ESTIMATES OF RAIL TRANSIT CONSTRUCTION COSTS

Reliable estimates of the costs of constructing new rail transit facilities are necessary to evaluate the growing number of proposals to build new rail lines and extend existing ones. Yet the construction cost estimates used in past studies have often been erroneous, even when they have been based on detailed engineering analyses of proposed projects. Further, rail construction costs appear to have increased rapidly in recent years, even after being adjusted to reflect general price inflation throughout the economy. New estimates of the costs of constructing rapid transit and light rail facilities are reported. These estimates are developed by statistically allocating (via regression analysis) total expenditures for 18 rapid transit and 14 light rail construction projects among their individual components. The results include estimates of unit costs for building rapid transit and light rail lines and stations underground, at grade level, and on elevated structures, including construction outlays and expenses for acquiring the necessary land at typical prices. Some uncertainty exists about the cost estimates for individual rail system components (lines and stations) developed here, but the procedure for estimating them allows this uncertainty to be explicitly quantified. Yet the best estimates of line and station costs suggest that local transportation planners and consultants have seriously underestimated the likely expense for building almost every new rail line or system extension now under serious consideration in the United States.