Quote:
Originally Posted by wodin
Don't get me started, Oahu has been building a 20 mile heavy rail boondoggle for the last 5-10 years now. It serves only one community but everyone else (including you if your a US citizen) is getting to pay for it. It was originally projected to cost ~$3.5Bn, but has soared to more than the Chunnel at ~$10Bn and is likely to top out at more like $13Bn.
For what? A train to nowhere that no one will ride? I guess it'll provide a really nice canvas for all the graffiti artists.
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This happens all over. Boston had an effort called the Big Dig intended to improve transportation routes in the city. It was finally finished, but dragged on and on. Lots of snarky speculation from Bostonians ensued about who was in whose pocket and who was skimming what from the till.
Similar things happen elsewhere. The MTA in NYC has finally completed the Second Avenue subway. Lots of cynics didn't expect it to ever actually get
done.
Fundamentally, such efforts serve to get Federal funds into private hands. The beneficiaries are the companies contracted to perform the work, and the workers collecting a paycheck from the contractors. Attaining the end result the project is supposedly for is a distinctly secondary consideration. The longer it can be stretched out on the Federal teat, the happier the companies
and workers doing it are. They're getting well paid.
(I see a fair bit of that in NYC. The work could be done just as well, a lot faster, and at half the cost by non-union labor, but the trade unions have an interest in preserving union jobs, and particularly union pay scales.)
And the contracting process is such that Lowest Bidder Wins. So you get cases where companies bidding on the job submit a bid they
know is too low to actually do the work. They assume they'll be able to go back to the well later and get additional funding, because the alternative is halting the project and putting out RFPs to get new bids from others to complete the work.
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Dennis