The Cost of Waiting

January 21, 2026 · 6 min read

Have you heard the expression “value engineering”? Odds are you have, especially when it comes to projects we are expected to live with for decades. The idea sounds reasonable, even responsible. Build the infrastructure we need, but simplify its scope wherever possible to reduce costs and “optimize value.”

Except that “value engineering” is often less about value and more about deferring decisions. It becomes a way to design for today’s budget rather than tomorrow’s reality. Capacity is trimmed. Redundancy is removed. Flexibility is postponed. Anything that is not immediately required is quietly reclassified as something that can be “added later.”

That assumption, that we can fix things later without consequence, is where the real costs begin. Once concrete is poured and geometry is fixed, the window for cheap, elegant solutions closes. When demand inevitably arrives, the system does not fail all at once. It strains. And the fixes that follow are rarely simple, cheap, or invisible.

Designing for Today Instead of Tomorrow

Value engineering did not become prevalent by accident. Its rise is the product of decades of policy choices and public opinion that have come to view infrastructure and adjacent projects as wasteful, bloated, and incapable of delivering meaningful outcomes.

As a result, success is no longer measured by long-term performance or resilience, but by the ability to demonstrate immediate cost control. Scope discipline became a virtue, while overbuilding became a liability. Anything that could not be justified within the initial funding envelope was treated as excess rather than preparation. Designing for future demand stopped being seen as prudent planning and started being framed as unnecessary risk.

In this environment, project planning became a hot potato. Politicians sought positive headlines by claiming they had saved money for taxpayers. Project teams focused on producing bids that were economically viable and compliant, but only just robust enough to avoid foreclosing future expansion on paper. Each actor optimized for their own incentives, while the collective purpose of the project slowly eroded.

The result is a familiar pattern. Systems are delivered at the minimum scale required to open. They technically function and meet the specifications, but they do so by baking in constraints that make future growth more expensive, more complex, and more disruptive than it ever needed to be.

Fixing It Later Is Never Neutral

Waiting is often framed as a way to preserve flexibility. In reality, it introduces new costs that compound over time. The most obvious is financial. Construction costs rarely stand still. Materials, labour, and specialized expertise become more expensive with each passing year. A feature deferred at the design stage is almost always more costly to deliver later, even before accounting for the inefficiencies of working within an existing system. In asset management terms, these decisions shift cost out of the capital phase and into operations, maintenance, and future capital interventions, where they are harder to fund, harder to justify, and harder to coordinate.

Less visible, but just as important, are the opportunities lost. Capacity that was not built cannot be used. Connections that were not provided cannot attract riders. Operational efficiencies that depended on scale or redundancy never materialize. The system functions below its potential, often for years or decades.

Ottawa’s Line 2 offers a clear example. Rather than twinning the entire alignment, only select sections were built to support higher capacity, relying instead on longer trains to add throughput while capping frequency at twelve-minute intervals. At the same time, the city’s north south transit corridor is expected to see some of its most ambitious development, driven by proximity to transit and transit oriented development plans. Ridership projections exceeded the original business case within the first year of service.

Instead of addressing capacity holistically during the initial closure, each future increase now requires increasingly complex interventions. Tracks must be twinned. Trenches widened. Tunnels enlarged. What could have been a coherent, system wide design decision becomes a sequence of constrained actions.

Line 2 illustrates the cumulative effect of compromise. Its potential is not absent, but buried beneath layers of fixes, operational constraints, and assumptions that future problems can always be solved later.

This pattern is not unique to Ottawa. Similar tradeoffs have played out in cities across Canada and abroad. Transit lines built with shortened platforms later require costly extensions. Single-track corridors meant to save money cap frequency for decades. Stations designed to minimum code struggle when ridership exceeds expectations. In each case, the rationale is the same: future demand can be addressed later. In practice, it almost never is, at least not cheaply.

Complexity also increases with time. A clean, integrated solution that could have been delivered as part of the original project is replaced by layered interventions. New structures must work around old ones. Temporary measures become permanent. Interfaces multiply. Each addition solves a narrow problem while making the system harder to understand, operate, and adapt.

Waiting also erodes expertise. Project teams disperse. Design intent fades. Decisions that once had clear rationales become difficult to revisit because the people who understood the tradeoffs are no longer involved.

By the time action becomes unavoidable, the conditions that shaped the original assessment have changed. Costs are higher. Options are fewer. The margin for error is smaller. What could have been a deliberate design choice becomes a reactive intervention.

Planning for Real Needs, Not Just Deliverables

This argument is not about a single project or mode. It is about how responsibility is defined in infrastructure planning more broadly.

If waiting carries real costs, then avoiding those costs requires a different definition of responsibility. One that looks beyond the opening day balance sheet.

The first step is acknowledging that infrastructure must be planned for real demand, not just for what fits within a funding envelope or political cycle. Building to a price target often means compromising from the start. Building to a narrowly defined specification, developed in isolation, reinforces that compromise by locking decisions into silos. One practical step would be to require projects to explicitly assess the cost of deferral alongside the cost of delivery, treating “build later” as a decision that carries quantified financial, operational, and service risks, not as a neutral default.

Planning for real needs does not mean building recklessly. It means grounding projects in credible long-term demand, operational requirements, system wide performance, and lifecycle cost. These are well established principles in asset management and infrastructure planning, but they are often sidelined when projects are judged primarily on headline cost.

Overbuilding is often framed as waste. In practice, it is capacity planning.

Building ahead of demand does not simply accommodate growth. It helps shape it. Infrastructure that offers reliable, frequent, and intuitive service creates the conditions for ridership, development, and mode shift.

Infrastructure that is constrained from day one does the opposite. It attempts to manage growth by limiting it.

That distinction matters. One approach treats future demand as a risk to be controlled, while the other treats it as an outcome to be supported.

This also requires expanding how costs are evaluated. Capital budgets capture what it takes to build a project once. They rarely account for the financial, operational, and social costs of waiting. Lost ridership. Missed development. Repeated construction. Operational workarounds. Eroded public trust. Those costs are real, even if they do not appear on a balance sheet.

A more responsible approach would explicitly weigh the cost of deferral against the cost of building it right the first time as part of project approval, scope definition, and funding decisions. Waiting should have to justify itself, rather than being treated as the default.

That shift would not eliminate hard choices. But it would make them explicit, accountable, and honest.