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Comment by Symmetry | Hacker News Reader

They can learn a lot more from Barcelona's $39m/km subway construction costs, compared to something like $1b/km in New York. Some of that is NY's density but worldwide averages are still around $300m/km and Barcelona is a stellar outlier.

Also their way of having dedicated bus lanes.

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I think that $39m/km may have been a figure for some other stuff. Barcelona's most recent lines, L9 and L10 cost euro 16bn for 48km or about $370m/km

http://www.catalannewsagency.com/business/item/barcelona-el-...

Barcelona is a great city, but the construction of its subway is not the best example.

The construction of the Barcelona subway caused the collapse of at least one building, and over 50 needed to be evacuated in El Carmelo neighborhood.

Currently the construction of the subway is under investigation due to fraud, and bribery in the national court.

Their "subway" is actually more like light rail. I think the lesson here is that more cities should be building high quality underground light rail (none of this at-grade Muni BS that exists in SF and other Pacific Northwest cities).

What's the difference between subway and underground light rail?

Really a matter of terminology, but there's a clear separation between underground heavy rail (all of the New York City Subway) and underground light rail. You can see this division in Boston and San Francisco. Heavy rail has much more capacity, generally has more/larger/better entryways, and has more spacious trains. It might also be faster, although that's possibly just a function of stop frequency.

What's wrong with at-grade rail, presuming signal priority and dedicated lanes? Works fine in Geneva, Amsterdam, etc.

In Portland, a far too frequent cause of MAX (the light rail) service interruptions is due to car/train collisions. See the following links for a small taste:

http://koin.com/2014/04/01/1-hurt-car-max-crash-portland/ http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2013/06/max_col... http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2015/05/max_blu... https://www.reddit.com/r/Portland/comments/3d5i9g/saw_an_ora...

There may be more to it in Portland than "at grade", but that certainly seems to be a large component of the problem.

From the photos, it looks like bollards would have solved most of these? It's not really a dedicated lane if drivers can just wander into it.

Works fine until someone driving by runs over the passengers who are de-boarding [0]. Or until someone crashes into the train [1].

[0] http://sf.streetsblog.org/2016/02/18/muni-taraval-meeting-me... [1] http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Car-crashes-into-Muni-...

Sounds like a poor design, most places will have people boarding from sidewalks or a raise area.

As for the 2nd, people run into stuff in the cars all the time. Around 50-100 people die each day on US roads. And in the story you mentioned only the people in the car were injured, nobody on the train.

This is solved by bollards.

It's not really comparable to heavy rail in terms of speed or capacity. You can fit 1,500 people into a single NYC subway train, way more than any light rail system in existence, and the express trains go way faster than any light rail because they don't have to worry about potentially hitting stray pedestrians, bikers, or vehicles. NYC subway cars will go up to 55 mph going express or in tunnels. At-grade light rail simply can't go that fast, or even if it could, it wouldn't do it because it's unsafe.

Yes, but at-grade light rail isn't an alternative to subways, it's an alternative to buses. The M23 et.al. barely hit ten mph.

Select-bus service (that is, buses running in dedicated lanes) is about as fast as at-grade light rail, and significantly cheaper to construct. NYC has been going in that direction for awhile. Building at-grade rail is just a complete non-starter. The city already tore out all of its above-ground rail a long time ago for a variety of reasons that persist to the present day.

Wow, I thought Amsterdam's new metro line (Noord/Zuidlijn) was extremely expensive because it's way over budget, Amsterdam was built in a swamp and there was damage to rows of houses etc.

But it's 9.7km, originally planned at 680 million euro, now estimated at 3.1 billion euro (project started in 2009, currently expected to be completed in 2018). That works out to $360m/km or so, not that bad compared to the worldwide average.

Most of the cost in infrastructure is actually caused by too many regulations in countries such as the US. It is estimated that current regulations increase the costs by a factor of 6-7.

When you look at Barcelona an how they build there it is obvious that they (currently or at least in the recent past) do not have that problem.

That's also one of the reasons why the Chinese can complete a large infrastructure project like a skyscraper in a few months while we need half a decade for the same task.

This is pretty silly since countries like Sweden, France and Germany have much lower infrastructure costs but equally or more stringent regulations and obviously stronger unions. I'd love to see a source for the 6-7x figure for regulation costs.

Alon Levy has a good blog that steadily beats the drum about US costs and what can be done to fix them:

https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/category/transp...

The "regulations" are things like like "maybe don't do this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7o8W52NIgXw "

Most of your infrastructure in the US was built during a time when there was comparably little regulation if any at all.

Does this mean that everything built back then is built bad? Why does the Empire State Building still stand?

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