IFP’s Transit Abundance Playbook
Two weeks ago, the Institute for Progress published a playbook called Transit Abundance, comprising 15 policy briefs about reducing construction costs. One of them was my own, about itemization of costs. Eric has a good one about phasing funding to prevent the situation of the Boston Green Line Extension in which the planning for the project was funded from the same grant that funded construction, leading to rushed pre-planning to get that money in the first place. And unfortunately, many of the rest are questionable. There’s a mix of good, meh, and downright counterproductive, and unfortunately, I’m seeing people I know and respect from elsewhere say things that are wrong or barely relevant.
My first filter for pieces like this is “is this even close to correct?”. There are some pieces that fail the test right there, praising projects that were extremely expensive as examples to emulate rather than avoid (for example, the reliably incompetent Stephanie Pollack is saying that of the Green Line Extension).
But beyond that, for things that at least get what the problem is, I look at what they cite. If they only cite the Transit Costs Project, then they don’t know enough to play. If they cite things I wasn’t aware of, then it’s more interesting. A positive highlight is Anthony Potts’ piece calling for technical scoring of proposals, which relies on literature about the exact weighting required for technical scoring to matter. We knew from interviews that California’s 30% technical score, 70% cost weighting produced identical results to lowest-bid. This piece actually went and found published results on this issue and found that if the cost is weighted at 57% or more then it’s the same as lowest-bid, and that this produces higher final costs both in general and in California case studies. This piece, I encourage everyone to read for a more complete discussion than we wrote of technical scoring and its merits.
And if this piece is a highlight, a lowlight is a piece on AI, by Lizzie Speed and Bennett Capozzi, panned across social media for calling for using more AI for transit planning, from a background of trying to sell AI technology rather than from that of transit planners; the authors cite the Transit Costs Project’s review of planning and other soft costs to argue the unique Anglosphere problem is data limitation (we say no such thing in our report) for which the solution is more AI, and seem not to know where those high costs come from. This compounds a criticism I’ve seen across social media for IFP’s use of generated images, to the point that the lead image for the playbook was noted for having errors in how the trains look (it’s hung on bus-like wheels rather than on bogies).
And regrettably, I’d like to also highlight Jackson Moore-Otto’s piece, which says that federal loans can stabilize transit funding to prevent a feast-or-famine problem. I respect Jackson and have seen him do and lead good work on matters of commuter rail and Boston-area advocacy, and am honestly surprised he’d write such a thing, which is just wrong.
The specific problem with Jackon’s argument is that it relies on a chain of citations, each introducing some errors to the point that the final claims are just wrong. A central claim is that the first electrification project costs more than subsequent ones, which is manifestly untrue (for example, compare Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor electrification in the 1990s with its struggles to install autotensioners now). This is based on a claim sourced to Momentum (which doesn’t quite say that), which sources it to the RIA Electrification Cost Challenge (which gets some Continental costs wrong); to get there, Jackson is saying the New Haven-Boston electrification was not a first line but a subsequent line, when in fact Amtrak had literally never electrified a railroad before and its forerunners on the Northeast Corridor had last done so in the Great Depression. The British costs are meanwhile compromised by repeated project cancellations that lead to sunk planning costs and make internal comparisons difficult, since the surviving lines are by definition the easiest ones. In truth, rather rapid electrification projects, without decade-by-decade continuity, exist outside the UK and are often quite reasonable in their costs, as in Denmark, Israel, and especially India.
The upshot is that because there is no feast-or-famine problem with electrification, any program to reduce its cost in the US (or UK) needs to understand what works and not talk about making it easier to apply for federal loans. On the Northeast Corridor, for example, a senior engineer since removed for incompetence and potential embezzlement of Amtrak funds unilaterally decided to tighten the required catenary pole spacing, driving up costs for reelectrification since the existing poles are not compatible with the new standard (but are compatible with high-speed electrification systems sold by international vendors). This is not a feast-or-famine problem, and to the extent there may be a specific federal policy solution, it’s to require planners to attend international industry fairs and conferences like InnoTrans and make it clear that ones who don’t will have stalled careers.
Pedestrian Observations 
Would a reasonable argument instead be that rolling programs may make it more likely that standards are adopted? And that rather than the rolling program being the root cause of low costs, it’s rather an ecosystem in which standards are not being constantly relitigated?
In particular, I am thinking of the PRC system in which HSR planning, design, and approval can happen in less than a year — all under CRC’s umbrella. Or Spain, where ADIF AV does the same but slower AFAIK (e.g. ~10 years for Madrid-Galicia). Moving from HSR to metro, again PRC has clear standards while the degree of customisation seen in the US (Los Angeles Sepulveda line’s expansive range of heavy rail options) and UK (Elizabeth line plug PSDs) is high.
Is it possible to quantify the degree to which standards are used in transit planning?
Well, PRC HSR construction costs relative to the amount of tunneling aren’t particularly low. France’s are lower; Germany’s are inconsistent, depending on whether money is wasted on excessive tunneling or on other things.
Standardized systems are important, and there is a systems premium in the US and UK, but it can’t be about a regular pipeline because London has that and yet Crossrail engaged in some really dodgy systems decisions that drove costs up.
Thanks.
Is that also correcting for % viaduct? In my experience, PRC HSR has high % viaduct as well as high % tunnel, compared to European HSR. I don’t have numbers, and that anecdata will be skewed by mostly taking PRC HSR in the mountainous South.
I am also thinking that a rolling program would bias you towards good standards, but that certainly is not an iron law. It could be for instance, that the PRC has fallen into a local minimum in the parameter space, given that there are only a few design agencies able to bid for HSR and metro (AFAIK, ~5). An interesting analysis would be to see where each country is most constrained in terms of capacity.
No, if you correct for viaducts then China is cheaper. But that raises the question of why China uses viaducts so much whereas here we’re fine putting HSR on the ground on earthworks when there’s no tunneling.
I wonder if it’s an engineering practice learned from Japan. As in Japan, elevated structures are very common in PRC not just for HSR but also for auto expressways and metros. Cities in other Asian countries that also may have learned such from Japan: Taipei, Manila, Bangkok, Jakarta…
The reason Japan does it is that when you have weak eminent domain powers, fragmented landownership plus lots of earthquakes, typhoons, floods, landslides etc, the net cost of a viaduct is not so bad. That’s not a bad fit for Korea/Taiwan which have similar land law and similar restrictions.
Last major earthwork burst was in the early 1960’s with the Tokaido Shinkansen, 5 Direction JNR project and the Musashino line. But the surface area of embankments is higher than viaducts, and actually the concrete used is increasingly similar, all of these earthworks are encased in concrete slaps as reinforcement. 1970’s lines from Sanyo Shinkansen to the New Town Lines
Notably Japan is also allergic to trenches not just embankment earthworks/at grade. Soil liquification is a thing.
Doesn’t mean its a good thing to do on the North China Plain…
China also adopts ridiculously conservative gradient and curve radii standards for HSR, with an all EMU fleet as well. That probably makes grade changes much more difficult and makes an all-viaduct alignment easier to design (while also forcing more tunnels). Taking into account all of that China probably isn’t that more expensive.
Is it substantially easier to get an easement to go over properties vs EU/NA? Along these lines, Osaka and Chongqing have famous viaducts through buildings.
The North China Plain has fairly high earthquake risks and flood risks (several of history’s deadliest floods along the Yellow River, now typically better controlled by infrastructure though for instance the Juhe River just flooded). The total risk is definitely less than Japan/Taiwan/Philippines/Java, but still substantial. South China of course has high earthquake risks in the Southwest region, and typhoon/flood/landslide risks throughout.
Sounds like a possible instance of poorly designed standards, though I imagine those costs may be recouped by faster trains over time.
What we see in the North China Plain is the collision between two Chinese insecurities, energy and food supplies.
Countries like China who import most of their oil and gaz often build HSR because it is the most efficient transportation technology. China is also relatively land poor (0.08 hectare of arable per capita) as opposed to 0.43 hectare in the US, 0,26 in Brazil or France. The viaducts simply minimize the loss of cultivated land. Elsewhere, China’s HSR construction is quite conventional with embankments, cuttings, tunnels and short viaducts over rivers.
Note that China’s food insecurity is self inflicted. The land poor Netherlands (0.6 hectare per capita) export agricultural products worth over 137 billion Euros annually, almost as much as the US and Brazil. This is more than enough to pay for HSL Zuid 8 km tunnel under pasture land and shoddy viaducts but that’s another story. Dutch farmers secure tenure is generally believed to be essential for efficient land use including investments in maintaining or increasing land productivity. The absence of private land ownership and the relatively short lease agreements are impediments but the Chinese government would rather pay for HSR viaducts on flat land that change its doctrine and allow private ownership.
@dralaindumas
The reason why NL is so successful in agricultural export is because they focus on high value products, not because the farm is actually that many times more efficient than the other much larger countries.
NL still has to import a lot of staple foods to maintain its population, as a population cannot survive solely on such high value crops.
It depends how you define efficiency or productivity.
If you measure output in tons, as was done in the Soviet Union, Dutch agriculture is not specially productive while the US is top.
Traditional traders like the Dutch measure output by value. In that respect, Dutch farmers are very productive with a 2025 agricultural trade surplus of 42.4 billion Euros. This is true whether one compares with agricultural land-rich US ($41 billion agricultural trade deficit) or land-poor China ($100 billion + deficit).
Thanks for the reference to the Transit Abundance playbook. The “Eliminate Redundant Subway Cross-Passages” article by Brian Potter is very interesting.
The National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) 800 feet cross-passage requirements accepted by the Federal Transit Association are stricter than the 500 m European standard and Japanese expert opinion that these standards are unwarranted. The NFPA had admitted to a “lack of technical substantiation” for its requirement.
The transit agencies can either follow the NFPA standard and have a better chance of securing federal financing while inflating construction costs, or they can perform an engineering analysis demonstrating that wider spacing will result in an acceptable level of safety and ask for an exemption. Brian Potter notes that “this places a significant burden on the transit project designing team, as it requires them to perform an analysis and risk failing to secure approval, possibly delaying the project”.
That transit agencies need to perform an engineering analysis to be exempted from a standard written without engineering analysis suggests that US transit practice not only suffers from its isolationism from foreign achievements but tends to isolate itself from empiric experience in the first place. I have seen the same thing in medicine with practice standards set out of experts guesswork instead of experimental data.
We’re looking at cross-passages and their costs and so far everything looks 2.5th-3rd order.
What is the sum of US standards issues? To include: over-customisation (quantifiable?), onerous environmental review for obviously environmentally beneficial projects (if we may lump this in as a standards issue), poor standards (per Alain), and standards fragmentation (e.g. elevator codes)? I would guess that the sum of those is an order of magnitude more than just cross passages.
You’ve pretty much nailed it as far as I can tell at least:
Yes, environmental review is one of the poster children of the retreat from judgment.
Quoted from, and including lots of other examples: Understanding the Cascade of Rigidity – by Jennifer Pahlka
I thought that was the advantage of the Eurowunder builders. That they could change anything to fit anywhere, anyway. While at the same time being off-the-shelf.
Interesting, makes sense though given how different NA transit systems are from each other and even between lines/stations.
I actually wasn’t thinking of this angle, but that is definitely true and I did not know about the retreat from judgment terminology. I was rather thinking more along the lines of (1) Jamie Tessler’s article in the playbook, discussing self-certification/categorical exclusion, and (2) how lack thereof leads to relitigation of solutions costing excess staff/contractor time/pay. That is, not only should transit agencies be able to use those CEs, but there should be a transparent mechanism by which others’ solutions to the same problems can be adopted; that is, there should be evolving standards for solving environmental issues which, because they are well-reasoned and defended in someone else’s environmental review, can be adopted as a standard globally.
Where the retreat from judgment comes in here, I think, is that someone (NIMBYs, etc) can always nitpick that solution X is actually hyper-specific to locale A, and does not apply to locale B.
I think a good example of this is elsewhere in the thread. We discussed how China’s standards are quite strict in some regards, and how this is possibly a learning from Japan. Borners then said that well, Japan has a lot of natural disasters that, say, the North China Plain does not have. This is true! Though the North China Plain has had some of the deadliest natural disasters in human history (Yellow River floods, Tangshan earthquake). But by not relitigating the standards, PRC has been able to build quickly and fairly cost effectively.
It is possible that a set of standards is actually ideal. And here again, there is a good PRC example — they have a set of standards for metro rail that agencies can pick and choose from depending on needs. Maybe the ideal solution (based on modeling) for a given city is somewhere between Type A heavy rail metro and Type B, but by picking a standard you reduce the number of customisations needed.
Of course, you don’t need an authoritarian state to develop such standards; France and Spain also have good HSR standards, and Grand Paris Express looks set to export their Metro standards to the rest of France.
Perhaps not, but any sections of those standards that are poor should be vigorously improved. I am also thinking of the standards that lead to issues sharing track for light rail systems in the US, e.g. IBX.
I’ve taken a brief look at NYC codes for example, and the number of amendments is frankly mad. Some of the amendments seem designed to make labour as expensive as possible. Overall, it seems that regulatory capture is incredibly bad in the US (not just by labour but also legal, consultancies, NIMBY, etc). There seems to be a crab bucket mentality (squeeze as many dollars and jobs out of one project as possible; engage in legal combat with your contractor or agency on overruns), as opposed to an abundance mentality (cheaper projects leads to more projects).
I’ll leave this micro essay with a note that too much abundance is also possible. By compressing the HSR buildout so much, PRC likely grew the HSR sector by too much and may have too much capacity in the medium to long term. In contrast, I would say France is a bit slow and Spain is possibly also a bit too fast.
Your micro essay touches important issues. The tension between standards and innovation is unavoidable. High speed rail, moving block technology, low floor trams, automated subways were once bold deviations from standards and are now becoming standard all over the world. Unfortunately, in the last decades, US deviations from passenger rail standards were more often examples of regulatory capture than genuine innovations. This problem is specific to the industry, not to the US. In freight rail and many other domains, the US has been at the forefront of innovation.
In my opinion, this phenomenon is linked to the sensation of abundance, in space as well as resources. Abundant land and petrol favored urban sprawl. Most European or Asian cities could not take that route. In most US cities and states, passenger rail is a nice thing to have. People vote to finance it in the hope others will take it and leave more space on the highway. In Europe, Asia or NYC, rail mass transit is a necessity but NYC is uniquely feeling rich enough to build oversized $1 billion subway stations and accept extravagant union demands.
@Szurke
This is something that would be very helpful indeed, because construction projects everywhere face some of the same environmental problems, and having to spend ink re-stating how these problems are solved over and over again in various EIRs is a waste of everyone’s time. (Stormwater management & erosion control are pretty universal, for instance.)
There are definitely improvements to be made (both on the urbanism front and on the safety front as well), although “Gradatim Ferociter” is probably the best motto when working on improving engineering standards (vs. say P&Z where you have much more freedom to slash&burn as all you’re risking is political capital). As far as LRT/mainline track sharing — part of the issue there is that agencies adopt very cramped views of what electrified mainline rail can do, which rules out the just-as-practical-as-a-tram-train solution of running intense urban service using mainline rail vehicles.
I’d expect NYC to have a fairly amendatory posture towards their building codes because they genuinely have to deal with some rather specialized situations (a much larger % of multifamily stock than basically anywhere else in the country, for instance) as well as a lot of historical baggage because they used to have a completely bespoke code, and have things like FD operating procedures that have adapted to the way things are set up locally (which means things have to change in a coordinated way).
That said, there is definitely a regulatory capture aspect with both amendments (my home city’s in a big fight because our planning department doesn’t like the fact we have our own bespoke plumbing code, but the plumber’s union here is defending that code to the death) and the model Codes themselves, as the ICC isn’t quite aligned with the ANSI consensus process which is intended to ensure a broad cross-section of interests are at the table. (The NFPA does a far better job on this, although not perfect.) Suburban jurisdictions tend to be the worst culprits when it comes to amendments, though, as they amend Codes with far less of a design basis than a large urban city that can actually have P.E.s and the like sit down and do an adult job of it.
This, I think, is the biggest takeaway here — an assumption that individual projects must be extracted from to the hilt because you never know when that project might be your last for a good, long while, vs being able to not have to worry about value extraction because you know there’s plenty of work to go around.
Great point, and that’s where you probably need something like backwards compatibility, where if you can show that the technology is better you can deviate from the standard but future orders do not 100% rely on the innovation. A good example of this is BRT, which can use normal buses; an inverse example is the rubber-tyred metro/light rail.
I’m also thinking of those highway wildlife overpasses. Now that we know they are much better than underpasses, we should be building many more of them for roads and rails, wherever there is a land animal migration concern.
“Move fast and break things” does lead to a lot of things being broken. As you say, question is whether they are things that society can tolerate being broken temporarily.
By percentage yes, but aren’t there contiguous areas of multifamily in other US cities? Also as I understand it, US codes already broadly have break points built in where e.g. past a certain number of floors a stricter version of the code is applied.
I also like what Alon said about small projects/small contractors being a good thing, and I think it’s related.
Backward compatibility depends whether the innovation is an addition or a substitution. Paris métro sur pneus had tires added to the conventional bogie in order to improve acceleration and braking, and gain about 15% capacity on line 1 in 1963. If it did not work, they could still rely on their steel wheels.
While Lyon and Marseille chose derivates of rubber tyred métros ordered by RATP in 1973, the smaller Lille metropolis argued it could not afford drivers salaries. They built an automated metro based on a 1971 patent deposed by a local university. The rolling stock was rubber tyred, 26 m long and 2.06 m wide. The concept had only been tested in a lab and was therefore risky. The back up plan was to manually drive the trains by activating the controls normally only used in the depot. The 66 seconds headways promised by automation were not possible with human drivers. To ensure decent capacity the trains would have to be paired and the stations were therefore designed to a 52 m standard. The VAL opened in 1983 with platform screen doors over 26 m, and without a glitch. The other 26 m are only now becoming handy. Platform screen doors have been installed and the first 52 m open gangway trains entered service in February.
Having bought the technology in the 1990’s, Siemens is now commercializing a derivate named CityVal. It has a much simplified tyred wheel set is and guided by a somewhat fragile gear borrowed from the Translohr rubber tram. It is now running on Rennes B line next to the line A VAL. The two are incompatible. Which one is best, and whether steel wheeled metros with modern electronics can now match rubber tyre performance is still debated.
The rubber tyred tramways are incompatible with standard ones because the tyres replaced the steel wheels. Two benefits were expected. Lower construction costs and better adhesion allowing service on steep streets (12% in Medellin, 13% in Nancy). The Bombardier TVR variant was quickly abandoned and replaced by a steel tram in Caen and trolleybus in Nancy. The Translohr one is now commercialized by Alstom with limited success. Padova should open its second line in a few months.
On high speed trains, in cab signaling replaces conventional signals. There is no backward compatibility because the drivers could not reliably see line side signals at high speed.
In the US and especially New York City, obsolete standards are ferociously defended, and innovations only tend to increase costs. I don’t know whether setting national standards will work. I am afraid the sickness is more profound.
As for wildlife, overpasses are great, but Chinese viaducts are best. The Europeans disagree on the second best approach with SNCF and Adif enclosing the high speed lines and DB arguing that the enclosures may trap animals and are therefore dangerous.
Flame wars on railroad.net and subchat don’t count.
I don’t know anything about railroad.net or subchat. I was referring to the labor siloing and other union-mandated featherbedding practices resulting in New York City underground work requiring up to four times as many workers than similar projects in Europe or Asia.
Half a million dollars a year in overtime and very good benefits, over a ten year project, for a few dozen excess sandhogs doesn’t make a project cost billions more. Ya got anything else to pull out of railfannery whining?
Sure, and it is important that sometimes backwards compatibility needs to be broken (tech example: USB-C replacing Lightning for iPhones). I remain unconvinced that rubber tyred metros are worth the differences, but in the context of metros with their lower standardisation, rubber tyres are not as bad as they would be in the context of regional rail or national rail.
And how are issues such as construction slow zones or cyberattacks managed? There has to be some backwards compatibility, though I’m sure systems vary in the amount.
I have only seen comparison of overpasses and underpasses, but logically speaking I agree that long viaducts are probably better than either.
This is true. However, many of the NYC codes make projects much more bespoke than they need to be, and I can easily imagine this cost to run in the high millions for e.g. 2nd Avenue Subway.
Eliminating cross passages is failry easy to do. But you still have the challenge of how to manage smoke in the event of a fire. Now of course you could just say, well the risk is very low, so lets not bother with that. And have a stack of body bags available……
Cross Passages can be a scheduling nightmare, sure you can use the methods adopted by Bouygues for the Chep Lap Kok – Tuen Mun highway tunnel and use a mini TBM launched through watertight collar etc. If you have the room to do that which you probably wont in a subway tunnel. Otherwise you can often be trying to mine a cross passage by hand while TBM mining of the main tunnels are ongoing, which can cause disruption to your main tunnel ops. And then if your underwater and on a down slope you have the potential risk of flooding your downstream ops leading to additional safety doors etc. something we had to deal with on Storebaelt many years ago. And before anyone says mine uphill, sure, tell me how to do that on what was effectively a syphon……..
NFPA is currently 2500ft to fresh air I believe, so not 800ft. We actually eliminated some vent shafts on a recent project becasue of this.
Interestingly, the FY2024 FRA awards for the NEC showed quite a difference in electrification cost per mile if the scope of the project was limited to catenary structures and wire versus a more comprehensive replacement of the traction power system, including substations, transformers and grid tie-in; and of course a comparison to Northend is imperfect because Northend did not need to decomission and remove existing traction power infrastructure and maintain electric services during construction. These numbers omit state matching funds:
I’d be interested to know how electrification cost scales with number of tracks. It stands to reason that traction power for 4 tracks is not 2x the cost of 2 tracks, but by actually how much, I can’t tell immediately.
The electrification numbers I use always include transformers and substations. If anything, this should reduce the cost of installing autotensioners, which does not require new substations and transformers.
Electrification costs are supposed to scale with the number of tracks, as far as the wires go; substations depend on peak traffic but are degressive (for example, we have cost estimates for expanding the Boston-Providence substation to accommodate MBTA electrification and they’re very low).
Thank you for your reply.
The fact that the incremental cost of implementing electrification for at least a couple of MBTA commuter rail lines is within the realm of the achievable makes this nonsense all the more infuriating (see slide 4, although you’re probably already well aware).
Back of the envelope math: electrifying 9 miles of Fairmount at $11M/mile, ~$100M for a small fleet of multilevel EMUs (based on NJT), ~$50-75M for any high-level station mods required and ~$50-75M for a layover yard/maintenance facility, plus whatever you’ve got for Boston-Providence gets you a starter pack of EMUs and partial electric service on two lines, somewhere in the neighborhood of $300-350M. Instead, they’re paying $200M over that, for the privilege of renting battery consists for 15 years.
It seems the high level platform modifications on the line have exploded in price for some reason. It seems that MBTA is estimating 55-90 million per station to be upgraded for full accessibility, and they’re currently proposing “temporary” mini highs for 3 million per station that will probably need replacing every 10 years. Using this cost estimate the two stations without full high platforms probably could be upgraded with <150 million dollars, even at the egregious cost estimates.
The MBTA needs to be able to upgrade stations much more cheaply going forward however, as the whole system really should have full high platforms.
$11M per mile for dual track catenary is also on the high side. I picked it because it’s Northend escalated for inflation, give or take. I wanted to provide a reasonable comparison to a capital project for electric services.
As with all transit costs, we should endeavor to frame our arguments around what things should cost in a transparent world, not what some consultant spun out of whole cloth.
The messaging about these BEMUs, their costs, and capabilities are rooted in untruths and incompetence. I am reminded of Alon’s post about Connecticut’s procurement of unpowered coaches.
Actual people using the railroad, even though it’s an icky diesel hauled one that makes Alon get the heebie jeebies is better than waiting around a few decades while electrification happens.
Have you seen the price of tyransformers recently? Plus have you actually found one that complies with Buy America? And the lead times are horrific……….
Yes, Buy America add to costs but it goes beyond that.
While Caltrain spent $1316 million electrifying 222 km of track near San Francisco (Euros 5.3 million/km), SNCF installed 25 kV catenary between Gretz, Nogent and Provins near Paris for 192 m euros in 2022 (1,2 m Euros/track-km).
Adif is currently electrifying hundreds of track-km (Vilar Formoso-Fuentes de Oñorio, Talayuela-Plasencia-Cáceres-Badajoz and Zaragoza-Teruel). Some of these lines are new high speed ones where work can proceed without interruption, others conventional ones where bridges need to be raised. Regardless, they do it at less than 1 million Euro/km and this is not exceptional. Currently, German tracks are also routinely electrified for less than 1 million E/km.
I’m not defending AMTRAK’s or CALTRAINS’s costs by any means just pointing out that there are other non construction reasons why the US ends up more expensive than other places. Besides rank incompetence.
Do any of the systems you mention procure the equipment themselves and provde it to the contractors to install or are the contracts procure and install type contracts. this can help offset costs as the rail system operator can purchase long lead items early, knowing that they will use them at some stage, lets face it transformers dont exactly become obsolete if you store them. I saw this done on a couple of projects both in and out of the US and given the volsatility in the global economy this could be a way to hedge against tarriffs, supply chain problems etc.
I’m also guessing that the European examples you give dont require the systems to be designed for seismic and hurricanes that is commonly included in the design criteria maintained by the agencies here in the US and used as a reason to design foundations more appropriate for high rise buildings……
I am looking at the cost breakdown in California and Troyes and it looks even worse for California than my previous numbers suggested. Unlike in California, SNCF costs include management oversight, land acquisition, bus services during line closures. Once everything is added, Caltrain’s electrification costs were about $1887 million.
The main cost elements on the Nogent-Troyes electrification are the electrical work and supplies for 69.2 million Euro or 36% ; raising overpasses for 35.9 mE or 19%; bus services and other logistics 34 mE or 18%, provision for cost overruns 14.3 mE or 8%; project management 24.5 mE or 13%. The work was done by contractors, not SNCF itself. In summary, overhead line, transformers and substations are relatively cheap. The context is important.
The Paris-Troyes-Belfort line was most impacted by the TGV. It was once a mainline used by the Arbalète Trans Europ Express which run non-stop between Paris and Basel before terminating in Zurich. Nowadays, one travels between Paris, Belfort, Basel or Zurich via Dijon and Besançon. The LGV detour saves about 90 minutes. This electrification is only occurring because the Région wants to improve service for commuters and is ready to pay. Because the line is nowadays secondary, SNCF Réseau can cut services for weeks when needed. The opposite is happening on the Dax-Bayonne re-electrification. The 100 years old gear installed by the Compagnie du Midi is corroded. This 40 km segment of mainline for passenger and freight traffic between France, Spain and Portugal cannot be interrupted. In comparison with the Troyes line, each km will probably cost twice as much but the Région won’t have to pay anything. Because of its national and international significance, financing will be provided by SNCF Réseau (86%) and the EU (14%).
“Rank corruption” is way way way up there.
Just limitless rent-seeking consultant self-dealing self-enrichment.
And the best news is that now a new floor is set for “peer” (always north American peers, nobody else can match us, USA USA USA) costs for any future still-born “modernization” (as if! the steam locomotive firemen still rule!) projects in the continent. We benchmarked ourselves against ourselves, and what with something something supply chain, escalations against the baseline we established are only to be expected.
PS Transformer costs? Jesus. Third or fourth order or magnitude, at best, in this affair. HAVE YOU SEEN THE FUCKING “SOFT” COSTS??????
Butwhatabout? WHATABOUT THE TRANSFORMERS?
What about them?
Richard if the French are doing electrification for €1m/km these days then Northern California with its highest wages in the world would be matching it at €2m/km. Plus you have to add on the earthquake proofing and difficulties due to the much higher population density than rural France and €5m/km really isn’t awful. Maybe it’s 1/3rd-1/2 too much – certainly a lot better than we manage in Britain.
Looking at the earthquake risk map, the South coast of Spain + Rhine valley are roughly equivalent to the earthquake risk in the US Northeast and New Madrid area, and Naples is as high as San Francisco or Los Angeles. It is true that hurricanes are not a thing in Europe, but the flood risk in some parts of Europe (England, South of France, South of Germany for instance) is high. So you miss the need to design for storm surge, and the combination of flooding and high winds. Most of the Asia-Pacific region has some combination of earthquakes, typhoons, and flooding.
That said, this area is quite low for disaster risk whereas a major fault line runs parallel to Caltrain.
Yes, and the US needs itemisation to figure out what order of magnitude. Then we can more easily determine the costs of Buy-American and other issues with US procurement, per Alon’s article.
@Szurke Italy and Turkey don’t seem to take earthquakes as seriously as countries of their level of wealth should in general.
The … requirements…. of the various programs the encourage domestic production aren’t unlimited pots of money. Not that commodity goods like transformers have widely different prices across global markets. Somebody somewhere paid a vendor for the individual parts and there is an itemized invoice for it.
Alon, what did you think of Paul Lewis’s essay in the playbook about rebuilding transit agency expertise?
I only ask this half-facetiously: do you have a Dream Team of transit professionals from around the world who could save us here in the Northeast?