I think a lot of modern US public works fall prey to politicians who think the objective of the project is the spending of the money. That is - they push for spending on transit so they can talk about how much, in dollars, they got passed in transit funding. The actual outcomes for many of them are, at best, inconsequential.
Further cynicism could be layered in if you consider some of the blocks of donors (infrastructure contractors / RE devs / etc) and blocks of voters (union transit workers & construction workers) who are recipients again of the spending but not the outcomes.
Finally a lot of the problems come from a long gap of not doing capital projects and so hollowing out of state capacity which has been outsourced. If you outsource your planning, they are less incentivized to re-use existing cookie-cutter plans for subway stations. If you outsource your project management, they are less incentivized to keep costs down. ETc.
Personal suspicion is that real leadership is dull and thankless (like so many things in life).
Announcing a big new transit project is exciting. Actually running the program well requires a lot of boring study, meetings, and management of details. Why bother, if the voters don't punish them for not doing it?
You can find endless internet posts by people complaining their manager doesn't want to do the scheduling of employees, which is the most basic part of their job. It's too tedious, so they try to avoid it.
> Further cynicism could be layered in if you consider some of the blocks of donors (infrastructure contractors / RE devs / etc) and blocks of voters (union transit workers & construction workers) who are recipients again of the spending but not the outcomes.
It's probably best to think of an initial budget as a foothold, and that its ideal amount is low enough to be approved, but high enough to prevent the organization from changing direction after realizing that it's not going to be nearly enough i.e. to think in terms of "pot-commitment."
Further cynicism could be layered in if you consider some of the blocks of donors (infrastructure contractors / RE devs / etc) and blocks of voters (union transit workers & construction workers) who are recipients again of the spending but not the outcomes.
Finally a lot of the problems come from a long gap of not doing capital projects and so hollowing out of state capacity which has been outsourced. If you outsource your planning, they are less incentivized to re-use existing cookie-cutter plans for subway stations. If you outsource your project management, they are less incentivized to keep costs down. ETc.