We are TERRIBLE at building transit. This is why.

[00:00:02]This graph shows just how much public transport projects in Australia are costing. Light rails, heavy rails, metros. [music] Some going beyond 1 billion dollars per kilometer. But this isn't an Australian problem.

[00:00:18]San Jose, London, Los Angeles, Toronto, [music] Singapore, Auckland, Hong Kong, New York. Building public transport around the world is in absolute shambles.

[00:00:30]Or is it? Let's look at a few other cities. Paris, Istanbul, Barcelona, Toulouse, Milan, Madrid, and more.

[00:00:40]These are places that know how to keep transit construction costs down, even in the face of complex underground [music] metro projects.

[00:00:49]>> So, what do all of these countries have in common?

[00:00:52]Well, they speak English. Because you see, this isn't a global problem at all.

[00:00:59]It's an Anglosphere problem. For years, the Anglosphere has been paying premiums that make our surface light rails cost as much as underground metros, and our metros cost amounts off the charts.

[00:01:11]>> Of all the nations in the world that have paid more than a billion dollars per kilometer to build a transit line, every single one speaks English. And these eye-watering budgets have held nations back from grander public transport expansions.

[00:01:27]>> Huge cost blowouts on the UK's HS2 has seen its route massively scaled back from Leeds and Manchester to Birmingham.

[00:01:35]Seattle's impressive Sound Transit 3 expansion plan is now facing a 35 billion dollar shortfall, with the whole plan not set to be done until 2052.

[00:01:45][music] Auckland originally wanted to build a train to the airport. Then expensive costs made them swap to light rail. Then expensive costs made them just cancel it altogether. Cancellation after cancellation after cancellation.

[00:02:01]>> Yeah, at these costs that we're building at, we probably will not be able to build another wave of subway expansion like this in the English-speaking world.

[00:02:07]>> This is the story of the Anglosphere's [music] devastating transit cost crisis and why things have never been so dire.

[00:02:22]>> Costs in the Anglosphere are spiraling due to the four Os: overbuilding, outsourcing, overcaution, and overreach.

[00:02:30]>> Overbuilding basically means the practice of building more than we need to. Toronto's Scarborough extension used overly rigid interpretations of fire regulations, meaning a fire separation wall was required for the tunnel.

[00:02:43]Contrast that to Milan's M1 extension.

[00:02:46]Similar train dimensions, but the fire separation wall necessitated a bigger tunnel. Milan simply found other ways to ensure safety, like sprinkler systems and stronger driver [music] responses.

[00:02:57]>> Originally, the Sydney Metro wanted to build cross passages 500 m apart before Australian fire standards forced them to come down to 240 [music] m, costing 100 million dollars. The story of the day was that Sydney Metro had irresponsibly broken strict fire [music] standards.

[00:03:16]>> But there isn't an Australian standard for cross passage spacing on rail tunnels. The AS 4825 is actually just general design guidance, a framework.

[00:03:28]The part about cross passage spacing uses the word "typically" to emphasize this subjectivity.

[00:03:34]It's a guide. Informed engineers make the final call. Sydney Metro likely landed at 500 m because this is what Europe requires.

[00:03:44]>> [music] >> Research shows diminishing returns with more passages.

[00:03:48]>> But there was no interrogation by commentators on why Sydney Metro had chosen 500 [music] m.

[00:03:54]>> The question you hear all the time is like, "What's the price of a a human life?" If you're the engineer, you're not going to say like, "Ah, I'm going to get rid of the emergency exit here. It's going to save some money." Well, then the fire department's going to say, "Well, we have [music] We're here to save lives." You really need a holistic way to evaluate some of these fire requirements. Like, what's the level of safety we're delivering and what's [music] the minimum level of infrastructure we need to build to deliver that level of safety.

[00:04:15]>> My name is Jerrid Mark. I'm a transportation planner and researcher at the University of Toronto. [music] My work currently focuses on project delivery, transit construction costs, and railway standardization.

[00:04:25]>> Toronto's Young North Subway extension was realigned to run significantly deeper because residents of the affluent Royal Orchard complained about the noise and disruption that tunnel boring would cause. [music] This often dooms projects in their entirety. Sydney's Epping to Chatswood rail link was originally set to cross the Lane Cove River on a bridge.

[00:04:47]Environmental groups protested this, which meant the line was built in an incredibly deep tunnel. A station was dumped and half the project [music] was canceled.

[00:04:57]>> Community consultation is generally opt-in. So, there's not as much of an attempt to consult those who probably would benefit, but [music] don't really care enough to say so. Meanwhile, trying to change a project requires far more effort than just saying, "I support this." So, those against are often the most motivated and powerful. The end result can be that a transit project gets cut in scope, handicapping the project [music] for thousands, all to benefit a few dozen people.

[00:05:24]>> We tend to not [music] provide the political coverage to our civil servants who are making these tough decisions. It It creates a culture of fear where [music] we're afraid to try new things or be more ambitious because we're afraid of pushback from NIMBYs. There's plenty of NIMBYs in like Spain [music] and Italy. What you see in a lot of these low-cost countries is they don't listen to those loud voices [music] in the room who are kind of unreasonable.

[00:05:46]They think from a big picture and they are all also able to provide the political cover.

[00:05:51]>> Gold plating means spending past the point of diminishing returns, often to make a project flashier. Part of why the Melbourne Metro Tunnel cost so much was that three different architects were contracted to design [music] five stations.

[00:06:05]The goal was to create unique, distinctive geographical landmarks for Melbourne.

[00:06:10]But the effect of this diversity is a lack of standardization, which would otherwise allow projects to be delivered in a modular and iterative manner. Now, I'm all for making train stations grand and incredible, but see, the Melbourne Metro Tunnel was actually just part one.

[00:06:27]Metro Tunnel 2 was meant to follow, but money ran out. When we gold plated our projects, money dries up to build anything else. I mean, there was also Suburban Rail Loop, but we'll get to that.

[00:06:36]>> South Korea is one of the cheapest jurisdictions anywhere in the world to build metro. A lot of them don't have AC. They don't have second escalators.

[00:06:43]They're like the most bare-bones, like low ceiling. Like I think that's fantastic. Like they can expand subway everywhere. They are [music] just building them purely as for their transportation function.

[00:06:53]>> Scope creep occurs when the size of the project expands to incorporate new, often tangentially related deliverables.

[00:07:00]This is the Sheep House Wood [music] Bat Protection Structure on the HS2 in the UK, built to protect a colony of endangered bats from being hit by trains at a cost of 100 million pounds.

[00:07:14]This is despite there being no evidence that [music] bats would be at risk from trains. The scope was originally to just build a train. Then it became to protect bats. Then it became to build a structure no other country with high-speed rail has ever even considered building. And the weirdest part, no one can even figure out who proposed the shed. Scope creep can make it exponentially harder to get a project built because of a sort of compounding effect, one small decision can quickly snowball into a massive deliverable. And if you multiply that over the course of a Uh Excuse me, are you asleep?

[00:07:52]Uh I'm I'm talking about really important things here. Can you Can you give me the attention of Oh, wait. Wake up.

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[00:09:09]The next row is outsourcing. This is the redirection of responsibility for public transport projects. It isn't inherently problematic because it drives competition and innovation, but its application is not always disciplined. In a healthy system, there's [music] a balance between the two major sectors of transport, the public government side and the private [music] contractor side.

[00:09:34]Design, planning, management, these are responsibilities that are largely shared. However, over time, the Anglosphere has gradually concentrated this technical expertise in the private sector.

[00:09:46]>> On its own, this isn't a problem.

[00:09:48][music] The private sector plays a large role in projects, even in low-cost jurisdictions, but the balance between public and private must be optimal.

[00:09:56]Otherwise, costs will rise.

[00:09:59]Toronto's Metrolinx [music] spends an average of 17.1% on professional services, which is almost Italy spends on soft costs alone.

[00:10:09]Soft costs are spent on anything that isn't physical infrastructure, like planning.

[00:10:14]Applying these averages, Toronto's Eglinton Crosstown Light Rail spent around $1.8 billion on professional services. Indeed, Metrolinx spends more on soft costs than hard costs, which we'll talk about in a bit. [music] >> Since the '70s, we've had a drought of projects in the English-speaking world.

[00:10:32]Now, we're trying to catch up for for the last 30 years and not build So, we're trying to [music] staff up with like consultants from all over the world.

[00:10:38]>> While the private sector is now largely responsible for delivery, the public sector still has the final say. But, a gradual loss of in-house talent means that, regardless of individual capacity, the public sector as a whole may lack the technical depth to effectively manage projects, which can drive up costs.

[00:10:58]>> I think it's also an education problem.

[00:11:00][music] Until last year in Canada, we had not a single railway engineering program. I think we have even less respect for civil engineers here than in Australia. And so, it's like it's like the number My friends from Europe will [music] tell you that civil engineering is like the top engineering profession.

[00:11:14]>> Within the Anglosphere, agencies rely heavily on either domestic or English-speaking [music] precedent projects when forecasting their costs. Someone on Montreal's Blue Line extension [music] claimed the project is competitive with the worldwide average. It's not, and the only way you could ever come to that irrational conclusion is by looking at only the Anglosphere.

[00:11:39]>> Instead of looking to, say, Istanbul's very cost-effective metro, we're genuinely more likely to look at, say, Crossrail.

[00:11:48]>> This just takes poor cost management and compounds it. The blind leading the blind.

[00:11:53]>> Singapore's Circle Line Stage 6 cost an eye-watering 1.4 billion dollars per kilometer. In fairness, this included massively upgrading the line's existing underground depot in Kim Chuan, but even so, that's a crazy amount for just three stations. Singapore's inclusion is surprising [music] because they have an incredible public transport network.

[00:12:16]They're well positioned to ignore NIMBYs and avoid political games, given they've literally been ruled by one party for their entire existence. And yet, the numbers don't lie.

[00:12:28]Why does this happen even to a place like Singapore?

[00:12:32]Singapore, [music] like the rest of the Anglosphere, share the same institutional structures such as common law. Also, English is a notoriously insular language, being the world's default. That alone breeds an incuriosity about the rest of the world.

[00:12:48]>> A lot of Anglosphere [music] jurisdictions they'll send like the CEO of a transit agency abroad on like a 1-week trip to like experience the trains of [music] Japan or whatever. But at the same time, they regard sending lower-level civil servants to conferences abroad as a huge waste of taxpayer money. [music] When in reality, like that's where true learning comes from. Find those solutions from abroad.

[00:13:07]>> I think there's also an element of exceptionalism involved. The Anglosphere is special. It's unique. What you do outside the Anglosphere is irrelevant.

[00:13:15]We pride ourselves on safety, high wages, and strong workers' [music] rights. So, that must be why our projects cost so much, and that's why we should only listen to one another.

[00:13:26]No. God, no. That's not why. Back to this graph. I couldn't show you an Australian version of this because Australia is notoriously secretive with the cost of its transit projects, even more so than the rest of the Anglosphere. For example, the Sydney Metro City and Southwest cost 15.35 billion, but the exact cost breakdown has been kept confidential. So, I can't work out a split per kilometer cost, which means I can't properly scrutinize the costs and critique the government on where [music] they could save money.

[00:13:59]>> For Singapore's upcoming Cross Island Line, beyond finding some smaller individual contracts, the only estimate I could find for the entire project was an article from 2016. And that's just by experts, not the Singaporean government.

[00:14:15]>> It's okay to keep some cost estimates secret. [music] You have a competitive bidding process. The problem is in the Anglosphere, we use that as our justification to make everything [music] redacted.

[00:14:25]>> Like we have zero transparency.

[00:14:26]>> We are scared of public backlash.

[00:14:28]Governments trying to protect their image as well.

[00:14:31]>> We do [music] have this myth that we if we preserve commercial confidentiality, that somehow we're going to get lower prices. [music] I mean, clearly that hasn't worked. Italy and Turkey, they do these government-led cost benchmarks by law, which they enforce that the government [music] must compile kind of unit costs for materials and for labor and all these kinds of things. So, the government knows what it's paying.

[00:14:50]>> The end goal of planning is always to build the project. But sometimes the process becomes so convoluted that the system itself loses sight of that.

[00:15:00]>> $229 million was spent on Auckland's canceled Airport Light Rail without any track ever being laid. During planning, the public sector's goal was delivering studies to relevant ministries on time and ensuring procurement procure procurement procurement procure procurement procurement procure I actually don't know how to say that word. And ensuring that thing followed the right procedure.

[00:15:24][music] Meanwhile, the private sector's goal was winning contracts and delivering high quality studies. To be clear, all people working on the airport light rail genuinely wanted it to be [music] built, but the disjointedness of the system and the fragmentation of accountability incentivized a focus on the immediate term deliverables and process compliance. The very same fragmentation that has made it hard to trace who proposed the H2 structure. The convolution of the system incent Is that a It's a bus that's kind of blocking my way blocking my whole view.

[00:16:00]Oh, okay. The convolution of the system incentivizes thorough planning and due process, all the while muddying the actual goal, building a light rail, moving people faster across Auckland.

[00:16:13]>> We're obsessed with the process and the appearance of doing things rather than the outcomes of what we're actually delivering. [music] I mean, look at any of these projects that have been built, particularly in North America. A lot of them, they get menial [music] ridership.

[00:16:25]The best example of this is New York's East Side Access project. They actually lost riders when they opened this $11 [music] billion rail project cuz it halved all the frequencies from Long Island to the core. I mean, that's just something that will blow the trust of [music] the entire general traveling public, the entire taxpayer tax-paying public.

[00:16:41]>> The next O is over caution. The Anglosphere has become so risk-averse that we've made everything more expensive trying to avoid risk. And the worst thing about this O is it has nothing to do with safety.

[00:16:56]>> Public transport projects are inherently risky and the government really does not like risk. This has given rise to the public-private partnership project model. Private investors will finance and manage the construction of a project. They assume all project risk, so in theory, [music] if anything goes wrong, the taxpayer isn't on the hook.

[00:17:16]Instead, the private sector has to sort everything out.

[00:17:19]>> Unfortunately, knowing that the risks are high, contractors are forced to charge higher rates. It doesn't help that these PPPs often have a lack of clear specifications, late-stage change orders, and poor owner-side project management. If scope is poorly defined, [music] contractors won't know what you want, so they'll charge you for the worst-case scenario.

[00:17:40]>> So, what happened to the risk?

[00:17:42]>> Nothing. The government is still paying for the risk. If those risks don't manifest, there was no point in overpaying. If those risks were poorly defined, the contractor may end up demanding more money.

[00:17:54]>> This is exactly what happened on Sydney CBD light rail, where the government paid $576 million to Acciona, who were misled over the project's complexity.

[00:18:04]>> A lot of English-speaking jurisdictions, we [music] try to have our cake and eat it, too. We want to offload a lot of risk and responsibility to the private sector, but we also want a lot of public sector oversight.

[00:18:15]>> If you look at the lowest-cost [music] projects that come out of English-speaking jurisdictions, they're actually the most privatized. So, if you look at Canada Line, basically, what TransLink did is they had [music] a hands-off approach. You take all the risk of delivering this project, but you can build it however you want. The public agency [music] was willing to give the private sector partner the cover, the authority, and the political mandate to do it. So, it's one of the cheapest metros we built in the English-speaking world.

[00:18:37]>> If building a project becomes this risky, only the biggest consortiums will be able to place bids. This completely undermines the principle of public-private partnerships, which are meant to breed competition by awarding a contract to the best bidder. This reduces the incentive for consortiums to be innovative or to keep costs down. The buyer could be getting less for more.

[00:18:58]>> So, in a world where cost blowouts are the norm, what's the sensible thing to do? Figure out how to keep costs down, right?

[00:19:06]Nah.

[00:19:07]Just spend even more money.

[00:19:08]>> Australia tends to desire a P90 cost estimate. That is to say an estimate that has a 90% chance of being correct and not being surpassed. This is honestly quite difficult to achieve and necessitates a huge backup budget.

[00:19:24]Across various projects in North America, contingency and escalation end up accounting for roughly 33% of a project. And remember, we have no idea about Australia because the government literally won't tell us.

[00:19:37]>> It's really politically [music] difficult to say, "I'm sorry, we hit the budget limit and we need more money."

[00:19:43]They just say, "Oh, my project's going to cost a lot of money from the start."

[00:19:46]They still [music] blow the budget in the end. You have a stakeholder that's not happy with where your subway's being built. The English-speaking solution is like, "Oh, we don't want to deal [music] with the stakeholder, so the rail line was supposed to run on the surface, we'll just put it underground." Some problems can be just solved through negotiation and sitting [music] down at a table for one another. And when you have a lower contingency budget, usually it forces a lower [music] spend.

[00:20:05]>> It doesn't help that the public don't know how much these projects should cost.

[00:20:09]>> Tell me which of these sound better.

[00:20:11]>> The Sydney Metro West set to cost $25 billion or the $27 billion Sydney Metro West set to come in $2 billion under budget. We can't judge projects on their cost without that frame of reference.

[00:20:24]So, the government is aiming to come in under budget no matter what.

[00:20:28]>> Trouble is, often that frame of reference is too inflated to mean anything. A lot of time goes into managing every risk on a project.

[00:20:36]Accurate cost estimates, community consultation, adequate safety. What's much less considered is the cost of not delivering a project.

[00:20:46]>> Like, if you look at some of these risk matrices in the English-speaking world, thousands of rows of Excel cells about like, "Oh, like this particular stakeholder will throw a fit if this specific event." It's like pigeonholing us into fear where we need to be accommodating everyone at any point.

[00:21:01]>> Think about the cost of not building HS2 to [music] Manchester. All the people living in Manchester who lose out on a high-speed link to their nation's capital, the housing that doesn't get built, the areas that don't get rejuvenated. Public transport connects communities. It allows people to reach services faster. It improves access to employment, education opportunities, and high-quality health care, all life-changing. Too often, tunnel vision emerges, in this case quite literally.

[00:21:30]Choosing to build part of your alignment in a tunnel, not for engineering reasons, but primarily to avoid upsetting the community. No one decision proves too expensive, but combined, this overcaution can escalate the budget beyond recovery. Trying to guarantee complete risk mitigation manifests the worst risk of all, project cancellation.

[00:21:53]Avoiding this one risk is never sufficiently considered. The final O is overreach. This one comes down to politicians making the decisions that engineers should be making, because ultimately, the buck always stops at them.

[00:22:08]>> In August 2018, the Dan Andrews government announced the Suburban Rail Loop, a 90-km railway orbiting the entirety of Melbourne's peripheries and linking every single railway. To be clear, I believe the project concept is reasonable. Melbourne doesn't have any orbital railways. The problem was that neither Infrastructure Australia nor Infrastructure Victoria had recommended the project before its announcement.

[00:22:33]There were more important projects. Why not electrify the line to Melton first, or build Melbourne Metro 2? Why spend billions on a project that, until its announcement, virtually no one had ever mentioned? Well, the project was announced 3 months before a Victorian state election. And SRL East runs through marginal seats in Melbourne's eastern suburbs. We can't know for sure that this is why the project was announced, but it's certainly relevant.

[00:23:00]>> You can all see the issues with overplanning, but underplanning is the worst.

[00:23:04]>> We're already quite bad at keeping costs down, but conjuring up a project without proper due diligence, while seemingly forcing it into a rigid set of political requirements, will only drive prices further up. The solution to the Anglosphere's problems isn't to just bypass the system entirely. Politicians need to work with engineers and planners.

[00:23:26]>> In the states, the LA Metro is currently undergoing a very impressive, but expensive expansion.

[00:23:33]>> The K Line Northern Extension, for example, is expected to cost $950 million per kilometer.

[00:23:39]>> It's light rail, by the way. The LA Metro is coordinated by the Metro Board of Directors, which [music] is full of engineers, planners, and individuals with extensive backgrounds in transport networks.

[00:23:50]>> Haha, nah, I'm kidding. The entire board is mostly about political connection.

[00:23:53]For example, LA Mayor Karen Bass is herself on the board, and she gets to appoint three [music] others.

[00:23:59]As a politician, her systemic incentives revolve around keeping the electorate happy. So, she's unsurprisingly focused on locals worried that a tunnel will deflate their property values. Bass's interventions likely resulted in more studies, adding cost and delays to the project, which, by the way, isn't even set to start construction until 2041.

[00:24:20]>> Politicians should exist mostly to approve or reject projects. They should not be involved in technical decisions where possible, because their motivations are too political and [music] easily swayed by lobbyists.

[00:24:32]>> Low-cost jurisdictions rely mostly on engineers and planners, [music] who not only possess stronger technical judgment, but rely impartially on that judgment to make the best decisions for the broader transport network, not just those directly [music] impacted.

[00:24:47]>> The Gold Coast Line Rail Stage 4 was canceled in 2025, just [music] a year after a change in the Queensland state government, having soared to around $250 million per kilometer for a surface tramway, this plus community protest inevitably turned the project into a political football, one that the incoming government canceled as soon as they could in favor of buses.

[00:25:11]>> Public transport projects are insufficiently protected across election cycles, becoming political footballs.

[00:25:17]Proposed schools and hospitals are rarely canceled, but governments seem to treat public transport as a nice-to-have. After all, if you cancel a project, at least everyone will still have their cars. Look, play political football with a stadium, I don't care, but public transport matters. It affects people and their lives deeply.

[00:25:37]>> When you know your project is at risk of being canceled by the next government, you rush to make it happen as fast as you can, breaking it up into small [music] stages that each required tedious approvals and prevent economies of scale. Meanwhile, the private [music] sector hates political uncertainty, so their costs often reflect the unpredictability [music] of the Anglosphere.

[00:25:57]Canceling a project can mean losing the expertise associated with it, meaning it must be built up once again, driving up costs further.

[00:26:07]By now, you can see the complex set of factors that [music] have caused the Anglosphere's crippling cost crisis.

[00:26:14]Every jurisdiction has responded to the transit cost crisis in their own, often infuriating ways. Singapore have expensive transit costs despite being largely immune to political overreach, as we discussed earlier, but this immunity means they must just blaze through projects regardless of cost.

[00:26:29]That doesn't mean they're absolved. No system is perfect, and if they bring [music] costs down, they could build even more.

[00:26:35]>> Things are a lot more dire everywhere else. The Anglosphere identified years ago that costs were spiraling out of control, [music] so they kind of got addicted to building light rails under the belief that they are more cost-effective, but Anglosphere cost inefficiencies ensure they end end costing as much as a metro. In addition, light rail projects carry less passengers per dollar spent because they're generally not very fast and the Anglosphere keeps applying them in context where a metro would have made more sense, like the Eglinton Crosstown.

[00:27:05][music] >> So, you're building a surface tram, which in Toronto's case does not look very nice. It's like down this middle of a giant suburban [music] stroad. It's like the lowest risk project possible and yet it costs the same or more than some of these really [music] grand Chinese or French metro projects. You have to ask yourself like what does this cost mean? Here, we're just paying more to get way less.

[00:27:26]>> But now, because even light rails keep blowing up in cost, governments are moving to the next logical conclusion.

[00:27:31]Let's build buses instead. Now, honestly, I don't even know where to begin with why this is a problem. Too often buses are not given proper right-of-way. Just look at the B-Line in Sydney, hampering their success. And even when they are, the unreliability and lower comfort of buses puts people off and they have lower capacity. So, yeah, they're cheaper because they're worse. Like, this is not hard to understand.

[00:27:52]>> We've [music] deluded ourselves into thinking that we can keep de-scoping our projects and delivering the similar outcomes.

[00:27:58]>> Anglosphere governments keep campaigning for light rail over metros and buses over light rail. It drives me insane. We keep treating cost blowouts as inevitabilities instead of looking to the rest of the world out of misguided notions of exceptionalism.

[00:28:15]>> We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas.

[00:28:18]>> But, one jurisdiction in the Anglosphere has defied all the odds.

[00:28:23]I recently discovered that there is an entire uncontacted civilization on Australia's west coast that no one has ever heard of, known to its inhabitants as Perth. Perth's Morley-Ellen Brook line came in at $61 million per kilometer, the Thornlie-Cockburn line at $67 million, and the Yanchep line at $64 million. Importantly, these all opened post 2024. Incredibly recent projects.

[00:28:49][music] Nowhere in Australia has come anywhere close to these since 2020. Now, in all fairness, these projects were relatively uncomplicated compared to other Australian projects. Perth reserved land decades in advance, so really they were just adding steel to empty land and freeway mediums.

[00:29:06]I'd respond that that's kind of exactly the point I'm trying to make. Perth had vision. They stuck to their plans. They didn't gold plate and they genuinely got bang for their buck. But more importantly, there was one Perth [music] project that definitely wasn't simple.

[00:29:21]The Forrestfield Airport Link. Opened in 2022, this 8.5 km line includes 8 km of tunnel and three stations, two of which are underground. Hardly easy to build, but Perth did it for just $175 million per km. Nothing comes close.

[00:29:42]Nothing underground basically anywhere in the Anglosphere. Perth's Airport Link cost close to or even lower than surface [music] light rails and no one is talking about it. The first O, overbuilding, was avoided through common sense decisions. Tunnels only reached 26 m in depth, allowing Redcliffe and Airport Central stations to be built through cheaper cut and cover techniques. Rather than expensively force Redcliffe station to fit the existing road network, [music] roads were cheaply redirected around the station. High Wycombe was built not underground, not elevated, but simply at grade. Remember how I told you the Sydney Metro was made to build cross passages 240 m apart? Well, Perth's Airport Link has them spaced 666 m apart on average. This proves my point that Australia's standard isn't a standard. Building cross passages in Perth's unique geological conditions required extensive ground treatment and was genuinely risky. So, they successfully argued down the number of passages. Sydney wasn't so lucky.

[00:30:42]Insight into the second O, outsourcing is provided in a parliamentary submission [music] by Peter Martinovich, a former deputy project leader on Perth's metro rail program. Project management in Perth was undertaken by a dedicated team. This ensured that the government remained not only an informed client, but a critically represented [music] client as well. Although it may be possible for government to outsource tasks, there were critical responsibilities that are retained, no matter what assumptions may otherwise be made. The third O, over caution, is difficult to quantify because Perth keeps costs under wraps like the rest of Australia. But it's safe to assume that any contingency [music] was not particularly high. Funnily enough, the final O, overreach, definitely happened. And the project absolutely became a political football.

[00:31:27]Perth did not avoid overreach, so they probably could have saved even more money if they did. Maybe you think I'm giving Perth too much credit. After all, Perth was tunneling under houses and an airport, not skyscrapers like many other tunneled railways. But I hardly think that explains everything. Another Australian city is trying to build an airport link, Melbourne. Their planned route is only a bit longer. It's entirely above ground and largely runs along an existing rail corridor. And yet, it's expected to cost $730 million per kilometer. Granted, there'll be quadruplication, upgrades to stations like Sunshine and more. But it's difficult to hand wave these huge cost differences away. It cannot both be true that Perth had it easy with its tunneling and Melbourne has it [music] difficult with at grade corridor upgrades. Perth is kind of an echo chamber within an echo chamber. They're somewhat known in the industry to do things the Perth way, like their own brand of exceptionalism. This could mean that they're ignoring the terrible practices the rest of Australia has [music] entangled ourselves in, hence building way cheaper than any of us. And if they don't even need to, they have so much mining money. They're like Australia's richest state.

[00:32:41]Perth proves that the Anglosphere can build for cheap if they truly want to.

[00:32:45]And of course, there are others that we can learn from, too.

[00:32:48]>> Montreal REM is like half the cost of [music] surface tramways built around the same time. And in Canada, it's now a quarter of the cost. They really focused on high standardization. All the stations look exactly the same. They avoided underground tunneling wherever possible. They reused all kinds of existing right-of-ways. They reused the rail corridor, they reused highway medians, [music] they reused the hydro corridor. Like it's really important to reduce land acquisition costs. And also, they managed soft costs really well. If you look at their delivery team, it's like a team of like a hundred people in-house [music] that like managed this project top to bottom. And you look at the staffing count of like other Canadian projects, five times the size, at least. And they also had the political mandate. [music] The government really empowered them to deliver the project and make those decisions. I think the problem with this transit cost problem is it's a complex problem. It's a wicked problem. It has to be a coordinated [music] effort. All levels of government, all levels of civil service, the taxpaying public needs to advocate for these changes as well. It needs to be like a systematic review and questioning of [music] our fundamental assumptions about how we do things. And I think there's a huge fear and reluctance to do [music] that. We really need to be investing in our civil service. No matter how small the government involvement, you still need qualified experts [music] in civil service roles who know what they're doing, who know what to ask for. We have to have the political backing from politicians [music] to be able to clear barriers away for our civil service. Let's stop being so insular. We need to stop thinking we're the best in the world. [music] We are not. We are way behind. Latin America, people in the English-speaking world deride as third world or poor. They are building some of the most advanced metro systems [music] in the world. They are lapping us.

[00:34:25]>> With the video, I specifically only chosen I had to go through and choose countries where I was like, "Okay, we will actually res- >> [music] >> people will respect this." I wanted to really frame the video as look at these very advanced nations, but I shouldn't have to do that. It shouldn't matter. It should be like if South America do it, we can do it.

[00:34:39]>> I think you should make that point in the video. Like the fact that we don't respect [music] these places, the fact that you can't even make an argument about that is just so reflective of our culture. Even talking about the fact that we are a high cost jurisdiction [music] is a taboo. If we can't even acknowledge that we have a problem, we won't even go about solving it. So the first step is to really acknowledge [music] that we have a problem and I think we are starting to do that.

[00:35:00]>> But there's one other thing I want to draw your attention to. For the Anglosphere isn't just home to expensive transit.

[00:35:07]It's home to expensive Oh.

[00:35:09]>> videos. I've seen them.

[00:35:10]>> Oh, thank you so much. Thank you.

[00:35:12]>> [laughter] >> It's home to expensive homes. And as you might have guessed, those two things are not a coincidence. Not even close. Stay tuned for the next episode because I'm going to perform a deep dive into how the five Os That's right. When it comes to home ownership, there's a fifth O.

[00:35:30]Have systematically caused the Anglosphere's crippling housing crisis, killed the dream of home ownership through entire generations, and arguably [music] thrown entire nations into an inevitable downfall.

[00:35:47]But you know, that's that's later. For now, you go and chill.

[00:35:52]Have ice cream.