The Link light rail extension to Ballard in Seattle is now estimated to be nearly double the previous estimate at an eye-popping $20-22B. This extension is expected to add 7.7 miles of new light rail service with nine new stations, putting the average cost per mile at a staggering $2.73B per mile. That would make it the most expensive subway project on a per mile basis in human history, making it even more expensive than New York’s Second Avenue subway extension which came in at $2.5B per mile. NYC’s subway project has been marred in controversy for years for stratospherically high cost overruns and delays, entire orders of magnitude more expensive than building subways in other dense wealthy cities across the world. Somehow, the Puget Sound region has managed to surpass NYC in cost to build what is effectively an underground tram.

We need to fundamentally start building our transit differently. Ballard deserves highly reliable rail-based transit, especially because this extension is expected to add more ridership than any other extension in the ST3 package. It will be as transformational to Seattle as the East Link extension will be to the Puget Sound region. However, much of the coverage on this issue has focused on two topics: 1) the debate around prioritizing the “spine” (connecting Everrett to Tacoma) or the Ballard to West Seattle extension and 2) what trade-offs must be made to complete the extension.

Infuriatingly, there is not much coverage or attention given to why the Ballard line will cost so much in the first place. Contrary to belief, we are adequately funding transit expansion; Sound Transit has more funding than any other city in the entire world could ever dream of for building transit. Yet, we are building low-capacity, fairly low-frequency, non-automated light rail lines without even basic features like platform screen doors in our stations. If we built our regional rail at the same price per mile as Swiss, Italian, French, or Scandinavian countries (all are countries by which we share values with on land ownership, democracy, and strong worker protections) with $64B slated for Sound Transit, we should have a regional rail system comprising of over 150 new stations and 170+ new miles of track — all with significantly better peak frequencies (trains every 90 seconds), driverless, entirely grade-separated, and handing 10x the number of riders. It sounds like an over-exaggeration, but take a look at the numbers yourself:

The results are damning. We are spending insane amounts of money for relatively poor coverage and service levels. By global standards, the entirety of ST3 should cost us less than $20B for what we are getting; yet we are dealing with increasing costs and Sound Transit facing a budget shortfall of $20-$30B! Think about that: our budget shortfall by itself costs more than it would cost to build all of ST3 in other countries.

Seattle, the broader Puget Sound region, all the encompassing transit agencies, and Washington State need to come together and understand why this is the case. We need reform, at all levels of government, to make transit drastically cheaper and faster to build. Far too often, we look at our other American and Canadian peers to learn how they build transit instead of learning from non-English speaking countries who have largely figured this out already. Why are we taking lessons from NYC and SF who are notoriously ineffective at building transit, instead of learning from Paris, Copenhagen, or Zürich?

We need expedited permitting, across cities and counties, and enforced at the state level. For ST3 which is expected to take 25 years, we need to develop in-house expertise and stop relying on extremely expensive contractors. We need a complete overhaul on our procurement strategy. We need to rethink the way we do community engagement and allow significantly more power to our transit agencies to move fast, make decisions quickly, and not get stuck dealing with too many decentralized authorities and agencies on top of a million different community groups. We need smart station design and far more standardization across everything being built. We need to rethink our right-of-way acquisition. And most of this can be learned from global peers that have gotten this right.

Contrary to what people believe, most of the money doesn’t get spent on technology or where we build our tunnels. It gets used up in ineffective government processes and structures, bad RoW acquisition processes, litigation, forced delays, political infighting, bad planning, inexperience, and an unwillingness to change and learn from places that have figured this out. Even Canada, another country infamous for expensive transit projects, was able to figure it out for the REM in Montréal where they built a brand-new fully-automated grade-separated metro at only $139M per mile (vs. $2.73B!). And they are building the entire network within a span of a few short years instead of multiple decades. Interestingly in the same city, the Montréal blue line extension on their subway costs $1.46B per mile because they are building it the traditional way Canadian and American cities usually build. They are only building an additional 3.7 miles of track for the extension costing $5.43B. Even if you consider REM an anomaly for low-cost, at 3x the cost of the REM per mile, they could build 13 miles of track instead of 3.7 miles using the same practices they used for building the REM. The Flying Moose on YouTube recently posted a fantastic video on how the REM was so cheap and fast to build and what we could learn from it.

If Seattle built at the price per mile of the Grand Paris Express, we would get a very high quality, high capacity driverless metro spanning 178 miles of new track with 150+ stations criss-crossing the Puget Sound region. Our transit is very well funded; however, we are squandering the money by not learning from global leaders in transit. We could have so much more for the price of ST3.

It’s time for Seattle, the Puget Sound, and Washington State to stop focusing on compromising on the system to “save cost” and focus more on systemic changes and radical reform to bring transit costs more in line with global standards. If we can do that, using ST3 funding we can build a world-class regional transit system that will help us exceed all our current VMT and climate goals, rivaling the very best of Europe’s regional rail systems, and still have money to spare, instead of incurring cost overruns by $20-30B on top of an already astronomical budget. We need comprehensive transit reform now.