I thought when I read it something seemed off. You are 100% right the headline is clickbait. The MTA spends twice the amount on design and consultants. Which is about an extra 9% of the project cost. Though they don't say how the in-house people in Europe are budgeted for. Is the fully loaded costs of consultants and designers added. You can't just take the engineers hourly rate and say how many hours are allocated to a project. An engineer working for the government will have downtime between jobs, vacation and sick, benefits costs like Healthcare and pension, that worker uses other government workers who's costs are not included like government payroll and HR, IT workers to keep their computers running, office space such as rent amd electric costs. What about management costs all the way up the food chain. Plus when the project is over is Europe adding the fact that municipal workers are impossible to fire. Even if there is no work they will sit at their desks getting paid till they retire or just milk whatever they are working on to look busy. When you write a check to a consultant or private engineering firm 100% of the workers payroll and benefits costs and all the costs included to keep the worker working is included.