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Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

This article is a bit clueless. The state has more than adequately provided the MTA with money. The place where the state failed is providing sufficient oversight to make sure the MTA isn't wasting it.

Paris spent 1.3B euro on the 14 line, which has 9 stations. The MTA spent 2.4B on a single stop on the 7 line. MTA construction costs drastically exceed worldwide norms - the MTA spends $1B/kilometer.

http://www.systra.com/IMG/pdf/metro_meteor_en.pdf

https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2013/06/03/comp...

Apparently the only project outside NYC to cost more than $1B/KM is London's Crossrail. Even the Jubilee line extension is only $0.45B/km, and that's pretty pricey.

https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/us-r...

tl;dr; Funding is adequate, costs are simply out of control.

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Funding is adequate, costs are simply out of control

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

The port authority bus station renovation proposal had sticker price of $9 billion.

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.

Why are costs so much higher in NY though?

Based on comparisons to London, Paris, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Singapore, we can rule out (market) wages and density.

@MarketUrbanism suggests exceedingly unproductive construction techniques requiring 4x the amount of workers in the rest of the world (caused by union capture of local politics) play a role.

https://twitter.com/MarketUrbanism/status/639445006084886529

https://twitter.com/MarketUrbanism/status/639265131885686784

http://www.jacobssf.com/images/uploads/09_Thapa_Caldecott_RE...

Apparently the MTA also spends money to avoid having to cooperate with NJ:

https://twitter.com/MarketUrbanism/status/638356461538684928

Costs are higher throughout the entire US for infrastructure projects. The US routinely pays an order of magnitude more per mile for similarly scoped projects compared to countries like Spain.

The root cause appears to be in the unique way projects are bid on in the US, where details need to be laid out in excruciating detail ahead of time and then any unplanned changes are cause for cost padding.

Sincerely curious: What's an alternative to the bidding process you mention?

Historically, most projects in the United States performed by public agencies have been of the "Design-Bid-Build" variety, but there are a number of other styles. Most of which involve the owner/agency contracting to fewer entities who do more of the various types of work that need to be done (design, constructing, managing, operating, financing etc.). Traditionally, in Design-Bid-Build the owner contracts with one company to design, they perform the bidding process, and a separate entity does the building, with financing also coming from their own operating/capital budget. The alternatives shown here [1] spice up that process. DBB isn't completely evil, the wiki page does a good breakdown of it's pros and cons. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_delivery_method

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design%E2%80%93bid%E2%80%93bui...

The proposed Hudson River tunnel has price tag of $20 billion.

The 30 mile+ Channel Tunnel cost less. Go figure.

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