The most interesting part to me is the chart that shows the cost per mile over time. The cost per mile went up about 20% from 1940 to 1988 and then tripled from 1988 to 2017 and doubled again by 2019. What caused this increase?
* 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).
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.
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