What Cap Metro is Not Telling You about Light Rail vs. Monorail Costs in their Milestone 2 Study:

When comparing Monorail vs. Light Rail capital construction costs, Monorail Costs are biased upwards and Light Rail Costs are based on 'representative' LRT systems, NOT the 'true' estimated Austin LRT costs!!!

The Cap Metro Route and Vehicle recommendation based on the Milestone 2 Study ranked light rail first and monorail last based on 'affordability'  (capital costs and operating and maintenance costs):

You can see that Light Rail gets two stars for Affordability while Monorail gets a negative star '-'.

We will discuss only 'capital construction costs' here and discuss 'operating and maintenance' costs elsewhere..

The following chart from the Milestone 2 Study cites these representative light rail costs (shown here in graph form):

However, Cap metro gives a figure of $918 Million in capital construction costs for their base route (called Alternative 1) (Revised Executive Summary Milestone 1 10-12-01). Given, a base route length of 20.8 miles, this yields a per mile capitol cost of $44 million/mile. Note that this is in the high range of all the representative light rail systems shown above.

Cap Metro is also considering both partial and fully elevated light rail transit systems. They are trying to gain some of the benefits of a true monorail system without giving up the streetcar mentality. They cite the cost of a fully elevated light rail transit system (Alternative 6) as an additional $561.8 million dollars for a total of $1.486 billion dollars. That is almost $1.5 BILLION dollars of capital construction cost. This comes out to $71 million dollars per mile.

Regarding monorail cost, the study chose to list three of the most expensive monorails either planned or operating:

According to the study, three monorail systems were examined:

           Source:  PB 2001 and LTK Engineering Services 1999

Let's examine these costs in more detail:

Some sources indicate that the estimated cost per mile of $162 million for the Las Vegas monorail are exaggerated. One source indicates that the total capital cost of the project is valued at $354 million for 6.4 Km (3.84 mi) of route, which works out to a capital construction cost of $92.2 million per mile:

However, the critical point here is that the Las Vegas monorail is not a representative sample.  It exists to take conventioneers and gamblers to casinos and the convention center, not to take commuters to their jobs and schools.  Las Vegas Hotels and Monorail are more for entertainment than they are for sleeping and transportation. In a city where billion dollar hotel-resorts are not unheard of, spending lavishly on a monorail system is not unreasonable. Austin should not spend on a monorail like Las Vegas anymore than Austin should build hotels like Las Vegas.

According to this article, Newark's 'notorious' new airport monorail which runs 2.1 miles and cost $354 million, was 'overbuilt, mis-built, and dogged by mishaps that might only happen in New Jersey'.

The cost of the Kitakyushu monorail was high because according to Kim Pedersen, President and Founder of the Monorail Society, 'Kitakyushu had a lot of special circumstances, including building the guide-way along the underside of a new freeway':

If one compares the cost of other representative monorail systems, most come in lower than the three quoted above. The Monorail Society website lists the costs of representative operating and proposed monorail systems here, but the data is summarized in the table below:

In a recent report from DMJM+Harris (large PDF file) , cost data have appeared for two existing and two 'not yet built' monorail systems:

Bombardier/Adtranz/Von Roll (M-VI): $25.00 million/mile

OTG HighRoad: $26 million/mile

Futrex System 21: $20-$25 million/mile

Also, Mr.Y. Hirabaya, Section Manager, Overseas Marketing Dept. of Hitachi, LTd. has told us that 'It is generally observed that the capital value in market of our monorail system (with capacity of 3,000-10,000pphpd range) is around 25-35Mill US$/mile for E&M system (excluding CIVIL cost like guideway/station/other building etc). Please note the E&M (Electric and Mechanical) includes; Train, Power supply, Signal, Communication, OCC equipment Depot equipment, track switch.' Note that this cannot be considered to represent the cost of the projected Austin monorail system because a more detailed analysis will be required (and therefore Hitachi, Ltd. cannot be held commercially responsible for this information); it is simply a 'generally observed capital value', since many many other factors must be considered in a detailed analysis.

Finally, many other factors influence monorail (and light rail) costs, such as number of river crossings and right of way purchase. A great introduction to this can be found here and here.

Let's summarize by putting representative monorail and light rail systems side by side on the same graph:

Monorail Systems- GREEN

Light Rail Systems- PINK

Austin Light Rail Proposed System- RED

THE UTILITIES PROBLEM

Drive down any Austin street.  Look at the long, rectangular patches.  These are ‘street cuts' and they are a regular feature of utility maintenance.  Since water, sewer, gas, telephone, electric, phone and cable lines are run mostly underground, when it is necessary to service or repair these lines, cuts must be made in the street.

When the utility must repair these lines under the light rail, what becomes of the rail service?  Cars would have to be shifted from one set of tracks to the other, thereby slowing service in both directions.  Extensive switching must become part of the light rail line to enable them to shift cars from a south-bound to a north-bound track, and vice-versa.  

However much this slows the commute, it also slows the utility work since they can only go to the center of the light-rail line and stop, finish the first portion, then move to the other side and begin all over again, doubling the service time usually required.

However, the real problem of utility lines is what light rail electrical current does to them.  It corrodes them!  In Salt Lake City, this was a surprise result of their light rail, and every utility pipe had to be dug up and coated to prevent further corrosion.  See Utility Reconstruction for the University Light Rail, for an article where they try to sugar-coat this damage.  Likewise, in Austin, besides tearing up the street to lay rail lines, they would have to dig deeper for the entire route to uncover all utility lines, and coat them as well.

Cap Metro has made no mention of this in their planning.  Could it be that like Salt Lake City they were unaware of it?   How much will this increase their cost projections?  If the normal track installation took a matter of 6 months on any given stretch, how much longer will it take to dig up every utility pipe at a much greater depth and specially coat it?  Will it have to be retrenched and laid even deeper than it was?  These are just some more of the unanswered questions Cap Metro has left us with.

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