Okay This is Enough Boring Real World (No Not THAT Real World) Shit for One Day

Interesting note on why building public transportation is a nightmare, ie fucking consultants:

For example, when the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority got to work on the Green Line Extension, the agency only had a half-dozen full-time employees managing the largest capital project the MBTA had ever undertaken. On New York’s Second Avenue subway, the most expensive mile of subway ever built, consultant contracts were more than 20 percent of construction costs—more than double what’s standard in France or Italy. By 2011, the MTA had trimmed its in-house capital projects management group of 1,600 full-time employees (circa 1990) to just 124, tasked with steering $20 billion in investment.

People love screaming about how "incompetent" the government is while extolling the supercompetence & nobility of private businesses. But from here we learn that most of the time the government just hands jobs over to consultants, whose opportunistic greed leads to them to gouge the government for crazy amounts of $crillah after which they still screw the job up. Since the "impossible to get anything done!" gub'ment gets blamed anyway, it seems a case could be made for them to simply knock it off with the endless, no-cost-matters consultants and just hire enough full-time employed people to do the work themselves.