I have not been posting much lately. The proximate reason is that I spent most of October finalizing with Borners the text of the London construction costs report; there’s still another round of edits but they’re quite small. I don’t want to preview the argument in the report yet, but I do want to talk about one thing that jumped to me while looking at the cost history of London. In New York, we broke down the cost premium into three components, each stacking on the others: labor (primarily overstaffing) raised overall costs by a factor of 1.5, project delivery problems by a factor of a bit more than 2, overdesign of systems and stations combined to a factor of almost 3. Ever since then, almost four years ago, we have tried tackling procurement and poor design separately, having some successes on the latter while nothing has gotten better and much has gotten worse on the former. But what’s emerging out of what we’re seeing in London is that really, the procurement and design premiums are the same problem.
To be clear, “the same problem” should not be taken literally. Stations can be designed to be twice as large as they need to be even under a system of solid project delivery, and vice versa. However, their causes are deeply intertwined, and historically, in London (but not New York), they emerged at the same time.
New York’s cost history is unique, in the sense that high New York costs go back to the IND era of the 1930s. Already then, there was a cost premium of a factor of about 4 over London and Paris. The cost premium over Paris has further increased then, though that over London has not, London itself having a rapid increase in costs starting in the 1990s. The IND’s project delivery did not to our knowledge have any special problems, but it was severely overdesigned, with full-length mezzanines, underground flying junctions, and wide curves under streets requiring demolishing corner buildings; Sixth Avenue Line was particularly expensive as it had to be built around and under PATH and carve a new avenue through the already gentrifying Greenwich Village.
