Actually, civil engineers routinely deliver infrastructure projects on time and budget with accurate projections in Spain and Korea. [0] The failure of projections in the USA and the typical 10x cost for the same project (at least as far as underground rail -- bridges may be only 5x) and the cost overruns have multiple, layered causes.
Incompetent planning, political self-aggrandizement, aesthetic confusion, diffusion of responsibility, corruption, not-invented-here, trade protectionism, failure to learn from experience, anti-corruption measures that actually promote corruption like closed competitive bid-plus overrun processes, and a general lack of interest among the public in electing officials that even promise to confront past failures and improve are just the beginning. The Augean Stables of American infrastructure spending are deep in muck and we have no Heracles on the horizon.
The Second Avenue Subway, the eventual Hudson tunnel, the Bay Bridge, insanely expensive BART to SFO, Seattle's tunnel, CA High Speed Rail, and the like are just a taste of a very expensive and gridlocked future if we don't change our ways.
Eh, projects that finish on time don't exactly get a lot of press.
Just as an example, the NJ Turnpike recently finished a project widening it from 6 to 12 lanes for a 35 mile stretch, and came in on schedule and $200M under budget: http://www.njturnpikewidening.com/
One really interesting historical example (or, perhaps, counter-example) was the Empire State Building. At least in Mary Poppendieck's telling, it was completed on time, under budget, and with no plan in advance, at least not as we understand plans today:
This makes a ton of sense to me; the American culture around plans is thoroughly fucked.
In software, otherwise reasonable people expect me to give them numbers at the drop of a hat. When will this be done? What will it cost? What will our revenues be for the next 5 years? When I tell them I have no data for numbers like that, they will ask again, as if they thought I hadn't quite heard the question.
When I make it clear that although I'm glad to do real estimates I won't just make up numbers, they get mad. They need numbers! [No, they don't. They want them, often for political reasons.] Other people have given them numbers! [I am not other people.] This is how everybody does it! [Thanks, I've seen the stats on how well that works.] I should just give some ballpark numbers! Nobody will take them seriously! [Except they always, always, always turn into real numbers.] It makes me crazy.
For years, I kept thinking that if I just explained it well, people would come around. But I've come to believe that the root problem here is a managerialist culture, where power matters more than expertise or professional responsibility. Managers want numbers, so managers get numbers. They don't actually help, but managers get to feel in control. If it all happens to work, they're brilliant managers. And if it doesn't, the blame falls upon the people who gave them the numbers, or the people who failed to execute according to the always-impossible plan.
Now I just look for people and work cultures that are focused on actual results and are comfortable with bottom-up power structures.
Your statement isn't 100% it seems, the only talk on those links about whether Spanish are budget actually show that "Barcelona’s L9/10, despite still being about average-cost, went over budget by a factor of over 3"
Incompetent planning, political self-aggrandizement, aesthetic confusion, diffusion of responsibility, corruption, not-invented-here, trade protectionism, failure to learn from experience, anti-corruption measures that actually promote corruption like closed competitive bid-plus overrun processes, and a general lack of interest among the public in electing officials that even promise to confront past failures and improve are just the beginning. The Augean Stables of American infrastructure spending are deep in muck and we have no Heracles on the horizon.
The Second Avenue Subway, the eventual Hudson tunnel, the Bay Bridge, insanely expensive BART to SFO, Seattle's tunnel, CA High Speed Rail, and the like are just a taste of a very expensive and gridlocked future if we don't change our ways.
[0]https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2013/06/03/comp...
https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2012/10/28/cons...