The article also said The extra cost meant the city wasn ' t able to do as much work as planned . As a result , 14 years in , the city has only replaced about 50 kilometres of the 260 planned . It is implied in the article that inflation for roadbuilding and utility work increasing faster than inflation is the sole cause for Kitchener not having reach it ' s goal 14 years later . But that ' s not true . Basically , they wanted to do just under 9 km of this work per year for 30 years at an initial estimated cost of $ 15 . 6 M per year . Had the costs remained static at the 2002 level , between then an 2015 you ' d expect about 121 km of work to have been completed by now based on the implication above . However , as mentioned not only did costs go up , they went up faster than inflation . To go from $ 1800 m in 2002 to $ 5000 m in 2015 , that is a 7 . 57 % increase each year . A reasonable compromise would have been to progressively reduce the yearly work done in order to cap the yearly expenditure to the original $ 15 . 6 M . Had they done that you would expect 78 km of work to have been completed . Another reasonable compromise would have been to cap the expenditure to original estimate plus yearly inflation , resulting in only 5 % less work done each year rather than 7 . 6 %. If you say that inflation was 2 % per year since then , you ' d still expect 88 km to have been finished by now . What this means is that Kitchener City Council did not budget enough money each year to be able to offer enough tenders to hit even possible compromise goals . Therefore the real problem is not the increased cost but the City putting off needed work . Had they gotten more of the work done earlier at cheaper costs , utility prices would not have to increase as much , or at least increased in a far more manageable rate . I made a spreadsheet to help me figure out those numbers . Let me know if anybody wants to see it and the math therein for my numbers above .