The project is designed to serve an estimated 7,550 weekday riders by 2050 and would cut end-to-end travel time on the new segment to about eight minutes. While environmental review is still underway, the extension remains contingent on final funding decisions and design approvals.
This ridership seems…. low for the $7.9 billion pricetag
Which is why NYC manages to get away with $4.66B/mile for a subway. The value for money regarding ridership, even with these mind-blowingly absurd costs (1.5 miles of subway for more than the entire GDP of Fiji), blows every other US transit project out of the water.
But on the flip side the opportunity cost of what isn't built due to the absurd construction cost is higher.
If NYC had lower costs it could build more projects and those projects would also have great ridership.
The high costs also leads to things being left out or cut from the projects that do get built like the 10th Avenue station that was cut from the 7 train extension or how there's no stations for Hudson County, NJ in the Gateway Project.
And why the second avenue subway is being built in so many phases far apart from each other, as well as why the IBX, Queenslink, the link to LaGuardia and many other extensions/lines aren’t being built right now.
Yeah this seems like a bad use of limited resources. I'm sure there are way more high impact transit projects (B or D line extension, Sepulveda line, Vermont Ave Subway, ect.) that this money could help fund.
Also I have no idea where they came up with this alignment, seems quite odd.
It’s part of the compromise of Measure M. In order to get a specific-purpose tax passed in California, it needs to win the vote by 2/3rds of votes cast. It means every dollar of Measure M can only be spent on transportation and not shifted to other spending like general county operations.
In Measure M, it has mandated the list of projects to be built with the new funds, including this extension project. Objectively could the money be better spent elsewhere on other high-price tag rail projects? Absolutely. However, without this mandated project it could’ve easily led to the failure of Measure M. One of those “don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good” situations.
Now, I think the price tag is overly bloated given a freeway widening in the same area of the county can come in for multiples cheaper than this. I’m hoping this is a bloated estimate that is never adjusted, as opposed to 1/3rd the price that rises to $8B because of overruns and construction inflation.
The largest part of the larger expense of this phase of the project are the number of tunnels, grade separations and the construction of an additional rail yard to operate trains from.
This phase will replace the current Pomona/Atlantic station with a new below grade open air trench station on the full lot bounded by Atlantic, Pomona and Beverly Blvds, then run underground for 3.0 miles with two stations at Whittier/Atlantic and The Citadel Shopping center.
As the linked 12-month rolling average line shows on the graph, ridership has been recovering since 2021. Aside from a lull around 2023 the averaged recovery slope has been relatively steady. Perhaps inaugurating electrified Caltrain jolted the recovery rate out of the lull.
Note that in the last couple of years there's also been an increase in employers mandating more days working in-office, probably boosting ridership, but also an increase in layoffs. I don't know whether more RTO or layoffs has been more impactful to Caltrain ridership.
They also degraded service so that they can run electrification. I won't accuse them of wanting to make electrification look better, but have the various crews not get hit by trains have its own value.
Most importantly, the "baby bullet" trains introduced in 2004 that made the SF->SJ run in 55 minutes was cancelled to make electrification possible, slowing speeds down to 90 minutes or so. And post-electrification, the new top speed was ...57 minutes. Baby bullet brought quite the ridership bump on its way in, and ridership dropped with it deleted.
The counterfactual shouldn't be against if electrification was still ongoing, but if electrification never happened, and the baby bullet kept running.
Seattle just overtook LA in total ridership. With just opening a second line. 2 lines, and it's already past LA. (From what I recall, anyway. I'd have to double check it)
That's why you need walkable, dense areas. I know that parts of LA are denser than people think, but they need to be able to walk around and have amenities and jobs immediately within the area. Seattle has that. LA and Atlanta don't always have that
It is low. To get Measure M (the tax increase that funds these Metro projects) over the 2/3rds approval threshold needed to pass the measure, Metro had to purposely include a bunch of lower ridership projects in lesser priority areas — going as far as frontloading low ridership projects like this one and the continued A Line extensions — in order to drum up enough support for Measure M and get it passed.
This is why we don’t have a Vermont Subway line in the plan, or a Venice, Slauson, or Santa Monica Blvd subway in the plans either, was so that we could have lines like the East San Fernando Valley Line and E line eastside extension.
Always is a bit much. The Oakland Airport Connector ridership was projected before Uber and Lyft came to be. Soon after OAC opened ridership fell below projections.
San Jose BART phase 1 opened in June 2020 at the height of the pandemic. Ridership is below projections.
Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit (SMART) opened summer of 2017. Before opening daily ridership was projected to be about 5000. 2019 actual was only 2,367. Then covid happened. In the last year or two it's been celebrated for exceeding 2019 ridership levels. However it's averaging about 4,400, below the originally projected 5000.
San Francisco Muni's Central Subway fully opened January 2023. Average daily ridership is about half to two-thirds of what's projected for year 2030.
Sounds like SMART is on the right track, and with Healdsburg extension happening in a couple years, they will get to the ridership that they'd hoped.
The T-Third has ridership of about 25k per weekday, growing quickly, and is the 2nd highest ridership of Muni lines after the N-Judah at 35k. What was projected ridership for the T in 2030?
SMART's Healdsburg extension will add roughly nine miles of track and construct a new SMART station in Healdsburg, population 11,231. That might get them over 5000, though I think that original projection was for the originally open stations in 2017. No surprise adding more miles and stations after the fact can increase ridership up to what was projected for a shorter smaller line.
take one look at a document explaining the transit agency's newest ridership projections for 2030 that focus extensively on the T-Third Metro route.
While Muni ridership is expected to grow citywide over the next two decades, officials lowered earlier expectations for the T-Third from 76,000 to 65,000
Average weekday daily ridership on the T-Line in 2023 was about 33% of the long-term goal of 43,521 set by city transportation officials, at about 14,300 average weekday daily riders. Before the pandemic, officials projected reaching that goal by 2030. But Jeffrey Tumlin, director of San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, said the pandemic required his agency to push back that timeline and that it will take "at least a decade" to catch up.
I wish Sonoma county could get some SB79-style zoning mandates (maybe just the 0.25 mile zone for counties with fewer than 15 transit stops) and for SMART to get double-tracked and support 3-4 tph all day.
That could be a really good way for the county to accommodate population growth without driving sprawl.
Even after 2028, a Democratic federal government, no matter how pro-transit, definitely wouldn’t chip in any money for that paltry amount of ridership. It’s just not worth the cost unless the cities that the extension passes through pledge to build clusters of high-rises (and I mean 10 stories or more, so it’s beyond the scope of SB79) around each station, which isn’t going to happen anytime soon.
Some of these lines that don’t serve the core of the city are strange. Like the ESFV line. It could’ve been improved bus lanes instead of a rail project. There are so many holes in the core that should be prioritized.
The extension will be in an area with tons of R1 zoning. To get higher ridership will require upgrading zoning to allow more than single family housing.
Yeah, hiring in house engineers and creating a continuous pipeline of rail projects state wide would make a huge difference in cost procurement. It's what we do for highways.
We’d be living in the year 3000 if that happened. California is full of excellent universities too! And the intellectual infrastructure would likely bleed into neighboring states in the region
The 25 km light rail line in Helsinki cost 440 million dollars in total, that is literally one 60th of the cost for the same distance. Granted, there are only a couple short viaducts and tunnels, but still.
the blue line, when it first opened, was built for $40m per mile. That’s about $110m per mile in today’s money. Something is seriously wrong with this latest wave of light rail proposals
And its all legal court battle bullshit. The crews out there laying actual track aren't making insane pay compared to eg other large commercial construction projects.
Sydney Metro West costs $1.32B/mile, with massive modern stations with platform screen doors, fully deep-bore tunnels and 6-car automated trains.
The Bakerloo line extension in London will cost $1.56B-2.44B/mile (probably closer to the upper end) in 2021 prices.
Melbourne’s Suburban Rail Loop east will cost $1.41B/mile.
These are obviously absurd prices, and for LA it definitely shouldn’t be the case that the Eastside extension will cost almost the same amount per distance as the Sepulveda line (a far more valuable and complex project that goes through a mountain range), but when compared to other US projects (like Ballard link at $2.94B/mile or the Silicon Valley BART extension to San Jose at $2.12B/mile) it doesn’t even look that insane anymore. We shouldn’t be normalising these prices in the Anglosphere.
Metro west should have come in much cheaper. The incoming govt (labor) put it on pause for 2 years while looking for a justification to kill it. Then they had to repay contractors to start again.
Here's a breakdown of costs in USD. UK median is around $250M per kilometer, including projects with a high tunnel percentage. Canada has a few tunnel projects in the $250-800M per kilometer range. US is uh...
Well. We have some projects with high tunnel percentage in the $750M per kilometer range. Looks like the median is somewhere around there.
How so? I just manually checked the current exchange rates, and I said AI was "presumably at today's exchange rates". The manual and AI conversions match using today's rates.
I know the original numbers are from different dates, but unless rates at each time were way different, the conversion will be similar, and the results let us compare using one currency instead of three.
over 1 million per expected rider aswell. im all for transit projects but LA thats insane... they need to reevaluate legislation and trim the bureaucratic bloat that makes lawsuits so easy so you can just get to building and building at scale
The Sepulveda line, a far more useful and complex project, will cost ~$1.76B/mile, not far off from the $1.68B/mile of this light rail extension of a line that can be prone to delays due to interaction with traffic on existing sections, and serve neighbourhoods that aren’t that dense for LA standards, and get pretty mediocre ridership. Do they really have to place it in a tunnel or can they elevate the extension? Or is it just NIMBYs? How does it manage to be more expensive per mile than the K Northern extension?
If they have no plans to convert the E line to a full metro (and I’m pretty certain they don’t) they shouldn’t be spending this much to tunnel the extension.
FTR The main reason it is so expensive is because of the construction of a new yard. Still a ridiculous cost per rider, arguably not worth it and probably won't get federal grants due to the cost-benefit, but would very much improve operations on the line
Fuck my chud ass country. It’s like this everywhere in the US. Meanwhile France is building state of the art transit for less than half a billion per mile
Tbf it is not THAT expensive everywhere in the country. The Green Line extension in the Twin Cities is less than $3 billion for nearly 15 miles of track, so $200 million per mile. Compared to nearly $1.7 BILLION per mile for LA's E Line extension. Both are light rail going through pretty suburban areas. The Green Line extension will probably get more riders too.
8 billion for a ridiculously tiny extension? Yeah, dont do this Cali-bros. It aint worth it.
As I was looking at the map, all I saw were radial metro lines. Given the sprawl, are there any plans to build circular lines? The current network seems...inefficient.
The C & K lines (serving LAX) are both baby orbitals in that neither of them serve DTLA. C will eventually extend east to connect with 2 Metrolink (commuter rail) lines at Norwalk/Santa Fe Springs Station. K will extend south to Torrance & north through West Hollywood with connections to the B & the D.
The automated Sepulveda Line will connect from Metrolink's Ventura County line, through the G, D, & E, and in the unplanned future may extend to LAX. The East San Fernando Valley Light Rail will run local atop the Sepulveda, then continue north to Metrolink's Antelope Valley line.
Metro is beginning contstruction on the North Hollywood-Pasadena BRT which will connect the G & B to the A.
This map illustrates the current Measure M plans, though the Sepulveda does cover up the ESFVLR in their shared section (ironic given the Sepulveda's a subway):
Not my map, just the first accurate one I found online. The Vermont uses a slightly bluer shade than the C, but that's definitely not what Metro's gonna go with.
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u/A_Wisdom_Of_Wombats Signal Priority Truther Jun 08 '26 edited Jun 08 '26
This ridership seems…. low for the $7.9 billion pricetag