Major League Baseball needs a Nobel Prize:
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eric goldwyn
@ericgoldwyn
| egoldwyn@nyu.edu | transitcosts.com | A lot of damaged soles, I done damaged those | transition lenses | 7 5/8 or 7 3/4
eric goldwyn’s posts
In early 2022, , , & I are going to hire someone, who can help us figure out how to build high speed rail along the northeast corridor for less than $100 billion. We want to learn from other countries and apply those lessons to the US. Get in touch!
Today we published our Phase 1 of the Second Avenue Subway case study. We show oversized stations (specifically back-of-house spaces), extractive negotiations with city agencies, a diminution of in-house capacity and embrace of consultants over everything drive costs and delay.
A deep dive on our transit costs research by , who moderated our in person event last week.
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Baseball does have natural breaks in the game, which are not driven by commercials. BUT, they probably could shorten some of them. Getting average game time down to 2 hours would be amazing.
Last week we published our final report re: transit costs. All of this follows from our finding (not unique) that the US pays more for transit projects than other countries in our database.
Enjoyed this piece on why we can’t build anymore. This closely aligns with things we have found in our ongoing transit costs work. The major issues re: diminished in-house capacity and nimbyism have slowed schedules and increased costs
Work with and me at . We are trying to figure out why it’s so expensive to build subways in America and how we can do better. We are building a database with costs and project scopes and doing in-depth cases. Apply here apply.interfolio.com/75316
450M per mile of surface light rail is definitely a US record, at least based on this audit of projects from Minnesota:
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$450M per mile for a surface light rail line. What a mess. Even with a new bridge this is criminal pricing. Portland built a surface streetcar loop for $45m per mile. 10% of the cost. WHY IS IT SO EXPENSIVE?! twitter.com/bentonjgraham/…
Is the point of congestion pricing to limit the number of total people who enter the zone or increase it? Ht:
While chatting with about US transit costs, he asked how the US compared to the world. I hesitate to give a concise answer because of variation. Here's a chart we ( & ) put on our site re: costs/km, tunnel %, & country that tells the story.
New York's Public Service Commission employed over 1000 engineers during the Dual Contracts era of subway construction in the 1910s and 1920s. The PSC was also responsible for utilities! This is a very different model than anything that exists in the US today.
In New York, at least in about 2010, for every tunnel boring machine a contractor used for boring a subway tunnel, it had to pay Local 147 $350,000. Second Avenue Subway Phase 1 used 1 TBM. In Istanbul it is required that contractors have 4, 6, or more TBMs
Here’s an example from the second Avenue subway. This is an open station with no support columns as far as the eye can see, though not unique to NYC. The design inspiration, I have been told, comes from visiting new builds from the late 1990s in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Bangkok.
"The high costs of the 96th Street station can be partly
explained by the inclusion of 65,000 square feet for the
MTA workforce in underground facilities and office space,
requiring expensive blasting."
When I'm bored I like to think about the origin of the b24 and q38 route alignments. Is there bus route design fan fiction?
Are you interested in transit-infrastructure projects? Are you interested in understanding what drives costs across cities/countries? Do you read foreign languages? Do you know what a database is? Are you interested in speaking to and me? We may have a job for you.
For a little less than a year I’ve been working with a group in Seattle to help speed up project delivery & restructure Sound Transit’s capital plan. This has been a great opportunity to apply our academic work into the real world.
The final Brooklyn Bus Network Redesign report is done. Thank you to for her keen design sense. If interested get in touch with and me. Cc: @NYCSpeakerCoJo
look i'm a boomer, with transition lenses, but this doesn't instill confidence: "Rather, designers will spend the next several months working with community members to envision a transit system that feels uniquely Austin." h/t:
“When existing bus routes are unreliable and slow, focusing attention on microtransit is like trying to perfect dessert at a restaurant that routinely burns the entrees.”
In an image VTA has perfectly diagrammed the cost issues we have been studying. A lot of excavated earth to accomplish a mid-sized building worth of fans and very generous underground circulation. The tracks appear secondary at best in this rendering.
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VTA also has updated its rendering of the Downtown San Jose BART station, where the platforms will be 69 and 87 feet below street level mercurynews.com/2021/05/20/twi
Lots of the proposed Amtrak services look good on a map, but these travel times & frequencies continue ongoing problems. Houston to San Antonio seems like a useful service, but at 4:45 by train versus 3 hours by car & 1 hour by plane, it's hard to see why anyone would take it.
Remember when New York had wooden streets? If you weren't there, you aren't a *real* New Yorker
Wrote about governance & transit costs for . Always happy to get into the details of specific projects & cost categories, but the issue of governance, while vague, is critical to alignments, wages, third party agreements, design, & timelines:
Here's a link dump from our webinar with :
The webinar: youtube.com/watch?v=i-DIsF
The Italian Case by : transitcosts.com/city/italy/
The Istanbul Case by : transitcosts.com/city/istanbul-
is omnipresent
Love this LA Metro chart showing level of influence over projects & expenditures during project life cycle. The basic point is that the ability to get in front of cost and delay drivers is in the earliest phases. Once contracts are tendered, the game is over. ht:
If you don’t want to work with and me, but you want to share information & help us understand why transit-infrastructure costs vary from country to country, dm/email us. We need data, experts, & people with information from inside agencies, consultancies, & the trades.
“She also highlighted that rail now has an 80% share of the rail-air market on the famous ‘air bridge’ route between Madrid and Barcelona.”
One reason why , , and I have looked at transit-infrastructure costs is that there is no discernible connection between GDP and costs. Rich countries like Norway and Switzerland build cheaply and poorer countries like Bangladesh and Vietnam don't.
Here is what 173 bus operators say would make them more effective at their job (don't worry i have a few hundred more surveys to enter).
Some tweet streaming newest report on international project delivery. Average costs for tunneled projects. If you exclude New York, the US numbers basically get cut in half
Now that Amtrak is about to receive a windfall, & I look back at Amtrak’s first 50 years. Let’s not repeat the mistakes of the past, and let’s not assume intercity passenger rail is completely obsolete, as naysayers did 50 years ago:
Im all about the 14th street busway. Everyone seems to think that the 27,000 daily riders on 14th street deserve more reliable service--they do. HOW about the 27,000 daily riders on Church Avenue? More busways, please
This is just a teaser of the great work is doing to transform , , , & 's rich transit-infrastructure cost data into a website. Can't wait until we have finalized all the details & launch the site with +500 projects.
We, & , compiled a comprehensive tunneling staffing/wages sheet for Second Avenue Subway phase 1. A few things to note, tunneling ran from May 2010 to September 2011 so even at ~600k/month, this was a tiny fraction of the ~$4.5 billion project.
This is why we need to figure out how to build faster & cheaper. Phase 2 of the second Ave. subway is estimated to cost *$4 billion a mile*. Long term planning, smaller stations, greater MTA capacity, genuine partnership with the city and unions, & political support are vital.
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We were impressed by Istanbul's approach to minimize station digs by excavating smaller station boxes and stacking back-of-house facilities above the passenger areas. Istanbul manages to build similarly sized passenger areas with much smaller digs.
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Megaprojects breed extraction. NYC DEP wanted bigger & more expensive pipes; NYC DOT wanted bike lanes, bus lanes, floating curbs, new street lights, and uniform paving, even in areas w/o construction; NYC Parks wanted cash, replacement trees, and funding for additional staff.
2021 marks the 50th anniversary of . and I wrote about how most didn’t think Amtrak would last 5 years, let alone 50, and how schedules, frequencies, delays, and lack of autonomy continue to plague it for ’ slow boring:
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Yes, we have higher wages. BUT, we are also less productive & overstaffed. In our GLX case, the general contractor proposed 1 supervisor for every 1.8 laborers. Internationally, this ratio is closer to 1:5. This is why some sites appear to have more people watching than doing.
When I teach this is the exact stretch of streetcar I show my students! So glad to have this video.
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Cruising into 2022 like a champ! The #kcstreetcar is running today, 8am-midnight. #HappyNewYear #KansasCity!
@FTA_DOT @APTA_Transit @KCMO
Excited by the prospect of an Interborough Express. Much has been made about connecting Brooklyn and Queens, but havent seen much about land use. and I took a quick look at the travel and land-use data for :
We, , , , compared LA’s Purple Line 1 & Istanbul’s M1B. This is our first attempt to compare platform length, construction method, financing, etc. Let us know what you think. check it out:
Excited to share our site, transitcosts.com. We definitely need your help adding data, finding documents, understanding nuance, making corrections, and improving site stability! Please get in touch if you know about any of these things: info@transitcosts.com
I was surprised to learn that more bus passengers in Brooklyn transfer to the bus (37%) than the subway (35%). This is a strong indication that service improvements, greater frequencies and reliability, should be foundational to any redesign.
I spoke to someone about GLX today, which reminded me of these old presentations re: station design and community character. I love that someone gave a presentation and explained community character with this image.
Was walking past an ancillary facility for phase 1 of the second Avenue subway on 69th street. The emergency exit door was wide open. I have always wanted to see inside. If you’re like me, here you go:
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Since the 1990s, the capital construction arm of New York City Transit, CPM, has been dissolved & overtaken by MTA CC, and MTA C&D. CPM had 1,600 staffers who performed 95% of construction management and 60% of designs. MTA CC during phase 1 had ~120 full-time employees.
“The Seattle Transit Commission had urged the Washington State Highway Department in 1953 to include a 50-foot median in the new freeway as a future rail right-of-way. The state rejected the rail plan.”
Just wanted to give a final 2021 shoutout to the great , , , , , , & others who helped us put out bangers in 2021. Excited to share our next set of cases & start our HSR work in 2022. As always, get in touch!
Folks are skewering the GAO transit infrastructure study. & I via have a research project ready to share with any foundations or wealthy individuals who want to uncover why US transit infrastructure costs are so high. Get in touch if you want more info.
LIRR fare integration would really help Queens out! Look at all those blue dots (half-mile from LIRR stops) within the yellow boundary. If i were an elected in queens this is what i would harp on re: congestion pricing. cc:
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This is the opening vignette of something I wrote a while back for . Universities, UW, UMN, etc. all trot this out. I was told GOT was willing insulate several rooms at duke, but the university countered with, well what if we move the machinery?
"For too long, Congress has treated Amtrak as a pork barrel, dividing the fat among the most influential representatives. The result has been service so expensive and inferior that the very idea of train travel got a bad name."
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Agreed re: bonus runner. Still very disorienting.
Isn’t the joke that SNCF was so disillusioned with CA HSR that it left for Morocco? I think SNCF said Morocco was less politically dysfunctional than California.
The first thing we need to do is contextualize costs & schedule so we can talk across projects and in detail about specific projects and make good decisions about tradeoffs: do we accept longer work windows to speed up construction and reduce costs?
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Replying to @sam_d_1995
Given how many billions of dollars we’re throwing away on inflated infrastructure costs, it feels like a no-brainer for Pete to spend a few million to hire @alon_levy @ericgoldwyn @ChittiMarco @nilocobau @elifensari to start up an in-house transit costs consulting arm
I will be speaking a talk tomorrow. I will answer the age old question: how many people does it take to tunnel in New York? I will also reveal a small example about escalators that explains why stations are really expensive in New York. Maybe you will be hearing a listen?
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Replying to @TransitCon and @marxling
We'll have @ericgoldwyn speaking a talk on Why is it so Expensive to Build a Subway in the United States
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Expensive labor and low productivity is a recipe for expensive projects. What if we could dig a launch box for the tunnel boring machine in six months or a year, as they do in Turkey and Italy, instead of the three years it took in New York?
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Anyone who has visited phase 1 stations knows they're spacious. What is less obvious is all of the space blasted out of Manhattan Schist that you don't see or even know exists.
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Anyhow, it's been a thrill working with , , , , , , , , , and others on this. For more check here:
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We attribute these increased costs to physical structures (stations, finishes, and systems), labor, and procurement and soft costs.
Great to speak with about transit infrastructure, high speed rail, streetcars, and ongoing research with , , & . Also, *very* exciting to e-meet The Weeds’ producer Erikk Geannikis. The other (E,A)r(r)i(c,k,ck,q,ct, etc.) understand
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On this episode of The Weeds, @mattyglesias and professor @ericgoldwyn discuss why transit projects in the US often fail — including the Second Avenue subway line in New York, the Green Line Extension in Boston, and the DC Streetcar.
open.spotify.com/episode/55OpL9
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When transit projects are $$$, we get less transit per dollar spent. It also makes the marginal project look cost ineffective. Make no mistake Phase 1 delivered great value, but it was also the single best project in the city. How do IBX, Utica Ave, W ext. to Red Hook compare?
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What's alarming is that on average, we build the majority of our projects at-grade, i.e. the cheapest solution, versus in tunnels, the most expensive.
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Sweden has high cost labor, not as high as New York, but not so far off. It manages to build infrastructure cost-effectively by using a mobile, experienced work force more productively.
Did a long semi-rambling interview with about our transit costs research. All of our key topics are here: politics & decision making, agency capacity, coordination w/3rd parties, design, labor, & procurement. More soon.
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There is a role for consultants, no doubt. BUT, the MTA also has to lead and have the bandwidth to manage its projects effectively. Consultants complained that they didn't always have clear instruction on what they were supposed to do, and were expected to figure it out.
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In New York and Boston, we show how internal capacity has diminished over time. When GLX began, the internal team consisted of 4 to 6 managers. In New York, the in house team managing these kinds of projects has fallen from ~1600 to ~120.
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Now, we aren't all doom & gloom! We see hope in our low cost cases. In Italy, station standardization works. Stations, outside of Naples, aren't monuments. In Turkey, they have optimized station digs and use of underground space. Building shallow stations via cut & cover is key.
“…the average cost of one mile of elevated line in New York was between $125,000 and $175,000. The cost of one mile of the Fourth Avenue subway in Brooklyn was $402,000…. One mile of subway under Broadway was expected to cost $1,190,000.”
Reading 's latest, and I am reminded of one of the most infuriating quotes about the 2nd Ave Subway: "'We're not against the Second Avenue subway. We're New Yorkers. We need it,' Ceccarelli said. 'We're just against the siting of the entrance.'"
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We detail how stations in our Boston and New York cases made up a large share of project costs, and that they were designed beyond international norms we found in Italy, Sweden, and Turkey: more back of house space, full-length mezzanines, bespoke rather than standardized, etc.
This is one of the most dramatic TOD turnarounds I've found in the US. MAX debuted at Orenco Station in 1998, and by 2007 the lots closest to the station were basically vacant. Much of the writing on this project predate the massive changes depicted here. How do I learn more?
This article really captures domestic transit projects: Non-subject-matter experts micromanaging station locations, parochialism vs. regionalism, missed connection, and delayed timelines:
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and walking from departures/arrivals and the Link station is a cross country journey in and of itself.
Many good lessons in ’s piece on the Madrid metro. I’ll highlight 2: 1) no new technology for key components. This is key and was a huge problem w/BART rolling stock. 2) restrictive work windows are $$$. Construction needs to move.
When reading 's case on Istanbul, I was struck by how often cost estimates exceeded contract values. As the case argues, Istanbul's local construction ecosystem is teeming with contractors ready to submit bids: transitcosts.com/city/istanbul-
Phase 1 of the Second Avenue Subway delivered new stations and tunnels for ~200,000 daily riders. It also paid for bike lanes, bus lanes, led streetlights, floating curbs, traffic signals, street trees, etc.
vans thrive in areas with unreliable bus service. It's not about transit starved. It's about inadequate service: timesledger.com/stories/2017/9
Book proposal: let's make a beautiful book that traces the universal design of subway/metro car floor patterns around the world (from Baku to Brooklyn). I'll interview designers and belabor the point that the universality of floor design unites us.
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Maybe instead of complaining about the lack of transit infrastructure, the governor of a state could build some???
This LRT alternative from Union Square to the southern tip of Manhattan would have been wild. The majority of the route would have been at-grade and in mixed traffic.
The thesising from is A+:
"it’s about creating transit networks that allow people to navigate from home to work....Bringing down costs is paramount to achieve the climate and economic benefits that accompany transit projects."
vox.com/22534714/rail-
Talked to about transit costs and the second avenue subway. Got to walk around the 96th street station and some of the above ground areas of interests. is also on, which is great since she was one of the project’s champions:
By the way, this quote is from 1978
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"A few years ago, the transit industry began to see a rapid escalation in the costs of heavy rail construction."
Comparing a highway that bypasses a neighborhood to a light rail station (this is a reference to a proposed station) that provides access to/from a neighborhood is malpractice.
Automation allows for more frequent service, which allows for smaller, cheaper stations. Automation also reduces operating costs. It does come with higher systems costs, however. Not sure why this hasn’t been embraced in the US since it’s a mature technology at this point.
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In a different reality we could have expanded Baltimore's existing Metro by: 1. Full Automation 2. Building new stations only long enough for 4 car trains reducing costs. Think automated light metro style.
This piece is a banger. Fed policies impede projects. Local agencies also have inane reqs that layer on top of one another & need to be addressed. The Feds should mandate a review of these specs before allocating $$$ for megaprojects.
When and I began thinking about IBX, we started by looking at subway trips that originate and end within the IBX geography, a .5 mile buffer of the alignment. IBX will clearly serve these 12k trips/day much better and quicker.
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Procurement and soft costs, admittedly the fuzziest factor, drives costs because of contractor markups, dealing with slow moving agencies, depending on high cost consultants, and complying with different regulations, like Buy America.
A number of things: 1) Janno is right that internal issues re: multiple rounds of redesign because of demands from NYCT, DEP, DOT, Con Ed, buildings along the corridor, etc. drive costs. Hourly rates for designers, with benefits and overheads, can easily eclipse $150/hr.
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Replying to @aarmlovi
@ericgoldwyn This is the key video where they debate MTA's internal views on the construction cost crisis. You may want to watch Evan Eisland's preceding presentation too, but this link starts at Bob Linn's comment:
youtu.be/C1DRC-WrOyU?t=
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Alternative project delivery can work, but not when there isn't enough agency staff to direct, oversee, and manage. In the US, we see projects caught in delays, infinite root cause studies, and changes. In Istanbul, design build is prevalent, but there's a strong leadership team.
For the Seattle crowd. Speak to me slowly. Why does it take 10-12 years to build a subway station?
Though not ’ point, one thing we have heard in our interviews re: transit costs is that federal conditions, buy America, nepa, dbe, etc. structure the transit agencies that receive it; thus, limiting experimentation re: institutional design and procurement.
