howl
Active Member
From my point of view there are two reasons why public projects take so long to get built in Toronto compared to places like China:
1. The planning and design process has a huge public consultation component which means the decision makers (e.g. the politicians) get very nervous about approving anything. The waffle and flip-flop based on what a handful on NIMBY constituents tell them or what the latest opinion polls are telling them. Even after they've agreed to something they change their mind and the whole process starts over again. This is a result of living in a true democracy. If we want things to get approved and designed faster we need to trust the engineers and planners which would create more of a technocracy.
2. Ever since the mid-1980 Reaganomics era governments have been about saving taxpayer money, not about investing in the future. Public projects are built for budget prices and the only way to do that is to spread out the construction period. The first thing to go in a public project is often the contingency fund. If more money was invested into the project you could take the risk of starting one component even when a component that part is dependent on is not complete, because you have a large contingency fund to fix it if there is a problem. With no contingency fund you can't take those risks so every stage must be complete before the next stage can start.
1. The planning and design process has a huge public consultation component which means the decision makers (e.g. the politicians) get very nervous about approving anything. The waffle and flip-flop based on what a handful on NIMBY constituents tell them or what the latest opinion polls are telling them. Even after they've agreed to something they change their mind and the whole process starts over again. This is a result of living in a true democracy. If we want things to get approved and designed faster we need to trust the engineers and planners which would create more of a technocracy.
2. Ever since the mid-1980 Reaganomics era governments have been about saving taxpayer money, not about investing in the future. Public projects are built for budget prices and the only way to do that is to spread out the construction period. The first thing to go in a public project is often the contingency fund. If more money was invested into the project you could take the risk of starting one component even when a component that part is dependent on is not complete, because you have a large contingency fund to fix it if there is a problem. With no contingency fund you can't take those risks so every stage must be complete before the next stage can start.
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