Not sure a $1B street update (literally 2 miles of street in a city with thousands of miles) could be regarded as "affordable" with a $12.6B city budget.
Seems like they redid the whole street, sidewalks, street lamps, etc for those $12 million, and bike lane was just an excuse to do all that work. But yes, everything here is much more expensive than it should be. The "city overhead" itself was just above $1M.
I think there are a few problems with the math but the largest seems to be his costs seem out of whack.
Creating a new road is more expensive than any maintenance/entire repaving since it shouldn't need to be re-graded/piped/utilities dealt with/etc. Sunnyvale in California quotes a variety of prices for street maintenance up to reconstruction and none are over $7/sq foot.[1] And this is in California where constructions costs are usually high compared to the rest of the nation.
As the articles goes on to point out, only that single section in the entire project will be that expensive, and that includes a lot of city upgrades that were otherwise needed and rolled into this (like new lighting, adding additional drainage, upgraded sidewalks, and new crosswalks).
To be honest the project sounds fantastic and I hope they keep at it. If they're able to roll in other upgrades at the same time, so much the better. The 12m figure is borderline clickbait (even if it is technically true).
As a frame of reference we were quoted $160,000 USD to resurface two miles worth of residential streets, including ground work like changing drainage pipes and upgrading drains etc.
This is in Sweden so YMMV, but we were quoted $80K per mile and these people got told $1.5 million for just over a quarter mile?
There is another degree of freedom here: project cost. Why on earth does 0.32 miles of residential road cost $1.5M? Having just managed a construction project much larger than this stretch of road myself, I am certain that a lot of the blame here lies with the contracting process as well as outrageous fees (and just sheer inefficiency) from the engineers and contractors. There is no valid reason this should be so expensive. In the rest of the world, I guarantee you they are not paying over a million dollars for something like this and their standards are just as high if not higher.
I’m not sure there is an opportunity to fix this - I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this now and modeling it out - by building a better construction company: most of the problem is, instead, essentially political.
We have an access road that was sized for utility trucks. We had to widen it slightly because of obscure California regulations.
Widening it didn’t cost $1.7M. However, the cost per linear foot was within a factor of two of buying a line of Tesla Model 3s. This is in an unincorporated (rural) area, on a farm.
The work lasted one rainstorm before needing extensive repairs.
I’m completely unsurprised that building a hut around existing plumbing and adding a toilet costs so much in the city. I wonder if the price includes a sink.
2.5x what a larger municipality paid for a system that was newer at the time seems pretty unreasonable to me. It’s not like the NYPD is field testing something cutting-edge here.
To be fair, experts said that $6-$10 billion estimate was not realistic. First time projects always overshoot their budget. Also, it assumed placing tubes on the highway, instead of buying land (by far the biggest expense of the project).
Only $24k for 800 sqft of construction. A lot less than I would've guessed. It would've been $240k if it was done by the government with 12 planning meetings and corrupt contracting bids.
This is really being blown out of proportion. Spending $400k on a prototype for something that will cost $10M+, will be on every street, will be interacted with by every citizen seems pretty fucking reasonable. Their unit costs are basically in line with what other cities are paying. SF has its bullshit, but I don’t see this as that.
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