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Decade after decade, New York’s elected officials have deliberately raised false expectations about their ability to build a Second Avenue subway line. As a result, the city and state have wasted resources, eliminated critical transit infrastructure, and nearly ruined the nation’s most important transit system.

By integrating literature on transportation planning, megaprojects, and public choice theory, this article identifies the following eight factors that can cause delays in planning transportation megaprojects in the United States: impacts to neighborhoods and the environment, laws and regulations relating to the environment and planning, insufficient funding, changes in scope and design of a project, government bureaucracies and conflict between agencies, overly optimistic expectations, uncertainty involved in identifying the best alternative, and the absence of an effective public sector champion.