Posted on Monday March 8th by Yonah Freemark | 7,643
We’ve barely begun the new decade, and already billions are being handed out for major transit projects around the country. But before we leap off the cliff into new territory (read: HSR) it’s not a bad idea to take a look back at what our time, efforts, and money have yielded in the last ten years — and how much we’ve gotten for each buck.
Here are the most expensive transit projects of the past decade, detailed in all their glory (or ignominy). Click the picture below to start the gallery.
March 8th, 2010 at 3:52 pm
How many of those projects were over their projected budgets?
March 8th, 2010 at 3:59 pm
Meanwhile, I’ve just heard that East Side Access has another cost escalation, and will now end up costing $8.3 billion, for about 2.5 km of tunnel and one eight-track train station.
The coming decade’s transit projects are all going to be much more expensive and run much more over budget.
March 8th, 2010 at 4:00 pm
Here’s the maps (all PDF) page for the New Jersey Transit light rail network :
http://www.njtransit.com/rg/rg_servlet.srv?hdnPageAction=SystemMapsTo
The above maps page link was tucked away in the site map. Some clown made a mess out of the home page for that system. Two of the three line links under “Learn More” will redirect you right back to that NJTransit.com home page. And the third takes you to a Flash document. So if you want the old web sites for Hudson-Bergen and River Line you’ll have to go to the Wayback Machine at Archive.org .
The above is in response to pages 3 (Hudson-Bergen) and 9 (River Line) of the gallery.
March 8th, 2010 at 4:44 pm
Here’s a link to a hi-res version of the closing graphic of the gallery (1200×635, 461KB+) :
http://www.flickr.com/photos/45398879@N02/4417612070/sizes/o/
March 8th, 2010 at 5:44 pm
The Tren Urbano wouldn’t have been such a failure if the government had finished the system, and if they had kept their eyes more open to contractors’ attempts to get away with cash in their pockets. And I know it sounds greedy, but these people were slowing down the project to squeeze out more money from the government to pay their employees. Employees need to be giving it their all to avoid these kinds of things.
Anyways, that’s my 2-cents.
March 8th, 2010 at 5:56 pm
Only 16 stations of the planned 36 were built. And there were stations planned in the historic downtown district, you know, the few districts that weren’t designed รก la Tyson’s Corner.
Notice how Seattle’s light rail was almost as expensive as the Tren Urbano, but now the Tren Urbano is built and it is the elephant in a room full of auto-oriented development. This should be strictly avoided if the US wants to be more livable. Stop states from promoting unwalkable development.
March 8th, 2010 at 6:46 pm
[...] at the Infrastructurist today, Yonah Freemark took a slideshow look at the ten most expensive North American transit projects from the past decade. Number one was the $2.63-billion, 10.7-mile Tren Urbano, and the list [...]
March 8th, 2010 at 7:20 pm
It is shocking how many of these are boondoggles. Seattle spent all that money for 14000 riders a day, which is basically what you expect from a busy at-grade bus route. Thank God the next extensions (northward and eastward) actually make sense (demand exists for those routes), but it really raises the question of why they didn’t build those first.
I’m really coming to doubt the ‘build it and they will come’ attitude of urban development. In Vancouver, they were able to make dense transit-friendly communities first. Then they were able to respond to existing demand (instead of infering potential demand), build it, and bam: 100,000 riders a day. I think Seattle could get there eventually, but because of development and zoning reform (doing away with required low density, parking, and setbacks), not because they built the train.
NYC was dense first. Then they built the subway. The subway was actually mostly a vehicle of suburban sprawl. I think that’s really the only tested model. The same is true of the only other success stories I’m familiar with, Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. I know less about DC, but they were built a world-class metro with federal dollars that the Canadian cities which actually have good ridership couldn’t possibly afford, suggesting to me that even if the metro is itself responsible for density and livability, this isn’t a reproducible success story for cities that don’t already, y’know, house the federal government.
March 8th, 2010 at 8:42 pm
Dude, the Central Link is the backbone to the system. Without the whole picture it doesn’t compare.
The same logic applies to Tren Urbano.
But thinking about what you said, I like it and I agree wholeheartedly. I wish governments would embrace that kind of thinking. That why when the time comes to spend a lot of money the investment can be more than justified.
March 8th, 2010 at 9:09 pm
Although it is not a regional system, the Dresden Strassenbahn seems to go just about everywhere in the city. I am curious as to how it stacks up against expensive projects and what its history (in terms of cost overruns) has been.
March 8th, 2010 at 10:39 pm
What about Austin’s $4B line, Houston’s $2, Dallas’s $2B Green line? Man, the internets just have no respect for Texas.
March 8th, 2010 at 11:56 pm
John: Calgary has nearly the same transit mode share as Vancouver, and was decidedly not dense first. Of course, it didn’t just build it and hoped they’d come - it upzoned areas near anticipated stations, and restricted downtown parking. Parking rates in downtown Calgary are the highest in North America outside Manhattan.
Washington has a lower transit mode share than the five largest Canadian cities. If you include its full CSA, it’s barely above Winnipeg. It has a gold-plated metro in its center, but once you step outside of downtown it becomes a slow suburb-oriented system, falling between the chairs of rapid transit and commuter rail.
March 9th, 2010 at 12:53 am
John,
Effective transit needs density to be effective, but often times the density is not possible unless you have effective transit. It is simply too difficult to have hundreds of thousands of people living and working and consuming everything they need within a few hundred acres unless there is a space efficient way of getting them there. This is what transit does.
Zoning only goes half the way there. Zoning doesn’t build density, it merely allows it to be built. In order to make density really commercially viable (to where private developers don’t mind building densely), transportation needs to already exist. If everybody in Manhattan drove to work, half of Manhattan would be a parking lot. Manhattan has the density it does today because the parking lots aren’t necessary.
Of course, the New York City subway was built in a time where densities were even higher than they are now, and in a sense all of upper manhattan was suburban sprawl, but it is a very high and even density sprawl that exists, and transit made it possible.
The C-train in Calgary that Alon mentioned is an excellent example of a transit system creating the density that they need to operate efficiently. The systems that exist but do not have high densities today are that way for one of two reasons: 1) They haven’t been around long enough to let the densities grow, or 2) They have zoning systems that are entirely too restrictive to allow higher densities from forming. This can include height restrictions, or zones that are too restrictive as to the type of building that can happen, or even parking requirements. Calgary started out fairly high in ridership, but ridership has grown at high rates (much higher than population growth) ever since. Calgary literally grew into its transit system.
March 9th, 2010 at 9:53 am
What’s the scope of this list? If Vancouver were not included, then I would imagine it is within the US. But to see Vancouver in the list, without some other cities that have dramatically expanded their systems in the past decade (here I’m thinking Madrid or Beijing, but there are probably many other cities that could be included), is a bit confusing. I guess it is North America.
March 10th, 2010 at 3:34 pm
John and Danny.
Actually, much of the New York system was built before much sprawl. The lines were often built by developers who owned vacant land in what was then “the country” of Queens and the Bronx. They built the lines to get people to thier amusement parks, or to their farmland that could then be dveloped as housing. But Danny is right in that the subways/elevateds helped promote sprawl to some degree.
March 10th, 2010 at 5:29 pm
Interesting list. Of course total cost is only one part of the equation. How effective these systems have been in attracting ridership is really the key measure. I see some ridership information for some of the systems listed but not all. In Calgary, we developed a measure when we evaluated the C-Train in comparison with other North American systems - capital cost per weekday passenger. Of course there are many reasons that these projects are very expensive, particularly if the rights of way are not available or planned as the cities developed (e.g. Vancouver) and you have to build over or under lots of expensive stuff. As well, how do cities view transit vs roadways in terms of priority? If the transit system cannot get priority at intersections you end up with lots of expensive infrastructure to maintain free flow on both systems.
If you are interested take a look at the paper we presented to the Joint International LRT Conference - St. Louis in 2006.
http://www.calgarytransit.com/pdf/Calgary_CTrain_Effective_Capital_Utilization.pdf
Calgary’s system is both inexpensive (relatively) and effective which is why we have the citizens wanting LRT to every neighbourhood
Neil Mckendrick. Manager, Transit Planning, Calgary Transit
March 10th, 2010 at 7:12 pm
CT Busboy: you’re wrong about the Bronx and Queens. The lines in those boroughs were built by the city in order to extend service to fast-growing exurban areas. Queens was doubling in population per decade even before it had any subway service, and although the areas along the Corona/Flushing Line were at first rural, the termini were not.
The lines that were built by developers connecting to amusement parks were those forming the Coney Island network today.
March 10th, 2010 at 9:53 pm
The list kind of begs that question…. “That’s it?”
To me, the list just kind of shows how anemic the transit program was over the past decade. Another legacy of George W. Bush.
March 12th, 2010 at 4:09 am
NJ’s Hudson-Bergen Light Rail actually remains likely to expand: currently it doesn’t reach into Bergen County, and there’s a continuous push to extend it there along an existing lightly used freight rail line, as was the original plan. The density and the demand are there.
There is also talk of extending the Riverline from Trenton to West Trenton — it’s not well developed but it’s not a very long extension and is all at-grade street-running, so it could happen fast if Trenton decided it wanted it.
March 12th, 2010 at 6:30 pm
[...] 4.) Infrastructurist names the 10 most expensive transit projects of the decade. [...]
March 13th, 2010 at 6:54 pm
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