cheaper to do that than to have the project take twice as long in total.) And why did many of the instances enumerated on the page happen in relatively high cost (for the time) locations, like New York, DC, and San Francisco, rather than in cheaper places?

As far as I can tell, for a lot of transit projects in the US, at least, the capital isn't there up-front to just pay more to parallelize things. The money is being raised by a long-duration tax so it comes in incrementally.

And then there's a second closely related factor: do we have the production capacity to switch from a five-year-project-horizon to a one-year one even if we wanted to spend the money faster?

It seems like it feeds itself, when it comes to cities and infrastructure:

- huge early growth spurs a big demand, construction industry spins up around it (this, I think, answers the "why did stuff happen in high-cost areas" question - high demand is what causes high cost, so in an area where nobody is demanding infrastructure, there's gonna be a lot less reason to build it)

- a lot of stuff, once built, will last decades or longer, and would be extra-hard and expensive to replace. so once demand starts to be met, and growth starts to slow, the construction industry gets less and less business, so it shrinks

- this is a limiting factor on new projects, but they're also seen as less urgent than the initial stuff (road widening is less critical than creating a road where there was none, say), so the slower pace is accepted.

- red tape also starts to develop, since in a new-frontier situation there are fewer entrenched powers to create regulations to protect things (whether or not those regulations are net-beneficial!)

That's my current pet theory, anyway: It's not that we've deteriorated, it's more that priorities, effort, and industry have shifted. There are a LOT of other things that happen far faster now than they did 30 years ago in 1992, after all; and unbelievably faster than they did when the Empire State Building was constructed. Sometimes it's harder to repair a body than to make a new human in the first place, if you will ;)

Construction time is dominated by staging materials (shipping, delivery, and movement of those materials around on site and into place), and sync points. Houses will sit for weeks waiting on a chain of specialists to get time to finish some critical piece.

In larger projects, there are generally larger staging issues (less footprint to put materials relative to the amount and size of materials), and there are many more specialists involved (including inspectors), increasing the frequency and delays of sync points. The materials for large projects are also much larger now. The Empire State Building exterior was built of bricks, layer by layer. The exterior of most modern buildings are giant panes of glass, requiring cranes and such to move them into place.

I think examining the sync points and staging requirements could shed some light on why construction projects are taking so much longer nowadays.

My theory is it’s common law contracting systems combined with government and industry wanting to push time and cost risk down the chain of subcontractors as far as possible. This leads to a situation where market forces are aligned to generate epic amounts of bureaucracy and unwillingness to be flexible. ‘I can’t do that because this was supposed to be ready for me to start’ or a part that costs 3x more even though there’s an exact equivalent generic component from a different brand but the expensive one is in the specification and a contractor won’t suggest a substitution because then it’s thier design risk. As an architect I’m very cautious about specifying anything innovative, because when it goes wrong in my experience the suppliers always find a way to get out of any warranty promises and everyone tries to blame me to get my PI insurance to pay for it. I’ve been stung before by being too trusting of product manufacturer’s claims and this had poisoned the well for anyone coming after them with something new they want me to try out.

Something that has changed is there were factories and farms that employed a lot of people. Wasnt easy to get out.