Thanks everyone for the kind words! This project has been highly rewarding to work on, and I'm glad our hard work is getting out to the public at large.
We are using a cost estimate of $300-500 million, mainly because those are costs of the two 'precedent projects' we reference in the proposal. Reno NV completed their 2-mile long trench+station rehabilitation for $300 million in 2005. The 'Train Box' for the Rio Grande project is only 1 mile long (so about half as many utility impacts) but would be about twice as wide, which makes it more expensive to cover with a street above it.
Note, this is not a tunnel. This is a single integrated box structure. Picture a multi-story parking structure with trains in the basement and cars on the surface level. Building as a single structure makes things so much cheaper than a conventional tunnel. A good comparison would be the parking garage beside the Wells Fargo building, which if you unwind it, would also be about a mile long. The point is that this 'train box' wouldn't be the biggest structure in downtown - we already have car infrastructure larger than what we are proposing.
The other project is, of course, Denver's Union Station, which cost around $500 million in 2014. That project realigned 0.5 miles of light rail track, demolished the existing transit center, rehabilitated the historic depot building, constructed an entirely new rail terminal with 8 tracks (our plan has only 6, but because ours is a through-station, we would have a higher capacity than Denver) and then built a huge underground bus station (which coincidently has the same square feet as our underground train platforms).
So at this point we see our plan as being larger than Reno's, but smaller than Denver's, so we feel it is appropriate to give the range of $300-500 million.
I like this comparison, because it also highlights what our neighboring cities have done. Reno and Denver are our largest neighbors on the east-west rail route, and they were forward-thinking enough to address the rail issues in their downtowns. We can do the same.
If we get busy on this project, there is the potential to have something done and ready by the next Utah Olympics, especially if they happen in 2034.
There was the question of future High Speed Rail capability. However likely it is that HSR ever comes to SLC, I think it would be wise to build the east-west commuter line (between Tooele and Park City) as HSR-compatible. It would stop at the same platforms at the Rio Grande as the 'Lake-to-Mountain' commuter trains, and might share a few other stops as well (such as the SLC airport connector stop, or Kimball's Junction near Park City). Getting any rail between SLC and Park City is actually a larger stretch than completing the Rio Grande Plan, IMO, and getting HSR money from the government to 'future-proof' this corridor actually makes rail to Park City more probable, I believe.
Anyway, its exiting times for the Rio Grande Plan! Hopefullly we'll hear more from the Mayor and the City council in the near future (they are having a formal meeting on this document soon, along with other transit leaders in the area). No matter how that meeting goes, we need to do all we can to get the plan out into the larger public conversation. Make it an
issue, something that the politicians need to talk about. Without the support of the general public, nothing can happen. Perhaps nothing will happen even if the public does support it, but certainly nothing will happen if they don't. This is to say that I am not done with this plan, and I apologize in advance for how obnoxious I am going to be about pushing it 'out there.'
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