Transit Projects Hit by Overruns, Delays : Study Cites New Rail Systems in 10 Cities

It has taken 20 years and nearly $7 billion to construct 71 miles of the high-tech Metro subway system in the nation’s capital and there are still miles to go and billions more to spend before the system is completed.

The original Metro price tag was $2.5 billion and promoters said the system would carry a million riders daily. Current ridership is half that number and experts say Metro costs will probably top $10 billion before the last mile of track is laid early in the next century.

Washington’s Metro--considered the cleanest, best-run, best-used subway built in the last quarter-century in the United States--is just one glaring example of how rail transit building costs have skyrocketed in recent decades. These same runaway costs and delays have plagued projects in a dozen other cities and are now a big concern in Los Angeles.

From San Francisco to Atlanta, rail promoters--playing on the frustrations of commuters tired of fighting traffic gridlock--have touted each of these new megabuck projects as an affordable way to reduce congestion and alleviate air pollution.

Despite the rosy predictions, each of the projects has come in over budget and far behind schedule, according to a soon-to-be-released Department of Transportation study.

The study’s findings are only confirmation of what some urban planners and transit experts have been saying for years. Rail critics contend that cities such as Los Angeles have been warned and should have known that costs were going to escalate. The money, these critics add, would be better spent on busways, van pools and super-freeway systems.

“Rail projects are horribly wasteful,” said Peter Gordon, a USC associate dean of urban planning.

He believes that cost overruns are inevitable because rail promoters oversell the merits of their projects and understate the construction costs at the outset. “That,” he added, “was the case in Atlanta, at BART and in Washington. . . . Why should Los Angeles be different?”

Metro Rail Project

Los Angeles County has embarked on construction of an ambitious, 150-mile rail system approved by the voters in 1980. This includes the $3.7-billion Metro Rail subway project that is being tunneled 17.3 miles from downtown’s Union Station to North Hollywood.

Construction started on the first 4.4-mile, $1.29-billion segment of the Metro Rail in 1986 and, with 40% of the work completed, the job is already running over budget and behind schedule. With costs climbing past $300 million a mile, recent audits are predicting budget overruns of at least $473 million before the first 11 miles are finished.

Why are these big projects so costly and hard to build? That is the central question addressed in the 10-city federal study ordered by the Transportation Department’s Urban Mass Transit Authority, the agency that parcels out federal transit funds.

“We are trying to figure out what went wrong (and) why the early planning estimates were so different from what actually was being spent,” said Sam Zimmerman, an UMTA transit expert.

He said cost overruns are inevitable.

“That’s the unwritten . . . behind-the-scenes fact that everyone knows,” Zimmerman said.

Unforeseen Costs Normal

Rail supporters argue that unforeseen costs, inflation and other uncontrollable factors are normal in big transit projects. But they say that, as costly as they are, the rail systems are needed to solve urban traffic problems and reduce air pollution. Without the trains, no metropolitan area can thrive and remain competitive.

“Does Los Angeles need a rail system? Absolutely,” said Neil Peterson, executive director of the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, the funding authority for the 150-mile rail network. “We’ve got to have it and it’s going to be a hell of a lot cheaper to build it now.”

Peterson agreed that costs tend to be understated when these projects are first proposed. However, he said, this was not the result of intentional deception. It happens because preliminary estimates have to be made just to get a project approved and funded. Without approval, there would be no money to design and engineer the project--and, in the process, learn more about how much the project will really cost.

‘Have to Be Optimistic’

“In order to sell projects (to the voters) you have to be optimistic,” Zimmerman said. As a result, something called “compound optimism” enters the equation, he explained. Planners want to keep budget estimates low, so they make the most optimistic assumptions on tunneling costs, choose bare-bones designs for stations using the least expensive materials and put in stairways rather than escalators.

After the project is approved, funded and final design starts, reality sets in.

Civic pride in Washington dictated that the capital’s subway should have monumental aspects. The stations have costly vaulted ceilings, terrazzo tile platforms with granite edging at rail side and indirect lighting, Zimmerman said. And the costs had gone up.

Then there are the unknowns on big tunnel projects: underground rivers, pockets of methane gas, contaminated soils. These are factors that drive the engineers back to the drawing boards to seek new route alignments that can entail more costly tunneling techniques.

‘Compound Optimism’

“So you start out planning to be as cheap as possible,” Zimmerman explained. “Confronted with the unknowns, you make the optimistic assumptions . . . (and) don’t figure in the gold plating that politics and civic pride eventually dictate. That’s compound optimism.”

Delays are one of the biggest budget headaches on any project, most experts agree. Starting a project today costs less than next year because the construction costs are going up about 5% a year, they said.

The Southern California Rapid Transit District was delayed 16 months in starting construction on Metro Rail because it had to work out a detailed funding agreement with federal authorities. Transit district officials said that delay added $23 million to the cost of the project’s first phase.

RTD Executive Director Alan C. Pegg said the project was late getting started because the Reagan Administration tried to block the start of any new rail transit systems.

Schedules Snarled

Work on the first tunnel did not start until August, 1986. Even then, it was not smooth sailing because other delays snarled construction schedules, causing work to back up. The final completion date now is September, 1993, but may be pushed back even further.

Metro Rail audits by the county Transportation Commission show the project is not only behind schedule but running over budget by as much as 10% on the first $1.29-billion phase, raising questions about the transit district’s ability to manage the contract.

“The (transit district) system is too protective, too cumbersome, there are too many checks and balances,” Peterson said.

The result, he added, is that the district is spending $2 to save $1, resulting in delay.

“Delay just kills you,” Peterson said. “When you have delays, contractors are not getting paid. . . . Without the contractor working with us, we’re not going to get this project in anywhere near on time or (within) cost.”

Fewer Stations Suggested

At Peterson’s recommendation, the commission appointed a “cost reduction panel” to supervise the subway project in an effort to hold costs down. He also recommended that the commission take supervision of construction away from the district and put it under a newly created Rail Construction Corp. that would fall under the commission’s authority.

There is talk of building fewer stations and taking other cost-cutting steps, including trimming 70 supervisory jobs from the project staff. Peterson called such steps “a rescue operation” aimed at curtailing Metro Rail overruns before they become unmanageable.

These proposals have touched off a jurisdictional war between the commission and the transit district.

Top RTD officials agree that costs are going up but they say the commission has exaggerated the numbers in a blatant attempt to take over the Metro Rail project.

“The (commission) audit and staff report are so fraught with errors” they are useless, said Gordana Swanson, the RTD’s board president.

Way Over Budget

“The (county Transportation Commission) doesn’t have the expertise or ability” to manage the Metro Rail project, Swanson said, contending that the commission’s own light-rail projects were way over budget.

With both agencies fighting for control of Metro Rail--and releasing their own sets of numbers on cost overruns--it is difficult to tell for certain which agency “owns” the big subway project or what the impact of these escalating turf battles will have on costs. Both sides claim that they alone have the skills needed to cut costs.

Another cost factor for most projects has been the unpredictability of federal budget cuts. With each budget slash, the delivery of authorized funding has slowed or been disrupted altogether and districts with money coming have had to wait months, even years, to get their funds, project managers reported.

‘Extremely Difficult’

Atlanta’s rail system is a case in point. Called MARTA and built by the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority, the system has cost $2.8 billion. It was to have been 50 miles long, but because of federal delays and budget cuts only 32 miles were built.

“It was extremely difficult to get all of the federal dollars that had been authorized,” said Richard Stanger, a former MARTA rail expert who now heads up the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission’s rail development projects.

“You would project your costs and develop your (construction) schedule expecting the federal dollars would be available . . . but they wouldn’t come . . . and that put you further and further behind,” he said.

The impact of the Reagan years on urban mass transit has been devastating, according to officials of the American Public Transit Assn., the powerful, 107-year-old voice of the transit industry. Funding for the start of new rail projects dropped from $4.6 billion a year before Ronald Reagan took office to $1.6 billion last year, association officials said.

Funding Cuts

In the 1970s, the federal government was funding 80% of each rail project, but by the time Los Angeles’ Metro Rail system was approved, the federal government had cut its funding share to 50%. And federal officials have told Los Angeles that UMTA no longer pays for any cost overruns.

Most of the big rail projects have been sold to voters on the premise that they would pay for themselves out of the fare box. The 10-city transportation department study shows that not one of the projects has been able to meet that promised goal.

“The pattern is very clear,” said Michael Jacobs, chief of the U.S. Transportation Systems Centers assessment division, which authored the federal study. “Rail projects have not been very cost effective and have not lived up to expectations. This is a sensitive issue . . . (because) 30 cities are now planning rail systems.”

Least-Efficient System

In Miami, transit authorities predicted that the $1-billion system would be carrying 200,000 riders a day when it opened in 1984, freeing up highways in that Florida city. Today, the trains carry 45,000 passengers a day and their fares pay 20% of the operating costs, making it the least-efficient system, according to the study.

The San Francisco-to-Oakland Bay Area Rapid Transit system carries two-thirds of the predicted 300,000 daily ridership. BART surveys show that the trans-Bay ridership takes 70,000 cars from the road, a small number considering the area’s population growth and increasing auto congestion.

“That’s just a drop in the bucket because there are 100,000 (cars) just waiting to get on the freeways,” BART spokesman Sy Mouber said. He labeled the early ridership and cost predictions “pieces of puffery,” but said that without such puffery BART probably would not have been built. Federal officials agree these projects have not lived up to to their advanced billing.

Untested Technology

Inflation also has contributed to the cost overruns, as has the reliance on new, untested technology such as space-age car design and automated train control systems pioneered by the BART system, the granddaddy of all the modern subways.

BART was touted as a system that would be the most sophisticated, high-tech subway in the world. Paid for entirely by local funds, it would have automatic controls that allowed the trains to whiz through the tube under San Francisco Bay at high speed without a motorman at the controls.

In 1962, BART designers predicted the 71.5-mile system would cost $792 million and take eight years to build. Trains started running in 1973, but only on a limited basis because the trans-Bay line was not completed for another year. The system cost $1.4 billion, nearly double the original estimates.

Basic Design Mistakes

BART experts now agree that the high-tech system was designed by aerospace engineers who knew so little about railroading that they made basic design mistakes that produced strange, sometimes dangerous problems. Controlled by computers and electronic sensors, the trains were to fly along on automatic control, separated only by 90 seconds of space between trains. No motormen were needed. Everything was controlled from the command center.

Problems developed. Trains disappeared from the command center’s screens and could not be detected, even when they were stopped in the stations. The high-tech disc brakes on the cars failed. Electric motors that powered the cars shorted and burned up.

“The early cost estimates for BART seriously underestimated the time and money required for testing and debugging the new rail transit system,” according to a 1978 report by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, which oversees area transit projects.

To help defray the cost of fixing the mistakes, parts of the proposed BART system were cut from the budget. Even so, the commission noted, cost overruns totaled $641 million.

BART nonetheless is considered a success by transit officials across the country and by the people in the Bay Area who have approved a $1-billion expansion program that will add 35 miles of track and 10 more stations, including a connection to the San Francisco International Airport.