As much as I think unions are an absurd way to deal with income inequality by doing everything terribly and expensively, this is a really unsatisfying answer when it comes to explaining why the US is so bad at infra construction. Freaking Germany and France are hardly famous union-busters, and somehow they manage to be infinitely more efficient than us at public works projects. There's clearly something more complicated going on than "Unions."
Care to elaborate?
They're not typesafe, and that slows down refactoring.
The solution, of course, is to rewrite the subway in Rust.