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Alon Levy and the transit costs project are a great source of actual hard analysis on this- https://pedestrianobservations.com/2023/02/25/the-issue-of-c... has a great concise breakdown, pasted here because no one will click through:

Based on around 100 interviews and many diagrams and reports, we managed to decompose the New York construction cost premium over low-cost countries, which is about a full order of magnitude, into the following items:

    The stations are overbuilt by a factor of 3, which contributes an overall factor of 2 cost premium
    The systems are not standardized, which contributes a factor of about 2.3 cost premium for the systems and 1.35 overall
    Labor costs (including supervisors and other white-collar workers) are 50% of hard costs in New York where they should be about 25%, contributing a factor of 3 premium on labor costs and 1.5 overall
    Procurement problems including the privatization of risk, change order risk, agency micromanagement of contractors, general red tape, and profit stemming from too little competition double overall costs
    Soft costs are depending on what one counts either 21% on top of hard costs where they should be 7%, or 46% where they should be 20%

I can't speak too much to the first several points, but noting

    - agency micromanagement of contractors
    - general red tape

is very fitting and a direct contribution to

    - too little competition

I worked with a startup company ~8 years ago that wanted to go after government contracts. According to the owners, everyone they demo'd the product to said it was very clearly superior to what they were currently using.

Unfortunately, the people who would use it are not the people that sign off on paying for it. Those people had checklists of irrelevant requirements, slow response times, almost certainly pressure to select "certain" vendors (i.e. those who threw money into lobbying the right folk). It got to the point where they seriously considered hiring a consulting company whose sole purpose was to help others navigate all the red tape that gets thrown in your way when you try to get government contracts.

In the end, they realized that they were better off pivoting entirely to the private sector instead of doing a half and half approach.

I seem to recall a similar tale with the lead pipe retrofitting in Flint, MI... contractors to do the job were picked not necessarily by speed and capability, but by other qualities. Regardless of how they were chosen, though, the city failed to deliver. Despite the crisis starting in April 2014, residents and activists had to sue the city in 2017 to actually get the work completed, and it still isn't done. Mostly done, but not completely... 8 years later.

> the people who would use it are not the people that sign off on paying for it.

Reminds me of a demo I did for some Congresscritters once. The staffer said "It'll take $50k per record to bring this database online" so they refused to look at the live, running demo I had of the database online. I heard, later, that someone else got "$50k per record" as a contract.

> the people that sign off on paying for it. Those people had checklists of irrelevant requirements, slow response times, almost certainly pressure to select "certain" vendors

This reads like a lack of democratic influence and even direct corruption.

That is, these "stakeholders" are not concerned that the voters would be unhappy with their performance, and would fire them (directly or through an action of a newly elected official). They seem to be conveniently shielded from feedback of the population which they nominally are hired to serve.

There is very little democratic influence in the bureaucracy of most governments. Most functions aren't political, and most politicians don't actually have any direct authority to manage a random government employee's job performance.

I'm not sure. Too me it reads like why too much democracy..

How do you figure that?

See https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/why-is-everything-libe...

Political control (ie democratic control) is not value neutral.

Though the actual important bit is actually a quote from https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-new-su...

> Those people had checklists of irrelevant requirements, slow response times, almost certainly pressure to select "certain" vendors (i.e. those who threw money into lobbying the right folk)

That last part isn’t true in my experience, but that makes it harder to solve: every procurement officer I’ve worked with has been very scrupulous about not favoring a vendor but they’re operating under rules for things like fairness and security which are hard to comply with. A huge company can hire a room full of people to document how they’re complying with everything but a startup is going to run into exactly the problem you described. The big guys all support this since it has the effect of limiting options without actually being illegal — who’s going to argue against risk reduction, right?

> According to the owners, everyone they demo'd the product to said it was very clearly superior to what they were currently using.

And owners have never lied about the superiority of their product, or what other people think.

Except that is pretty much all they do.

It is worth noting that the second phase costs even more per mile to build, despite the fact that pretty much all the tunnels already exist from an earlier attempt, are structurally intact, and will be reused.

Yup. $8B for .. 2-3 stations, 1.5 miles of track and 0.75 mile of new tunnel. Incredible.

The second ave subway was supposed to be a replacement for the elevated train they tore out. At this point, they should consider just building a modern elevate train down second ave if digging is such a boondoggle. I think the only reason it was torn down is that business owners thought it to be unsightly.

0% chance that will happen. It greatly lowers property values which will cause every single owner on the path to come out swinging.

I feel like there is value for a property having it be in walking distance to the would be second ave el. It also needn't look like the 100 year old cast iron els in the bronx or brooklyn. Modern elevated rail is fully welded, so no cathunk cathunk or really any screeching, and it usually sits on a cement bed, which is more aesthetically appealing than the old steel beam els that tend to drip stuff that ruins your paint job in nyc or chicago. In Culver city, for example, there is a pocket park under a portion of their elevated expo line: https://goo.gl/maps/fUFW2xQ9z4imj9XE8

This reminds me of political discourse. We solve all the easy problems (murder is wrong, we all agree), and then we're left with the tough questions like abortion and civil rights. It's not that we can't agree, it's that we solved everything that is solvable (without great difficulty).

Maybe we've now built everything that's easy to build, and all that's left is the hard stuff.