Rising Cost of Rail
The proposed rail extension to Dulles airport is running up against its budget limit, a $2 billion limit imposed by the federal government. To cut costs the project builders are now trimming the number of stations and number of cars that will run. This prompted Randal O’Toole at the American Dream Coalition blog to comment:
That would make the perfect rail project. It costs a lot of money, no one can get to it, and there aren’t any trains to ride even if you could. Why don’t they just skip the train cars and stations altogether — think how many miles of rail you could build if you didn’t have to pay those extra costs!
Costs for rail are never what they are projected to be when the projects are first conceived. The Dulles airport line is a case in point, going from $1.5 billion to $1.8 billion and then reality:
After estimates for the project surged to $2.4 billion last summer, the project’s managers settled on several steep cuts . . .
Longtime critics of the Dulles extension said the latest spike in cost estimates confirmed their position that the line is an inefficient way to expand transit in the Dulles corridor, which they say could be done more easily with bus rapid transit.
“They never factored in all the costs, even though they knew full well they’d have to” eventually, said Bruce Bennett, a retired high-tech salesman in the Reston area. “I think they’ve fudged on the cost of the whole deal.”
Whole article here.