Who Killed the Federal Study of Transit Costs?

The costs of rail projects in Los Angeles have led to a document covering best practices for such public transit projects, "Some people in the United States Senate had the smart idea that the federal government ought to do something similar and included language in their appropriations bill commissioning a Government Accountability Office study of the issue," Mathew Yglesias comments for Vox.  However, a federal report on best practices regarding public transit will not be written, because that language didn't make it into the bill that the House of Representatives will see. According to Yglesias, "Nobody seems to want to officially claim credit for killing this."

The problem is real. "The Second Avenue Subway in New York City, for example, is being built at a cost of nearly $1.7 billion per kilometer while new subway lines are being built in Paris, Copenhagen, and Berlin for about $250 million per kilometer," Yglesias reports. And while one study or compendium of best practices won't make the problem go away, studying a problem is better than sweeping it under the rug.