From the article:

Contrast all of these issues with a city like Istanbul, where the M5, an 18-mile subway line, was built in seven years and for just $630 million.

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That is roughly $35 million per mile. And it is one of the deepest subways in the world. Almost as deep as Moscow's. Meanwhile the 2nd Avenue Subway cost $2.5 billion per mile. That is a difference of 71x.

The big bogeyman that is ignored is the incredible corruption involved with the politicians, contractors and "consultants" who rig these absurd outcomes.

And let's not forget the incredible corruption in Boston and the Big Dig that became a smaller dig with massive cost overruns and delays:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig

One other thing is that in countries like Turkey they build a lot of infrastructure with private funds who run it like a concession for a certain period of time (say 2 decades) and then it reverts back to the government. The private contractors have an incentive to build build inexpensively and quicker as their IRR is ticking.

Examples of such Public Private Partnership projects are:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istanbul_Airport

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%87anakkale_1915_Bridge

The concept of PPT:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public%E2%80%93private_partner...

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By the way the awesome website of the quoted and mentioned Alon Levy which I discovered years ago when we had a discussion on the disparity of subway costs per mile between the US and places like Prague:

https://pedestrianobservations.com/construction-costs/

The more regular an activity is the more likely you're going to have people specialized in it - you'll have much more accurate estimates around costs and time to deliver since people will have more recent experience getting it done and you'll have infrastructure around building infrastructure. When these projects are rarer it becomes infeasible for a company to dedicate itself to the labour so you end up with residential construction firms digging tunnels and laying road foundations - and needing to learn a lot as they go or bring in consultants.

The more you build - especially the more you commit to build in the future - the cheaper it will be. If everything is billed as a one-off then the specialized labour doesn't settle in the local market and you end up paying large costs over and over.

Yes, that's why doing so many projects helps Istanbul do them cheaper. But my point to GP is that doing so many projects would fund the politically-powerful infrastructure contractors even more effectively. Yet we aren't doing it, which seems to imply that maybe GP's explanation doesn't actually explain our situation.

I want to point out that The Netherlands has a similar dynamic. They build a lot of infrastructure all the time. Very little corruption. I suspect there is a healthier relationship between the private sector and government. (The US is weirdly anti capitalistic when it comes to government. In the Netherlands, so many public services are delivered by private companies, by concession. Like, the equivalent of Amtrak is a private company. Also, private companies selling coffee/beer/ice cream in parks, which for whatever reason rarely happens in the states)

I’m an expat, but maybe a local could explain how/why the Netherlands has the best infrastructure in Europe?