4 ms·
> The gleaming new glass and white-painted-steel station sat finished but empty, disconnected from the rest of the BART system. Nevertheless, it was staffed wit
by dmnd 10y ago
> The gleaming new glass and white-painted-steel station sat finished but empty, disconnected from the rest of the BART system. Nevertheless, it was staffed with five station agents, two janitors and a train controller because of a quirk in the way BART schedules workers.
- idoh 10y ago5.4 miles, $890,000,000.
- theparanoid 10y agoPuts the staffing quirk in perspective.
- jeffdavis 10y agoDo infrastructure projects in the US cost more, or am I imagining it? Is it proportional to what the local population can pay or something? Anyone have an idea why or how it coild be fixed?
- ubernostrum 10y agoIt depends. When you hear about massive projects being done cheaper (especially in per-mile costs), often it's because the project isn't running through an established, densely-populated area. So what you end up getting is "cost of building in a wilderness" versus "cost of building in a dense established city". The latter is going to be more expensive.
- magila 10y agoThe BART extension is being built along an existing rail right-of-way for most of its distance so I'm not sure how much existing development can be blamed for the high cost.
- kalleboo 10y agoYou're right, Tokyo, Singapore, Seoul, they're not densely populated at all! Not to say there aren't valid reasons for some projects to be more expensive (especially when you're tunneling), but by all accounts the US manages to have outsized costs for pretty much any infrastructure project.
- mateo411 10y agoAre infrastructure projects a lot cheaper in Japan, South Korea and Singapore? I honestly don't know. I know they have better rail infrastructure, but those societies also pay higher taxes and make rail infrastructure a higher priority.
- narrator 10y agoThey have some pretty neat tech for building railroads fast in China: https://youtu.be/T7hdo9tL6u0?t=14 https://youtu.be/T7hdo9tL6u0?t=14
- pchristensen 10y agoYes, almost always, for a variety of reasons. See Pedestrian Observations by Alon Levy for the details. Here's a link to the "Construction Costs" category: https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/category/transportation/construction-costs/ https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/category/transp...
- anewhnaccount2 10y agoCorruption.
- pkaye 10y agoAbout a mile of this is underground and went under a lake in Fremont. I don't know how much that adds to the cost of construction.
- dekhn 10y agoinfrastructure projects in the US tend to be really expensive and prone to cost explosions. There are a number of reasons for this- for example, the design of the terminal is absurdly overly done for what it needs to be. Another issue is regulations- we tend to build things to an absurd level of regulations. ANother issue can be environmental restrictions (these added significantly to the cost of extending BART to SFO), which are often used as obstructions to development in the Bay Area.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- pbreit 10y agoI'm trying to think how such a quirk would be worded?
- JamilD 10y agoThe BART union contract only allows employees to bid on station postings twice a year.
- donretag 10y agoIf there is such a scheduling quirk, where schedules are determined in advance, why is overtime such an issue with BART? If they can allocate overtime at the last schedule because of a need for more resource, surely they can do the opposite. But of course, the real answer is: unions.
- keithpeter 10y agoYes, that paragraph struck me as odd as well. I can handle the idea of a regular staff presence in an empty building to discourage vandalism &c but 5 staff on full time hours? Then again, the two year extra salary cost as a percentage of the contract cost is probably below rounding error.