Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The problem isn't money in - it's the high costs that the MTA inflicts on itself.

In terms of cost, consider construction. Cities like Singapore, Hong Kong, Delhi, Dubai and Budapest build subways at $100-500M/km. In NYC the cost is $2,000M/km.

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

I'll talk a bit about the Delhi metro since my wallet currently contains a NYC metro card and a Delhi travel card. The Delhi metro cost 10,800 crore for phase 1 and 19,131 crore for phase 2. That's about $5 billion.

http://archive.indianexpress.com/news/delhi-to-recover-entir...

http://www.delhimetrorail.com/projectsupdate/project_cost.as...

Here is a time lapse of the Delhi metro being built:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delhi_Metro#/media/File:Delhi_...

For approximately $5 billion, Delhi got 132 miles of track (mixed subway, at-grade and elevated) and 160 stations.

In NYC, we spent $2.4 billion on the 7 line extension. We got 1 mile of subway and 1 station.

The MTA wastes virtually every dollar we give them. Giving them more money is not the solution; putting them in jail and paying Singapore to administer our transit is.

There's many differences to consider before calling it 'waste', however that's capital expenditure and not operational which is completely different.

There are easy examples of operational waste to be found; e.g. trains are overstaffed (relative to any international trains) with highly paid conductors, and we still have token booth employees who grumpily point you to the metrocard machine if you interrupt their candy crush.

http://nypost.com/2011/07/13/mtas-too-nice-pay/

Unlike construction, it's harder to find concrete operational numbers to compare to other more functional systems.

But here is an obvious one: Singapore (pop 5.4M) gives their MOT $2.3B for operational costs and and $4.6B for construction costs (the plan is to double the length of the MRT).

http://www.singaporebudget.gov.sg/budget_2013/expenditure_ov...

NYC (pop 8.4M) has operational costs of $13B, and no particularly ambitious construction plans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Transportation_Au...

What are fatal accident rates like for construction of the Delhi and NY system? Workers' wages and benefits? Land prices?

> Giving them more money is not the solution; putting them in jail and paying Singapore to administer our transit is.

Do you think that's practicable? I thought you were a big supporter of of the rule of law rather than arbitrary politically motivated jailings.

Evidently a lot has gone wrong with NY transport, but "just stop giving the MTA money" is not going to result in better transport, and "the MTA is incompetent" reasoning seems to mostly lead to adding yet another layer of procurement/management rules that makes them less flexible and more wasteful. What would be an incremental, politically acceptable change that we could make to improve matters?

If you don't like the Delhi comparison, I linked to lots more. Land prices, wages and benefits are pretty high in Singapore, Spain, Japan and Hong Kong.

An incremental change would be to start replacing MTA employees with Spanish, Indian or Hong Kongian contractors who can get the job done without featherbedding. Probably nothing but more money for the people currently robbing us will be "politically acceptable".

And yes, actually putting them in jail would be something I oppose - if you couldn't tell, that was a bit of hyperbole.

> An incremental change would be to start replacing MTA employees with Spanish, Indian or Hong Kongian contractors who can get the job done without featherbedding. Probably nothing but more money for the people currently robbing us will be "politically acceptable".

If we believe that employers should be responsible for things like health coverage then it 100% should be the government's responsibility to lead the way when it's acting as an employer. If contractors are so much cheaper than employees then either we're putting too high a burden on employers or we're allowing those who hire contractors to shirk their social responsibilities (possibly both); either way while the MTA could probably save some money in the short term by using the loopholes I think that would encourage dysfunctional lawmaking in the long term. I'm not sure where nationality comes into it; it's not like there's some featherbedding gene that Americans carry and Spaniards don't, and a fair share of the contractors for overbudget American public works projects have been foreign (e.g. bay bridge). Far more likely that the American bidding process or some other aspect of the political/legal environment encourages such things to happen.

You must realize this is an apples/oranges comparison. The cost of labour alone is vastly different between NYC and Delhi.

If you scroll up, you'll see a less detailed comparison to Singapore, Hong Kong and Hungary. The former two are about as wealthy as the US, so if we pay more for labor that's only because the MTA wastefully funnels money to it's workers.

I discussed Delhi mainly because I know it well.

That said, if we can hire Indian workers and have them build our subways at lower cost, we should absolutely do this. I'm sure this helped keep Dubai's cost down. Then again, it doesn't seem necessary; Barcelona built a subway at $39M/km.

Its not news that labor is much cheaper in many countries than the US, but I think people are going to get pretty mad if you call paying transit workers a decent professional wage[1] "wastefully funneling money." There are good reasons we don't outsource all our work to less-well-off regions with lower costs- and standards-of-living.

[1] https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/New-York-City-Transit-Autho...

I'm sure the transit worker making $50k/year to sit in a booth and say "go use the metrocard machine" will get mad if I suggest firing her. That doesn't mean it wouldn't be the right thing to do for the taxpayer and the MTA customer.

I'm also pretty sure you are deliberately misreading me since you ignored the fact that I cited several countries where wage levels are comparable to the US (e.g., Singapore). Singapore's just uses "modern" technology and replaces two $75k/year conductors and a $150k/year driver with a robot train.

("Modern" = technology that Paris has used in production for 18 years.)

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

The productivity of labor is also vastly different.

The reason that mass transit is so profitable in those countries is because they can capture the externalities of their benefit through owning capital near stations.

http://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/09/the-unique-...

In NYC, some rich landowners get all the benefit of public spending.

That's why mass transit is so much cheaper in every single country in the world? You've checked, and you are sure that Bangalore, Cairo, Barcelona, Singapore and Stockholm all follow this model?

Incidentally, the MTA also does this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Side_Yard

The West Side Yard doesn't look at all like the huge shopping malls that are owned by the MTR in Hong Kong...in fact, there's basically no commercial activity there.

The area surrounding the Delhi metro, the Istanbul metro and the Paris metro don't look like those either.

Picking out a Hong Kong specific feature and using it to explain why NY has vastly higher costs than, well, everywhere, doesn't really make sense.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com