There have been a couple of articles recently about the high cost of infrastructure in the United States compared to other countries. Some critics of ours have even argued that this is the real problem we should be trying to solve: that if we just lowered the cost of infrastructure, the long-term maintenance issue would go away. Many of these same critics also claim to be free market advocates, yet here they’re missing a basic free market understanding: if something costs less, demand will increase.

Fundamentally, the Strong Towns critique is based on the lack of financial productivity of our development pattern. If we made the assembly of steel, concrete, and asphalt cheaper, do you think suburban mayors would stop demanding we build them big box interchanges? Do you think minimum lot sizes would shrink and neighborhoods become thicker? Quite the opposite would happen.

The latest article in this genre is a good one from NY Magazine’s The Intelligencer titled Here’s Why We’ve Failed to Figure Out Why Infrastructure Costs So Much. For those of you sending me your complicated projects asking me to help you figure out the cost comparison and return-on-investment, this paragraph was descriptive of the conundrum:

“The complexity of rail-transit construction projects and data limitations, among other things, limits the ability to compare the costs of these projects, according to the stakeholders we interviewed,” the GAO explained. They noted a number of very real problems that make useful international comparisons difficult. For example: Projects are built in different contexts, requiring different construction methods; sometimes they require the purchase of expensive land and sometimes they do not; different authorities report costs by different methods, and there are some cost categories (such as financing costs) that are counted in some reports but not in others.

There are many technical reasons why infrastructure is so expensive—pick your favorite as they are all elusive to broadly discern—but it's clear that there are two underlying drivers that are not merely technical.

The first underlying driver of U.S. infrastructure costs is that the U.S. has felt so rich as a country that, for decades, we spent freely on infrastructure and never asked serious questions about the return on that investment. Never. As I’ve suggested many times, a study of human behavior in complex environments suggests that, with an abundance of resources, complex feedback loops break down. At this point, it’s difficult to identify one underlying cause because the real cause is systematic. And worse, the players involved work in single-discipline silos where a standard way of operating has become normalized; they don’t even know which questions to ask.

Do we really need a third interchange or can we get by with the two we have? (Traffic counts justify a third and we have two big box stores ready to build.) Do we really need to acquire that five feet of right-of-way so we can have 12-foot lanes when 11.5 foot lanes would be just fine? (Of course we do because that’s our standard.) Do we really need to pay a premium price for that five feet of land, as if it were valuable real estate in Manhattan and not the edge of some parking lot buffer? (Of course, unless you want the project delayed for years and for every case to end up in court.) Do we need ten signs or can we get by with eight? (Remember that one time we were threatened with a lawsuit—don’t want any chance of that happening.)

Individually, these are all reasonable reactions, especially when viewed from within a professional bubble that focuses on one or two metrics for success. Collectively, they are disastrous. The richer you are, the more you can throw money at solving your problems. The more money you can throw at a problem, the less you are confronted with the nuances of that problem and the less pressure there is to be creative. The complex becomes merely complicated. Painful feedback and uncomfortable balancing of priorities are avoided. Costs go up and nobody understands just why.