Even the T's sandbagged estimates are significantly less than that.
Regional Rail (RUR) & North-South Rail Link (NSRL)
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TheRatmeister
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It's not just NSRL, it's also full electrification of the whole network. If that doesn't at least mostly happen NSRL isn't either.
I very much disagree. For the initial build out, it should be the Fairmount + Providence Line electrification (cheap) and on the north side the Rockport/Newport line up to Salem. That's it for the initial. After that north and south commuter rail lines can be electrified independently of the NSRL. Trying to do a big bang full electrification of the network is a terrible idea, and will never happen.
I feel like it’s not surprising that no one has been working on the NSRL? Whether it’s 5 or 15 billion, it will be a big project, and it was clear that the 2018 study was patently ridiculous and therefore was clear that the Baker admin wasn’t interested.
Given… many things about the Baker admin, I was not at all expecting anyone to be quietly working behind the scenes.
Given… many things about the Baker admin, I was not at all expecting anyone to be quietly working behind the scenes.
Yes, I agree with this — I probably would add electrification to Waltham/Weston, as that stretch can absorb higher freqs than the Eastern Route can. Run Fairmount trains at high freq to Waltham, run PVD trains to Lynn/Salem/Peabody at lower frequencies.
On the topic of broad costs for an NSRL: I outlined in January why I think $10B is good as anything else to toss around as an estimate. (Sorry for the triple post.)
Teban54
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I wonder how the cost estimates (as well as the GL Reconfiguration one) will change when Red-Blue costs $850 million for a 0.5-mile C&C tunnel.
At the surface, that translates to ~$1.7 billion per mile, which is slightly above your estimated cost in both threads. And we can expect a TBM tunnel to cost even more.
Yeah, I think my initial comment at the time still holds:
I don't mean to be dismissive of your point. For sure, costs will rise, and, as ever, we can't forget that GLX's cost per mile was far above average, which doesn't bode well for the prospect of future projects keeping their costs to industry standards.
One would really hope the MBTA or someone at the state would do a thorough and in-depth retrospective on the GLX so that the MBTA can learn from the problems and mistakes for future projects.
JeffDowntown
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Everyone always states that a TMB tunnel will, by definition, cost more than a cut-and-cover tunnel on a per mile basis, but that is simply not true.
A TBM tunnel through a clean boring right-of-way (like under the O'Neill Tunnel, the most likely route) would likely be cheaper than a cut-and-cover tunnel through an alternate route strewn with utilities and unforeseeable obstructions, on a per mile basis.
And a big cost driver in NSRL is the deep stations at South and North Station (and potentially Central). But those stations are going to be deep under any scenario, because they have to be under all the existing underground infrastructure.
Teban54
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While I agree with what you're saying in general, isn't it believed that Cambridge St, which Red-Blue will traverse under, is already largely free of underground utilities due to Urban Renewal efforts?
I do realize that comparing costs of Red-Blue and NSRL is apples to oranges, but if a C&C without (or with minimal) utility relocation is already above average in cost, it speaks poorly of our ability to keep costs under control.
JeffDowntown
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New Connection for Boston Subway Lines Could Cost $850M : CEG
An engineer with the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority outlined a plan before an MBTA board on June 7 that would create a subway extension linking Boston's Red and Blue Lines at a cost of $850 million, while also requiring nearly 10 years of design and construction.
www.constructionequipmentguide.com
"He estimated the construction costs at $740 million, with another $110 million set aside for design, administration, and train costs.
CommonWealth Magazine reported that the spending plan for the concept estimates the cost of tunnel construction at $270 million, or nearly $114,000 per foot. A new Blue Line station was estimated at $60 million and the reconstruction of Cambridge Street at $20 million. The proposal includes $140 million for contingencies, $50 million for additional design work, $130 million for inflation, and $130 million for other measures."
I have (perhaps incorrectly) assumed the extra $130 million for other measures are for things like utility relocation.
F-Line to Dudley
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Cambridge St. isn't free of utilities. Its utilities are better-mapped because it was a late-1930's urban renewal, sparing the anything-goes 19th century spaghetti of, say, the Big Dig. But there's definitely crap under there that the 'sandwich' layer in a C&C tunnel is going to have to accommodate. It's maybe "medium-easy" on the overall difficulty scale because the road's width makes accommodating the 'sandwich' layer easier, but it's not frictionless.
The U.S. has simply given up the ghost on cost control. In any other country excepting maybe the U.K. these projects could've been done with half the cost, but we don't even flinch at estimates that round up to a $B anymore.
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Electrification is not subject to wild runaway cost inflation, unless you manage the project as poorly as Caltrain so thoroughly has. It usually scales at a fixed linear cost. The only places with a chance to sail on their costs are on the outskirts of the network, where 2nd substations will be needed (25 kV subs can cover about 30 miles), where some lines (Newburyport and Rockport out on the branches, for instance) have poorer transmission line coverage and may need some substantial feeder infrastructure, and where some lines (Haverhill mostly) have maxed-out freight clearance issues. But that's the outskirts of the system. Electrifying to Route 128 on all of the mainlines is not a backbreaking production, and that's all you really need to have whole-system functional pair-matching with NSRL on its debut service day.
Yes, I could see the Cape still being unwired by the time NSRL happens; it's far out, it's a lot of subs, and there's questions about whether :30 service is truly needed or whether hourlies will do. Yes, I could see Haverhill+Wildcat lagging if we're wracking our brains figuring out how to do wires and double-stacked freights under some of the snug Lawrence-North Andover bridges. Yes, I could see Fitchburg past Littleton lagging for a second sub...or Fall River/New Bedford for similar distance-related reasons. Yes, I could see the Old Colony being deferred until the single-track pinch is fixed, because the branches can't do better-than hourly service without. But if we're serious about Regional Rail all the mains to 128 or even 495 are doable within a couple decades (generously!) and a couple billion total. Check the route miles that continental Europe is still first-time electrifying on a year-by-year basis. It's really not as much of a megaproject as "can't-build" U.S. attitude says it is.
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I would argue that the single biggest cost driver is that comparative to Europe, is that the US pays workers obscenely well. Material and equipment cost similar amounts everywhere, but a tunnel worker on NYCMTA's 2nd Ave Subway project can expect to earn around $110/hr, plus overtime at 2-3x. Here in Boston that's currently ~$77/hour, and that's a legally mandated minimum - prevailing wage must be paid on all federally or state funded projects exceeding $1000, but note that that's only for private firms contracted by the government - in house workers can and are paid less.
Compare that to Germany, where a tunnel worker would be well paid at €33/Hour, and overtime is compensated through comp time, not a multiplier. It also doesn't account for the EU rules allowing companies and individuals from comparatively low cost EU countries like say, Romania or Spain, to bid for and work on projects in the Netherlands, and they actually have a unified contracting regime under FIDIC to harmonize terms and conditions.
F-Line to Dudley
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Alon Levy, who's dedicated their career to analyzing cost inflation, disagrees. The biggest driver in the U.S., Canada, and U.K. is lack of in-house project management. Having contractors handle every step of the way from study to design to build instead of having substantial professional oversight in the in-house ranks has led to runaway inflation. It's a very top-down problem. Bottom-up labor costs can explain some of the differences between continental European countries, but it doesn't explain the enormity of the disconnect across the Atlantic. Even the sandhogs in NYC don't begin to explain how divorced from reality New York transit construction costs have gone; that fish rots thoroughly from the head down.
I should have clarified that I was looking at costs in the construction component only, not including soft costs like project management and owners costs. Certainly, I'd hardly argue with Levy that European soft costs are far better controlled, nor am I going to argue that NYC's severe issues keeping any costs under control is a management driven problem. But I'd also note that our fractured and very locally driven contracting permitting, environmental review and approval process doesn't help at all on the national level.
source
India is in the process of electrifying the whole freaking country - like 40,000 miles of rail. Lots is freight, but they did it in 10 years.
Opinion | Indian Railways: Is 100 Percent Electrification A Boon? - News18
Complete electrification of the railway network is unlikely to reduce pollution as long as power generation is predominantly coal-based. It would be strategically risky to make the entire railway electric-dependent
www.news18.com
Charlie_mta
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Pretty amazing that a much poorer country than the US can do this, but we can't.India is in the process of electrifying the whole freaking country - like 40,000 miles of rail. Lots is freight, but they did it in 10 years.
Opinion | Indian Railways: Is 100 Percent Electrification A Boon? - News18
Complete electrification of the railway network is unlikely to reduce pollution as long as power generation is predominantly coal-based. It would be strategically risky to make the entire railway electric-dependent
F-Line to Dudley
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India solved for the whole soft costs thing by having it managed top-down starting from Federal government fiat, that's why. Some serious manpower was set up internally to manage such sprawling objectives, and they achieved proper efficiency by having the civil-service ranks do most of the study and design work. The scale of it all became self-perpetuating, and made getting to shovel-ready easier and easier through repetition. Then the actual construction, as described earlier, just accrues at linear fixed costs with little other bloat. India wasn't flawless; it took some lumps especially when it was getting started. But once they got going it was pretty efficient.
In the U.S., by contrast, you hire some "professional services" consultants to manage other consultants who manage other consultants who manage the study, design, and finally build. Such that you've got multiple layers sucking up project management costs at any one time, woefully underfunded/understaffed public resources for managing the beast (and thus copious opportunities to sneak in corruption), inordinate % of resources being sucked down just by the paper design (the fact that permitting is a bitch just exacerbates an already bad paper problem), and overly long timetables for actually getting to shovel-ready which cause construction estimates to keep jumping multiple times before anything gets built. It's an incredible amount of machinery to even get things started, and much of it is wasted on just perpetuating consultant management for consultant management's sake. That's where Caltrain electrification jumped the shark. This giant colossus of consultants was massed up to overthink, overdesign, and overcomplicate a fairly straightforward project...and cost control just lost the plot. The actual construction has, after late starts, pretty much gone according to plan...but the project management soft costs became an insatiable resource drain that's made Caltrain a laughingstock.
If anything, systemwide electrification presents a unique opportunity for the T to think big about in-house project management. Because it's going to be a continuous incremental effort spread over much more than a decade and several funding dumps, and not just a one-and-done like consultant special like Caltrain's boondoggle (or, for us, GLX). The very bigness of it could enforce some efficiencies, since it's simply not going to get done on tolerable terms if every individual line in the process has to have a contractor hired to manage other contractors who manage other contractors. There's no reason why that has to be when the design of a railway electrification is pretty much cookie-cutter identical for all lines with variances existing only in some fringe cases (like branches that need some transmission lines laid further afield to power their subs, or the very trickiest freight clearance cases like outer-Haverhill). It's one more reason why they need to stop half-assing it with this "discontinuous electrification" cop-out, because that's only going to defer more parts of the job while getting even more layers of consultants involved over the novelty and degree-of-difficulty of it all. And it's one more reason why they need to plan further than just the Phase I of Fairmount + Eastern Route mainline and start priming the pump for definitely Worcester, probably Reading, and maybe even Franklin as Phases 1A, 1B, and 2 to perpetuate some of the scale instead of letting the first phase devolve into a balkanized monolith that inhibits further action.
It can be done, but they've got to be smart about it. And the commitment has to be there to actually go through on it and turn the page from the Baker era's excuse-making. I'd like to say I'm optimistic, but there are warning signs that Toronto/GO Transit's most-similar Regional Rail mass-electrification project is going down a boondogglish plan of its own mismanagement follies partially emulating (if not necessarily exceeding) the Caltrain experience.