How Much Has New Rail Transit Cost?

How much money have American cities spent building “new” rail transit lines? A 2005 paper published by the Brookings Institution attempted to answer this question, but the numbers were only sketchy for some systems such as San Francisco BART and Washington Metrorail. Other systems were left out entirely, as were, of course, any lines built since 2005.

Using a variety of other sources, the Antiplanner estimates that the United States has spent more than $90 billion in 2009 dollars on new rail transit lines opened since 1970. This includes the BART system, which opened in 1972 but was under construction before 1970. This does not include the Cleveland Red Line, the only post-war rail transit line built before 1970 (unless you count the Seattle Monorail, which also isn’t included). It also does not include additions made to Boston, Chicago, and other rail transit systems that existed before 1970, or the Las Vegas monorail, which was built with private funds. Finally, it does not include money spent on lines that have not yet opened, such as the Norfolk light-rail route.

In a previous post, I estimated that the Washington Metrorail system cost about $17.6 billion (not counting a recent extension to Largo). But this is only a rough estimate because it is hard to get data showing how much money has been spent each year. Since inflation has halved the value of the dollar since 1982, it is important to know the annual spending so that dollars in various years can be converted to constant dollars. Most estimates of construction costs use “year of expenditure” data, which is like adding pounds, euros, and yen and counting the total as dollars.

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For transit agencies that had rail before 1992 but built more since then, another source of information is the FTA’s New Starts annual reports. These indicate the total projected cost of new rail lines funded by FTA grants. The actual total costs may be slightly more than the final projections, but at least these numbers don’t include maintenance of older lines.

For lines not covered by the above references, the Antiplanner relied on a variety of other sources, including a few academic articles, newspaper reports, and the transit agencies themselves. All of these sources are given, with links where possible, in the Antiplanner’s paper, which covers people movers, commuter rail, heavy rail, light rail, and streetcars.

Rail lines take several years to build, and the New Starts data report year-of-expenditure costs. The Antiplanner conservatively assumes that the average expenditure was made the year before the line opened. When converting to 2009 dollars, assuming an earlier year would result in a higher cost. Other than this imprecision, I feel confident about the estimates for almost all of the rail lines except the Washington Metro and BART systems, most of whose costs I have only in one lump sum even though they were built over many years.