California’s high-speed rail project was ‘captured’ by costly consultants

I experienced this in my first job... A regulatory decision around approval of a new power line in California... where the consulting and regulatory costs of simply discussing whether the line should be built literally ran over $100 million. Paid for by all California power users in their rates.<p>The sad thing is the state of affairs can be used by any party that for any reason wants to fight anything it want (with money): just leverage environmental protection laws even when it&#x27;s intellectually dishonest to do so, and win by miring the process in hundreds of millions of dollars of total waste.<p>Of course that&#x27;s just the abuse of law&#x2F;process side of things. Separately we&#x27;ve seen the loss of expertise in house within governments and the rise of consulting firms required to do everything.<p>There was a time when cities built their own transit! Now you have to hire expensive Consultants from Europe or Asia because the idea that people could figure this out on their own with their civil engineering degrees and experience in adjascent fields is simply verboten.<p>If anyone hasn&#x27;t read The Power Broker about the rise of Robert Moses, it&#x27;s a great read: You can disagree with much of his methodology&#x2F;power hunger&#x2F;abuse of people, and you can certainly disagree with what he built, but what he did demonstrate is that the people with the plans who can execute while everyone else is talking about grand dreams can GET STUFF DONE.<p>We need more people in government who actually have a plan, that are actually willing to take bets on people, to hire high-quality people, to see hard projects through, not to punt everything off to consulting firms.<p>Let&#x27;s be honest, consulting firms never feel ownership. Their deliverable is that beautiful PDF. No PDF ever built any grand infrastructure.<p>And the Golden Gate Bridge, and the New York subway, never even had the glorious joy of benefiting from either PDF or PowerPoint.<p>Let&#x27;s admit it, when it comes to building infrastructure we&#x27;ve completely failed and we need to have a serious wake-up call.<p>Sadly most people have no idea how bad it has gotten because when they spend a hundred million dollars collectively deciding whether to build a power line in the San Diego desert, they barely notice that they&#x27;re paying an incremental portion of a penny more for every kilowatt-hour of power.

Consultants get paid to do what you want them to do.<p>If the government contracts for some consultants and lets them &quot;take over&quot;, then it&#x27;s their fault. They were either unclear in their direction, providing incorrect direction, or incompetent at managing the contract.<p>If they do not have the expertise to act as their own general contractor, they should hire one.<p>Really, since federal funds went into this, the agencies managing this should be investigated by the federal government and the state should have to pay back the funds that they mismanaged.

There are some parallels here to London&#x27;s troubled Crossrail project. Politicians and civil servants took their eyes of the ball and turned project management almost completely over to the private sector. For years, everything was apparently going fine and the project was on time and on budget. Suddenly, just weeks before it was supposed to open in 2018, it was revealed to be years behind and potentially billions over budget.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newcivilengineer.com&#x2F;latest&#x2F;true-scale-of-crossrail-problems-laid-bare&#x2F;10038753.article" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newcivilengineer.com&#x2F;latest&#x2F;true-scale-of-crossr...</a><p>(And, for an even more crazy civil construction project failure, see Berlin Brandenberg Airport)

It&#x27;s amazing how terrible we&#x27;ve become at public works.<p>The Golden Gate Bridge was built in 4 years. Ahead of schedule <i>and</i> under budget!<p>The Bay Bridge took 5 years, also ahead of schedule and under budget.<p>This was the 1930s. Imagine what people thought would be possible in the futuristic 2000s. Surely we&#x27;ve gotten a lot better at building things in nearly a century? Better technology, machines, engineering, materials...<p>Well, recently we rebuilt a small portion (just 2.2 of 8.2 miles) of the Bay Bridge. It took 11 years to build. Years behind schedule and 2,500% over budget.<p>Seriously, why isn&#x27;t this considered unacceptable? It&#x27;s such a shame compared to what we could be accomplishing.

Calling a lot of these contractors &quot;consultants&quot; is rather misleading. WSP--the biggest contractor--is the &quot;rail delivery partner.&quot; They&#x27;re responsible for overseeing everyone else, dealing with environmental review, dealing with engineering contingencies, etc. $700 million sounds like a lot for a &quot;consultant&quot; but seems pretty reasonable for what is basically the general contractor on a $50-100 billion engineering and construction project.

Okay. So the project is $44 billion over budget, and the consulting contracts (not just the overages, but the entire contracts) add up to less than $2 billion. Where does the other $42 billion in overages come from?

Wow I had no idea they were actually already constructing this rail line, and it&#x27;s actually going to go all the way into central San Francisco, that&#x27;s great! I thought it was all just a vague idea and people wanted a hyperloop instead.

Public officials need to start going to jail for wasting money like this.

Sounds like no one person or group wanted to take responsibility for the project. If the project fails, they wanted the blame to be distributed among as many people as possible.

If you contract out your design work you need to then hire people as smart or smarter then the contractors to oversee that work.

And some people want government to run healthcare? the mind boggles.

Where there is money there are people trying to get a piece.<p>This is why we need regulations.

Sounds like the problems Hertz had with Accenture

This is sorta tangential...<p>I immediately thought of these sort of flops when I musk&#x2F;spaceX announce the boring company.<p>These things happen all the time. Where I live (dublin), the overcoat scandal du jour is a big hospital build that is costing 300% over budget, due to this sort of failure.<p>Then follows the finger pointing, moral righteousnous, promises that heads will roll, long, boring speeches (we are very good at these here) about greed and accountability.<p>But... like enterprise software contracts... all the agreements are carefully designed so that liability doesn&#x27;t stick to you when failure inevitably comes.<p>Anyway... Musk. Being this name-brand business magnate makes avoiding liability much harder. If they were contracted to do a boring priject, they&#x27;d naturally have something riding on success. Boring company is just an example, but name brand contractors for city level projects may be useful... A good name to put on the line.<p>Just a thought.