Managing large-scale transportation infrastructure projects is difficult due to frequent misinformation about the costs which results in large cost overruns that often threaten the overall project viability. This paper investigates the explanations for cost overruns that are given in the...

Managing large-scale transportation infrastructure projects is difficult due to frequent misinformation about the costs and benefits, which results in large cost overruns and benefit shortfalls that often threaten the project viability. This paper explores the explanations for cost overruns that...

The successful delivery of major infrastructure projects is increasingly vital to the global economy, with an estimated $22 trillion in projected investments to be spent in emerging economies alone (The Economist, June 7, 2008). Projected benefits include employment, the purchase of domestic...

This article asks how planning scholarship may effectively gain impact in planning practice through media exposure. In liberal democracies, the public sphere is dominated by mass media. Therefore, working with such media is a prerequisite for effective public impact of planning research. Using...

This paper examines three independent explanatory variables and their relation with cost overrun in order to decide whether this is different for Dutch infrastructure projects compared to worldwide findings. The three independent variables are project type (road, rail, and fixed link projects),...

During World War I, the US Congress made it unlawful to speak against the war. The executive prosecuted many for doing so and when tried at the Supreme Court it upheld the sentences. During the Iraq War it was not a crime to speak against the war, but it was almost impossible to be heard if you...

This paper focuses on problems in megaproject policy and planning and their causes and possible cures. After considerations of methodology, the paper first identifies as a main problem in megaproject development pervasive misinformation about the costs, benefits, and risks involved. A...

This paper explores how theories of the planning fallacy and the outside view may be used to conduct quality control and due diligence in project management. First, a much-neglected issue in project management is identified, namely that the front-end estimates of costs and benefits – used in...

The term ‘phronetic social science’ was coined in Making Social Science Matter (Flyvbjerg 2001). However, as pointed out in that volume and by Schram (2006), phronetic social science existed well before this particular articulation of the concept, but it was just not organized, recognized or...

There is ferment in the social sciences. After years of sustained effort to build a science of society modelled on the natural sciences, that project, long treated with suspicion by some, is now openly being rethought. A critical intervention in this period of reflection was Making Social...