Learning from Many Places is Better than Learning from One
An article from last week about a cost saving push in Seattle made me think again about how learning from lower-cost examples works. As the costs of the majority-above-ground Ballard extension are careening toward the $2 billion/km mark, the agency and civil society are looking for cost savings. Scott Kubly, the former head of the Seattle Department of Transportation, is proposing to reduce the costs of stations by shortening the platforms, citing Copenhagen’s combination of driverless operations and very short trains as a cost saver. Kubly says,
They built it at about a quarter cost. How they did that was shorter, more frequent trains, which leads to smaller stations, which leads to less excavation, which leads to faster delivery and a better passenger experience.
This, to be clear, is at best a second-order saving. The issue is that Copenhagen’s short trains and driverless operations are more or less unique to it, but its medium-low costs aren’t. An honest program of learning from Scandinavia ought to learn from all of the Nordic capitals at once, as much as possible, and focusing on what’s common to them and not on the differences. Stockholm in particular has lower construction costs than Copenhagen these days and has longer trains than Seattle: Stockholm T-bana trains are 140 m long (and Citybanan, with 200 m trains, cost $400 million/km in 2025 prices, less than a quarter as much as Ballard), Link trains are designed up to 116, Copenhagen Metro trains only 39. Nya Tunnelbanan manages lower construction costs than Copenhagen these days, so learning from low-ish Nordic costs should not center the combination of driverless trains and short platforms.
More broadly, this proposal by Kubly (and by the generally good Robert Cruickshank, formerly of California HSR Blog) is convincing me that the real strength of the Transit Costs Project is that we’ve done deep dives into more than one success case. We technically have three low-cost cases: Stockholm, Istanbul, and a selection of Italian cities. But in Stockholm, too, the case looked at trends common to the Nordic countries, namely, the unfortunate tendency in all four to privatize project planning to international design-build consortia. Our conclusion also uses some medium-cost Parisian examples to check itself as well as a few German and Spanish specifics, and we’ve increasingly looked at some Chinese examples, though well short of a full case like our main three. We’re blinder than we’d like to be in East Asia, especially low-cost Korea, but our coverage in Europe is fairly good and we have at least some idea of what’s going on in Latin America. Our ideology is always that it’s most important to look at the commonalities of the places that work when distilling the best practices, rather than on the differences.
This matters, because the average Continental European (or Chinese) just doesn’t think about the United States when doing transportation engineering. A Swede, asked about the features of their transportation program, will focus not on what makes the difference between Scandinavia and the United States, but on the differences between Sweden and the other Nordic countries. The literature I saw when I wrote the Sweden case was replete with intra-Nordic comparisons, on every conceivable measure. Most of the literature came from the country I was researching, but some came from the other three Nordic countries. All of them are like this. Ask a Swedish planner about what makes Nya Tunnelbana work and they’ll cite pertinent features like the drill-and-blast construction method and why it’s superior to tunnel-boring machines, where Copenhagen in fact uses TBMs just fine; ask a Danish one and they’ll talk about the driverless operations and extremely high frequencies.
And this generalizes. Italy has used very short stations and driverless operations to keep down the costs in very small cities like Brescia, and somewhat longer but still short stations in Milan, but Rome Metro Line B1 uses 110 m long trains and was built for $300 million/km in 2025 prices. While Italians talk about this as a cost saver, Manuel Melis Maynar wrote positively of Madrid’s rejection of driverless operations as an example of cost saving through technological conservatism. I don’t doubt that in both cases they were right under the circumstances (Melis having written of extensions built 25 years ago), but just as the medium-low costs of the Nordic countries have to be properly attributed to shared features, the even lower costs in Southern Europe have to be properly attributed.
Far more important than looking at a Copenhagen-specific feature is answering all of the following questions, in increasing order of abstraction:
- How large are the underground stations compared with the train length? How standardized are their designs?
- How standardized are the RFPs for station finishes, signals, and electrical and mechanical systems?
- Is there a single point of homologation for the system, or can a single suburban fire department demand construction in excess of code because the fire department head objects (as happened in Bellevue across Lake Washington)?
- Does contracting follow good practices (i.e. the traditional system as used in Scandinavia until about 15 years ago), or is everything done with layers of consultants managing other consultants with opaque design-build contracts? Are contracts itemized or fixed-price? Is there technical scoring to ensure contractors race to the top and not the bottom?
- How large is the in-house planning and supervision team? Does it have the capacity to manage a project the size of ST3, or even a single subway line like the combination of Ballard and West Seattle?
- Are priorities decided by professionals or by political appointees? Does funding follow the Acquis or possibly another similar system governed by rule of law? Is a cost-benefit analysis mandatory, and do project designers expect that a poor cost-benefit analysis will lead to project cancellation?
Each of these questions, by itself, represents a cost saving larger than anything that could come from shrinking the stations based on driverless operations, a tradeoff that reduces station dig costs but increases systems costs and works in many places but is never going to turn American costs into Southern European or Nordic costs. In contrast, relying on one simple trick like Copenhagen’s requires deep understanding of why each of Copenhagen and Stockholm does what it does, which understanding is unlikely to exist in anyone who doesn’t know that these cities have comparable costs, both a fraction of the United States’.
Pedestrian Observations 
Overlearning from Copenhagen, sigh, they don’t talk about the S-tog.
A good example of overreading the automated light-metro strategy out of context is the DLR (which is getting a report chapter). The DLR was until Thamesmead very cheap because it either repurposed existing rights of way or was built in digestible sections, as well as using limited size automated trains plus POP. But its fundamentally an auxiliary system to London core radial network and would be far less successful if the Jubilee Line Extension and now Crossrail weren’t there to do the heavy lifting. And I shudder to think at the cost of lengthening platforms if all but 4 of the stations hadn’t been above ground.
Or look Nippori Toneri Liner, in Northern Tokyo, where its ridership is screaming “should have built another subway line here guys” (admittedly they quadtracked the nearby Tobu Isesaki/Skytree trunk). At megacity class building radial smol/light metros can backfire on you.
Also on the opposite, I’ve told Alon this, but Japan also has cases where the train lengths proved too long for demand. I’ve actually uploaded these to Metro Spreadsheet, Sapporo, Osaka, Nagoya and Kobe have subway lines that run shorter trains than they were designed for, indeed often the later extensions purposely built shorter platforms to fit. The Sennichimae being built for 8 and running 4 car trains (and that was before the Namba line was opened).
but Seattle isn’t a mega city so most of these issues aren’t issues for it?
I was making a wider point about choices and comparisons, different cities with different needs.
Seattle’s geography of a high-density (by US standards) of jobs/residents in the core hemmed in by water, also pushes strong radical corridors intersecting in the centre. Choosing “light rail” was in retrospect a weird choice. Not that I’d advocate adding another mode given it already has like three. Run with the grain of a pre-metro/stadtbahn.
I’m not sure what Seattle can learn from the S-Tog; also it’s important to understand how Seattle landed on light rail as a technology; it demonstrates how all these decisions are contingent on history.
Seattle had a plan to build a subway in the 60s and 70s, the voters rejected it twice. The first referendum in ’68 got a majority but not the required 60% threshold; the second in ’70 failed.
So, having rejected rail, they plan in the 70s for what would become the Downtown bus tunnel; construction didn’t start until the 80s, opening in 1990. The bus tunnel was envisioned from the start for conversion to light rail, and once that was funded, the technology was locked in.
There’s also a category error here: is the criticism of this proposal based on the assumption that it only learns from Copenhagen Metro? Because the report sure seems more focused on using Copenhagen as an illustrative example of what’s possible.
My point is comparing Copenhagen to anything has to consider the long history of s-tog before it. Although Seattle’s legacy freight network does have a city centre tunnel (yeah I know Class 1’s a toxic).
But at this stage if you look at maxing out light rail with lots level crossings….Japanese private railways aren’t a bad place to learn from. They all started as Interurbans and have slowly upgraded to metro levels of service.
(cough cough)
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-japan-has-such-good-railways/
Seattle can unlock a lot of capacity if they didn’t run 4x coupled light rail vehicles in tandem with 3 sets of redundant cabs. Their new order seems to double the length of vehicles so only one set of redundant cabs are required, but they really should be ordering fully walk through vehicles to best utilise the capacity. Seattle should be fine with these platform lengths for a long time and the system is probably still overbuilt.
I’m fairly certain there are a lot of Japanese private railway lines that had no street running from the start…
I was thinking more the 2-line Link system, rather than two disconnected street car systems (which of course each is run by two different overlapping operators).
Kaoshuing in Taiwan has too long platforms as well I believe from when I used it.
Most subway stations in Kaohsiung were built to the same specs as Taipei’s MRT. However, Kaohsiung doesn’t have nearly the same population density and so half-length 3-car trains are being used. To avoid overbuilding, all new MRT lines in Taiwan since them have been medium-capacity.
At what point does it make sense to simply copy standards from abroad wholesale? For instance, the PRC uses a fairly small number of standards across the entire country, with quite small customizations from city to city (with exceptions). It is my understanding, for instance, that US/Canada elevator standards are substantially different to those in the rest of the world; this is a major cost driver for transit accessibility.
Regarding Copenhagen, I really did not like the short platform lengths. At least in the city core, the system feels underbuilt. Copenhagen is smaller than Seattle, and the downtown is less dense, so I suspect Seattle needs longer trains even at Copenhagen frequencies.
US elevator standards are a general accessibility problem, as this lead to US buildings having way less elevators than in Europe. I suspect it is the same basic problem has the US not using standard UIC standards for trains…
That depends. Standards are a trade off in many ways (assuming they really become a standard – as opposed to everyone ignoring it) once you have a standard you stop or greatly slow innovation in that area. People go from making a better widget to making the standard widget cheaper – which means you shouldn’t standardize until you have enough information to be confidence there is little useful innovation left (standards can be updated if there is some innovation left, but it is much more difficult). That is don’t do a standard for hyperloop – if this ever works out in the real world (a big if lets not get into) it needs a lot of innovation in ways we can’t predict. OTOH, monorail is greatly hindered by the lack of a standard – it is possible if there was a standard it could be better than regular rail in some situations.
For something like elevators a the US is large enough that having a completely different standard isn’t a big deal – there is enough market for competition within the US, and there isn’t any reason to make elevators interoperable with elevators elsewhere. However Wyoming isn’t a large enough market to have their own standard. I don’t see any gain from an international standard. The issues with how and why the US standards are different are interesting to look at and we can debate if the compromises are worth it, but any changes can be made US only and it won’t make any difference.
For trains, there are a lot less in the world, and so it makes sense to standardize more. A standard that everyone goes with means manufactures can make cheaper reusable jigs for just that part instead of either no jig (because they are expensive and not worth it when they won’t be used enough), or a more expensive adjustable jigs. However there are limits. I don’t need a standard brake pad, every manufacture can do their own thing, I only need assurance they will keep making the replacement parts for the life of the train. I don’t need to standardize on seats, you can make your own seat options. I might need to standardize how the seats attach in some way (so I can safely drill the needed holes without hitting something important). All this is to say I need the train manufactures to get their engineers together to create the standard. A politician (or even an engineer working in a different industry) is too likely to focus something like like “all trains shall be blue” which is saves nothing, while allowing none of the gains from standardization.
The real goal is when a city needs a train they can order one from any manufacture that has capacity to deliver on time and they get a good train for cheap. I want cities who are choosing a train to focus on variations that are cheap (do you want the hard plastic seats or the first class seats?), and while not getting a choice about things that would make the train more expensive. When I buy a car I don’t tell BMW/GM/.. where I want the cup holders, I take what they give me (or I don’t), I get to chose the tow package or not.
It won’t. Physics is a cruel cruel mistress. Which people figured out back when vacuum tube trains were first proposed. Elon Musk thinks it’s an innovation because Elon Musk didn’t know that people figured out physics is a cruel cruel mistress when they were first proposed. No amount of software will change that physics is a cruel cruel mistress. Or that we have airplanes.
It is my understanding that actually, elevator standards being different in US/Can is a big deal that costs a lot of money. See About Here’s episode ‘North America’s Elevator Problem’ on yt.
Also not sure about your point that fewer items make sense to standardize more. Standards amortize over a large number of items; no one cares if for instance a handcrafted draisenne has non-standard wheels, but when we get to the modern bicycle wheel standards start to become extremely important. Standards are also important when interoperability matters; not only buying off the shelf as you mention (correct), but also potentially buying secondhand, and labour mobility (factory, service technicians). It is true that as the number increases, the standard’s cost per item will approach zero and therefore more standards may become economical; but elevators likely have not reached this point given the complexity of the standards and cost of a unit. Another driver of more standards is simply different conditions; surely there are far too many urban rail standards, but more than one standard makes sense based on capacity etc. Hence my point about Chinese rail standards, of which there are several.
According to this video, elevator in the US cost 3× what they cost elsewhere, and this has lead to US buildings having less elevators than elsewhere. There are also less manufacturers and less competition…
I stopped watching after 5 minutes – I find the guy annoying. Which I could get past except 1/3rd of the way through and he still hasn’t given me any reason why – which is what you told me to watch this for. I’m not disputing that elevators are more expensive in the US. However this seems to be a rant at that fact, and that they costs too much – but not why.
I think there are a few major costs that a standard imposes. (1) engineering costs, such as injection or casting moulds, engineer time, and so on. (2) certification costs. (3) cost to the consumer, passed on by the manufacturer and/or servicer. (4) cost to the consumer, in the form of excess capability imposed by the standard that the consumer does not want. Let’s see how US/Can elevators stack up.
(1) some parts will be different given the different elevator dimensions and possibly some other parts of the standards, as the video explains.
(2) certification will be vastly more expensive for the US/Can due to the different jurisdictions’ codes and certification processes, as the video explains.
(3) as a result of (1) and (2), due to the oligopoly the video explains.
(4) as a result of the excess capacity the video explains.
@weismann, that is an interesting video.
I definitely think in general that the EU has spent a lot of effort coming up with standards for stuff – and those rules are a combination of the rules in France, Germany and pre-brexit the UK. They are pretty good in general – and the US should follow them too when sensible.
Often the Chinese and Indians have just wholesale copied those rules.
Yes, thanks to Weisman for the vid link. Very counterintuitive. But MH, the rest of the world have adopted a single set of standards for elevators yet the USA with only 5% of world installations has dozens. Indeed Chicago, which I believe is where the elevator was invented, has different regulations to the rest of Illinois! In fact a lot of the problem seems to come from “state’s rights” though the video suggested this is changing with the feds proposing some all-encompassing regulations. (Hah, this was written pre-Trump2.0) Funny enough, in fact it shocked me, one significant state has chosen to adopt the world standard. No, it isn’t CA which would not be a shock. It’s Texas! Almost certainly related to keeping construction costs lower.
I have more to say about the nature of safety regulations on my next post on nuclear.
For this discussion let me define two terms: regulation: the rules that need to be followed, but you can choose who you follow them. Standard: the rules that need to be followed so that customers/users of your widget and mix/match with one made by somebody else. This is not a standard definition, and in the real world we rarely can make a clean separation. However for this discussion it is useful. Both are needed.
I want my elevator and trains to have at a backup safety brake that is powerful enough to stop everything should the main system fail – this adds costs. I don’t care how you implement this, but you better have this safety regulation.
Standards allow me to grade a widget from different manufactures and use it. Standards also constrain expensive variations so you can focus on making on variation cheaper instead of all possible variations. Standards in the right place reduce costs because manufactures can ignore a lot of expensive things that you won’t do. Standards in the wrong place reduce customer choice without and gain.
Again, the above definition should only apply to this discussion here where it is helpful to have the separation to know what we are talking about. Please be careful about taking it elsewhere.
And people in Seattle have to keep it simple. And relentlessly repeat Carthargo del… relentlessly repeat “More expensive than Manhattan subway”. Once that catches the attention of people who don’t care, they can start discussions about how to keep costs down.
One of the analyses I found most illuminating in the full Transit Costs report was the tri-axis representation of cost escalation over baseline in section 1.4, where the axes represented physical structures (x), labor (y), and procurement & soft costs (z). An excellent and intuitive data visualization.
I can see how the bullet points listed in this post correlate to those axes (kinda – still an amateur at this). It’s a little concerning that actual transit professionals attribute such a dramatic cost escalation to one part of one axis only.
With HS2 the decisions are being taken largely by a special purpose unit.
The politicians on both/all sides of the aisle care more about cost than the non political appointees for sure.
Yeah, I should have included a question about SPDVs for this reason.