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1/12/2024
Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART)’s "Fleet of the Future" train fleet is coming in hundreds of millions of dollars under budget, the San Francisco-area agency announced this week.
Due to a revised schedule and an accelerated monthly delivery rate of new rail cars, the acquisition is expected to cost $394 million less than when the contract was awarded in 2012, BART officials said in a news release.The original contract was awarded for 775 cars for an estimated $2.58 billion, but an October 2023 financial update lowered the projected cost by 15% to $2.19 billion.
The original delivery schedule called for providing 10 cars a month, but BART worked with manufacturer Alstom to increase the rate to 16 cars a month, saving more than $100 million, BART officials said.
Another cost saver was BART's decision to have its own staff do more of the engineering work in house. The project team has included engineers who have completed new rail-car projects at other agencies, BART officials said.
The rail-car delivery schedule is now faster — 20 cars a month are being delivered to BART. As of Dec. 31, 2024, 672 of the 775 cars were on BART property.