On the cost side, you’re comparing apples and oranges: building through downtown Boston in a tunnel compared to building through exurban Virginia above ground on an existing right of way.
A better point of comparison to the Silver Line is the inter-county connector in MD. Both built in the 2010s. $127 million per mile, which includes land acquisition costs because it wasn’t built along an existing right of way like the Silver Line.
You’re also completely off on the ridership side. Because rail only takes you on inflexible routes, actual ridership is low except in dense downtown cores. The Silver Line operates nowhere near capacity. Silver Line ridership is under 17,000 passengers per day. The inter county connector averages 30-40,000. So more than double the ridership for half the per mile cost.
The Silver Line was built to serve the single largest commuter destination in all of Virginia. At that scale, rail transit is cost effective. Rail transit wouldn't make sense for a smaller scale development like the one described in the article. At this scale, dedicated bus lanes would make more sense and would be much, much cheaper than rail.
Boston's 'Big Dig" urban centre highway construction created 2 miles of roadbed at. costs of $15 - $24 billion, (up to $12 billion/mi), carrying 536,000 vehicles/day. At an average of 1.55 occupancy rating, about 830,000 passengers/day. Two miles.
DC Metro's Silver Line is 29.6 miles long, has 26 stations, and cost $6.8 billion, or $229 million/mi, roughly one tenth the cost of Boston's freeway project.
Peak capacity at 26 8-car trains of 120 passenger earch per hour is just under 25,000 passengers/hr. Over nearly 30 miles. Or roughly 750,000 passenger miles per hour, as compared with 70,000 passenger-miles/hr sustained for the Gig Dig.
Note that, yes, I'm comparing Metro peak with Boston daily average. The >10x advantage remains. "More than 70% of rail ridership occurs during the morning and evening rush hours, and 43% of these commuters ride Metro in a one-hour time period' (WMATA Core Capacity study).
This gives us about 3,200 passenger-mile/$billion for urban highway, versus 110,000 passenger-mile/$billion for DC Metro.
Metro wins handily. Rail is 34x more cost effective than highway.
I also grew up in Northern VA. Biggest issue there is how hard it is to build public transit. The silver-line was such a clusterfuck largely because of fights over who should pay[1], how much it should cost and how to balance construction-induced disruption and costs with long-term TCO.
If we could build rail miles as cheaply and quickly as Western Europe, everyone in Fairfax Co could commute via rail except perhaps those work west of there.
1: Fairfax county is rather centrally planned compared to everywhere else in the US I've lived since then, but the DC Metro is funded by MD, VA, DC, and the federal government. The difficulty of building infrastructure seems to scale super-linearly with the number of people paying for the infrastructure...
It doesn’t matter. Pretty much every place that has enough people going in the same direction to fill a rail line already has one. Meanwhile, rail outside those downtown cores is vastly underutilized. The I-270/I-495 interchange (which connects the DC Beltway to the inner suburb of Montgomery county) carries 760,000 vehicles per day, more than the entire ridership of the DC Metro, and double that of the LA Metro.
The loss of the W&OD railway was a major failure of foresight IMHO. It collapsed for the same reason most local rail systems collapsed around that time: automobiles ate their lunch.
Now the local government is spending billions to build the silver line expansion more or less parallel to the W&OD trail, except that it doesn't go as far. The stations locations for the Silver Line are not very good. They bypass the downtown areas of Reston, Herndon, and Ashburn (such as it is) so the rail lines can be built in the middle of the toll road. Only a couple of the Tysons Corner stops really make much sense. Even the Dulles Airport stop is a quarter mile from the terminal.
But really they didn't have the option of running it through town without buying out loads of expensive property (and no doubt a whole lot of politically unpopular eminent domain use) and spending decades in court fighting over it.
The eternal sadness is that in part due to that reliance on federal money, we were unable to put real rail infrastructure in as part of the project and could only get Bus-'Rapid'-Transit which led to the mediocre Silver Line.
In some parallel universe Boston is yukking it up with a high frequency train from Roxbury to the South End (along the original elevated Orange line route) to South Station to Seaport to the Airport and I hate them for it. I just know they demolished Central Parking at Logan and built a gleaming rail terminal in its place.
Check out the Silver Line extension to the DC metro as a counter point [1]. Something like $7B to run rail 25 miles. And, who knows what the maintenance will be. For large sections of it, they had to run the tracks over the roads. So, now, there are these hulking, eternal masses of concrete that run through the sub-cities along the route.
Every day that I see its ongoing construction, I wish someone would just turn off the project are redirect the funds to improving infrastructure to support self-driving vehicles.
It took 22 years and almost $7B to build 22 miles of MRT (not high-speed rail) just outside of the DC beltway, and much of the route had an existing right-of-way. It's a populous area, but the DC to Boston route is quite heavily developed.
I grew up in Northern VA. Public transit here is a solution looking for a problem. The job centers and commercial are too spread out for public transit to make any sense. Most of the population and jobs in the DC metro area aren’t in DC but spread around in Tysons, Loudoun, Reston, Arlington, Bethesda, etc. The state spent billions building the Silver line out to Tysons, Reston, and Loudoun, and ridership was disappointing even before COVID. (And it’s approximately zero now.) In a traditional hub-and-spoke city like Chicago, heavy rail can bring tons of commuters down to where the jobs are in the core. But when the jobs are spread out all over the spokes, that model breaks down. It’s impossible to take Metro to Reston from most of the surrounding residential areas (all the ones except the narrow slice on the Silver line itself). And it’s a huge pain in the ass to do the spoke-hub-spoke commute and take Metro from a different suburb to Reston. And for married couples, it’s a real roll of the dice whether both your jobs will be easily accessible via Metro.
Rail transit is an anachronism, best suited for the 1950s when life involved a woman staying home with the kids while dad took the train into the city for work. I did that for a year before my wife started her job and it was lovely (took Metro North down from Westchester to Manhattan every day). But in a modern family with two jobs in two locations, plus kids with daycare and school and after school activities, it’s not scalable.
My wife and I are “city people.” We really tried to scale the transit lifestyle. We lived in downtown Baltimore for two years and took Amtrak to work each day. We lived in downtown DC and took Metro. We’ve commutes in the Silver line, Orange line, Blue line, MARC, etc. And every year the service got worse, and every time we had another kid the equation got harder to balance. Eventually we threw in the towel, moved to a red county, and bought an SUV that gets 13 mpg. And we’ve never looked back.
You want to know what the future of America looks like? Go to the Dallas suburbs. That’s where all the immigrants with kids are, and where the next generation of Americans are being raised. It’s a glorious place. And it doesn’t involve public transit.
You need to solve the right problem. For example in Maryland, the problem is not getting people into the “urban core” (i.e. DC). There is actually a surplus of rail capacity from Maryland into DC. You’ve got six separate rail lines going from the Maryland suburbs into DC (two regional rail, four metro).
The problem we have in Maryland is moving people from suburban population centers to suburban job centers. People commute from Bowie to College Park, or Frederick to Bethesda, or Waldorf to Alexandria. Indeed, none of the highways being widened (270, 495, and 295) even go near the urban core. 270 and 295 bring people from the outer suburbs to 495, which passes through the inner suburbs.
You couldn’t build a rail line that would solve that problem. I mean you could, it would just cost a ton. Widening 270 and 495 is going to cost about $100 million per mile (or $6.4 billion if you did the entire beltway). The silver line serves just 17,000 riders per day. The beltway serves ten times that in the bush portions.
Those numbers aren’t possible literally anywhere else. Silver line phase II extension carried about 1.1 million people over six months. That’s the marquee project of the DC metro system—the only thing it has focused on building over the last decade (to the detriment of the rest of the system). Boring Company’s little demo carried a meaningful fraction as many passengers as that $3 billion dollar, decade-in-the-making transit project.
That's an extension of the Copenhagen heavy rail line within the city. Obviously that's more expensive than building infrastructure out in the suburbs--Silver Spring, my point of comparison, is a suburb of D.C. I was talking about the Greater Copenhagen Light Rail: https://www.intelligenttransport.com/transport-articles/1426....
Although, I should note that the cost for building 10 miles of new track entirely underground beneath Copenhagen is less than what it cost DC to extend the Silver Line the same distance entirely above-ground through low-density suburbs along a pre-existing right of way.
To use some example numbers. VA7, which goes from the Dulles area where many DC-area data centers are located, through Reston where many tech companies' offices are located, to near DC, carries 50,000-100,000 vehicles per day, and is congested pretty much all day. The Metro Silver line, which follows roughly the same route, theoretically destroys that. An 8-car Metro train carries 1,400 people. With 8-minute headways, that's 7.5 trains per hour, 90 trains over a 12-hour commuting day, or 126,000 people.
Except the actual ridership of the Silver Line is just about 17,000 people per day, and declining. Why? Because it's useless for most people. It takes you to DC at one end, and the airport at the other, and a few places that happen to be on the way. But most people who live in that area don't commute to DC. People take VA7 to go from say Sterling (where there is no metro station) to Tyson's Corner. They have to get in a car to use Metro anyway, and by the time they do that, it's faster to just drive to Tysons instead of getting on the Metro for the segment of the trip Metro covers.
On the other side of DC, the Maryland suburbs are served by no fewer than 37.5 trains per hour (15 on the Green/Yellow, 15 on the Blue/Silver, and 7.5 on the Orange). That's 50,000 people per hour! But the cars are pretty much empty in Maryland, because few people commute into DC. In the height of irony, Metro is moving one of its main employment centers to Lanham Maryland, located on the terminus of the orange line. That means it's not actually commutable by Metro for most part. Folks who work for WMATA aren't living in DC and doing a reverse commute. They're living in Bowie or Largo or College Park or Hyattsville (the surrounding towns). Taking Metro would involve going all the way to DC, switching from the Green/Yellow or Blue/Silver to the Orange, then going back all the way.
Houses near metros should be more expensive. It's higher quality living. That's the point. I fail to see a problem with that. But it would also make commutes easier for everyone, rich and poor, just by building it. Bus routes, etc all point to metro.
Build more public transit would bring those costs down, though. Which was the idea.
And some of the stations on the silver line are most certainly not rich. Some are, yes. Others, no.
The DC metro is ridiculous. I'm cynical enough to think that the only way the Silver Line would have been done faster would have been to shutdown DCA so politicians would be forced to use Dulles. Even then they would probably just have drivers.
IIRC, there are issues with the concrete used on the new platforms too.
> That and I'm still hoping they extend the line out to Dulles so we'll finally live in a fully connected urban area that befits the density of NoVA and D.C.
IMO, as another denizen of the D.C. area, the Silver Line, once completed, will not fully connect the D.C. area. There are other developed areas that will still not be reachable.
Take the 28 corridor, for instance: home to the NRO, a bunch of defense contractors, tech companies, the Dulles Expo Center, the Air and Space Museum, and a lot of residential and office space. This region will still not be connected. Going up and down 28 itself is something that almost certainly has to be done by car; I don't know of many (or any) buses that would enable one to get from, say, Centreville to Reston.
A better point of comparison to the Silver Line is the inter-county connector in MD. Both built in the 2010s. $127 million per mile, which includes land acquisition costs because it wasn’t built along an existing right of way like the Silver Line.
You’re also completely off on the ridership side. Because rail only takes you on inflexible routes, actual ridership is low except in dense downtown cores. The Silver Line operates nowhere near capacity. Silver Line ridership is under 17,000 passengers per day. The inter county connector averages 30-40,000. So more than double the ridership for half the per mile cost.
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