The Purple Line: sixteen miles of light rail in Montgomery County, Maryland. It was approved in the late 2000s, broke ground in 2017, and will not carry its first passenger until around 2027. That is nearly two decades from approval to operation. In that same window, Spain built hundreds of miles of high-speed rail. France extended the TGV. Japan opened new Shinkansen lines on schedule, as Japan does.
The United States spent $266 billion on highways alone in 2022. This alone tells us that this is not a funding issue. We have the money. What we don't have is the institutional machinery to turn money into finished infrastructure without losing a decade in the process. Five structural failures explain why.
1. Environmental review has become a weapon
The National Environmental Policy Act of 1970 was well-intentioned. The postwar highway builders had carved through poor and Black neighborhoods with no accountability. NEPA said: stop and think. But NEPA doesn't require fixing anything. Just identifying problems. The result is a process that can consume years, produce reams of documentation, and change nothing — while giving well-organized, well-funded opponents a legal crowbar to stall projects indefinitely. Research from GWU and Yale found that after these laws passed, the correlation between local resident wealth and infrastructure cost quintupled. Richer neighborhoods use the process more effectively. The people who needed the train most are still on the bus.
2. America is a uniquely litigious country.
Our common-law legal system converts disputes that other nations resolve through administrative channels into years of courtroom combat. Citizens can sue over inadequate environmental studies. Contractors sue agencies. Agencies sue contractors. The Purple Line's original contractor walked off the job in 2020, and what followed was years of litigation that cost hundreds of millions of dollars and delayed opening by half a decade. This is not rare. It is the norm. Britain, which also uses common law, builds slower and more expensively than most of Europe for the same reason. The legal structure itself is a drag on construction.
3. Nobody is in charge.
Most peer nations fund major infrastructure at the national level: one government decides, appropriates, and builds. In the United States, money flows from federal to state to county to transit authority, each layer adding its own requirements, timelines, environmental reviews, and consultants. The Purple Line required agreement between federal agencies, the state of Maryland, two county governments, and a private contractor, all simultaneously. When any one party balks, everyone waits. Japan's Shinkansen and France's TGV were funded entirely by their national governments, with no local veto and no multi-jurisdictional approval chain. They built fast because one entity was accountable for the outcome.
4. We gutted the agencies that know how to build.
State transportation department employment has dropped sharply over the past two decades, particularly after the 2008 recession. The institutional knowledge left with the employees. Today, states routinely outsource planning and design to private consultants. They cost more, produce less detailed plans, and generate far more change orders. Each change order triggers a renegotiation. Each renegotiation costs money and time. One study found that a single standard deviation increase in consultant reliance correlates with a 20% increase in cost per lane-mile. The political logic of cutting government headcount is understandable. The practical result is that taxpayers pay more for worse outcomes.
5. Beneath all of it? Distrust.
As one retired railroad engineer put it plainly: in this country, we don't trust the government to do it. That distrust has been encoded into every layer of American infrastructure law: the veto points, the mandatory reviews, the judicial oversight, the fragmented funding. Every one of these mechanisms exists because someone, at some point, did not trust the entity above them to act in the public interest. The accumulated result is a system that treats every public project as guilty until proven innocent and structures the approval process accordingly. Other countries extend more institutional trust to their planners and get faster results. We do not, and we don't.
None of this is inevitable. We built the interstate highway system in thirteen years. The Golden Gate Bridge in four. When a bridge carrying I-35W collapsed in Minnesota in 2007, the environmental review was completed in three weeks and the replacement bridge opened in thirteen months. The urgency changed the calculus. We are capable of building quickly. We simply haven't decided that infrastructure that does not service automobiles (i.e. the trains people ride to work, the transit lines connecting underserved communities to opportunity) deserves the same urgency as a crisis. We have the capacity. We lack institutional will.
The solutions aren't mysterious. Streamline environmental review so it identifies real harms and fixes them, rather than serving as a delay mechanism. Consolidate funding authority so projects don't require unanimous agreement from a dozen agencies. Rebuild in-house government expertise so we stop paying consultants to do what civil servants did better and cheaper. Reform zoning to allow density and mixed use so that walking somewhere is actually possible.
Until we address these root issues, the Purple Line will continue being the trend. Approved under one presidential administration, still unfinished four administrations later. Twenty years. Sixteen miles. And a lot of people still waiting for a train that should have been running years ago.