The federal government’s proposed Alto high-speed rail line to connect Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Quebec City is still in the early stages of planning. Taxpayers want to know: What’s it going to cost? Alto’s preliminary estimate is $60-$90 billion. The Parliamentary Budget Officer recently estimated Alto’s construction costs at $75-$113 billion.
Evidence from high-speed rail projects around the world suggests the ultimate cost could be considerably higher. Bent Flyvbjerg of Oxford University has documented a tendency toward “optimism bias.” His research on transport megaprojects covers more than 1,000 infrastructure projects from the late 1920s to the present. He finds that rail costs are typically underestimated, and ridership and fare revenues greatly overestimated. In sum, 86 per cent of the projects he looked at exceeded their initial budgets.
