Building infrastructure is hard. Bridges, roads, railways, streets, sewers, and tunnels are big, expensive projects that require complex engineering, advanced, expensive materials, expert management, and a technically skilled workforce. In Connecticut, many of our projects entail updating or replacing old or obsolete structures and doing so without having the luxury of closing or diverting traffic elsewhere, making these efforts even harder. With a growing economy and increasing transportation needs, infrastructure projects have become a priority.
In recent years, Gov. Ned Lamont and the State Legislature have invested considerable resources in infrastructure projects. Incredible amounts of money, in fact; Governor Lamont’s proposed budget includes $4.7 billion in transportation spending, on top of the $6.4 billion from President Biden’s infrastructure act. These are real, solid funding commitments that should build a good deal of new rail tracks, road upgrades, bike lanes, and such.
Trouble is, they do not, because Connecticut has been quite dreadful at putting those funds to work in an effective manner.
Consider, for example, the Walk Bridge in Norwalk. The current span, a four-track, 200 meter bridge, is more than 100 years old and is beyond obsolete, forcing trains to slow down and randomly malfunctioning when opened for marine traffic. Similar bridges in France, carrying high-speed rail, were built for around $50 million. A much longer conventional rail span in Germany went for $32 million. The current budget, per CTDOT, for our project is one billion dollars—an extravagant, absurd amount of money for a bridge this size.
Part of the problem, in this case, is CTDOT’s dogged insistence on building a movable bridge instead of a fixed span with additional clearance over the water or just buying out the few boat owners upstream. This change alone, however, does not explain construction costs an order of magnitude higher than other wealthy nations.
We could take Walk Bridge as an isolated disaster, maybe the result of a very complex project, poor soil, or some freak combination of factors. Unfortunately, high construction costs are present across the state in all kinds of projects, both road and rail, big and small. The Devon rail bridge, a crossing longer than Walk but in a far less constricted area, is expected to surpass $2.2 billion. The Hartford Line, for instance, will add a station in Enfield with a single 350-foot platform for an estimated cost of $45 million. Spain regularly budgets 700-foot, two-platform stations on electrified lines (including elevators, an underpass, and a waiting room) at around $10 million. The State Pier in New London, besides having all kinds of hilarious cost overruns, will end up costing about ten times what similar projects require in most of Europe.
My favorite outrageous budget estimate, however, remains the Time for CT proposal to speed up Metro-North trains to travel times similar to what the old New Haven Railroad offered on their trains in 1950, at $10 billion. This is roughly the same cost as the Madrid-Barcelona high-speed rail line, a 400-mile, 190-mile-per-hour, electrified, brand-new infrastructure. In Connecticut, we plan to use that money to speed travel times on a 72-mile-long railroad by half an hour.
Now, I truly believe Connecticut needs to build a lot more infrastructure. We need more rail, public transit, road repairs, bike lanes, and bus rapid transit, and we need them now. Regrettably, these extremely high construction costs mean that our investment is not going very far, and many projects are either delayed, suspended, or canceled due to lack of funding.
There are plenty of theories and explanations for why infrastructure costs, both in Connecticut and across the United States, are so much higher than in other Western nations. Wages and benefits often come up as a possible explanation. Although labor costs are higher in the U.S. than in Germany, Spain, or France, they are not an order of magnitude higher, and wages remain a comparatively small share of the total costs. Land acquisition also comes up often, but U.S. projects remain equally expensive even when those are absent.
The explanation, however, is much simpler and comes down to our institutional design. The main source of delays in infrastructure projects is litigation, specifically both legal challenges from people opposing a project and the incredibly lengthy and onerous paperwork that CTDOT and other agencies need to complete to protect themselves from it. Environmental reviews for infrastructure, even upgrades to rail lines on existing rights of way, are both incredibly expensive and take years to complete. Other countries achieve a much better balance between environmental protection and development by placing strict time limits on these reviews as well as any kind of legal challenges. Delays, a constant problem in U.S. projects, are a major source of escalating costs, especially when they involve design changes in the middle of a project.
The biggest cost driver for infrastructure projects, however, is a persistent lack of expertise at CTDOT. I do not mean that state engineers are incompetent—far from it. The big problem is that there are too few of them, so the department must outsource much planning, design, and supervision on their projects to outside contractors.
There is, in fact, a considerable amount of comparative research on this issue. The Transit Costs Project at NYU has extensively analyzed which countries and U.S. jurisdictions are the most effective at building infrastructure cheaply. Their conclusion is that a key component is to have an agency with a strong planning, engineering, and supervision staff that knows what they need, understands the project, and can keep it on track. The Paris Metro, SNCF, or ADIF never outsource planning or procurement. Every single project is carefully supervised by a fully committed, well-trained, well-paid staff, and contractors know they must deliver because the folks looking over their shoulder are experts who understand the project better than they do.
To their credit, CTDOT employees and unions know this. Labor leaders have voiced their concerns about understaffing the agency for years and have complained about excessive outsourcing. As it turns out, they are right, and there is plenty of evidence to back this up.
We saw this, for instance, on the State Pier project. The state outsourced project planning and management to an external contractor, who came up with a project estimate and a plan. They placed the contract to build the pier up for bid and concluded that they should be the ones building it… only to run into massive cost overruns immediately afterward, blowing up the budget. It is not hard to imagine (because this is what happens elsewhere) an alternate scenario where the state hires engineers to plan, bid, and manage the project instead of having a contractor happily self-dealing all the way to the bank.
It may come as a surprise, in these days of budget cuts and hysterical anti-government extremism, to say that a proven, immediate, effective way to cut costs is to hire more bureaucrats, not to fire them, but this happens to be the case. Expertise really matters, especially when it comes to spending money. If we want to get our money’s worth in infrastructure spending, we need to hire more people at CTDOT.