Can someone provide me with a general per-mile cost of urban light rail (excluding, of course, the price of acquiring rights-of-way, which will vary by city)? How about the per-mile cost of subterranean rail lines?
This link compares Dublin’s light rail with San Francisco’s.
I heard that San Francisco’s BART cost one-tenth as much per mile as L.A.s subway, but I don’t know if that’s adjusted for inflation or not.
In a thread in the pit a little while back, we discussed it a little.
My post #77 talks about the price San Diegan’s paid: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=9645292&postcount=77
The money was not spent on laying any track, but on building passenger stations and buying the trains. (I don’t know what else.)
477 million divided by 22 miles = 21.68 million dollars per mile.
I think the answer to your question is going to be vary widely, depending on the cost of living in the area (due to different wages, cost of construction), whether any lobby groups oppose the train (court costs), etc.
Holy SHIT!
I had no freaking idea.
And here I was, thinking light rail was the future of urban mass transit because it’s cheap.
And freeways are?
Toronto’s costs:
Subways cost about $150 million per running kilometre to build compared with about $30 million to $35 million per kilometre for light rail transit or $20 million to $25 million per kilometre for bus rapid transit.
Source:Is subway really the better way? - Transit Toronto - Newspaper Archive
This article from 1990 talks about St. Louis’ relatively low construction cost of $16.5 million per mile for the original 18-mile leg of its light-rail system. However, the system as it now exists runs about 38.5 miles and cost $34 million per mile.
Almost all of the route is on abandoned railway right of way, and land acquisition is a pretty minimal part of the total.
The Central Corridor of the Minnesota Light Rail System (the second leg) has an estimated cost of $840 million to $930 million for a length of 12 miles. One helluva lot, but it’s inner city and they have to make a large number of changes to get the rail system through there.
The Hiawatha Line cost roughly $700 million for the same length, but didn’t require as many changes. The article also states that the line carried 9.4 million passengers in 2006, or 20% of total area mass transit rides. For one single 12 mile light rail line.
I’ve ridden it once. My nephew and I drove into Bloomington, parked at one of the stops there and took it to downtown for a Twins game, avoiding all the downtown parking and driving issues and expenses.
Compare to;
Reconstruction of an 11 mile stretch of Hwy 52 cost $232 million, or more than $20 million per mile. Thats RE-construction, not full blown land acquisition and all.
I found a Florida document that estimates a 6 lane highway costs roughly $7 million per mile rural, $12.5 million urban. But I think that’s highly variable, depending on how many changes they have to make, reroutes of existing roads and utilities, and land acquisition costs.
Buffalo’s 6.4-mile long light rail system cost about $500,000,000 in 1984 dollars. About five miles of the system is in subway.
And an electric trolley system, like the old Red Line?
Beyond the initial capital costs discussed so far, there are also maintenance & operational costs. I don’t know how much per mile that is, but it would be different for rail vs. highway.
I also agree with this:
As well as differing costs of materials in different geographical areas. Note that asphalt prices will rise with oil prices.
As a serious partisan for urban rail, I must weigh in.
YES, light rail is expensive. Subways are MORE expensive. So are highways and airports. But with urban rail, you get your money’s worth.
Just my opinion…
Sure, until the people want to live somewhere else, then you’re screwed. You can run electric streetcars fed by overhead wires on rubber tires much more cheaply, without tearing up the streets to install tracks, and relocate them them for a pittance if you guessed wrong about where the traffic patterns were going to be.
Edited to add:
Hell, you could add a tow behind diesel generator and provide transportation on an ad hoc basis for special events, festivals and the like in areas that are not normally served by streetcars. Try that with a subway.
You could put the diesel generator onboard the electric streetcar and call it a motorized bus!
Given that Light Rail systems are being put in existing urban areas, basically I have to say “fat chance” that people will suddenly abandon the area en-masse and move elsewhere. What we are seeing here is a re-development of the corridor along the light rail lines, drawn by the proximity. I think it helps though, that the Hiawatha line goes from Downtown Minneapolis, to the Airport, to the Mall of America. Job, Home, Travel, Shop, all on one line.
The next line will go between downtowns. Again, fat chance that people will suddenly abandon those areas, especially when they’ve built thousands of condos along that future route in the last couple of years.
Sure you could, but if you normally run it off overhead wires you can leave the generator at home most of the time, and use nuclear, or gas, or coal, or whatever is best at the time for energy. The only time you’d need the generator is if you were “off the grid”.
Hell, I moved to my house 4 years ago and could see cows out my window. Now it’s houses as far as the eye can see. The population density along most of the areas you’re talking about are as high as they can be without decreasing the quality of life. That’s the way it usually is with places that people want to live. They keep moving there until it’s no more attractive to live there than anywhere else, then they stop.
So then what, you tear up the roads again and extend the rail out another 5 miles? It takes years to do that, and in the meantime people are clogging up the torn up highways and swearing at the orange barrels.
I know the bus isn’t sexy, even if you electrify it and call it a streetcar, but you can add as many miles of route as you want for much less than rail, even with dedicated lanes on the interstates for rush hour commuting. And you can add those miles with the stroke of a pen, not years of eminent domain and court fights.
In the late 19th century “railway suburbs” began to appear, the most famous of which are probably the “Main Line” suburbs west of Philadelphia. They were a haven for the rich and upper middle classes then and have continued to be so to this day.
So abandonment isn’t really the issue as much as the fact that they are limited in the number of people they can support (if you aren’t very close to the stations, then what’s the point) and that a premium is charged for the convenience. Those are in fact reasons why more suburbs like them didn’t develop until the car made it possible to live anywhere with the same convenience but at a much lower cost.
I can’t see how that basic fact will alter in the future, even given much higher fuel prices. You can’t build enough railroads to make a real dent, and you certainly can’t backfit enough railroads into existing areas.
Railroads have a certain limited use, but nothing more. They can work in a few specific regions but there is no total metro area in America that they are even theoretically a solution for, and in most metro areas they are next to worthless in the big picture.
A major part of the expense of rail and light rail in urban areas can be blamed on the road lobby and its friends i government in days gone by (the car-mania of the 50s onwards). Here in Sydney, we had a genius by the name of J.J.C. Bradfield (the guy who designed the Sydney Harbour Bridge). His grand plan for a suburban rail network was laid down in the 1920s. Much of it was built, but a lot wasn’t because of lack of funds at the time. Still, he managed to persuade the government to at least purchase rights of way the lines yet to be built. A classic example of this was the proposed Northern Beaches Line (for those who know Sydney, the entire NE of this sprawling LA-style metropolis is without any rail transport and has massively congested roads). The Northern Beaches line was never built because the road lobby won in removing two tram lanes (originally designed for heavy rail) from the Harbour Bridge and replacing them with genral traffic lanes, and then greedy and corrupt governments in the 1970s started selling off the remainder of the corridor to developers. What could have been done cheaply then would be prohibitive now.
We also have the NIMBY residents who complain very vocally about the visual impact of rail, forcing it underground at great expense. For some reason the same people must find congested highways beautiful.
Traditional rail has had its day, and traditional 1950s-style mass car usage likewise. It’s time now to actually integrate the various modes. You can’t have a line to every little tiny suburb, and you can’t have everybody driving a private car into the downtown area. Buses should be used as feeders in the outer suburbs, directing people to heavy rail. The heavy rail then provides a fast trip into the city, where shoppers and workers can get around on light rail. Private cars can fill in the gaps. It’s not rocket science, and the lobbyists (for all modes) need to be told where to go.