My brother and father (concrete construction) would probably lay the blame on onerous regulation. They regularly complain about nit-picky engineers with their insistence on (in their words) unreasonable slavish devotion to engineering specifications. I'm not on the jobsite so I don't actually know.
I wonder is our construction regulations are much more stringent than other western nations?
Count your blessings. Construction can be much harder in other countries for reasons beyond engineering and safety.
Italy, for example, is a real estate developers nightmare. Every rock or patch of dirt has a decent chance of sitting atop an Ancient Greek or Roman ruin, and the process to ensure that construction won't damage any heretofore unknown ruins is agonizingly slow.
It boils down to political power and cultural preference. Americans are fine with tearing down almost anything (except designated landmarks) to build something "better" than before.
> Americans are fine with tearing down almost anything (except designated landmarks) to build something "better" than before.
Unless that "anything" are super-expensive detached single-family homes on relatively large lots, and the proposed replacement is something that increases density. :-)
Oh, I'm obviously taking a pot shot at the Bay Area, but the influential underlying psychology exists to some extent everywhere else in the country, too. The vast majority of the country has zoning rules designed to prevent any expansion that isn't horizontal.
Or if it qualifies as something qualifying as, "not in my backyard".
And this isn't unique to that area: Transform a cornfield into low-cost housing next to a "nice" area. Put a halfway house in place of a fire-gutted house. Even worse, put in a prison (which keeps crime rates lower than average).
But that problem applies to a lot of places in Europe - a lot of projects in the UK need to have teams of archaeologists in place and stuff seems to get built here at a reasonable rate (OK mostly - around Edinburgh we've had one dubious tram project and a successful major bridge and railways being re-opened).
The Crossrail project in London had over 100 archaeologists working on it:
Some of it is PR: some parts have gone badly (redevelopment of Whitechapel station comes to mind), but by and large it has gone to plan (albeit using almost all of its risk time, AFAIK!). They've by and large kept their cards quite close to their chests about things going wrong, though.
The worst parts, by and large, have been around the existing railway infrastructure: dealing with long-disused parts of railway infrastructure (partly buried and exact design and current state unknown) and with currently used infrastructure without long-closures (as well as Whitechapel, the electrification of the GWML out to Reading comes to my mind, with all its problems, which is really a separate project but Crossrail cannot run beyond Heathrow Junction without it complete).
I believe that they are, but that is clearly no panacea. Massachusetts is famous for having lengthy and onerous regulations and code but the Big Dig project still had many failures.
I wonder is our construction regulations are much more stringent than other western nations?