The spiraling costs of the Laval subway extension

But it wasn’t to be so. Six years later, the National Assembly had to authorize additional funding which raised the modest projection of $179 million to $803.6 million.

Ironically, the costs of the Laval Metro are in line with similar projects. In fact the Metropolitan Transport Agency (AMT), the body responsible for overseeing the building of the system, states that the extension of the subway across the Rivière des Prairies into Laval was cheaper than similar projects implemented in Baltimore, Hong Kong, and Los Angeles.

In 1999 came the first of several cost adjustments, upping the new figures to $250 million, the added costs coming from a miscalculation of the distance that would have to be covered. Engineers, it was then said, had forgotten to factor in the cost of a kilometer of work out of a total distance of 5.2 kilometers.

The spiral continued in the following year, with the government approving a proposal in June of 2000 to fund the project at a new cost of $378.8 million, tax included. But there was more to come. Just sixteen months after Premier Bernard Landry had stuck the first symbolic shovel into the ground to launch construction, a second government decree upped the approved costs to $547.7 million, this coming in July of 2003. Taxpayers were not out of the woods yet, because in the fall of 2004 the group of experts appointed by Liberal Premier Jean Charest to clean-up the management of the project recommended a budget of $803.6 million, $785.3 million coming from public funds and $18.3 million charged to the AMT for minor installations such as parking lots.

It is on the government’s $785 million that the cost of the Laval metro has been calculated at $154 million per kilometer, compared with Baltimore at $207 million, Hong Kong at $183 million and Los Angeles at $166 million.