The "learning curve" argument

A Streetsblog writeup of the Eno Center’s inquiry into American transit project costs repeated a tired and sloppy claim: that we have to build more transit for costs to come down. For how often this line, that the United States must traverse a learning curve to build as much subway per dollar as the rest of the first world, gets repeated, the evidence that exists stacks up squarely against it.

If a learning curve were the problem, we would expect costs to be coming down in cities that have done the most tunneling. In the US, the two cities building the most underground rail recently are New York and Los Angeles. Yet, in both cities, the per-mile costs of projects have tended steeply upward. New York went from paying $500 million/mile in today’s dollars for the Archer Avenue subway, completed in 1988, to $2.4 billion/mile to extend the 7, completed in 2015. The final cost of the Second Avenue Subway’s first phase, completed at the turn of 2017, totals $2.7 billion/mile. The estimate for the long-awaited line’s second phase is $3.9 billion/mile—for a line whose tunnels are already partially built, and the estimate for the Amtrak Gateway Project—only 1/4 of which would be in a tunnel—totals some $3 billion/mile.

Similarly, in Los Angeles, the unit costs have trended upward in the last 30 years. The initial Red and Purple Line system built in the 1980s and 1990s cost an average of some $400 million/mile in today’s dollars. Since then, costs for each successive phase of the Wilshire Boulevard subway have increased even as the line has progressed away from the city center along a wide road that is not particularly densely developed. The innermost phase is to cost $700 million/mile—an already high figure, and the outermost phase is now projected at $1.4 billion/mile.

The same companies that manage to dig at best a mile of subway under US cities end up tunneling much farther overseas. The obstacle is not that no one knows how to build cheap subways, it’s that they cannot do so in the current US political environment. Blue America already spends vast sums on transit infrastructure. The investments on which the effectiveness of these expenditures hinges are as much political as financial. They are investments into planners and construction supervisors within public agencies who can function mostly without consultant involvement. They are investments into the willpower to defend well-planned, logical projects from inevitable opposition, instead of skipping population and job centers in the name of inoffensiveness. They are likely investments into private sector job quality, re-unionization, and social programs so that the impetus for rail projects to create jobs can be subjugated to the need to move people cost-effectively.

Whether advocates realize it or not, the learning curve fallacy is the perfect cover story for those who don’t care about costs. They will always be able to claim “We’ll do better next time” if not pressed to live within reasonable means from the earliest stages of project development. Mankind has been building railroad tunnels for well over a century. The idea that the United States needs to learn from scratch how to build cost-effectively by building dozens of miles of overbudget tunnels defies common sense. That approach has also not drummed up the willpower to spend what we are being told is needed for the new Hudson River and Baltimore tunnels. The responsible thing to do is to retire this claim.