Do you have evidence to show that the problem is Boring Company's unwillingness rather than hesitance by cities (perhaps under pressure from Boring Company's more established competitors) to bring in a relatively inexperienced partner for a major project like a new subway line?
Because the people who are excited about the boring company clearly do not understand anything about how a typical subway functions. For the cities, they do know better, they often compared these projects against the cost of rail transit, they just got fleeced by Boring company that straight up made up numbers apparently about project costs with no intention to deliver. Like it would be a comparison of a 1 billion dollar light rail or a supposedly 48 million dollar underground right of way, that's damn attractive for cities.
Subways are not particularly efficient from a cost perspective. One of the main reasons for the Boring company’s existence is the extremely high costs associated with subway construction. They are trying to bring the costs down by one or two orders of magnitude. This is material.
NYC recently opened the first stage of the Second Avenue Subway. This is a project that was initially started ~90 years ago and has been started and stopped multiple times in the intervening years. I believe the final version used none of the original tunnels however. It cost ~$6B for 1.5 miles of track [1]. The budget was padded at probably every level (eg [2]). There are a bunch of other contributing factors.
Now compare Crossrail [3]. This is a hugely ambitious project to build some 117km of track and 21km of tunnels under London in an east-west direction connecting Kent, Essex, Heathrow, central London and the Thames Valley. This was in the planning stage in the early 2000s (possibly earlier) and construction commenced in 2009 or so. It is near completion, only 2-3 years behind the original schedule (that I recall from 2003 at least) with cost overruns of around 20% (IIRC) coming out to ~17B pounds.
The UK and US are similarly developed industrialized nations. NYC and London are large cities with all the problems that entails. Actually, London is far worse because it's been for literally thousands of years, including some ~500 years of Roman occupation.
The scale of Crossrail (adjusted for cost) compared to the Second Avenue Subway is unreal. It's basically an order of magnitude.
The reasons for this are complex. There's no single determining factor. There is failure all the way from the Federal through the state and local governments as well as with the companies that build these things, the oversight of those projects, how the bids are awarded and the people who are actually doing the work. This should at least convince you that there is a problem and it's absolutely massive.
A substantial part of the problem in the US regarding transit projects is also lack of practice and atrophy of experience and capability.
In the past 50 years, we didn't build those sorts of projects frequently. When we did, they were often one off projects in one city not repeated until another 10 or 20 years passed, and there have rarely been these sorts of projects going on in many places around the country at once.
As such, you've got:
- A very small number of suppliers for anything, especially with any track record of succeeding at contracts in North America, because the market has been unable to sustain more. Competitive bidding isn't when you get 3 bids and only 1 or maybe 2 of them fully meet your needs/requirements.
- Very few people with any real depth of expertise on building these projects on your management side, so running them effectively is unlikely at best. International hires may have more experience building a subway in the abstract, but that doesn't help them navigate very different regulatory/permitting/planning/contracting environments.
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I'm not necessarily saying "just throw money at it and eventually they'll figure out how to do it better", but to some extent we're never going to get to faster/cheaper construction until we're actually doing it consistently.
No, the issue is more bidding process shenanigans and regulatory overload from labor to environmental to local. It’s become prohibitively expensive to do large public works in the US of all sorts due to these things. It’s not just subways, it’s bridges and tunnels and all other infrastructure that would be amenable in sprawling megalopolises.
They could do all kinds of things to cut costs and expedite projects, if business people and engineers were running the show.
But alas red tape, political croneyism, union labor and entrenched supply contracts are in the driver's seat in the USA, and doubly so for the Northeastern US.
Not to mention the system is made of a complicated fragile mess of legacy infrastructure, tracing the entire historical evolution of mass transit from it's inception, acquired from several different transportation companies over the course of the 20th century.
The extensive rail transit infrastructure that we do have today, was largely built in an era 100+ years ago when there was much public optimism around rail projects coupled with rampant private investment in transportation. Plus the entrenched political speed bumps we see now were still in their infancy.
In the last century NYC took all the punches of learning the ropes of operating a subway system, and had a big hand in contributing that knowledge to the rest of the world. Rapid transit in the USA also suffered from public backlash and overall negative public sentiment after decades of missteps and outright sabotage by the automotive industry. This opened up the doors to decades of mismanagement and low ridership.
For new projects in other countries, they really have their wind at their backs in many many ways in comparison to NYC. Far more at play in their favor than simply labor cost
You can't ignore things like: whether the debt can be afforded and paid back. Because these are public ventures, you practically know they'll never produce a suitable return on investment.
Did you know that the NYC subways were originally built and run by two private companies that competed with each other? Did you know that the city froze their rates for two decades then took them over when they were no longer making desired improvements (wonder why)?
Agreed. This feels like a classic causation v correlation problem.
Of course when a substitute improves, some people will switch. However, the root cause is the declining quality and lack of improvements to the system that even gives a substitute the chance to compete.
I honestly don't understand how 100 years ago nyc was able to build an expansive subway system and today it takes decades to add a new station. I know it's a combination of land costs, labor costs, corruption, regulation, underground congestion (and that the original lines were built by private companies) but I still don't really understand the situation.
You made up a railway logistics company instead of addressing the point about a commuter subway. There is no need for growth in a subway unless they are adding lines or stations. If there is constant growth outside of that then it's just hurting consumers.
That’s a really interesting point and I’m sure it has a huge impact, but it can’t be the whole story. For example, the DC Metro suffers from this inability to get much done, and absurd costs and timelines when it does, yet most of their projects are underground or use existing rights of way.
> Yes the Second Ave Subway is expensive, but how many cities are building new subway lines underground through incredibly dense existing infrastructure?
Tokyo for one. E.g. the very recently built Fukutoshin line, deep tunneled subway underneath some of the busiest areas of the city (the tunneling is complicated in part because it had to dodge myriad existing subway lines), including very elaborate and expensive stations, had a cost-per-km about 1/4 that of the SAS. The Fukutoshin line is also overbuilt in various ways because it will be interlined in the future with the Tokyu Toyoko line (an extremely high-ridership suburban line).
A number of recently built subway lines in the Tokyo area had many problems, and were considered extremely expensive—but they were still much cheaper than the SAS...
So it isn't "complexity," it isn't "density," and it isn't high wages (Japan is not a low-wage country!). It's not fares—Tokyo transit fares are roughly on par with NYC; they're distance-based, so sometimes higher, sometimes lower, but it works out to roughly the same thing. Arguably it isn't even unionization, as Japanese industry is heavily unionized, although of course Japanese unions are rather different than U.S. unions.
One difference may be that Tokyo actually keeps building subway (and other rail) lines, and thus has has kept around the necessary in-house organization and knowledge for doing so, and has a wide selection of competent contractors available. U.S. cities typically have none of these things, and end up relying on consultants (and may not even have the competence or freedom to choose the consultants well), and a limited selection of contractors. [The NYC contracting situation is reportedly pretty dire, with a very few contractors having figured out how to game the system.]
You are comparing a different time in the US to now. I dont think this is a fair comparison, everything takes longer now -- buildings, bridges, tunnels. I'm amazed to hear how quickly subways in NYC were built -- these days it takes a decade to build a handful of stops.
Ok, then the problem with such projects in the US is obviously the lack of plannability. New York has now (finally, after decades of planning) built 3 stations of the Second Avenue Subway. Wether it will ever be expanded is currently unsure. Compare that to Munich, where between 1965 and 2010 there was always a subway under construction. Even without the inherent interests of the companies and workers involved, it should be obvious that when you build more, the cost per mile will be much lower.
I think the MTAs woes are unique to the MTA/management of the MTA and not lack of competition. Paris and Madrid have no problem building and operating trains at reasonable costs even though they also operate with no competition.
> The core problem with the NYC subway system is a management culture that does not value long term problem solving, instead preferring quick fixes and short term band aids
Do they have the time and budget horizon to do long-term planning ?
To me it seems like SF and NY subways are underfunded
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