Why New York City Stopped Building Subways (2018)
citylab.com
citylab.com
> With the subways now in municipal hands, a doubling of the fare was finally negotiated. Years of deferred maintenance by the cash-strapped private companies had become increasingly evident. But by then, fare hikes only exacerbated the problem of declining ridership.
So the government destroyed the system through price controls. Odd that City Lab doesn't explore that angle further.
Price regulation continues to be a problem with the subway. Fares on the MTA are half those of the London Underground. New York relies heavily on subsidies to cover operating costs, while the London Underground covers its operating costs through fares: https://www.theguardian.com/money/us-money-blog/2014/sep/29/.... That makes the MTA much more sensitive to changing political winds, as opposed to the Underground, which can pay its ongoing maintenance costs regardless of what the politicians are doing.
“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.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
It's pretty easy to deduce that there is an anticorrelation between ability to adjust riding schedules and ability to pay increased fees.
how is it progressive, exactly? seems like it’s just another tax on the poor who have to get to jobs at exact times.
Sure, there are some working poor who need to be in the office 9-5, but the majority of people working full time regular hours aren't poor. And for people who can't afford the increase, you just introduce an exception (if you make under $40,000 per year you don't pay the increased fare, or something like that)
The question is if the benefit of more revenue and environmental savings warrants making the secretaries an cashiers adapt to less efficient schedules (eg come in earlier, stay later)
Increasing capacity would also result in taking more vehicles off the road.
Peak fares to encourage people to work non-peak hours if possible can shift demand enough to mean you don't need build more transit now saving a lot of money now. Eventually there is no substitution for building more, but better utilization can ease that somewhat.
There are are a lot of similarities with road congestion pricing going into effect in San Diego and NYC, and planned for LA and SF. Who will bear the greater burden, high earners who can easily pay the fee or low earners with rigid schedules.
Presumably rush hour commuters could afford more than others.
Maybe that's an incorrect assumption but if all we can do is time slice, I would expect rush hour commuters to have the most means.
Fares in Osaka or Tokyo are ~$2 per 3-4 stations from your departure point. Riding to Kyoto from downtown Osaka (40km) is ~$8 and 8 stops across two lines. The prices overall are low (IMO), and Japan has lower wage inequality than the US (IIRC).
It is certainly correct that having fixed fares across time and distance is a government subsidy which arguably may even effectively target poor riders.
The lack of a subsidy is fundamentally not the same as a tax.
But when a subsidy distorts the market to the point where it causes inefficiencies in the market, those inefficiencies can undermine the value or effectiveness of the subsidy, sometimes altogether.
I.e. lack of peek pricing causing massive ridership spikes at specific hours overloading the system and making it break down.
A theoretically better system might be one with a fixed monthly fare credit for low income riders, while also having peek pricing. This shifts demand to keep the system running more smoothly while also making transit more affordable for lower income riders.
But then, why not ask the question, if we’re giving money to low income riders, why give rebates only to low income people who ride the train? Why have a low income subsidy specifically for subway ridership versus any of a dozen other things people fundamentally need. Why micromanage to that level?
I think that the whole narrative around trains needing to justify their cost based on fares is ridiculous. Few people ride trains for the experience of riding a train. They ride to go somewhere, and do something, and the real value of the fate exists outside the transportation system.
I think Japan, and HK got it right by letting train companies act as real estate developers and build out the areas around stations. That gives them enormous profitability since they can charge rent, commissions for the stuff that people actually care about - what’s at the destination - and literally funnel people in the millions to their shopping centers, office complexes, and apartments.
This is becoming less relevant with the increased prevalence of contactless pay as you go systems. (Although the newer systems tend to be more complex for irregular users like tourists.)
Now in a system the size of NYC you probably should do something, the person only riding a couple miles shouldn't pay as much as the person riding many miles (I'm not sure how you can get in NYC). However a simple easy to understand system of fares is important and very hard to design. Part of that needs to be a guaranteed maximum you will pay in a month - with the idea that a significant portion of users will hit that maximum - when you know you will hit the maximum you are more likely to take transit in off-peak times even though you have a perfectly good car.
If you find different prices for different services confusing, how do you grocery shop?
Shall we introduce peak pricing to fire trucks as well?
I take MTA subway every week day and at least once a weekend. On weekends, you'll see workers repairing or doing maintenance on tracks because .... Hurricane Sandy (circa 2012) apparently destroyed the infrastructure. I mean I moved to NYC in 2016 and that maintenance has been going on every weekend since then (probably it started even before 2016). Some of the trains will not run or will skip over some local stops and it really inconveniences millions of commuters every weekend. The trains are supposed to slowly move around the areas worker are 'in action' (I read somewhere that it's because a few worker died by being hit by moving train, so they now require trains to move very slowly while blaring horns to warn workers ahead; I still felt that's unnecessary unless there's a clear distinction between which line workers operate on and as long as these workers are smart enough to not encroach on the active lines. Anyway, enough about that). While the trains move slowly, I see a lot of workers simply just sitting around or doing nothing.
The same is true on the 9th ave x 50+th street area where there's active water sanitation department's work going on. I walk along 9th ave every weekday morning and there are a lot of idle 'workers' who are probably supervising. I'd say only about half of them are doing useful work while others sit/stand around and chat.
No wonder these public projects take years to finish and have budget overrun. No wonder the US can't compete with other countries (ahem, like China and anywhere in Asia) where workers have better work ethics. The US blue collar workers like to complain about their diminishing salaries and industries, but they won't be able to compete for long while their counterparts in other developing regions are working harder.
Some of the reasons are:
- When the site is active they often have a need to hold traffic or otherwise alter the traffic pattern to move equipment around. An excavator swinging an arm through the travel lane, loading a dump truck with debris that might fly around a bit, etc.
- The two guys are more efficient than the portable light at moving traffic volumes, since they can extend/shorten cycles as they see fit, and don't have to add in a big extra margin for the last, slowest possible vehicle to get through the work zone. They can see when it's cleared and let traffic through the other direction immediately.
It took me next to nothing to get a license in the US. In Germany, it took me months with a minimum set of mandatory lessons required by law - theoretical and practical.
I also don't think the argument about needing a driving license asap on the country side works because it is the same in Germany. Only major cities truly allow you the be car-free. Public transport elsewhere can at least be spotty if not outright disastrous and comparable to the US.
Interesting anecdote: I was driving through North Dakota this summer and hit resurfacing roadworks. It was the first time I've ever seen it, but rather than setting up hundreds of cones and directing traffic through them, then re-arranging the cones to do the other lane, they just had a flagman on each side and a pilot vehicle guiding 10–20 vehicles at a time through the work zone. No cones at all. I'm sure that project was completed in half the usual time.
This looks bad, and some of the time it is just inefficiency, but in many cases there may be a series of tasks, dependent on each other, some of which require a lot of laborers and some that don't.
It's often better to employ a welder for the day than to stop work entirely when you don't have one milling around on site waiting for their next task.
Some groups have this down to a science for their particular industry (say, Apple supply chain logistics) and others aren't even aware of the issue and pass it off as expected.
It would be an interesting study to get queuing theory people, lean experts, or some such qualified group to look into public construction and maintenance projects to simulate and analyze optimal vs. actual. No question this would be very hard to do because unions hate this kind of thing and people don't like being measured over their shoulders and the basic implication that they're "lazy" or inefficient or whatever. (it's hard to measure and improve worker output while actually making the worker happier too because there tends to be a Stanford Prison Experiment vibe where you get managers nitpicking lunch breaks and the basic pleasantries of working instead of bulk errors like allocating skill sets)
It could be fairly straightforward to compare the efficiency of the same task in both countries.
You say that as though the policies and procedures by which worn is done haven't intentionally been made inefficient to create work for the workers.
I once sat on a train for 3hr waiting for a railroad employee to show up with a chainsaw and cut a downed tree of the track. There was another employee in a service truck equipped for brush clearing a couple miles away at the station waiting for his wife who was stuck on the same train. He couldn't clock in and deal with the downed tree, because rules. This story is fairly well known among people who ride that rail line so some here may recognize it.
So the thing that doesn’t seem to work in the US is the “hold them accountable”-part. Maybe public transport quality just isn’t an issue the typical US voter considers their business?
Democracy lives from everybody’s attendance — if you stay at home you got no right to complain.
Sadly even a strong faith in the invisible hand-shaped market-god doesn’t change that, because quasi monopolies like railway infrastructure and the invisible hand-shaped market-god never mix as well as promised for some weird reason.
If someone abstains from voting because they find all the choices equally unqualified, I don't think that eliminates the person's right to complain nor does it diminish the validity of their complaints.
Why is America so bad compared to them?
It would be interesting to see how successful governments manage promotion of talent.
Result: It's difficult to run government services well, when we do such a poor job of picking good people to run the government.
Take California DMV for example. The DMV is led by state governor appointees. No governor will be voted in or out office based on DMV improvement performance. Running government services well hardly ranks in voters minds
Some counties in Europe have seen their former very nice state run public transport systems seen completely deteriorated over the past decades once sold out to the so-called 'efficient' private sector. I'm putting in 'so-called' as in practice they still receive close to as much in subsidies as the state-run enterprises they replaced, but now only serve cherry picked parts, most often with lower quality, and divest the required upkeep investments in infrastructure into separate businesses that are completely reliant on public funding.
There is a real myth about the effectiveness of private enterprise vs public enterprise.
Large private companies are not more efficient than a comparably sized public endeavor. Small companies can be, but that is systemically only true if you ignore the waste of 99% of the 'competitors' that are perpetually failing.
Doesn't Germany have proportionally an even bigger car industry?
> Some counties in Europe have seen their former very nice state run public transport systems seen completely deteriorated over the past decades once sold out to the so-called 'efficient' private sector. [...]
Most public transport used to be private in the 19th century and was nationalized as a combination of cash cow and for military purposes.
The graphs on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_privatisation_of... look pretty good.
If you think everyone in the private sector is 'profit-driven', and you don't mean 'personal gain driven', which is the larger the company the less likely to be aligned with or incentivized by the benefit to the enterprise, I'm guessing you never spend time in such environments.
One of them has a lookout at each end, who alerts the workers whenever a train approaches. Work stops until the train has passed, because the distraction caused by operating loud and heavy machinery is ao high. (The train only sounds the horn once, unless the driver fails to see an acknowledgement from the lookout.)
However, this isn't really practical on a busy line like a metro, so they'd much prefer to work overnight with the line closed if possible.
It's also possible to fence off the work area from live tracks, but installing the fence is then the disruptive work.
> as long as these workers are smart enough to not encroach on the active lines.
That attitude is completely at odds with the European approach to worker safety.
(I cannot comment on whether either point applies to the USA.)
As an example, there's are descriptions of the failures of the safe working system in the reports of accidents, such as this one: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/report-122019-near-miss-w...
It is unavoidably dangerous, and planners are supposed to choose it only when other options aren't practical, but in reality they often pick "Open line" for convenience. For example maybe the workers would prefer to do this on Tuesday midday, so we plan it as "Open line" and schedule it for Tuesday 1145, rather than for 0400 on Thursday when we can just shut the line to do it safely. This gets people killed, but because it doesn't reliably kill the specific people you scheduled most of the time it feels OK to them and to you.
This is also why unions aren't enough to implement safety. Unions represent workers and the workers feel like convenience is more valuable than safety. A 1-in-1000 chance to die, for five minutes extra coffee break is a good deal, until you're the 1-in-1000 and then it sucks. In the UK signaller unions fought very hard to continue working 12 hour shifts instead of maximum 8 hours. Because working 3x 12 hour shifts and then the rest of the week off is _convenient_ even though it was excessively dangerous if anything goes wrong.
"better work ethics"? I prefer "unfair competition and dumping enabled by sometimes outright slavery".
That's the problem with most of the current free-trade agreements, they do not contain anything to protect the respective weaker parts getting exploited. As a result, scandals about child work and slavery conditions (e.g. in China) are commonplace, while at the same time European/US people lost millions upon millions of jobs because there was no way they could compete with what is essentially dumping.
To those of you, I ask - why?
New York's flat non-distance based fare is one of the great democratic institutions of the city. Whether you live in Flushing, Rego Park or Gramercy; whether you ride one stop or make four transfers - you pay the same fare. The only way this can work is if those of us with more wealth take care of those of us with less. What seems wrong about this?
I used to travel, in Philadelphia, from a Main Line-adjacent community, on a bus to 69th Street Station, and then on the Market-Frankford Line, and then switched to the Broad Street line, all the way up to Temple U. for a $10/hr job, on a $1.30 token plus a $.60 transfer, each way. That's outrageous. I was mooching off the system, and my employer was mooching off the system as well. If they made me pay higher fares, well, I could afford it. What's an extra $3.80 when you're making $10/hr? At that wage, it was a small fraction of the time spent commuting.
If you price people out of the trains so they start driving cars again or even taking busses you are suddenly losing a huge amount of volumetric efficiency in your transit system.
Optimal cities can get almost everyone anywhere either walking, biking, or riding train all the time. Any requirement for road bound vehicles is an infrastructure failure of city planning. There are exceptional circumstances (moving heavy items that can't be carried) but they should be just that - exceptional, and rare.
Discouraging people from working where they live is the worst inefficiency you can create.
The hourly rate of a great part of the city workers is below 3$ and do not have full day employment.
What do these numbers mean? That a worker can get a 3.5$ an hour for 3 hours a day on the other side of the city will do it because it will cost him 0.6$ a trip. But if he had to pay 2$, that worker might not do it.
He doesn't have the choice now: he pays a tax when he buys food that forces him to take long trips to make a difference in the subway.
Overall result:
Economic efficiency: bad, because it costs more to do it this way
Welfare: bad, because it increases commute times, and reduces wages
Transit & demographics: bad because it concentrates people on the expensive side of town and increase transit exponentially
It isn’t odd because City Lab is generally in favor of leftist economic and urban policy. Exploring price controls might call into question their fundamental bias. Price controls are anti-market and typically so is City Lab.
Railways are one of these fields where markets regularily fail to deliver because you are in monopoly region and building another railway system to get some competition is unfeasable.
I don’t really see this as very ideological btw. I just have never seen a public transport market that developed much in favour of the general population without government intervention. So anecdotal evidence etc.
About affordable inter-city buslines, I feel that the new companies (uber like) that handle buses brought much more affordability than any law before.
In Germany at least, rail is viewed as a public good that should provide mobility to people in both big cities and more rural areas. Making it available outside the most heavily trafficked routes at a reasonable price is incompatible with privatization, again unless heavy subsidies are involved.
Is New York any different?
It also includes sales taxes, excise taxes, registration fees, and tolls.
From yesterday;
The fact that tax revenue from cars & trucks pay for the cost of their infrastructure is true regardless. IF you want to analyze externalities, please by all means, take a tally of all positive and negative and show me the balance.
If this is in fact the case, I don't think it's a bad thing. The problem in that case comes from double standards, where the ground-level understanding of how society operates includes costs incurred by individuals/businesses which effectively disappear into a vacuum rather than being directly paid/passed onto customers, yet is used as evidence of the completely natural and inherent utility of cars over alternatives.
For a different doc more directly about who pays for roads, I've found this one useful. Made by a so-so thinktank, but seems well-sourced and rigorous.
https://uspirg.org/sites/pirg/files/reports/Who%20Pays%20for...
Trucks on last mile delivery are invaluable for some deliveries, as you mention, but then... why else does any other vehicle need to use most streets? Is it reasonable for someone who orders a truck to pay 33% of the cost of that truck on the road? What about 0%, or 100%? Which is best?
In cases where alternatives to trucks or cars are less costly overall in some situation, or additional efficiency can be achieved with batching, how much of that is ignored because of these accidentally created incentives? Not even mentioning the indirect cost to communities (walkability, clean air, autonomy of disabled people).
I don't have the answers, but I think these are good questions to be asking. For the specifics of policies, we need to base that on data ofc.
simply put, living in town is not financially or socially viable for many and the freedom afforded by auto ownership is not giving the value is vastly underestimated by those who would restrict their use by others.
as with most lifestyle conversations it is far easier to score internet points with altruistic comments let alone being part of the clique. about as useful as hashtag diplomacy
That's what excise taxes are for. For example, in my town, we spend $1.2m on highway maintenance, and $450k in snow removal, while collecting $2.4m in vehicle excise taxes.
There is also about $60k in fines income, but it doesn't break down exactly how much of that is vehicular.
The whole point is to keep the water away from the dirt, and when it's not possible, minimize (distribute) loads from the tires across as large as area as possible.
They tested alternatives extensively in the 50's, driving trucks in circles on different test tracks for literally weeks and months at a time. As poorly planned as some people believe the interstate system to be, the government didn't throw billions of dollars at it blindly.
Remember I carefully excluded everything except delivery from roads - this is horribly unrealistic. You can call it a strawman.
Trucking is responsible for transporting roughly 12 billion tons of cargo annually, with an estimated value of $9 trillion dollars. As a total share of goods transported by value, trucking makes up about 70%, and 60% by weight. The trucking industry employs 10 million people (3.5 million of which are drivers), and directly contributes to about 5% of GDP, to say nothing of the share of GDP which indirectly depends on trucking, which would be roughly... all of it.
The United States' $20 trillion GDP is entirely dependent on a functioning and well maintained highway system, and it is absolutely irreplaceable as a means of economically and rapidly transporting goods throughout the country.
In that context, the roads that regular everyday taxpayers get to drive are basically free and paid for, because most of them would have needed to be built anyway for the basic provisioning of goods and services, health & safety, building materials and as a right-of-way for water, sewer, electrical, data, and communications infrastructure.
If you want to talk about externalities, you have to have a clear-eyed analysis of both positive and negative externalities. It's a very difficult analysis, because they both total in the trillions of dollars. I'd welcome a well researched scientific paper on the subject.
But since they are very visible, very direct taxes (And in addition to them, you have to pay for gasoline itself, insurance, parking, etc), drivers who have not done the math mistakenly believe that they aren't being subsidized.
1. Ignored the amortized cost of all that roadway construction. You can't just look at maintenance costs.
2. Ignored the state and federal funding that went into it.
3. Ignored the cost of 'free' parking.
4. Ignored the cost of highway and parking enforcement (If you have even one officer doing it full-time, the fines don't pay for it.)
5. Is quite atypical.
2. State & Federal funding of highways currently totals approximately $175 billion per year. I think inflation adjusted that has been fairly steady of the last half century. It's one of the few things where government spending has actually remained constant. [2] Income from fuel taxes has been reducing over the last decade, while income from sales & excise tax has been increasing.
It's reasonable to project that for the last several decades that infrastructure costs have been more than covered by vehicular income, and will continue to be covered for the forseeable future. Setting policy for today and tomorrow should be based on the facts of today and tomorrow.
It would be claiming more than I need, to state that vehicular direct revenue has always exceeded direct expenses, when we can at least clearly state this was true for the last decade, and the next. Economically speaking, it would be extremely costly to reduce the utilization rates for infrastructure we have already paid for, for example, in terms of infrastructure cost per passenger-mile.
One aspect which will eventually need reform is gas taxes will continue to drop with the spread of EVs, so a new form of usage-based billing will need to be developed -- hopefully one that doesn't involve a national tracking system, but I digress. It's fortunate that roads are so profitable that we haven't needed to raise the Federal fuel tax rate in over a decade, and have ample time to develop a solution.
3. The cost of 'free parking' is a relative rounding error in the $175 billion/yr we're talking about. Don't confuse the theoretical economic value of selling parking, or the potential value of re-purposing the space, with what it cost to build it.
There may be a subsidy here, even possibly a large one, but that's not based on the cost of building the spot, but more the perceived theoretical value in renting it. Again, we've gotten into externalties and strayed away from the basic cost analysis.
In reality, most parking costs are paid for by the parking consumer in one way or another. For example, at the mall, while you might not pay a fee to park, the store's rent includes the cost of building and maintaining the parking, and the prices of the goods at that store cover that rent. At your place of employment, you might not pay to park out back, but rest assured that the profit margin of the business includes the rent on the building, leaving less room in the P&L for salary. Again, whether the parking "benefit" is taxed as income to the employee is a different discussion as to whether roads pay for themselves.
4. You're getting into externalities here, without considering the positive ones. Police use the roads to prevent and respond to crime, which includes vehicular crime. Don't underestimate how much money is collected by governments through fines, fees, and forfeitures. In D.C. it works out to over $200 per person. Yes, it turns out, highways are overall very lucrative for the police. [3]
5. Thank you!
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System
[2] - https://edit.urban.org/sites/default/files/hr_4.png
[3] - https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckdevore/2016/10/26/police-c...
And a dozen or so States have increased fuel taxes in the last 5 years, so maybe the trend is starting to reverse.
Even when you add in externalities (climate change, etc.) road subsidies are about $0.10-0.20 per passenger mile. (Of course, electricity on the east coast isn’t generated from renewable sources, so you have to add pollution externalities to the subway too.)
Roads are cheap and not heavily subsidized when you account for how many people use them. There are pollution externalities, but those can be addressed by mandating electric cars without changing the basic structure of everyone having private vehicles.
NYC for example has over 6,000 miles of road * a very conservative 60 feet ignoring sidewalks is ~40,000 acres or 20% of the city. Central Park by comparison is only 842 acres. As Property taxes add up to ~55 Billion per year that’s (55/.8*.2) ~= 13.8 billion in lost revenue per year.
There are of course options to build more roads underground, but then they start costing as much as subway systems.
Your whole point depends on the fact that almost everyone uses roads and of course everyone uses roads when there are no great alternatives. If things were structured differently, the same could probably be said for other transit options.
Bike lanes. for instance, are ridiculously cheap from every perspective, have none of the externality costs you mention, but no one can bike safely as of now and therefore much fewer choose to do so than the infrastructure could support.
Biking is cheap only if your time is worth nothing. It’s also untenable given the climate of most of the US (much wider temperature variation than in Europe where biking is more common), and the physical fitness of your average American.
How much would an equivalent amount of road capacity cost in NYC?
(For the sake of argument, ignore the fact that such an insane amount of road capacity is probably physically impossible in NYC without knocking down half the city)
> Roads are cheap and not heavily subsidized when you account for how many people use them.
[citation needed]. You haven't said that fraction of road costs are covered by subsidies (e.g., by property taxes). I suspect it's a substantial fraction.
When the company tried to raise the fare to 7 cents, they were disallowed by the courts because they couldn't prove the 5 cents fare was confiscatory.
I understand the city could raise the fare to benefit the company, but that isn't their obligation.
I would assume you're libertarian from the point you've made, and am curious whether you believe it was right for the contract to be enforced as it was agreed upon.
Passenger rail service in the US suffered a similar fate when the federal government called in its chips to move personnel and supplies all over the place during the command economy years of WWII. Yes, the rails received substantial subsidies in land grants, etc, to get started. Yes, there was agreement to serve the public interest in this way because of that. Yes, this was a big blow to passenger rail.
Fares of MTA are higher than those of ATM in Milan, the service in Milan is excellent and it covers the operating costs through fares.
They are so good that have also built and now maintain the subway of the city of Copenhagen and over 100 buses and train lines in the province of Milan.
Prices are super regulated and recently fares have gone down for long distance commuters and slightly up only for casual passengers (one way tickets, tourists fares)
The company makes profits that go back to the city which in the end benefit the citizens
But there are certainly likely other factors. One might imagine that as alternative modes of transportation (ridesharing, etc.) become more commonplace, prices would go down in a competitive marketplace. But one might also imagine that established construction firms might see things like ridesharing (or other decreases in construction costs) as damaging to their long-term stability; they may therefore do things like lobby the city for increased regulations that would cause the proposed project to drag out even longer and provide increased financial stability to the firm. (An alternate read on this is that the firms are finally catching up to increased standards for labor and health, and this was not priced in in the past... but that's a very optimistic read.)
As the years go on, projects with large liabilities have to go to extreme lengths to show they did their due diligence. Otherwise, it’s a ripe for a lawsuit that says “well you knew that risk existed and did nothing to prevent it” and pays out a few million taxpayer dollars.
I also have an impression that the US mostly stopped building infrastructure like subways which has various negative effects. Lack of experienced engineering oversight, lack of local engineering talent, no experienced workforce. Weak industrial capability and support. And milking to death any projects that do get through the approval process.
If a country that was suffering a self-implied famine killing tens of millions just half a century ago could go from that to high speed rail across half a continent then maybe the foremost superpower for going on a century could think about building a high speed train line anywhere in this century.
* Labor costs and construction material costs have grown faster than inflation.
* There are more amenities in subways (such as handicapped access in stations) now than 100 years ago, and new construction accounts for them from the beginning.
* The underground infrastructure has become more crowded, which increases the number of pipes and the like that need to be relocated or avoided during construction.
* Planning and permitting requirements have increased, so you need to spend money showing, e.g., that you aren't harming any migratory fowl resting areas, or ensuring that you can expeditiously evacuate the station in case of an emergency.
* The agencies in charge have been doing worse and worse jobs at cost-control and project management.
The proposed price tag of the second phase of the 2nd Avenue subway is absolutely ludicrous--and so far, the MTA's justification [1] for the insane cost premiums is "fire codes." Seriously. For 10× over, say, Paris Metro construction costs. The public really needs to take MTA and the New York state government to task for allowing that sort of bullshit to stand.
[1] http://secondavenuesagas.com/2019/09/23/mta-officials-cite-f...
>An accountant discovered the discrepancy while reviewing the budget for new train platforms under Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan.
>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.
>“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.”
...
>A Dizzying Maze of Jobs
>The reasons for the M.T.A.’s high costs start with the sheer number of people employed.
>Mike Roach noticed it immediately upon entering the No. 7 line work site a few years ago. Mr. Roach, a California-based tunneling contractor, was not involved in the project but was invited to see it. He was stunned by how many people were operating the machine churning through soil to create the tunnel.
>“I actually started counting because I was so surprised, and I counted 25 or 26 people,” he said. “That’s three times what I’m used to.”
>The staffing of tunnel-boring machines came up repeatedly in interviews with contractors. The so-called T.B.M.s are massive contraptions, weighing over 1,000 tons and stretching up to 500 feet from cutting wheel to thrust system, but they largely run automatically. Other cities typically man the machine with fewer than 10 people.
>It is not just tunneling machines that are overstaffed, though. A dozen New York unions work on tunnel creation, station erection and system setup. Each negotiates with the construction companies over labor conditions, without the M.T.A.’s involvement. And each has secured rules that contractors say require more workers than necessary.
>The unions and vendors declined to release the labor deals, but The Times obtained them. Along with interviews with contractors, the documents reveal a dizzying maze of jobs, many of which do not exist on projects elsewhere.
>There are “nippers” to watch material being moved around and “hog house tenders” to supervise the break room. Each crane must have an “oiler,” a relic of a time when they needed frequent lubrication. Standby electricians and plumbers are to be on hand at all times, as is at least one “master mechanic.” Generators and elevators must have their own operators, even though they are automatic. An extra person is required to be present for all concrete pumping, steam fitting, sheet metal work and other tasks.
>In New York, “underground construction employs approximately four times the number of personnel as in similar jobs in Asia, Australia, or Europe,” according to an internal report by Arup, a consulting firm that worked on the Second Avenue subway and many similar projects around the world.
>That ratio does not include people who get lost in the sea of workers and get paid even though they have no apparent responsibility, as happened on East Side Access. The construction company running that project declined to comment.
Note that labor costs include more than the wages of the people who work on a project. Employer taxes, such as social security obligations and Medicare charges, also factor into labor costs, as does employer-provided healthcare, disability insurance, and the like. If we're tracking from 1904, that's a lot of extra surcharges that weren't present 100 years ago that will get included in the labor column.
I should note that I didn't order the list in any particular order. The reason why 1940 costs are higher than 1904 is likely driven in larger part by labor costs than other considerations, whereas the more modern spike is probably driven mostly by incompetent management and cost-control (for example, failing to push back against featherbedding).
Basically almost war-like propaganda about how working on the tunnel was good for you and the country, how you are chicken if you don't go down in there, etc.
They got it done fast by literally throwing people at the tunnel and scooping out their remains.
Then they had the papers run propaganda to cover up incidents and recruit more bodies.
Incidentally, they basically had the human powered version of a TBM frame back then and still had people dying left and right.
Times are a little different now....a little hard to have people dying every hour on a construction job
Per mile subsidy for the NYC Subway is $0.35 per passenger mile. Backing out the revenues, the total cost is about $0.55
vendor a ($1M) - geotechnical services consisting of ...
vendor b ($10M) - excavation consisting of ...
vendor c ...
(I ask because I'm looking for a pet project to test drive the FOIA process on.)
That's a fascinating little tidbit. When the developers were able to negotiate with the subway firms on an equal basis, they saw them as assets and partners; but when they were no longer able to (because a government is never an equal partner: it can change the law any time it wishes), they just saw them as an imposition.
There's a lesson there about buy-in.
Part of the reason for this: building roads extended Robert Moses’ personal power, building subways didn’t.
If you can think of something fucked up about NYC, odds are good it finds its way back to Moses somehow.
I’m a little older than the average HN person. I remember as a kid growing up in Queens, my dad sweeping the ash from the Greenpoint Incinerator off of his car in the mornings when the wind blew the right way.
The city was filthy, polluted and overcrowded. The subways were no exception.
Well, no, he acquired power by (a) having a massive independent river of cash to spend and (b) using the state's power to insulate him from the city's power.
Of course, a lot of cities really were, to at least some degree, crime-ridden places to avoid. The reality is complicated and varies by city of course, but it's still pretty accurate as a sweeping generalization to say that a lot of cities in the 70s and 80s wouldn't have looked all that appealing to the sort of college-educated professional class who want to live in cities today.
As I was saying to someone the other day, with the exception of people in finance moving to Manhattan, very few of the people in my class in grad school went to live in a city when they graduated.
But as you also no doubt are aware, the trend reversed itself in the current century with cities being desirable again. Part of this is reduced crime. But part is that perception, which kept newly educated people away as you say, simply being lifted.
I can't imagine how much nicer this country would have been with ~8 trillion invested in infrastructure over blowing up mud huts in deserts with "collateral" causalities in the millions while destabilizing third world nations into our next terrorist threat to point that 600 billion dollar tumor at next.
We should have seen everything from public development of high rise high density apartments in high-demand urban cores to high speed rail networks connecting major metro areas across state lines to dozens of recent-gen nuclear plants funded from the federal level down. We got none of that except a burgeoning debt and thousands with lifelong PTSD and crippling injuries from a war machine to make defense contractors rich burning taxpayer money.
I'll extend this even further: what if, after several years of all of this civilian engineering/infrastructure work being done, tons of expertise would have been built up...Then "sell" that expertise - either as a country to other countries, or as workers create their own smaller firms to look for work in other countries. Other countries would ideally hire American workers - because tons of expertise in infrastructure building - then these other countries could build up their own infrastructures, and so on, and so on....I can even imagine that our workers helping other countries (to build themselves up) might actually avoid some conflicts in the world - thereby avoiding needing such a heavy, expensive military in the first place. Ok, perhaps my premise is a little naive or idealistic...but I'm sure it would work in some pockets, and at least we (and a few other countries) would have some decent infrastructure remaining. So far, for all of our heavy, expensive, and excessive military spending, what do we have to show for it - mountains of debt, more people in the world hating Americans, our own people victims to PTSD?? President Eisenhower was correct.
In the last 10 years that engineering machine got turned to foreign investments, right now China is building thousands of miles of high speed rail and skyscrapers throughout Africa and Southeast Asia. Thus getting foreign nations indebted to them not for "protection" like the US tried but for their economic lifeblood.
Its going to pay off lavishly throughout this century for the CCP. They will have billions in their debt for their engineering expertise in helping modernize all these foreign economies and not all of it will be strictly fiscal debt. They will be dependent on Chinese engineering because all the intellectual capital is held there. All the US will have to show are millions of insurgents crying death to the nation. The marginal advantage of accumulated expertise for China will be the ability to build civilizations up (to serve their own interests) while the US is only good at tearing them down (to still serve their own interests).
New York stopped building infrastructure due to government and politics, not some sort of natural law.
If a city grows enough to need more infrastructure, it usually grows plenty of taxpayers to fund it.
We are also nowhere close to peak density efficiency, since the widespread refinement of high-density building would drop the price per person way below the current aggregate costs of living considering the whole of infrastructure and housing almost anywhere.
There is a strong cultural barrier to the development of higher densities though that associate it with poverty. Thats the real challenge to overcome, because that culture operates like the anti-nuclear sentiment to stymie development and stunt the growth of innovations in the domain of urban planning.
Cheap depends on context. Here, on R&D, creating excellent machines, mass produced, and reused with high duty cycle, embedded in a big high-productivity surrounding process, all amortized and enabled by scale. And also on tunnel characteristics, especially small diameter (many costs scale roughly with face area). These are not well matched to existing markets. The sweet spot really is in system design, not merely in fancy small TBM design. The scale permits the cost that permits the scale.
> custom public transit that allow only for electric cars with compatible self driving systems
Access could indeed be an interesting issue at some point. But at present, company focus is on dedicated mass transit shuttle bus/vans. More analogous to rail transit, than to highways.
Unless people are going to start living underground. Then you start to remove the above ground choke points ;)
(In any case, the answer here isn’t a technical one, it’s political. And NYC/New York State lacks the political will or desire. A third party private company won’t solve that)
That and all the Manhattan Schist that needs to be excavated. New York certainly isn't built on mud.
At the risk of downvotes... Here's my work-in-progress theory (v0.1):
Musk isn't a tech genius, (or maybe he is, but irrelevant) he's a regulation genius. (Which allows him to also be an effective fundraiser, but again, irrelevant.)
Musk's MO is to enter a niche, mostly uncontested and unregulated area of an otherwise over-regulated market. Then make a whole lot of noise about why this niche is so different and special and going to be so groundbreaking, which is really just cover for "why existing regulations shouldn't apply to me." Then as regulations (and subsidies) for that niche market are created, make sure that they favor his company (which already has a beachhead), while still being a barrier to market for any new-comers hoping to ride his coat-tails. Continue until level of regulation roughly matches the rest of the (non-niche) industry, ensuring niche status while becoming a competitor in the overall (non-niche) market. This happens as everyone realizes the final product, as finished, probably wasn't special enough to be excluded from the (non-niche) market regulations.
See: (in decreasing rank of success)
PayPal-> Banking
SpaceX-> Rockets/Aerospace
Tesla-> Cars
Giga-factory/ Tesla assembly automation -> manufacturing
Boring Company-> Subsurface Construction
Solar City-> Power Utility
Not-a-flamethrower -> flame thrower market???
Scuba rescue tank-> pedo scuba rescue market???
There are obviously some places this fits and others it doesn't. There's also some level of genius in how batteries/electric cars/solar/power-grid play off of one another, but nothing non-obvious. I suspect he wanted to make an earlier play in ride-sharing, but Uber beat him to it, with a similar strategy. This is now delayed until self-driving (re)allows for the regulatory advantage.
But the intended overall playbook starts to become obvious.
Back to Boring Company: I suspect skirting the existing regulations isn't going quite as well as desired because:
1- people realize his technology isn't all that special, even if it is (self-imposed) niche. (This is a failure in how hyperloop played out.)
2a- Subsurface engineering regulations aren't all that interesting, at least as far as looking for creative ways around them
2b- the regulations that are there have a pretty good (non-arbitrary and simple) engineering purpose. (Which is another way of saying the existing market is not actually over regulated)
3a- nimby politics plays a major role
3b- local governments (clients) don't have the power and/or money to override regulation politics
To answer: the Boring Company can't go and bid on bigger projects (yet) because then they would completely burn their niche status, which would admit to the world it's just another subsurface drilling company, and should be treated as such. They have to delay until their personalized regulatory system has been built, acknowledged, and subsidized. Then you can go after the regular projects that don't justify a special regulatory framework.