Transportation – Status Quo

Countries spend trillions of dollars to maintain our perpetually failing highway infrastructure. Unfulfilled promises of new materials and “innovative” designs lead to premature failures, doubling or tripling costs, and project durations.

 

New technology mega-projects are costing hundreds of millions of dollars per mile for commuter rails, tunnels, hyperloops, high-speed rails, and maglev rails. These projects consistently cost three times the original budget and deliveries are years behind schedule causing increased traffic jams and taxes.

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We want President Biden to succeed, but the US can’t fulfill his pledge to “Build-Back Better” as this has failed for decades and will continue to fail based on current practices.

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Take for example one transportation construction project in Hawaii: a simple  20-mile-long commuter light rail. The project budget was set at $1.5B and the current cost is now over $10B. Before completion, it is predicted to reach costs of $13B at a staggering $650 Million per mile. This one example will cost over 10x the original budget.

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This has become normal for large infrastructure projects.  

For decades countries have exceeded infrastructure budgets.

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Should we continue to accept this “status quo” for decades more? Imagine the possibility of a prefabricated system that would allow costs to stay exactly within the budget and allow for accelerated implementation.