Why we stopped building subways cheaply

Brian Potter · 28 May 2025

Others here said this too

The binding constraint on building anything in America is permitting and litigation, not money.

Their wordsPolitical costs and civic opposition will often make a technology unviable regardless of how the dollars and cents add up.

Also said by Casey Handmer, John H. Cochrane

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Brian Potter did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
American cities chose subways over elevated railways knowing they cost two to four times as much, because nobody would live under an el.

Their wordsCities began to prefer subways to elevateds, despite the fact that they were two to four times as expensive to build as elevated trains.
Our reading
Cut and cover is still often the cheapest way to build a subway and rich countries have abandoned it anyway, because the disruption is no longer tolerated.

Their wordsCut and cover will sometimes be the best choice from a basic cost-benefit perspective, as will elevated rail, and both are useful to have in the tunnel construction toolbox for that reason.
Our reading
The binding constraint on building anything in America is permitting and litigation, not money.
Mental modelBottlenecks

Their wordsPolitical costs and civic opposition will often make a technology unviable regardless of how the dollars and cents add up.

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