By: Ethan Rogers
The real bottleneck isn’t permitting. It’s what nobody wants to admit about how projects actually fail.
There is a moment on many large infrastructure projects when the optimism quietly drains out of the room.
It doesn’t happen during the announcement. Or the environmental review. Or the public consultation phase, where everyone nods and says the right things.
It happens later. Much later. Usually, when a machine stops moving.
A foreman notices something isn’t right. A bucket comes up wrong. A locator mark doesn’t line up with what’s on the drawing. Phones come out. The job goes quiet. Someone says, “That shouldn’t be there.”
From that moment on, the schedule is no longer real.
What follows is rarely dramatic enough to make the news. There’s no explosion. No viral video. Just a slow, expensive unraveling: work stoppages, emergency meetings, revised drawings, change orders, finger-pointing, and a calendar that quietly slips a week at a time.
By the time the project gets back on track, if it does, the cost has already been absorbed. Not always by the same party. Not always transparently. Almost never early enough to avoid.
To the public, this looks like the price of complexity. To policymakers, it’s usually blamed on regulation. To people who actually build things, it’s something else entirely.
“It’s not that people don’t care,” says Gord Reynolds, a veteran infrastructure advisor who has spent decades working inside utilities, government programs, and major capital projects. “It’s that we keep discovering reality too late, and then acting surprised by it.”
Reynolds has seen this pattern repeat often enough that he no longer treats it as bad luck.
“It’s systemic,” he says. “And it’s optional.”
The Story We Keep Telling Ourselves
Ask almost anyone why infrastructure projects take longer and cost more than expected, and you’ll hear a familiar explanation.
Permits take too long. Environmental reviews drag on. Government is slow. Communities object. The rules are too rigid.
That story is convenient. It’s also incomplete.
A large and growing share of the projects that matter most to communities—local energy resilience, distribution upgrades, microgrids, broadband builds, hospital backup power, utility-funded hardening—don’t trigger federal environmental review at all.
They’re state-regulated. Utility-funded. Municipally permitted. Or privately financed behind the meter. And yet they still stall.
They stall in interconnection queues. They stall in tariff interpretations. They stall in municipal permitting offices, trying to reconcile conflicting utility records. They stall when underground conditions turn out to be different from what everyone assumed.
“The problem isn’t that environmental review doesn’t matter,” Reynolds says. “It’s that we’ve convinced ourselves it’s the main bottleneck even when the evidence says otherwise.”
What actually stops many projects is far less visible and far more expensive.
Building Blind, By Design
The United States has one of the most complex underground utility networks in the world. Natural gas, water, sewer, power, fiber, installed over decades by different owners, under different standards, using different recordkeeping practices.
Some of that information exists digitally. Some of it lives in scanned drawings. Some of it exists only in the memories of people who retired years ago.
In theory, all of it is “known.” In practice, much of it is not.
So projects do what humans always do when the facts are incomplete: they push uncertainty forward.
Design advances based on records that may or may not be accurate. Schedules assume best-case conditions. Contracts allocate “unknowns” to broad clauses that look harmless until they’re invoked.
And then excavation begins.
“You can’t think clearly in chaos,” Reynolds says. “Clean inputs create clean outcomes. But we keep feeding projects dirty information and then managing the consequences instead of fixing the cause.”
The industry has language for this because it happens so often: unforeseen conditions, utility conflicts, relocations, rework.
What it doesn’t have, at least not consistently, is a system that forces those conflicts to surface early, when they’re still cheap.
The Part That Makes People Uncomfortable
Here’s where the conversation usually gets awkward.
While late discovery is disastrous for schedules and public trust, it is not universally harmful to business.
Surveyors resurvey. Engineers redesign. Contractors issue change orders. Schedulers rebaseline. Lawyers argue about damages. Claims consultants document the failure in meticulous detail. Insurers reprice the risk.
None of this requires bad actors. No conspiracy is needed.
It only requires a system where prevention is underpaid and remediation is billable.
“Doing things twice unnecessarily is a big business,” Reynolds says. “And we’ve normalized it to the point where people confuse waste with complexity.”
For decades, that waste was absorbed. Projects still moved forward. Budgets flexed. Time stretched. The system survived. But the context has changed.
Skilled trades are constrained. Supply chains are brittle. Insurance markets are tightening. Private capital is smarter and more selective.
“We don’t have the capacity to be this wasteful anymore,” Reynolds says. “Every unnecessary redesign steals resources from housing, hospitals, and resilience projects that communities actually need.” Late discovery isn’t just inefficient now. It’s destabilizing.
Why “Better Coordination” Keeps Failing
After almost every delayed project, the official takeaway sounds the same: we need better coordination. More meetings. More working groups. More memoranda of understanding.
Reynolds calls this the coordination illusion, the belief that effort can compensate for a system that withholds the information people need to make good decisions.
Coordination without shared ground truth is just synchronized guessing. And worse, it diffuses responsibility.
“If you can’t point to the person responsible when something goes wrong,” Reynolds says, “then no one was ever really responsible.”
That’s not a cultural failure. It’s a governance failure.
The rules allow uncertainty to drift forward. They allow responsibility to remain vague. And they allow risk to be transferred late, when it’s most expensive and most adversarial.
The Irony: The Standards Already Exist
What makes this harder to ignore is that the industry already knows how to do better.
There are mature standards for investigating and documenting underground utilities during project development. There are established methods for grading the quality of utility information. There is decades of evidence showing that earlier investigation reduces claims, delays, and disputes.
And yet most projects still rely on records that everyone quietly knows are incomplete.
Why? Because standards without mandates are optional. Optional standards lose to short-term budget pressure. And the benefits of prevention are often invisible, until they’re absent.
The project that spends money early to reduce uncertainty often looks expensive. The project that defers reality looks efficient, right up until it isn’t.
Other Countries Stopped Pretending This Was Normal
The most damning thing about America’s underground data problem is that it isn’t unsolved. It’s just unaddressed.
The United Kingdom faced the same pattern, frequent strikes, delays, escalating costs, and chose to treat underground information as national infrastructure.
It built a centralized, standardized underground asset register. It mandated participation. It tied the system to real economic outcomes.
The result wasn’t faster. There were fewer surprises.
Australia and New Zealand followed similar paths, modernizing how underground assets are recorded, shared, and governed.
Canada accelerated broadband deployment not by weakening environmental oversight, but by showing providers what was already in the ground before routes were finalized.
“They didn’t debate philosophy,” Reynolds says. “They fixed the information.”
The American Workaround: Call Before You Dig
In the United States, the primary tool for managing underground risk remains the 811 locate system. It matters. It saves lives. But it is reactive by design.
It tells you what’s there when you’re about to dig, not when you’re deciding where and how to build.
“There’s no centralized registry. No standardized formats. No planning-level visibility,” Reynolds says. “It’s a safety system, not a delivery system.”
Some states are experimenting with improvements. Others mandate electronic locatability for new installations. Useful steps, but incomplete ones.
They improve the future while leaving the legacy network, the one causing most conflicts, largely untouched.
Risk Doesn’t Disappear. It Just Shows Up Later.
Most infrastructure pain isn’t caused by mistakes. It’s caused by predictable conflict between misaligned stakeholders. Owners want cost certainty. Contractors want risk clarity. Utilities want safety and minimal liability. Municipalities want compliance. Financiers want bankability.
If you don’t align those interests early, using shared, credible data, the project doesn’t become less risky. It becomes risk-delayed. And delayed risk is always more expensive.
“Digital twins aren’t about agreement,” Reynolds says. “They’re about dialogue. You don’t eliminate conflict by ignoring reality.”
That’s the core misunderstanding. Data sharing isn’t about harmony. It’s about early truth-telling.
This Is What A Real Fix Looks Like
The solution is not another coordination committee. It’s rules.
If you take public infrastructure money, you should be required to:
- maintain digital underground asset records, including legacy modernization plans
- share them securely in standardized geospatial formats
- participate in a registry that supports planning, not just emergency locates
- apply disciplined utility investigation during project development
- define authority and risk allocation before construction begins
That’s it. No buzzwords. No transformation theatre. Just discipline.
“Infrastructure digitalization isn’t optional,” Reynolds says. “It’s what happens when leaders stop waiting for perfect information and start using the tools already in front of them.”
Digital tools don’t replace judgment. They remove excuses.
They surface conflicts earlier. They make responsibility clearer. They make it harder to hide behind ambiguity.
Capital Already Understands This, Even If Policy Hasn’t Caught Up
Private capital doesn’t fear regulation. It fears uncertainty, and it can’t price.
Underground uncertainty is uniquely toxic because it shows up everywhere: schedules, claims, insurance, politics.
Projects with visible, managed risk get financed. Projects with hidden, drifting risk get repriced or avoided.
That’s not ideology. It’s math. “Don’t admire the problem,” Reynolds says. “Solve it.”
The Quiet Conclusion
There is no cavalry coming. No secret room of smarter people. No magical reform that fixes everything without changing incentives.
Everyone involved in infrastructure delivery is working with imperfect information. The difference is whether leaders choose to make that uncertainty visible early or continue paying for it later.
Digital registries. Shared standards. Clear authority. Early risk allocation.
Those aren’t tech upgrades. They’re governance upgrades.
And until we treat them that way, America will keep doing what it has quietly perfected:
Paying twice to build the same infrastructure.
About Gord Reynolds:
Photo Courtesy: Gord Reynolds
Gord Reynolds is the founder of Battersea Advisory, a Toronto, Canada-based infrastructure consulting firm, and a former utility executive. He architected the government’s digital twin strategy and now advises governments and utilities on critical infrastructure modernization, broadband deployment, and energy systems transformation.
