Today, there is widespread interest on the part of practitioners and academics in finding out why the unit costs of building underground infrastructure projects varies so dramatically between jurisdictions within the developed world. In particular, people want to know why the cost of a mile of subway in the United States and other English-speaking countries is so much higher than the cost in continental Europe (see here, here, and here). This differential in construction costs, is visible in the data for projects in recent decades, is frequently mentioned when there is yet another news story about cost over-runs (see here, here, and here). For reasons that remain poorly understood, Europeans and Japanese people seem to be better at building subways cheaply than are North Americans. If we can figure out why these costs are so different between countries at roughly the same level of development, we will be closer to finding some solutions that would allow countries to build great subways cheaply. Other researchers have grappled with this question for some time. Our historical research aims to determine when the differential in construction costs between countries developed and why they developed. We are bringing some historical data into the conversation.
Image: Tunnel on the 7 Subway Extension, under construction Date 21 June 2013, 10:27:19
Author :Metropolitan Transportation Authority (New York) Camera location 40° 45′ 21.02″ N, 74° 00′ 07.06″ W This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license
You can access our dataset here. Before you look at the raw numbers in the spreadsheet, we suggest that you look at the following pages: “Why Was This Historical Research Necessary?”; “Research Methods and Data”; “What Contemporaries Said About Rising Costs” and “Key Findings”.
This project was supported by a British Academy/Leverhulme research grant SG2122\210400. The PI was Dr Andrew Smith, Associate Professor of Responsible Business, University of Birmingham Business School. The Co-I were Kevin Tennent, Reader in Management, University of York School of Business and Society, and Dr James Fowler, Lecturer in Management at the University of Essex. Dr Ian Jones, University of York School of Business and Society joined the project after we had been awarded the research grant. The four of us will be equal co-authors on all future research outputs. We devoted roughly equal time to collecting the analysed the data here. Drs Smith and Jones focused on collecting the North American data, Dr Tennent collected the data from continental Europe, and Dr Fowler collected the data for the UK lines.
The Past Speaks 