6 ms·

The article lacks precision in the fact that it's not necessarily "American" construction costs, so much as "why are construction costs in large American cities

• xxpor 6y ago
  >We know very well that there are orders of magnitude more bureaucratic obstacles, as well as dramatically higher labor costs, when comparing any building project conducted in Texas vs. California. New York City's municipal projects are widely-known to have dramatically inflated labor costs due to various factors, not limited to rampant corruption within unionized labor. Please read the actual link. This simply isn't an issue the way you think it is. "It's the unions" is simply being intellectually lazy because it fits your preconceived notions. "I am not overlooking union power, I believe it is not an important factor, not when right-to-work US states have very high construction costs too while Scandinavia has low costs." The problem is the quantity of labor. In the US we use many more people to operate a TBM vs what they'd use in Europe. On commuter rail lines we pay conductors $100k a year to collect tickets when in Europe they'd use a ticket machine. On the NYC subway they have a driver and a conductor when in Europe they'd only have a driver at best, or even some lines are being made driverless I believe. They're trying that in NYC too but it's complicated and costly because of how old the signaling system is, because it was too costly to ever upgrade. The agencies should focus less during union negotiations on keeping salaries and benefits down and more on reducing the quantity of required workers. If they were able to do it in Europe, they can certainly do it here.
  • bpodgursky 6y ago
    You can try to break it down, but the fact is in NYC the quantity of labor is a union-negotiated (and demanded) problem. The NYTimes did a detailed article on this a couple years ago, with a focus on the NY subway expansion: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-.... There's no escaping that the overstaffing was a political boon to a union. _Why_ NY construction unions are so much worse than Scandinavian unions is a whole different question. But it's not really deniable that the public-union interaction in big cities here is incredibly extractive and antagonistic, and that drives up costs.
  • wil421 6y ago
    Who do you think requests more quantity of labor for every job?
    • throwaway0a5e 6y ago
      The unions. And the contractors pass on the cost because the bigger the final dollar amount the more opportunity there is to squeeze in profit. And the beurcrats rubber stamp it because the bigger the amount of resources they control the more powerful they are. And the politicans ignore it because it provides them more power to do favors and a bigger haystack in which to bury their nepotism and unethical meddling. It's self serving waste all the way down. The fundamental problem is that nobody anywhere in the chain or responsibility wants to spend taxpayer money with precision, efficiency and care because doing otherwise is in their best interest, as is every other party, except the taxpayer who has no choice but to bend over and take it. It's not just a union problem. But rest assured the unions are doing all they can to perpetuate it as it benefits them.
      • bjourne 6y ago
        How does that work? Unions do not run companies and hence have no say in negotiations between government offices and contractors. Unions only concern themselves with the relationship between the employees and the employer. I don't think you know what a union is.
• bradleyjg 6y ago
  > DC, NYC, LA, SF are not representative of how infrastructure projects are pursued in the rest of the country. If the suburbs are different, this is a decent point. But the major American cities and their suburbs are a majority of the country on every metric that matters. BOS-WASH + SoCal alone is more than 20%.
  • ff317 6y ago
    The state of Texas is ~9% of the US pop, and Dallas, TX (top metro area by pop in the state, 4th in the country) has a substantial public transit infra to study (DART).
    • bradleyjg 6y ago
      Totally reasonable to say we should look at Greater Houston and Dallas-Ft. Worth as well as BOS-WASH, SoCaL, and Chicagoland.
• closeparen 6y ago
  The rest of the country keeps its transit infrastructure costs down by refusing to have transit. New York and California have plenty of roads.
  • Ericson2314 6y ago
    And roads aren't even cheap, but they are nice and decentralized and do not require smart planners. That's a nice resiliency and I give roads credit where they are due for it. But cars are terrible and we simple cannot continue to do the easy status quo thing.
    • closeparen 6y ago
      Grids can be resilient, but these days we protect neighborhoods from traffic by forcing use of arterials/collectors that become single points of failure. Often this is even retrofitted onto grids via turn restrictions.
• aidenn0 6y ago
  They are comparing large American cities to large cities in other countries, so it's apples-to-apples.