Horribly inefficient infrastructure repair

The joke goes like this: There are two seasons in Chicago. Winter, and Construction.

Ha ha. I'm such a wit.

There might be something to it, though, that applies not only to Chicago but to a wide variety of civic improvement projects around the world. My current pet peeve is at a street corner near my apartment in Evanston. For the last four years, this intersection has undergone massive construction efforts every single summer. The intersection is opened up, a few huge holes are dug, they futz around inside the hole for a month or two, then close it up again.

Well, that's not so bad, right? The biggest project seems to be a sewer repair, where there is obviously some difficulty in making repairs with high patency. True, that implies bad civil engineering and a certain stupidity in parceling out adequate funds for the project, but that's not unexpected.

What annoys me is rather that not *only* is there a sewer project, but there are also invariably gas, telephone, and electric utility projects at the same intersection, every single year. Big ones. These projects never think to coordinate how things are done... so when the sewer project is done, they fill up the hole, repave the intersection... only to have the intersection torn up again not a week later for a different project.

That level of inefficiency is simply irresponsible and infuriating. Government projects are never cheap, as bureaucracies have no incentive to lower costs. Yet this takes things to a whole new level of stupidity. There's already a friggin hole in the middle of the street! No need to repeat work so many times in the same summer.

I've heard interesting explanations for this phenomenon. A former civil engineer I know from Israel mentioned that many government projects over there are carried out similarly. Unemployment is a big problem there, and the number of skilled engineers/workers/etc. is actually quite high. So the government chooses to be inefficient, acting as sort of a Keynesian investment in the economy and helping employment levels (this doesn't make too much sense if one comes at it from a libertarian perspective, but most governments are not interested in that, so oh well).

Uncharitably, an alternative explanation would be that pork-barrel politics and rampant corruption mean that each project has a different pet contracter that is trying to squeeze out every possible bit of money from the government. *shrugs*

(Parenthetically, I read an interesting related piece about road repair in African countries. The article claimed that UN- or NGO-built roads were intentionally defaced/damaged/not kept up by the populace. The reasoning of the people using the roads was that if the roads fell apart quicker, they could more easily get further foreign aid. And said foreign aid need not go towards building good roads, which they viewed as optional, but to other government interests, whatever they may be. Interesting thought; don't know the validity thereof.)