Quick Note: What the Hell is Going on in San Jose?
The BART to San Jose extension always had problems, but somehow things are getting worse. A month and a half ago, it was revealed that the projected cost of the 9.6-kilometer line had risen to $12.2 billion. Every problem that we seemed to identify in our reports about construction costs in New York and Boston appears here as far as I can tell, with the exception of labor, which at least a few years ago showed overstaffing in the Northeastern United States but not elsewhere. In particular, the station and tunnel design maximizes costs – the first link cites Adam Buchbinder on the excessive size of the digs. Unfortunately, the response by the Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) to a question just now about the station shows that not only are the stations insanely expensive, but also not even convenient for passengers (Twitter link, Nitter link).
Cost breakdown
The March 2024 agenda (link, PDF-pp. 488-489) breaks down the costs. The hard costs total $7 billion; the systems : civils ratio is 1:3.5, which is not bad. But the overall hard costs are still extreme. Then on top of them there are soft costs totaling $2.78 billion, or 40% on top of the hard costs. The same percentage for Second Avenue Subway was 21%, and the norm for third-party consultants for the Continental European projects for which we have data (in Italy, Spain, Turkey, and France) is to charge 5-10%. Soft costs should not be this high; if they are, something is deeply wrong with how the agency uses consultants.
Large-diameter tunnel boring machines
The BART to San Jose project has long had two distinct options for tunnels and station: twin bores, and single bore. The twin bore option is conventional construction of two bored tunnels, one for each track, and then stations to be built as dedicated civil construction projects outside the tunnel; this is how most subways are built today. The single bore option is a large-diameter tunnel boring machine (TBM), with the bore large enough to have not just two tracks side by side, but also platforms within the bore, eliminating the need for mined station caverns or for extensive cut-and-cover station digs. Both options cleared environmental reviews; VTA selected the single bore option, which has been controversial.
I’ve written positively about large-diameter TBMs before, and I don’t think I’ve written a full post walking this back. I’ve written about how large-diameter TBMs are inappropriate for San Jose, but the truth is that the method is not treated as a success elsewhere in urban rail, either. This is controversial, and serious engineers still think it works and point to successes in intercity rail, but in urban rail, the problems with building settlement are too serious. The main example of a large-diameter TBM is Barcelona L9/10, which uses the method to avoid having to open up streets under multiple older metro tunnels in Barcelona; it also has high construction costs by Spanish standards (and low costs by non-Spanish ones). In Italy, whose construction costs are also fairly low if not as low as in Madrid, engineers considered using large-diameter TBMs for the sensitive parts of Rome Metro Line C but then rejected that solution as too risky, going for conventional high-cost mined stations instead.
Regardless of the wisdom of doing this in Southern Europe, in San Jose it is stupid. There are wide streets to dig up for cut-and-cover stations. Then, the implementation is bad – the station entryways are too big, whereas Barcelona’s are small elevator banks, and the tunnel bore is wide enough for a platform and two tracks on the same level whereas Barcelona has a narrower bore with stacked platforms.
Thankfully, it is administratively possible to cancel the single bore option, since the twin bore option cleared the environmental reviews as well, and in 2007 was already complete to 65% design (link, PDF-p. 7). Unfortunately, there isn’t much appetite among officials for it. Journalists and advocates are more interested, but the agency seems to stick to its current plans even as their costs are setting non-New York construction cost records.
Is it at least good?
No. Somehow, for this cost, using a method whose primary advantage is that it makes it possible to build a station anywhere at the cost of massively more expensive tunneling, the station at the city’s main train station, named after still-alive Rod Diridon, will not be easily accessible from mainline rail. The walking distance is 400 meters, which has been justified on the grounds that “The decision had to do with impacts and entitlements. It’s also beneficial for the future intermodal station.”
It is, to be clear, not at all beneficial for a future intermodal BART-Caltrain station to require such a long walking distance, provided we take “beneficial” to mean “beneficial for passengers.” It may be beneficial for a Hollywood action sequence to depict characters running through such a space. It is not beneficial for the ordinary users of the station who might be interested in connecting between the two systems. There are 300 meter walks at some transfers in New York, and passengers do whatever they can to avoid them; I’ve taken three-seat rides with shorter transfers to avoid a two-seat ride with a long block transfer, and my behavior is typical of the subway users I know. Transfer corridors of such length are common in Shanghai and are disliked by the system’s users. It’s not the end of the world, but for $1.3 billion/km, I expect better and so should the people who have to pay for this project.
Pedestrian Observations 
Welcome to the unnecessary BART extension demanded by the Sillicon Valley leadership group to mark San Jose’s “major league” status. May I suggest basic design from the “first subway” in NYC. A simple, shallow ditch with the roadway directly framed as the roof and side platforms with fare control directly at platform level, would be vastly cheaper, and faster to build. The escalators and elevatorswould be cheaper, and for ALL riders, the time from sidewalk to train door much shorter.
Doesn’t the two tube approach also offer some improved fault-tolerance, as a problem would typically be contained within one tube, so the other one could still be used, for instance for evacuation?
Maybe? My understanding is that the very large single-bore option was chosen over the regular-large single-bore option for evacuation purposes – with such a large bore, the entire station fits on one level, which simplifies fire evacuation compared with the two-level format of L9.
As was pointed out below, the nominal reason given for favoring the single bore way back when was related to the promise not to disturb businesses on Santa Clara St. with cut and cover construction. (It was a weak argument then as it is now, but hey it was the reasoning).
In terms of the pricing, per the Seattle Times: The Alaska Way Viaduct Tunnel project came in at $3.3B for 2.8km large bore tunnel (TBM Bertha was at the time the largest TBM every built); correcting for inflation and length seems to get you into the ballpark of the VTA pricing. But that’s insane when you consider that the Alaska Way project broke their TBM cutter head early into digging and that was a multi-year fiasco to fix; they had a way more complex geology because they had to dig through glacial soils and regions of Seattle that are famously part of the Denny Regrade; and they were contracted with Tutor Perini, which you would think even the US agencies go figure out is a bad bad bad idea.
minor correction, the cutterhead was out of tolerance when it left the factory…..
Couple of things to consider.
Back in 2020 there was a “Value Engineering” exercise performed to attempt to get the costs within the amount that had been authorized by the voters. There were some constraints that were not helping with the price even then.
The local politicians/agency had promised that there will be no in street work in downtown San Jose. It is my understanding that the EIS has been written and approved around this concept. So any form of cut and cover is off the table for the three stations, which is one of the main reasons why the large diameter single bore was selected as it only requires station entrances vent/emergency egress shafts built off the side on building lots. Now some of those connections are going to be difficult but still the price seems excessive.
The decision to go Progressive Design Build also appears to have backfired. Looking at the project from a distance the price has inflated rather than decreased as the design has progressed towards final pricing, whihc is not supposed to be how such contracts work. Part of this may be structural overdesign, and I’m not talking about the layout, mezzanines, platform length, operational aspects of the stations etc. I’m talking about the design of the reinforced concrete which typically is pretty uniform around the world as most design standards are very similar. Lets face it concrete behaves the same pretty much wherever you are. Now granted, California has seismic issues to be managed, but some of the designs may have been over engineered for the final pricing, if you take the most pessimistic and conservative view of a code you can do this quite easily. If your the contractor and all risk after price is agreed is on you then (and I have no idea hon the specific’s or the risk sharing and commercial terms) this is a strategy that will minimize price risk to the Contractor, and to the Client but comes with a hefty premium up front. This means though that once you go to construction the designs can be reworked to “optimize” the design, reducing the steel and even the concrete strength to reduce cost. Whether that results in a deductive change order to reduce the cost though is a different question.
In a sane world this should be done with a twin bore 22ft TBM diameter (pretty much standard subway/light rail external diameter TBM) with segments, with top down cut and cover construction to minimize street impacts as once the roof slab is in your working under the deck and street disruption can be minimized.
On the single bore issue, it seems to be growing in use, the Scarborough Extension in Toronto is a large diameter Single Bore and one of the recent Singapore projects is I think a large diameter single bore. There’s no particular technical reason why 45 to 50ft diameter TBM’s with segments cannot be used successfully. There may be operational and other issues but from a straight up technical and design perspective there’s nothing to be particularly concerned about.
In a sane world, it would end at Diridon rather than Santa Clara, and would be elevated rather than tunneled, and would cost $1.5 billion (at Honolulu prices – elevated relative to the mainland) rather than $12 billion.
And if people complain about the elevated line – the $10B saved would be roughly equal to $3M per meter of track along the populated part of Santa Clara. Probably more than the total property value of every single land parcel adjoining the track. Just buying them out would be cheaper than this tunnel. Just as an illustration of the insanity of the proposed expense.
*Santa Clara street (in my most recent comment)
well I’m assuming that the elevated option was not an option as a baseline for sanity. But if it were possible then yes why not just extend the existing elevated
What’s going on in San Jose?
COST MAXIMIZATION.
Nothing more, nothing less, nothing ever, at not time.
They’ve been at it on this “project” (wrong rail system, wrong alignment, wrong technology) consistently and 100% successfully since at least 1994, when I first started really paying attention to how the Bay Area always came up with the shittest and least useful and most costly outcomes, every single time. (The answer then, as now, through a line of successor corporations, is Bechtel/Parsons Brinkerhoff Joint Venture.)
FYI the exact same people (PB et all, Steve Heminger, then of Bay Area Metropolitan Transportation Commission, today of San Francisco Municipal Transportation agency, because no evil deed ever goes unrewarded) are 100% responsible for the catastrophe that is California High Speed Rail. Wrong alignment – catastrophically wrong alignments – worst designs, cost maximization at every step, incredibly cheap buying off of local agencies and local electeds, astroturfing about “impacts”. Works every time.
COST MAXIMIZATION. That’s it, that’s the memo. Corrupt local officials, corrupt public agencies, infinite private profit, endless public squalor, zero accountability, forever.
Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.
If they are willing to consider a non-transportation project, I know one that would fit their plate well. The Hungarian government realized that the national railway company MÁV had a closed marshalling yard (Rákosrendező) in Budapest, Hungary, and this could be redeveloped into a modern office-residential-bells-whistles area. So far, excellent. AFAIK no contracts have been signed yet, but there are red flags galore:
– Spokes said that this project would put Budapest on the list of cities that did such a megaproject [sic].
– Scope includes a few skyscrapers because… they want to have some? The area is currently adjoined by 1-2-3-story buildings, mostly residential with some industrial.
– There’s been talk that the whole project would happen under a single prime contractor, for which role they may have already tapped an Emirati firm.
– Due to the foreign prime, they are going to sign an interstate deal.
– Some (non-project-internal) transit improvements are obvious (pre)requisites, otherwise the surrounding land use would already be more intensive. But those are the turf of Budapest, the current (~Green) mayor of which is already sort of campaigning against the project (and is in general politically opposite the Fidesz national government driving the project).
– I’m personally uninterested in this one, but the opposition is making a lot of hay about how the skyscraper(s) would intrude on the World Heritage views on Andrássy boulevard and Heroes’ square (Hősök tere). The site indeed lies on the extension of the boulevard, 1-1.5 km behind the square.
Of course, this is the same government that is building the high-speed freight (!) corridor from Budapest to Belgrade. The whole idea is bonkers (Chinese cargoes will continue to use the ports of e.g. Rotterdam (see actual Betuweroute), will not go overland after unloading at Piraeus, Greece), the complementary segments (Piraeus to Belgrade, through a few independent countries and a bunch of mountains) are presumably not happening, and even if both of these fatal issues weren’t there, Budapest with its radials heavily used by R-Bahns, IRs and IC/ECs is the wrong point to connect freight traffic going elsewhere to the existing network.
They also had the coach maintenance facility of the state TOC (MÁV-Start) start manufacturing the “IC+” coaches. Unpowered, high-floor (~1100 mm; for UIC-standard 550 mm and various significantly lower unupgraded legacy platforms), buffer-and-screw coaches. Naturally, this techlevel is the result of the constraint that the maintenance facility couldn’t build anything more advanced — heck, they had trouble maintaining the existing fleet (which makes diverting capacity to new construction an especially good idea). Was this in any way motivated by a service plan of any kind? Haha, ha, hahaha. MÁV-Start currently runs several “IC-ish” trains with two distinct 2nd class segments. They contain an “IC 2nd class” and a “gyorsvonat 2nd class”, which mean separate coaches (with very different amenity levels), different fares, and partially incompatible ticketing (IC 2nd class tickets contain a fee for including a mandatory seat reservation, even though this is a complete sham as the ticket is valid for any out of 4 consecutive trains, whereas on gyorsvonat 2nd class one cannot reserve a seat even if they would want to).
In 2020, they transferred the national long-distance bus operator company (Volánbusz) into the ownership of the rail company. You may be thinking “eh, whatever”. But the kicker is that bus and rail ticketing remain completely separate. As in, single tickets letting you use both on a single journey simply don’t exist, and the fare structure is not fully harmonized anyway. (Monthly passes that do it have been introduced in 2023.)
Alon, I get Richard’s vibes here, but I wonder if this could do with a more thorough analysis based on public choice theory.
I don’t think public choice theory has been great at explaining infrastructure cost trends; for one, in-house work by technocratic civil servants consistently leads to better outcomes on this than involving private consultants or trying to surveil the apolitical experts (“what are their GRE scores?”).
Well said.
Re: the long connection between Caltrain and Bart — I feel like Bay Area transit systems in general feel poorly connected together. I always had suspicions that this was more or less intentional, not ground in anything other than a general model of human organizations as tending territorial.
The explanation I’m seeing is that there are some vaporware plans to expand San Jose Diridon toward the future BART station in order to build a people mover to the San Jose airport. There’s always an explanation for these things; the explanation is sometimes understandable, but rarely actually good.
Round numbers:
San Jose BART to downtown: $12 billion/6 miles = $2 billion/mile
San Francisco Caltrain to Salesforce: $8 billion/2 miles = $4 billion/mile
The SF extension is to an already existing trainbox at Salesforce. San Jose is pinching pennies compared to SF.
Probably you can find someone more expert, but to summarize what you can/cannot learn from the single bore in L9/L10 in Barcelona:
The advantage of the large bore was kind of wasted because:
Other problems have compounded in the project that aren’t the TBM’s fault: Catalan government decided to experiment with Design-Build for a mega-project, then started with overly optimistic cost estimates for a completely new and untested construction method, with some questionable prestige targets (longest line in Europe! Madrid has metro to airport, we must have it too!), then changed the project specs as said before, then some local municipalities extracted more tortuous routes at the extremes of the line, then the next government ran out of money and credit and decided not only to re-finance, but also to use the construction company as an undercover credit bank at usury rates, then the following government decided to stop the works because it couldn’t pay anymore, creating waste to survive the short term… Apparently after the crisis some lessons were learnt, and now the project is progressing slowly but following a plan “let’s finish and bury this disaster as deep as we can” (figuratively and literally).
So as an amateur, I’d say the large bore TBM has a niche application: Deep tunneling to avoid already built areas, where you still need many stops. L9 would have been impossible without going deep, and deep stops would have been more expensive without the single big bore. But it’s better to go shallow whenever possible.
For a Regional train carrying a lot of people I’m not convinced this is a good solution. Hundredths of people can leave a train at the same time, and the throughput of the lifts is not that great. The solution is working OK for average metro stations, there are questions on how it’s going to hold when the central part is open and much more people starts using the line.
Madrid so far has been able to worry less about sinking buildings, but in the last decade they ran into problems too: A hurried extension in MetroEste (L7b in San Fernando de Henares) has ended up causing a lot of demolitions in the neighborhood, plus closures for repairs in the line. I read that in this case the problem was that the construction changed much more underground water paths than expected, and the salty bedrock is dissolving now in the whole area.
…L9 uses design-build? Is there something I can read about it (Spanish is fine, or even Catalan in a pinch)?
They started with design-build and at some point they decided not to insist on it for new contacts.
I remember reading a page with the whole story, which I can’t find now, but I guess it was the website of this man because the facts and the wording resemble a lot what I remember. He’s probably a better knowing insider than me:
“Importantíssim un altre tema: l’adjudicació dels trams de la L9 es va fer de forma conjunta pel projecte constructiu i l’execució. Un fet pràcticament inèdit en obres d’aquestes magnituds, que demostrava una certa improvisació i pressa per acabar la línia el més aviat possible.”
Translation: “Another very important subject: the awarding of the sections of L9 was done together for the structural design and the implementation. A fact almost unseen in works of this magnitude, which showed a certain improvisation and haste to finish the line as soon as possible”.
Local paper (San Jose Mercury News) had a update on this project today; apparently VTA board just approved the purchase of 48 rail cars for the line which will be delivered at least 10 years before line opens. BART is about done with it’s car refresh, so I understand why buying now makes sense, but VTA members upset that they are going to basically provide additional cars to the rest of the system for 10 years. (I have to give BART credit, their new car buy has gone way smoother then the fiasco that is MBTA buying new cars in Boston). But the other item of note in the article, that I hadn’t appreciated, is that VTA is going to re-look cost of twin bore vs. single bore this summer (though it seems like they are doing it under duress, so maybe they will find a way to make it say what they want).
The System is Working Exactly as Intended, chapter 10000000000000:
Limitless fraud and unbounded naked criminality are unendingly rewarded. It’s a great time to be alive!