Matt Yglesias Mentions The Transit Cost Project

I’m a big fan of the work of the Transit Cost Project, a small team at the NYU Marron Institute that’s produced some in-depth reports on why American transit projects seem so comparatively expensive. But the more work they do, the clearer it seems to me that the big meta-reason is just that nobody is trying to make the projects cost-effective. They had a great case study out of Boston where the Green Line Extension went so far over budget that it got canceled and then re-launched in a cheaper way. One key to reducing costs was eliminating plans to build large custom stations and going with simple bare-bones ones instead.