There are a ton of "reasons," some of which are not going to be easy to remedy, but hopefully some of which will be.
Reasons I think apply:
1) US tends to split projects into smaller pieces that are less economical than building out everything at once would be. This is partly done because of poorly planned or poorly available financial frameworks, and partly done because of the relative lack of political will to do it, partly because the US is not as dense and not as reliant on transit. The aging of the population might have helped increase the understanding of benefit as people lost their drivers licenses, but it appears driverless cars may arrive soon enough to offset that.
2) Lack of Federal, universal standards that supercede local design regulations means a company suitable to bid for a Boston project may not be able to bid for a New York project. A National standards, engineering, and construction corps would help mitigate that, but Constitutionally it's hard for the Feds to mandate that and it may or may not always result in savings, even if it did save money on the hardest projects and overall.
3) No national Union contract for labor costs and work practices means localities each have to reinvent the wheel with each Union. Even though Union have been shown to typically result in cost savings for skilled labor specially projects, transit can become so specialized by local modifications that savings that occur in more common activities like building construction don't have the scale to develop in transit projects.
4) While a net positive overall, higher safety standards and accessibility standards (such as the ADA) can require designs that are visually only slightly bigger but require dramatically higher design and construction costs.
5) Local laws intended to save money by preventing graft can counter-intuitively end up increasing costs by scaring away bidders, actually denying participation by bidders who fail to meet higher standards in bid quality, or simply creating unusual bid requirements that necessitate bidders to pad their bid due to uncertainty.
6) Sometimes decisions to go with a less direct route because it's percieved to be easier and cheaper cause one phase to save money, but future extensions to incur unusual costs.
7) Unrelated to construction costs, but choosing less convenient but initially less expensive routes can result in lower use which forces a line to need to be more heavily subsidized because of lower ridership, forcing agencies to plan smaller phases each of which becomes more expensive because the fixed costs become distributed over fewer miles. This snowballs.
Americans hate the idea of central planning, but this is one area where it would almost certainly result in dramatic savings. If the Feds could plan universal transit standards for every major American city, including TOD requirements, density standards near rail station, rail width standards, and rolling stock standardization, and assumed all actual construction, development costs would almost certainly fall dramatically. As would operating costs, while resulting in higher ridership.
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