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Construction Costs

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Transit & Housing June 2026

The Most Expensive Track on Earth

What it costs to build a mile of subway in New York versus peer cities around the world. All figures are PPP-adjusted 2023 dollars per mile of corridor, from the Transit Costs Project's global database of roughly 900 urban rail projects. East Side Access is the most expensive project per mile in the entire database, at $8.1B per mile of new tunnel.

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New York City projects
International peers
Created by Tal Roded · NYCuriosity · Sources: Transit Costs Project (NYU Marron Institute)
The same costs on a logarithmic scale
A log axis spaces each project by order of magnitude. New York's three projects (blue) sit one to two orders of magnitude beyond the tight international cluster (gray), a gap the linear bars above flatten against the left edge.
Created by Tal Roded · NYCuriosity · Sources: Transit Costs Project (NYU Marron Institute)

Why is New York so expensive? The Transit Costs Project's New York case study found that direct labor accounts for 40–60% of construction costs in New York, versus roughly 20–31% on comparable projects in Italy, Turkey, and Sweden. The Second Avenue Subway Phase 1 tunnel boring machine ran with 46 laborers per shift where contractors said 30 would have sufficed, adding more than $10M over the 16-month tunnel drive.

The data behind the chart Cost per mile, PPP-adjusted 2023 dollars.
#ProjectClassCost per mile

What these figures are: Cost per mile of corridor in PPP- and inflation-adjusted 2023 US dollars, computed from the Transit Costs Project database's cost-per-km (2023 dollars) figures at 1.609 km per mile. Because of the inflation and purchasing-power adjustment, these will not match commonly cited nominal numbers. Second Avenue Subway Phase 1, for example, is usually quoted at roughly $2.5B per mile in nominal dollars ($4.45B over 1.8 miles); the $3.7B/mi shown here is the same project expressed in 2023 dollars over the database's corridor length.

East Side Access denominator: The Transit Costs Project measures East Side Access over its 2.8 km of new tunnel corridor, which yields $8.1B/mi. The New York Times' widely cited "$3.5 billion per mile" figure spread the project's cost over roughly 3.5 route miles, including reused 63rd Street Tunnel segments. The two numbers describe the same project with different denominators.

Projections: Second Avenue Subway Phase 2 (2019–2029) and Grand Paris Express (2017–2030) are still under construction; their figures are projected costs as of the database's 2025 release and may rise.

Scope: Database costs exclude rolling stock and sales taxes, and lengths are corridor distances rather than track length. The Transit Costs Project cautions that per-mile comparisons miss differences in station counts and platform lengths; all comparators here are 77–100% tunneled to keep the comparison as fair as possible (Grand Paris Express is 80% tunneled, Madrid's 1999–2003 program 77%, all others 100%).

Sources: Levy, Goldwyn, Ensari & Chitti (2025), Construction costs of urban rail projects worldwide [data set], NYU / Transit Costs Project. Labor findings from the Transit Costs Project's New York Case Study (2023) and Brian M. Rosenthal, "The Most Expensive Mile of Subway Track on Earth", New York Times, December 28, 2017.