With the custom rolling stock and 60% Buy-America requirement, BART’s purchase price for new rolling stock was a bit of a surprise. Bombardier’s winning bid was just $2.2 million per car. That is considerably less than the original estimate of over $3 million.
Ok 70% more expensive than a New York subway car, but this is BART after all…
$2.2 million is not at all bad. New York’s latest order is $2 million per car, and NYCT uses extremely conservative designs (e.g. there are no inter-car gangways).
Inflating the 2006 Dollars to 2016* Dollars at 2%/year implies that BART’s order is about 40% more expensive per car than NYC’s and BART’s cars are about 1.5x the size (and will move and accelerate more quickly). To me it looks like BART got a deal that was about as good as NYC’s 2006 deal.
*I’m using delivery dates because I don’t know when NYC issued its contract and I’m picking the BART delivery date as a date midway between the 10 prototype cars and the 2017 delivery of the balance of the order. Use 19.5% inflation instead of 22% inflation if you want to use the first delivery dates on both orders.
The BART cars are only 1.25x the size (75 feet instead of 60), and I’m not sure that their acceleration is necessarily better than that of the R-160s, though the top speed is likely higher, because I’m relatively sure that the R-160s performance is artificially limited to match the artificially limited performance of the older generation of cars. NYCT does save a bit of money by having the cars in semi-permanently linked sets, with some equipment shared among the sets, and BART has the disadvantages of custom track gauge and custom power supply voltage.
The R160s have 11.4 kW of power per ton of empty weight. For the BART trains, I think the figure is 15. New York doesn’t just semi-permanently link cars into sets; it also has very conservative rolling stock (higher weight than cutting edge, not much performance, no walkways between cars), and makes huge orders.
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