urbanclient
Active Member
I don't have much faith the number will come down. To paraphrase the professor in the Flying Moose REM video, when escalation and contingency buffer are offered, they're almost certainly to be used.
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The Increasingly Exorbitant Cost of (Transit) Infrastructure
- Thread starter DirectionNorth
- Start date
I don't have much faith the number will come down. To paraphrase the professor in the Flying Moose REM video, when escalation and contingency buffer are offered, they're almost certainly to be used.
Northern Light
Superstar
I concur with @duffo that the contingency here is bloated, and should come down (its not the only project component for which this is an issue); the very notion that soft costs exceed hard costs is absurd.
Regrettably, I also concur with @urbanclient that they are unlikely to come down. Its not impossible to do, we certainly ought to try, and I would find it challenging to endorse this project unless they do. But there certainly are vested interests
that treat the public as saps to be milked, rather than citizens whose hard earned dollars ought to be used with care and integrity.
Regrettably, I also concur with @urbanclient that they are unlikely to come down. Its not impossible to do, we certainly ought to try, and I would find it challenging to endorse this project unless they do. But there certainly are vested interests
that treat the public as saps to be milked, rather than citizens whose hard earned dollars ought to be used with care and integrity.
rbt
Senior Member
Anyone know what Metrolinx is missing, or value engineered, in Systems? It's well below the Italy version with hard cost ratios normalized. Signals, communication, power, [anything else?] seem like they shouldn't be cheaper in Ontario.
urbanclient
Active Member
rbt
Senior Member
And how do we know the delineation between soft and hard costs is the same? Design and Training for the signal system could either be a hard cost because it's included with the hardware purchase agreement or a soft cost from a separate consulting company.
Yes, Metrolinx clearly has a lot of consultant spending, but I still wonder just how much of that missing 15% from Systems is within Professional Services instead.
urbanclient
Active Member
You could be right, but please also remember that Italian projects cost much less than Mx projects to begin, roughly 1/3rd to 1/4th. So Mx 'systems' don't cost 1/4th of Italian systems, they cost about the same, I don't remember the source, but I remember reading that Italians classify part of what Mx would consider line works and facilities under systems instead.
rbt
Senior Member
I'm just trying to understand the meaning behind the values because it isn't obvious to me.
In the long-past there was a kerfuffle about farebox recovery ratio with TTC being the highest. When you dug in you found that Montreal (example with lower farebox recovery ratio at that time) had something like 30 escalator technicians on staff and they did all minor and major maintenance on an ongoing basis [operating expense], but TTC largely due to how Ontario and Toronto fund transit was bundling together quite a bit of day-to-day maintenance as mid-life rebuilds in a $30M capital project. Once you add together TTCs unusually high SOGR budget and their lowish operating budget you got a different picture.
Metrolinx very clearly has issues, I'm just uncertain the specifics of them have been identified.
For example, the report suggests using more off-the-shelf European systems. Part of why Ottawa and Finch LRT have issues today is they use some off-the-shelf European components/design but not all of them. ONxpress appeared to want to implement European style operations but with (apparently) little to no knowledge of the enforced and difficult to change Canadian regulations. European stuff is proven to work with European stuff; mix in a bit of legacy North American hardware or regulations and now you've got integration problems. It's not clear this is a path to cheaper transit; it could be it just isn't obviously so.
Ideally I could elect a provincial government that would dramatically increase funding to the auditor general who would dive into the detail. Instead we elected a government that gleefully funds projects where the absolute best case is getting back $1 in benefits for $10 in spending; yes a fixed Metrolinx might get that down to $3 spending per $1 in benefits but "image" is more important than "efficiency".
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lastcommodore
Active Member
What are you referring to?
Re: "But they could be hiding costs elsewhere" This is true to an extent that most MX costs factor in 30y M&O, however even when this is factored out we are still several times more expensive per km.
Ultimately I think the problem here is you are trying to argue that there may be definitional differences-- where there always is, but no amount of it can account for the several x more expense here. I am not even sure what these could be, my interpretation of the study is that these breakdowns were compiled by the authors of the paper and not each respective agency. I'm not really sure how to respond to you because it feels more like you just feel like it may be off.
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nfitz
Superstar
Surely the bogies, which I don't think had been used anywhere else in the world.