Hey, what a f*#kin' surprise!

Seems highway projects in the region will cost more than expected.  Wow, whoda thunk it?

Here's the thing:  COST OF MATERIALS GOES UP WITH TIME.  I don't understand, and frankly am baffled by, the shock and horror people feel when the cost of transportation projects proves to be more than expected.  If we can grok that milk, gas, and bread will cost more from year to year, how can we completely fail to understand that the cost of steel, cement and labor also rises? 

It strikes me as self-evident that if you're going to release budget numbers, you'd do well to be conservative and release numbers that assume higher-than-expected inflation, and a cushion for spikes in the cost of materials.  Then, you'd be dealing with an informed (oops, I think we just identified the problem) constituency, have room for those inevitable cost problems, and give yourself a scratching chance at actually getting done under budget.  Instead, if inflation is built into these projections at all (I honestly don't know, but I assume so), it's built in at a friendly, consistently unrealistic rate. 

How do I know it's consistently unrealistic?  Because I've never seen a major infrastructure project, ever, anywhere, that made budget.  They all go over budget, and they all cry about the totally unexpected rise in cost of materials! 

This is, of course, made worse in Washington state, where any transportation project must first be discussed and voted on ad nauseum for 5 to 25 years before any actual work begins, during which time the cost...*gasp*...goes up.  This incredible, mind-boggling delay in actual work in the misguided effort to provide an appearance of consensus itself causes the rise in costs, as more and more studies are commissioned and commissions are studied and COSTS OF MATERIALS FUCKING GOES UP WITH THE PASSAGE OF TIME.  And we just keep ramming our thumbs further up our collective asses, then going all Eyman with outrage when we learn that the as-yet-unstarted massive $12 billion transportation project, voted on and approved and planned several years ago but still being discussed and voted on again, suddenly will cost $16 billion.

Ironically, the only infrastructure project I've seen that gave a realistic cost estimate was voted into extinction within two months of release of that unfortunate, honest budget:  the Seattle monorail.  They made the mistake of releasing the actual, total cost of the project with financing and interest, and people went freaking apeshit over it.  Granted, the financing scheme they'd come up with was crap, but that can be corrected.  In the final analysis, the numbers they were released weren't that far off from what was realistically possible, but even the better honest numbers would have doomed the monorail to death.  Why?  Because in the first vote, people were given a cost estimate that was patently (and to me, obviously) well short of what the actual, total cost would have been. 

In other words, while we are slaves to the total cost of ownership (TCO) model when we buy computers or cars for ourselves, for some reason we make no such demand that our public servants share with us the TCO for infrastructure projects, and when they do share it, we respond with righteous outrage.