Thanks for that article. I'm not sure if you're agreeing with my point or not. This still doesn't say that it's our labor or safety standards are the reason for expenses, instead it shows rampant corruption. Sounds like 200 politically connected people were getting absolutely insane rates off the government dime. I would love to see some real investigative journalism about who this money is going to. I guarantee those 200 imaginary laborers are giving money to political bosses. Short staffing the actual workers or cutting their safety precautions would not fix this issue, right?

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).

Fair enough. I'd be interested in seeing an actual journalist/accountant dig into the labor breakdown rather than NY Post cherrypicked BS. I would guess the difference between NYC and other major metro systems around the world is more about how litigious and corrupt we are than our labor standards though.

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

Kind of ridiculous to blame the laborers doing dangerous difficult work instead of the capitalist grifters making hundreds of thousands in consulting fees while sitting in an office. Corruption, needlessly complicated bidding, exorbitant lawyer fees so that the contractor and the city can sue each other. These are the big differences between the Parisian state run system and the NYC 'free market' system. You really think the French have looser labor laws and tougher working conditions?

It’s pretty clear they are saying that overall ridership is much higher in NYC, nothing about the price that the rider pays. Like building a bridge for 10,000 cars a day would cost more than for 100 cars a day even if the river is a similar size.. I’m no construction expert but it makes plenty of sense to me

Absolutely sickening while the police budget balloons every year with no oversight or accountability.