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Why? Unions. 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-..

• bumby 4y ago
  It's interesting that the Times identified three culprits (unions, construction companies, and consulting firms) but you only focused on one.
  • ryan93 4y ago
    If you read the article you would see that the unions are the ones demanding a much larger than necessary number of employees. The unions are the political road block to change.
    • bumby 4y ago
      You mean the same article that said this: >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. ... Consulting firms, which have hired away scores of M.T.A. employees, have persuaded the authority to spend an unusual amount on design and management, statistics indicate. or this: >"Worker wages and labor conditions are determined through negotiations between the unions and the companies, none of whom have any incentive to control costs." All they say is that the reason starts with the number of people employed. If you continued reading past that point, they talk about other non-union incentives that drive up costs, like: >Critics pointed out that construction companies actually have an incentive to maximize costs — they earn a percentage of the project’s costs as profit, so the higher the cost, the bigger their profit. They also talk about the "soft costs" of NYC construction, like: >The project plan called for the hiring of 500 consultants from a dozen different companies And of course bureaucracy: >Officials have added to the soft costs by struggling to coordinate between vendors, taking a long time to approve plans, insisting on extravagant station designs and changing their minds midway through projects. So while we can probably agree that unions are part of the problem, it's disingenuous to act like they are the whole problem.
• nukeman 4y ago
  France has unions out the wazoo, yet you don’t see nearly the level of cost increases.
  • debacle 4y ago
    France has real unions. The US has graft disguised as organized labor, and New York has some of the worst.
    • PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
      Graft, maybe, maybe not, but the real hallmark of US unions is their general refusal to be political organizations, unlike their counterparts in Europe and elsewhere. Oh, sure, they throw money in the pot for candidates, but in Europe, unions take actual political positions on important matters. They do not often get their way, but they act as an important counterweight in politics to the interests of the rich and powerful.
      • mike50 4y ago
        Not select public sector unions in New York. PBA and NYUST get whatever they want.
  • stametseater 4y ago
    France has French unions, America has American unions. Each are run according to different sets of rules and in different social contexts.
    • nukeman 4y ago
      The major point is ultimately that the organization of labor does not inherently lead to higher project costs. You may be right that the peculiarities of American labor are one potential cause of higher costs.
  • ars 4y ago
    European style unions are not the same thing as American style ones, despite both being called unions. I wish they had different names because they are quite different.