This is completely idiotic. Conversation about transit construction costs is being dominated by the New York City Second Avenue Subway. This is an extreme out

This is completely idiotic. Conversation about transit construction costs is being dominated by the New York City Second Avenue Subway. This is an extreme outlier among transit projects. Initially proposed in 1919, the Second Avenue was considered too complex and expensive to be built. Since then it has repeatedly been considered and shot down because of the extreme complications and expense involved for nearly one hundred years. After all of this it was finally decided that the value of having such a conveyance matched or exceeded the extreme cost and complications and plans went ahead. Having completed this people are now shocked, shocked to find out that it was expensive because of complications. The real lesson here is how utterly disconnected the supposedly sophisticated modern world is from history and basic constraints. We can't even inquire reasonably about the costs of things because they might be larger than we would prefer even when there is nearly a hundred years of documentation regarding that.