You are correct, Stellar, the Amsterdam North-South Metro is a fiasco. It's five years behind schedule and currently slotted at 3x the original budget (although the original budget, at under E1 Bn for a ten mile heavy rail line bored through multiple tunnels in the middle of that city was always unrealistic). Another stupendously expensive, delay-prone project you could have tossed out there was the Second Avenue Subway in Manhattan.
But the amazing thing about the MBTA: measured on a cost per mile, cost per station, cost per rider, or on a simple degree-of-difficulty basis, the T can belly up with the most ridiculous urban transit boondoggles of all time on a cost basis before they even turn a shovel. And after they actually start and blowing their generous budgets and unambitious timelines, they are in a league of their own.
Exhibit A: The proposed Silver Line Phase 3 bus tunnel. That was supposed to be about 2 km long, featured only two (2) "new" platform sets to connect to stations at Chinatown and Boylston (really, more like 1 1/2 given proximity of these stations and some shared egress), and was to be built entirely under roadways. The last estimate, circa 2006, before this was mercifully euthanized? $1.2 Bn over 6 years.
So let's compare: the Amsterdam project is 5x longer, will handle well over 10x the projected traffic, and is infinitely more complex than SL3 would have been, with multiple all-new stations and interconnections, and is being built in a city where (standard) labor is more expensive than Boston, tunnelling under all sorts of sensitive foundations. It's widely viewed to be an utter failure in terms of engineering, project planning, and any other metric you could care to toss out there - many have called it one of the biggest planning failures in Europe.
But if I inflate the now four-year-old T estimates for Silver Line 3 to current commodity pricing and compare the scope and cost to Amsterdam's North-South, the Amsterdam fiasco looks like a pretty good deal, no? Even if they over-run their estimates yet further it's way more cost effective than SL3 would have been.
In the present case, we are talking about a modest relocation and realignment of a rather shallow cut-and-cover underground light rail line. And true to T form, they are treating it as if they were building the freaking pyramids.
