Avalon Place Highway 7/8 Multi-Use Trail Crossing

[plam]

My understanding is that the 'consultancy model' so common in North America is a big part of the issue - governments have gradually let in-house expertise go away to the private sector, and thus for anything deeply technical they must hire that expertise at a premium.

If instead, say, the provincial government kept a large team of civil servants with the relevant knowhow in-house that cities, regions, or other agencies could call upon, that could bring broader savings overall (and help establish standards provincewide). This expertise could extend to not just designers and engineers, but actual builders and contractors, who could lean on those provincial standards to bulk purchase and mass produce standard infrastructure elements.

But that system has a lot of up-front cost, and our current brand of politics frowns on such long-term thinking. Alas.

I read something about this in industry too. From dan hon's newsletter and developing capacity---in this case, for software development:

"Some organizations do. They also take the opportunity to outsource all software development. You can then lay off all your software development capacity. It saves money, after all. Why not leave the software making to the people who concentrate on that?

But that’s not what it looks like Vox did. What Vox did was start working on the next thing, the next bet for what would make them distinctive. And that’s this Communities product."

I kind of think it's what MBAs say to do but it's not actually good. There should really be more in-house expertise for a bunch of things.