Bob Hellman is CEO of American Infrastructure Partners, a private investment firm focused on U.S. infrastructure. The Gateway Hudson Tunnel project was supposed to be a $13.5 billion fix for aging rail infrastructure under the Hudson River. Instead, it is becoming another government-managed money sink, already exceeding $16 billion with completion pushed years beyond its original target. The failure is as sickening as it is predictable. Hitting taxpayers harder is not the answer to constant budgetary and execution failures. The answer is to bring operational and fiscal discipline to critical infrastructure that only private-sector capital and oversight can. Governments simply cannot deliver major publicly funded infrastructure projects on time and under budget. Expecting that they will, given the sorry state of our existing infrastructure, is definitional insanity. Gateway is hardly alone. Voters approved California’s high-speed rail system in 2008 at a cost of $33 billion, with trains scheduled to run by 2020. Today, the projected cost ranges from $89 billion to $128 billion, with no service expected before 2033. Over $15 billion has already been spent. The private capital that was once assumed to join the project has yet to materialize – which should set off alarm bells by itself. This is how governments build megaprojects — and we’ve seen it play out for decades. Costs rise, timelines slip and accountability disappears. Boston’s Big Dig was originally estimated at $2.56 billion. The final construction cost reached nearly $15 billion — more than $24 billion when debt interest is included. Honolulu’s Skyline rail project began at $5.1 billion and is now more than a decade behind schedule and projected to cost about $10 billion. The data are clear: - A widely cited study of 258 transport projects across 20 countries found that 86% experienced cost overruns. - Rail projects averaged 45%