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Originally Posted by SoCalKid
My larger point though is that this project has truly had 200%-300% increase in costs, and that isn't just some conservative fearmongering narrative, it is fact and is something that should be addressed transparently. A good portion of that is because of inflation, and another big portion is because it's impossible to accurately project costs without doing a ton of design work. BUT there has also been a lot of mismanagement and politically expedient design decisions that have significantly inflated the budget. So while we should continue to fund and work on this project, we also need to use it as a case study for what can go wrong with large projects and try to improve the process for the next segments. Pretending that all the very real problems are just conspiracies or political attacks is not helpful.
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It's worth noting that a cost overrun of this scale is not at all unusual for a major infrastructure project. Britain's HS2 increased in estimated costs from £37.5 billion in 2009 to over £100 billion before significant portions of the project were cut earlier this year.
Nor are non-English speaking countries immune. France's Turin–Lyon high speed rail line estimated costs have increased from €12 billion in 2002 to €25 billion in 2012. The latter cost estimate was legally capped in 2015, meaning if it's breached it would throw the entire project in jeopardy, so essentially everyone has agreed for the past decade not to do any more cost estimates...
Even China isn't able to avoid overruns. Indonesia's first HSR line, built by China, saw the eventual increases from $4.5 billion in 2015 to $7.3 billion when it opened in August (after some negotiations, China and Indonesia agreed to say the overrun was only $1.2 billion for the purposes of Indonesia paying back its loans to China).
All of which is to say is that engineering is hard and there aren't easy ways around it.
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