RTD lowers FasTracks cost estimate, but gap remains

The overall cost of the Regional Transportation District’s FasTracks program is down 6.4 percent, according to the agency’s annual reappraisal costs and revenues, but changes in FasTracks’ individual components – the 10 rapid transit corridors and associated elements – were all over the board.

And they came not necessarily from the much-anticipated impact of declines in the cost of construction materials, RTD’s decision to trim plans for the corridors also is designed to help hold down costs and get more of the program built by 2017.

RTD now estimates the entire FasTracks program will cost $6.5 billion by 2017 but believes revenue will fall short by $2.45 billion – a dilemma that means it can’t all be built without finding new revenues or further reducing the price tag.

The transit corridors and other elements such as maintenance facilities and conversion of Denver Union Station into a transit hub all are being managed as separate projects within the overall $6.5 billion program.

And naturally, as each project has its own unique challenges that make cost swings vary widely, aside from the overarching issues such as costs of construction materials and labor that affect everything fairly equally, whether the tag for an individual corridor project went down a little, down a lot or even increased while others decreased depended on unique factors.

A look at the changes to each corridor also shows that cost decreases were not all necessarily due to recession-caused declines in the cost of construction material. Many price tag decreases were due to cuts to the projects, as new General Manager Phil Washington has asked the project managers of each corridor to do bottoms-up, zero-based re-budgeting of their projects to cut as much scope as can be sacrificed while still accomplishing the basic purpose of each line. One mandate was to retain each corridor’s planned end-of-line destination instead of cutting them short.

For instance, the estimated price of the 11.2-mile Gold Line heavy-rail commuter line from Denver to Arvada and Wheat Ridge dropped 14 percent over the past year. But RTD attributes much of that savings to reduced scope of work during construction as well as reduced level of service when it’s done. Instead of running trains every seven and a half minutes during rush hours and every 15 minutes off-peak—as outlined in the recently approved Environmental Impact Statement – RTD is proposing 15-minute frequency of trains in rush hour. While this can also lower ridership, it reduces the need for purchasing expensive rail cars from 22 to 12.

Read more at Kevin Flynn’s Inside Lane.