When I first began trying to figure out how to actually find a job without dragging my wife out of stop-by-her-parents-to-pick-up-dinner range nearly two decades ago, I didn’t understand why no direct train was available from Fall River to Boston.  As laptops, tablets, and smartphones advanced, the prospect seemed even more obvious.  In the meantime, government (broadly considered) found money for a sparsely used train station in Wickford; go figure.

However, now that the excitement of possibility is ramping up in Fall River, as Kevin O’Connor reports for the Fall River Herald, what jumps out at me are the numbers:

Commuter rail to Boston was first proposed 30 years ago. Gov. Bill Weld and Gov. Deval Patrick both promised it would happen. Patrick promised trains would carry commuters by 2016. Plans called for a $1.4 billion project to improve rail lines through Stoughton. That price has since risen to an estimated $3.4 billion

Baker instead proposed running the rail lines through Middleboro, which would cost an estimated $935 million. It could also be completed in less time, state officials say. …

Plans now call for a train that would stop at a station on Davol Street at Pearce Street next to the Boardwalk Crossings Plaza. Studies show the train would carry an estimated 1,600 passengers a day for the 90 minute ride to Boston, Fiola said.

I’ll stipulate that these are back-of-the-envelope calculations, because I’m not sure what specifically is included in that number of passengers or how neatly the expected cost matches up with serving just those passengers, as opposed to other customers elsewhere up the line.  But these costs are huge.

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Even going with the lower estimate (and assuming it doesn’t grow), $935 million amounts to a $160 subsidy per ride over the course of 10 years.  For a single two-way commuter working five days a week in Boston, that’s over $80,000.  Would anybody actually pay that amount for themselves?  And sure, opening up such possibilities in the Southeast of Massachusetts would have an economic effect (although some of it will just be a shift in wealth away from closer suburbs), but that’s a tricky thing to estimate.

It’s important to remember that this subsidy has to come from somewhere else in the economy that, by virtue of the fact that it wouldn’t need a government subsidy, is likely to be more economically productive.