Private Investors Can Build Bridges

Can private investors build public infrastructure more efficiently than governments can? In this Wall Street Journal opinion piece, Bob Hellman, CEO of American Infrastructure Partners, makes the case that they can, and that the evidence sits in the budgets and timelines of government-led megaprojects.

His central example is the Gordie Howe International Bridge linking Detroit and Windsor, a project launched with a budget of roughly $4.4 billion that has since run about $2 billion over. For Hellman, that overrun is not an anomaly but a symptom of how public infrastructure is typically financed and delivered. Agencies that build and operate assets are largely insulated from the financial consequences when costs balloon or deadlines slip. Private investors who finance, own, and operate infrastructure over decades, by contrast, carry a direct and lasting stake in controlling costs and hitting schedules, because overruns come out of their own returns.

Hellman argues that this alignment of incentives, not ideology, is what makes private capital and public-private partnerships a more reliable path to building bridges and other infrastructure on time and within budget. He frames the argument not as government stepping aside, but as inviting market discipline into a delivery model that has too often lacked it.