Transit construction
Credit: Peter Macdiarmid
Construction costs in the United States are significantly higher than what Europeans pay, but when given the opportunity to look into the cause and ways to streamline costs, the GOP killed the investigation. (emphasis added.)
Mass transit construction costs in the United States appear to be far higher than what European countries pay for comparable projects.
The Second Avenue Subway in New York City, for example, is being built at a cost of nearly $1.7 billion per kilometer while new subway lines are being built in Paris, Copenhagen, and Berlin for about $250 million per kilometer. It’s not entirely clear what accounts for those differences or what the United States can do to increase the cost-effectiveness of its tunneling. But one clue could come from studying what Los Angeles, the city that’s doing the most rail construction in the US these days, is doing to deliver lower-than-normal costs. They’ve also been publishing project management best practices to explain what they’ve gleaned.
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As a civil engineer I have worked on the design phases of several mass transit projects in Southern California. From my experience you can’t necessarily compare projects across seas, because there are too many variables. The environmental evaluation alone could have huge implications on design, which can ultimately make for more expensive construction, and environmental policies vary between states, let alone countries. Also, there are only a dozen or so companies that are able to perform major tunneling, so it is likely that the same company working on a project in France might also bid on a project in the US. Ultimately it comes down to the client, which is likely a state or local agency, to control costs, and when the federal government gets involved with funding, it comes along with a huge amount of extra paper work, and months of additional review. Governor Brown just asked President Trump if California could cercumvent the federal government in order to complete the environmental review on their own for high-speed rail, in order to speed up the project and lower costs. CALTRANS already has the ability to go around the Fed for highway projects, and it has made projects cheaper and easier to complete. All that said, this is way more complicated an issue than the article was able to articulate. If you are wondering how companies lower costs, they do it by paying workers less, and outsourcing work to China, India, and Poland to name a few countries… so be careful what you wish for, because if the Fed pushes for cheaper delivery of projects, the global companies that deliver will have to do so by outsourcing work, which means fewer jobs for US citizens, and more room for errors.