I wish we could build more subway trains. Now it seems like adding a mile or two takes ten years and billions of dollars, and building whole systems like BART from scratch seems nearly inconceivable.
At least in public infrastructure projects, land acquisition is very expensive in California. And the second big factor is lack of competition when it comes to contractors.
However, even that showed the issues with America building so sporadically. The construction was really expensive. And a lot of those expenses could have been reduced if the US was doing this consistently enough so we could learn from them and optimize future construction.
The next phase, for example, has changed the station design based on the experience with the first phase, which alone has been estimated to save about $500mm in costs. There’s some great work being done by NYU or Columbia (I can’t remember which one) analyzing the expenses and suggesting other trivial changes (such as the working hours and the shift timings) that will save many more hundreds of millions if not billions (1 example I believe was something like modifying shift timings so excavation is completed right before the trash pickup arrives, because right now many millions were being spent to excavate additional space simply to hold the materials excavated until the trash pickup shift started).
Why do transit-infrastructure projects in New York cost 20 times more on a per kilometer basis than in Seoul? We investigate this question across hundreds of transit projects from around the world. We have created a database that spans more than 50 countries and totals more than 11,000 km of urban rail built since the late 1990s. We will also examine this question in greater detail by carrying out six in-depth case studies that take a closer look at unique considerations and variables that aren’t easily quantified, like project management, governance, and site conditions.
The goal of this work is to figure out how to deliver more high-capacity transit projects for a fraction of the cost in countries like the United States. Additionally, we hope that our site will be a useful resource for elected officials, planners, researchers, journalists, advocates, and others interested in contextualizing transit-infrastructure costs and fighting for better projects.
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Planned in the 1920s, initial demolition to make room in the 1940s and 50s, initial construction started in 1972, and it opened in 2017, so… depending on your perspective, it took up to ~90 years, but arguably no less than 45 years.
Western Europe seems to be doing fine. The EU opened 10x as many metro systems in 2024 compared to 2023 [1]. Notable systems include the Grand Paris Express, Thessaloniki Metro, and Milan M4.
Not every western country (although every Anglophone country). There's a whole spectrum of costs - e.g. Spain has the lowest costs and fastest delivery of transit projects in the developed world, by a large margin (maybe an order of magnitude?). Alon Levy at https://pedestrianobservations.com covers this in great detail if you're interested.
