Civil Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
be made more efficient, without net loss to urban environments, natural
environments, and the economy.
PROSPECTS FOR IMPROVING PROJECT DELIVERY
In the mid-twentieth century, a single public official, namely Robert Moses,
was responsible for building more of New York State's public works, including
bridges, than anyone else in the state's history. According to his biographer,
he would often underestimate a project's costs to get the state legislature to
approve it, but once construction was underway and running out of money,
would put the legislators over a barrel—force them to appropriate more funds
to escape blame for an unfinished project. To this day, around the world,
major projects, especially vast “megaprojects,” typically run late and exceed
initially estimated costs.
This phenomenon has prompted the speculative hypothesis that those
who initially push for the project (and the private parties that benefit from
building the project) purposefully underestimate costs. Allegedly, they do so
out of personal enthusiasm for projects or because of political or economic
pressure, though the channels of this alleged influence on cost estimators
remains elusive. While we do not have the evidence by which to fully
judge this or other explanations for project overruns, we can say, with a
view to the modern-day US delivery process we have described, that this
hypothesis is not plausible.
The many varied professionals who estimate project costs, at stages
from project initiation through the PS&E, and for various subsets of a proj-
ect, do not have the incentive to be wrong in their estimates. They have no
obvious motive for dishonesty—the estimators gain no eventual benefit from
cost overruns or delays. Nor do the public officials who oversee decisions
at each stage have a clear motive to underestimate costs. In some respects
they are under the contrary motive. Transportation improvement programs
impose fiscal constraint. Projects that go over budget eventually subtract
from the sum total of projects that can be funded. In modern US proj-
ect development, officials who want regional projects to move through the
approval procedure should, in terms of incentives they face, want projects
correctly estimated, so that other favored projects are not later subtracted
from the bottom of the list.
A second hypothesis refers to the standard procurement method,
in which design is separated from construction: state entities design the
bridge and then, after a bidding process, a private entity constructs it. The
hypothesis is that this separation creates dissonance between design and
construction, causing overruns and delays. The solution often proposed is
the
design-build
procedure (which has several variations). In this scenario,
