Construction Costs: Metro Stations | Hacker News Reader

Construction Costs: Metro Stations

pedestrianobservations.com

47 pointsSymmetry12 comments

I wonder how much it would cost to compensate the business owners along the construction project. The reason cut and cover is usually avoided is because of business NIMBYism as they're concerned the construction will harm their business. Since it's so expensive to do these other methods of construction maybe the construction should just pay the businesses to relocate out of the savings from using cut and cover.

I think that businesses should really appreciate the foot traffic that Metro station would bring. It's three years of losses and then 30 years of profits.

If we're talking about renters, they can move out if they don't like the hassle, and landlords will surely compensate losses with sweet deal they'll get once subway is open.

Commercial leases are generally ten years long. The landlord ends up capturing most of the increase in value, while the current lessees end up eating most of the costs.

I would imagine that current lessees' influence will be pretty limited and definitely offset by their landlords. Public reaction on top of that.

I don't understand why their word will be decisive here.

I don't really think so. Small business owners are often much more influential at the city level than lobbyists paid by out of town landowners. Even if the landowners have significant influence, they're outnumbered by the lessees and the lessees have a lot more to lose.

I can see how this might become a problem. Small business owners will be hostile to any city configuration change, because they'll have to adapt to it and that will require some effort from them.

Naturally their influence has to be limited in order to see any kind of motion forward.

I really wish there was much better details on costs on such large public projects (and institutions). Between the extreme costs of public works like these, healthcare, college education, there is a cost disease that needs to be figured out and addressed.

> More granularity is needed.

I feel like one big step forward on that would be requiring the disclosure of detailed budgets and expenses for all such semi-regulated institutions/projects receiving large portions of their budgets from public funding.

At a previous job my first project was building a webscraper and some processing tools to pull down every application for preliminary permit ever filed with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to build a pumped storage plant.

The basis for this was two-fold, first, to get some kind of backing of what the potential supply might look like based on developer assumptions up to that point in time, second (and more germane to this discussion) to pull out every cost characteristics we could find in order to build a more robust set of cost models and cost prediction tools than had existed up to that point. Hydro costs are extremely site specific, so this is typically an onerous process.

I suppose the kicker here is that I was at a national lab and nominally employed by the Department of Energy, and they has such a sub-optimal grasp of hydropower that we were in the process of writing the first big national report on the resource in a long time[1]. Now hydro's also part of NREL's annual technology baselines[2], which was similarly fun to work on.

[1] https://energy.gov/eere/water/articles/hydropower-vision-new...

[2] https://atb.nrel.gov/

I've been thinking about this for a while actually. A lot of the data is available but generally requires going through FOIA which is difficult to do at scale.

There is one basic flaw in this.. The 2nd avenue subway is too deep underground for cut-and-cover to be an option for building stations.

Building them that far underground was a design choice. Partly as a result of deciding for the expensive and unnecessary full mezzanines and partly to avoid having to coordinate with con-ed and other users of the sub-street space.

wow great blog, glad people take the time to write stuff like this

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