Why Is American Rail So Costly? - Bloated Station Designs

[M II A II R II K]

Why Is American Rail So Costly?


January 27, 2021

By Connor Harris

Read More: https://www.city-journal.org/why-ame...-are-so-costly

Study: https://transitcosts.com/

Why are American rail projects so costly? The initial results of an ambitious project by three researchers at New York University’s Marron Institute suggest one culprit hiding in plain sight: pointlessly fancy train stations.

- The Green Line Extension (GLX) built by Boston’s public transit authority, the MBTA. In principle, GLX is simple. It extends an existing light-rail line 4.3 miles into Boston’s inner suburbs, mostly in a trench that already holds commuter rail tracks. But GLX’s costs ballooned after planning began in 2006, reaching $3 billion in 2015 more expensive per mile than most subways. — Much of the cost bloat, the NYU researchers found, was for bells and whistles on the line’s seven stations. The first design for GLX envisioned basic stations much like existing Green Line stops in dense parts of Boston, comprising little more than a pair of concrete platforms with wheelchair ramps and costing about $500,000 each. But in later designs, the researchers write, “These simple stations morphed into bespoke neighborhood icons with headhouses, redundant elevators, escalators, personnel rooms, fare arrays, larger footprints, and additional landscaping and street grading extending beyond the stations.”

- Simple tunnels in New York were 1.7 times as expensive as in Paris due to overstaffing of tunnel-boring machines, but New York’s stations were also larger than their Parisian counterparts and 6.5 times as expensive. One engineer in the San Francisco Bay Area has also pointed out that several suburban Bay Area Rapid Transit stations are overbuilt. For instance, Milpitas Station, part of a recent, expensive extension to San Jose, is a pointless hangar-like structure occupying more than an acre. A functional station would need just escalators from the street to the platforms, a simple bus shelter, and possibly a pedestrian bridge. — Another driver for station bloat, which played a large role in GLX, is community involvement. In reaction to postwar urban-freeway construction, which threw hundreds of thousands of residents out of their homes with minimal due process, state and local governments began requiring infrastructure projects to pass through protracted community meetings and public comments.

- “Pushing the yes button” exemplifies a general problem with government: bad policies with obvious benefits for the few and diffuse costs for the many are easier to pass.— One possible solution: transit agencies should make tradeoffs more explicit. Planners could propose multiple versions of projects: one that spends extra on fancy stations and other nice-to-haves, and a more economical version that rolls the savings into better service and faster construction. The public could even vote on these alternatives: in Switzerland, one of the world’s leaders in low-cost construction, most transit investments are made by referendum, encouraging planners to cater to the whole public, rather than just vocal minorities. Ultimately, planners need to be enabled to make economical decisions that benefit the entire population, overruling local busybodies if necessary.

.....