21 ms·

The Most Expensive Mile of Subway Track

225 points by seibelj 9y ago

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
melling 9y ago
“The estimated cost of the Long Island Rail Road project, known as “East Side Access,” has ballooned to $12 billion, or nearly $3.5 billion for each new mile of track — seven times the average elsewhere in the world.”
djsumdog 9y ago
Waste and corruption in a public good as vital as rail transport is truly sad. It happens everywhere though. In Melbourne, contracts for their new ticketing system were given to a totally unqualified company and ran several hundred million over budget. Rather than just eat the cost, the corrupt city officials have doubled down by wasting more money of worthless ticket inspectors to attempt to recover some of the costs from fare evaders. https://sites.google.com/site/cheaperthanmyki/home https://sites.google.com/site/cheaperthanmyki/home
- boulos 9y ago
  Having just visited Melbourne, I truly hated being forced into paying $7 (AUD) for the privilege of getting a myki card to make a $4.10 trip each way (so $8.20). There is no longer any way to buy paper tickets, and unlike San Francisco which can print out reasonable RF-enabled single ride tickets for MUNI, everyone took it as obvious that $7 AUD was simply the cost of doing business. Thanks for the backstory on myki!
  - ClassyJacket 9y ago
    Melbourne had a disposable ticket system in place for Myki - the tickets had already been made[1]. The Liberal government threw them out, wasting 15 million dollars in the process. And probably more on the equipment to dispense them. This is the same party that on a federal level threw out the nationwide fibre to the premises project, wasting 50 billion dollars on installing new DSL connections instead. I am actually being serious, they will be installing new DSL at a cost of 2400$ per premises until at least 2020. [1] http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/15m-myki-cards-set-to-be-pulped-20110904-1jsf3.html http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/15m-myki-cards-set-to-be-p...
- jseliger 9y ago
  It happens everywhere though Did you read the article? The leaders entrusted to expand New York’s regional transit network have paid the highest construction costs in the world, spending billions of dollars that could have been used to fix existing subway tunnels, tracks, trains and signals. The estimated cost of the Long Island Rail Road project, known as “East Side Access,” has ballooned to $12 billion, or nearly $3.5 billion for each new mile of track — seven times the average elsewhere in the world. The recently completed Second Avenue subway on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and the 2015 extension of the No. 7 line to Hudson Yards also cost far above average, at $2.5 billion and $1.5 billion per mile, respectively
AznHisoka 9y ago
Sometimes I wonder why the heck I should live in NYC and pay so much in state and city taxes.. and then I can’t even deduct them starting in 2018... But then i get depressed so I try not to think of it too much.
- ajmurmann 9y ago
  I'm sure getting more negative about living in NYC was exactly one of the things that the authors of the tax bill aimed for.
  - bmelton 9y ago
    Meanwhile, progressive-leaning organizations have been pushing for the elimination of SALT deductions for years, on the logic that it primarily benefits the wealthy residents in high tax states. The Center for American Progress was urging the Obama administration to eliminate those tax deductions[1]. Politifact fact-checked a Pelosi claim, and came to the same conclusion, that the SALT deudction "is a tax deduction that disproportionately benefits higher-income taxpayers[2]". Only 10% of filers earning under $50k a year even bother claiming the deduction[3][4]. [1] - https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/general/news/2011/02/02/9070/tax-expenditure-of-the-week-state-and-local-tax-deduction/ https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/general/news/2011/02... [2] - http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/oct/20/nancy-pelosi/do-moderate-income-families-benefit-more-state-and/ http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/oct/... [3] - https://www.urban.org/research/publication/repeal-state-and-local-tax-deduction https://www.urban.org/research/publication/repeal-state-and-... [4] - https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2017/12/20/the-only-good-thing-about-the-tax-bill/ https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2017/12/20/the-only-go...
    - ajmurmann 9y ago
      "wealthy residents in high tax states" This to me is one of the biggest problems talking about taxation and wealth in the US. $50k is nothing you can really live off in most (by population) parts of California. $100k would make you well-off elsewhere but makes you poor in the Bay Area. While I'm generally for some degree of wealth redistribution, I'm afraid this will hit many people who aren't actually wealthy, but just scraping by.
so33 9y ago
The NYT article compares East Side Access and the Second Avenue Subway to the Line 14 extension project in the Paris Metro: >... while the Second Avenue Subway cost $2.5 billion a mile, the Line 14 extension is on track to cost $450 million a mile. The costs for the SAS, over 5 times more per mile than the Line 14 extension, are preposterous in this context.
- RayVR 9y ago
  Why is the line 14 extension not comparable?
narrator 9y ago
In the U.S, public transportation has the same problem as healthcare. That problem is that spending more money on it won't make it better since the costs are already many times higher than any other country. However, there is always a demand that to get better public transportation and healthcare we must continue to raise taxes. Finding out what is so expensive and fixing that never occurs to anybody, probably because it's some well connected person's cash cow.
- BurningFrog 9y ago
  > Finding out what is so expensive and fixing that never occurs to anybody It occurs to a lot of people. We're just completely powerless.
  - windlep 9y ago
    Not only that does it occur, but it also occurs that the same people messing it up have bought off both sides. So it's not like voting for Dems or Republicans will magically make it cheaper. They'll just change who pays the insane prices, if that.
    - ringaroundthetx 9y ago
      Yeah my frightened brethren in coastal US cities dont get it, the political party is a sideshow: play by a more effective set of rules If you DONT have a state-sanctioned racket I’m like “Do you even America bruh?”
    - imbur 9y ago
      Are there any examples of states or countries that handle this the right way? Can this be applied to NYC?
      - oblio 9y ago
        Most European countries have a multi-party system, usually due to not using first past the post voting systems. As a result you have more parties, more diversity of choice and less polarization and of course more competition. Parties can actually go away and they do, usually every few decades. The downside is that you can get deadlocks as no party can get a majority sometimes, even after making coalitions with smaller parties. Still better end result than the US end result, in my opinion.
kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
> they were each being paid about $1,000 every day How is this even possible?
- bob_theslob646 9y ago
  You left off the most important piece. If your going to quote it, provide the right context. >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.”
  - bassman9000 9y ago
    Thanks. That's $200k extra a day, 1m week, 4.5m month extra. _no one figured out how long they had been employed_ Nice.
    - zeep 9y ago
      it would be cheaper to get universal income going
rayiner 9y ago
> “We thought ours was expensive,” said Laurent Probst, managing director of Île-de-France Mobilités, which controls transit in the French capital. > The small number of workers has not slowed the Paris project. The line, which will run driverless trains every 85 seconds, is set to open by 2020, six years after groundbreaking. The Second Avenue subway, by contrast, took a decade to build. > M.T.A. officials declined to comment on the Paris project. French inefficiency used to be a joke in the US when I was a kid. Joke’s on us now I guess.
- pluma 9y ago
  American inefficiency has been a joke in Germany as far as I can think back. Also, a recurring theme in what I hear about American customers from people working in manufacturing is that US companies insist on providing extremely detailed specs and strict tolerances but then run into issues because their own (presumably US sourced) parts don't actually match the same specs.
  - masklinn 9y ago
    > American inefficiency has been a joke in Germany as far as I can think back. 'course now there's BER so the joke is a bit harder to make.
    - chx 9y ago
      For people not familiar with that particular flustercuck: BER is the new Berlin Brandenburg airport. After a lot (more than 15 years!) of planning they began building in 2006. By 2011 October, it was ready or so they thought. In 2011 November they actually ran trials with some 12 000 people. 8 May 2012 it was announced due to the failure of the fire protection system the opening is postponed. In a 2016 audit, they concluded the airport was at less than 60% readiness in reality at 2012 May. Right now the opening is perhaps late 2020 or even 2021... We are getting to the point where the 2016 audit should've concluded it is better to tear it down and build a new one.
    - Feniks 9y ago
      Berlin is the black sheep in the German family. Luckily Berlin always gets bailed out by its loving Bayern family members.
seibelj 9y ago
I’m not sure why the title was changed. “On Earth” is in the article’s headline. Some sort of editorializing by HN staff, very strange.
- SilasX 9y ago
  “On Earth” isn’t very descriptive of what the article is about. The new one is.
- dang 9y ago
  Taking redundancy and linkbait out of submission titles is standard here. "On Earth" was redundant because where else would the subway track be? And it was hyperbolic, therefore linkbait, which is presumably why they put it there to begin with. That's not editorializing because no particular interpretation is being pushed; we're just being good Strunk-and-Whiters and omitting needless words.
  - jcranmer 9y ago
    > "On Earth" was redundant because where else would the subway track be? Without qualifiers, given the provenance of its source material, one could reasonably assume it to mean "in the US". Saying "on Earth" or "in the world" would clarify that it's being compared against all other subway building occurring, even (perhaps especially) against notoriously corrupt countries with artificially high construction costs.
    - tomhoward 9y ago
      ...would clarify that it's being compared against all other subway building occurring Sure, but it's not that kind of article. The title is rhetorical, rather than conveying a demonstrated fact. The article isn't about some study that establishes with certainty that it is actually the most expensive length of track, anywhere in the world, ever, in real terms. Sure it seems plausible given the facts conveyed in the article, but the world is big and the history of rail is fairly long, and the article is not describing an exhaustive comparison with every other railway ever built. So it seems reasonable for dang to decide that the original title is a little too baity for HN.
exikyut 9y ago
> 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.” People may disagree with the following view and downvote, but still... Where can I read an account of what the accountant found and how they reached their conclusions? I can only trust/hope that the accountant had experience in construction and/or could consult with trustworthy advisers. But the two things that came to mind as I read these three paragraphs were that a) this is a puff piece written from the POV of "spending too much money" for whatever agenda this spin would help b) this is cost-cutting being re-spun to look good Some balance: I live close by to a brand new driverless underground metro network that's being developed. I'm super excited to travel on the new trains when they arrive. I even hope to work there at some point. When I was poking around the websites at an early point in the construction process, I found that one site's design/layout was clearly mobile-first to the extent that it was mobile-only and displayed Amusingly™ on a desktop PC; I also found a bit of a headscratcher with another site's DNS setup that I didn't know where to report; and when I poked around the bid platform that let any contractor sign up to be recruited to be part of the construction, I decided the whole system (bid platform and everything else) felt very very rushed-through. So I have no industry experience but I've had a very tiny whiff of what a multi-billion project looks like on the ground as it's developing. Tons of overhead, lots of space for little things to fall through, etc etc. I wouldn't be surprised if what's happening here is really just most of the same kinds of industrial-scale rounding errors. But that makes it equally possible that what's reported really is unambiguously what happened, or that this is the uncomfortable norm and there's some spin.
- Spooky23 9y ago
mc32 9y ago
In SF a couple of parks needed to have new public bathrooms built. Cost: 2 million.[1] If you had to do it yourself, It'd be about 100k max. It's pure graft and greediness. Meanwhile in Japan, they convert an above ground line into a subway line in 3.5 hours of coordinated work.[2] It's a startling difference. This is the one time I'd love to be able to bring engineering and crew from overseas and have them do the work for us and dispense with all the local corruption. 200 ghost workers -unbelievable. And they initially wanted to keep that discovery quiet. $1000/day/ghost worker for the taxpayers of New York. $200k waste per day --that's how much The City respects its citizens. [1]http://hoodline.com/2017/10/golden-gate-park-playground-lands-2-million-for-bathrooms-upgrades http://hoodline.com/2017/10/golden-gate-park-playground-land... [2]https://youtu.be/wIbZqqLra9k?t=80 https://youtu.be/wIbZqqLra9k?t=80
- olingern 9y ago
  Japan also has a much different outlook on blue collar jobs, and (from studying the culture and spending ~3 months there) people seem to take genuine pride in their job regardless of what it is. Contrast that with the MTA subway workers I see regularly huddled into groups, shooting the breeze and playing on their phones -- it's a widely different outlook on work. Also regarding you [2] link, I can't remember where I read it, but I believe that operation took years of planning.
  - mc32 9y ago
    I mean, to be sure Japan has institutionalized pork too[1]. They offer contracts to build retaining walls where no one lives. But damn, when they have to do something they are experts in they do it right. And given the JRs are private orgs, they can't just ask for another bond measure or other tax or more pork from the govt. And of course it took years of planning. In the US you'd have years of "planning" [pork dealing] and then the line shut down for a year or two probably, doing things as slowly as possible. [1]https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-japan-election-concrete/analysis-japan-election-points-to-return-of-construction-state-idUKBRE8BA1AD20121211 https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-japan-election-concrete/a...
mojomark 9y ago
More "fleecing of America" alarmist journalist bullshit. This type of ill-informed journalism is largely what creates the red tape (i.e. extra layers of unnecessary oversight, insane requirements, and irrational spending restrictions) in government agencies that would otherwise be very lean. I'm a government contractor and I see first hand every day (painfully) how this type of reporting has resulted in the Governments inability to attract and retain talent, as well as the loss of corporate knowledge. It's the same irrational logic that prevents non-profit orgs from attracting/regaining talent because people thinking that wvery dollar spent goes directly to those in need without regard to the need to build an infrastructure to deliver fund/aid. I have no knowledge of New York subterranian transit, but at some point you have to step back and ask yourself if the expenditure is worth it, simply based on the value of the dollar. I think it is. This journalist apparently doesn't, but seems to have all the answers, so I say fire the 200 'excessive' workers, hire Todd Heisler (the journalist) and put him in charge of the teamining 600 workers (and associated budget) to get the job done. Apparently 900 isn't good enough for Todd.
- pishpash 9y ago
  Just because NYC generates enough value to make an over-budget project still "worth it" does not mean everybody should be sucking on the government teat and seeing nothing wrong with it.
- zck 9y ago
  > I have no knowledge of New York subterranian transit, but at some point you have to step back and ask yourself if the expenditure is worth it, simply based on the value of the dollar. I think it is. That may be true. But if NYC could get five times the amount of new track for the same money, I'd prefer that. Or spend the money revamping parts of the crumbling control systems. Or pay down debt. The point is that NYC shouldn't spend more money than it has to.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  > you have to step back and ask yourself if the expenditure is worth it I don’t think our $4 billion train station that looks like a reptilian carcass is worth it [1]. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/6/11168484/inside-the-oculus-new-yorks-insane-looking-4-billion-train-station https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/6/11168484/inside-the-oculus...
annerajb 9y ago
Hmm maybe this is what the boring company is trying to do. If they can use their tech to tunnel the same distance at 90% less would truly redefine transport.
- cardamomo 9y ago
  The problem NYC is facing isn't the tech. The MTA's tunnel-boring machines can be operated with far fewer people.
- mc32 9y ago
  There was initial skepticism regarding Musk's predicted [reduced] costs --perhaps he was taking into account the removal of all these excess construction costs much of the public isn't privy to.
- alexhutcheson 9y ago
  A good response to the Boring Company plans: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2017/12/15/elon-musks-ideas-about-transportation-are-boring/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/2017/12/15/elon-musks-ide...
- venomsnake 9y ago
  Boring itself is highly optimized - the oil industry likes their holes long, stable and cheap. So the tech is there. It is the other stuff that bogs down a project.
spikels 9y ago
This is what is killing US public transit. Most things are reasonably priced in the US by global standards. Why are our public works projects always so ridiculously expensive? It has to be some structural or cultural difference.
- mc32 9y ago
  I'm not an expert, but it seems the mix of unions, politicians, kickbacks, corruption, favoritism, etc., leads itself to abuse. Maybe, maybe if we just used something similar to the Army Corps of Engineers to handle all major infra construction in the US, keeping local politicians out of the fiscal and contractual aspects, then maybe we could get what we pay for. In the meantime, it seems like a bunch of backscratching and pocket stuffing --I mean, someone's making money.
  - thatfrenchguy 9y ago
    Using a public agency to build stuff ? That’s socialism yo.
    - mc32 9y ago
      Can't be worse than local politicians. The Corps would do the management and contract with local engineering concerns --at reasonable prices. Bring them from Texas, Illinois, who cares, so long as they can do the job.
    - azemetre 9y ago
      I prefer my public works to be infested with kickbacks and bribes from massive corporations.
  - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    Is the military somehow more efficient?
    - vadimberman 9y ago
      Not really. The military contracts are a pork barrel.
bob_theslob646 9y ago
Reading this makes me want to throw up. How these people are not in jail is beyond me. First Wall Street and now the MTA. My dad would always say this expression to describe the difference between a criminal on Wall Street and in construction. The only difference is a suit.
- chimeracoder 9y ago
  > My dad would always say this expression to describe the difference between a criminal on Wall Street and in construction. The only difference is a suit. Also, the construction worker or MTA worker is probably making more money and working fewer hours. For those who don't believe me, read the article - or even look up the salaries online, since they're often public. This is not even an exaggeration.
lmm 9y ago
> But the government worked closely with vendors, trying to build the type of collaborative relationships that are rare in New York. This comes just a handful of paragraphs after: > A Times analysis of the 25 M.T.A. agency presidents who have left over the past two decades found that at least 18 of them became consultants or went to work for authority contractors, including many who have worked on expansion projects. > “Is it rigged? Yes,” said Charles G. Moerdler, who has served on the M.T.A. board since 2010. “I don’t think it’s corrupt. But I think people like doing business with people they know, and so a few companies get all the work, and they can charge whatever they want.” So which is it? Is the MTA not close enough to the vendors, or too close?
- lewis500 9y ago
  I think this is the most important part. It reveals one reason why things are bad: uncompetitive bidding.
desertrider12 9y ago
If the tunnels have a 20 ft diameter, that's $2100 per cubic foot of material removed. Give me a jackhammer and shovel and I'll happily do it for 50% off.
elango 9y ago
There is a burst of NY times articles with annoying paid plans
electic 9y ago
> The labor deals negotiated between the unions and construction companies also ensure that workers are well paid. The agreement for Local 147, the union for the famed “sandhogs” who dig the tunnels, includes a pay rate for most members of $111 per hour in salary and benefits. The pay doubles for overtime or Sunday work, which is common in transit construction. Weekend overtime pays quadruple — more than $400 per hour. The article correctly identifies the number of people are working on a job is about 4x the normal rate when compared to Asia and Europe. However, when you take the hourly pay rate you quickly see it for what it is. This is fraud.
- chimeracoder 9y ago
  It's even worse than that: > The critics pointed to several unusual provisions in the labor agreements. One part of Local 147’s deal entitles the union to $450,000 for each tunnel-boring machine used. That is to make up for job losses from “technological advancement,” even though equipment has been standard for decades They literally have to pay the union $450,000 for using machines that have been standard around the world for fifty years.
  - Robotbeat 9y ago
    ...and people scoff at Elon Musk for saying he can significantly reduce the cost of tunneling in the US...
    - chimeracoder 9y ago
      > ...and people scoff at Elon Musk for saying he can significantly reduce the cost of tunneling in the US... Nobody scoffs at Elon Musk for suggesting he could reduce the cost of tunneling in the US. It's not like it's a mystery why tunneling is so expensive. They scoff at the suggestion that he's somehow unique or exceptional for making that claim.
      - Robotbeat 9y ago
        Then their problem is with the press, not Elon Musk.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Animats 9y ago
It's an inherently hard project that's costing way too much. The East Side Access involves building another level of station underneath Grand Central Station, without disrupting service. The tracks are 150 feet below Park Avenue. They're working around skyscraper foundations, and adding supports for buildings above. Look at some of the pictures on line.
- tomarr 9y ago
  The article goes into this though, these challenges are something that comparable international projects have faced in much worse ground conditions (which extenuates the issue). The magnitude of cost difference does not stem from engineering challenges.
  - martinald 9y ago
    Exactly. Crossrail in London had some insanely difficult challenges (like threading a new subway tunnel between two existing ones with only a few cm of distance between them), and hitting an enormous ancient Roman burial ground at Liverpool Street. Despite that (and many more) it is currently 6 months ahead of schedule. There's a great documentary about the project called the fifteen billion pound railway which covers a lot of these challenges.
    - spiralx 9y ago
      Don't forget that they did that bit of the tunnelling on a Monday morning, there were some tense looking staff on the platform that morning :)
cmurf 9y ago
Lack of anti-fraud measures in the law as well as in the project contracts. Where's the auditing and prosecution budget? There should be an independent auditor making referrals for prosecution to an independent prosecutor. Th $3.5 billion for each new mile of track At a certain point of a project, whether business or personal, you pull the fucking plug. Done. Scrape it. Cut the loss. And that's what should be done here. Fire everyone, fire the contractors, they don't like it, sue, the gravy train has come to an end.
- keithpeter 9y ago
  I understand the feeling(1), but if only a small number of contractors are bidding for the work, and you pull the plug on a major contract, how do you move forward? Abandon any plans for extensions? Demolish buildings to build more roads? (1) In the UK, national government IT projects famously go over cost and sometimes, arguably, under-deliver. Much finger pointing. Very limited number of companies that have the scale to bid for projects.
- ubernostrum 9y ago
  It's worth pointing out that a situation like this is often the endgame of anti-corruption rules. It always starts simple: you put in a rule, say, that a contract can't be awarded to a contractor who has some relationship to the person making the decision. Then someone quite reasonably objects that a bureaucrat from a different department might try to influence the decision-maker to award to their friend for a kickback. So now you add a rule that there are multiple entities, ideally adversarial, involved who all have to agree before the contract gets awarded. Then you pile on yet more rules as people come up with ever more creative ways to get around them. And then one day you wake up and realize you have a literal maze of reports and applications and audits and inspections and committees that all have to be fulfilled for even the simplest project, and it's grown so complex that only a couple of companies put in the (extreme) effort of figuring out how to navigate it; everybody else has given up. Now those have a guaranteed lock on future contracts, and no longer have any incentive to be honest or control costs, since who else are you ever going to legally be able to give a contract to? Plus, the system is so complex that even the people in charge of it don't always know how to manage or enforce it. And then the costs start going up and up and up...
vman81 9y ago
"Construction companies, which have given millions of dollars in campaign donations in recent years, have increased their projected costs by up to 50 percent when bidding for work from the M.T.A., contractors say." That's because you've legalized bribery. Your political system rewards corruption. Every actor in the described mess is (re)acting rationally. Is this somehow a surprise?
- masterleep 9y ago
  The surprise is the large number of seemingly intelligent people constantly bleating for more of the same.
- chimeracoder 9y ago
  > That's because you've legalized bribery. Your political system rewards corruption. Every actor in the described mess is (re)acting rationally. Is this somehow a surprise? Ugh, please stop saying this. Bribery is not legal in the US. We literally just tried a sitting US senator for corruption including bribery, and we just convicted the former Speaker of the New York State Assembly for corruption, including bribery and kickbacks. It's very much not legal. New York politics is an outlier - in fact, New York has literally the most corrupt government in the country. The problem isn't that it's legal (it's not legal); the problem is that New York has such a wide and extensive network of corruption (as this article shows) that it's damn-near impossible to actually address any of it.
  - reustle 9y ago
    But campaign donations by corporate interests and lobbying _are_ essentially legal bribery.
    - chimeracoder 9y ago
      > But campaign donations by corporate interests and lobbying _are_ essentially legal bribery. Campaign contributions and lobbying are not at all the same thing. First, "Corporate interests" are prohibited from making campaign contributions. Secondly, lobbying is simply the process of petitioning elected officials to persuade them to advocate your causes. That's not unique to the US; every democracy has a mechanism for that process.
mahgnous 9y ago
How does this have anything to do with tech?
cm2187 9y ago
Can’t help thinking of the sopranos, where a few mobsters were “employed” on construction sites. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=r-ECvI5rD40 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=r-ECvI5rD40
mnm1 9y ago
There's simply no excuse for not tracking spending. With software, every $1 box of nails should be tracked. Everything else is fraud, that the NYC DA seems to be willingly ignoring. Once again, no consequences for bad behavior. Almost every single issue here boils down to no consequences for harmful behavior or horrific consequences for normal behavior. It will be interesting to see if we ever implement a justice system to fix these problems or just keep pretending like whatever the fuck we're doing now is working.
- briandear 9y ago
  The Manhattan DA is Cyrus Vance Jr., son of Jimmy Carter Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. Jr has come under fire for refusing to prosecute Weinstein and there is some evidence that his office received campaign donations from high profile people he refused to prosecute. Vance is about as old school “NY Democrat machine politics” as it gets. He’s pretty much a modern Tamminy Hall. If he’s DA you will never see any prosecutions for politically-connected corruption — at least not as long as the campaign donations are rolling in. By the way, I am not implying that Republicans are any better or worse — Vance is just in the dominant party of NYC politics — the problem is the “machine” not the specific flavor of that machine. If you are in New York, stop voting for Vance and other stuff like him. There is a lot of talk about “resisting Trump,” but really I have yet to see any equivalent outrage over the guys right in your neighborhood that are essentially enabling theft and corruption. Most New Yorkers can spit fire over Trump, but seem to be asleep when it comes to this ground level corruption. Tip O’Neil once said “All politics is local,” — perhaps voters should act like it and start holding local politicians’ feet to the fire. In a city packed full of lawyers, Cyrus Vance is the best y’all could do? For sure national politics matters, but the real bleeding happens on the street: on school boards, the DA’s office, City Hall, in the boroughs.. NYC is a great city — despite the politicians New Yorkers insist on re-electing.
  - thebiglebrewski 9y ago
    I'm pretty sure Vance ran unopposed in the latest election. I did not want to vote for him.
arnon 9y ago
Anyone who's ever tried to set up a booth at a trade-show will know exactly what this is like. $900 for renting a TV for 3 days + $450 fee for installing the bracket + $180 for placing a power-strip at your booth. You're billed $90 for every hour of work, billed at 30m increments. Order of business: 1. Person comes to look at where you want the TV. Billed $45. 2. Person comes to drop by an extension cord, $45. 3. Person comes to plug the extension cord in, but sees you're not ready to have the TV mounted yet, $45. 4. Lunch break 5. Person comes to hook up the extension cord, $45. Total bill: $180, for something a kindergartner can do (literally connecting a power cord to the socket that's already in the floor)
- ianlevesque 9y ago
  So what happens if you just plug it in yourself?
  - imglorp 9y ago
    Trade unions get seriously bunched panties about power to conference booths. Organizers are forced to play along, ostensibly for fire marshal and safety rules but really for union getting its cut.
    - briandear 9y ago
      Think that’s bad — visit a Hollywood film location. I was a camera assistant for a film and I literally couldn’t drive dailies from the airport in my own car — that’s the Teamsters. I couldn’t touch a broom to sweep up our camera loading area — that’s another Union. I couldn’t plug a surge protector into an outlet — that’s the electricians. I couldn’t touch a dolly upon which we were to mount a camera — that’s Grip. I couldn’t move a $500 light five centimeters — That’s Lighting — despite being trusted to load a $100k+ Panavision camera or attach at $85k lens. And god forbid shooting take 30 seconds longer than the schedule — the entire crew on the set gets overtime.. costing thousands of dollars. However to be fair, Hollywood is a private enterprise so it’s what the market allows — but when it comes to public money, it’s infuriating for such egregious waste and inefficiency.
tankenmate 9y ago
Unions have a necessary function; as a check and balance against corporate power. But unions acting like this are just as bad as monopoly companies. Anti-trust legislation or similar should be brought to bear here to break the unions into smaller competing unions or place them under a consent decree. Just like a monopoly company should be broken up or placed on a consent decree (Google - search, Amazon - online shopping (although Amazon have yet to seriously part take in rent seeking), Microsoft - desktop software) so should abusive unions. Abuse of collective power; union, corporate, government should be constrained and where reasonably possible pre-empted.
- chimeracoder 9y ago
  > Anti-trust legislation or similar should be brought to bear here to break the unions into smaller competing unions or place them under a consent decree. We can't. US law explicitly exempts unions from the monopsony and anti-trust laws that would allow us to force them to compete with each other. Unions successfully lobbied for that special protection decades ago, and now it'd be very hard to reverse.
  - tankenmate 9y ago
    Doesn't mean we shouldn't try. I love unions, and I love companies too. One represents the capital and the other the labour; both should be forced to compete. But of course if a company tried to deal with only one union to force the hands of the others then the one they dealt with would wound up being broken up too. So problems wouldn't go away. And employees could chose the union that represents their interests best; i.e. charges reasonable fees, negotiates reasonable wages, etc.
brohee 9y ago
Because most countries have nationalized health care, projects abroad do not have to fund worker health insurance. That might explain a tenth of the cost differences, contractors said. That's a wrong analysis. Healthcare is funded of workers compensation in countries with nationalized healthcare. The real issue is that Americans pay much more for the same healthcare, but that only have repercussions on prices when it's actually financed and not a burden on society.
- TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
  Americans pay a huge percentage of GDP for relatively poor outcomes. http://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2015/oct/us-health-care-from-a-global-perspective http://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/20... So it’s not a wrong analysis. Helth care costs distort entire markets in the US.
  - chimeracoder 9y ago
    > So it’s not a wrong analysis. Helth care costs distort entire markets in the US. It's a completely wrong analysis. It's not even an analysis - it's just quoting a talking point straight from the MTA justifying their high payroll. And, as the article demonstrates, it's completely off-base. If you look at the numbers from the article, it still doesn't add up, even assuming that every employee is given the most generous healthcare plan available, the kind that venture-backed Silicon Valley startups might give to their employees.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
d13 9y ago
“Nobody knew what those people were doing, if they were doing anything,”... “All we knew is they were each being paid about $1,000 every day.” Why didn't they just ask them?
turc1656 9y ago
$1,000 a day?! $400 an hour for overtime on the weekend?! Holy shit, what a corrupt scam machine. The politicians that signed off on these projects at these costs after receiving generous donations should be flayed alive.
jgalt212 9y ago
> Trade unions, which have closely aligned themselves with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and other politicians, have secured deals requiring underground construction work to be staffed by as many as four times more laborers than elsewhere in the world, documents show. The Left decries the death of the unions, but it's this kind of nonsense that kept Obama from getting any sort of fiscal stimulus passed in the wake of 2008.
nkoren 9y ago
My previous career was as a consultant for public transport infrastructure. I was involved in consultations in roughly two dozen countries, depending on how you count, including India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and other localities not well-known for efficiency and innovation. Of these, however, public-sector America was overwhelmingly the least efficient and least innovative. (I'm American myself, but emigrated to the UK to find less crazy-making work in this sector.) This isn't just a New York problem, although the 2nd Avenue Subway is a really excellent example. It's a problem everywhere in America. I feel like this article does an excellent job of digging into some of the lower-level symptoms, but only touches lightly on the root cause. At its core, this is a product of not just a broken political system, but of two broken political cultures. Rhetoric has polarised into "we need to spend more money on the public good" (health care, infrastructure, etc.) vs. "we need to spend less money on the public good" -- Democrats and Republicans, respectively. I say "rhetoric" because what either side says has very little bearing on what they actually do, spending-wise, but nonetheless the rhetoric is important because of what it excludes. Missing from this dichotomy is: "we need to get smarter at spending money on the public good" -- independent of any argument about whether more or less should be spent. One simply isn't allowed to make this statement: the "spend more money" crowd reads such a statement as being fundamentally in opposition to a funding increase, while the "spend less money" crowd takes umbrage because of its implicit endorsement of spending money on the public good in the first place. Everybody hates the argument that spending can and should be done more smartly. It has no real supporters. But why not? Digging deeper, I submit that this isn't a broken system, but one which is working precisely as intended. It boils down to campaign finance: politicians need campaign funds to be re-elected, and unions and planning/engineering/construction companies are both major campaign contributors, on a bi-partisan basis (unions skewing Democratic of course, and the companies mostly skewing Republican). If public funds were spent more efficiently, they would get less money, full stop. Therefore they don't give campaign contributions to politicians who advocate such positions, and therefore there are no such politicians. So what we get is a system intended to redistribute money to major campaign contributors. It is working exactly as intended. In infrastructure this enriches both unions and corporates; in healthcare it enriches doctors, health insurers, drug companies, medical device companies, and lawyers. Those are the stakeholders that the systems are designed to serve. Recipients of actual transport / health care services are a tertiary concern at best. This problem won't be fixed until those "stakeholders" are held to better account, required to do more work for less money. And that won't happen as long as they are able to buy influence in the political system. Everywhere else in the world, the kind of influence-buying that happens in America is regarded as corruption and is highly criminalized; in America, corruption is legal as long as it goes through the right channels, and this is the result. So nothing will change without major campaign finance reform, and that seems to be a very distant prospect.
mschuster91 9y ago
> First, the contractors said, the vendors add between 15 and 25 percent as an “M.T.A. Factor” because of how hard it can be to work within the bureaucracy of the transit authority. Then they add 10 percent as a contingency for possible changes. And then they add another 10-12 percent on top of all that for profit and overhead. There is the core problem. Extreme horrid bureaucracy in the MTA (or any public sector), combined with the change stuff - it's not unusual for decades-long projects to have politicians demand changes, new regulations (fire protection!), court orders (environmental protection) or the discovery of historic sites leading to, sometimes expensive, change requests. If I were a contractor, of course I'd calculate with this risk in mind. I'd run bankrupt if not. > insisting on extravagant station designs And yet another problem: public projects don't like doing stuff with "standardized solutions". It always ends up with specific weird customizations - designed to e.g. force the project to buy parts from a specific vendor in the home region of the politicians (hello NASA, Airbus), or to prevent political undesirables from getting the contracts. In addition, with public-sector works there is often a lack of competent in house oversight and planning - and a lack of preventing any small politician to cause change requests in the first place.
ryan606 9y ago
Stories like these are the reason that much of the public hates unions -- especially public sector unions and unions employed/contracted on public sector projects. If public sector unions negotiated work rules and compensation that were more in line with the private sector, I suspect that their public image would benefit tremendously.
noddy1 9y ago
More and more I think that US/europe should adopt expat worker models. Having a bunch of chinese companies bidding on this sort of work and then bringing over ships full of temporary workers and equipment to do the job seems to make sense. We outsourced manufacturing, now we need to outsource infrastructure projects. It alleviates poverty in china, and ensures that our country doesn't become a useless calcified relic.

225 points by seibelj 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

“The estimated cost of the Long Island Rail Road project, known as “East Side Access,” has ballooned to $12 billion, or nearly $3.5 billion for each new mile of track — seven times the average elsewhere in the world.”

djsumdog 9y ago

Waste and corruption in a public good as vital as rail transport is truly sad. It happens everywhere though. In Melbourne, contracts for their new ticketing system were given to a totally unqualified company and ran several hundred million over budget. Rather than just eat the cost, the corrupt city officials have doubled down by wasting more money of worthless ticket inspectors to attempt to recover some of the costs from fare evaders. https://sites.google.com/site/cheaperthanmyki/home https://sites.google.com/site/cheaperthanmyki/home

boulos 9y ago
Having just visited Melbourne, I truly hated being forced into paying $7 (AUD) for the privilege of getting a myki card to make a $4.10 trip each way (so $8.20). There is no longer any way to buy paper tickets, and unlike San Francisco which can print out reasonable RF-enabled single ride tickets for MUNI, everyone took it as obvious that $7 AUD was simply the cost of doing business. Thanks for the backstory on myki!
- ClassyJacket 9y ago
  Melbourne had a disposable ticket system in place for Myki - the tickets had already been made[1]. The Liberal government threw them out, wasting 15 million dollars in the process. And probably more on the equipment to dispense them. This is the same party that on a federal level threw out the nationwide fibre to the premises project, wasting 50 billion dollars on installing new DSL connections instead. I am actually being serious, they will be installing new DSL at a cost of 2400$ per premises until at least 2020. [1] http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/15m-myki-cards-set-to-be-pulped-20110904-1jsf3.html http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/15m-myki-cards-set-to-be-p...
jseliger 9y ago
It happens everywhere though Did you read the article? The leaders entrusted to expand New York’s regional transit network have paid the highest construction costs in the world, spending billions of dollars that could have been used to fix existing subway tunnels, tracks, trains and signals. The estimated cost of the Long Island Rail Road project, known as “East Side Access,” has ballooned to $12 billion, or nearly $3.5 billion for each new mile of track — seven times the average elsewhere in the world. The recently completed Second Avenue subway on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and the 2015 extension of the No. 7 line to Hudson Yards also cost far above average, at $2.5 billion and $1.5 billion per mile, respectively

AznHisoka 9y ago

Sometimes I wonder why the heck I should live in NYC and pay so much in state and city taxes.. and then I can’t even deduct them starting in 2018... But then i get depressed so I try not to think of it too much.

ajmurmann 9y ago
I'm sure getting more negative about living in NYC was exactly one of the things that the authors of the tax bill aimed for.
- bmelton 9y ago
  Meanwhile, progressive-leaning organizations have been pushing for the elimination of SALT deductions for years, on the logic that it primarily benefits the wealthy residents in high tax states. The Center for American Progress was urging the Obama administration to eliminate those tax deductions[1]. Politifact fact-checked a Pelosi claim, and came to the same conclusion, that the SALT deudction "is a tax deduction that disproportionately benefits higher-income taxpayers[2]". Only 10% of filers earning under $50k a year even bother claiming the deduction[3][4]. [1] - https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/general/news/2011/02/02/9070/tax-expenditure-of-the-week-state-and-local-tax-deduction/ https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/general/news/2011/02... [2] - http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/oct/20/nancy-pelosi/do-moderate-income-families-benefit-more-state-and/ http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/oct/... [3] - https://www.urban.org/research/publication/repeal-state-and-local-tax-deduction https://www.urban.org/research/publication/repeal-state-and-... [4] - https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2017/12/20/the-only-good-thing-about-the-tax-bill/ https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2017/12/20/the-only-go...
  - ajmurmann 9y ago
    "wealthy residents in high tax states" This to me is one of the biggest problems talking about taxation and wealth in the US. $50k is nothing you can really live off in most (by population) parts of California. $100k would make you well-off elsewhere but makes you poor in the Bay Area. While I'm generally for some degree of wealth redistribution, I'm afraid this will hit many people who aren't actually wealthy, but just scraping by.

so33 9y ago

The NYT article compares East Side Access and the Second Avenue Subway to the Line 14 extension project in the Paris Metro: >... while the Second Avenue Subway cost $2.5 billion a mile, the Line 14 extension is on track to cost $450 million a mile. The costs for the SAS, over 5 times more per mile than the Line 14 extension, are preposterous in this context.

RayVR 9y ago
Why is the line 14 extension not comparable?

narrator 9y ago

In the U.S, public transportation has the same problem as healthcare. That problem is that spending more money on it won't make it better since the costs are already many times higher than any other country. However, there is always a demand that to get better public transportation and healthcare we must continue to raise taxes. Finding out what is so expensive and fixing that never occurs to anybody, probably because it's some well connected person's cash cow.

BurningFrog 9y ago
> Finding out what is so expensive and fixing that never occurs to anybody It occurs to a lot of people. We're just completely powerless.
- windlep 9y ago
  Not only that does it occur, but it also occurs that the same people messing it up have bought off both sides. So it's not like voting for Dems or Republicans will magically make it cheaper. They'll just change who pays the insane prices, if that.
  - ringaroundthetx 9y ago
    Yeah my frightened brethren in coastal US cities dont get it, the political party is a sideshow: play by a more effective set of rules If you DONT have a state-sanctioned racket I’m like “Do you even America bruh?”
  - imbur 9y ago
    Are there any examples of states or countries that handle this the right way? Can this be applied to NYC?
    - oblio 9y ago
      Most European countries have a multi-party system, usually due to not using first past the post voting systems. As a result you have more parties, more diversity of choice and less polarization and of course more competition. Parties can actually go away and they do, usually every few decades. The downside is that you can get deadlocks as no party can get a majority sometimes, even after making coalitions with smaller parties. Still better end result than the US end result, in my opinion.

kevin_thibedeau 9y ago

> they were each being paid about $1,000 every day How is this even possible?

bob_theslob646 9y ago
You left off the most important piece. If your going to quote it, provide the right context. >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.”
- bassman9000 9y ago
  Thanks. That's $200k extra a day, 1m week, 4.5m month extra. _no one figured out how long they had been employed_ Nice.
  - zeep 9y ago
    it would be cheaper to get universal income going

rayiner 9y ago

> “We thought ours was expensive,” said Laurent Probst, managing director of Île-de-France Mobilités, which controls transit in the French capital. > The small number of workers has not slowed the Paris project. The line, which will run driverless trains every 85 seconds, is set to open by 2020, six years after groundbreaking. The Second Avenue subway, by contrast, took a decade to build. > M.T.A. officials declined to comment on the Paris project. French inefficiency used to be a joke in the US when I was a kid. Joke’s on us now I guess.

pluma 9y ago
American inefficiency has been a joke in Germany as far as I can think back. Also, a recurring theme in what I hear about American customers from people working in manufacturing is that US companies insist on providing extremely detailed specs and strict tolerances but then run into issues because their own (presumably US sourced) parts don't actually match the same specs.
- masklinn 9y ago
  > American inefficiency has been a joke in Germany as far as I can think back. 'course now there's BER so the joke is a bit harder to make.
  - chx 9y ago
    For people not familiar with that particular flustercuck: BER is the new Berlin Brandenburg airport. After a lot (more than 15 years!) of planning they began building in 2006. By 2011 October, it was ready or so they thought. In 2011 November they actually ran trials with some 12 000 people. 8 May 2012 it was announced due to the failure of the fire protection system the opening is postponed. In a 2016 audit, they concluded the airport was at less than 60% readiness in reality at 2012 May. Right now the opening is perhaps late 2020 or even 2021... We are getting to the point where the 2016 audit should've concluded it is better to tear it down and build a new one.
  - Feniks 9y ago
    Berlin is the black sheep in the German family. Luckily Berlin always gets bailed out by its loving Bayern family members.

seibelj 9y ago

I’m not sure why the title was changed. “On Earth” is in the article’s headline. Some sort of editorializing by HN staff, very strange.

SilasX 9y ago
“On Earth” isn’t very descriptive of what the article is about. The new one is.
dang 9y ago
Taking redundancy and linkbait out of submission titles is standard here. "On Earth" was redundant because where else would the subway track be? And it was hyperbolic, therefore linkbait, which is presumably why they put it there to begin with. That's not editorializing because no particular interpretation is being pushed; we're just being good Strunk-and-Whiters and omitting needless words.
- jcranmer 9y ago
  > "On Earth" was redundant because where else would the subway track be? Without qualifiers, given the provenance of its source material, one could reasonably assume it to mean "in the US". Saying "on Earth" or "in the world" would clarify that it's being compared against all other subway building occurring, even (perhaps especially) against notoriously corrupt countries with artificially high construction costs.
  - tomhoward 9y ago
    ...would clarify that it's being compared against all other subway building occurring Sure, but it's not that kind of article. The title is rhetorical, rather than conveying a demonstrated fact. The article isn't about some study that establishes with certainty that it is actually the most expensive length of track, anywhere in the world, ever, in real terms. Sure it seems plausible given the facts conveyed in the article, but the world is big and the history of rail is fairly long, and the article is not describing an exhaustive comparison with every other railway ever built. So it seems reasonable for dang to decide that the original title is a little too baity for HN.

exikyut 9y ago

> 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.” People may disagree with the following view and downvote, but still... Where can I read an account of what the accountant found and how they reached their conclusions? I can only trust/hope that the accountant had experience in construction and/or could consult with trustworthy advisers. But the two things that came to mind as I read these three paragraphs were that a) this is a puff piece written from the POV of "spending too much money" for whatever agenda this spin would help b) this is cost-cutting being re-spun to look good Some balance: I live close by to a brand new driverless underground metro network that's being developed. I'm super excited to travel on the new trains when they arrive. I even hope to work there at some point. When I was poking around the websites at an early point in the construction process, I found that one site's design/layout was clearly mobile-first to the extent that it was mobile-only and displayed Amusingly™ on a desktop PC; I also found a bit of a headscratcher with another site's DNS setup that I didn't know where to report; and when I poked around the bid platform that let any contractor sign up to be recruited to be part of the construction, I decided the whole system (bid platform and everything else) felt very very rushed-through. So I have no industry experience but I've had a very tiny whiff of what a multi-billion project looks like on the ground as it's developing. Tons of overhead, lots of space for little things to fall through, etc etc. I wouldn't be surprised if what's happening here is really just most of the same kinds of industrial-scale rounding errors. But that makes it equally possible that what's reported really is unambiguously what happened, or that this is the uncomfortable norm and there's some spin.

Spooky23 9y ago

mc32 9y ago

In SF a couple of parks needed to have new public bathrooms built. Cost: 2 million.[1] If you had to do it yourself, It'd be about 100k max. It's pure graft and greediness. Meanwhile in Japan, they convert an above ground line into a subway line in 3.5 hours of coordinated work.[2] It's a startling difference. This is the one time I'd love to be able to bring engineering and crew from overseas and have them do the work for us and dispense with all the local corruption. 200 ghost workers -unbelievable. And they initially wanted to keep that discovery quiet. $1000/day/ghost worker for the taxpayers of New York. $200k waste per day --that's how much The City respects its citizens. [1]http://hoodline.com/2017/10/golden-gate-park-playground-lands-2-million-for-bathrooms-upgrades http://hoodline.com/2017/10/golden-gate-park-playground-land... [2]https://youtu.be/wIbZqqLra9k?t=80 https://youtu.be/wIbZqqLra9k?t=80

olingern 9y ago
Japan also has a much different outlook on blue collar jobs, and (from studying the culture and spending ~3 months there) people seem to take genuine pride in their job regardless of what it is. Contrast that with the MTA subway workers I see regularly huddled into groups, shooting the breeze and playing on their phones -- it's a widely different outlook on work. Also regarding you [2] link, I can't remember where I read it, but I believe that operation took years of planning.
- mc32 9y ago
  I mean, to be sure Japan has institutionalized pork too[1]. They offer contracts to build retaining walls where no one lives. But damn, when they have to do something they are experts in they do it right. And given the JRs are private orgs, they can't just ask for another bond measure or other tax or more pork from the govt. And of course it took years of planning. In the US you'd have years of "planning" [pork dealing] and then the line shut down for a year or two probably, doing things as slowly as possible. [1]https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-japan-election-concrete/analysis-japan-election-points-to-return-of-construction-state-idUKBRE8BA1AD20121211 https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-japan-election-concrete/a...

mojomark 9y ago

More "fleecing of America" alarmist journalist bullshit. This type of ill-informed journalism is largely what creates the red tape (i.e. extra layers of unnecessary oversight, insane requirements, and irrational spending restrictions) in government agencies that would otherwise be very lean. I'm a government contractor and I see first hand every day (painfully) how this type of reporting has resulted in the Governments inability to attract and retain talent, as well as the loss of corporate knowledge. It's the same irrational logic that prevents non-profit orgs from attracting/regaining talent because people thinking that wvery dollar spent goes directly to those in need without regard to the need to build an infrastructure to deliver fund/aid. I have no knowledge of New York subterranian transit, but at some point you have to step back and ask yourself if the expenditure is worth it, simply based on the value of the dollar. I think it is. This journalist apparently doesn't, but seems to have all the answers, so I say fire the 200 'excessive' workers, hire Todd Heisler (the journalist) and put him in charge of the teamining 600 workers (and associated budget) to get the job done. Apparently 900 isn't good enough for Todd.

pishpash 9y ago
Just because NYC generates enough value to make an over-budget project still "worth it" does not mean everybody should be sucking on the government teat and seeing nothing wrong with it.
zck 9y ago
> I have no knowledge of New York subterranian transit, but at some point you have to step back and ask yourself if the expenditure is worth it, simply based on the value of the dollar. I think it is. That may be true. But if NYC could get five times the amount of new track for the same money, I'd prefer that. Or spend the money revamping parts of the crumbling control systems. Or pay down debt. The point is that NYC shouldn't spend more money than it has to.
JumpCrisscross 9y ago
> you have to step back and ask yourself if the expenditure is worth it I don’t think our $4 billion train station that looks like a reptilian carcass is worth it [1]. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/6/11168484/inside-the-oculus-new-yorks-insane-looking-4-billion-train-station https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/6/11168484/inside-the-oculus...

annerajb 9y ago

Hmm maybe this is what the boring company is trying to do. If they can use their tech to tunnel the same distance at 90% less would truly redefine transport.

cardamomo 9y ago
The problem NYC is facing isn't the tech. The MTA's tunnel-boring machines can be operated with far fewer people.
mc32 9y ago
There was initial skepticism regarding Musk's predicted [reduced] costs --perhaps he was taking into account the removal of all these excess construction costs much of the public isn't privy to.
alexhutcheson 9y ago
A good response to the Boring Company plans: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2017/12/15/elon-musks-ideas-about-transportation-are-boring/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/2017/12/15/elon-musks-ide...
venomsnake 9y ago
Boring itself is highly optimized - the oil industry likes their holes long, stable and cheap. So the tech is there. It is the other stuff that bogs down a project.

spikels 9y ago

This is what is killing US public transit. Most things are reasonably priced in the US by global standards. Why are our public works projects always so ridiculously expensive? It has to be some structural or cultural difference.

mc32 9y ago
I'm not an expert, but it seems the mix of unions, politicians, kickbacks, corruption, favoritism, etc., leads itself to abuse. Maybe, maybe if we just used something similar to the Army Corps of Engineers to handle all major infra construction in the US, keeping local politicians out of the fiscal and contractual aspects, then maybe we could get what we pay for. In the meantime, it seems like a bunch of backscratching and pocket stuffing --I mean, someone's making money.
- thatfrenchguy 9y ago
  Using a public agency to build stuff ? That’s socialism yo.
  - mc32 9y ago
    Can't be worse than local politicians. The Corps would do the management and contract with local engineering concerns --at reasonable prices. Bring them from Texas, Illinois, who cares, so long as they can do the job.
  - azemetre 9y ago
    I prefer my public works to be infested with kickbacks and bribes from massive corporations.
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  Is the military somehow more efficient?
  - vadimberman 9y ago
    Not really. The military contracts are a pork barrel.

bob_theslob646 9y ago

Reading this makes me want to throw up. How these people are not in jail is beyond me. First Wall Street and now the MTA. My dad would always say this expression to describe the difference between a criminal on Wall Street and in construction. The only difference is a suit.

chimeracoder 9y ago
> My dad would always say this expression to describe the difference between a criminal on Wall Street and in construction. The only difference is a suit. Also, the construction worker or MTA worker is probably making more money and working fewer hours. For those who don't believe me, read the article - or even look up the salaries online, since they're often public. This is not even an exaggeration.

lmm 9y ago

> But the government worked closely with vendors, trying to build the type of collaborative relationships that are rare in New York. This comes just a handful of paragraphs after: > A Times analysis of the 25 M.T.A. agency presidents who have left over the past two decades found that at least 18 of them became consultants or went to work for authority contractors, including many who have worked on expansion projects. > “Is it rigged? Yes,” said Charles G. Moerdler, who has served on the M.T.A. board since 2010. “I don’t think it’s corrupt. But I think people like doing business with people they know, and so a few companies get all the work, and they can charge whatever they want.” So which is it? Is the MTA not close enough to the vendors, or too close?

lewis500 9y ago
I think this is the most important part. It reveals one reason why things are bad: uncompetitive bidding.

desertrider12 9y ago

If the tunnels have a 20 ft diameter, that's $2100 per cubic foot of material removed. Give me a jackhammer and shovel and I'll happily do it for 50% off.

elango 9y ago

There is a burst of NY times articles with annoying paid plans

electic 9y ago

> The labor deals negotiated between the unions and construction companies also ensure that workers are well paid. The agreement for Local 147, the union for the famed “sandhogs” who dig the tunnels, includes a pay rate for most members of $111 per hour in salary and benefits. The pay doubles for overtime or Sunday work, which is common in transit construction. Weekend overtime pays quadruple — more than $400 per hour. The article correctly identifies the number of people are working on a job is about 4x the normal rate when compared to Asia and Europe. However, when you take the hourly pay rate you quickly see it for what it is. This is fraud.

chimeracoder 9y ago
It's even worse than that: > The critics pointed to several unusual provisions in the labor agreements. One part of Local 147’s deal entitles the union to $450,000 for each tunnel-boring machine used. That is to make up for job losses from “technological advancement,” even though equipment has been standard for decades They literally have to pay the union $450,000 for using machines that have been standard around the world for fifty years.
- Robotbeat 9y ago
  ...and people scoff at Elon Musk for saying he can significantly reduce the cost of tunneling in the US...
  - chimeracoder 9y ago
    > ...and people scoff at Elon Musk for saying he can significantly reduce the cost of tunneling in the US... Nobody scoffs at Elon Musk for suggesting he could reduce the cost of tunneling in the US. It's not like it's a mystery why tunneling is so expensive. They scoff at the suggestion that he's somehow unique or exceptional for making that claim.
    - Robotbeat 9y ago
      Then their problem is with the press, not Elon Musk.

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Animats 9y ago

It's an inherently hard project that's costing way too much. The East Side Access involves building another level of station underneath Grand Central Station, without disrupting service. The tracks are 150 feet below Park Avenue. They're working around skyscraper foundations, and adding supports for buildings above. Look at some of the pictures on line.

tomarr 9y ago
The article goes into this though, these challenges are something that comparable international projects have faced in much worse ground conditions (which extenuates the issue). The magnitude of cost difference does not stem from engineering challenges.
- martinald 9y ago
  Exactly. Crossrail in London had some insanely difficult challenges (like threading a new subway tunnel between two existing ones with only a few cm of distance between them), and hitting an enormous ancient Roman burial ground at Liverpool Street. Despite that (and many more) it is currently 6 months ahead of schedule. There's a great documentary about the project called the fifteen billion pound railway which covers a lot of these challenges.
  - spiralx 9y ago
    Don't forget that they did that bit of the tunnelling on a Monday morning, there were some tense looking staff on the platform that morning :)

cmurf 9y ago

Lack of anti-fraud measures in the law as well as in the project contracts. Where's the auditing and prosecution budget? There should be an independent auditor making referrals for prosecution to an independent prosecutor. Th $3.5 billion for each new mile of track At a certain point of a project, whether business or personal, you pull the fucking plug. Done. Scrape it. Cut the loss. And that's what should be done here. Fire everyone, fire the contractors, they don't like it, sue, the gravy train has come to an end.

keithpeter 9y ago
I understand the feeling(1), but if only a small number of contractors are bidding for the work, and you pull the plug on a major contract, how do you move forward? Abandon any plans for extensions? Demolish buildings to build more roads? (1) In the UK, national government IT projects famously go over cost and sometimes, arguably, under-deliver. Much finger pointing. Very limited number of companies that have the scale to bid for projects.
ubernostrum 9y ago
It's worth pointing out that a situation like this is often the endgame of anti-corruption rules. It always starts simple: you put in a rule, say, that a contract can't be awarded to a contractor who has some relationship to the person making the decision. Then someone quite reasonably objects that a bureaucrat from a different department might try to influence the decision-maker to award to their friend for a kickback. So now you add a rule that there are multiple entities, ideally adversarial, involved who all have to agree before the contract gets awarded. Then you pile on yet more rules as people come up with ever more creative ways to get around them. And then one day you wake up and realize you have a literal maze of reports and applications and audits and inspections and committees that all have to be fulfilled for even the simplest project, and it's grown so complex that only a couple of companies put in the (extreme) effort of figuring out how to navigate it; everybody else has given up. Now those have a guaranteed lock on future contracts, and no longer have any incentive to be honest or control costs, since who else are you ever going to legally be able to give a contract to? Plus, the system is so complex that even the people in charge of it don't always know how to manage or enforce it. And then the costs start going up and up and up...

vman81 9y ago

"Construction companies, which have given millions of dollars in campaign donations in recent years, have increased their projected costs by up to 50 percent when bidding for work from the M.T.A., contractors say." That's because you've legalized bribery. Your political system rewards corruption. Every actor in the described mess is (re)acting rationally. Is this somehow a surprise?

masterleep 9y ago
The surprise is the large number of seemingly intelligent people constantly bleating for more of the same.
chimeracoder 9y ago
> That's because you've legalized bribery. Your political system rewards corruption. Every actor in the described mess is (re)acting rationally. Is this somehow a surprise? Ugh, please stop saying this. Bribery is not legal in the US. We literally just tried a sitting US senator for corruption including bribery, and we just convicted the former Speaker of the New York State Assembly for corruption, including bribery and kickbacks. It's very much not legal. New York politics is an outlier - in fact, New York has literally the most corrupt government in the country. The problem isn't that it's legal (it's not legal); the problem is that New York has such a wide and extensive network of corruption (as this article shows) that it's damn-near impossible to actually address any of it.
- reustle 9y ago
  But campaign donations by corporate interests and lobbying _are_ essentially legal bribery.
  - chimeracoder 9y ago
    > But campaign donations by corporate interests and lobbying _are_ essentially legal bribery. Campaign contributions and lobbying are not at all the same thing. First, "Corporate interests" are prohibited from making campaign contributions. Secondly, lobbying is simply the process of petitioning elected officials to persuade them to advocate your causes. That's not unique to the US; every democracy has a mechanism for that process.

mahgnous 9y ago

How does this have anything to do with tech?

cm2187 9y ago

Can’t help thinking of the sopranos, where a few mobsters were “employed” on construction sites. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=r-ECvI5rD40 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=r-ECvI5rD40

mnm1 9y ago

There's simply no excuse for not tracking spending. With software, every $1 box of nails should be tracked. Everything else is fraud, that the NYC DA seems to be willingly ignoring. Once again, no consequences for bad behavior. Almost every single issue here boils down to no consequences for harmful behavior or horrific consequences for normal behavior. It will be interesting to see if we ever implement a justice system to fix these problems or just keep pretending like whatever the fuck we're doing now is working.

briandear 9y ago
The Manhattan DA is Cyrus Vance Jr., son of Jimmy Carter Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. Jr has come under fire for refusing to prosecute Weinstein and there is some evidence that his office received campaign donations from high profile people he refused to prosecute. Vance is about as old school “NY Democrat machine politics” as it gets. He’s pretty much a modern Tamminy Hall. If he’s DA you will never see any prosecutions for politically-connected corruption — at least not as long as the campaign donations are rolling in. By the way, I am not implying that Republicans are any better or worse — Vance is just in the dominant party of NYC politics — the problem is the “machine” not the specific flavor of that machine. If you are in New York, stop voting for Vance and other stuff like him. There is a lot of talk about “resisting Trump,” but really I have yet to see any equivalent outrage over the guys right in your neighborhood that are essentially enabling theft and corruption. Most New Yorkers can spit fire over Trump, but seem to be asleep when it comes to this ground level corruption. Tip O’Neil once said “All politics is local,” — perhaps voters should act like it and start holding local politicians’ feet to the fire. In a city packed full of lawyers, Cyrus Vance is the best y’all could do? For sure national politics matters, but the real bleeding happens on the street: on school boards, the DA’s office, City Hall, in the boroughs.. NYC is a great city — despite the politicians New Yorkers insist on re-electing.
- thebiglebrewski 9y ago
  I'm pretty sure Vance ran unopposed in the latest election. I did not want to vote for him.

arnon 9y ago

Anyone who's ever tried to set up a booth at a trade-show will know exactly what this is like. $900 for renting a TV for 3 days + $450 fee for installing the bracket + $180 for placing a power-strip at your booth. You're billed $90 for every hour of work, billed at 30m increments. Order of business: 1. Person comes to look at where you want the TV. Billed $45. 2. Person comes to drop by an extension cord, $45. 3. Person comes to plug the extension cord in, but sees you're not ready to have the TV mounted yet, $45. 4. Lunch break 5. Person comes to hook up the extension cord, $45. Total bill: $180, for something a kindergartner can do (literally connecting a power cord to the socket that's already in the floor)

ianlevesque 9y ago
So what happens if you just plug it in yourself?
- imglorp 9y ago
  Trade unions get seriously bunched panties about power to conference booths. Organizers are forced to play along, ostensibly for fire marshal and safety rules but really for union getting its cut.
  - briandear 9y ago
    Think that’s bad — visit a Hollywood film location. I was a camera assistant for a film and I literally couldn’t drive dailies from the airport in my own car — that’s the Teamsters. I couldn’t touch a broom to sweep up our camera loading area — that’s another Union. I couldn’t plug a surge protector into an outlet — that’s the electricians. I couldn’t touch a dolly upon which we were to mount a camera — that’s Grip. I couldn’t move a $500 light five centimeters — That’s Lighting — despite being trusted to load a $100k+ Panavision camera or attach at $85k lens. And god forbid shooting take 30 seconds longer than the schedule — the entire crew on the set gets overtime.. costing thousands of dollars. However to be fair, Hollywood is a private enterprise so it’s what the market allows — but when it comes to public money, it’s infuriating for such egregious waste and inefficiency.

tankenmate 9y ago

Unions have a necessary function; as a check and balance against corporate power. But unions acting like this are just as bad as monopoly companies. Anti-trust legislation or similar should be brought to bear here to break the unions into smaller competing unions or place them under a consent decree. Just like a monopoly company should be broken up or placed on a consent decree (Google - search, Amazon - online shopping (although Amazon have yet to seriously part take in rent seeking), Microsoft - desktop software) so should abusive unions. Abuse of collective power; union, corporate, government should be constrained and where reasonably possible pre-empted.

chimeracoder 9y ago
> Anti-trust legislation or similar should be brought to bear here to break the unions into smaller competing unions or place them under a consent decree. We can't. US law explicitly exempts unions from the monopsony and anti-trust laws that would allow us to force them to compete with each other. Unions successfully lobbied for that special protection decades ago, and now it'd be very hard to reverse.
- tankenmate 9y ago
  Doesn't mean we shouldn't try. I love unions, and I love companies too. One represents the capital and the other the labour; both should be forced to compete. But of course if a company tried to deal with only one union to force the hands of the others then the one they dealt with would wound up being broken up too. So problems wouldn't go away. And employees could chose the union that represents their interests best; i.e. charges reasonable fees, negotiates reasonable wages, etc.

brohee 9y ago

Because most countries have nationalized health care, projects abroad do not have to fund worker health insurance. That might explain a tenth of the cost differences, contractors said. That's a wrong analysis. Healthcare is funded of workers compensation in countries with nationalized healthcare. The real issue is that Americans pay much more for the same healthcare, but that only have repercussions on prices when it's actually financed and not a burden on society.

TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
Americans pay a huge percentage of GDP for relatively poor outcomes. http://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2015/oct/us-health-care-from-a-global-perspective http://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/20... So it’s not a wrong analysis. Helth care costs distort entire markets in the US.
- chimeracoder 9y ago
  > So it’s not a wrong analysis. Helth care costs distort entire markets in the US. It's a completely wrong analysis. It's not even an analysis - it's just quoting a talking point straight from the MTA justifying their high payroll. And, as the article demonstrates, it's completely off-base. If you look at the numbers from the article, it still doesn't add up, even assuming that every employee is given the most generous healthcare plan available, the kind that venture-backed Silicon Valley startups might give to their employees.

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d13 9y ago

“Nobody knew what those people were doing, if they were doing anything,”... “All we knew is they were each being paid about $1,000 every day.” Why didn't they just ask them?

turc1656 9y ago

$1,000 a day?! $400 an hour for overtime on the weekend?! Holy shit, what a corrupt scam machine. The politicians that signed off on these projects at these costs after receiving generous donations should be flayed alive.

jgalt212 9y ago

> Trade unions, which have closely aligned themselves with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and other politicians, have secured deals requiring underground construction work to be staffed by as many as four times more laborers than elsewhere in the world, documents show. The Left decries the death of the unions, but it's this kind of nonsense that kept Obama from getting any sort of fiscal stimulus passed in the wake of 2008.

nkoren 9y ago

My previous career was as a consultant for public transport infrastructure. I was involved in consultations in roughly two dozen countries, depending on how you count, including India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and other localities not well-known for efficiency and innovation. Of these, however, public-sector America was overwhelmingly the least efficient and least innovative. (I'm American myself, but emigrated to the UK to find less crazy-making work in this sector.) This isn't just a New York problem, although the 2nd Avenue Subway is a really excellent example. It's a problem everywhere in America. I feel like this article does an excellent job of digging into some of the lower-level symptoms, but only touches lightly on the root cause. At its core, this is a product of not just a broken political system, but of two broken political cultures. Rhetoric has polarised into "we need to spend more money on the public good" (health care, infrastructure, etc.) vs. "we need to spend less money on the public good" -- Democrats and Republicans, respectively. I say "rhetoric" because what either side says has very little bearing on what they actually do, spending-wise, but nonetheless the rhetoric is important because of what it excludes. Missing from this dichotomy is: "we need to get smarter at spending money on the public good" -- independent of any argument about whether more or less should be spent. One simply isn't allowed to make this statement: the "spend more money" crowd reads such a statement as being fundamentally in opposition to a funding increase, while the "spend less money" crowd takes umbrage because of its implicit endorsement of spending money on the public good in the first place. Everybody hates the argument that spending can and should be done more smartly. It has no real supporters. But why not? Digging deeper, I submit that this isn't a broken system, but one which is working precisely as intended. It boils down to campaign finance: politicians need campaign funds to be re-elected, and unions and planning/engineering/construction companies are both major campaign contributors, on a bi-partisan basis (unions skewing Democratic of course, and the companies mostly skewing Republican). If public funds were spent more efficiently, they would get less money, full stop. Therefore they don't give campaign contributions to politicians who advocate such positions, and therefore there are no such politicians. So what we get is a system intended to redistribute money to major campaign contributors. It is working exactly as intended. In infrastructure this enriches both unions and corporates; in healthcare it enriches doctors, health insurers, drug companies, medical device companies, and lawyers. Those are the stakeholders that the systems are designed to serve. Recipients of actual transport / health care services are a tertiary concern at best. This problem won't be fixed until those "stakeholders" are held to better account, required to do more work for less money. And that won't happen as long as they are able to buy influence in the political system. Everywhere else in the world, the kind of influence-buying that happens in America is regarded as corruption and is highly criminalized; in America, corruption is legal as long as it goes through the right channels, and this is the result. So nothing will change without major campaign finance reform, and that seems to be a very distant prospect.

mschuster91 9y ago

> First, the contractors said, the vendors add between 15 and 25 percent as an “M.T.A. Factor” because of how hard it can be to work within the bureaucracy of the transit authority. Then they add 10 percent as a contingency for possible changes. And then they add another 10-12 percent on top of all that for profit and overhead. There is the core problem. Extreme horrid bureaucracy in the MTA (or any public sector), combined with the change stuff - it's not unusual for decades-long projects to have politicians demand changes, new regulations (fire protection!), court orders (environmental protection) or the discovery of historic sites leading to, sometimes expensive, change requests. If I were a contractor, of course I'd calculate with this risk in mind. I'd run bankrupt if not. > insisting on extravagant station designs And yet another problem: public projects don't like doing stuff with "standardized solutions". It always ends up with specific weird customizations - designed to e.g. force the project to buy parts from a specific vendor in the home region of the politicians (hello NASA, Airbus), or to prevent political undesirables from getting the contracts. In addition, with public-sector works there is often a lack of competent in house oversight and planning - and a lack of preventing any small politician to cause change requests in the first place.

ryan606 9y ago

Stories like these are the reason that much of the public hates unions -- especially public sector unions and unions employed/contracted on public sector projects. If public sector unions negotiated work rules and compensation that were more in line with the private sector, I suspect that their public image would benefit tremendously.

noddy1 9y ago

More and more I think that US/europe should adopt expat worker models. Having a bunch of chinese companies bidding on this sort of work and then bringing over ships full of temporary workers and equipment to do the job seems to make sense. We outsourced manufacturing, now we need to outsource infrastructure projects. It alleviates poverty in china, and ensures that our country doesn't become a useless calcified relic.