Infrastructure analyst Alon Levy has written a lot about this issue in their blog. A lot of it comes down to aversions to maintaining in-house expertise in government agencies (preferring outsourcing to contractors) and (particularly in the US) an exceptionalist belief that there is nothing to learn from other (implicitly lesser and/or culturally alien) countries.

Interesting how Singapore and Hong Kong are part of the list. Are they really considered part of the anglosphere? And yes, I know English is also spoken there.

How does one open the links in the youtube description? They all seem curtailed. I just need to see the spreadsheet or a tldw.

I assume in the UK it's mostly It's land acquisition costs, stemming from a long lasting guillotine shortage. And also probably fragmenting the projects into 50 hierarchical contract layers that with each party taking its dumb "risk-adjusted" rate of return.

I'm wondering if this is a common-law issue or poor insurance culture or corruption.

Notably Europe generally has a top notch insurance culture. And civil law + insurance might reduce lawsuits.

That said, look at Latvia and railbaltica. It's a shitshow, so maybe corruption.

I must get around to watching this video. I will say that I take exception to the thumbnail though: The Perth Metronet project finished up earlier this year, it costing $12.4 billion to roll out 72km of track.

On the surface, that comes out at about $172 million per kilometre. But, that is only part of the story. That money also paid for the construction/renovation of 18-23 stations, 8km of tunnels under the river for the new airport line, elevation of 5.5 km of track, removal of several level crossings, and a whole program to locally manufacture trains.

Just reducing the project to 'dollars per kilometre' would be super inaccurate for the overall result. But even then, that would be less than a quarter the implied cost of building a rail line in Australia from that thumbnail.

Signals from noise, cause and effect, my dog has four legs a tail and a long nose, a crocodile has four legs, a tail and a long nose, therefore my dog is a crocodile!

The difference is the anglosphere was taken over by neoliberalism