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SUMMARY
Estimating Soft Costs for
Major Public Transportation
Fixed Guideway Projects
This report presents the research, data sources, and analysis underlying Estimating Soft
Costs for Major Public Transportation Fixed Guideway Projects, Part 1: Guidebook, which
came out of TCRP Project G-10. This Final Report is one of two final products from the proj-
ect and is intended to support the information summarized in the Guidebook in Part 1.
Please refer to the Guidebook for a summary of how the results of the research presented
here can be applied to practice, including an introduction to "soft costs" and a new method-
ology to estimate these soft costs based on historical projects.
To support the development of a guidebook for agencies on soft costs, this report:
· Identifies a working definition of soft costs,
· Describes the current industry practice of estimating soft costs through a questionnaire
of the transit industry and interviews with industry professionals,
· Statistically analyzes the as-built costs of 59 past transit projects to determine how proj-
ect characteristics have driven soft costs historically, and
· Introduces a new methodology for estimating soft costs based on actual past expenditures,
presented in the Guidebook.
S.1. Definition of Soft Costs
Generally, soft costs (or indirect costs) are the capital expenditures that are required to
complete an operational transit project but that are not spent directly on activities related
to brick-and-mortar construction, vehicle and equipment procurement, or land acquisition.
Instead, these expenses are incurred on ancillary professional services that are necessary to
complete the project.
After reviewing a variety of financial, engineering, academic, and other literature, this
study concludes that the Federal Transit Administration's (FTA) definition of Standard Cost
Category (SCC) 80, Professional Services, is an equivalent operational definition of soft costs
for the purposes of this project. FTA (U.S. FTA, 2008) defines SCC 80 as follows:
[Soft costs include] all professional, technical and management services (and related professional liabil-
ity insurance costs) related to the design and construction of fixed infrastructure during the preliminary
engineering, final design, and construction phases of the project. This includes environmental work,
design, engineering and architectural services; specialty services such as safety or security analyses;
and value engineering, risk assessment, cost estimating, scheduling, before and after studies, ridership
modeling and analyses, auditing, legal services, administration and management, etc. by agency staff or
outside consultants.
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