In the Before Time, The Long Long Ago, people could still be mildly shocked when the cost of Boston’s Big Dig, a project to build some five miles of traffic tunnels underneath Boston and the bay, ballooned from $2.8 billion to $14.6 billion from conception to finish. These days, of course, Dmeocrat-run states can inflate infrastructure construction costs at a greatly accelerated rate, which is how cost estimates for California’s insane, never-to-be-built high speed rate have now ballooned to $232 billion, or more than the entirety of Reagan’s first defense budget.
Another case in point: The estimated cost to rebuild the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore has ballooned from $1.8 billion to over $5 billion in two years. Those are some impressive blue-state project management skills at work.
Bridges are expensive. (Not as expensive as tunnels under Boston, but expensive none the less.) Gone are those 19th century days when you could throw a few million dollars and tens of expendable manual labor lives into a project to achieve the desired results. You have a lot more safety regulations to comply with, and more palms need to be greased.
“The new Francis Scott Key Bridge is designed as a modern cable-stayed structure that will stretch more than two miles across the Patapsco River.” You know what else is a modern cable-stayed bridge? Corpus Christi’s New Harbor Bridge. It’s slight shorter than the planned Francis Scott Key Bridge (10,820 vs. 11,015 feet), but a whole lot cheaper. New Harbor Bridge cost $1.2 billion, despite numerous delays, assessments and revisions to the design.
So even after all those delays and revisions, they were able to build a large (but slightly smaller) bridge in Corpus for $400 million less than the starting estimate on the Francis Scott Key Bridge, and a fourth of the revised Francis Scott Key cost.
No wonder Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is scrutinizing the Francis Scott Key Bridge project.
How much of that four times cost is due to the graft, fraud and waste of building something in a blue state like Maryland rather than a red state like Texas?
Tags: Boston, bridges, California, Democrats, Francis Scott Key bridge, fraud, high speed rail, infrastructure, Maryland, Massachusetts, Sean Duffy, Texas, waste