NYC has much different issues with cost. You're paying for bad management that does long term projects as a series of short term projects and lets all the contractors go in between, for instance. You're paying the union for the right to use a tunnel boring machine, and you have an oiler watching your cranes because it's still 1910 and that's a full-time position. You're paying to move legacy infrastructure out of the way. You're paying to mine out cavernous underground subway stations through small shafts because apparently that's how America and America only designs the stations. I could go on.
It costs them $1.5B-$3.5B per mile of track in NYC, while other global cities do it for a tenth of the cost.
One glaring example of mismanagement of funds:
The budget showed that 900 workers were being paid to dig caverns for the platforms as part of a 3.5-mile tunnel connecting the historic station to the Long Island Rail Road. But the accountant could only identify about 700 jobs that needed to be done, according to three project supervisors. Officials could not find any reason for the other 200 people to be there.
If they can’t get the costs down to the same range as the countries whose systems they envy, how can they compete?
NY prioritizes this stuff in a way that’s great for optics but is wasteful, ineffective, and at a snail’s pace in practice. Construction costs for subways, for example, are about $3.5B/mile [1] as of the most recent line built. Corruption is rampant in unions, contracts, and consultants. The unions are nice enough to demand positions like break room supervisor or elevator operator (to press buttons in an elevator), to other workers that no auditor or construction professional could figure out why they were at the work site, as mentioned in the below article. Not to mention a MWBE program that dictates how government funds are spent based on race and gender, which inflates construction costs further.
Bike lanes and other non-car infrastructure? Good luck using them. Between police and other supposed city workers parking wherever they want with (often fake) placards to mopeds and ebikes going 20+ mph in the wrong direction, biking and walking in NYC is simply not the enjoyable experience it ought to be. Traffic enforcement might as well not exist - anyone can drive around with a paper plate from Texas or drive however they’d like because NYPD refuses to enforce traffic laws.
The subway hasn't been "just fine" for the past 100 years. Up until the '80s disinvestment was the norm, to the point where pieces of elevated track were literally falling on people on the streets below. It takes a long time to correct 50+ years of deferred maintenance, and we're not out of the woods yet.
Fewer miles of track is a legacy of that time period, as subway replacements for demolished elevated lines never came, and then elevated lines had to be demolished because they were a safety hazard.
As far as construction costs go, the problem is actually that the MTA is not involved in construction union negotiations at all, and the firms are more than happy to oblige the unions and pass on the cost to their captive consumer. The barrier to entry for new firms is quite high due to byzantine NYS bidding rules as a result of '20s era reform, and even if you could have a new firm start up they'd be hiring from the same pool of workers; it's not as if specialized construction workers can be hired on visa.
> At the heart of the issue is the obscure way that construction costs are set in New York. Worker wages and labor conditions are determined through negotiations between the unions and the companies, none of whom have any incentive to control costs. The transit authority has made no attempt to intervene to contain the spending.
This was brought to light in that excellent NY Times piece several months back[0] about the relative cost of train line infrastructure in other countries. Even the ones with strong unions and first class living standards were able to get it done for a fraction of NYC estimates on even older urban topologies. Something is seriously rotten in American govt. spending, both in the public sector union agreements and private contracting oversight for why we seem to get so little for paying so much.
Those who blame it squarely on unions, explain how Europe has strong unions and yet construction there is orders of magnitude cheaper than in the US?
It's because there isn't a proper bidding process. Politicians just give sweetheart bloated contracts to the same contractors every time, and those contractors then "donate to their campaign". If they instead used things like sealed bids and had contractors compete against eachother, it wouldn't cost $1B per mile for NYC's 2nd avenue subway, absurd.
It's not a question of whether "one of the richest cities on the planet" can "fund serious upgrades." It's how much money are New Yorkers willing to throw into a system where it takes several times as much money to do the same thing as other countries? https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-....
New York is rich, but so is London. Based on that wealth, there is a certain amount of money New Yorkers are willing to pay for subway service. If it costs twice as much to do the same thing, half as much service will get purchased. (Indeed, it's worse. Crappier subway service reduces demand, which decreases the money available to fund it.)
Costs are the fundamental problem with the MTA (and D.C.'s WMATA), and those are union problems, not management problems. If it cost Lenovo twice as much to build the same laptop as Acer, Lenovo would simply cease to exist. Transit systems generally cannot go bankrupt for political reasons, but they can decline to a state of government-funded life support where nobody uses them except people who have no other choice. (See, e.g., the transit systems in most cities outside NYC/Chicago/DC/Boston). Consider:
> France’s unions are powerful, but Mr. Probst said they did not control project staffing. Isabelle Brochard of RATP, a state-owned company that operates the Paris Metro and is coordinating the Line 14 project, estimated there were 200 total workers on the job, each earning $60 per hour. The Second Avenue subway project employed about 700 workers, many making double that (although that included health insurance).
This is a large-scale problem in the U.S. Our public services suck, which means that they turn into safety nets instead of something that are broadly used by the population. In turn, people have limited willingness to fund them (because people naturally are less willing to spend money on safety nets versus something they also use and benefit from). Unions aren't the only reason for our public services sucking, but to the extent they drive costs out of alignment with what is the case in other countries, they're a big part of the problem. If you can buy less service with the same amount of investment, that's a problem.
One of the things that's happened in the last 30 years that nobody talks about is that Europe became far more market oriented, and their unions adapted. Anti-union rhetoric in the U.S. yielded a very different result, with most private unions dying out, and the public sector unions that survived remaining a bulwark of the "old way" of doing things.
Overreaching unions. Layers of consultants. Squabbling jurisdictions. And as the article mentions, the fact that they build so infrequently that they essentially have to skill up from scratch every time and can never optimise or learn from previous mistakes.
There's a lot of information about this out there but that about covers it I think. Here's a nice quote from a nytimes article:
"Trade unions, which have closely aligned themselves with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and other politicians, have secured deals requiring underground construction work to be staffed by as many as four times more laborers than elsewhere in the world, documents show."
There's a lot of other reasons stuff is expensive in NY. Europe is heavily unionized and somehow they still manage to build subways at a lot less than $1 billion per mile.
Ask the MTA - several billion to dig a tunnel that should cost a couple hundred million. Hundreds of no-work jobs nobody can explain, with unions dictating that there needs to be 25 people there operating a machine that takes 8 people to operate.
Just cut out the corruption and you've saved hundreds of millions.
That's the tip of the iceberg - the linked article goes into much more detail.
Procurement practice and staffing practice are huge contributors to the excessive cost. The projects are massively overstaffed contrasted with comparable projects elsewhere - the article:
> "The staffing of tunnel-boring machines came up repeatedly in interviews with contractors. The so-called T.B.M.s are massive contraptions, weighing over 1,000 tons and stretching up to 500 feet from cutting wheel to thrust system, but they largely run automatically. Other cities typically man the machine with fewer than 10 people."
> "It is not just tunneling machines that are overstaffed, though. A dozen New York unions work on tunnel creation, station erection and system setup. Each negotiates with the construction companies over labor conditions, without the M.T.A.’s involvement. And each has secured rules that contractors say require more workers than necessary."
> "In New York, “underground construction employs approximately four times the number of personnel as in similar jobs in Asia, Australia, or Europe,” according to an internal report by Arup, a consulting firm that worked on the Second Avenue subway and many similar projects around the world."
The fictional no-show jobs that are pure corruption make up only a small amount of the cost of projects - a much larger portion are jobs are real, but largely unnecessary.
The other big practice cited in the article is that the unions do not negotiate with the MTA, but rather with contractors. Contractors, receiving a percentage of the total cost of the contract, have no incentive to reign in labor costs and staffing - and in fact have every incentive to do exactly the opposite.
A cheaper, smaller contract employing fewer people is worth less to the contractor. Realistically the city or the MTA should be negotiating with labor unions directly.
Excuse me, but USA pays a lot. But apparently due to some cost disease, we need to pay a lot more than other countries to achieve the same goal. There was a fascinating NYT article [1] about spiraling costs of NYC subway, but you can observe the same phenomenon in other places (defense spending, healthcare spending, California high speed rail etc).
So yeah, as a taxpayer, I will be super weary of approving any bond measure for infrastructure projects unless there is an ironclad proposal to control the costs.
Actually, it's worse than that, if you read the article.
NY Government (Governor Andrew Cuomo): Let's build a new subway station. Hey MTA, why don't you negotiate for us and figure out how much it costs.
MTA: Hey TWU, you can figure this out for us, right?
TWU: Hey contractors and vendors. How much will it cost us to have you supply parts and do some of the work for this project?
Contractors/Vendors: Oh, that'll be $500,000, which allows us to make a healthy profit margin of 20%.
TWU: That's not enough - you should be charging us $800,000, so we can make a healthy margin as well without cutting into yours.
Contractors/Vendors: By golly, you're right!
TWU: Also, add another $200,000, because we need an "operational readiness" consultant to help us when we're ready to finish. The project won't be ready for another ten years, but we should employ them the whole time just in case.
Contractors/Vendors: Sounds good to us. We're not the ones paying.
TWU: Hey MTA, this will cost $1,450,000. We added on an extra $450,000, because they're using a fifty-year-old piece of technology, and our contract stipulates that we get an extra $450,000 every time they do, to offset the job loss from this "technological advancement".
MTA: That sounds like a reasonable price for this. Hey Cuomo, you're the governor of NY. Can you please rubber-stamp this proposal to increase our budget by $1,450,000? Look how strapped for funding we are.
NY Government (Governor Andrew Cuomo): Well, you supported my last election bid, so I don't see why I should start questioning your prices now. Let's go!
...seriously, read the article. This isn't even an exaggeration.
There is lots of corruption and bureaucracy and lawsuit-avoidance driven construction. Right now the cost of constructing subway stations in NYC is the highest in the world.
The Second Ave. subway cost explosions are driven by a combination of union grift, overly litigious third parties, onerous design requirements driven by politics rather than engineering, and the requirement of building stations in the middle of New York. The problem in DC is similar but also impeded by the fact that Metro does not want to take responsibility for any new track (see the Purple Line fiasco).
Your point still stands that America's approach to infrastructure (and underground in particular) is costly; however, those costs are not nearly as bad outside of major metropolitan cities. Underground work in the Vegas area is relatively inexpensive in my experience (I have worked on underground projects in all three of these locations within the last decade).
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