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PersonalFan480 t1_jbvazv1 wrote

Reply to comment by notqualitystreet in Cost of 2nd Avenue Subway extension to East Harlem balloons to $7.7B by Grass8989

https://transitcosts.com/wp-content/uploads/NewYork_Case_Study.pdf

Sums up as incompetence at every level of the MTA. The MTA does not have the engineering staff to build its own subways, nor to design their own subways, nor to supervise the contractors who would do the above. For that matter, they cannot handle even simple capital projects at a reasonable cost.

And the leadership, who are mostly political hacks and career managers who haven't had an original thought in decades all drive and so do not use their own product. They also do not care nor want to learn about best practices for subway operations. Meanwhile the MTA, instead of developing in house capacity to handle capital projects, has created a stupidly complex rule book that inflates costs because for-profit contractors aren't just going to eat the extra costs of compliance.

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planning_throwaway1 t1_jbxyrsb wrote

Yeah. Most places keep costs down by having more internal staff. We've largely gutted public staffing across the board, NYC's planning staff is a fraction of what it used to be.

Everyone is run ragged, so everything gets outsourced to contractors at 3x the cost.

Paris builds new rail constantly, at a fraction of NYC prices, despite being an old system, in an old city, with a river and riddled with catacombs below ground, with a heavily unionized workforce.

The big "trick" is they do it all in-house, only outsource if absolutely necessary, and keep contractors on a tight leash. Also, they don't have to do multi-year long environmental reviews and feasibility studies for every little project, they just do them.

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