Stockholm County is a region of 2.5 million people. Despite its modest size, it has one of Europe’s busiest urban rail networks: in 2019, on the eve of the corona crisis, the 104 km Stockholm Metro (Tunnelbana or T-bana) network carried 1,265,900 riders on an average weekday and including the region’s commuter and light rail networks the system carried 1,892,300, representing comparable ridership per capita to large, established European transit cities like Paris and Berlin. The modal split for all trips in 2019 was 40% car, 30% public transport, 28% biking and walking (SL Annual Report 2019), representing one of the highest shares for public transport in Europe. The system is currently in the middle of a large expansion wave: the commuter rail tunnel Citybana opened in 2016 and the system is currently carrying 410,300 passengers a day, while the T-bana is currently building about 19 kilometers’ worth of extensions, collectively called Nya Tunnelbanan.
Stockholm Metro, Source: https://nyatunnelbanan.se/en/media/
The urban rail expansion program in Stockholm is an instructive case. The construction costs remain fairly low. Citybanan cost SEK 16.8 billion in 2007 terms, or about $2.4 billion in 2020 purchasing power parity (PPP) terms, averaging $320 million/kilometer; this is slightly more expensive than the global median, but Citybanan was an unusually complex project, built entirely underneath city center, with two large station caverns mined under older T-bana platforms. Nya Tunnelbanan is currently projected to cost SEK 32 billion, about $190 million/km, well under the global median. Alongside the other Nordic countries and perhaps Switzerland, Sweden is the only country among the world’s very wealthiest with construction costs this low: other low-cost countries such as those detailed in the reports about Italy and Turkey are on the economic periphery of the developed world.
The quality of in-house designs under the civil service system is high. The Swedish Traffic Administration, or Trafikverket, has a generations-long tradition of apolitical engineering, and decisions about the construction of small road projects are undertaken on the basis of benefit-cost analysis. Rail megaprojects like Citybanan and Nya Tunnelbanan cannot be so reduced – they cost so much that the elected national government must approve the final plans, and yet it has not politicized those plans. The in-house expertise of Trafikverket cascades down to the regional level and incorporates a procurement strategy that centers public-sector expertise; designs are traditionally done by the public sector, with the assistance of private consulting firms, and are subsequently owned publicly and bid out to private construction firms.