Here, I'll start:
http://blogs.reuters.com/gregg-easterbr ... dp-growth/
Boston’s Big Dig, mostly funded by the federal taxpayer though benefits went exclusively to Massachusetts, was supposed to take 10 years at a cost of $6.2 billion in today’s dollars. Instead it took 21 years and cost $22 billion.
*Seattle wants a 1.7 mile highway tunnel, a kind of Little Dig, that would mainly be paid for by federal taxpayers though the benefits would go exclusively to Washington State. The tunnel is priced at $2 billion, more than a billion dollars per mile. A billion dollars per mile is $16,000 per inch.
*San Francisco wants a new 1.7 mile subway line that would mainly be paid for by federal taxpayers, though the benefits would go exclusively to California. The line is priced at $1.6 billion, just shy of a billion dollars a mile.
*The Washington, D.C. metro is building a mainly federally funded extension from its current Virginia terminus to Dulles Airport. The next leg of the project was just priced at $3.1 billion for 11.5 miles – that’s $270 million per mile, not for subway but for above-ground rail on the median of a highway the public already owns. The price is so extreme that even Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood, representing an administration that loves to spend borrowed money, says the price must be cut.
*My home county, Montgomery County, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C., wants $1.9 billion for a 16-mile trolley line which would be mainly funded by federal taxpayers though the benefits would go exclusively to Maryland. That’s $121 million per mile for simple above-ground construction of trolley line.
*The federal government just gave contracts to renovate the Reflecting Pool that fronts the Lincoln Monument. The renovation is expected to take 18 months — longer than it took to build the pool in the first place, 90 years ago when machinery was much less efficient.
*Baltimore wants the federal government to fund a new light-rail line for the city. Set aside why taxpayers in Nebraska or Wisconsin should pay for a system solely for the convenience of Marylanders. In line is projected to cost $2.2 billion for 14.5 miles, about $2,400 per inch, entirely for above-ground work. Construction is projected to require nine years. That’s a pace of 1.6 miles per year. At that pace the First Transcontinental Railroad, completed in 1869 using far less machinery than available today, would have taken more than a thousand years to build.
*On the George Washington Parkway that runs along the Potomac River in the nation’s capital, there is a Depression-era humpback bridge that needed replacement. In January 2008, federally funded contractors began work on this small, low, four-lane, short bridge (80 yards) that crosses a shallow channel. Almost four years later, the job still is not finished. In the 1950s, the three-mile long, 140-foot high, seven-lane Tappan Zee Bridge, spanning the Hudson River at a deep point, took less time to construct. At the pace of the humpback bridge project, the Tappan Zee Bridge would have taken two centuries to build.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/lin ... story.html
After 20 months and about $34 million of work, the new Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is being refilled again for good.