> People say this a lot, but I really don't think it's a very satisfying explanation for having miles of one lane of a highway barricaded for weeks or months without any workers or equipment in sight, ever.
The problem is that both the workers and the equipment are short in supply.
The cause of that is the lack of continuity in politics. Construction machines and staff training can easily reach dozens of millions of euros in cost - particularly when it's rail related. It would be financial suicide for any company outside of extremely large conglomerates to take on that risk without politics providing the guarantee of at least 20 years worth of projects to recoup that investment. Instead, the US is down to "we can barely plan for the next fiscal year" timeframe, and Europe to "we can barely plan 5 years until the next EU fiscal cycle, add national election cycles and you're down to 1-2 years as well". On top of that come government accounting clusterfucks - basically, the norm is that it is very difficult to transfer budgets from one year to the next, and when you don't use all your budget for whatever reason, next year's budget will be cut back.
The problem is that both the workers and the equipment are short in supply.
The cause of that is the lack of continuity in politics. Construction machines and staff training can easily reach dozens of millions of euros in cost - particularly when it's rail related. It would be financial suicide for any company outside of extremely large conglomerates to take on that risk without politics providing the guarantee of at least 20 years worth of projects to recoup that investment. Instead, the US is down to "we can barely plan for the next fiscal year" timeframe, and Europe to "we can barely plan 5 years until the next EU fiscal cycle, add national election cycles and you're down to 1-2 years as well". On top of that come government accounting clusterfucks - basically, the norm is that it is very difficult to transfer budgets from one year to the next, and when you don't use all your budget for whatever reason, next year's budget will be cut back.