Pity the mega-project – the white elephant, the boondoggle, never on time, always over budget.
No one can build anything ambitious these days, it seems, without being second-guessed. Most recently, Brazil is being criticized for its $495 million, 70,000-seat World Cup soccer stadium. Taxpayer backlash and lawsuits have slowed California’s high-speed rail project to a crawl.
But the list of hectored mega-projects goes back years, all around the world: The Chunnel, The Big Dig, bullet trains in Japan and China. The price tag is typically the number one concern, but so is the rationale, the usefulness, the promised economic development returns, and on to many other themes including the design, the execution, and the maintenance. There is an assumption as well that corruption works its way into all modern-day public works.
But is that what happened?