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You're wise to point out historically tunnels were more expensive. And I shouldn't be making claims without a bigger dataset in front of me. I'm just extrapola
by breck 6y ago
You're wise to point out historically tunnels were more expensive. And I shouldn't be making claims without a bigger dataset in front of me.
I'm just extrapolating from trends and some cherrypicking. The ongoing elevated rail project in Hawai'i is now running at $500M per mile. Boring Company projects they can get cost of tunneling down to $10M per mile.
What I forecast (without much data, so please correct me if I'm wrong) is that with more money going to tunnels, we will see the costs continue to drop. You don't have the quasi-extortion that goes on now over land rights above ground.
Tunnels also scale better long term—you can just keep adding tunnels.
But beyond cost and scale tunnels are just so much nicer. You can replace ugly, polluting above ground infra with parks and greenery. Even though the Big Dig in Boston took forever and went way over costs, the city is so much nicer now without the Central Artery.
- jcranmer 6y ago> I'm just extrapolating from trends and some cherrypicking. The ongoing elevated rail project in Hawai'i is now running at $500M per mile. Boring Company projects they can get cost of tunneling down to $10M per mile. Note that you're (or, rather, Elon Musk is) comparing apples and oranges. Tunnels are actually cheap, about $80m / mile. The expensive parts of metro systems is not the tunnels, but the things that go inside them and stations. This is doubly so for the inexcusably high costs of US transport construction. When people talk about the cost of metro systems, the divide the total cost of the expansion (or entire system if it's a new one) by the length of the system, so they include the amortized costs of new vehicles, infrastructure inside the tunnels, and stations (which often cost more than the tunnel to get to them! Station excavation isn't cheap).
- TylerE 6y agoBy comparison, China builds above ground high speed rail for about $15M/mile.
- Alupis 6y agoWithout paying US prevailing market wages to the contractors. Also, all the materials used on the Hawaii rail line have to be shipped in - literally, adding expense.
- ricardobeat 6y agoYou should take a second look at that. Average wages in China are $12k/year, only a third of the US, but higher in the industrial areas, and in terms of purchasing power it has surpassed every other country long ago since everything is so cheap at scale. They have half a billion people in the middle class.
- Alupis 6y agoWhen you are directly comparing how much something cost to build, such as a mile of track, in USD, Purchase Power doesn't matter, does it? This is what the Parent post was asserting. China builds a mile of track at half the price because they literally pay their people half the price (or less). It doesn't matter that their local Purchase Power might be greater. Taking it a step further, the Parent was comparing a mile of track in China to a mile of track in Hawaii, which literally has to ship all supplies, and likely a lot of labor, across an ocean. So it's not a great comparison even if we remove labor costs.
- sudosysgen 6y agoWell, if at labour prices at half of the US average China can build high speed trains at a fifth of the price that we can build tunnels, there is more to it than that.
- brianwawok 6y agoHow much does it cost the respective governments for right of way land? Environmental studies?
- sudosysgen 6y ago