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Comment by iot_devs | Hacker News Reader

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iot_devs·

So M5 in Milan is completely automated AND underground.

According to the Italian Wikipedia page the cost was of 1.3B € for 13kms.

For a cheaper 100m€/km

While the cost is comparable with Montreal, the Italian one is completely underground.

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Having just stayed in Milan for a week i was really impressed with how the metro had been built and continually improved.

I wanted to know though, how was the tunnelling done so cheaply? I noticed the lines seemed to follow roads a lot, did they do cut and cover along the roads to keep costs down?

One thing to mind is that infrastructure project's financing and cost allocation is different in Europe vs North America. All countries and jurisdictions counts things differently. Are stations part of the cost, what about roads and paths leading to them, getting right of way, buying land etc. some of these costs are often incurred by local governments and municipalities and aren't considered part of the infrastructure project while other projects will include them as part of their costs. The Milan project is fantastic, but it's difficult to have more than a ballpark comparison based on general numbers such as these.

Don't forget that Milan is a very old city (initially settled 400BC) so there was probably lots of old infrastructure and stuff to work around. Similarly old Amsterdam has a collection of all the objects found during the digging for one of the metro lines in one of the stations, with all sorts of very old coins, plates, knives, etc.

100mEUR is 150mCAD

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