
Why New York City Stopped Building Subways (2018) - jseliger
https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/04/why-new-york-city-stopped-building-subways/557567/
======
rayiner
> Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia took advantage of the disastrous finances of the
> BMT and IRT, ravaged by the Depression and the ban on fare increases, to
> acquire both companies

> With the subways now in municipal hands, a doubling of the fare was finally
> negotiated. Years of deferred maintenance by the cash-strapped private
> companies had become increasingly evident. But by then, fare hikes only
> exacerbated the problem of declining ridership.

So the government destroyed the system through price controls. Odd that City
Lab doesn't explore that angle further.

Price regulation continues to be a problem with the subway. Fares on the MTA
are half those of the London Underground. New York relies heavily on subsidies
to cover operating costs, while the London Underground covers its operating
costs through fares: [https://www.theguardian.com/money/us-money-
blog/2014/sep/29/...](https://www.theguardian.com/money/us-money-
blog/2014/sep/29/public-transportation-subway-tube-expensive-ticket-rich-).
That makes the MTA much more sensitive to changing political winds, as opposed
to the Underground, which can pay its ongoing maintenance costs regardless of
what the politicians are doing.

~~~
objektif
I dont see any problem with subsiziding MTA fares by collecting funds through
other taxes. The more people use the system the better. Based on my limited
research on this topic, the root cause of the problem is the labor cost and
inefficiency of MTA workers. I think everything else is noise. Here is great
quote from NYT article on this subject:

“Nobody knew what those people were doing, if they were doing anything,” said
Michael Horodniceanu, who was then the head of construction at the
Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs transit in New York. The
workers were laid off, Mr. Horodniceanu said, but no one figured out how long
they had been employed. “All we knew is they were each being paid about $1,000
every day.”

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-
subway-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-
construction-costs.html)

~~~
programmertote
I grew up in a third world country in SE Asia and moved to the US for college.
One thing that astounds me about public workers in US is that they are super
rude and entitled, while seemingly having poor work ethics.

I take MTA subway every week day and at least once a weekend. On weekends,
you'll see workers repairing or doing maintenance on tracks because ....
Hurricane Sandy (circa 2012) apparently destroyed the infrastructure. I mean I
moved to NYC in 2016 and that maintenance has been going on every weekend
since then (probably it started even before 2016). Some of the trains will not
run or will skip over some local stops and it really inconveniences millions
of commuters every weekend. The trains are supposed to slowly move around the
areas worker are 'in action' (I read somewhere that it's because a few worker
died by being hit by moving train, so they now require trains to move very
slowly while blaring horns to warn workers ahead; I still felt that's
unnecessary unless there's a clear distinction between which line workers
operate on and as long as these workers are smart enough to not encroach on
the active lines. Anyway, enough about that). While the trains move slowly, I
see a lot of workers simply just sitting around or doing nothing.

The same is true on the 9th ave x 50+th street area where there's active water
sanitation department's work going on. I walk along 9th ave every weekday
morning and there are a lot of idle 'workers' who are probably supervising.
I'd say only about half of them are doing useful work while others sit/stand
around and chat.

No wonder these public projects take years to finish and have budget overrun.
No wonder the US can't compete with other countries (ahem, like China and
anywhere in Asia) where workers have better work ethics. The US blue collar
workers like to complain about their diminishing salaries and industries, but
they won't be able to compete for long while their counterparts in other
developing regions are working harder.

~~~
rayiner
Our German au pair was astounded that every project that requires shutting
down a lane on a road has two guys waving people through the remaining lane.
Apparently in Germany they just use portable traffic signals.

~~~
bpicolo
I live in the US and am still astounded by this. I've seen cases where we have
a portable traffic signal that's also manned by two guys.

~~~
pkaye
There is a lot of featherbedding going on. Read this article about the
Manhattan tunnel costs. [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-
subway-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-
construction-costs.html) There are people who are paid to do nothing because
that job existed in the past.

------
travisoneill1
The most interesting part to me is the chart that shows the cost per mile over
time. The cost per mile went up about 20% from 1940 to 1988 and then tripled
from 1988 to 2017 and doubled again by 2019. What caused this increase?

~~~
btown
So one thing that's deceptive about that graph is that the projects are far
from equal in per-mile complexity. The 1988 Jamaica extensions service a
relatively sparsely populated area, with ready access for construction
vehicles (see:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamaica%E2%80%93179th_Street_s...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamaica%E2%80%93179th_Street_station#Entrances_and_exits)
) - by contrast, the proposed Manhattan projects in 2019 require much more
engineering to route around limited access, preserve above-ground activities,
and ensure reinforcement given large skyscrapers above. See:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Avenue_Subway#Construct...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Avenue_Subway#Construction_methods)

But there are certainly likely other factors. One might imagine that as
alternative modes of transportation (ridesharing, etc.) become more
commonplace, prices would go down in a competitive marketplace. But one might
also imagine that established construction firms might see things like
ridesharing (or other decreases in construction costs) as damaging to their
long-term stability; they may therefore do things like lobby the city for
increased regulations that would cause the proposed project to drag out even
longer and provide increased financial stability to the firm. (An alternate
read on this is that the firms are finally catching up to increased standards
for labor and health, and this was not priced in in the past... but that's a
very optimistic read.)

~~~
dantheman
The big things are corruption, graft, and mismanagement.

~~~
simplicio
Has corruption, graft and mismanagement increased so sharply over the last few
decades? I don't picture, say, the NYC of Robert Moses as being particularly
free of corruption and graft. And yet, they seem to have been able to build
Subways much cheaper

~~~
Gibbon1
My working theory is graft and corruption can coexist with effective
management of projects.

I also have an impression that the US mostly stopped building infrastructure
like subways which has various negative effects. Lack of experienced
engineering oversight, lack of local engineering talent, no experienced
workforce. Weak industrial capability and support. And milking to death any
projects that do get through the approval process.

~~~
TylerE
Wonder how much of it is not treating workers like disposable things? Look at
pictures of work crews back in the 30s and you see workers eating lunch -
completely unharnessed - on exposed beams 100s of feet in the air. Deaths were
common on large projects.

~~~
simplicio
Better worker safety certainly accounts for some increase in costs. But US
infrastructure costs aren't only high compared to the past, they're high
compared to other modern developed countries. I don't think Spain, for
example, is keeping their costs relatively low by treating their construction
workers as cannon-fodder.

------
ChuckMcM
I have always wondered what the 'actual' expenses were on the per-mile cost of
rail transit. I had the curious experience of trying to get the information
out of the VTA for their light rail project and they suggested I get a court
order. I was very confused by that, its tax money they are spending and
California has open government laws.

~~~
rayiner
See page 7:
[https://iurd.berkeley.edu/wp/2010-04.pdf](https://iurd.berkeley.edu/wp/2010-04.pdf)

Per mile subsidy for the NYC Subway is $0.35 per passenger mile. Backing out
the revenues, the total cost is about $0.55

~~~
ChuckMcM
That is an excellent report, the numbers I would like to see is from ground
breaking to ribbon cutting, what are the actual expenditures and to whom.
Something like:

vendor a ($1M) - geotechnical services consisting of ...

vendor b ($10M) - excavation consisting of ...

vendor c ...

~~~
pinot
There's got to be a hard cost breakdown somewhere.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Yup, there is. The issue is that the VTA won't release it.

------
dang
Discussed at the time:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16851165](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16851165)

------
mocha_nate
The chart about cost hides how dramatic the cost difference is and it bothers
me. Note the increment of .25 billion to .5 billion on the y axis without the
design reflecting that shift

------
zeveb
> The real estate industry was one of the most important constituencies
> supporting the development of the subway system in the early years.
> Developers enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with the subway, which was
> extended into empty fields that were then swiftly and profitably blanketed
> with apartment houses whose residents then filled the trains. With the
> construction of the IND, that bargain began to break down—they saw new
> subways as more of a tax burden than a generator of big speculative profits.

That's a fascinating little tidbit. When the developers were able to negotiate
with the subway firms on an equal basis, they saw them as assets and partners;
but when they were no longer able to (because a government is never an equal
partner: it can change the law any time it wishes), they just saw them as an
imposition.

There's a lesson there about buy-in.

------
drtillberg
TL;DR: Private startups built subways rapidly in the 1910s and 20s. Government
took over in the 1930s as startups lost steam, declined to invest via bond
issues, plowed money into autos, and the long gaps in capital projects meant
private expertise was repurposed and no longer available when needed.

~~~
smogcutter
> plowed money into autos

Part of the reason for this: building roads extended Robert Moses’ personal
power, building subways didn’t.

If you can think of something fucked up about NYC, odds are good it finds its
way back to Moses somehow.

~~~
Spooky23
Robert Moses acquired power because people wanted to GTFO of the city, either
for the weekend or for good.

I’m a little older than the average HN person. I remember as a kid growing up
in Queens, my dad sweeping the ash from the Greenpoint Incinerator off of his
car in the mornings when the wind blew the right way.

The city was filthy, polluted and overcrowded. The subways were no exception.

~~~
jacques_chester
> _Robert Moses acquired power because people wanted to GTFO of the city,
> either for the weekend or for good._

Well, no, he acquired power by (a) having a massive independent river of cash
to spend and (b) using the state's power to insulate him from the city's
power.

~~~
smogcutter
Yes, but before the triboro he used public opinion around parks and easy trips
out of the city to force his building projects through. That’s what put him in
position to build and run the triboro in the first place. But yes you’re
right, the TBA and the fact that he wasn’t a city employee is what gave him
the power to really go off the reservation.

------
sytelus
TLDR; It is 16X more expensive than in 1904 to build a mile of subway
adjusting for inflation. It costs $4B for each mile now!! This should be
extremely surprising as we generally expect tech to improve and become cheaper
over time. It is being speculated that cost rises as we lose all knowledge of
how to do this efficiently because of huge gaps instead of doing continuous
construction. This is why we need Elon Musk and Boring Company.

~~~
zanny
What the US really needed, and could have been using for 30+ years now, was a
reorganization away from a military industrial complex war machine for 600
billion a year to a civilian engineering corps to build up the country and
provide a guaranteed jobs program for an order of magnitude less money.

I can't imagine how much nicer this country would have been with ~8 trillion
invested in infrastructure over blowing up mud huts in deserts with
"collateral" causalities in the millions while destabilizing third world
nations into our next terrorist threat to point that 600 billion dollar tumor
at next.

We should have seen everything from public development of high rise high
density apartments in high-demand urban cores to high speed rail networks
connecting major metro areas across state lines to dozens of recent-gen
nuclear plants funded from the federal level down. We got none of that except
a burgeoning debt and thousands with lifelong PTSD and crippling injuries from
a war machine to make defense contractors rich burning taxpayer money.

~~~
mxuribe
THIS 100x!

I'll extend this even further: what if, after several years of all of this
civilian engineering/infrastructure work being done, tons of expertise would
have been built up...Then "sell" that expertise - either as a country to other
countries, or as workers create their own smaller firms to look for work in
other countries. Other countries would ideally hire American workers - because
tons of expertise in infrastructure building - then these other countries
could build up their own infrastructures, and so on, and so on....I can even
imagine that our workers helping other countries (to build themselves up)
__might __actually avoid some conflicts in the world - thereby avoiding
needing such a heavy, expensive military in the first place. Ok, perhaps my
premise is a little naive or idealistic...but I 'm sure it would work in some
pockets, and at least we (and a few other countries) would have some decent
infrastructure remaining. So far, for all of our heavy, expensive, and
excessive military spending, what do we have to show for it - mountains of
debt, more people in the world hating Americans, our own people victims to
PTSD?? President Eisenhower was correct.

~~~
zanny
China already adopted and is widely benefiting from this strategy. Their
massive civil engineering corps first built up their "ghost cities" that are
now populated, more high speed rail than the rest of the world, and brought
the country from famine in the 70s to some of the most technically advanced
development anywhere.

In the last 10 years that engineering machine got turned to foreign
investments, right now China is building thousands of miles of high speed rail
and skyscrapers throughout Africa and Southeast Asia. Thus getting foreign
nations indebted to them not for "protection" like the US tried but for their
economic lifeblood.

Its going to pay off lavishly throughout this century for the CCP. They will
have billions in their debt for their engineering expertise in helping
modernize all these foreign economies and not all of it will be strictly
fiscal debt. They will be dependent on Chinese engineering because all the
intellectual capital is held there. All the US will have to show are millions
of insurgents crying death to the nation. The marginal advantage of
accumulated expertise for China will be the ability to build civilizations up
(to serve their own interests) while the US is only good at tearing them down
(to still serve their own interests).

------
cft
Summary from the article: "1940: City takes over the private subways"

------
boyadjian
City growth cannot be endless. Everything has an end. It is the same thing for
Paris. With the "Grand Paris", we try to build new subways, but it is
tremendously expensive.

~~~
bobbydroptables
Yes and no. Many cities have not stopped growing. And New York is quaint
compared to many metropolises these days.

New York stopped building infrastructure due to government and politics, not
some sort of natural law.

If a city grows enough to need more infrastructure, it usually grows plenty of
taxpayers to fund it.

------
shmerl
May be the Boring Company can work on this. They should be interested in
accumulating expertise, instead of wasting it.

~~~
untog
Given everything they’ve done on the increasingly bizarre LA tunnel, I think
NYC is just fine without their input.

(In any case, the answer here isn’t a technical one, it’s political. And
NYC/New York State lacks the political will or desire. A third party private
company won’t solve that)

~~~
shmerl
From the article, looks like the problem isn't political, but financial. It
costs a lot, and there is a lack of expertise which only drives the cost up
even more. So it would make sense to hire someone who wants to retain the
expertise.

~~~
untog
It costs a lot because of political reasons. There’s no technical reason why
NYC subway construction should cost 10x what it does in Paris, and yet, it
does.

~~~
TurningCanadian
NYC has more skyscrapers above to worry about below.

~~~
jcranmer
But the trains run underneath the streets, not the skyscrapers.

~~~
TylerE
Yes, but the foundations of the skyscrapers (which can go as much as 250ft
underground) are where you'd want to build the subway. So you can't. You
either have to go deeper ($$$$) or around (longer, again $$$). Plus, you have
to make sure you don't dig out too much in the wrong place and cause a
building to fail.

~~~
jcranmer
Uh, no they aren't. Look closely at maps of the NYC subway: with very few
exceptions, the lines run directly underneath the streets themselves. Even
many of the curves to traverse to following a different street occurs
underneath the street right-of-way or the underneath parks. I count just five
places where the subway runs underneath a tall building, and I believe in all
but one of those cases, it's the subway that predates the building.

~~~
Tokkemon
That's not the point. Digging a massive hole in the ground directly next to a
skyscraper's foundation changes the physical properties of that foundation,
and requires some very complicated engineering to get around it.

That and all the Manhattan Schist that needs to be excavated. New York
certainly isn't built on mud.

~~~
delfinom
O god. The Manhattan Schist takes ages to dig through and often involves
blasting under the streets of NY because it's basically obsidian.

