Want light rail? It’s gonna cost ya.

Last week, Business Insider reported that the federal government awarded $1.04 billion to the City of San Diego, California, to extend its trolley line 10.9 miles at a whopping $100 million per mile. Its rival in this war of Spend More for Less is Washington, D.C., which has built a streetcar along 2.4 miles of the city for a total expenditure of $200 million. It’s hard to discern which is more insane. I would have guessed the usual winner in the spend-it-if-you-got-it sweepstakes. But lo and behold it’s actually San Diego, at a meticulously calculated (by calculator) $95,412,844.04 a mile—but you can keep the four cents.

Some other examples: San Francisco’s F line cost about $30 million per mile. That’s reported as high.

The city of Pittsburgh—that’s the one in Pennsylvania—estimates costs of on-the-street trolley construction at $10 million per mile. I think that’s about standard.

Kansas City recently spent roughly $46 million per mile for its downtown line in 2016, but St. Louis only spent $19.5 million per mile for its loop trolley the same year.

Cincinnati spent $41 million per mile (2015), Tucson spent $52 million per mile (2014), and Seattle spent $49.2 million a decade ago.

Looking at the miles involved, it appears that frugal city governments pay less per mile even for small projects (less than 5 miles) than will San Diego.

For comparison’s sake, railroads building into the Powder River Basin to haul coal spent far less per mile, and it’s generally acknowledged that a mile of single track mainline railroad runs about $1 million, bridges, tunnels, etc., extra. Texas organizations supporting high speed rail there estimate a mile of high-speed, double-track main line to cost $5 million.

To be fair, streetcars aren’t what they used to be. In the heyday of the streetcar, cities allowed private contractors to build on city streets under franchise and, though there were some pedestrian boarding islands involved, no stations had to be built. Neither auto nor truck traffic were heavy enough to create any threat to pedestrians walking out from the curb to the (generally) street-centered tracks to board streetcars. What traffic did exist mingled with the streetcars, and, as can be seen by some photographs taken in the time period, monumental traffic jams could result, even with the lesser traffic density, particularly in bad weather.

Today, light rail in streets requires dedicated stations and the numerous pedestrian and traffic controls that go with them to assure passenger safety. Those stations must also have each and every provision to comply with the Americans With Disabilities Act, and to assure risk managers that all possible safety appliances imaginable will keep the city out of court—or, at least, away from large settlement awards. To prevent mingling with traffic, in some instances, dedicated street lanes are also developed. In effect, even if it’s a streetcar, it is more like a rapid transit train on a dedicated right of way, except it’s not.

So, if your city is contemplating light rail, it doesn’t have to cost as much as Washington D.C. (nothing has to cost as much as D.C.) or San Diego; but it is gonna cost ya.

©2017 – C. A. Turek – mistertrains@gmail.com

(Charles A. Turek is a writer and novelist based in Albuquerque, NM. After four decades working in areas of the insurance industry related to transportation, he now writes on all aspects of American railroading. Charles is a political conservative but believes in public funding of passenger rail as a part of the federal government’s constitutionally conservative obligation to provide for defense and public infrastructure so that private enterprise may flourish.)