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Monorail Cost Estimates Released
Jan 17, 2002 --
Preliminary monorail cost estimates were unveiled at the January 9 Elevated Transportation Company (ETC) board meeting. Current estimates say 14 miles of monorail from Crown Hill to West Seattle will cost somewhere between $970 million and $1.7 billion. The first figure is for a system running two-car trains. The second figure is for a four-car system, accounting for more cars, and stations that will have to be twice as long. This amount also supposes higher costs for beams, parking facilities, permitting, and utility relocation. How does this figure compare to Sound Transit's current light rail estimate? Sound Transit's latest variation on what voters approved, this time to run 14 miles from downtown to one mile north of the airport, is currently projected to cost $2.1 billion.
Reader Comments
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Dick Burkhart
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Jan 21, 2002
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Seattle, WA
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mathematician
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Your report on Monorail Cost Estimates failed to note a very important point: System capacity makes a big difference in cost. What is surprising is not that the 2-car monorail costs so much less than the 4-car. It is that Sound Transit's Link light rail does not cost far more.
This is surprising because Link will ultimately have 3 1/2 times the passenger capacity of the 4-car monorail plan, 20% more even at start up. This is based on 30 four-car trains per hour and allocating each standee a customary 5.1 sq. ft. Yet the initial Link segment has the same length and is expected to have about the same or less cost after inflation (the preliminary monorail estimates are in 2002 dollars, the Link budget is in year-of-expenditure dollars).
There are also questions as to why the ETC cost estimates for technology (trains, switches, power, communications, control, maintenance equipment) are only half the cost, on a per mile basis, of the 4 mile Las Vegas monorail currently under construction. The Las Vegas technology costs are 3 times those for light rail and even exceed construction costs.
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Louie Bergsagel
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May 04, 2004
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Seattle, WA
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computer programmer
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If Sound Transit stops 1 mile north of the airport, I hope they all get committed as being criminally insane.
What are people supposed to do, hop in a taxi for the last mile? How big is the taxi lobby around here? I hope the people boycott Sound Transit. Maybe then somebody will use a little common sense to the region's transportation problems. |
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