I may not understand the scope of this project, but when I read the $2 billion, my thought was "wow that's cheap!" Consider the Big Dig or the current Seattle tunnel, at $14B+ and $3B+ respectively.
There may also be extra safety requirements for people tunnels that could raise costs. A tunnel used for cars for example will need some way to deal with accidents. Imagine a big accident in the middle of the tunnel, perhaps with a fire, during rush hour.
You'll need some way to get rescuers in even if the public traffic lanes are completely blocked both ways by the accident. If there is also a fire you might need a way for people on foot to quickly get out.
These requirements could increase the space requirements for the tunnel, driving up costs. They might also cause limits on where the tunnel can go or how deep it can go, which may drive up costs.
That's great if you're paid to model the traffic but probably not so great if you now have to pay the added expenses.
Notably: I only modeled traffic. I am not to blame. ;-)
(I have used that caveat so many times.)
Then the Monitoring and Control process group will evaluate Planning again each time it loops back, so it makes no sense to me their plan failed, multiple times really for each loop. It's even worse knowing that each time they come back to Planning as part of the process they screwed up yet again.
Case in point: it was only 17 months from Trump announcing his candidacy to winning the election - plus his party put up over 20 nominees.
I know, it's not realistic... but it would be nice to see. I have this picture in my head of the entire government running like it did in The Pentagon Wars (that's billion, with a "b"...) and nobody can stop it.
Warning, this could take a minute.
The Big Dig was pretty much my first project outside of the lab. I am not overly fond of admitting to my part in the project but it could be worse, much worse. Truth be told, we did our job just fine, but I digress.
By the time I got involved with the project, it had been in planning stage for quite a while and had undergone a number of revisions and had many funding proposals. My involvement was because I was busy taking traffic modeling into the computer revolution stage.
These various plans all needed to be modeled, of course. Even if there wasn't a snowball's chance in hell, it needed to be modeled. Even trivial changes will mean new modeling. It's lucrative work, if you can get it. Though, it's not much more than a fancy plugin today, it's based on some pretty complicated math and can be improved by adding more data points. Again, I digress...
Now, being new to the world of working as a contractor for municipalities, I had great expectations from the government representatives. I was quickly disabused of such notions but, again, I digress.
The Big Dig had many, many people working on it. It was in the public eye for a fairly short time, compared to the time it lumbered as a meandering project in the planning and pre-planning stage. Yup, they plan to make plans and call it pre-planning. This, of course, goes hand in hand with fact finding, feasibility studies, ecological impact studies, noise studies, and these may very well require constant revision as the plans change.
Well, traffic modeling is just one of those things.
At any point in time, any contractor, sub-contractor, or affiliate could have gone to the media to say just what you propose. In fact, if you examine the archives, I'm sure you'll find ample evidence of people doing just that very thing.
Sure, the amount I made on the project was just a rounding error, but there were a lot of rounding errors.
Then, you have people who will fight it, at every step of the way. They will tie it up in court for as long as they can, which means even more revisions. People sometimes wonder where I got my legal knowledge... Some was in academia but the majority of it was through experience.
There is tons of waste in government, I think we know that. But, politicians will add more - so long as it gets them votes. Interestingly, in this case, the guy campaigned on prosperity for the local economy. The project must not disrupt local business. Got to make money, after all. Yet, it slowed the project down and probably added a good 10% to the overall budget. The lengths we went to were absurd.
And so it goes...
Sure, someone may stand up and tell the politicians that they are insane and that they are stupid but, frankly, we've been saying that for years and nobody actually listens. We can't opt out, because we have contracts.
Oh, contracts? Yeah, every time you extended the project? I got a nice bonus to help grow my business. Every time I had to run the models again? Thanks... Every time I had to go get more data? Thanks...
The Big Dig was what enabled me to get my business up and functioning. We had more contracts before the first year was over and that project seemed to last forever.
I can see why people would just go along for the ride. If I'd had more insight and experience, I may have said something. I doubt it old have done any good, I'd have still had contractual obligations and the penalty clauses would have meant I was a poor man today.
Well, there is a wall of text. Make of it what you will, I guess. It is summed up with contracts, politicians, municipal workers, and citizen expectations.
Contrast that to the Canada line in Vancouver, which was built using a cut-and-cover method. All the business owners in the Cambie corridor were convinced that this would be a minimal disruption to their business.
By the time construction was done, every single merchant along the corridor went out of business. Strangely enough, cut-and-cover proposals for more subway lines in Vancouver are as dead as a Monty Python parrot.
This is hacker news. It's easy enough to google for 2 seconds to learn a new term.
In Seoul I grew up watching subway construction all the time. Yes the local traffic suffers for many years, but the underground construction is covered with iron roofs that allow overground traffic, and people get used to it. After all, a street is likely to have subway construction because it had a large number of people using it: these people don't suddenly go away. (If they did, it would be a major blunder on the part of subway planners!)
The whole street looked like a large bomb crater for a year.
Yes, you could still access the buildings, but why on earth would you shop on Cambie, when you could go the next block over to Robson. Even a 10% reduction in customers could sink many retail businesses, over such a period of time.
1,200 Japanese workers convert above-ground train to subway line in a matter of hours.
https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/2msfz2/1200_japanes...
$3.2B of that is going to replacing the system's electrical infrastructure, replacing 90 miles of track infrastructure, and on retrofitting all of the tunnels, including the Transbay tube, new train control systems, relieving crowding, and more. [1][2]
BART has problems, but it's not spending 3.5B on lights and cleaning seats, and to suggest otherwise, especially without a citation, is arguing in bad faith.
[1] http://www.bart.gov/better-bart/the-plan
[2] https://sfbay.ca/2017/05/11/bart-maps-out-plan-to-spend-3-5-...
My point was to highlight that we've allocated them $3.5billion for repairs, essentially; we're getting no new track from that bond (where the comments I was responding to were talking about wholesale new constructions).