SYLVIE DOUGLIS, BYLINE: NPR.
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DARIAN WOODS, HOST:
In 2011, Dan Richard got a call from California's governor at the time, Jerry Brown, and Jerry Brown had a job offer for him that Dan actually turned down.
ADRIAN MA, HOST:
But they kept talking, and eventually, they got to this other idea that had been around for decades - California High-Speed Rail, a superfast train that would take passengers from LA to San Francisco in just 2 1/2 hours. Nothing like this had ever been done before in the U.S.
WOODS: And at this time, it was more than a dream. It had a budget - $33 billion when it went to voters a few years prior. It had a completion date - 2020. It also had a board. So Dan, a veteran transport executive, said, I could help there.
DAN RICHARD: And I believe I literally said the words to him, you know, how hard could that be? So...
WOODS: (Laughter) Famous last words.
RICHARD: ...He gave me an opportunity to find out.
MA: How hard could it be? Well, Dan soon learned that California High-Speed Rail was victim to what often plagues megaprojects - enormous cost overruns and delays.
WOODS: Today on the show, how to build big. From California High-Speed Rail to the Sydney Opera House, we will learn the do's and don'ts on leading ambitious projects.
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WOODS: To learn how to build big projects like High-Speed Rail, Bent Flyvbjerg is the go-to guy. He's a professor at Oxford University and IT University of Copenhagen. And Bent and his colleagues have discovered this striking pattern with megaprojects, as in railroads, tunnels, mines, airports, that kind of thing. He calls this pattern the Iron Law of Megaprojects.
BENT FLYVBJERG: The vast majority of projects are unsuccessful, and not just by a little - by a lot.
MA: Bent found that 99.5% of megaprojects were over time, over budget or had lower benefits than expected, often a combination of these things. And California High-Speed Rail has gone over time and budget, which is not that unusual. Rail projects are typically 40% over budget. But by 2011, costs for the High-Speed Rail had tripled.
WOODS: Bent's research has uncovered a few lessons that megaprojects like High-Speed Rail could learn from. And the first lesson is the importance of actual experience in the exact type of project.
FLYVBJERG: Experience actually really makes a difference. And often, this is disregarded when you talk about project leadership.
MA: Bent points out there are no modern high-speed rails in the U.S. at the moment, so essentially, there's no experience building those in this country. And he's particularly critical of the California High-Speed Rail project for not awarding contracts to overseas companies with experience.
FLYVBJERG: They didn't hire the people who have planned and built high-speed rail lines before. They decided to reinvent the wheel.
WOODS: Several countries have high-speed rail, famously Japan, but also in Europe. The French National Railway Company even set up an office in California, hoping to land a contract. Contracts instead went to local U.S. companies that hadn't built modern high-speed rail.
MA: This is not an isolated example. Bent details a number of megaprojects that failed to properly value experience.
FLYVBJERG: So another really difficult type of project, actually more difficult than high-speed rail, is building magnificent architecture.
WOODS: Bent uses the case study of the Sydney Opera House as what not to do versus the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain as what to do.
FLYVBJERG: The Sydney Opera House had a 1,400% cost overrun. We talked about a 200% cost overrun for California High-Speed Rail Line. That looks very comfortable compared to 1,400%, right?
MA: The Sydney Opera House was also 10 years delayed, and - get this - when it finished, it was actually acoustically unfit for opera.
WOODS: You had one job.
MA: As a counterexample to the Sydney Opera House, you can look at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. It was one of those rare megaprojects, the 1 out of 200, that was actually delivered on time, under budget, and put the city, in this case, Bilbao, on the tourism map.
FLYVBJERG: People just love to go to that museum because the museum is a piece of art in its own right.
WOODS: The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao looks like a glorious tangle of metallic curves. It's like a kid's cardboard cutout model brought to real life in the best possible way. This is the signature style of its architect, Frank Gehry, who was then in his 60s. By contrast...
FLYVBJERG: The architect of the Sydney Opera House was not very experienced, and it makes an enormous difference.
MA: It makes an enormous difference because there are a million things that can go wrong. And somebody with experience could head off problems before they emerge. The Sydney Opera House suffered from political pressure to just start building, to put that shovel in some dirt before proper planning had been completed. But for the Guggenheim, Frank Gehry knew he needed to invest substantial time in that preparation. And Gehry and his team spent two years tweaking his new design and moving it to a detailed digital simulation.
WOODS: Now, this really goes against the stereotype of Frank Gehry just kind of crumpling up paper and going with that design.
MA: Yeah, I actually remember this from an episode of "The Simpsons"...
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JULIE KAVNER: (As Marge Simpson) Dear Mr. Gehry...
MA: ...Where he does exactly that. Marge writes this letter to Gehry asking if he can design a building in Springfield.
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KAVNER: (As Marge Simpson) Would you please build a concert hall for our town?
MA: And Gehry just scrunches up the letter and throws it on the sidewalk.
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FRANK GEHRY: (As self) Frank Gehry, you're a genius.
WOODS: Yeah, it's fantastic. You know, Frank Gehry said that this was just for fun, but he says that portrayal has haunted him because people who watch the Simpsons clip believe it.
MA: Oh, that's rough - the hazards of cartoon cameos.
WOODS: Exactly, because Frank Gehry's approach was much more focused on details and planning. This was an approach that would have reduced cost overruns for California High-Speed Rail. That sort of planning is Bent's second lesson for megaprojects - specifically, think slowly before acting fast. This wasn't happening when Dan Richard joined the board of the California High-Speed Rail Authority.
RICHARD: I was kind of banging my head against the wall.
MA: High-speed rail lines were being constructed alongside existing rail lines. But the law was if they were too close, they needed to build some kind of protection.
RICHARD: These very tall, very sturdy concrete intrusion barriers that are costing hundreds of millions of dollars.
WOODS: That's just one example of how shoving that spade into the ground too soon limits your options later.
RICHARD: When people lay these things out, they look at a map, and they take a magic marker, and they draw a line and say, I think it ought to go here. Well, when you are talking about going 520 miles across California, across seismic zones, through wetlands, when you get on the ground, all of those things look very, very, very different.
MA: Dan Richard made it a point to get on the ground. And that's one thing that the project did get right according to Bent's recommendations for megaprojects. Make friends and keep them friendly. Dan visited one city in Northern LA where the High-Speed Rail line was proposed to cut through.
RICHARD: Our proposed alignment was right next to schools. There were thousands of homes and businesses that would have to be displaced. And I finally just said, this is just not workable.
WOODS: Instead, now a 22-mile tunnel is planned under that city.
MA: Bent says this kind of community engagement and stakeholder management is critical, especially for sprawling projects like High-Speed Rail. The plans have changed a lot over the years, and costs have risen further now. The plan is for the High-Speed Rail to open in the first phase between the rural cities of Bakersfield and Merced. But that could be as late as 2033. It's a compromise after decades of wrangling between communities, politicians, engineers and environmental advocates. And Bent says successful leaders tackle this head-on.
FLYVBJERG: They invest a lot of time in meeting with community groups and stakeholder groups and making sure that they understand how they see things, and they make sure that they think up measures that might be attractive to those stakeholders so that you can actually get some kind of consensus.
WOODS: Experience, planning, stakeholder management - in some ways, this is quite a boring list. Of course, these things are important, but in a world that values youth and shiny objects and urgency to just do it, these principles are fighting upstream.
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MA: In case you missed it, we have a new line of merch for INDICATOR listeners. Help support our show by getting our new Indigator T-shirt or joining Planet Money Plus for sponsor-free listening. Links are in our show notes.
WOODS: For more about building megaprojects, Bent Flyvbjerg's book is "How Big Things Get Done." This episode was produced by Cooper Katz McKim with engineering by Kwesi Lee. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Kate Concannon is our editor, and THE INDICATOR is a production of NPR.
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