> In 2018, Congress asked the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to report within 9 months on the cost of rail – transit infrastructure projects across the

> In 2018, Congress asked the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to report within 9 months on the cost of rail – transit infrastructure projects across the United States compared to similar projects worldwide. After 16 months in July 2019, a report was produced but it did not provide the comparisons requested by Congress. Rather, the GAO in its report said making the comparisons was too difficult to obtain meaningful results and instead reported on improvements to be made by the FTA for better cost estimation. It appears even the GAO did not have the ability to identify measures for cost reduction of transit tunnels that have impacted the taxpayers by billions of dollars over the years. Alon Levy has more in depth reporting of this failed report: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/07/22/new-report-on-construction-costs-misses-the-mark/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/07/22/new-report-on-... And Matthew Yglesias has a good article on the congressional inference which is preventing this from being meaningfully analyzed https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/5/24/15681560/gao-report-transit-construction-costs https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/5/24/15681560/g...