One other piece I haven't seen mentioned yet: large construction projects that take years to complete are incredibly hard to estimate accurately, because unpredictable economic swings can cause the cost of items to vary quite a bit between when the estimate was produced, and when the work was actually being performed and purchased.
This was one of the reasons why the Big Dig's estimates were so far off. Although there are a dozen other factors with that particular case as well.
How does such a person know what's "too much"? Absent a reasonable working model of costs involved in infrastructure projects, it's all going to sound like too much.
And past a certain point on a spectrum of temperamental tendency to attribute laziness or wastefulness to other people, the working assumption is going to be it's boondoggles all the way down.
The only way to fix this -- if it can be fixed -- is reinforcing narratives about the value of projects and measured collective values.
Costs above initial estimates should only happen when there's an unknown (e.g, digging discovered a really hard rock layer that nobody knew about). Or weather issues beyond prediction (like tornadoes or hurricanes).
How, other than by buying everything you need up-front, finding a place to store it until you need it, and hoping that it is still usable when you do?
The transbay terminal is one of the biggest rip-offs ever. It cost the revenue of sales taxes of the city for years. And it doesn't even work, while the "transient" station that must have cost almost nothing works perfectly fine.
Every single tax dollar can be raised to relieve poor sick children of their ailments.
In both situations, the person on the street is stuck with a broken station and paying an extra dollar for coffee everyday.
Oh, Willie Brown did that too. He appointed his lover to two state commissions (he was the speaker of the California Assembly at the time), then helped her become district attorney in San Francisco.
or rather, is it even ironic? it seems totally germane to a forum full of geeks with a wide spectrum of interests, many (most?) of whom are software devs.
What do high construction costs have to do with HN?
It's like having a post about how ecologically unfriendly the fast food industry is on Exxon's website.
i think what willie brown describes here is also part of the problem providing estimates for the time required to complete software projects: if we gave more honest answers as devs, bosses and people signing contracts would blanche, so instead of standing firm, we go lower, or cut corners, or both.
i think the two things compounded together (inherent difficulty of estimating large unique projects, aversion to seeing real costs) are why estimates so often skew too low when we're trying to predict how long it will take to write a thing.
But doing a feasibility study that gives an estimate is much different from doing a full plan, which is still quite diferent from having fresh surveyed maps and ready to build blueprints, and all of that is just before doing the first strike with a backhoe.
And it's no wonder everything seems so complex, because the people who are able to cut through the bullshit are usually ignored, because people don't like to accept the fundamentals. They cling to their biased beliefs about costs, project management, design, estimation methods, etc.
Robert Moses is quoted as saying the same thing. Once you start, there is no choice for the public but to push on and finish.
I think the inability of politicians to have a real conversation about costs is a big part of high construction costs. Without this sort of difficult conversation it's hard to plan and try to mitigate things that might cause ballooning costs because you need to pretend that don't exist in the first case.