This is woefully lacking in context. The Second Avenue subway in particular was proposed more than a hundred years ago and at that time the proposal was consid

This is woefully lacking in context. The Second Avenue subway in particular was proposed more than a hundred years ago and at that time the proposal was considered to be far more expensive than could possibly make sense. Over and over again the proposal came back up and got shot down again because of the expense. By the time New York actually committed to building the Second Avenue subway there was roughly a hundred years of literature going in detail into why the project was simply to complicated and costly to ever make sense. So then they actually built it and if you can actually imagine this it turned out to be so expensive it didn't necessarily make sense. But instead of referring to the hundred or so years of detailed documentation of this problem neophyte analysts descend and make what they think is a detailed comparison of costs when in fact they should have been examining the many complications faced by this extremely complex project. Ultimately this analysis is drug down by the weight of their failure to comprehend the Second Avenue subway alone because of the huge scale of that project and the complications that it faced. This is like looking at per seat construction costs of the Airbus 380 and deciding that something strange must have gone on to make it cost more per seat than a basic small scale commuter aircraft.