New Jersey’s Governor Christie has been assailed lately for canceling a proposed railroad tunnel because the cost estimates have grown to between 11 and 14 billion dollars (source). None of the newspaper articles that I’ve seen on this story, however, have compared the cost of this tunnel to others around the world. Here are the data that I wish the journalists had pulled from Wikipedia:
- Lotschberg Base Tunnel, world’s longest land tunnel, dug under a mountain at the peak of the world economic boom and completed in 2007; 21.5 miles long, about $4.5 billion (might be 1998 dollars, though); cost per mile: $209 million
- Gotthard Base Tunnel, when completed in 2017 will become the world’s longest railway tunnel; at least 35.4 miles plus additional tunnels, shafts and passages totaling 94.3 miles, about $10.2 billion; cost per mile: $288 million
- Channel Tunnel or “Chunnel”, connecting France and England, world’s longest undersea tunnel; 31.4 miles, opened 1994, cost $7.4 billion (might be 1985 dollars and the cost overruns did lead to bankruptcy); cost per mile: $235 million
- Wushaoling Tunnel, traveling through four regional fault zones; 13 miles long, opened 2006, cost $845 million; cost per mile: $65 million
- New Jersey-New York Mass Transit/ARC Tunnel, scheduled for completion in 2018; 3.5 miles long, cost $11-14 billion; cost per mile: $3.7 billion (I used $13 billion for this calculation)
Are folks in New Jersey rich enough to pay 15 times as much per mile of tunnel as the Swiss? Or 57 times as much per mile as the Chinese pay? New Jersey has high income now (2nd in nation), but Forbes suggests that New Jerseyans will not be especially wealthy in 2018 if present trends continue. New Jersey has some existing fiscal problems that led to its being the first U.S. state charged with fraud by the federal Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC site).
To me the most interesting part of this story is why newspapers couldn’t be bothered to calculate the cost per mile of this project. A Google News search for ‘new jersey tunnel “cost per mile”‘ yielded no results (“new jersey tunnel” yielded 689 results). The New York Times article mentions the number of jobs that the government forecasts would be “created” (the accounting doesn’t make sense to me because they did not subtract the number of jobs that would be lost due to taxpayers having $13 billion less to invest and spend) and a bunch of other estimates. In a situation where the main debate is about whether or not something is too costly you’d expect a newspaper to include some facts about what similar projects have cost worldwide.
[The data from other tunnels is a little bit confusing since there are varying numbers of tracks and holes through the Earth. The Chunnel, for example, is really two single-track tunnels plus an additional “service tunnel”. The Lotschberg Base Tunnel is currently a mix of double- and single-track capacity. The Gotthard Base Tunnel is two tunnels with one track each (no “service tunnel”).]
I think you are using wrong basis to compare the projects, A tunnel unlike other investments, is something that will greatly affect prosperity of the region. consider number of new tax-payers the tunnel will be able to attract?
Rather than cost per mile (which makes no sense) since all are different types of tunnel. also there are some non variable cost attached to building an underwater tunnel which are independent of the the length of the tunnel being built. Had Channel tunnel being built today, even then its cost per mile would have come fairly close.
In any country other than USA, no politician in his right mind would cancel such project.
Akshay: I would agree with you that if there were current no way to get from NJ to NY other than swimming, a tunnel investment would have an obvious payoff. However, NJ and NY are in fact already connected by multiple bridges and tunnels for cars, buses, and trains. The return on a 6th or 7th means of ground transport from Point A to Point B is not as high as the return on the first one.
Its somehow funny, I dont know whether it is because majority of the Baby boomer’s are close to retirement or already retired. Most of republican Americans seem to have become extremely risk averse in terms of Infrastructure spending. Which is funny, they seem to think that, a nations greatness equates money in the bank (I mean actually lesser negative balance a.k.a. deficit) and military in middle east. rather than human capital and technological superiority. When I grew up (in 1990s ), We viewed USA as symbol of humanities progress.
Now Taiwan and Dubai have, taller buildings. And other countries have much far-sighted infrastructure and high-tech projects. While Americans seem to be just bunch of old guys bickering over Taxes, and planning to dismantle NASA and banning Stem Cell Research and what not.
Another joke is the whole Health Care debate, no country in world, would have significant population like USA opposing the health care bill, however only in USA, People fail to consider opportunity costs of having faulty healthcare system.
@Phillg Having lived in Manhattan and having traveled by NJ Transit, PATH and via Car / Bus through the tunnels, I can attest to the fact that there is actually a need for another tunnel.
Another important point is that most of the people who I have found to be agreeing with governor actually live outside NJ or Manhattan. Have a look at NY times comment thread, most of the people who agree are from Florida or Tennessee or other conservative states. Even you stay in MA. It would have been understandable if most of them were from NJ, but rather most of the NJ’ers seem to be for the tunnel; (And its they who are going to pay for it.)
Akshay, you say this: “In any country other than USA, no politician in his right mind would cancel such project.”
My problem with this is that you haven’t explained to me why this project is so important. What makes it truly vital to the region? Not every tunnel actually needs to be built. If you want to make the case that this one should be built, you might want to start by explaining why.
What is so important about this tunnel that the people of New Jersey really need to pony up 13 billion dollars? We’ll be polite and assume the middle ground and no cost overruns.
The most important information omitted in the analysis-free news reports is where the projected cost overruns come from. My guess is the project cost was low-balled by overly optimistic initial projections to get the plan approved. In other words, a bait-and-switch scam.
Is $/mile an appropriate way to measure the cost of a tunnel? No doubt there are large startup costs associated with digging a tunnel of any length, followed by presumably lower per mile costs once all the machinery is in place. The per-mile costs of the European tunnels are remarkably consistent, but those tunnels are all on the order of 10x longer than the NY-NJ tunnel. Perhaps, if those tunnels were just the length of the NY-NJ tunnel, their per-mile costs would jump way up. (The Chinese tunnel seems to be a real outlier here; perhaps somebody didn’t do the conversion right, or perhaps that’s just a reflection of paying workers $1/day.)
You’re sadly misinformed on this project. I have worked in the bidding phase of it and you can’t make any of the comparisons you did. First you have crazy union wages. Second, you’re drilling, digging and working under one of the most populated cities in the world, while under sea level. Your only access is through a hole drilled somewhere in the middle of the city. All your equipment, waste, and personal have to travel through this hole.
However, if it can’t be paid for, it can’t be paid for. Spending money that isn’t here has cause a lot of problems, including this one. And this is coming from someone who is gonna be put out of a job because of this.
Have the proponents of the project be able to give any justification for the seemingly exorbitant cost per mile?
More on European tunnels:
Gotthard base tunnel achieves connection between tunnels drilled from both ends; may be completed early (Swiss engineering, no doubt):
http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/technik/0,1518,722035,00.html (in German)
Stuttgart, Germany, is up in arms about a project to move its main railway station underground, together with a set of tunnels totalling 33 km (20.6
mi).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuttgart_21
Cost per mile is not easy to calculate, though, because the total cost comprises the station, tunnels, above-ground lines and a section of high-speed rail towards Munich.
@Ashkay — “A tunnel unlike other investments, is something that will greatly affect prosperity of the region”
Alas, it seems this is one of Christie’s main objections. After the project is completed, it will have to be staffed by train drivers and sidewalk-gum-removers earning about 225% what French doctors make. (google “french doctors kevinmd”). This will indeed affect the future prosperity of the region for generations.
It is kind of hard to know what is an “investment” if the capital in question must be deployed via American public employee unions. For example, you could argue that the thousands of trains and busses, and hundreds of miles of tracks, tunnels, and stations used by the San Francisco Municipal Railway are now paying out thanks to the “investments” made by previous generations. The problem is that the mere operating expenses of Muni are now on the order of $1.50 per passenger mile traveled, approximately 3 times the cost of private cars (including depreciation of the typical car, gas, and maintenance, about $~.50 per passenger mile according to AAA.) Fare revenues cover 26% of that cost, so the return on investment is on the order of minus double the cost of all surface transportation for hundreds of thousands of transit users, divided by the value of our grandparents’ sweat, either in perpetuity or until this “investment” bankrupts us.
A clearer example: Cobb County GA recently purchased 2 mules at $6000 for use in a park, and subsequently spent $78000 to care for them over the course of a year, while putting them to no use. ( http://www.ajc.com/news/cobb/mules-jack-and-jill-655561.html ). (-1,300% per annum? Except it appears that the mules are only worth $3k, so call it -2000%.)
Tyler: Thanks for the insider’s perspective on this. You imply that this new tunnel is an exceptionally challenging project, more challenging than the Swiss tunnels, for example, and hence the staggering cost. I’m having a hard time understanding this. The NJ/NY tunnel is billed as necessary to replace and/or augment a “100-year-old” existing rail tunnel. Page 6 of http://www.arctunnel.com/pdf/deis/4_1_0013.pdf makes it look like tunneling under the Hudson means going through sand and mud. This was apparently well within the capabilities of civil engineering circa 1910.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel says that the maximum overburden of the new Swiss tunnel is 2500m, i.e., there are 8200′ of rocks pressing down on the tunnel (generates a lot of water pressure if nothing else). http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/Specials/Gotthard_base_tunnel/The_tunnel/Tunnelling_through_a_mountain.html?cid=28276254 talks about the granite that they are tunneling through in places.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holland_Tunnel says that this tunnel, completed in 1927, never gets more than 93′ below the mean high water of the Hudson.
I’m not a civil engineer, but compared to what the Swiss are doing, yet another NY/NJ tunnel seems like something a toddler in a sandbox might do. You can tell me that they are unionized toddlers and they need to make $14 billion, but let’s not fool ourselves about whether we’re achieving anything exciting.
I looked at this project a little more closely. There are two train stations in Manhattan: Penn and Grand Central. The proposed “tunnel to nowhere” does not connect to either train station. Stepping back from artificial lines of political and bureaucratic boundaries, the $14 billion tunnel doesn’t make any sense as a means of tying together suburbs and city. What would make sense is something like the Washington, D.C. Metro system, which goes under and over the Potomac River in two places and seamlessly connects Maryland, Virginia, and the District. Imposing requirements on commuters to check schedules, buy separate tickets, change trains, etc. will greatly reduce demand.
A quick look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NYC_subway-4D.svg reveals that the New York system is greatly distorted by political boundaries. From the center (Manhattan) it is possible to travel a vast distance east into Queens or north into the Bronx, but not possible to travel a short distance west into New Jersey. Compare to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:WMATA_system_map.svg (Washington) and you can see how commuters and taxpayers have a fighting chance when politicians and bureaucrats are able work together (as they apparently are not able in the NJ/NY area).
How about Boston’s own Big Dig. Of course we got a bridge too.
I’m confused. Why can’t the state of New Jersey hire one of the firms from those European/Asian projects? Also, is there any good reason the tunnel goes nowhere?
The need should be pretty clear — there has been zero increase in travel capacity across the Hudson to Manhattan since the George Washington Bridge was double-decked in the early 1960s. The population (especially in the parts of NJ most dependent on commuter rail) has grown considerably since then.
I agree that the deep-cavern destination would have made this tunnel less useful than one to Penn Station and/or Grand Central, but cancellation of the project at this stage, with designs and most of the funding in hand, seems very short-sighted.
We are going through the same thing here in Ottawa.
Everyone here is looking at the NJ situation:
http://ottawa.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20101008/OTT_LRT_101008/20101008/?hub=OttawaHome
Saw this link from the Atlantic website. It seems pretty clear that the reason this project is so expensive is all the mouths at the trough. Unions, politicians, well-connected contractors, etc. I have no doubt that the plethora of “no-show” and “no-work” jobs depicted in The Sopranos from time to time were a pretty accurate portrayal of how infrastructure projects go down in the Tri-state area.
I don’t see any need for this tunnel. When I spent a week at my employer’s head office in Hoboken NJ I had no trouble taking the PATH train from my hotel in Manhattan each morning across to New Jersey.
It did look pretty crowded for folks going the other way though 😉
Yes, construction costs are completely absurd. They’re absurd in “blue states” like NJ where a supposedly-maverick governor thinks he can score points by coming on like a foe of mobbed-up contractors. They’re also absurd here in the deep south, where workers aren’t unionized, and profits accrue to a few politically connected (and invariably GOP-supporting) good-old-boy businessmen. The rigged game is the same.
The situation in New Jersey is about pseudo-maverick political posturing, first and foremost, but also about Christie trying to direct the federal cash ($3b?) into the right trough, i.e.road projects elsewhere in the state.
Philip:
You’re comparing the Swiss drilling through rock with ARC having to tunnel through a mixture of mud and bedrock, and that’s not really an appropriate comparison. For one thing, tunneling through solid rock is *much* easier tunneling through sand/mud – you just use a tunnel boring machine to drill through the rock and the structure is (usually) strong enough to support itself. Tunneling through sand and mud is just like digging a big hole at the beach: once the whole gets big enough, it starts to collapse in on itself so you have to find ways to shore it up as you go. Also, if you’re tunneling through mud/sand underneath existing buildings, you have to take care that your tunneling doesn’t shift the ground enough to undermine the structural integrity of the foundations of those buildings.
These are similar to the problems faced by the Big Dig. If Boston had been built on bedrock, the project could have just bored the tunnels and probably been finished 10 years ago, but since Boston sits on fill, the project had to use slower/more expensive cut and cover techniques.
And yes, we’ve been able to tunnel through sand and mud since the 19th century. They way it was done back then was to through a bunch of underpaid Chinese, Irish, Irailian and black workers at the problem, and if a few dozen died during a tunnel collapse, no one really cared. We can’t do that any more, not to mentioned that the construction activities have to be cognizant of existing structures as mentioned above.
(not a civil engineer, but I’ve worked with civil engineers on rail and highway tunnel projects including the Big Dig and 2nd Avenue Subway)
Herb: Thanks for the perspective. A few more accomplishments like the Big Dig and our country will be well and truly bankrupt! I feel that we got more for the taxpayers’ $15 billion or so with the Big Dig. We got a new tunnel to the airport (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Williams_Tunnel ). We got a fancy new bridge (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_P._Zakim_Bunker_Hill_Memorial_Bridge ). We built an 8-lane highway underground. We didn’t connect North Station and South Station for some reason, a source of enduring pain for many commuters. The return on investment for the Big Dig in terms of commuter time saved has been estimated as low as 0% (there have been some aesthetic benefits for downtown).
I still think that if not for the arbitrary political boundaries and crippling pension obligations that may shut the entire system down soon enough, what would make the most sense for the greater NYC metro area is an expanded subway system. That might actually be worth $14 billion.
“We didn’t connect North Station and South Station for some reason, a source of enduring pain for many commuters. ”
We haven’t connected them because connecting them is not a trivial task. The biggest problem is that North Station and South Station are so close together, that connecting them via tunnel is problematic because the descent and ascent grades would be too steep for locomotives to traverse. Your solutions are to either place one end of the tunnel north of North Station or south of South Station to make the climb more reasonable, or have the trains stop underground at one or both of the stations – all of which are solutions that would make Big Dig spending look like peanuts.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m a member of the New England Rail Coalition (linked in my username) and I’m all for expanded rail and the N-S link, just understand that it hasn’t been done because it’s not an easy thing to do and the need for it isn’t as dire as the need to replace the old elevated artery (which was 20 years past it’s design life).
“The return on investment for the Big Dig in terms of commuter time saved has been estimated as low as 0%”
The Big Dig fundamentally re-architected traffic through and around downtown Boston. It would have been better if planners in the 1950’s had done things right the first time, but they didn’t and it was up to planners in the 1990’s to bite the bullet and fix the problem.
I used to work in Burlington and I would have to travel to the South Shore often for project work. It used to be that driving N/S on I-93 from Woburn to Quincy would take 1-2 hours during off peak hours and up to 3 hours during peak hours. I do that route now, and it takes maybe 20-30 minutes during peak hours. I’m okay with that ROI.
“what would make the most sense for the greater NYC metro area is an expanded subway system. That might actually be worth $14 billion.”
NYC is getting 2nd Avenue for $17 billion – that’s tunneling through bedrock and using some existing tunnel segments that were built in the 1970’s so that project is relatively easy.
Tunneling through soft sand or clay is MUCH easier than tunneling through rock. The London Underground deep tunnels were all dug (in the 19th century!) by manual labour, using a steel shield which was progressively forced into the clay, pressing on pre-fab cast-iron tunnel linings, segments of which were added as the tunnel progressed.
Although we wouldn’t use a few guys with pickaxes and shovels anymore (not because they cost too much, but because they are too slow!), modern tunnel boring machines work on the same principle, with a cutter on the face of the sheild, a system for removing the excavated soil, and an automatic erector to build the tunnel lining out of precast concrete blocks. Just in terms of the speed of excavation compared with boring through rock, the fact that the tunnel needs to be lined is a trivial detail.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunneling_shield
As I understand it the major cost driver is the cavern for the station under 34th St. The tunnels themselves are only about a third of the total cost. So the per mile comparisons aren’t valid, because pure tunnels are being compared to a much more complex project.
Nixing the station at 34th St. and connecting directly to the new LIRR tunnels under GCT would both improve the utility and reduce the cost. The problem is that the three regional commuter rail systems are unable to worth together. Unlike in the DC area, where the federal government has enough clout to make the two states work together (sometimes), there is nobody that can force NJ and NY to plan for the NYC metropolitan region as a cohesive whole.
PeakVT: Thanks for the perspective on costs. Paying billions extra because some bureaucrats don’t want to work together doesn’t seem like a good deal for the taxpayers of NJ.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Authority_Trans-Hudson has some interesting data on the under-Hudson train tunnels built in the early 20th century. The document also claims that the cost of building the entire PATH system, in today’s dollars, was about $1 billion. With the construction technology of 100 years ago, they managed to push four tubes underneath the Hudson, separated by about 1.25 miles, and build about 10 stations. The original PATH system included about 14 miles of track, much of which was underneath either Manhattan or the Hudson. I can’t figure out why it should cost 14X more to build a much more limited system today. One would think that construction innovations would have made tunneling cheaper.
Speaking of $14 billion, if it were used to build additional apartments on Manhattan at $260/square foot (average price for NYC in 2008 according to http://www.reedconstructiondata.com/news/2008/12/hospital-nursing-home-and-apartment-building-construction-costs/ ) and you budget 250 square feet per occupant of those new apartments, you’d have built enough new apartments for 215,385 people. Right now PATH has a daily ridership of 246,000. If we are committing to incinerating $14 billion taxpayer dollars, why not use it to make it possible for more people to live in Manhattan and walk to work, rather than build more mass transit infrastructure in a city that already cannot afford to pay for its transit system and associated pension obligations (see http://www.recordonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20101004/NEWS/10040323 for how the MTA has 70 different unions and http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-07/new-york-s-mta-raises-subway-commuter-rail-prices-amid-state-budget-cuts.html for how the MTA is cutting back service, i.e., reducing usage of its current infrastructure).
@stephen
The physical act of removing mud/clay is easier than removing rock, but the processes of boring through rock is less complex than boring through soil – at a minimum with the tunnel shield process you have the added system of bringing in the precast segments along with in addition to bringing the muck out, plus having to monitor and adjust for
subsidence, having to properly dispose of any contaminated soil they come across and so on. It can certainly be done, it’s just more complex than straight drilling through rock.
@philg: ” I can’t figure out why it should cost 14X more to build a much more limited system today”
“The entire PATH system” consisted described in the article was basically the tubes under the Hudson linking up to existing rail systems on the NY and NJ sides. A railroad tunnel today is also nothing like those designed 100 years ago – the tunnels have emergency ventilation systems for fire control, the rails and fasteners are designed for higher speeds, there are extensive signaling controls and so one. I’d bet that if you add in all of the upgrade costs from over the last 100 years, the costs would come much closer.
There’s the matter of the workforce – as I wrote before, we don’t have slave laborers any more and safety is paramount. Your wiki link showed that 20(!) workers died when they started excavating one of the PATH tunnels. As a comparison, in 15 years of construction and operation the Big Dig had five deaths (4 construction workers and the woman killed by the ceiling collapse) and out of those five, one guy was a truck driver who had a heart attack while sitting in his truck (since he was on duty at the time the dearth is attributed to the Big Dig even though it wasn’t directly construction-related).
The ARC tunnels are also designed to go under existing Amtrak and MTA tunnels and the design/construction has to be performed with minimal disruption to those services. Finally, there are all the environmental and urban factors ARC has to deal with that weren’t considered in the late 1800’s. When the project comes up on contaminated soil (and given that this is NY/NJ it will definitely happen) they can’t just dump it in the Hudson, it has to be disposed of appropriately. Demolition of historically-significnt buildings have to be done carefully to preserve historic elements. Vent buildings have to be aesthetciclly pleasing. It goes on and on.
PeakVT mentioned that the cost involves construction of the station at 34th street. It also includes the construction of a rail maintenance/storage yard (with associated land acquisition and ROW costs) as well as the purchase of new rolling stock.