Category: Construction Costs

The Meaning of Construction Costs Per Rider

I’ve written a lot about urban rail construction costs per kilometer, but from time to time, my colleagues and I have been asked about what happens if we compare costs, not per kilometer, but per rider. There’s an intuition among people in transportation advocacy (including anti-transit activists who prefer cars) that the construction costs of urban rail lines per rider are a meaningful measure of cost-effectiveness. This intuition is true, and yet, it must be interpreted delicately.

First, modes of transit with different operating cost structures should tolerate different levels of capital costs; in particular, the current practice in which subways are built at higher cost per rider than light rail, which in turn is built at higher cost than bus lanes, reflects real differences in operating costs and does not mean there is overinvestment in subways and underinvestment in buses. And second, costs per rider can be too low, in a sense – if a city’s construction costs per rider are very low, indicating a very high benefit-cost ratio, then it shouldn’t be lauded for its fiscal prudence but scolded for not having built these lines long ago and for not building more today. In truth, places with healthy decisionmaking about infrastructure expand their networks to the limit of cost-effectiveness, which means that costs per rider averaged over an entire region vary less than costs per kilometer, and this just reflects that cities build what they can, so low-cost cities can afford to build lines to lower-ridership areas, which higher-cost cities would reject as too expensive for the benefit. This way, costs per rider are not too different in New York and in cities that build for an order of magnitude lower cost per km than New York.

The meaning of cost per rider

In the remainder of this post, the meaning of “cost per rider” is “cost divided by the ridership on a working day.” In Europe, workers get around six weeks of paid vacation, and tend to take them in the summer, leading to depressed ridership around July or August, depending on the city; daily counts usually avoid this period, so for example Stockholm specifies that daily ridership figures are taken in winter. This, as I will explain shortly, does not unduly make European lines look more cost-effective than they actually are.

The cost per rider is best understood as a cost-benefit measurement. All benefits of public transportation scale with ridership, generally linearly: higher ridership indicates tighter economic and social ties if it comes from more travel, and better environmental outcomes if it is at the expense of car travel. What’s more, raw ridership measured in trips is better at capturing these benefits than passenger-km. The issue is that focusing on p-km overrates the success of extremely suburban systems, which have low environmental benefits for their p-km (the users are typically park-and-riders and therefore drive extensively, just not to their city center jobs) and usually also high net operating costs since they are peaky and tend to charge low per-p-km fares. Conversely, the short-hop trip is a net profit to the system – even subways with distance-based fares charge degressive rather than linear fares – and comes from dense networks that cut out car-based travel entirely. These effects roughly cancel out to the point that ridership is a good proxy for actual benefits.

That said, all outcomes need to be scaled to regional or even national incomes. Economic benefits are usually measured relative to worker wages anyway; in some business case analyses, such as that of the United Kingdom, the economic benefit is even scaled to rider income rather than regional or national income, which favors lines built to rich neighborhoods over lines built to poor ones, and isn’t really how cities need to think about their public transit networks. Social benefits are usually taken on a willingness-to-pay basis, and the same is true of health benefits including reduced air and noise pollution from cars and reduced car accidents.

The next step is then to compare the cost per rider with GDP per capita, which is not perfect but is good enough as a proxy for incomes. This also takes care of the issue of Europe’s synchronized summer troughs in local travel: those six weeks of paid vacation are visible in reduced GDP per capita, so the apparent bonus to the European system of using cost per daily trip where “day” means “workday outside the summer vacation season” rather than cost per annual trip cancels out with reduced annual GDP per capita.

The rough rule of thumb I use is that the absolute limit of cost-effectiveness for a subway or commuter rail line is when the cost per rider is equal to GDP per capita. This is a coincidence: a one-time cost has no reason to be equal to an annual income – this just follows from Börjesson-Jonsson-Lundberg’s estimate of the Stockholm Metro’s benefit-cost ratio compared with its cost per rider relative to the GDP per capita of 1960s’ Sweden. In practice, infrastructure is never built down to a benefit-cost ratio of 1, due to construction risks; in countries that make decisions based on benefit-cost analyses, the minimum is usually 1.2 or 1.3. In this schema, the United States can afford to build up to an envelope of $85,373/1.3 to $85,373, which is $65,000-70,000/rider in 2024 prices. The frontier lines, like the Interborough Express, are fairly close to this limit already; in practice, there’s a range, with some lines in the same city built well over the limit for political reasons (often airport connectors) and others built far below it.

Cost per rider by mode

The above analysis works for subways and commuter rail. It does not work for trams or buses. The reason is that surface transit never achieves the same low operating costs as metros, so in practice, the total cost to be truly comparable needs to be incremented by the additional operating costs.

To be clear, this is just a rule of thumb. There are different metro lines, even with the exact same technology in the same city, with different projected operating cost profiles; for example, in Vancouver, the Broadway extension of SkyTrain toward UBC was projected in the 2010s to reduce net operating costs as many buses would be replaced by fewer, larger trains, but the outward extension of the same system deeper into Surrey and Langley is projected to increase net operating costs. There are different ways to interpret this – for example, the Surrey extension is in a more auto-oriented area, with more likely car-to-train switchers (this is still much denser than an American park-and-ride); on net, though, I think the differences are not huge and could to an extent even be folded into the notion of cost per rider, which is substantially better on Broadway than in Surrey and Langley.

That said, metros consistently have much lower operating costs than light rail and buses in the same city; here are American cost profiles. As far as I can tell from CoMET data, most European and Asian metros cluster toward the bottom end of the American cost profile (such as the Chicago L; the New York City Subway is the top end among the big systems); bus operating costs are more or less proportional to driver wages times operating hours throughout the developed world. Here we need to briefly switch to cost per p-km, since mature urban rail networks use buses as short-hop feeders – the counterfactual to a bus-based network for New York isn’t people riding the same bus routes as today but at higher intensity, but people riding longer bus routes, so the cost would roughly scale to cost per p-km, not per passenger.

In rich Asia, metros are profitable. In Europe, it depends – the London Underground operationally broke even in the early 2010s, and the Berlin U-Bahn was said to do the same in the late 2010s. In healthy European systems, it’s never reported directly, since there’s fare integration across the region, so financial data are reported at metropolitan scale without much breakdown between the modes, but the farebox operating ratios in at least Germany and Scandinavia, and probably also Paris (which has much higher ridership density than London or Berlin, comparable costs per car-km, and higher fares than pre-2022 Berlin), suggest that metros and the inner sections of commuter rail systems can break even, and then the subsidies go to the buses and to suburban extensions.

Individual bus systems can be profitable, but never at metropolitan scale, not in the first-world cities I’m aware of. In New York, the buses between New Jersey and Manhattan are profitable and run by private companies, but that’s one specific section of the system, and on net the bus system in New Jersey, including not just these cross-tunnel buses but also internal buses within the state, loses money, covered by New Jersey Transit subsidies, and the financial performance of buses within New York is, frankly, terrible.

One potential complication is that BRT infrastructure is usually installed on the highest-performing individual routes, and those can have rather low operating costs. But then, the operating costs of the buses on Broadway in Vancouver are extraordinarily low, and still the projections are for the SkyTrain extension that would replace them to, on net, reduce systemwide operating subsidies. If your city has a bus corridor so strong that ordinary BRT would be profitable, the corridor has high enough ridership for a subway.

Light rail is essentially a via media between metros and buses: higher operating costs than metros, in theory lower ones than buses. I say in theory, because in the United States, light rail as a mode comprises different things, some behaving like lower-efficiency subways with shorter cars like the Boston Green Lines, and others running as mostly grade-separated urban rail in cities like the Los Angeles and Portland cities with extremely low ridership and high resulting operating costs. But a light rail system with serious ridership should comfortably obtain better operating outcomes than buses, if worse ones than metros.

Costs per rider can be too low

In New York, as mentioned above, the current urban rail extensions under construction (Second Avenue Subway Phase 2) or discussion (Interborough Express) have costs not far from the frontier relative to American incomes. In Berlin, the extensions instead are far cheaper; U8 to Märkisches Viertel was projected to cost 13,160€ per daily rider in 2021, which is a fraction of Germany’s GDP per capita.

This does not mean Berlin builds cost-effectively. It means Berlin builds too little. A line that costs less than one third the country’s GDP per capita should have been built when the GDP per capita was one third what it is now. If there are a lot of such possibilities in the city, it means there was a crisis it’s only now recovering from or there has been too much austerity, or both, in the case of Berlin.

Healthy construction environments – that is, not Germany, which has normal costs per kilometer and chooses to barely build intercity or urban rail – will instead build to the frontier of what’s cost-effective. In New York, it’s Second Avenue Subway; in Madrid, it’s extensions into deep suburbia making the system almost as long as that of New York, on one third the metro area population. Rational yes/no decisions on whether to build at all can coexist with good construction practices or with deeply irrational ones.

More American Station Construction Extravaganza

Los Angeles has plans to extend its urban rail network. They’re taking forever, because construction costs are extremely high – and Nick Andert just pointed out one reason: the station caverns are huge. The overage on the proposed northern extension of the K Line, also known as the Crenshaw/LAX Line, is a good deal larger than on Second Avenue Subway, making it the most wasteful station construction that I am aware of. This is driving up the construction cost estimate to, depending on which alignment the K Line is to take as it goes north into West Hollywood, around $1 billion per kilometer.

Nick provides some station footprint diagrams. The K Line’s stations are designed for a maximum train length of three cars, or about 81 meters in total. The stations on the proposed extension, however, start at 124 meters when there is no crossover, or 50% overage, and most are 300 meters with crossovers. In other words, an underground light rail extension with trains less than half the length of New York City Subway trains is proposed to have stations about as long as those on Second Avenue Subway, which are already about twice as long as they need to be by New York standards. (In the low- and medium-cost countries for which I have this information, the overage is not 50%, but ranges between 3% and 17%.)

The 50% overage without crossovers is completely unjustifiable. But the crossovers, which turn the 50% into nearly 300% overage, are equally unjustifiable. It is not normal to build bored tunnel subways with so many crossovers, precisely because it’s expensive to blast caverns for them. Marco gives the example of Milan M4, which, counting the soon-to-open extension, has four crossovers in 15.5 km and 21 stations.

To this I can add that the Copenhagen Metro, built with bored tunnel with blasted caverns for crossover, has on the original line just two underground crossovers; the City Circle Line has only two as well, plus two on the M4 branch. There are more crossovers above ground, where it’s not so expensive to build them, but still less than one per station. This is a system designed for 24/7 operation; crossovers are required to allow trains to run on a single bidirectional track at night to permit maintenance, one track at a time. Without this constraint, even fewer crossovers are needed – only at the ends of the line, which includes the end of each operating segment if the line opens in stages.

If the K Line extension’s split between station and tunnel costs is similar to that of Second Avenue Subway Phase 1, 3:1, then shrinking the stations to the normal overage of a few percent would slash their cost by a factor of close to four, which would cut the line’s cost by more than half. This is what the extravaganza of crossovers is doing to Los Angeles and its ability to build mass transit infrastructure.

Quick Preliminary Notes on Rolling Stock Costs

At the Transit Costs Project, we’re starting to build a database not just of infrastructure construction costs but also rolling stock acquisition costs. The database is extremely incomplete and not at all ready for public consumption, so please read the following preliminaries with the understanding that more data may reverse some conclusions. All costs below are in 2023 PPP dollars.

  • The $100,000/linear meter cost for single-deck rolling stock, which I mentioned in previous blog posts, looks like it holds for European regional trains and Chinese metros. Smaller trains, such as trams, may just be more expensive per linear meter.
  • The variation in costs is, as expected, much narrower than in the costs of infrastructure. $200,000/meter exists but is unusual and generally indicates something wrong happened, such as the Berlin S-Bahn stock, which suffered from a lawsuit by Alstom over losing the bid to Stadler.
  • There is a rolling stock premium for rubber-tired metros in Paris, on the order of 40% over steel-wheeled metros.
  • Berlin and London have expensive metro stock as well, and reading some about their production, I am left to wonder if there’s somewhat of a prima donna premium for cities of such size.
  • To my surprise, in cases where the costs of a base order and options can be disaggregated, the options aren’t consistently cheaper than the base.
  • There doesn’t seem to be any secular increase in real rolling stock acquisition stock going back to the early 2000s.
  • The PPP conversion is dicey within Europe; there’s an integrated European supply chain, and then the question in non-euro countries is which PPP rate to delfate to, which makes a big difference where the PPP conversion differs substantially from the euro’s, in one direction in Switzerland (with its cross-border lines, to add a complication) and in the other in Eastern Europe. In contrast, it’s easy in China, with its domestic supply chain, and in the US, with its pretense of one.
  • American costs are near the high end, and rising gently, but even the New York City Subway orders of the 1990s and 2000s had somewhat of a premium – I’m getting $148,000/meter for the base R142/R142A (source) and $120,000/meter for the base R160 (source) with higher costs for the options. Nonetheless, at worst the cost premium for the R211 ($160,000 base, $145,000 option) is a factor of 1.6, not the factor of around 10 we see for infrastructure.
  • Some orders come with maintenance and some don’t, and we try to disaggregate this when we can, but sources are inconsistent on whether they mention maintenance bundles in the contract; in at least two cases, the maintenance contract drives up the cost premium, but in some others (like rubber-tired Parisian trains), the premium is not about maintenance.

Reports on High-Speed Rail and the Northeast Corridor

Two reports that I’ve collaborated on are out now, one about high-speed rail planning for Marron and one about Northeast Corridor maintenance for ETA. A third piece is out, not by me but by Nolan Hicks, about constant-tension catenary and its impact on speed and reliability. The context for the latter two pieces is that the Northeast Corridor has been in a recurrent state of failure in the last three weeks, featuring wire failures, circuit breaker failures, track fires, and transformer fires. The high-speed rail planning piece is of different origin – Eric interviewed officials involved in California High-Speed Rail and other American projects that may or may not happen and this led to synthesizing five planning recommendations, which aren’t really about the Northeast Corridor but should be kept in mind for any plan there as well.

The broader context is that we’re going to release another report specific to the Northeast Corridor, one that’s much more synthetic in the sense of proposing an integrated infrastructure and service planning program to cut trip times to about 1:53 New York-Washington and 2:00 New York-Boston, informed by all of these insights. Nolan’s piece already includes one key piece of information that’s come out of this work, about the benefits of constant-tension catenary upgrades: 1:53 requires constant-tension catenary, and if it is not installed, the trip time is 2:04 instead, making this the single biggest piece of physical infrastructure installation the Northeast Corridor needs.

The catenary issue

Trying to go to Philadelphia, I was treated to a train stuck at Penn Station without air conditioning, until finally, after maybe 45 minutes of announcements by the conductor that it would be a while and they’d make announcements if the train was about to move, I and the other passengers got out to the station, waiting for anything to change, eventually giving up as the train and several subsequent ones were canceled. My post from three days ago about Germany has to be read with this context – while publishing I was waiting for all three pieces above to appear.

I encourage people to read the ETA report for more detail about the catenary. In brief, overhead wires can be tensioned by connecting them to fixed places at intervals along the tracks, which leads to variable tension as the wires expand in the heat and contract in the cold; alternatively, they can be tensioned with spring wires or counterweights, which automatically provide constant tension. The ETA report explains more, with diagrams, some taken from Garry Keenor’s book on rail electrification, some made by Kara Fischer (the one who made the New Mexico public transit maps and others I’ll credit upon request, not the USDOT deputy chief of staff). The catenary on the Northeast Corridor has constant tension north of New York, and for a short stretch in New Jersey, but not on the vast majority of the New York-Washington half of the line.

Variable-tension catenary is generally unreliable in the heat, and is replaced with constant-tension catenary on main lines even in Europe, where the annual temperature range is narrower than in the United States. But it also sets a blanket speed limit; on the Northeast Corridor, it is 135 mph, or 217 km/h – the precision in metric units is because 217 km/h is the limiting speed of a non-tilting train on a curve of radius 1,746 meters, a common radius in the United States as it is a round number in American units (it’s 1°, the degree being the inverse of curve radius). This blanket speed limit slows trains by 11 minutes between New York and Washington, subject to the following assumptions:

  • The tracks otherwise permit the maximum possible speed based on curvature, up to 320 km/h; in practice, there are few opportunities to go faster than 300 south of New York. There is an FRA rule with little justification limiting trains to 160 mph, or a little less than 260 km/h, on any shared track; the rule is assumed removed, and if it isn’t, the cost is about one minute.
  • Trains have the performance of the Velaro Novo, which trainset is being introduced to the United States with Brightline West. Other trainsets may have slightly better or worse performance; the defective Avelia Liberty sets are capable of tilt and therefore the impact of maximum speed is larger.
  • Intercity trains make one stop per state, counting the District of Columbia as a state.
  • Intercity and regional trains are timetabled together, on a clockface schedule with few variations. If a train cannot meet these requirements, it stays off the corridor, with a forced transfer at Philadelphia or Washington. All train schedules are uniformly padded by 7%, regardless of the type of catenary. If variable-tension catenary requires more padding, then the impact of constant-tension catenary is increased.

The bulk of the difference between 1:53 and the current trip time of about 2:50 is about timetabling, not infrastructure – when the trains are running smoothly, there is extensive schedule padding, in one case rising to 35 minutes south of New York on a fast Regional. Rolling stock quality provides a boost as well, to both reliability and acceleration rates. Faster speeds on curves even without tilt matter too – American standards on this are too conservative, and on a built-out line like the Northeast Corridor, being able to run with 180 mm of cant and 130 mm of cant deficiency (see explanation here) is valuable. But once the regulatory and organizational issues are fixed, the biggest single piece of infrastructure investment required is constant-tension catenary, simultaneously reducing trip times and improving reliability.

Nolan’s piece goes more into costs for catenary repair, and those are brutal. The Northeast Corridor Project Inventory includes $611 million to just replace the catenary between Newark and New Brunswick, without constant-tension upgrades. This is 36.5 route-km, some four- and some six-track; the $16.7 million/cost electrifies a new line from scratch around six times over in non-English-speaking countries, and while the comparison is mostly to double-track lines, around half the cost of electrification is the substations and transformers, and those aren’t part of the project in New Jersey.

State of Good Repair projects always end up as black holes of money, because if half the money is spent and there’s no visible improvement, it’s easy for Amtrak to demand even more money, without having to show anything for it. An improvement project would be visible in higher speeds, better ride quality, higher reliability, and so on, but this is free money in which the cost is treated as a positive (jobs, the appearance of work, etc.) and not something to be minimized in pursuit of another goal. One conclusion of this is that no money should be given to catenary renewal. Money can be spent on upgrades with visible results, in this case constant-tension catenary. On all else, Amtrak cannot be trusted.

High-speed rail planning

The report we wrote on high-speed rail planning at Marron is longer than the ETA report, but I encourage people to read it as well, especially anyone who wishes to comment here. In brief, we give five broad recommendations, based on a combination of reviewing the literature on high-speed rail, cost overruns, and public infrastructure management, and interviewing American sources in the field.

  1. The federal government needs to nurture local experimentation and support it with in-house federal expertise, dependable funding, and long-term commitment.
  2. The FRA or another federal entity should have consistent technical standards to ensure scale and a clear operating environment for contractors.
  3. The federal government should work with universities to develop the technology further, which in this case means importing standards that work elsewhere – high-speed rail in 2024 is a mature technology, not requiring the inventions of new systems that underlay the Japanese, French, and German networks.
  4. Agencies building high-speed rail should have good project delivery, following the recommendations we gave in the subway construction costs report. Using consultants is unavoidable, but there needs to be in-house expertise, and agencies should avoid being too reliant on consultants or using consultants to manage other consultants.
  5. Agencies and states should engage in project planning before environmental reviews and before making the decision whether to build; the use of environmental reviews as a substitute for planning leads to rushed designs, which lead to mistakes that often prove fatal to the project.

Currently, all American high-speed rail plans should be treated as case studies of what to avoid. However, this does not mean that all of them fail on all five criteria. For one, California High-Speed Rail largely used pan-European technical standards in its planning; Caltrain did not in related planning including the electrification project and the associated resignaling (originally intended to be the bespoke CBOSS). The criterion on technical standards becomes more important as different projects interact – for example, Brightline West is inconsistent about what it’s using. Then there’s Texas Central, which uses turnkey Shinkansen standards, but as it’s turned over to Amtrak is bound to get modifications that conflict with what Japan Railways considers essential to the Shinkansen, such as total lack of any infrastructure mixing with legacy trains.

Notably, none of this is about the Northeast Corridor directly. My own interpretation of the report’s recommendations points out to other problems. For example, the Northeast Corridor’s technical standards are consistent but also bad, coming from an unbroken legacy of American railroader traditions whose succors can barely find Germany on a map, let alone bother to learn from it or any other foreign country. This way, the New Haven Line, which with modern trainsets and associated standards has few curves limiting trains to less than 150 km/h, is on a blanket speed limit of 75 mph, or 121 km/h, in Connecticut, with several further slowdowns for curves. There’s long-term planning for the corridor, and it’s bipartisan, but this long-term planning involves agencies that fight turf wars and mostly want to get the others out of what they perceive as their own turfs. There is lush funding, but it goes to the wrong things – Moynihan Train Hall but no improvements at the track level of Penn Station, extensive track renewal at 1.5 orders of magnitude higher cost than in Germany, in-place bridge replacements on curvy track instead of nearby bypasses.

The current planning does use too many consultants – in fact, Penn Reconstruction’s interagency agreement stipulates that they use consultant-centric project delivery methods, with one possibility, progressive design-build (what most of the world calls design-build; what New York calls design-build is different and better), not even legal in New York state law, but the local power brokers are trying to legalize it and break their own construction cost records. But it’s not quite the same as not bothering to develop in-house talent – there is some, and sometimes it isn’t bad, but poor project management and lack of interagency coordination has caused the budgets for the big-ticket items that Amtrak wants to explode beyond anyone’s ability to manage. The five recommendations, applied to the Northeast, mostly speak to the low quality of the existing agencies, rather than to a hodgepodge of standards as is happening at the interface between California High-Speed Rail and Caltrain or Brightline West.

The ultimate problem on the Northeast Corridor is that it is held together with duct tape, by people who do not know how to use more advanced tools than duct tape. They constantly fight fires, sometimes literally, and never ask why fires always erupt when they’re around; it’s not the heat, because the Northeast isn’t any warmer than Japan or South Korea or Italy, and it’s not underinvestment 30+ years ago, because Germany has that history too. Nolan points out the electric traction backlog on the Northeast Corridor grew from less than $100 million in 2018 to $829 million today; the people in charge are substantially the same ones who deferred this much maintenance over the six-year period that included the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. I didn’t get into this project in order to study other people’s failures again, as we did with the construction costs report. But everything I’m seeing on the Northeast Corridor, even more than in California or Texas, points to what may be the worst intercity rail planning of any even vaguely modern country.

Anglosphere Costs and Inequality

After my last post detailing how high American subway construction costs cannot be attributed to high incomes, people in comments were talking about inequality instead. Matt was talking about lack of union power, calling high US and UK costs “social democracy by stealth,” and Michael James was talking about political elite elements of inequality including domination by Ivy League and Oxbridge graduates with their old boy networks. Just as the story that high US costs are about wealth does not stand up to closer scrutiny, the converse story, relating high US and UK costs to a negative exceptionalism about their inequality and class systems, is also false.

Inequality and costs

The Luxembourg Income Study has comparative data for inequality in most of the world, looking at inequality after taxes and transfers. The OECD has its own dataset, which mostly agrees with the LIS, except notably in the UK: on LIS data, the UK nowadays has similar inequality to Germany and France, after a long period of decline from post-Thatcher levels under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, whereas on OECD data, the UK has higher inequality than nearly anywhere else in Europe, and is slightly more unequal than halfway between Germany and the US.

But regardless, among the countries and macro-regions that build a lot of subways, the highest inequality is in India and Latin America. India’s Gini index on LIS numbers is 0.5; Indian costs are in theory below-average, but only by virtue of high use of els, and correcting for that, its costs are high by global standards and low by Anglosphere ones. Chile, remarkable for its low costs (as explained by Eno), has a Gini index of 0.46. Much more expensive Brazil is rather similar. Next to Latin America there is China, which the LIS gives a Gini of 0.41, and which has rather average costs. Any attempt to do correlations between a country’s subway construction costs and its Gini will run into those outliers; I expect the correlation is still going to be positive because of high American inequality (0.39) and high American costs, but dropping the US it might not even be positive, let alone statistically significant.

Canada and Australia

The US unambiguously has high inequality and high costs. The UK has ambiguous inequality, and other features of high inequality, such as low income mobility (see for example an OECD review). However, Canada and Australia both have lower inequality and high income mobility; a more recent paper, by Corak, Lindquist, and Mazumder, finds that Canada has more mobility than Sweden and not just more than the US.

The sort of elite that the UK and US have does not exist in Canada. The United States is a country of “where did you go to college?”; the UK is the same, except it’s called university and not college. Most of Continental Europe is not like this at all – what one studied matters much more (engineering is good, humanities are not) than where one studied. Canada is rather like Continental Europe in this – there just isn’t an equivalent of the Ivies or Oxbridge there, just a number of huge, very good research universities like Toronto, McGill, and UBC, none of which is anything like an elite American university. The current prime minister is literally the son of a previous prime minister, but his predecessor, Stephen Harper, worked his way up from the mail room of an oil company; the previous PM, Paul Martin, is the son of politicians; the PM before, Jean Chrétien, was born indigent, more reminiscent of classical Victorian literature more than modern first-world poverty. This is not the consistent middle-class or princeling upbringing of leaders in the US or UK.

And yet, Canada has horrifically high construction costs. This, again, is in a country without any of the elite hangups of the US or UK. It doesn’t have Nordic or even Franco-German inequality, but it’s very close to France and Germany and not at all close to the United States. It doesn’t have nearly so much core-periphery dynamics (every single province has received net equalization payments at least once in the history of the program). Its provinces have local core-periphery dynamics, but nothing by the standards of any region or small country that builds subways at reasonable costs. It doesn’t need to do stealth social democracy.

Italy and East Asia

While Canada (and Australia) has American costs without American inequality, in Italy we see low costs while inequality is, by European standards, high. On LIS numbers, Italy is the worst in Western Europe on this. It also has low income mobility, and very sharp core-periphery dynamics, with incomes in Lombardy clocking in at about twice the level of Campania and Sicily. If anywhere needs to do stealth social democracy, it’s Italy – the core-periphery dynamic does lead to social disaffection on both sides of the North-South divide.

And yet none of that happens. Construction costs in Central and Northern Italy are rather low. They’re higher in Naples, for geological reasons more than any stealth social democracy.

What’s more, Italian costs fell between the 1980s and 2000s, an era of much cleanup of the endemic corruption of the First Italian Republic. This did not involve any resolution of longstanding social tensions – the North-South divide remained as large as ever, economic inequality rose (slightly), the one-party rule of Democrazia Cristiana was replaced with left-right polarization and the growth of the both extremist and regionalist-to-secessionist Lega Nord as one component of the right coalition. Economic growth ground to a halt – Italy took until about last year to recover to 2007’s GDP per capita, which itself was not too far above 1990s levels.

And again, Italian costs fell.

Democratic East Asia has different tensions – very deep political polarization in Taiwan and South Korea, political corruption, distaste for a universal welfare state of exactly the kind that encourages stealth place-based replacements, brutal test meritocracies in which the leadership comes from the same narrow social milieus as the US and UK. Taiwanese costs are high, though not Anglosphere-high; Japanese ones are lower; Korean ones are quite low. None of this seems to matter.

The timing of Anglosphere cost growth

To be clear, there are elements of the Reaganite and Thatcherite package that I do think are responsible for high costs – namely, the delegitimization of the civil service. But they’re not usually core to what people perceive as Thatcherism, and much of the dismantling of state capacity happened under people trying to come up with a synthesis of postwar big government and the Reaganite and Thatcherite antithesis thereto, leading to public-private partnerships and outsourcing of government functions.

None of that has anything to do with inequality or stealth social democracy or elite theory, though. The same cost explosion happened in Canada, where on LIS numbers, inequality has been largely the same since the 1970s; Brian Mulroney, unlike Thatcher or Reagan, did not preside over a rise in inequality. It did not happen in Germany, where inequality did rise under Gerhard Schröder and early Angela Merkel; Schröder’s ideology was similar in broad outline to that of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, except that under Schröder economic growth was weak and inequality rose, the opposite of Clinton and Blair, and yet Anglo-style privatization of state planning to consultancies did not happen.

Rather, the culprit for high costs must be a more specific set of project delivery mechanisms that have been popularized in 1990s Britain – the same globalized system I mentioned in the previous post, workshopped by British consultants in Hong Kong and Singapore, and now in the Gulf states. British neoliberalism had Singapore and Hong Kong to absorb consultants, whereas German neoliberalism had Russia, which led to different dynamics, such as gas dependence and geopolitical weakness, rather than Russia inviting Germans to teach it how to redo the way RZhD contracts infrastructure and operations.

And in the US, costs rose from an already high base. This is not the same situation as in the UK, where in the 1960s and 70s costs were the same as in Continental Europe. Rather, American costs were already high, New York costs having exploded in the 1920s. Things have gotten worse in the last 40 years, but the mechanisms aren’t always the same, and the atrophying of the civil service is not a matter of stealth social democracy, not when postwar New York was incapable of building.

Meme Weeding: High Wages and Baumol’s Cost Disease

The Baumol effect is a mechanism for how the real costs of goods and services can rise over time: wages rise due to economy-wide productivity growth, including in sectors with no productivity growth, and this raises their overall real costs of production. The original example for Baumol was classical concerts – they use the same number of musicians as in the 19th century, but wages have increased from 19th-century levels. More generally, it’s also used to explain higher real costs of services as service productivity growth lags manufacturing productivity growth.

Unfortunately, I’ve also seen people use Baumol as a way of explaining rising infrastructure construction costs, for which it is not at all a good explanation. In fact, even though growth in average infrastructure costs over time is documented, there is very little cross-national correlation between GDP per capita and per-km subway construction costs. Notably, the Anglosphere’s very high construction costs affect not just very rich countries like the US and Singapore but also ones that are poorer than the Western European average, like New Zealand, Ireland (which has high GDP per capita due to corporate profits but unimpressive local wages), or increasingly the United Kingdom. Conversely, Nordic and Swiss wealth has not at all led to high construction costs, and until recently the Nordic countries and Switzerland had some of the world’s lowest tunneling costs.

Metro construction costs and GDP per capita

In an earlier version of the construction cost database, there was some positive correlation between GDP per capita and construction cost per km (about 0.23), but nearly all of it came from the fact that poorer countries tend to build more els and fewer subways; correcting for that, the correlation fell to about 0.04, and turned negative if New York and Singapore were dropped. We made a scattergram at the national level:

While looking at the scattergram, bear in mind that the poorest country as of 2020 on our list, Pakistan (the small gray circle touching the much larger gray circle of India), built an all-elevated line, and in general, substantially-elevated or even all-elevated lines are common in developing Asia, including Vietnam, Bangladesh, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and India. The only all-underground Indian line in our database, Mumbai Metro Line 3, cost $535 million/km in 2023 PPP dollars; Mumbai Line 11 and Chennai’s first-phase program are the only other two items that are majority-underground, both a bit more than $300 million/km.

At this point, even if we restrict our attention to Europe, the correlation between GDP per capita and construction costs per km isn’t clear. For example, Railway Gazette has just reported on the groundbreaking of the first metro line of Cluj-Napoca, to cost 13.7 billion lei/21 km, which is $8 billion in PPP terms, or $380 million/km. But then rounding up the bottom of the EU’s GDP per capita table is Bulgaria, with fairly low costs.

This is not supposed to happen if the Baumol effect is what’s going on. Grocery prices in developing countries are lower than at first-world discounters like Walmart or Aldi, even in PPP terms. Even at tourist traps, the prices are usually lower than where the tourists came from, not because retail and food service are atypically efficient in developing countries, but because these are labor-intensive industries and labor wages are lower in Thailand or China, let alone in India or Pakistan, than in the US or Germany.

The issue of the Anglosphere

The Anglosphere has atypically high construction costs. A dummy variable that takes the value 1 in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Singapore, Hong Kong, and (when it starts building) Ireland, and 0 elsewhere, has a correlation of 0.41 with per-km construction costs. In contrast, the tunnel percentage only has 0.15 correlation, due to the aforementioned effect of high-cost developing countries building els. I’ve heard the high Anglosphere costs blamed on a kind of areal Baumol effect: high pay in professional services drags the costs up, on the theory that the United Kingdom may be poorer than Germany and no richer than France, but at least it has productive London finance that drags engineering wages up, so Britain can’t just Germanize or Francize, right?

Well, no. British engineering wages are not at all high by Continental Western European standards. London finance pays a lot, but also has been stagnating for a while, and a number of professional service firms and regional HQs have left the country in response to Brexit to locate in the rump-EU, for which Amsterdam is a popular destination. British costs remain high, and if anything, they’re exploding again. The Bakerloo line extension is now projected to cost £5-8 billion in 2023 prices for what looks like 8 km, which is around $1.2 billion/km in PPP terms, somewhat more than the much more complex Crossrail and about twice as expensive as the comparably complex Northern line extension to Battersea.

Then-Singaporean minister of transport Khaw Boon Wan excused the meteoric growth in Singapore’s MRT construction costs on the grounds that the Singaporean economy had grown rapidly as well. But we’re seeing the same cost explosion in the slower-growing United Kingdom, and conversely we’re not seeing high costs in fast-growing South Korea. New Zealand, which has had okay growth but from low levels for a Western country and remains poorer than Italy, has these extreme costs as well. It’s not that the Anglosphere is rich; it’s that it’s the Anglosphere and builds inefficiently.

So why have costs grown?

While there is no correlation between subway tunneling costs and GDP per capita, there is an evident secular growth in costs over time. It’s not uniform everywhere – German costs are barely up compared with the 1970s and Italian costs are slightly down – but it’s huge in the Anglosphere and also evident elsewhere (for examples, in France and in the Nordic countries). So what’s going on?

Well, we’ve divided the New York cost premium into three tranches: labor (mostly overstaffing, not high wages), station and system design, and procurement and soft costs. All three show evidence of having gotten worse, the first in the Northeastern United States and the other two throughout the Anglosphere and sometimes also elsewhere.

Ad labor, staffing levels in New York are just higher than elsewhere. More workers are required to service a tunnel-boring machine in New York than in Istanbul, let alone richer European cities. This is, in theory, an eexample of the Baumol effect: higher wages raise the real cost in an industry without productivity growth. But in fact, there has been plenty of productivity growth in this industry, the Northeast just refuses to make use of it. Stockholm has been able to keep up and keep its labor share of the hard costs to the same 20-something% as Turkey and Italy; New York and other Northeastern US cities are in the 40-60% range instead. Swedish construction productivity has grown at slower rates than the overall Swedish economy, but American construction productivity has fallen.

Ad station and system design, we have pointed out that stations for Second Avenue Subway Phase 1 dug a cavern twice as long as necessary for the train, for the benefit of extensive back-of-the-house spaces, where in non-UK Europe and in China, the digs are typically a single-digit percent longer than the train. This is a general North American problem, also evident in Los Angeles and Vancouver, and I believe also in London. It’s also a new problem: in the 1980s, the overage in the United States was small, comparable to contemporary European levels. Then there’s the issue of poor standardization of materials, systems, and designs; we are uncertain whether this is a growing or longstanding problem, but it is smaller in magnitude than that of excessive station size, and in general, standardization is more important in a richer economy than a poorer one since the richer economy will have more reliance on big businesses with division of labor, which is also one of the speculated causes of the falling construction productivity (it’s a less standardized sector).

Finally, ad procurement, the invention of the globalized system in which state planning is outsourced to private consultancies, and with time even the supervision of the consultants is outsourced to consultants, is an Anglosphere special, dating from the 1990s onward. This system comprises design-build procurement (confusingly called progressive design-build in New York), very large contracts sometimes growing to $1 billion apiece, lump-sum rather than itemized contracts, and privatization of risk. It’s turned entire countries, like the United Kingdom, incapable of building more than about one line per generation. The Nordic countries have been affected as well, leading to sharp cost growth from very low levels to rather average ones. Canada went from fairly normal costs in the early 2000s to building the most expensive subway outside New York with the new Ontario Line cost overruns, and this can be traced to Toronto officials visiting Madrid, a city that sticks to traditional design-bid-build procurement, and coming back convinced that to imitate Madrid’s low costs Toronto should adopt design-build.

None of this is the Baumol effect or some general cost disease. When agency officials lose interest in building things and instead want to outsource their own jobs to consultants, it’s not Baumol; it’s experimenting with a new way of project delivery and then refusing to admit that it’s a failure. The same is true when nobody bothers to say no as each operating department demands more back-of-the-house space until half the station dig is about providing high-cost underground break rooms and storage rather than about providing space for trains and passenger circulation.

It’s a comforting story for Americans, Brits, and Singaporeans to tell themselves that their infrastructure costs are so high as a byproduct of their wealth. It happens to be entirely false. It’s not even interestingly wrong; it’s just plain wrong, ignorant of the explosion in station size, of the failures of the globalized system of project delivery, and (in New York) of labor productivity innovations elsewhere. The Anglosphere is not expensive because it’s ahead in anything, but rather because it’s behind. And as we see in the United Kingdom, it doesn’t even require American or Singaporean wealth to be totally incurious of Continental European success.

Standardizing the Right Way

Picking consistent standards in order to make use of economies of scale is an important part of good planning. In our construction costs report, we attribute a high cost premium on systems and finishes in New York to lack of standardization of station designs and parts, to the point that the three stations of Second Avenue Subway used two different escalator vendors. This point has appealed to a number of area activists, who reach to not just what we report cross-nationally but also American history. John Pegram, who comments here as BQRail and writes an excellent blog on Substack, gave the example of the PCC streetcars of interwar America a week ago, and I promised I’d follow up on this; the news of the cancellation of congestion pricing delayed this post somehow but it’s still important to discuss. The issue here is that good public transportation procurement requires not just consistent standards, but also good ones, which give international vendors a familiar environment and keep in touch with technological advances.

The starting point for me is that the rolling stock on American subways and commuter rail is fairly standardized. New York City Transit procured standard designs in the 1990s, dubbed the R110A and R110B, and for decades kept buying trains based on these designs. In the 1990s and 2000s, it worked, in the sense that the trains were of comparable quality and cost to rolling stock in other large cities (although they were on the heavy side). But over time, technology diverged, and by the 2010s, a cost premium started to appear. By now, NYCT subway car contracts have a noticeable premium over the European norm, even if this premium is far smaller than the infrastructure cost premium.

Commuter and intercity rail cars have a similar issue with what the standard is. American commuter rail cars follow a few standard designs – the EMU design (in either the LIRR/Metro-North version or the SEPTA one), and the unpowered car hauled by a diesel locomotive one. DMU designs are not at all standard, and do have cost premiums as a result, especially since these are also small orders. That said, nearly all American commuter rail ridership is on EMUs or locomotive-hauled trains (usually diesel, occasionally electric), and those, too, have their problems.

The most glaring problem is that those designs are not at all what the rest of the world does. A few of the changes are modular, including the platform height and the loading gauge. The others are not; the consultants who write the design specs do so without trying to fit themselves to common products made by the multinational vendors.

Then, those specs are extremely detailed; there’s little room for a vendor to try to pawn off a standard Coradia or FLIRT and make that fit with little modification. The RFPs run into the deep hundreds of pages; SEPTA had one with more than 500 pages, and Amtrak’s most recent one ran to, I believe, 1,000. They define even what a train is, as opposed to the looser RFPs common in Europe – Spanish RFPs are 50-70 pages and have single-digit summaries, detailing just how many cars are needed, what the loading gauge is, what electrification is required, and what the expected performance level is.

Designs exist that do dialog with the international vendors and aim at a comparable product – the FRA reform process that led to alt-compliance did exactly that. But then no American commuter rail operator has bothered to make use of alt-compliance; they still buy the heavy, low-performance, low-reliability equipment that they’re used to buying, even as technology marches on and vendors don’t specialize in making that anymore.

The original example of the PCC standard is well-taken in the sense that there need to be repeatable standards. However, it’s important to understand that technological advances in trains exist in East Asia and Europe, and not in North America. American standardization needs to be around what is sold on the other side of either the Atlantic or the Pacific, with no wheel reinvention, and no “we are familiar with this so we’ll keep buying this” excusemaking.

American Myths of European Poverty

I occasionally have exchanges on social media or even in comments here that remind me that too many people in the American middle class believe that Europe is much poorer than the US. The GDP gap between the US and Northern Europe is small and almost entirely reducible to hours worked, but the higher inequality in the US means that the top 10-20% of the US compare themselves with their peers here and conclude that Europe is poor. Usually, it’s just social media shitposting, for example about how store managers in the US earn the same as doctors in Europe. But it becomes relevant to public transit infrastructure construction in two ways. First, Americans in positions of authority are convinced that American wages are far higher than European ones and that’s why American construction costs are higher than European ones. And second, more broadly, the fact that people in positions of authority really do earn much more in the US than here inhibits learning.

The income gap

The United States is, by a slight amount, richer than Northern Europe, which for the purposes of this post comprises the German-speaking world, the Nordic countries, and Benelux. Among the three largest countries in this area, Germany is 16.5% poorer than the US, the Netherlands 8.3% poorer, Sweden 14.3%. This is more than anything an artifact of shorter working hours – Sweden has an ever so slightly larger GDP per hour worked, the other two are 6-7% poorer per hour worked. All three countries have a much higher 15-64 labor force participation rate than the US, but they’re also older, which in the case of Germany actually gets its 15+ rate to be a hair less than the US’s. But there’s much more part-time work here, especially among women, who face large motherhood penalties in German society (see figures 5-7 in Herzberg-Druker, and Kleven et al). Germany is currently in full employment, so it’s not about hidden part-time work; it’s a combination of German-specific sexism and Europe-wide norms in which workers get around six weeks of paid vacation per year.

One implication of the small gap in income per hour is that wages for the same job are likely to be similar, if the jobs pay close to the mean wage. This is the case for tunnel miners, who are called sandhogs in the United States: the project labor agreements in New York are open – the only case in which itemized costs are publicly available – and showcase fully-laden employment costs that, as we document in our construction costs reports, work out to around $185,000/year in 2010 prices; there is a lot of overstaffing in New York and it’s disproportionately in the lower-earning positions, and stripping those, it’s $202,000/year. I was told that miners in Stockholm earn 70,000 kronor/month, or about $100,000/year in PPP terms (as of 2020-1), and the fully-laden cost is about twice that; a union report from the 2000s reports lower wages, but only to about the same extent one would expect from Sweden’s overall rate of economic growth between then and 2021. The difference at this point is second-order, lower than my uncertainty coming from the “about” element out of Sweden.

While we’re at it, it’s also the case for teachers: the OECD’s Education at a Glance report‘s indicator D3 covers teacher salaries by OECD country, and most Northern European countries pay teachers better than the US in PPP terms, much better in the case of Germany. Teacher wage scales are available in New York and Germany; the PPP rate is at this point around 1€ = $1.45, which puts starting teachers in New York with a master’s about on a par with their counterparts in the lowest-paying German state (Rhineland-Pfalz). New York is a wealthy city, with per capita income somewhat higher than in the richest German state (Bavaria), but it’s not really seen in teacher pay. I don’t know the comparative benefit rates, but whenever we interview people about European wage rates for construction, we’re repeatedly told that benefits roughly double the overall cost of employment, which is also what we see in the American public sector.

The issue of inequality

American inequality is far higher than European inequality. So high is the gap that, on LIS numbers, nearly all Western European countries today have lower disposable income inequality than the lowest recorded level for the US, 0.31 in 1980. Germany’s latest number is 0.302 as of 2021, and Dutch and Nordic levels are lower, as low as 0.26-0.27; the US is at 0.391 as of 2022. If distributions are log-normal (they only kind of are), then from a normal distribution log table lookup, this looks like the mean-to-median income ratios should be, respectively, 1.16 for Germany and 1.297 for the US.

However, top management is not at the median, and that’s the problem for comparisons like this. The average teacher or miner makes a comparable amount of money in the US and Northern Europe. The average private consultant deciding on how many teachers or miners to hire makes more money in the US. A 90th-percentile earner is somewhat wealthier in the US than here, again on LIS number; the average top-1%er is, in relative terms, 50% richer in the US than in Germany (and in absolute terms 80% richer) and nearly three times as rich in the US as in Sweden or the Netherlands, on Our World in Numbers data.

On top of that, I strongly suspect that not all 90th percentile earners are created equal, and in particular, the sort of industries that employ the mass (upper) middle class in each country are atypically productive there and therefore pay better than their counterparts abroad. So the average 90th-percentile American is noticeably but not abnormally better off than the average 90th-percentile German or Swede, but is much better off than the average German or Swede who works in the same industries as the average 90th-percentile American. Here we barely have a tech industry by American standards, for example; we have comparable biotech to the US, but that’s not usually where the Americans who noisily assert that Europe is poor work in.

Looking for things to mock

While the US is not really richer than Northern Europe, the US’s rich are much richer than Northern Europe’s. But then the statistics don’t bear out a massive difference in averages – the GDP gap is small, the GDP gap per hour worked is especially small and sometimes goes the other way, the indicators of social development rarely favor the US, immigration into Western Europe has been comparable to immigration to the US for some time now (here’s net migration, and note that this measure undercounts the 2022 Ukrainians in Germany and overcounts them in Poland).

So middle-class Americans respond by looking for creative measures that show the level of US-Europe income gap that they as 90th-percentile earners in specific industries experience (or more), often dropping the PPP adjustment, or looking at extremely specific things that are common in the US but not here. I’ve routinely seen American pundits who should know better complain that European washing machines and driers are slow; I’m writing this post during a 4.5-hour wash-and-dry cycle. Because they fixate on proving the superiority of the United States to the only part of the world that’s rich enough not to look up to it, they never look at other measures that might show the opposite; this apartment is right next to an elevated train, but between the lower noise levels of the S-Bahn, good insulation, and thick tilt-and-turn windows, I need to concentrate to even hear the train, and am never disturbed by it, whereas American homes have poor sound insulation to the point that street noise disturbs the sleep.

Learning to build infrastructure

The topline conclusion of any American infrastructure reform should be “the United States should look more like Continental Europe, Turkey, non-Anglophone East Asia, and the better-off parts of Latin America.”

If it’s written in the language of specific engineering standards, this is at times acceptable, if the standards are justified wholly internally (“we can in fact do this, here’s a drawing”). Even then, people who associate Americanness with their own career success keep thinking safety, accessibility, and similar issues are worse here, and ask “what about fire code?” and then are floored to learn that fire safety here is actually better, as Stephen Smith of Market Urbanism and the Center for Building constantly points out.

But then anything that’s about management is resisted. It’s difficult to convince an American who’s earning more than $100,000 a year in their 20s and thinks it’s not even that much money because their boss is richer that infrastructure project management is better in countries where the CEO earns as much money as they do as an American junket assistant. Such people readily learn from rich, high-inequality places that like splurging, which are not generally the most productive ones when it comes to infrastructure. Even Americans who think a lot about state capacity struggle with the idea that Singapore has almost as high construction costs as the US; in Singapore, the CEO earns an American salary, so the country must be efficient, right? Well, the MRT is approaching $1 billion/km in construction costs for the Cross-Island Line, and Germany builds 3 km of subway (or decides not to build them) on the same budget and Spain builds 6 km, but Europe is supposedly poor and Americans can’t learn from that.

The upshot is that even as we’re seeing some movement on better engineering and design standards in the United States, resulting in significant cost savings, there’s no movement for better overall management. Consultant-driven projects remain the norm, and even proposals for improving state capacity are too driven by domestic analysis without any attempt at international learning or comparativism. Nor is there any effort at better labor efficiency – management in the US hates labor, but also thinks it’s entirely about overpaid workers or union safety rules, and doesn’t stoop to learn how to build more productively.

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.

The United States Has Too Few Road Tunnels

The Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore collapsed after a drifting freighter hit one of its supports; so far, six people are presumed dead. Immediately after the disaster, people were asking if it could be prevented, and it became clear that it is not possible to build a bridge anchor that can withstand the impact of a modern ship, even at low speed. However, it was then pointed out to me on Mastodon that it’s not normal in Europe to have such a bridge over a shipping channel; instead, roads go in tunnel. I started looking, and got to a place that connects my interest in construction costs with that of cross-cultural learning. Europe has far more road tunneling than the US does, thanks to the lower construction costs here; it also has better harmonization of regulations of what can go in tunnels and what cannot. The bridge collapse is a corner case of where the American system fails – it’s a once in several decades event – but it does showcase deep problems with building infrastructure.

Road tunnels

The United States has very little road tunneling for its size. This list has a lot of dead links and out of date numbers, but in the US, the FHWA has a current database in which the tunnels sum to 220 km. Germany had 150 km in 1999, and has tendered about 170 km of new tunnel since 2000 of which only 48 are still under construction. France has 238 km of road tunnel; the two longest and the 10th longest, totaling 28 km, cross the Alpine border with Italy, but even excluding those, 210 is almost as much as the US on one fifth the population. Italy of course has more tunneling, as can be expected from its topography, but France (ex-borders) and Germany are not more mountainous than the US, do not have fjords and skerries like Norway, and don’t even have rias like Chesapeake Bay and the Lower Hudson. Japan, with its mountainous island geography, has around 5,000 km of road tunnel.

The United States builds so few tunnels that it’s hard to create any large database of American road tunnels and their costs. Moreover, it has even fewer urban road tunnels, and the few it does have, like the Big Dig and more recently the Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement tunnel, have become bywords for extreme costs, creating distaste even among pro-highway urban politicians for more and leading to project cancellations. With that in mind, the State Route 99 tunnel replacing the Alaskan Way Viaduct is 3 km long and cost $2.15 billion in 2009-19, which is $2.77 billion in 2023 dollars and $920 million/km, with just four lanes, two in each direction.

In Europe, this is not at all an exhaustive database; it represents where I’ve lived and what I’ve studied, but these are all complex urban tunnels in dense environments:

  • Stockholm: the six-lane Förbifart Stockholm project to build long bypass roads in Stockholm using congestion pricing money, after acrimonious political debates over how to allocate the money between roads and public transport, comprises 17 km of tunnel (plus 4 km above-ground) including underwater segments, for an updated cost of 51.5 billion kronor in 2021 prices, or $6.97 billion in 2023 PPPs, or $410 million/km. The project is well underway and its current cost represents a large overrun over the original estimate.
  • Paris: the four-lane A86 ring road was completed in 2011 with 15.5 km of new tunnel, including 10 in a duplex tunnel, at a cost of 2.2 billion €. I’ve seen sources saying that the cost applies only to the duplex section, but the EIB claims 1.7 billion € for the duplex. Physical construction was done 2005-7; deflating from 2006 prices, this is $4.18 billion in 2023 PPPs, or $270 million/km. This is a tunnel with atypically restricted clearances – commercial vehicles are entirely banned, as are vehicles running on compressed natural gas, due to fire concerns after the Mont-Blanc Tunnel fire.
  • Berlin: the four-lane 2.4 km long Tunnel Tiergarten Spreebogen (TTS) project was dug 2002-4, for 390 million €, or $790 million in 2023 PPPs and $330 million/km. This tunnel goes under the river and under the contemporarily built Berlin Hauptbahnhof urban renewal but also under a park. The controversial A100 17th segment plan comprises 4.1 km of which 2.7 are to be in tunnel, officially for 800 million € but that estimate is out of date and a rougher but more current estimate is 1 billion €. The exchange rate value of the euro today belies how much stronger it is in PPP terms: this is $1.45 billion, or $537 million/km if we assume the above-ground section is free, somewhat less if we cost it too. The 17th segment tunnel is, I believe, to have six lanes; the under-construction 16th segment has six lanes.

Crossing shipping channels

The busiest container ports in Europe are, by far, Rotterdam, Antwerp, and Hamburg, in this order. Rotterdam and Antwerp do not, as far as I’ve been able to tell from Google Earth tourism, have any road bridge over the shipping channels. Hamburg has one, the Köhlbrandbrücke (anchored on land, not water), on the way to one of the container berths, and some movable bridges like the Kattwykbrücke on the way to other berths – and there are plans to replace this with a new crossing, by bridge, with higher clearance below, with a tunnel elsewhere on the route. The next tranche of European ports are generally coastal – Le Havre, Bremerhaven, Valencia, Algeciras, Piraeus, Constanța – so it is not surprising the shipping channels are bridge-free; but Rotterdam, Antwerp, and Hamburg, are all on rivers, crossed by tunnel.

American ports usually have bridges over shipping channels, even when they are next to the ocean, as at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. This is not universal – crossings in Hampton Roads have tunnels – but it’s the trend. Of note, the US does occasionally tunnel under deep channels (again, Hampton Roads); that the Netherlands tunnels in Rotterdam is especially remarkable given how Holland is a floodplain with very difficult tunnel construction in alluvial soil.

Hazardous material regulations

Tunnels do not permit all traffic, due to fire risk. For example, the Mont-Blanc Tunnel requires vehicles heavier than 3.5 tons to undergo a safety inspection before entering to ensure they don’t carry prohibited dangerous goods. In Europe, this is governed by the ADR; all European countries are party to it, even ones not in the EU, and so are some non-European ones. Tunnels can be classified locally between A (no restrictions) and E (most restrictive).

The United States is not party to the ADR. It has its own set of regulations for transportation of hazardous materials (hazmat), with different classifications – and those differ by state. Here are the rules in Maryland. They’re restrictive enough that significant road freight had to use the Key Bridge, because the alternative routes have tunnels that it is banned from entering. Port Authority has different rules, permitting certain hazmat through the Lincoln Tunnel with an official escort. Somehow, the rules are not uniform in the United States even though it is a country and Europe is not; Russia and Ukraine may be at war with each other, but they have the same transportation of dangerous goods regulations.