“A lot of people would like to see the money quickly spent,” said Anirban Basu, chief economist of Associated Builders and Contractors, a construction industry trade group. Shortages of skilled labor are worsening, exacerbated by Covid-induced retirements. The construction industry is facing sharply growing costs for steel products, up by 142 percent in the last 12 months, and other key materials. The infrastructure spending plan is unlikely to rescue some existing infrastructure projects that are bogged down with problems.Īnd even with the new infusion of money, analysts say it will be tough to ramp up infrastructure progress as swiftly as envisioned in the current timetable. The nation’s busiest passenger rail line, Amtrak’s Boston-to-Washington corridor, would get the biggest slice of a $66 billion rail package. The $1.2 trillion package has bold goals, directing the majority of $500 billion to highways, $39 billion to urban transit, $65 billion to broadband projects and $73 billion to electrical grids, among other items. And spending on infrastructure as a fraction of the economy has shrunk, giving local agencies less experience in modern practices. Legal challenges have grown stronger under state and federal environmental laws. Agencies have less internal technical talent.

To the contrary, they signal the kind of cost overruns, engineering challenges and political obstacles that have made it all but impossible to complete a major, multibillion-dollar infrastructure project in the United States on budget and on schedule over the past decade.Īmerican cities and states were long renowned for some of the greatest bridges, water systems and freeways in the world, but challenges have grown more potent. Honolulu’s tribulations are far from a lone cautionary tale. The launch dates slipped forward and the cost estimates crept upward - at latest count, $11.4 billion, with a target completion date of 2031.

Earlier this year, engineers realized that in some sections, the wheels were a half-inch narrower than the rails. Concerns over Native Hawaiian burial grounds stalled early construction, then problems with welding and cracks in the tracks appeared. The cost escalation since then has been an engineering marvel all its own. The $4 billion estimate in 2006 was hardly cheap, amounting to $200 million per mile. As Honolulu sprawled into new suburbs west of Pearl Harbor over the last two decades, city planners proposed an ambitious rail transit line that would sweep riders 20 miles into downtown.

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