doughie t1_j7kz6wr wrote on February 7, 2023 at 3:42 PM

Reply to comment by youcantfindoutwhoiam in MTA spent twice as much on Second Ave subway consultants as it did on its construction by NYY657545

I was just pointing out you were making very different arguments than him. What's your source?

I'm seeing 1.3bn NYC and 1bn in Paris on wikipedia. And double the overall length, plus it runs 24/7. But again, I'm no expert. IMO the main reason Paris gets it done cheaper is because they do the entire thing top to bottom within the government, not layer after layer of "free market bidding" which just results in profit motives, corruption, and a bunch of lawyers passing around the blame for why things are slow. If it were labor laws or 'lazy workers' surely France would be more expensive and slower.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metro_systems

youcantfindoutwhoiam t1_j7l09ye wrote on February 7, 2023 at 3:50 PM

Your link doesn't work. You see that because you only look at the subway inside Paris. Paris has 3 track systems (Metro, RER, Transilien) covering Paris and its suburbs just like NY covers Manhattan and the other borough, except they only have one system which is less efficient. My argument is that we need to stop trying to make excuses about why the maintenance and construction of the NY system is so corrupt, slow, and wasting money because it's SOOOOOOO DIFFERENT when in reality it's not. Your free market argument though is completely accurate, and that's the problem, nothing to do with the age of the system, the mileage, the price of the ticket or the ridership. It's like as soon as you mention how other system manage perfectly fine, people here immediately jump to cover the people who fuck the system because they want to make it sound so exceptional.

Here is a link, and it's from 2011: https://www.planetoscope.com/Mobilite/443-.html

doughie t1_j7l2o2b wrote on February 7, 2023 at 4:06 PM

Hm.. the link works for me. Wikipedia's data is from 2021-22 and i didn't include LIRR or PATH or anything connecting. I think people do like to make weird excuses about why this city should be fundamentally more expensive. The answer seems pretty obvious to me, the same reason we spend 10X on military and the DOD can't even pass an audit.. waste, fraud, abuse and 3rd party contracting/grift dressed up as 'the free market'. It makes no sense to me that with so much to maintain that we shouldn't have dedicated people, sort of like the Army Corps of Engineers, who handle things and can't pass the buck or dissolve the company and reform under a different name.

Another example is Barclay's Center. We let some contractor promise a bunch of bullshit, deliver nothing that wasn't personally profitable to themselves, then sell it off to Chinese developers with the project overbudget and behind schedule. Privatized profits and socialized costs, and we still don't have half what we paid for. In France they'd riot (as we should).