A growing cadre of researchers, advocates, and experts are asking: why does it cost so much to build infrastructure, particularly public transit, in the United States? Last year, Eno kicked off a major research initiative analyzing cost and timeline drivers affecting the delivery of rail transit in the United States. A crucial aim of this research is to understand if and how costs are high, particularly when compared to other countries. To learn more about Eno’s transit project delivery research, click here.
To investigate the relative success and challenge of building transit, the Eno team created a database of projects. The database includes construction cost and timeline data for a total of 171 domestic and international rail transit projects completed over the past 20 years. For each project, factors such as number of stations, grade alignment, station spacing, and mode allow for deeper comparisons.
The full database and analysis can be found here.
The purpose of this database is to help draw conclusions about the extent to which transit construction costs differ in the United States and peer countries, as well as shed light on the differences between project characteristics and complexity across countries. The initial insights from this data help form the questions and themes we investigate in further detail through regional case studies. The database will be continually updated with more information and insights as they become available.
An initial look at the data supports five takeaways, all of which are explained in detail on the main database page. Those are, in a nutshell:
- Light rail is not necessarily cheaper than heavy rail. Grade alignment, rather than mode, is the major determinant of cost. Defining the mode of a transit project – whether it’s light rail or heavy rail – does not correlate well with its construction cost. Most of the construction and planning inputs for both modes are the same. A transit line, whether heavy or light, includes laying track, installing electrical systems, and building accessible stations. The main difference between the two modes is that light rail tends to be mostly at-grade, and heavy rail is often either tunneled or elevated. However, heavy rail projects outside of the U.S. appear to be largely below grade compared to U.S. projects.
The website of one of the authors of that research is https://pedestrianobservations.com/. On that they lay out that infrastructure is also wildly overpriced in the UK.