An Unusual Subway Stop in New York

Compared that to $500 million Japan spent renovating their Tokyo Station a few years ago which involved:

- Adding 3rd floor level, raising roof.

- reconstructing intricate decorations and motifs before it was bombed in the war.

- station hotel renovation

- installation of earthquake proof underground seismic buffers and dampers. (hundreds of them)

- 5 year long

All that for $500 million. In the middle of Tokyo.

Construction cost in the U.S. is a complete joke.

Yeah, that's the bottom line. Govt funded infrastructure projects are totally out of control, it's not just NYC.

My favorite example is local, in Oregon. In 1982 a very fine bridge was opened across the Columbia River. It cost $170 million.[1] Fast forward to recently. Before the plug was finally pulled, estimated costs for a second bridge a few miles away were $2.8 billion.[2] And that was for a scaled down version. Other estimates were as high as $10 billion.

Yes we've had some inflation in the last 30 years. But the cost increases far outpace inflation. And nobody in government cares. All they do is say "we need it", without doing any critical thinking. What they really mean is "we want it".

It's like the teenagers in my house. They want everything, they don't care how much it costs. They haven't earned the money they want to spend, so to them any possible costs are meaningless.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_L._Jackson_Memorial_Brid... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_River_Crossing