
Construction Costs: Metro Stations - Symmetry
https://pedestrianobservations.com/2018/01/27/construction-costs-metro-stations/
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jdavis703
I wonder how much it would cost to compensate the business owners along the
construction project. The reason cut and cover is usually avoided is because
of business NIMBYism as they're concerned the construction will harm their
business. Since it's so expensive to do these other methods of construction
maybe the construction should just pay the businesses to relocate out of the
savings from using cut and cover.

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thriftwy
I think that businesses should really appreciate the foot traffic that Metro
station would bring. It's three years of losses and then 30 years of profits.

If we're talking about renters, they can move out if they don't like the
hassle, and landlords will surely compensate losses with sweet deal they'll
get once subway is open.

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bradleyjg
Commercial leases are generally ten years long. The landlord ends up capturing
most of the increase in value, while the current lessees end up eating most of
the costs.

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thriftwy
I would imagine that current lessees' influence will be pretty limited and
definitely offset by their landlords. Public reaction on top of that.

I don't understand why their word will be decisive here.

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lukeschlather
I don't really think so. Small business owners are often much more influential
at the city level than lobbyists paid by out of town landowners. Even if the
landowners have significant influence, they're outnumbered by the lessees and
the lessees have a lot more to lose.

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thriftwy
I can see how this might become a problem. Small business owners will be
hostile to any city configuration change, because they'll have to adapt to it
and that will require some effort from them.

Naturally their influence has to be limited in order to see any kind of motion
forward.

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thewopr
I really wish there was much better details on costs on such large public
projects (and institutions). Between the extreme costs of public works like
these, healthcare, college education, there is a cost disease that needs to be
figured out and addressed.

> More granularity is needed.

I feel like one big step forward on that would be requiring the disclosure of
detailed budgets and expenses for all such semi-regulated
institutions/projects receiving large portions of their budgets from public
funding.

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cwal37
At a previous job my first project was building a webscraper and some
processing tools to pull down every application for preliminary permit ever
filed with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to build a pumped storage
plant.

The basis for this was two-fold, first, to get some kind of backing of what
the potential supply might look like based on developer assumptions up to that
point in time, second (and more germane to this discussion) to pull out every
cost characteristics we could find in order to build a more robust set of cost
models and cost prediction tools than had existed up to that point. Hydro
costs are extremely site specific, so this is typically an onerous process.

I suppose the kicker here is that I was at a national lab and nominally
employed by the Department of Energy, and they has such a sub-optimal grasp of
hydropower that we were in the process of writing the first big national
report on the resource in a long time[1]. Now hydro's also part of NREL's
annual technology baselines[2], which was similarly fun to work on.

[1] [https://energy.gov/eere/water/articles/hydropower-vision-
new...](https://energy.gov/eere/water/articles/hydropower-vision-new-chapter-
america-s-1st-renewable-electricity-source)

[2] [https://atb.nrel.gov/](https://atb.nrel.gov/)

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rattle1337
There is one basic flaw in this.. The 2nd avenue subway is too deep
underground for cut-and-cover to be an option for building stations.

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bradleyjg
Building them that far underground was a design choice. Partly as a result of
deciding for the expensive and unnecessary full mezzanines and partly to avoid
having to coordinate with con-ed and other users of the sub-street space.

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eorge_g
wow great blog, glad people take the time to write stuff like this

