Streetcar tracks were installed many years ago along H Street NE in Washington, D.C. This DDOT photo was taken in 2011. It's now 2015 and streetcar service hasn't started yet.

D.C.’s former mayor, Vincent Gray, had promised that the streetcar line would be ready for passenger service two years ago and when that didn’t happen, pushed for an opening date by the end of 2014. That didn’t happen either. The project, which started construction in late 2007 under the the administration of then-Mayor Adrian Fenty, has been called “A Streetcar Called Delay.”)

Gray issued a statement right as he was leaving office late last year that the streetcar’s opening was on track for an opening the week of Jan. 19. Since then, D.C.’s transportation officials had been silent on the issue until late last week.

According to Dormsjo’s statement, released Friday:

Passenger safety is the number one priority for public transportation in the District of Columbia. Further, given the need to achieve safety certification, the District Department of Transportation (DDOT) will not set arbitrary deadlines for the independent State Safety Office (SSO) to complete their regulatory compliance review. The Bowser Administration will work to launch the H Street line of DC Streetcar as part of our effort to expand the District’s transportation infrastructure and will put this long-delayed line on track. DDOT will continue to work with the independent SSO to ensure that Streetcar meets – and exceeds – all safety specifications before setting an official date to begin passenger service.

As WAMU-FM recently reported:

Unlike her predecessor, Mayor Muriel Bowser has refrained from making any public predictions about the start of passenger service in her few remarks since taking office about the streetcar. By now such promises carry little weight with a public that has been waiting four mayoral administrations to hop aboard a streetcar.

Project timelines, especially for infrastructure projects, can be very tricky things.

In Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, a road expansion project led by the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation has been causing big local headaches and was put on a new timeline this past summer.

"They're running a year behind schedule," Bethlehem Mayor Bob Donchez told The Express-Times. "If there's any glitch, we're looking at 2017."

In North Carolina, state transportation officials delayed the start of construction for a long-planned highway project to bypass the town of Havelock to 2018.

“I remember being in high school remembering them talking about how there was a bypass coming, but every time it came to actually spending the dollars, DOT either didn’t have the money that they needed or it wasn’t a high enough priority to be funded,” Havelock Mayor Will Lewis told the Havelock News in December. “It’s always been pushed further down the timeline.”

And in New York City, there’s a long history of large infrastructure construction projects being delayed and delayed and delayed, from the Fulton Street Transit Center in Lower Manhattan—which finally opened last fall—to the extension of the No. 7 subway line, pictured here in this Metropolitan Transportation Authority map: