Subway Race

The Chinese city of Guangzhou is set to double the size of its subway system by 2010, with 83 new miles of track at a cost of about $100 million a mile.

In New York City, construction of a 1.7-mile tunnel for the Second Avenue subway line, first proposed in 1929, could be completed eight years from now, at a cost of $2.4 billion a mile. The Second Avenue line was stalled by the Great Depression and then by budget crises in the 1950’s and 1970’s before ground was broken again in 2007.

Elsewhere, subways are being built at a cost of five dollars per foot.