Costs Per Rider and Willingness to Build
At the Transit Costs Project, we study the costs of urban rail lines per kilometer. This, with our usual controls, is a rough indicator of how efficient a city’s infrastructure construction program is. However, cost-effectiveness is different from efficiency, and is better measured not by just the cost but also the benefits, which are measured by ridership. Thus, cost-effectiveness is best measured by the cost of each project per rider. So what does it mean to compare different cities by their costs per rider, rather than per kilometer?
The answer is, “not much,” at least not as far as efficiency or good decisionmaking. In fact, while some projects persistently have costs per rider that are too high to be cost-effective (for example, it’s endemic to airport extensions), some cities have costs per rider that are too low, such as Berlin. The issue here is that if municipal or state decisionmaking is healthy, it will build cost-effective lines; if a line under discussion has a very high benefit-cost ratio, or equivalently a very low cost per rider, it means it should have been built long ago, and it speaks poorly to the local decisionmaking that it hasn’t been built already, as is unfortunately the case in Berlin.
Cost per rider and cost-effectiveness
As always, let’s start with Second Avenue Subway Phase 1, the project that launched my interest in construction costs and the Transit Costs Project writ large. The projected daily ridership is 202,000; the line came close to it in 2019, reaching about 163,000 (see data here; I’m taking boardings for the three new stations, adding the growth in ridership at Lexington/63rd, and multiplying by two to account for disembarkings), and would have likely reached projection by now but for the pandemic. The cost, in 2023 dollars, was $6.23 billion, or about $31,000 per projected weekday trip.
For another anchoring number, let’s use the Stockholm Metro’s entire construction from the 1940s to the 1970s. This is useful because in addition to costs per rider, there is a published ex post benefit-cost ratio, thanks to the work of Maria Börjesson. The cost of that system, in 2023 PPP dollars, was $3.7 billion, with a ridership of 1,265,900 per workday in 2019, or $2,900/rider, while the benefit-cost ratio is 6 without taking agglomeration into account, or 8.5 with. This does not mean that the value of a rider is only about $24,900; this was the value in the economic situation of postwar Sweden, a country that was substantially poorer than the Sweden of today. In 2023 PPP terms, Sweden’s GDP per capita in 1965, about midway through the opening of the original system, was about $19,400; today, Sweden is 3.5 times richer, and the US is 17% richer than Sweden.
The benefits of urban travel are largely proportional to GDP per capita. The economic benefits of agglomeration are proportional to the value of the economy writ large, and so are the benefits of reduced travel time, which in benefit-cost analyses are usually taken to be proportional to the average hourly wage. Conversely, the ability of a government to spend money on desired outcomes is proportional to its tax base, i.e. the size of its economy. All of this is approximate, but all we’re doing is first-order approximate analysis anyway, and so correcting for GDP per capita is valuable.
As it is, the difference between American and Swedish GDP per capita boils down entirely to working hours. Swedes work shorter hours than Americans, as they, like nearly everyone else in Europe, get much longer vacation time; as of 2022, Sweden’s GDP per hour worked was, by a rounding error, slightly higher than the US’s. However, at the same time, the daily ridership numbers for Sweden are specifically drawn from winter workday ridership, to avoid reporting figures from when ridership is lower during the summer vacation season, and the same is true for daily ridership counts in France. If we give Sweden and France credit by looking at ridership when people aren’t on vacation, we must compare the cost per rider with GDP per capita and not GDP per hour.
The upshot is that countries should be building metros up to a maximum capital cost per rider that’s about as large as their GDP per capita. The $24,900 computation for 1960s’ Sweden is ex post, and usually the ex ante benefit-cost ratio must be at least 1.2 or 1.3 for the project to go ahead due to risk. For light rail the allowable cost should be lower, and for bus projects it should be lower still, due to the higher lifetime operating costs; but for metros and metro-like urban rail projects (such as largely grade-separated light rail, or commuter rail tunnels like Citybanan), this analysis should hold. Second Avenue Subway Phase 1, which opened in a United States with a GDP of $73,300/capita in 2023 prices, is thus very cost-effective; Phase 2, budgeted at something like $70,000/rider in today’s prices, is marginal but makes it (in 2022, US GDP per capita in 2023 prices was $80,300).
Some more costs per rider
Our database of construction costs per km is largely complete, but we don’t have much ridership data. Worse, the costs per rider we do have have some biases. We have better information for the US and Canada than elsewhere, and for Europe than the rest of the non-North American world. Costs are also likeliest to be reported for megaprojects with notable delays or cost overruns and thus an incomplete database will be biased upward; large, international cities have better reporting in English than the rest and this introduces another upward bias in incomplete data (these are typically wealthy and therefore capable of affording a high cost per rider).
With that in mind, here are some (again, incomplete) examples:
- Crossrail cost $24 billion in 2023 PPP terms; ridership in late 2023 was 4.3 million a week, which is usually about 700,000/weekday, said to be above projections, with long-term projections rising to a million/weekday; on current ridership it’s $34,000/rider, and on future projections it’s $24,000.
- Paris Métro Line 14’s original section, opened by 2007, cost $2.44 billion in 2023 PPP terms; ridership in 2019, before more recent extensions and before corona, was 92 million, so around 320,000 per workday, which is $7,600/rider.
- Grand Paris Express was projected in 2021 to cost (in 2023 PPP dollars) around $65 billion, with a ridership projection of 2 million/day from 2022, and 2.3-2.4 million/day from 2012, for around $32,000/rider, or $28,000 if the older ridership projection is used.
- Milan Metro Line 5 cost $2.2 billion in 2023 PPP terms to date, and was said to carry 180,000 daily passengers in 2019, for $12,000/rider.
- Milan Metro Line 4 cost $2.63 billion, and was expected to carry 235,000 riders per day when complete, which would be $11,000/rider; it will be completed this year, but ridership so far is for only the half of the line that has opened so far ans is also still somewhat suffering from corona.
- The U-Bahn extensions in Berlin that are currently in development hell include U8 to Märkisches Viertel projected at 13,160€/rider (around $21,000 in 2023 PPP terms), a U6 extension to the former Tegel Airport projected at 27,200€/rider (around $43,000), and a U7 extension to the current BER airport projected at 23,000€/rider (around $36,000), among others brought up by the new coalition.
Willingness to build and Berlin’s problem
The above numbers should not be taken to mean that Italy and Germany are more cost-effective about metro construction. To the contrary, they indicate that they are leaving value on the table by not building.
Germany has a GDP per capita of $66,000 in PPP terms. The benefit-cost ratios of the U-Bahn extensions in Berlin that are being discussed but not actually brought forward and built are very high, and the U8 extension to Märkisches Viertel is scratching a ratio of 4. It is irresponsible that there isn’t a massive construction plan not just under discussion but in design and soon physical construction. This must include not just those lines but also others to be added until the benefit-cost ratio of the marginal line falls to slightly more than the minimum that deserves funding.
Italy has the same problem. No matter how pessimistic one’s view of the future of the economy of Italy is, the metro lines it is currently building, at least in Milan, are so cost-effective that there have to be more of them. In the 2010s, Italy was in a budget crunch and ended up using public-private partnerships to keep debt off-books, at very high implied interest rate based on the rate of payment to the concessionaire, about 8%. Today, fundamentally, even a stagnant economy with a GDP per capita of $55,000, which may finally overtake its 2007 peak this year, should be building more if the current extensive margin of Milan Metro construction is not even in the teens of thousands of dollars. Perhaps the benefit-cost ratios for Sweden rely not just on Sweden’s GDP per capita of the 1960s but on that of today, after 60 years of growth; but then even absent any of this growth, 55/3.5 > 12.
Paris showcases a healthier situation: the success of M14 endeared the region to driverless metros with longer interstations than the older metro lines but shorter ones than the RER, and with further growth in the region, the state decided to build the 200 km Grand Paris Express to improve circumferential rail service and add more fast radial connections from the suburbs to the city not along the RER. France’s GDP per capita is around $58,000 in PPP dollars; some elements of GPE may be marginal, but the project writ large has a solid benefit-cost-ratio starting with a 2.
Spain is like France in that when it can build, as it could before the Great Recession and as it can now after having recovered, it does. This is the right way to do it: low costs per km should translate to massive subway expansion. If you’re Madrid, you can build lines that would be completely ridiculous anywhere else in terms of land use, like MetroSur, because it’s cheap.
A Paris or Berlin cannot be so profligate as Madrid. Building a line like MetroSur here, which in the Spanish context looks silly but does pass cost-effectiveness muster, would be an economic albatross. But medium-cost cities can still cover most of the built-up area with subway and commuter rail lines; Paris is doing so but Berlin is not.
The problem for Berlin is not quite austerity, which afflicted Southern Europe last decade, producing negative economic growth. In the last coalition, it was the two most left-wing parties, the Greens and Die Linke, which opposed U-Bahn construction. In their view, trams are preferable; they complain about the high construction costs of subways, but don’t meaningfully engage with why they’re still necessary for fast urban transport beyond the range of the handful of inner neighborhoods where people vote for the Greens.
That said, in the current coalition, there’s no real political left. SPD is in it, but under an atypically conservative leader in Franziska Giffey, and the more left-wing faction in the party, including the youth league Jusos, is sidelined. Both parties in the coalition, CDU and SPD, are committed to building those U-Bahn extensions. But then nothing is happening; Giffey is not competent enough to do it, and CDU is too wrapped up in anti-environmental populism to do something that pisses off some environmentalists but makes others happy.
This way, the low costs per rider projected for Berlin U-Bahn expansion are not a testimony to cost-effectiveness. They’re a testimony to political unwillingness to build, for largely petty reasons. It is wasteful to build a subway line with a very high projected cost per rider relative to the country’s wealth, but it is equally wasteful not to build one with a low projected cost per rider, and the latter is what is happening in Berlin, unfortunately.
Pedestrian Observations 
Capital cost per rider equalling GDP per capita seems like an imperfect metric, particularly for developing countries with economic growth. For example, in many places such as São Paulo, metros are financed by states and/or cities that have a much higher GDP per capita than the national government. And other places can expect long-term GDP per capita growth and/or steady long-term ridership growth due to growing metro areas. Many Indian metros that were built that seem to be considered a worthwhile investment have a cost per rider more than India’s GDP per capita, because India’s current GDP per capita is low. It’s probably difficult and highly disputed to predict what the future GDP per capita of a country will be and politicians tend to believe that they will bring more economic growth than what actually happens. On the opposite end, capital cost per rider at GDP per capita might be too high of a metric in locations that are depopulating such as Japan’s smaller metro areas.
Yeah, so to be clear, all of the numbers I have are for mature economies.
In general, you should expect faster economic growth to go both ways: higher growth justifies higher costs in the present because of future impact, but conversely it also means there are other investments competing for funds so the real interest rate should be higher. In 19th-century American history, fast growth (in population but also in GDP per capita) led to higher interest rates than in Europe, and as a result, American railroads were built to lower standards, on the theory that they could be rebuilt later when there was more demand; much of the Northeast Corridor comprises such later lines, including about the southern half of the section in New Jersey (the old line served Princeton proper), the route through Philadelphia, and the route from Baltimore to Washington.
The flip side is that fast growth sometimes depends on the quality of infrastructure, which creates more positive externalities for public transit in a developing country than in one where there are substitutes (i.e. cars).
Real interest rates area are not necessarily higher in developing countries, mainly because people in fast growing economies save a lot more than people in developed countries. The Asian Tigers, as well as China and India, had very high savings rates during their peak growth phase. Also, there aren’t any barriers for someone in a developed country buying Indian or Chinese government bonds, and many people do so. So real borrowing costs should converge. 19th century high interest rates were due to the legal limitations on interstate banking limiting capital flows. That situation is not applicable at all today as anyone can buy developing country government and corporate bonds. In the 19th century the UK and British India has similar rates of returns on railway debentures because they had integrated capital markets. Gregory Clark discusses the reasons for the 19th century American high interest rates for American railroads in his book A Farewell to Alms in chapter 16.
To a first approximation: people produce more savings because the price (the real interest rate) is higher? If the demand curve for capital is just all the (private) investment opportunities, which we can tell has changed shape in the expected direction, then it is mostly unnecessary to posit that the supply curve (“households’ propensity to save”) moved at all.
But the real interest rates aren’t higher. You can compare stock market returns, rents on agricultural land/residences, or interest rates on government bonds after accounting for inflation and default risk and see that this is true. People in economically growing countries often still consume like they are poor so they tend to have higher savings.
Doesn’t focusing on cost per rider instead of per passenger-kilometer make lines with shorter average trip lengths look unfairly good? I’m aware that travel time and externalities scale sub-linearly with distance and that pax-km data is hard to get but it seems unreasonable to compare Crossrail (118 km) with line 14 (14 km) when new Crossrail pax probably travel 7x further.
Isn’t capital cost per rider km better than just per rider? Otherwise you have no way of telling whether the trips you are serving are 2km or 20km long, and since the latter type of journeys are inevitably going to be more expensive to serve, you end up skewing the metric away from longer projects.
E.g. if your decision is to build the whole Utica Av line or only half of it, you might see nearly as many riders in the latter option as in the former, because a lot of people will still end up getting the bus to the truncated terminus and then switching to the subway to get to their final destination. The benefits of doing the whole thing (in terms of travel time savings) thus get obscured.
My quip on this is “passenger-km don’t vote,” but yeah, it’s more complex than this. I prefer passengers to p-km, for the following reasons:
1. Fares tend to be flat or almost flat, while operating costs aren’t, so long metro lines have hidden operating costs.
2. In a city with any capacity problem – even a mild one like Berlin, let alone something like London – crowding past the busiest point matters the most for mode choice, and then the role of long tails like that of Crossrail (as in Kayla’s comment above) is to more efficiently feed the relief.
3. In your example of Utica, I don’t at all think half the line would get all or even a large majority of the ridership of the full line, because there’s still a bus transfer. In Vancouver, we’re seeing this with ridership estimates for the Broadway subway, standing at 170,000 for the first half (the one that’s about to open) and 130,000 for the second half (link). So yeah, the first half is projected to have somewhat higher ridership per km, but that’s more about service to Central Broadway than anything.
The ridership of Flushing-Main St station on the 7 or of Commercial/Broadway in Vancouver would seem to contradict your implication that a bus transfer significantly reduces ridership. This isn’t to say subway extensions don’t generate higher ridership, but there are certainly lots of riders going bus to subway today who would make a subway only trip if the 7 were extended East.
is SkyTrain really expecting 170k daily riders on Broadway, and 300k when complete to UBC? That seems really high, it’s 30k/km to Arbutus, 18.5k/km to UBC, and 24k/km overall. Each station would have to see and average of ~30k boardings.
For comparison the NYC subway has ridership of 16k/km, Skytrain was 6.6k/km pre-Covid, the 99-B carried only 55-60k at peak, and only one Skytrain station currently tops 30k riders per day. Even assuming a huge number of riders at UBC, does Vancouver really believe stations at Alma and Macdonald would see ridership placing them in the top 10 stations today?
East of Flushing, the bus lines scatter. Anybody not along the extension would still be going to Flushing
I believe it is, yeah – the ridership estimates from the early 2010s had the entire line at 300,000/day or so, before cost increases and the failure of the transit funding referendum forced them to cut the line in half.
The subway in New York is like the London Underground in that it has a lot of low-usage tails, while some core sections are overcrowded; in London this is mostly the West London branches, many inherited from secondary lines that were then connected to the Tube, and in New York it’s the Southern Division and the Rockaways, which have a similar history. A system without that history will get higher ridership/km: Stockholm almost matches New York on ridership/km (it was about 12,000 in 2019), and Paris is considerably higher (it’s maybe 25,000).
Obviously the busiest sections of any metro network will be busier than the average, the problem is that those ridership estimates are busier than Skytrain’s busiest segments.
From Waterfront to Commercial/Broadway is 5.73km, comparable to 5.53km for Broadway Ex. Part 1. Those six downtown/near center stations have 4 of the top 5 stations for ridership, and six of the top 12. Combined ridership is ~114k, for ~20k/km. If we continue down the Expo line to Metrotown we have a distance of 12.3km (vs. ~12.5km for the full line to UBC) and ~174k riders, for ~14k/km. In 2019 these figures would be ~23k/17k, still far below the extension projections.
I can’t see the Broadway extension getting 50%-100% better ridership per km than the core of the Expo line, which serves downtown (nothing but high rises), the system’s biggest interchange (Commercial Broadway, which gets a lot of UBC riders via the 99-B), and possibly the largest TOD project on the continent (Metrotown). West of Arbutus it’s all single family more than a block from Broadway. The densest part of Broadway (between Granville and City Hall) already has a station on the Canada Line smack in the middle of it, and ridership isn’t special, only 14th in the system/~11k per day, despite a one seat ride downtown. Skytrain expects this to quadruple by adding a line that doesn’t go downtown?!?! (keep the existing 11k, plus add an average of 30k per station)
UBC is a big ridership driver, but total faculty, staff, and students in Vancouver is only ~71k. Even if every single one of them commuted and took a trip from campus every day, that still leaves an unreasonable 230k riders on the Broadway corridor to meet projections, well exceeding the ridership on the Waterfront-Metrotown stretch at its 2019 peak (~205k) despite much lower density and land use intensity on Broadway. It doesn’t add up.
Conversely passenger-km as a metric will skew things towards long trips. Thus both metrics are imperfect.
As an example our tram system is often considered expensive due to a high cost per passenger-km. But the cost per trip is low and the system almost breaks even for operations. This is an inner city system serving mostly short trips in densest part of the city.
Getting people where the need to go is valuable, not just taking people as far as possible.
Also, cost per rider does not account for borrowing costs. Italian borrowing costs are 4.5% for 30 year bonds while only 2.5% for German 30 year bonds despite having the same Euro currency because the bond market believes Italy is at a risk of defaulting on its debt. So the actual cost will be higher for Italy since it will need to pay a higher interest rate. Italy’s high government debt to GDP means it has high borrowing costs and more limited ability to borrow, which is likely why Italy is hesitant to take on more transit projects.
Yeah, the higher interest rates matter – and in Italy the weak economy raises interest rates because people can easily invest elsewhere in Europe and because there are long-term pension obligations. But at 4.5% interest rates, if your metro frontier involves lines that cost 20% as much as your GDP per capita, you’re still underinvesting.
This is especially true in the case of Italy, I think, due to the structure of its economy. The sort of large firms with city center offices that rely on metro ridership are as efficient as their counterparts in Northern Europe: the value added per employee in a large firm is 50% higher than the Italian average (link, PDF-p. 69), which accounts for the gap between Italian labor productivity and French and Northern European labor productivity. The Italian economy is overall less productive because a much larger share of Italian workers work for inefficient micro-scale firms, usually run by relatives, than in Northern Europe, but those family-scale firms don’t usually produce much public transit ridership, so in a sense, the lower productivity of the Italian economy is already accounted for in ridership estimates.
Where does Capital cost per rider equalling GDP per capita come from? Is there any reasoning behind this, or does it just seem like a good number?
I think it’s a coincidence between the long-term social rate of return and the marginal impact of rapid transit on fully-laden transportation costs.
It does seem like a very big assumption to make with rather limited data. Projects can vary immensely in how much time per user they save compared to alternatives. That being said I’m unhappy with our travel time savings focused analysis. BCR for our projects seems to always be below 1 even though our construction costs are moderate and costs per rider are not that high.
Also: I assume one should only count new passengers? What about passengers abstracted from other forms on public transport? As subway ridership is used in the original calculations, I assume “new subway riders”.
For example most of the ridership for the Helsinki/Espoo west metro phase 2 are people who previously took feeder buses to the previous terminus, but can now walk to a metro station or take a shorter feeder trip. Metro ridership did not increase that much. This will change over time with development around the new stations though.
Yeah, the combination of high long-term BCRs for past projects and low BCRs for present ones with comparable cost per rider/GDP per capita figures is puzzling, and I think it just boils down to hidden assumptions. I think it comes from the same place as estimates of emissions reductions from new urban rail lines that are far lower than the difference between greenhouse gas emissions in transit-rich cities and other places in the same country (like Berlin vs. the rest of Germany). The long-term benefits are hard to measure in advance, which is why those BCRs are so dependent on assumptions.
Indeed! I’ve been quoting your Berlin U-Bahn example quite a bit. The systemic long term effect are hard to quantify.
Tangentially: we are seeing pushback to demolishing buildings with one justification being high CO2 emissions of new build. I believe that this can diminish the systemic climate benefits of projects, if they are blocked due to very narrow concerns.
Wait, doesn’t Finland build out of mass timber these days?
But anyway, even normal concrete doesn’t have very high embodied carbon. This paper says mid-rise concrete apartment buildings average 1.5 t/m^2 (smaller buildings, larger than missing middle but smaller than mid-rise, are 2-2.5), and Wikipedia says concrete production emits 180 kg/t, split fairly evenly between the chemical process and burning fuel. So a 100 m^2 apartment is 100*1.5*0.18 = 27 t-CO2; if it lasts 50 years then it’s 0.54 t/year, and probably around 0.2 t/capita/year. It’s pretty low, and by the standards of how much is saved from living at high density, it’s worth it. And that’s without taking lower-cement options like infra-lightweight concrete into account, or burning less fuel and more renewables to produce concrete.
@Icpikan it is a common problem for people being unable to see anything beyond 2 months from now. In most cases there is more CO2 in a new building than keeping the old for a few years, but modern standards are so much better than old ones that in just a few years you have more than made up the difference. We rarely tear down a building that is less than 20 years old, so there is plenty of reason to assume new standards are better than whatever the old building was. In most cases you cannot retrofit new standards to old buildings, though we can make a big difference.
It is a safe bet that the complaint is really a form of BANANA (build absolutely nothing anywhere) or NIMBY but they cannot admit their real issue so they come up with something that sounds like it isn’t. They probably don’t even care about CO2 except it is something to use to defend this NIMBY position.
A lot of this is NIMBY of course, but there is also a lot of sudden environmental awakening among architects now. Arguments are made that (almost) nothing should be demolished ever. Plenty of nostalgia in this of course. And not too much clear thinking.
Wooden multi storey buildings are quite rare in Finland. Fire regulations are very strict and prefabricated concrete is very efficient due to coordinated industry investments made back in the 60’s and 70’s. Wood is only common in single family and terraced houses and certainly not the only material for these either.
Should this use metro area gdp per capita (rather than nationwide)? e.g. NYC metro area gdp per capita is something like 30% higher than the general US figure (and bay area cities are often even higher), making the 2nd avenue subway look better.
No. Metro area GDP per capita is fake news, because it counts corporate HQs in the numerator but not the denominator; commuter income skews the results too even if you think you got the entire metro area. It’s possible to correct things for area income, but that ends up leading to investing in the rich before investing in the poor within the same country (=tax and spending union).
Edit: separately, if you think you should correct for area incomes then you should adjust for the fact that Stockholm is a lot richer than the rest of Sweden.
Would you argue the same for GDPs of small nations with open borders and a lot of cross border commuting like Luxembourg? (or in more extreme cases Liechtenstein, Monaco or Andorra)
Yeah, it makes no sense for Alon to say that you can evaluate cost using a different GDP per capita for Spain vs France (or Brussels vs Amsterdam) but Atlanta, Denver, and Boston all need to use the same GDP. Herbert’s comment about counties as small as/smaller than a metro area is exactly on point. Also, claiming that corporate HQs are in the numerator not the denominator, or that commuter income skews results, doesn’t seem to add up because metro areas by definition are a commuter shed. The income from a corporate HQ or CBD commuters should be balanced by all of the residents of the suburbs those workers live in. Granted not all metro areas perfectly capture their commuter shed (particularly where those sheds overlap between two metros) but then go right back to Herbert’s point about small countries and cross border commuter flows (like Copenhagen-Malmo, or lots of places in Switzerland-Germany).
Metro areas are never a complete commuter shed, is the issue.
And the issue with corporate HQs is separate from that of commuters – the profits of those corporations count in GDP, even if management doesn’t live there. This is how Ireland has such a high GDP per capita without having very high per capita income.
Nuremberg U-Bahn https://blog.vag.de/archiv/fahrgastrekord-fuer-u-bahn/ report a new record of ridership for 2023 at 111 million – notably that is already higher than the 2019 level by some 1.2 million. By simple math we get 111,000,000/365=304110 (rounded to the next full human) of daily ridership
There are surprisingly good nominal construction costs available https://www.nuernberg.de/internet/u_bahnbau/u_bahn_hefte.html here (click thru the various PDFs). However, they are a bit complicated by the fact that construction on the first section of U1 started in 1967 and the last section of U1 opened only in 2007 (and in Fürth, to boot). For U2 they give a start of construction in 1978 (which may refer to construction in Plärrer station which was already built for two lines – with preparations for a third – back when it opened for U1). Anyway, on the northern branch, they give a construction start in 1986 and the last station opened in 1999. The nominal cost of U2 was 960 million DM all told ( https://www.nuernberg.de/imperia/md/u_bahnbau/dokumente/u_bahn/heft15.pdf ).
U3 broke ground in 2001 (of course it uses parts of the RoW of U2, but that had to be upgraded for AGT/ATO). They give 303 million nominal Euros (the Euro was introduced for accounting in 1999 and as physical cash in 2002) for the stuff built up to 2020 https://www.nuernberg.de/imperia/md/u_bahnbau/dokumente/heft19.pdf plus a further 56 million Euros for for AGT/ATO (including 25 million Euros for AGT/ATO on the shared U2/U3 trunk)
Now getting from the nominal figures to inflation adjusted ones is a bit tricky and the 2023 ridership numbers are not differentiated by line (it is also a bit unclear whether they include the 7 out of 49 stations that are in Fürth – with “Stadtgrenze” of course being right on the border) but 2017 numbers *are* and they give (U3 was one station shorter back then) 217k for U1, 123k for U2 and 70k for U3 – which sums up to a higher number than 304k which may or may not be due to a difference of weekday vs average per all day ridership.
But anyway, long story short, I hope this is enough data (and sources) to calculate at least something…
If you take the U3 as it existed in 2017 you’ll get a cost of 290 million nominal Euros all told. If you take the 70k ridership for the calculation, that’s roughly 4,140 €/rider. If you inflate 290 million Euros from 2001 to 2024, you get 448.25 million € or 6,403€ per rider
If you take 960 million nominal DM and deflate from 1999 you get to 774.32 million € in 2024 prices. ( per this https://www.finanzen-rechner.net/inflationsrechner.php )if you deflate from 1984 (opening of the first stretch) you get 1,074.13 million €. If you assume the 123k ridership, that’s 6,295€ per rider (with the 1999-2024 inflation) or 8,733€ per rider (with the 1984-2024 inflation)
Unfortunately the result you get is extremely dependent on the inflation assumptions you make and while the old adage that investments grow with age but money shrinks with inflation holds true (yet another argument to build as soon as you possibly can), there is not really a statement that can be made which line was more cost efficient overall. I’m actually surprised that U3 holds up as good as it does, given that https://www.vgn.de/verbindungen/?to=de%3A09564%3A654&td=de%3A09564%3A275 the bus is faster from its current endpoint in the north to its 2008-2020 endpoint in the south due to the extremely c-shaped alignment…
Due to the aforementioned issues with inflation calculations, I will not even attempt to calculate U1 whose construction spanned 40 years (tho ridership west of Fürth Hauptbahnhof isn’t all that huge and that station opened already in 1985.
Okay, let me take a stab at U1.
Due to it mostly taking long in its section in Fürth (due almost entirely to politics and the very reasonable question “Why does a city of ~100k build a subway that mostly serves to reach its hated neighbor faster?”) and not the section in Nuremberg – where construction looked like https://www.nordbayern.de/region/nuernberg/bewegung-im-untergrund-40-jahre-u-bahn-in-nurnberg-1.1898426 this in parts, we can try and deflate by parts.
Langwasser-Stadtgrenze https://www.nuernberg.de/imperia/md/u_bahnbau/dokumente/u_bahn/heft15.pdf broke ground in 1967 and opened in 1972-1982 the nominal cost was 562 million DM. Interestingly it is also the section with the biggest variety of construction techniques – at grade, in a trench, elevated (along the traffic sewer https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%BCrther_Stra%C3%9Fe ), cut and cover, mined tunnels – and all of that partially in all but empty fields (the southeastern part cuts thru the former Nazi Party Rallying Grounds or rather the campsite they used to store the people) and in the core of one of Germany’s most densely populated cities with a history of over 900 years (1050 CE is the first mention of “nuorenberc” in a document – some settlement activity may have happened as early as 800 CE near current central Nuremberg). The geology varies from sandstone to sand, which makes tunneling varying degrees of difficult or easy – groundwater was often just dumped into adjacent rivers instead of freezing it, but still when it was high enough, it caused issues.
Anyway, lets deflate with base year 1967 (a very conservative assumption, given that the first six stations were among the easiest to build and they did not “waste” any money on aesthetics here: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/U-Bahnhof_Gemeinschaftshaus#/media/Datei:U-Bahnhof_Gemeinschaftshaus1.jpg ) we get 1,298.01 million €
Now. Let’s look at Fürth… The source gives 291 million nominal DM for Stadtgrenze-Stadthalle (what was open by 1998). For the then still planned or in construction part Stadthalle-Hardhöhe (notably not difficult to build or constrained by geography – the river crossing is just before Stadthalle station) the source gives 210 million nominal DM. https://www.nuernberg.de/imperia/md/u_bahnbau/dokumente/heft19.pdf This source gives 247 nominal Euro (which is a bit difficult, given that almost all of the line was paid for in DM, not Euro) for the whole line. If we multiply 247 by 1.95583 (the DM/€ conversion rate for nominal terms) we get 483 million DM. 291+210=501. Which would indicate them actually ending up cheaper than estimated… (They did take three years longer, tho – Hardhöhe opened in 2007, not 2004)
Let’s inflate then… Stadtgrenze-Stadthalle started construction in 1979 so let’s use that as our base year, so we get a 2024 price of 413.24 million €. Let’s say Stadthalle-Hardhöhe was 192 million DM / 98 million € nominal and let’s inflate from 2000, so we get…. 153.51 million €.
So let’s sum that all up… 1,298.01 million € + 413.24 million € + 153.51 million € gives us a grand total of 1864.76 million €. With the ridership of 217 k we get 8,755€ per rider.
Now lets do the sum total of all lines as they currently exist: 1864.76 million € for U1. 1074.13 million € for U2 (with 1984 as an inflation base year, quibble if you want). 448.25 million € for U3 as of 2017 plus a further 69 million nominal € (lets take base year 2014) 86.49 million €. Plus a further 12 million € for the AGT/ATO of U2. It was opened in 2008, but as U3 broke ground in 2001, let’s take 2001 as a base year… So we get 18.55 million €.
So the sum then is 1864.76+1074.13+448.25+86.49+18.55= 3492.18 So all told from 1967 to 2020 with the decisions about inflation base year usually on the conservative side (but again, U2 is probably the most arguable case) we have a sum total of 3,492.18 million € for a network of 49 stations and 38.2 km of track (of which some 2.3 km are single track, the rest being double track). That is 71.2 million € per station, 91.4 million € per km and – if we use the 111 million per year or 304,110 riders per day figure for 2023 – 11,483€ per rider.
All in all, surprisingly good value for money compared with what Alon mentions above, especially considering that Nuremberg is one of the smallest cities in Germany (by number of inhabitants) to have a “fully fledged” subway…
Isn’t a daily rider arguably only half a person?
Because if we take the “classic” trip (whether that be commuting, leisure, commerce or “other”) it would be there and back again on the same day, right? Or am I having a Denkfehler in there somewhere?
in UK speak a trip is a one way journey.
Amtrak example. Restoring passenger service from New Orleans to Mobile, Alabama.
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Amtrak won a $178 million Federal Railroad Administration CRISI grant that will pay for track improvements.
.After five years, Amtrak projects the Gulf Coast service would carry 72,200 people, or 49 per train. Based on Amtrak’s own figures, Gulf Coast service would lose as much as $373 per passenger.
Yeah, Amtrak is special in many ways.