What do you mean? What would you quantify?
Not that that matters, since I think the biggest lessons from DOLRT are qualitative. The issue's not about finances, but poor project management and stakeholder relations. (click me for more)
The sad truth (which isn’t newsworthy because the media and its average consumers are too reactionary, and don’t want to sit down and take their time to learn about the issues) is that the costs incurred aren’t weird or unusual. There’s a bunch of upfront costs that go into transit projects; if a project is not politically or socially viable (and the responsible thing to do is to kill it off) but people try to push and make it happen anyways, this is what happens.
Planning and political mistakes don’t cancel out. Complaints and distrust from institutions like the General Assembly, downtown Durham businesses, and Duke just pile up until you can’t outmaneuver them anymore, and you have people like then-CEO of GoTriangle Jeff Mann and project manager John Tallmadge take the fall.
(Maybe some of these are because Mann should’ve acted more cautiously or Tallmadge should’ve kept up with skeptical partners better. But I highly doubt it’s because they were fundamentally bad people or anything -and I really hope Tallmadge’s teaching his students to do better as a lecturer to planning students. Mann seems to have a cushy job at AECOM now, though, so… uhh… take that as you will.)
Also, I’m 99% sure we’ve talked about it somewhere but can’t find it, so here’s the full presentation GoTriangle put together. This was shown in a Board of Trustees meeting last month, I think.