What a schmozle... their contracting strategy was to split the project in many ways (each station was contracted separately!) to ensure island companies were engaged, not understanding that they would have been subcontractors under a single master contract. So the city/district/county had to try to coordinate many many contracts, and unlike a single master contract, if one fell behind, resources couldn't be brought in from other components nearly as easily. So the project has delays and budget problems TTC style!
There's some politics and misleading that goes into the idea that the Green Line was $4.5B for 46km, and is now $4.5B for 20km = horrible cost overrun. The original 46km project was more of a concept of the route and a bucket of assumed money that we could access. Following along with the engagement and design work it over the years, it wouldn't have been surprising that costs increased when routes were pushed above or below ground and the alignment shifted a bunch of times based on increasing level of detailed analysis and feedback from the public. Changing the scope dramatically at an early stage isn't exactly a cost overrun in the same way a signed contract for $4.5B is actually delivered for $8B.
Whether that was a good idea to present the two numbers side-by-side ($4.5B / 46km) is another matter entirely, as it clearly confused some people and was used as a political tool to attack the project. I think it's a tricky one: as the money wasn't secure the Green Line needed to build political and project momentum using the imagined future state, but to realities of building 46km of transit aren't understood widely by the public (there will be phasing, over many years/decades, and project is likely to change as we actually start looking at the details of specific alignments). It's very easy to perceive the process as misleading in this way.
Relatedly, I think it's pretty much impossible for the public to materially evaluate projects at this scale too. Consider these multi-billion dollar options:
- $4.5B but European tram-style low-floor, high attention to public realm and no grade separation for 46km
- my preference, but few have seen this and how it works, fewer understand the trade-offs and benefits that you need to make it work, and none have implemented this on the continent so it might not be possible anyways given consulting practices and engineering practices
- $4.5B but 36 Street NE style LRTwith limited/no grade separation for 46km
- Everyone is familiar, but it doesn't work well and is a horrible example of how to integrate transit into a community. Memory of 36th Street NE triggers a lot of people to demand grade separation (similar to a suburban Torontonian's memory of being stuck behind a streetcar so demands subways even when they don't warrant it in the deep burbs)
- $4.5B but for what was proposed. Some grade separation, ~4km of tunnel and about 20km overall
I much prefer if major transit was developed by some sort of a-political regional authority. Sure, it incorporates public feedback, but it's ideal route to maximum impact/usefulness is locked in early for any project as the public can't really give you a ton of helpful advice on the biggest, more costly decisions. It's the only way I see to avoid all the scope changes and water-down of the vision to push it up a layer and be treated more like a utility. This could take the form of some sort of regional transit authority or - if you don't want to create another layer - the Province.
Of course, if you handed large scale transit projects to the Province and (the highway only) Alberta Transportation as they are today, the results would be disastrous as public transit doesn't fit their ideologically-driven world view. Ideally, public transit should be viewed more like a utility or a highway - it's just a boring and necessary network of infrastructure in any modern, major city region, regardless of ideology.
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