This is about the saddest topic to even contemplate writing about, the challenge of building infrastructure/major projects. It’s like sitting down and making a list of why you are not a Formula 1 driver. You have bad reflexes. You are too fat. You have no money. You have no talent. Your legs are too long. Your legs are too short. You don’t know oversteer from overbite.
Not picking on anyone out there personally; what the above is getting at is that a Formula 1 driver has a nearly-unique set of skills and attributes that crosses paths with luck and the financial resources to make something crazy happen.
The odds of the average Joe Schmuck making it to Formula 1 are about the same as that of a major infrastructure project being completed successfully on time and on budget. There are many reasons why this is so hard. Some challenges are related to project management capability; some are just a function of the times we live in. And that’s actually not a lament about the times we live in; in some ways those impediments are things we would not consider living without.
A few major “nation building” categories often come into the discussion: Pipelines, and railways; one present, one historical; each category can stake a claim to nation-building. Each requires long-distance, cross-country construction. Each is a formidable undertaking, but at the same time each, if of significant enough scope and scale, be truly relevant to the national economy/psyche/industrial base. More on pipelines in a bit – they are a different beast because currently they are political dynamite, and thus have become emotional flashpoints in a way that no creature from this or any other galaxy could have imagined. Starting with railways then, a brief look at history for context.
A Canadian poster child for “nation building projects” is the Canadian Pacific Railway, because that’s exactly what it was. It bound a new country together; it enabled trade development, it enabled export of goods to other parts of Canada and the world that originated in the landlocked heart of the country.
The CPR is an anachronism of course; today, only in totalitarian jurisdictions could the path be so free of impediment. A modern example of what such a project undertaken today looks like comes from California.
Back in 2008, the state embarked on a project to build a high speed rail line from Los Angeles to San Francisco, winding inland through arid landscape, for a total length of about 500 miles/800 kilometres. A HSR system aligned perfectly with California’s green ambitions – fewer autos, more public transport, all electrified. The project’s price tag at kick off was $33 billion, with a planned in-service date of 2020 – some 12 years to complete.
Sitting here in late 2025, with not even a whiff of HSR service in California, the project gives a modern update on the challenges of building “nation building infrastructure”.
Wikipedia’s chronicling of the project’s grim existence is very good, documenting many issues that mega-projects have to face in the modern era. While it is true that California is not particularly friendly regulation-wise – as opposed to, say, Texas – California provides a far more comparable scenario to Canada. And it is bleak reading indeed.
For starters, the above stats about a 2008 kick off date/$33 billion total cost are not quite accurate. The initial plan for the HSR was drafted 8 years earlier, with an estimated price tag of $25 billion (it was formally approved/kicked off in 2008).
Four years after kickoff, in 2012, through various design iterations, developers arrived at the conclusion that creating a whole new rail line would be obscenely expensive, and thus drafted a “blended Phase 1” plan that would utilize existing passenger rail for significant portions. The blended Phase 1’s project cost had now risen to an estimated $55 billion.
By 2024, blended Phase 1’s cost estimate had swollen to $106 billion, and timelines kept pushing further out into the distance. The latest plan has a small segment, less than 1/4 distance, of the line operational by 2035.
What was going wrong? A better question is, what wasn’t going wrong? Every step of the project brought challenges that are not evident in napkin math.
The Wiki article lists 5 separate lawsuits to stop the project, each of which had to wend their way through the courts. Some suits challenged various levels of authority – did federal rights trump state rights, state vs. Local, etc. Each segment had its own characteristics and set of challengers. One environmental firm sued because funds were being allocated to the project that they alleged should have gone elsewhere. Some suits concerned route selection and environmental certifications.
And the lawsuits were just a fraction of the challenge. Land acquisition turned out to be massively difficult. Acquisition doesn’t mean just acquiring raw land; it includes all sorts of surface land issues. As another Wiki article on the subject puts it, “In order for actual construction of structures such as grade separations, trenches, and viaducts to start, land for both the structures themselves and for access and logistics have to be secured; utilities (electric, telecommunications, gas, and wet) moved; and impact on existing traffic mitigated, such as by temporarily or permanently relocating busy roads or freight rail tracks.”
By 2013, five years after the project kick off date, the state had yet to acquire a single land parcel, a process that is obviously near the front of the Gantt chart (and what a Gantt chart that sucker must be) for the first phase. Approvals had to be received from multiple state agencies to even being acquisitions.
It took until 2023, another decade, to acquire the majority of the parcels for the first, 190 km phase, and remember that this phase doubles up on existing track right of ways to speed things up and keep costs down.
The list of entities that needed to approve various parcels is staggering. The Army Corp of Engineers. San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District. Dozens of others, random groups you’d ordinarily never know existed. The Madera County Farm Bureau sued to halt the entire project, as did Kern County and Kings County. The town of Atherton sued to force design changes. Other towns sued for other reasons.
Seventeen towns and cities sued over the Final Environmental Impact Review. Some towns and counties and special interest groups sued federal agencies because they approved certain segments of plans. One county refused to allow the project to do soil testing, setting that simple process back by months.
But let’s assume all the lawsuits and court fights were settled. Then comes the entire realm of commercial nightmares. Utility corridors had to be relocated. Canals had to be rerouted, with each change requiring multiple levels of governmental and agricultural study and approval. Operations had to be meshed with existing rail operations for construction windows, co-location of bridges and tunnels, electrical infrastructure, etc. Each was a separate negotiation. Many had brief windows in which to do the work.
Many of these challenges are for the first phase of the project, from Merced to Bakersfield, which is about a quarter of the total distance. Go to Google maps and see what lies between those two cities. Almost nothing. Agricultural land, open space. The challenges at the populated ends outside this zone would be multiplied. The first segment to be operational by 2035 is this simplistic one. The complex ones have a target in service date of never.
And then there are whole other levels of complexity. The train was to have 24 stations in various towns along the route. So then each station-hosting town has a bunch of specific challenges. How to build the infrastructure to move people to the stations? What about all those right-of-ways and access permits and utility challenges just to build that part out? And who pays for those local challenges?
Ok, enough of that, everyone gets it by now; there are vast numbers of logistical challenges to build stuff at scale. But there is a whole other angle that enters the equation that is arguably even more difficult to deal with, the fact that we’ve gotten really, really good at ecology.
Think back to when the CPR was built, or if possibly you’re not that old – it was built around 1885 – imagine what the approvals process was like. I’m not saying it was good or bad, but there essentially was none. It just bulldozed its way through everything, with time of the essence. Incredibly, the whole railway was built across Canada in 4 years.
There was zero thought put into wildlife habitat, or endangered species, or delicate ecosystems. Hell, the project trashed its own workforce, in particular the Chinese contingent.
Today, we have a biological ecosystem of experts that understands biological ecosystems infinitely better than then. We know which species are at risk, what times of year work best in disturbing habitat, what the consequences are of turbidity in water.
Maybe we go too far, or some people feel that way when such aspects inevitably cause project delays. But…what do you do about that?
We’ve developed a remarkable web of knowledge and experts about ecological systems, and their knowledge shapes a lot of the reasons for mega-project delays.
Are we going to set that all aside?
Is an endangered species an endangered species, or not? Does that “not matter” because we’ve decided to rapidly build ‘nation-building infrastructure’?
Of course we won’t. No politician will anyway. The repercussions are way too big, down the road, to be known as the politician that ignored environmental guidelines to push through whatever. No politician will ram something through sensitive grizzly bear habitat, or ruffled grouse, or burrowing owls, or caribou, or on and on, and wear the responsibility for a species’ demise. Not going to happen.
We’ve developed vast ecosystems of expertise on every aspect of construction – the mental health of ‘camp workers’, localized habitat scrutiny, safety standards that would be unimaginable three decades ago. Which of those pools of experts are we going to put on ignore?
So is that it…throw up our hands? No I don’t think so. We just have to get smarter at things, which actually means listening to the smarter people on any given subject.
I was at a CALEP conference a few weeks ago, the Canadian Association of Land and Energy Professionals, and though I’ve been in the business a long time, and worked with a lot of great land people, I learned an awful lot. One thing that struck home was just where the expertise is, and that one of the biggest keys to actually completing nation-building projects resided in that room of land professionals. Look back at the California HSR rail example – many of the issues, if not most, are surface land issues of one sort or another. The energy sector has a fantastic depth of experience here, not just in oil and gas but other sectors as well that need to sort out land issues.
We’re pretty cross-threaded now, as a nation. We have these deep pools of governance focused on entirely the wrong things. For instance, the Conference Board of Canada recently issued a newsletter entitled “Building Canada’s Long Term Prosperity” with a corresponding report called “Bold Ideas for Canada”. They gathered opinions from a Listening Tour (their name, not mine), and compiled a list of Top Ideas to advance that long term goal. The first two items on the Top Ideas list: Sit down, they’re something else: to “Create a national data sovereignty strategy” and “Make Canada a global leader in combatting misinformation”. Yep. That’s it. The very top two ideas are internet surveillance and opinion gatekeeping.
It actually doesn’t take much doing to blow such junk out of the water, if the conversation can be steered towards the realities of building stuff as opposed to wishful thinking. Groups like land professionals should recognize that they are the cutting edge of Canada’s future hopes. Literally. We just need to reorient conversations, and we might see progress after all. It won’t be easy but if the task is in the right hands it sure will be a lot easier.
The ideal Christmas present or Halloween hand out! Kids will get over it. At the peak of the energy wars, The End of Fossil Fuel Insanity challenged the narrative, facing into the storm. Read the energy story for those that don’t live in the energy world, but want to find out. And laugh. Available at Amazon.ca, Indigo.ca, or Amazon.com.
Email Terry here. (His personal energy site, Public Energy Number One, is on hiatus until there are more hours in the day.)