Prioritizing Politics Ahead of Transit Projects
In the span of five years, the Federal Transit Administration’s (FTA) New Starts capital grant program expanded from just over one billion dollars in Fiscal Year 2019 to nearly four and a half billion dollars in Fiscal Year 2024. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, more broadly, authorizes as much as $108 billion in Federal support for public transportation through Fiscal Year 2026. With more money available for capital projects than ever before, it is critical that this money be spent well and develop projects that contribute to decarbonizing the transportation sector, promote compatible land-use goals, and improve access within and between American cities.
As exciting as the opportunity ahead of us is, there is concern that it is too difficult and expensive to build large-scale, transformative infrastructure projects in the United States in the 21st century. In the media, Klein, Gordon, Demsas, and many, many others have lamented large infrastructure projects’ soaring costs and extended timelines. Flyvbjerg argues that large infrastructure projects, megaprojects, are defined both by their large initial cost estimates that give them their name, but also by their tendency to be over budget, behind schedule, and produce fewer benefits than promised. Making this more urgent in the United States, Goldwyn et al.’s Transit Cost Project found that in a sample of 883 rapid rail projects across 57 countries plus Taiwan and Hong Kong, the United States had the eighth highest costs per kilometer in Purchasing Power Parity adjusted 2023 dollars. This reading of the data omits the key fact that in the United States only 34% of projects in the database are tunneled, the most expen-sive rapid rail construction method, while the eight countries with higher per kilometer costs build 65% or more of their projects in tunnels. Addi-tionally, the current group of projects in the development pipeline in the United States, such as Phase 2 of the Second Avenue Subway, Gateway Tunnel Project, Transbay Downtown Rail Extension, West Seattle to Ballard Link Extension, and the BART extension to San Jose have higher absolute costs and per kilometer costs than their predecessors.
In this paper, I argue that these mounting costs and delays are the product of prioritizing politics ahead of transit projects. Alan Altshuler and David Luberoff explain that over the last 60 years it has become increasingly difficult to carry out disruptive projects in the United States: “the capacity of local growth coalitions to impose disruption on other local interests sharply—and durably-declined in the late 1960s and early 1970s.” Nuno Gil approaches this issue from a different vantage point. He argues, rather, that impacted stakeholders, often “nonmarket actors” such as municipal agencies, require tangible value from megaprojects in order to allow them to proceed. In practice this “value distribution” is negotiated and renegotiated as political and funding commitments become firmer rather than at the outset when so much is still unknown. This ongoing uncertainty leads to larger project scopes, schedule slippage, and higher costs over time. For transit projects, this do no harm principle or expansive value distribution framework adds costs and diminishes project benefits, when viewed through the lens of faster travel times and greater ridership, when agencies site a transit project in a less convenient freight railroad right-of-way rather than condemning private land, use federal grants to pay for elements beyond the needs of a transit project to gain needed permits, adopt more expensive designs to limit third party interfaces, and placate different powerbrokers, including elected officials, utility companies, transit agency operating entities, and others while undercutting traditional planning, design, cost estimating, and project management.
Methodologically, I rely on quantitative and qualitative methods to describe and explain why American rapid rail transit costs are higher than global averages. I draw on quantitative evidence to develop key descriptive statistics, namely a global weighted average of rapid rail projects per kilometer, and contextualize global rail transit project costs to show how American projects exceed international averages. Next, I take an in-depth look at two recently completed domestic transit projects, Phase 1 of the Second Avenue Subway in New York and the Green Line Extension in Massachusetts. I examine planning documents, official reports, historical accounts, media coverage, and the megaproject and project management literatures to understand the development and shortcomings of specific projects. Additionally, I have conducted more than 170 semi-structured interviews with elected officials, agency staff, consultants, contractors, laborers, and others familiar with specific projects and the broader transportation industry including transit and mainline rail projects in Massachusetts, New York, California, Utah, Oregon, Maryland, Texas, Florida, and Washington. I show how project sponsors struggle to define their project’s purpose clearly; thus, never finding firm footing in the project development or construction phases, and how forces within and beyond agencies’ control knock them off their course. I conclude by sharing some good news: it is possible to build these projects faster and cheaper, as they do in Spain, South Korea, Turkey, Italy, Chile, and Sweden, but it requires changing our priorities and nurturing the expertise to plan, design, and manage rapid rail transit projects.
