MEDIA APPLIED KELLEYMATICS

DART Executive Director Charles Anderson awoke on the morning of January 26 to some shocking news. According to a story by Chris Kelley in The Dallas Morning News, the cost of DART’s plan for a mass transit system was $1.6 billion- “enough to buy each passenger a new Mercedes, or a Yugo for each day of the week.” Needless to say. Anderson exploded. “If a cost of $45,000 for every additional rider were accurate,” Anderson wrote to the DART board later that day, ’”then my recommendation to this board would be that we shut down and go play golf.”

The guiding principle of Kelleymatics is this: when estimating the per capita cost of any new building project, assume-wrongly-that each new person using the project will do so only one time. Here’s what happens if you apply Kelleymatics to a few other major projects around town. If Dallas really figured costs this way, we’d still be a cluster of log cabins on the Trinity.

Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center Estimated construction cost: $81.5 million Additional symphony-goers halt will attract: 1,000 per event K-cost: $81,500 per new patron



University Hospital Estimated construction cost: $32 million New beds created: 160 K-cost: $200,000 per patient treated



North Central Expressway Expansion

Estimated construction cost: $600 million

New cars accommodated when completed: 60,000 per day

K-cost: $10,000 per passenger



Dallas Zoo Gorilla Habitat

Estimated construction cost: $3.1 million

Number of new zoo visitors generated per day: 1,648

K-cost: $1,881 per gorilla lover