Departing the station, the train slips quietly through the urban sprawl and endless traffic jams and accelerates as it enters the open spaces of the Central Valley, until the countryside is racing by in a blur. Breakfast is served. By the time attendants clear coffee cups and plates, the train slows and glides into another station. This is downtown San Francisco. The whole trip took two and a half hours, not much more than the time it would take the average Los Angeleno to drive to the airport, clear security, and get on a plane to queue on the tarmac, waiting for departure. The cost of the train ticket was $86. The project was called California High-Speed Rail. It would connect two of the world’s great cities, along with Silicon Valley, the global capital of high technology. Words such as visionary are used too liberally, but this really was visionary. And for a total cost of $33 billion it would be ready to roll by 2020.[1] In a statewide referendum, Californians approved. Work began. (Location 65)
For perspective, consider that the cost of the line between only Merced and Bakersfield is the same as or more than the annual gross domestic product of Honduras, Iceland, and about a hundred other countries. And that money will build the most sophisticated rail line in North America between two towns most people outside California have never heard of. It will be—as critics put it—the “bullet train to nowhere.” (Location 83)
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In the early 1990s, Danish officials had an idea. Denmark is a small country with a population less than New York City’s, but it is rich and gives a lot of money in foreign aid and wants that money to do good. Few things do more good than education. The Danish officials got together with colleagues from other governments and agreed to fund a school system for the Himalayan nation of Nepal. Twenty thousand schools and classrooms would be built, most of them in the poorest and most remote regions. Work would begin in 1992. It would take twenty years.[4] The history of foreign aid is littered with boondoggles, and this project could easily have added to the mess. Yet it finished on budget in 2004—eight years ahead of schedule. In the years that followed, educational levels rose across the country, with a long list of positive consequences, particularly a jump in the number of girls in classrooms. The schools even saved lives: When a massive earthquake struck Nepal in 2015, almost nine thousand people died, with many being crushed to death in collapsing buildings. But the schools had been designed to be earthquake proof, as a first. They stood. Today, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation uses the project as an exemplar of how to improve health by increasing enrollment in schools, particularly for girls.[5] (Location 89)
data show that big projects that deliver as promised are rare. Normal looks a lot more like California High-Speed Rail. Average practice is a disaster, best practice an outlier, as I would later point out in my findings about megaproject management.[7] (Location 104)
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So what are the universal drivers that make the difference between success and failure? PSYCHOLOGY AND POWER One driver is psychology. In any big project—meaning a project that is considered big, complex, ambitious, and risky by those in charge—people think, make judgments, and make decisions. And where there are thinking, judgment, and decisions, psychology is at play; for instance, in the guise of optimism. Another driver is power. In any big project people and organizations compete for resources and jockey for position. Where there are competition and jockeying, there is power; for instance, that of a CEO or politician pushing through a pet project. (Location 117)
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In a 1931 publication, the corporation boasted that before any work had been done on the construction site “the architects knew exactly how many beams and of what lengths, even how many rivets and bolts would be needed. They knew how many windows Empire State would have, how many blocks of limestone, and of what shapes and sizes, how many tons of aluminum and stainless steel, tons of cement, tons of mortar. Even before it was begun, Empire State was finished entirely—on paper.”[14] The first steam shovel clawed into the Manhattan dirt on March 17, 1930. More than three thousand workers swarmed the site, and construction advanced rapidly, beginning with the steel skeleton thrusting upward, followed by the completed first story. Then the second story. The third. The fourth. Newspapers reported on the skyscraper’s rise as if it were a Yankees playoff run. As workers learned and processes smoothed, progress accelerated. Up went three stories in one week. Four. Four and a half. At the height of construction, the pace hit a story a day.[15] And a little more. “When we were in full swing going up the main tower,” Lamb’s partner Richmond Shreve recalled, “things clicked with such precision that once we erected fourteen and a half floors in ten working days—steel, concrete, stone and all.”[16] That was an era when people marveled at the efficiency of factories churning out cars, and the Empire State designers were inspired to imagine their process as a vertical assembly line—except that “the assembly line did the moving,” Shreve explained, while “the finished product stayed in place.”[17] (Location 165)
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Danes therefore long ago became experts at operating ferries and building bridges. So it was no surprise, in the late 1980s, when the government announced the Great Belt project. It comprised two bridges, one of which would be the world’s longest suspension bridge, to connect two of the bigger islands, including the one with Copenhagen on it. There would also be an underwater tunnel for trains—the second longest in Europe—which would be built by a Danish-led contractor. That was interesting because Danes had little experience boring tunnels. I watched the announcement on the news with my father, who worked in bridge and tunnel construction. “Bad idea,” he grumbled. “If I were digging a hole that big, I would hire someone who had done it before.” Things went wrong from the start. First there was a yearlong delay in delivering four giant tunnel-boring machines. Then, as soon as the machines were in the ground, they proved to be flawed and needed redesign, delaying work another five months. Finally, the big machines started slowly chewing their way under the ocean floor. Up above, the bridge builders brought in a massive oceangoing dredger to prepare their worksite.[1] To do its work, the dredger stabilized itself by lowering giant support legs into the seafloor. When the work was done, the legs were lifted, leaving deep holes. By accident, one of the holes happened to be on the projected path of the tunnel. Neither the bridge builders nor the tunnelers saw the danger. One day, after a few weeks of boring, one of the four machines was stopped for maintenance. It was about 250 meters (820 feet) out to sea and an assumed 10 meters (33 feet) under the seafloor. Water was seeping into the maintenance area in front of the machine, and a contractor unfamiliar with tunneling hooked up a pump to get the water out. The cables of the pump were trailed through a manhole into the boring machine. Suddenly water started pouring in at a speed indicating a breach of the tunnel. Evacuation was immediate—with no time to remove the pump and cables and close the manhole. (Location 195)
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After the accident, the recovery, and the eventual completion of the Great Belt bridges and tunnel, everyone agreed that the project had gone badly over budget. But by how much? Management said 29 percent for the whole project. I dug into the data, did my own analysis, and discovered that their number was, shall we say, optimistic. The actual overrun was 55 percent, and 120 percent for the tunnel alone (in real terms, measured from the final investment decision). Still, management kept repeating their number in public, and I kept correcting them, until they did a public opinion poll that showed that the public sided with me. Then they gave up. Later, an official national audit confirmed my numbers, and the case was closed.[2] (Location 219)