BART costs $300 million a mile to build?! WTF?!

As a resident of the San Francisco Bay Area I ride BART from time to time. I know many people who ride it every working day as their sole mode of transport to/from the office. I luck out in not having that sort of commute, but it is still a great mass transit system in my opinion. I'm always hopeful that they'll extend it more (680 corridor or San Jose), but said expansion is generally a very slow process. So I was very excited when I received last week's "myBART weekly" newsletter and read the following:

BART moves forward with $1 billion in extension projects
The BART Board of Directors has just moved forward with bringing Bay Area residents $1 billion in transit expansion projects. Board members voted to construct a 10-mile extension into eastern Contra Costa County and approved two significant elements of the funding plan for the Oakland Airport Connector. Watch this BARTtv feature on the Contra Costa County extension.

This extension doesn't help me at all, but any extension makes me happy. After some digging around I finally found the eBART website with more details. That's when things went from happy to yelling.

The second sentence on the front page reads: "The eBART Proposed Project would extend the BART system in the median of Highway 4 approximately 10 miles". That's pretty much where I came to a screaming halt. It doesn't take a a comp sci major to do that math. $1 billion / 10 miles = ONE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS A MILE. What. The. Fuck... are they building that costs $100 mil a mile? They better be installing fucking gold plated tracks for that cost. I realize they are building two stations, but even if those stations cost some fucking asinine number like $250million a piece, you're still talking about track that costs $50mil a mile to build. What. The. Fuck.

We're talking about land in Pittsburgh, Antioch, & the median of Highway 4. The last of which is not exactly highly desirable land. Frankly the cities in the area aren't terribly expensive by Bay Area standards. With all that, the cost can't possibly be in the land. While I'm no train expert, I am fairly sure that the transcontinental rail road didn't cost $100 million a mile, nor do modern rail roads. I know the track gauge of BART is specialty stuff and expensive to build equipment for, with recent track resurfacer engines costing $1 million each. We're not talking about ordering a thousand engines though, nor is this project even standard BART. They are using DMU's instead, which aren't compilable with the rest of the system. I could probably find some numbers somewhere in their hundreds of pages of documents, but I enjoy ranting more than researching. So where in the fuck is $1 BILLION dollars going?!

That brings me to my final point, and the subject of this post. On the Project Facts page it states "Conventional BART trains would require special engineering for tracks and hardware, with a cost three times that of the eBART solution.". If standard BART would have cost 3x as much, that means it would have cost THREE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS A MILE. Jesus. Fucking. Christ. What. The. Fuck. To put that in perspective, BART currently has 104 miles of track. Or at the going rate of $300mil a mile, it would cost $31.2 BILLION dollars.

==Brain Expodes...Transmission ends==