Most observers assume America has simply become slower at building things, but Brian Potter challenges this narrative with a dataset that suggests the problem isn't a universal decline in efficiency. Instead, he argues that our perception of delay is skewed by how we define "planning" and what types of projects we are actually attempting to build today.
The Definition Trap
Potter begins by dismantling the popular comparison between modern delays and historical speed records like the Empire State Building or the Golden Gate Bridge. He writes, "when doing these sorts of comparisons, it’s important to compare like with like: specifically, we shouldn’t measure the time spent planning a project (which would include doing the environmental studies and securing the permits) against the time spent actually building it." This distinction is crucial because the Golden Gate Bridge, for instance, took four years to construct but twelve years to plan. By conflating these phases, we create a false impression that modern construction crews are inefficient when they may simply be inheriting projects with longer bureaucratic lead times.
To test this, Potter analyzed 67 major bridges built since the early 20th century, carefully defining "planning begins" as the moment an official organization proposed the project. He acknowledges the difficulty in this methodology: "Most bridges aren’t the Golden Gate Bridge, with lots of publicly available sources chronicling their design and construction." The data reveals a complex picture where planning times actually fell from over 12 years in the early 1900s to just 6 years by the 1970s, before rising again. Critics might note that historical records are often incomplete, meaning Potter's dataset could be missing the truly chaotic early projects, but his effort to standardize definitions provides a much-needed correction to anecdotal claims.
"Planning timelines for bridge construction in the US have not gotten obviously worse over the past several decades..."
The Urgency of Replacement
The most striking insight Potter offers is that the nature of modern infrastructure projects has fundamentally shifted. He observes, "One notable thing about recent bridge construction is that a very large fraction of modern bridges are replacements for existing bridges." Of the 17 bridges completed after 2000 in his sample, 14 were replacements rather than new crossings. This includes critical structures like Florida’s Pensacola Bay Bridge, which was built to replace an aging span.
Potter argues that this shift changes the political calculus entirely. He suggests, "people will react more viscerally and negatively to a major traffic route being removed than they will for construction of a nonexistent bridge getting delayed." When a bridge collapses or is at imminent risk of failure, the sense of urgency cuts through bureaucratic inertia. We see this in the rapid rebuilding of collapsed overpasses in Atlanta and Los Angeles, which were reconstructed in weeks rather than years. The long timeline for the Francis Scott Key Bridge replacement in Baltimore stands out as an outlier precisely because it defies this usual pattern of emergency response.
This framing is powerful because it moves the conversation away from blaming "red tape" and toward understanding how crisis drives speed. However, relying on disaster to create urgency is a dangerous strategy; it implies we must wait for infrastructure to fail before we act.
The Disconnect Between Planning and Building
Perhaps the most counterintuitive finding in Potter's analysis is that there is no clear correlation between how long a project takes to plan and how long it takes to build. He notes, "Bridges that take a long time to plan might get built exceptionally quickly, and vice versa." This decoupling suggests that the two phases are governed by entirely different dynamics. A project can languish in planning for decades due to political disagreement or environmental review, yet once those hurdles are cleared, construction can proceed with remarkable speed.
Potter illustrates this with the Bear Mountain Bridge in New York, which took 54 years to plan before finally being constructed. The delay wasn't a failure of engineering but a long struggle over funding and design. Similarly, the Fremont Bridge in Portland saw planning stretch back to 1927, with proposals from Robert Moses in the 1940s, yet construction didn't begin until 1969. These examples show that "planning" is often a proxy for political consensus building, not technical preparation.
Bottom Line
Potter's strongest contribution is reframing the infrastructure debate: the bottleneck isn't necessarily modern inefficiency, but rather a lack of sustained urgency absent from non-crisis projects. The biggest vulnerability in his argument is that while replacement bridges move faster due to public pressure, new capacity—which is often what we actually need—remains mired in decades-long planning cycles. The path forward likely requires institutionalizing the sense of urgency seen in emergency rebuilds for routine infrastructure upgrades.
"Perhaps the trick to making US infrastructure construction proceed more quickly is figuring out how to instill this culture of urgency in the agencies responsible for building it rather than relying on imminent infrastructure failure to create it."