Although the Antiplanner spends a lot of blog posts ranting about rail transit, the truth is that all of the rail disasters of the last decade together did not cost nearly as much as certain other government planning disasters that the Antiplanner will cover later this week. Yet new rail transit lines can impose huge costs on local taxpayers, property owners, and — often — transit riders.
The sad fact is that rail transit takes so long to plan and build that just about any line that opened in this decade is really a result of planning that began in the 1990s or earlier. But for the purposes of this list, I mainly considered lines that opened after about 2004. This list is roughly in reverse order of the amount of net waste generated by each line or system.
