Urban highway capacity expansion typically costs $8-12 million per lane-mile for land acquisition, lane pavement and intersection reconstruction. This represents an annualized cost of $300,000-700,000 per lane-mile (assuming a 7% interest rate over 20 years). Dividing this by 4,000 to 8,000 additional peak-period vehicles for 250 annual commute days indicates a cost of 15-75¢ per additional vehicle-mile of travel, plus 7-15¢ per vehicle-mile for road maintenance and traffic services, indicating roadway costs of $3-15 for a typical commute trip that involves 20-miles of travel under congested urban-peak roadway conditions. Increasing highway capacity in built up areas of large cities such as Washington DC, Los
Angeles and Boston can cost even more