County Monorail Cost Analysis
We've developed an illustrative plan
for a county-wide monorail system to demonstrate how cost effective a regional monorail system could be. To provide a cost estimate, we analysed the cost breakdown of the Seattle Popular Monorail Plan and applied it to our own system.
The Seattle Green-Line plan is 14 miles long with 19 stations and two major water crossings. The following table shows the major cost categories for the Seattle monorail plan:
| Category | Total Cost |
Cost Per Mile | Cost Per Station |
Cost Per Crossing |
| Trains & Control Systems | $255 million | $18 million/mile | | |
| Stations | $135 million | | $8 million/station | |
| Beams, Columns, Foundations | $300 million | $22 million/mile | | |
| Water Crossings | $120 million | | | $60 million/crossing |
| Maintenance Facility | $30 million | $2 million/mile | | |
| Power Supply | $95 million | $7 million/mile | | |
| Utility Relocation | $80 million | $6 million/mile | | |
| Rights of Way | $30 million | $2 million/mile | | |
| Hazardous Materials | $10 million | $1 million/mile | | |
| Design & Administration | $235 million | $17 million/mile | | |
| Totals: | $1.29 billion | $75 million/mile | $8 million/station | $60 million/crossing |
When you take the total green-line cost and divide by 14 miles, you get $93 million per mile. For more details on the Seattle monorail costs, see page 46 of:
http://archives.elevated.org/final_spmp/final_spmp.pdf
We then take the Seattle monorail costs and apply them to our proposed routes:
| Route | Length (miles) | Stations | Water Crossings | Cost |
| Bothell-Seattle | 8* | 5 | 0 | $640 million |
| Redmond-Seattle | 14 | 8 | 5** | $1.4 billion |
| Bothell-Bellevue-Federal Way | 37 | 21 | 0 | $2.9 billion |
| Grand Total: | 59 | 34 | 5 | $5.0 billion |
* - Our plan assumes that the Seattle Popular Monorail Authority will pay for the extension of the Green-line to Northgate
** - Large water-crossing cost is to accomodate the challenges of putting monorail on a new 520 floating bridge.
If you take the $5.0 billion total cost for our county-wide monorail plan
and divide by 59 miles, it ends up at $85 million per mile.
QUESTION: Why is our average cost per mile less than the Seattle green-line?
ANSWER: Because we have fewer stations and water-crossings per mile of track.
|
