You may know the author of this essay, Brian Potter, from his substack, Construction Physics.
From American Affairs Journal. Fall 2026 / Volume X, Number 3:
Agencies without Agency: How Dispersed Power Derails Transportation Infrastructure
he United States has the unfortunate distinction of having some of the highest transportation infrastructure costs in the world. Urban rail costs in the United States are 50 percent higher than in Germany, double the costs of Norway, and nearly triple the costs of Sweden.1 Phase One of New York’s Second Avenue Subway was built at the eye-watering cost of $2.5 billion per mile, eight to twelve times the cost of similar projects in European countries.2 Phase Two is budgeted even higher, at $4 billion per mile.3
Outside of New York, an extension of Chicago’s Red Line is expected to cost more than $1 billion per mile, which transit researcher Alon Levy describes as “almost a world record for an elevated line.”4 California’s high-speed rail line, aimed at eventually connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles, is projected to cost over $200 million per mile, or over $126 billion altogether.5 This is roughly four times the cost of building high-speed rail in other countries (which average roughly $54 million per mile) and ten times the average costs of building high-speed rail in Spain.6
The exorbitant costs of rail construction in the United States mean that many such projects never get off the drawing board. In cities such as Austin, Atlanta, New York, and Philadelphia, enormous projected costs have resulted in rail projects being canceled or scaled back significantly.7 And it’s not only rail infrastructure. Road tunnels, highway bridges, and roadways are all more expensive to build in the United States than in major European countries.8 A study by economists Zach Liscow and Leah Brooks found that the inflation-adjusted cost of American highway construction tripled between the 1960s and the 1980s.9
Even something as simple as bus transportation is unusually difficult and expensive in America. In San Francisco, it took nearly twenty years and $300 million to build a two-mile bus lane on Van Ness Avenue.10 The average diesel bus in the United States costs around $500,000, more than twice the cost of diesel buses in European countries. Electric buses average closer to $1 million, three times the cost of the price of comparable buses in Asia.11
Wherever we look, we see the same thing: American transit agencies struggle to rein in costs when building transportation infrastructure. In the United States, we pay far more for our transit systems than virtually anywhere else in the world.
Solving this problem means understanding what’s driving it. A confluence of factors makes U.S. transit agencies ineffective at controlling costs and delivering projects. First, over the last several decades, transit agency authority has been increasingly dispersed, checked, and otherwise restrained. Second, at the same time, agencies have been under pressure to outsource as many of their functions as possible, resulting in their technical and oversight capabilities being hollowed out. These two trends, along with the bad incentives to which they contribute, have caused transit costs to spiral out of control.
Democratic Dispersion
In 1919, a young Dwight Eisenhower, then a major in the U.S. Army, joined the military’s first cross-country caravan undertaken by car and truck. A convoy of 310 men (including a fifteen-piece brass band) drove from Washington, D.C. to San Francisco, three thousand miles away. Thanks to the poor state of the country’s roads, which ranged from “average to non-existent,” the trip took over two months, with the convoy averaging just five miles per hour.12
The trip, which the New York Times would later describe as taking “60 days and 6000 breakdowns,” impressed upon Eisenhower the need for an “adequate, all-weather road US road system.”13 This impression was strengthened in 1945, when Eisenhower, holding the post of Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, traveled on Germany’s Autobahn after the country’s surrender in World War II. Germany’s rail transportation network had proven relatively easy to disrupt by way of Allied bombing raids (a single bomb could take a track out of service for days), but the country’s wide, robust highways proved harder to break: even a bombed out road could still be used by cars and trucks.14 A major U.S. highway system thus wouldn’t just make travel easier; it would be a valuable tool for defense. When Eisenhower was elected president in 1952, he decided that a national highway system would be a top priority, and in 1954, he asked members of his administration for a plan to get “50 billion dollars worth of self-liquidating highways under construction.”15
After several years of politicking and horse-trading, Eisenhower largely got his wish. In June of 1956, the Federal-Aid Highway Act was signed into law, which authorized $25 billion for a forty-thousand-mile National System of Interstate and Defense Highways, funded by an increase in the federal gas tax.16 A few months later, construction of the first segments began, and the first eight-mile stretch of interstate highway opened in November of 1956 near Topeka, Kansas.17 By 1964, nearly half of the new Interstate system was open or nearing completion.18
Initially, the new interstates were by and large met with enthusiasm. Newspapers printed headlines such as “Interstates a Boon to Iowa,” and property values near the highways rose.19 In his history of the Interstate, Tom Lewis notes that in 1956, “across the country, editorials complained not that the highways were being built, but that they were not being built fast enough.”20
But the scale of the interstate project, which required the government to acquire 1.5 million acres of land via purchases and eminent domain, meant that opposition inevitably appeared.21 Conservationists were upset at the loss of scenic beauty as highways were carved through the landscape; residents of rural areas were suspicious of what it would do to their way of life. Citizens “whose land and houses were being ravaged by interstate construction” began to mobilize opposition.22 This was exacerbated by the fact that interstate planning took place almost entirely based on what highway engineers believed would be most efficient; public reaction to the large-scale construction project was at best a distant concern, and more likely to be ignored altogether.23 Nothing more clearly illustrates this mindset than a 1963 plan to carve an interstate route through the Bristol Mountains in California by detonating twenty-two nuclear bombs, instantly creating a channel 325 feet wide and eleven thousand feet long, while saving an estimated $8 million in construction costs. Only uncertainty as to how long it would take the radiation to dissipate stopped this plan from going forward.24
Early on, increasing opposition to interstates was blunted by the fact that many of the early segments were built in lightly populated rural areas.25 But as interstate construction began to encroach on major cities—by the late 1960s, over sixty thousand homes a year were being torn down for highway construction—citizen resistance grew more fervent.26 In 1964, tens of thousands of protestors assembled in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco to protest against any new freeways through the city, and several planned highways were cancelled.27 In 1969, the Riverfront Expressway, an elevated interstate segment that would have cut across the city of New Orleans, was cancelled following intense activist and local citizen opposition.28 Similar opposition sprung up in cities across the country: from Los Angeles to Seattle to Miami to Boston.29 By the 1970s, highway construction was widely unpopular....
....MUCH MORE
Some of our previous visits with Mr. Potter:
May 2021 - Why Is It So Difficult To Automate Construction? "Construction, Efficiency, and Production Systems"
June 2021 - "Construction Costs Around the World: How Does the US Compare?"
January 2022 - Construction Physics: Where Are The Robotic Bricklayers? (plus: planning your dynasty)
September 2024 - "Why Can't the U.S. Build Ships?"
And many more.
