ION Phase 2 - Cambridge's Light Rail Transit

[danbrotherston]

To be fair, part of our cost here in North America is that we just don't have the local/regional/national expertise for building rail like places in Europe do. It doesn't account for why Stage 2 has that horrible $4.5B eval rather than $1.5B, but it would explain the difference between $1.5B and $1.1B.

Even aside from the P3 to build and operate ION, almost none of the stuff before that was done by Regional Staff, but by hiring external consultants instead, so we didn't build any local expertise to put that into development and procurement for Stage 2 to keep the costs down. 

Currently, only one Region staffer is working on Stage 2, and whatever external consultants they let him hire, so we're not doing any better this time and will have no clue on how to reasonably reduce costs without reducing functionality.

This is a great point. We have a major lack of knowledge when it comes to transit infrastructure and expansion in Canada/ North America. It definitely doesn't help that we have some of the most stringent rail regulations in the world and just hire external consultants for everything.  I know the staffer, they are a really good person and a hard worker, but one staff member to planning a 4 billion dollar extension is pretty sad.

It's too bad liability is such a massive issue now a days and the Region is adamant about never becoming a constructor for legal reasons.  In a dream world we would have a full time construction crew of transit experts constantly building 1-2 km of transit lines per year with a mandate for 1 station to come online each year. It would be a rock first couple years, but with in half a decade we would have

That's an extreme level, having regional employees build stuff, we don't even do that for roads. There are miles and miles of space between that and what we do now...

For example, the region could have engineers on the payroll who are capable of designing transit infra...then we could hire construction companies directly.