Why construction projects always go over budget

That's a recipe for failure

Programmers write the blueprint. The construction is handled by the computer (compiler, linker, tests).

Additionally, when your in the middle of creating your building, the owner doesn’t come in and say “actually, I want this apartment complex to also have a suite of luxury condors on every odd floor”.

It’s a fantasy to think that more planning would make software development cheaper or more on time. We tried that. That’s waterfall. And it failed miserably because software supports business needs which change on a quarterly or yearly basis. Not to mention that we need to update our software to take advantage of newer systems or security vulnerabilities. That building you’re putting has a fixed purpose that’s going to remain largely unchanged for 50 to 100 years or so, there’s generally nothing new to learn in terms of techniques and problems (unless your pushing things like with Burj in which case they did have to make on the fly adjustments and delay), and doesn’t have to deal with the challenges of the virtual space that software plays in.

So sure. If you’re a contractor building the same kind of website over and over again, I’m sure you can give a very accurate estimate of how long a given piece of work can take. If you’re trying to build a more scalable system or something totally new that hasn’t been done before, then there’s no plans to follow and you have to iterate until you figure out solutions to all the problems you encounter.

The other side of this conversation is that construction does get delayed or not finished. Talk with anyone that has built a house and they'll have horror stories of months of delays. Commercial is the place to be for construction, residential seems like endless issues up and down.

> compare this to a software team that has plans (design docs) for everything they want o build. they have schematics (tickets) that say do this here. to this exact interface.

Missing from your description is who is writing those precise plans and tickets that specify exactly what needs to happen down to the "exact interface", whatever that's supposed to mean. Whoever's writing those is your actual software developer, and they're wasting their time. If they already know exactly how the code should work, writing those documents takes longer than just writing the code itself. Throw the documents away and just write the goddamn code. Everyone else is doing literally nothing. What you described is not software development, it's a nightmare-creature feeding on wasted hours and crushed dreams.

I am not sure what "union break" is in Chinese...I would brush up.

You can say that we need experts, teams of consultants to issue reports at $1,000 per hour on disturbances to the local newt population or whatever, we need to pay off the bureaucrats in planning, we need to pay the unions and organized crime in NY...the reality is that someone has to pay this, and the US isn't efficient anymore. Layers of graft at every stage. China has just cut out the corruption, and they can sell the same goods at half the price, make double the profit...they just do it better.

He said of course they can finish, they have an entire week. Apparently he was incredulous. How does that NOT point to a week being more than enough time?

Busting my ass in my younger days to make "impossible" deadlines was far from unpaid work. It was a conscious tradeoff that paid off extremely well in cash and stock, and nobody cared about "undermining" their colleagues who had the exact same opportunities but chose not to chase them.

I don't "enjoy doing unpaid work", I "enjoy impressing people who casually throw big bags of money at people who are useful to them."

Knowing this, one could say that its a minor miracle anything gets shipped in this industry.

My father-in-law was in commercial construction for decades, now turned general contracting post 2008 recession, and he has binder and binders of contractor business cards, including a concrete section. I can assure you project managers would be frantically calling all concrete companies trying to find a replacement. And they will.

Risk management. Which in the real world actually means something, unlike those horribly pointless risk workshops your PM makes you turn up to.

The work package that contained the concrete truck would have assigned to it a risk. These risks have been carefully thought out ahead of time. I dare say in the building industry they re-use them. What an idea! Learning from your past. Anyway.

So the risk here is that ‘the truck gets stuck in an accident’, and that risk has a rating. An amount of money is assigned as a reserve to this risk in the event that it happens. This money is part of the project’s budget but ideally you never spend it. But it’s there.

So if the bad thing happens — freeway accident — the PM pulls out their risk register, looks it up, calls the boss, says “hey that risk eventuated, we need to use that reserve”, the funds are released, and the risk mitigation is initiated.

Sounds like $200,000 a day for bonus payments was nothing.

Incredible sense of teamwork, collaboration, support, care, pride in a job well done.

To me, it is efforts at this scale and quality that make “America great” and lets me reclaim the meaning of this phrase.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacArthur_Maze#2007_I-580_East...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TKjwblp1XI

Don't hire a mob-owned cement company, you say? Tough noogies, In NY, at least at that time, they were all mob-owned.

https://www.aviationpros.com/home/news/10393303/southwests-c...

https://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=401393

https://www.nytimes.com/1994/09/23/nyregion/mob-allegation-c...

https://www.gothamcenter.org/blog/material-politics-of-new-y...

No, the primary cause is politicians promising things that sound good so that they'll get reelected, because that's the number one thing they care about, not efficiency. On the other hand a private company will only build something that makes economical sense.

San Francisco? Lack of funding? $14 billion isn't enough?

The budget of San Francisco has roughly doubled in about the last ten years: is the government now twice as good at whatever it's supposed to do than it was ten years ago?

I'm not sure how accurate that generalisation is. The US has a lot of government – in some ways, a lot more than many other countries do, because local government in the US has a lot of responsibilities which in other countries are centralised at the state/province or even national levels - such as law enforcement, courts and prosecutors, public education, correctional facilities. Much of the US has two layers of local government (county and municipal), some parts even have three layers (e.g. the state of New York has village governments underneath town governments underneath county governments), when many other countries only have a single layer. The US has lots of special-purpose local governments (school districts, drainage districts, emergency services districts, etc), where in many other countries those kind of functions would be performed by state/provincial/national agencies instead.

Most of the anti-government rhetoric in the US is primarily directed at the federal government, not state or local governments. Even when state or local governments are targeted, it tends to be only directed at some of them. Some American conservatives will be very critical of the state governments of California or New York, but I doubt they'd be anywhere near as negative about the state governments of Florida or Texas or Utah or South Dakota. Or very critical of the county/city governments of big liberal-leaning urban areas like Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, but far less likely to criticise the local government of some rural "Red State" county or town.

Despite its reputation for hyper-capitalism, the US is arguably "behind" much of the rest of the English-speaking world when it comes to asset privatisation, public-private partnerships, public funding of private schools (US % of K-12 students in private schools is significantly below the OECD average, and severely limited public funding for private schools is likely a big factor in that), etc – and those issues are far from being the top priority for contemporary American conservatism. Which suggest that the US is actually far less "anti-government" than its popular image suggests.

I would agree with that.

> If all San Franciscans wanted a clean, efficient and convenient city, I'm more than convinced that all citizens working towards that goal could readily achieve it, and would make a government tasked with those goals.

I think you have to carry through your reasoning from the first point. People in San Francisco have different goals than those in Copenhagen or Tokyo. I strongly suspect that they also have differing (and lesser) ability to put aside their individual concerns to work together on a mass compromise like public transit inevitably must be.

Which is a good reason for the rest of the country to not want to throw a bunch of money on transit projects. American infrastructure reflects the American psyche. We drive around in individual steel tanks on roads that can take us anywhere we want to go because that’s who we are as a culture.

On a small/personal scale, you can (and I do) sandbag to a certain degree. But it's hard on a large project when everyone and their brother is looking to trim any fat out of the estimates.

In theory every single price is estimated analitically adding to market costs for materials and labor a percentage (usually between 13 and 17 %) and on this total another percentage for the profit of the contractor (usually 10 %)[1].

The quantities are calculated geometrically.

So in theory the estimation quantities by price should be exact or within a very small approximation to reality.

But in practice this sometimes (often) doesn't happen, the main reasons (cited in the article) are time passed since the estimation, optimism about ground/soil conditions, use of "wrong" price lists (and more generally inexperience of the estimator or Law/bureaucratic restrictions), optimism about weather, optimism about interferences with other infrastructures, change of building code, added features, actual mistakes in the project or in the contract, the list is long, but all the items in it tend to be "negative" ones implying more time and money needed for the construction.

Of course there are also many projects that are fine, properly estimated and that are built in time and within budget but essentially all the estimation, even if done in good faith and by experienced technicians, are predictions (and predictions about the future, the most difficult ones).

A better, more accurate process during designing and estimating (the 3 to 5% talked in the article) might help, but likely it would be not enough or reduce the incertainty by the same 3-5% that is spent for it.

To all the above you add what is a sort of the S.E.P. (someone else's problem) syndrome, the one(s) that make the project and the estimation, by the time the site is ready to start are already elsewhere, in another job or another project, it is not unlike what happens nowadays in many industries, a new CEO is chosen, he does some cuts on costs, changes something in the products, and after two years, by the time the effects of the changes become actually evident he leaves and someone else starts again.

[1] it depends on countries, but usually what are used are pre-made price lists that are a (supposed) average for a given work and are either outdated or do not apply to the specific work

1. New construction must meet ADA requirements. 2. Old construction can remain. 3. Repairing broken old construction requires meeting ADA requirements.

So between 2 and 3 you end up with broken old construction that cannot be repaired to "what it was" because repairs must meet ADA requirements.

Each step makes sense on its own, but combined they result in something worse (in particular) even though overall it works out better.

Not in the long run.

ADA just forces better designs. Retrofits are costly.

> As for the example of a minor accessibility project costing $1.4M and taking 3 years, I would suggest that there is probably more to the story that helps explain the cost or the time.

Committees, political turf wars, getting funding for the project through grants (that are complicated to apply for, that's why you need a dedicated bureaucrat to do it!). Then there's union rules since construction workers from the city are government employees.

That's half a million in employee's salaries right there and not a single concrete steps has been taken yet!

Adding a beg button can mean upgrading or replacing the signal control module, which could mean replacing the housing if it's not large enough for the new module. (Audible-tactile buttons and controllers themselves cost $5-6k each, just for parts.)

Aside from that, the issue with ADA compliance costs isn't when a municipality or DOT pays for them. It's when they remove the crosswalk entirely because they decide compliance isn't affordable enough.

There are other requirements as well relating to multimodal travel depending online the funding source.

All the while, we had an increasingly dangerous intersection with no visible crosswalks and outdated signals for years.

The stupid isn’t ADA, it’s compliance activity. Cities and towns cannot afford the engineers to meet the standards, so the Federal and State governments fund projects. So there’s no framework of best practices beyond the state standards - each project is a special snowflake.

Oh, your road itself is at a slope greater than 3%? Oops, you can't legally do it!

It's okay to have standards. It's not okay if they're bullshit.

And sometimes it’s ridiculous: drive through ATMs with braille for instance. Private motel swimming pools requiring wheelchair lifts. That extreme additional cost means that many motels just won’t have a swimming pool at all — so everyone is worse off. But you can’t charge disabled people a swimming pool surcharge since that discriminatory. So it raises costs for everyone. By the way, I am referring to private building codes, not taxpayer-funded projects like sidewalks.

Why haven't they been fixed? Why does the city continue to be cruel to disabled people year in and out, content to absorb the lawsuits from the few with means to bring them up? It's probably a simple case of those lawsuits being a lot cheaper than actually fixing the sidewalk to the standards the sidewalk is supposed to be fixed. This is an example of a regulation that was meant to help people (building nice sidewalks with various characteristics), but in the end the regulation was written with no understanding of the cost of these changes, or how they might stack up against the cost of doing nothing at all, so its an example of a bad regulation that should be changed so it can actually help people.

Construction times are even trickier, as they may also be influenced by other factors (authorizations/approvals or changing norms as an example).

A (typical) appropriate construction time for a (large/complex) project is around 4-5-6 years, 3 years means they were fast (in Chicago , in the '70's) 10 years means they were slow (in Slovenia, in more recent years), but otherwise there is no way to make senceful comparisons.

- catch politicians' bullshit before planning (plans that, say, lead directly through a nature reserve) or during construction (e.g. a new politician comes in and wishes some random shit to change just to be able to brag "I did something") and intervene

- check bids on tenders if they are actually plausible or if they are so far under a realistic budget that there will be massive problems later on (e.g. the company threatening insolvency to demand re-negotiated higher rates)

- check impediments if they are actually legitimate or if they are overblown and resolve them

- keep vendors accountable to milestones

You can forget about the first two points, which are the most critical, for external consultants.

I used to be a public sector dev with an agency that stores plaintext passwords and direct deposit information. People simply didn’t know any better and because government doesn’t have merit raises, the rest of us simply didn’t do anything about it.

Trams run fast and very rarely break.

I think the real problem is more that there is accountability for job performance in the private sector (you get fired if you suck and waste your boss's money) and very little to none in the public sector. No one votes for politicians based on objective performance data.

It'd wild to me how it's considered American to have this sort of bid process because "free markets" and "small government" but the results are everything Americans accuse socialist countries of being.

IMO, a lot of the differences come from the different set of rules that govt work has to run by. For example, Aldi can just decide to hire a contractor that they know does good work at a reasonable price. In contrast, the govt has to use a lengthy fair and open bid process and if they want to select a bid that isn't the lowest, it's a painstaking process to justify that selection. Govt work must adhere to certain laws that tend to push up labor wages (see: Davis Bacon Act). Plus, the govt has lots of other competing goals, like supporting minority or veteran-owned business etc. A simple comparison misses all of those nuances.