Hacker News Reader

Comment by bgentry | Hacker News Reader

The major issue with any plan to fix the subway is that MTA can no longer build cost-effectively. This was highlighted by the NYT just last week: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...

It costs them $1.5B-$3.5B per mile of track in NYC, while other global cities do it for a tenth of the cost.

One glaring example of mismanagement of funds:

The budget showed that 900 workers were being paid to dig caverns for the platforms as part of a 3.5-mile tunnel connecting the historic station to the Long Island Rail Road. But the accountant could only identify about 700 jobs that needed to be done, according to three project supervisors. Officials could not find any reason for the other 200 people to be there.

If they can’t get the costs down to the same range as the countries whose systems they envy, how can they compete?

View on HN

> MTA can no longer build cost-effectively. This was highlighted by the NYT just last week.

New York State government is totally broken. Although there is some outright corruption (a la bags of cash) that's not the real problem. The real problem is systematized, and legal, quasi-corruption. The rules of the game have been rigged for so long and insiders play it so well, that the general public just doesn't have any chance at all anymore.

Those insiders might be politicians, contractors, politicians, or special interest groups, but they know who they are and they are happy with how things work now. They are the reason that the state constitutional convention went down in flames. They didn't want even the smallest chance of upsetting the apple cart.

This should be obvious to anyone who's ever lived in NYC. It feels normal here to see 5 MTA employees in orange safety vests standing around watching one guy putting safety cones around a puddle.

Having been in construction I question if that obvious thing is really waste.

Of course if it really is 5 people watching the one guy put of cones that is waste. However most constructions jobs are let the machine work for 10 minutes, then you need 5 people for manual labor for 5 minutes before the machine works again. While it is true you have 5 people standing around watching the machine work 2/3rds of the time, there is nothing else that they could do and be back in 10 minutes so it is most cost effective to pay them to do nothing 2/3rds of the time.

> Having been in construction I question if that obvious thing is really waste.

Read the linked article. You'll see that it truly is waste.

> The budget showed that 900 workers were being paid to dig caverns for the platforms as part of a 3.5-mile tunnel connecting the historic station to the Long Island Rail Road. But the accountant could only identify about 700 jobs that needed to be done, according to three project supervisors. Officials could not find any reason for the other 200 people to be there.

For just one project, that's 200 paid $1,000/day to do nothing. $73 million/year wasted, just for one project.

In what world are construction workers paid $1000/day? That's an exaggeration, but your point stands.

The $1,000/day figure comes directly from the NYT article quoting the head of construction at the MTA. This is the paragraph after the one I quoted previously:

Nobody knew what those people were doing, if they were doing anything,” said Michael Horodniceanu, who was then the head of construction at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs transit in New York. The workers were laid off, Mr. Horodniceanu said, but no one figured out how long they had been employed. “All we knew is they were each being paid about $1,000 every day.

>Nobody knew what those people were doing, if they were doing anything

I just can't help but smile and remember the scene from The Sopranos of some wiseguys seating in lawn chairs at the construction site eating pastrami sandwiches... but in a tunnel this time!

> In what world are construction workers paid $1000/day? That's an exaggeration, but your point stands.

The MTA. That's not at all an unusual amount for total compensation expenses for an employee.

The 1000/day is not necessarily all received by the employee. It includes taxes, insurances of various kinds, etc. It's the expense, no the salary.

True, but 1000/day is still high. I doubt the foreman makes that much (I'd consider $40/hour high for a foreman, but NYC probably pays higher wages than you would get here).

The $1000/hr is probably a bureaucrat who sat at a desk pushing papers. There is some value in that job, but it is easy to find useless make-work to appear busy withing getting anything important done.

> 5 MTA employees in orange safety vests standing around watching one guy putting safety cones around a puddle.

You are being hyperbolic here, but cones around a puddle warrants a discussion.

There have been cases where I have seen portions of a station cordoned off with tape and perhaps with safety cones; however it is not my experience with NYC subway puddles in general. It feels like almost half the stations have leaky ceilings that you can see dripping during rainy weather. No safety cones. During drier days you can find these spots by stalactites and straws forming on the ceiling and by discoloration and mineral deposits on the platform. Two nights ago I noticed something much more frighting on the south bound Prince Street platform. Drip from the ceiling was freezing on the platform and formed an ice-patch a meter in diameter. There were no cones and the subway platform is not the place where I would want to slip. This is a safety issue especially as the whole platform feels only 3 meters wide.

You and I may see MTA workers milling about and appearing lazy to us, but the example of putting safety cones around a puddle doesn't pass the sniff test to me.

> You are being hyperbolic here, but cones around a puddle warrants a discussion.

Maybe not putting safety cones but I recently saw 5 workers fixing some box looking component at a station. One was doing something to the box. One was holding down the 3 foot step ladder. One was shining a flashlight at the box and two others were standing behind the flashlight holder looking at the box. I wish I had taken a picture.

Maybe the problems with the component couldn't be diagnosed by the agents assigned to the platform. Maybe there was further work that needed doing on the same job that required more of them, and there was no point in leaving for 10 minutes and coming back. Maybe they were just wrapping up.

Obviously there's tons of waste, and maybe you were right about that example, but it's also very possible you're not. These anecdotes people love to trot out about manual labor are really silly. It makes you sound exactly like nontechnical software project management who don't understand what technical debt is or why man-hour estimation is hard.

While possible, having first hand experience working for the MTA (not NYCT though) led me to believe that it was most likely not the case.

Frequently at my job we end up with a bunch of people around a computer. One is typing and has all the access rights. Another is taking notes about what has happened and a couple more are watching.

These people are all needed. The person with the access rights is authorised to be on the system. The one taking notes is recording what's happened so we can write it up in a post-mortem. The others are watching and ensuring the person who's allowed access is doing the right thing.

If you walked past and saw it for 10 seconds you'd thing one person was working and three were standing around, but in reality they're all needed to ensure the right thing happens in the right way.

Just today I had four other people standing around my machine, mostly saying nothing as I tried different things. Over the course of about 45 minutes (and coming and going back to their own machines) they each contributed invaluable assistance in resolving the issue. But there were easily gaps of 10 minutes at a time where nothing was said.

Were we guilty of the same thing as the construction workers in your example?

You know how someone might look at your typical software developer and conclude that, though they might type something on the keyboard once in a while, a lot of the time they're just staring off into space or just about anything other than type? >$100K/year, shouldn't they be doing more typing?

Your answer to that is going to sound quite similar to whatever response those workers might have. Put another way, unless you've actually worked as a subway maintenance worker, allow for the fact that there is a lot you don't know about the job.

From the submitted piece,

"For a delayed rider wondering whom to blame, it’s tempting to begin with the people you can see, the 7,000 or so men and women — track cleaners, inspectors, flaggers and other orange-vested M.T.A. employees — charged with preventing these incidents and keeping the trains moving. ...

No matter how diligent they may be, 7,000-odd orange-vested maintenance workers are simply not enough to keep the deteriorating system — with its 665 miles of passenger-carrying track, enough to reach all the way to Indianapolis — on schedule. All the real problems must begin elsewhere, further up the chain of command.

The rest of the piece is an argument against the "obvious" explanation and for more systems-based explanation.

Don't bet on it ,Seattle was burning nearly three hundred million per mile of light rail on their last project. Other global cities are probably better but US cities have nearly all demonstrated bad judgement and cost over runs. Politicians love a ribbon cutting.

Outside of NYC rail is not a rousing success and defrayed maintenance costs are in the tens of billions if not a hundred across the country for current installations. Worse many systems short change bus routes in an ill fated effort to boost rail ridership. Sadly they even have throw millions to get people to build along such lines.

with autonomous vehicles not far off, implemented as buses with such tightly controlled routes it would be a far better investment to go that route as a bus route can change with the needs of the population served.

With regards to the number of people on such projects, all the regulations and rules nearly guarantee waste as we have to accommodate every special group and politically connected companies

Even if every project is 25% overstaffed, not just the single worst one mentioned in the article, that's nowhere near 10x inefficiency

True. But this statistic is only bandied about as the most glaring inefficiency.

Consider if the project has 25% more workers than jobs, and also 25% more jobs than needed, and also workers are on the job 25% longer than needed (that sweet sweet double overtime!) and we're already at about 2x inefficiency. Just a couple more factors and you get to 10x ...

One of the major costs of building subway (in Manhattan at least) is that Manhattan is one of the densest places in the world. Higher density equals a higher density of infrastructure for things like electricity, water, and so on. This impacts the MTA in that the MTA has to be extremely careful to not adversely impact any infrastructure in the digging and construction process.

In my opinion this represents a fundamental limit on how dense we can make cities given we want a minimum standard of living (i.e no 3rd world slums) given our current technological level. Instead of trying to build more in Manhattan, it seems more prudent to me to encourage residential and commercial development of the other boroughs and concurrently more subway infrastructure in the boroughs. After all if Manhattan is hitting its density limit, New York City has a lot more land elsewhere to develop before resorting to trying to push that density limit.

Of course there seems to be a lot the city can do in terms of bringing down waste to make building in Manhattan less costly, but I think inevitably the city will need to opt for developing the boroughs if it wants to continue to grow in population.

Except the New York Times article shows that MTA's costs are 5-7x higher than recent projects under London or Paris.

Paris isn't that deep, though. Don't know about London.

But the sibling advice should stand - dig deeper. Russian subway systems are sometimes very deep, in places you can hardly see the end of the escalator.

London Tube tunnels are much, much deeper than anything in Manhattan transit-wise. An escalator at the Angel stop down to the bowels of the Northern Line is all you need to be convinced. Just don't stare too long or you'll get dizzy looking down. Bonus: great exercise running up the stairs.

Except point is that Manhattan is denser than London or Paris.

Paris is more dense than New York, and Line 14 goes right under the downtown core of Paris.

It's more dense than NY as a whole, which has suburban-like areas, but less dense than Manhattan. Not by a huge margin relative to other cities.

Just dig a bit deeper, what's the big deal? They should just bring some Japanese to show them how to do a train system properly.

It is completely ridiculous that the MTA does its own capital projects. They have lost that privilege. Everyone else goes out to tender and global firms with expertise bid on them. This is how tunnels and rail around the world are being built today.

The past is a poor predictor of the future.

In the past the NYC subway was an almost unusable mess overrun with graffiti, trash, and hoodlums. Changing the fare gates and being aggressive about patrols and cleanup turned things around.

Obviously different methods will be needed to fix subway construction, but the idea that the most recent construction effort had problems means all future construction will have the same or worse problems is not necessarily correct.

The article is not about construction costs but the essentials of urban design.

There's more to the story of 900 people on some contract to the MTA, and only 700 people actually being hired, that would be fraud and should be prosecuted, someone should go to jail for it. That's theft. It's way different than overbilling where you hire 700, but either overpay them by 28%, or even overcharge the MTA by 28% while pocketing the profit. Charging money for something that did not in fact happen is fraud, it's a crime.

But yes the first statement is overwhelmingly true, the MTA has lost the ability to build cost-effectively. More to the point, they've lost the ability to write coherent contracts, hire competent contractors to fulfill those contracts, and then hold all parties accountable. Their ducks are not in any sense in a row.

That's not just a NY problem though. Amsterdam and London suffer the same insane costs.

1 Labour 2 Century old monuments- Tokyo literally bulldozed a lot of that old crap in the 60s. 3 NYC subway itself is a monument

Reply on news.ycombinator.com