The Real Cost of Rail, Seeing Behind the Lies
Rail projects don’t “accidentally” have cost over-runs, they are planned that way. They aways have been. Same will be true here.
So it was clear that the Shinkansen was designed for cost overruns and the original budget had been drafted before standards had been set and even before a final alignment had been chosen. In other words, the designers, estimators and engineers had no idea what the final cost would be. But they firmly believed that investing in high-speed standard gauge railways would be better for Japan than in keeping its old, slow and narrow railway and building highways. One small group ended up spending 380 million yen and designing the transportation future for Japan. Project managers everywhere studied how the Japanese constructed (and funded) this new type of railway.
Closer to home, we have San Francisco’s Bechtel Corporation, one of the largest construction companies in the world. They have a really big project going on in Boston, called the “Big Dig,” where they are burying 7.5 miles of roadway to eliminate a rusting elevated structure. But all is not well in Beantown, as the state filed a complaint in Superior Court seeking up to $146 million in damages, the estimated profits and incentive fees for Bechtel and Parsons Brinkerhoff (an engineering consultancy). The familiar cause for this action is that the original 1994 estimate was a whopping $7.7 billion and as it nears completion later than expected, it looks to be almost double, chiming in at an unbelievable $14.6 billion.
The cost of rail is almost always much greater than projected. The promoters of rail simply lie.
Whole article here.