Comment by poulsbohemian
8 years ago
I may not understand the scope of this project, but when I read the $2 billion, my thought was "wow that's cheap!" Consider the Big Dig or the current Seattle tunnel, at $14B+ and $3B+ respectively.
8 years ago
I may not understand the scope of this project, but when I read the $2 billion, my thought was "wow that's cheap!" Consider the Big Dig or the current Seattle tunnel, at $14B+ and $3B+ respectively.
I'd guess that part of it is that people tunnels need to keep water out, and drain tunnels want to let water in. Generally keeping water out is a lot harder than letting it in.
There may also be extra safety requirements for people tunnels that could raise costs. A tunnel used for cars for example will need some way to deal with accidents. Imagine a big accident in the middle of the tunnel, perhaps with a fire, during rush hour.
You'll need some way to get rescuers in even if the public traffic lanes are completely blocked both ways by the accident. If there is also a fire you might need a way for people on foot to quickly get out.
These requirements could increase the space requirements for the tunnel, driving up costs. They might also cause limits on where the tunnel can go or how deep it can go, which may drive up costs.
To be fair, nobody would have undertaken the Big Dig if the true cost were known up-front. And a debt that's 200% GDP is a unique circumstance.
The Big Dig may have been closer to the budget, except it kept getting changed. An example would be that they initially planned on shutting down certain routes until a politician decided to announce that traffic flow would not be disrupted.
That's great if you're paid to model the traffic but probably not so great if you now have to pay the added expenses.
Just once, I'd like to see the people that planned something and signed the deals stand up to a politician. Just see the demand to make a huge, costly, unreasonable change (likely for political reasons) and say, "No, fuck it. We planned this, you already spent $3 billion on it, it's not changing now. If you want it changed, it's cancelled, the $3b goes up in smoke, along with your political career and everyone who's ever so much as had lunch with you."
I know, it's not realistic... but it would be nice to see. I have this picture in my head of the entire government running like it did in The Pentagon Wars (that's billion, with a "b"...) and nobody can stop it.
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But that indicates the project was not planned well since change requests for such a large project would have been expected.
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Similarly, the cost of Seattle's tunnel was greatly inflated by the little mistake that halted Bertha.
Chicago metro Deep Tunnel : $3B
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_and_Reservoir_Plan
Milwaukee, at well under 1/20th the size of Tokyo, spent $1B on a similar system: https://deeptunnelmke.com/impact/cost/
I don't know how they handle infrastructure, but whatever they do seems like something the rest of the world could learn from. A little while ago it made international news when they fixed a sink hole in a few days: http://edition.cnn.com/2016/11/15/asia/fukuoka-sinkhole-fill...
It should be noted that that sinkhole re-occurred shortly afterwards.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-38129691
Th original sinkhole was caused by a collapse of a under construction subway tunnel. This second time is just regular settling, there was no second collapse.
There is also this:
1,200 Japanese workers convert above-ground train to subway line in a matter of hours.
https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/2msfz2/1200_japanes...
That's what I thought as well, $2 billion doesn't seem like that much for that kind of project?
The project is a number of years old now. The cost of construction projects tend to increase by 15% per year in western countries.
Or the $3.5B approved for BART to upgrade some lights and wash more of the urine smell off the seats.
This is (intentionally?) false and misleading.
$3.2B of that is going to replacing the system's electrical infrastructure, replacing 90 miles of track infrastructure, and on retrofitting all of the tunnels, including the Transbay tube, new train control systems, relieving crowding, and more. [1][2]
BART has problems, but it's not spending 3.5B on lights and cleaning seats, and to suggest otherwise, especially without a citation, is arguing in bad faith.
[1] http://www.bart.gov/better-bart/the-plan
[2] https://sfbay.ca/2017/05/11/bart-maps-out-plan-to-spend-3-5-...
I was being hyperbolic, and the bit about washing the smell of urine off the seats should have been a real loud indication of that.
My point was to highlight that we've allocated them $3.5billion for repairs, essentially; we're getting no new track from that bond (where the comments I was responding to were talking about wholesale new constructions).