Construction projects go over budget and are late all the time. Remember the big dig? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig
The Sydney Opera house was 10 years late and 1475% over budget: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Opera_House#Completion_...
Anyone who's had renovations done to their house can also probably sympathize.
Private construction? Not so much, certainly nothing like 3x the estimated cost.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaza_Rakyat
http://gizmodo.com/the-sad-fate-of-the-worlds-six-tallest-un...
But rather than split hairs: I interpreted the underlying assertion being that construction is more predictable and reliable than software. I've heard this in other contexts as well. And that didn't pass the gut check for me, because I can think anecdotally of many construction projects (and home renovations) that were way over budget and took longer than expected.
Also something to consider in a circumstance like public transport stuff is that the multiple approval levels and meddling happens on the Government side as well. Like a perfect storm of bureaucratic bullshit that ends up making an enormous bloated mess that does everything but what was originally intended.
The big problem is that it's not beneficial for IBM/Oracle/Accenture/$consultancy to quickly deliver a stable solution that works well. They make much more money by having seven layers of middle management committees vote together a crappy solution that will need five years of support/upgrades and then a replacement.
In other industries, like construction, the same fundamental problem exists, but there human lives are at stake, standards bodies have been formed to prevent it, and non-software engineers aren't outsorced to people in India who have as little knowledge as they have pride in their workmanship.
If a contractor built apartment buildings the way IBM and friends build software, they'd be sued out of existence. I mean, have you ever heard of a building project going 3x over budget and then not actually delivering a building at all? It happens relatively often with software consultancies, usually on projects so trivial (like public transport ticketing systems) that it's hard to not attribute it to malice.