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Norway's tunnel: < $7M/km Seattle's tunnel: $1,167M/km Well over 100x more expensive per kilometer.
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The Lærdal tunnel (left) in Norway is the longest tunnel in the world, at 24km. It cost $164 million in today's dollars. I drove it yesterday. The State Route 99 tunnel (right) in Seattle, where I normally live, is 3km long. It cost $3.5 billion. Both were completed in 5 years.
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Yes, there are many differences between these projects; the Seattle tunnel had greater challenges and ought to cost more— But, a difference of more than 100x? More than $1 *billion* per kilometer?
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Do you know what makes up the difference? My naive guess is that a lot of it likely comes down to the price of the actual land itself (Norway is comparatively empty), but that's probably not enough to close more than one order of magnitude.
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It is really mind boggling why public infrastructure projects cost so much in US. Why subway lines in NYC are 3-5 times more expensive than in London. Has anybody done any detailed analysis? This is costing us so much money and is preventing us to build more.
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The first tunnel is just a hole blasted through a stable rock, not requiring tunnel tube to be built. The other one required boring thorough who know what kind of soil and it actually needed tube to be built. They are not comparable at all.
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