Every year a handful of cities announce ambitious plans to build faster, more affordable transit, and every year most of those plans get gutted by cost overruns and endless procedural review long before a single rail is laid.
Comparative studies of transit construction costs consistently find that many major cities spend several times more per mile of new rail than comparable projects in other developed countries, a gap too large and too consistent to be explained away by local geography or labor costs alone. Something structural in how these projects get planned, reviewed, and built is driving the difference.
I don’t think this is a story about any single villain, whether it’s unions, contractors, or environmental review. It’s a story about a planning process with so many sequential veto points — environmental review, community input at multiple separate stages, agency coordination across overlapping jurisdictions — that even a genuinely well-designed project can take a decade longer and cost several times more than an equivalent project elsewhere that consolidates those same steps.
Faster review doesn’t have to mean less accountability
The reasonable objection to streamlining any of this is that review processes exist for good reasons: environmental protection, community input, and preventing wasteful spending. Those are real values worth protecting. But a process that takes years longer than peer countries’ equivalent process, without producing measurably better environmental or community outcomes, isn’t accountability. It’s just friction that happens to look like accountability.
My honest view is that the cities getting this right aren’t the ones that skipped review — they’re the ones that consolidated sequential review steps into fewer, more decisive ones. That’s a genuinely harder political problem to solve than any single cost-cutting measure, since it means multiple agencies and community processes have to accept less individual control over the timeline. But it’s the actual lesson from the places building transit faster and cheaper, and it’s worth taking seriously.
