Quick Note on Subway Operating Costs

A London Underground benchmarking report using CoMET data from 2013 compared operating cost breakdowns and revenues between the Underground and its international peers. CoMET data is in principle anonymized, but it’s not hard to find which city is which, and in particular, whereas London, Paris, and Berlin all spent around $6/car-km on operations in 2013 costs, New York is the city labeled “Am” that spent $10/car-km. More recently, I followed up on these costs by looking at 2020s data, finding little for Berlin and even less for Paris, but finding exact costs per car-km for New York and per train-km for London. London has seven cars per train, from which we can impute, in 2024 PPP prices, $6.2/car-km in London; New York’s exact costs are $11.58/car-km. BVG’s costs are bundled across modes, but the total costs for 2024 reported in the Lagebericht und Jahresabschluss 2025 are 1.6B€; if U-Bahn costs per car-km and bus costs per bus-km were as in New York and tram costs per tram-km were…