Do you have any evidence of this?
Being a naïve Californian, I would assume that there are plenty of variables other than management (labor costs, union membership, labor laws, cultural status of subway workers, legal statues, building requirements, vendors and their rates) that could plausibly represent most of the difference.
I find it amusing how Democrats always obsess about fiscally conservative peoples obsession with 'deregulation', so when big news worthy accidents happen they point to conservatives and say 'see this is what you get with deregulation'. As if the only thing we're critical of is the money spent making sure accidents don't happen. Workplace safety and oversight of critical infrastructure is probably the lowest on the list of things I'm concerned with.
There are countless other bureaucratic government organizations that are crippled by incompetence and excess administrative oversight that are failing to accomplish their simple assigned tasks, to the point where it's now standard practice to expect costs to be 2-3x projections and only a fool would expect heads of public workers to roll as a result. Just blame the current leader of x polticial party, right?
I'm not convinced being in support of public infrastructure means I have to support throwing billions more into an organization that consistently fails to perform with the billions they already have.
And this has as much to do with the small group of consultants and big third party companies these people sign extravagant contracts with - under the guise of 'free markets'. So when these projects ultimately fail to be delivered, or end up 3x the cost, the big government liberals can blame capitalism. Because their idea of 'free market competition' is hiring the same 3 companies who managed to have enough lawyers and political connections to navigate their complex administrative systems put in place by these same bureaucrats, who often also end up being employees of these same companies later in their careers.
Lowest bidder government RFPs are just another layer of obscurity sold as a solution to this problem which just further masks responsibility with something that looks like a market on the surface but fails to hold up to even the most basic scrutiny. /rant
...but what is the answer? You can't have a free market subway system that throws any old traffic down the tubes like you can with roads. So there has to be some kind of centralised ownership. (indeed, the NYC subway used to be a system of independent private systems, and they all failed as businesses).
Personally, I don't see how the blame here lies with the usual tired party politics blame game. There are so many different factors at work.