Transit Costs Project Webinar Video and Case Study
"The Boston Case: The Story of the Green Line Extension"
On December 9 the Transit Costs Project research team of Eric Goldwyn, Alon Levy, and Elif Ensari hosted a widely attended webinar with moderator Matthew Yglesias, where they engaged in a conversation about their Transit Costs Project and the MBTA’s Green Line Extension. They also released their first case study, “The Boston Case: The Story of the Green Line Extension.” In the case study, the researchers conclude:
The ultimate goal of this research is to figure out how to bring down the costs of rail transit projects in the United States and other high-cost countries. We take a comparative approach to understand what drives costs, what reduces them, and how to build transit projects more efficiently so we can build more of them. In our first case, we identified project management and delivery, design and engineering, and politics as three cost drivers. Therefore we intend to look at how other cities do on those three issues. Is this everything? Definitely not. But it’s a start, and it should help us productively study more cities in the future.