France is spending $45 billion on 120 miles of new subways designed to better connect Paris with its suburbs. Known as the Grand Paris Express, the project would add four new lines to the Paris subway system.
Map of planned new subway lines by Hektor.
At $380 million per mile, the cost sounds cheap by American standards. Yet it has already suffered huge cost overruns, as it was projected to cost just $27 billion as little as four years ago. Continue reading
This is a question the Antiplanner asked almost exactly one year ago, but it comes up again because New York governor Andrew Cuomo and mayor Bill de Blasio are still arguing who should pay to repair the subways. Those subways are contained entirely within New York City. They were built by New York City. They are owned by New York City. Yet New York City mayor Bill de Blasio argues that all of the projected $37 billion cost of restoring the subways to a state of good repair should be paid by the state, not the city.
de Blasio’s reasoning apparently is that, although the city owns the subways, it has leased them to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, a state agency that also manages commuter trains and other transit lines that connect New York City with suburbs in Connecticut and New York. de Blasio claims to fear that, if the city gives any money at all to the MTA, it will spend some of that money on transit outside of the city.
New York governor Andrew Cuomo is willing to meet de Blasio halfway, agreeing that the state will pay for half the cost if the city picks up the other half. “We’ve lost a year because the city wouldn’t pay” its share, he says. Comments on the Gothamist article reporting Cuomo’s statement show that New York City residents don’t think much of this argument. Continue reading
Back in 2010, when the Federal Transit Administration admitted that the transit industry had a $78 billion maintenance backlog, America’s largest transit system seemed to be in the best shape of those with legacy (older than 40 years) rail lines. Having undergone its own crisis in the 1970s, the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority appeared to be adequately funded and was not suffering the huge problems faced by transit agencies in Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Washington.
No more. While Boston, Chicago, and Washington transit systems are worse than ever (and Philadelphia’s is only slightly better off), New York’s subways seem poised to catch up. According to Streetsblog, between November, 2012 and November, 2016, weekday subway delays grew by 322 percent.
To be fair, one month (November) is probably not a long enough period to measure a trend. Comparing MTA’s February 2012 and 2017 performance reports, the subway’s on-time record fell from 85.4 percent in 2011 to 66.8 percent in 2016. Part of the cause is an increasing failure rate of MTA’s rolling stock, which grew from one failure every 172,700 miles in 2011 to one every 112,200 miles in 2016. Both of those numbers indicate serious problems. On top of this, most of the subway system’s escalators and elevators are also out of service. Continue reading
New York City celebrated the new year by opening the insanely expensive Second Avenue Subway. Just two miles and three stations long, this subway line cost nearly $4.5 billion, or more than $35,000 per inch, making it the most expensive subway in the world.
Of course, not all of that money went for digging tunnels and laying track, which cost “only” $734 million (which is still more than $5,000 per inch). The three stations cost $800 million each. But that’s not all: to complete the Second Avenue subway, the city also spend $500 million on engineering and $800 million for “management, real estate, station artwork, fare-collection systems and other sundry items.” If the entire New York City subway system cost that much, it would have cost more than $500 billion, or roughly the cost of the entire 47,856-mile Interstate Highway System in today’s dollars.
Of course, the city didn’t pay for it alone. The federal government chipped in at least $1.3 billion. The state of New York put in some money, but much of the money probably came from bridge tolls paid by auto drivers. Actual riders of the Second Avenue subway will pay very little of the cost and what they do pay will be paid indirectly.
