Urban planning is pretty complex. Basic competence is a higher bar than you may realize and anyone really good at planning this stuff can make more money in the private sector.

Some people take staff jobs because they are good at the bureaucratic stuff. This does not necessarily mean they actually complete projects. It does mean they tend to keep their job and get viewed as competent, even if they may not be, really.

A good reason to take a staff job is you are good at the planning part and not so good at being an entrepreneur and would like to actually get paid for your work. I have no idea how many people fit this profile versus how many people are good at playing the game without actually getting all that much done.

If you are unlucky the project you are managing doesn’t scale linearly. So a 10 billion projects is 99999999 time more difficult than a 100 million project.

Then we have the problem of previous experience. How many 10 billion projects do we have in the whole country? And maybe they take 10-15 years to finish. You might get one chance at managing and then it’s time for retirement.

When projects of this size start they often have “wicked problems” [0] which demand a lot of competence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem

> How many 10 billion projects do we have in the whole country?

Right now I would guess a few hundred, going back and adjusting for inflation it’s easily thousands. For scale a single aircraft carrier costs more than 10 billion. The US operates at a scale that’s hard to comprehend.

Also,100 million dollar projects also run into Wicked problems.

A 10 billion dollar project is 100x larger. It's definitely more difficult to manage.

Sure it’s more difficult, but the difficulty doesn’t increase linearly with budget. A 100m dollar project isn’t 100x as difficult as a 1m dollar project.

I am not saying anyone can make the jump, but promotions often mean handing an order of magnitude larger projects.

I'm not sure how you can conclude that for any infrastructure project, complexity scales sublinearly. This feels true in software, but not real world matters IMO.

Think of all of the politics & hard choices involved, for instance, in displacing people vs. bending over backwards to accommodate them with the California high speed rail project.

If anything, complexity probably increases exponentially as you have to consider ever more permutations of possible project.

I agree, and think that this should be incorporated into the cost.

Ie, a project twice as complex should be 5x the cost due to the additional management, comms overhead, permutations and potential risk.

Said another way the curve is logarithmic and there's a theoretical upper bound on project complexity.

Total project complexity isn’t the relevant metric here, a project with 100x the budget has more people managing it any many decisions don’t make it to the top.

Also, if a 2x as complex a thing takes 10x the budget then that scaling is already part of the budget figure.

honest question: when the US Navy builds a new $10bn super-carrier, who is actually managing that project? is it US Navy staff, or is management of that project outsourced to a US company? i am genuinely curious.

Folks that graduate from schools like this:

https://foundrycollege.org/about-us/team/