Why is infrastructure so expensive to build in New York? jbarro reports on the construction-cost problem — and how to address it
Illustration: Zohar Lazar Imagine being able to get from the North Bronx to the Financial District in less than half an hour by train. Or being able to take a train straight from Peekskill or Greenwich or White Plains that, instead of terminating at Grand Central, ran straight through the city — stopping in midtown, at Union Square, in the Financial District, in Downtown Brooklyn, and then proceeding on to JFK airport — offering a one-seat ride to most any place you might need to commute to.
Cost Disease: Madrid , $14 million per station. The three-mile, two-station Line 9 extension was completed in 2015 for a total cost of $140 million. Los Angeles : $120 million per station. L.A. spends as much as New York to dig tunnels, but “cut and cover” station construction has kept the cost of its four-mile, three-station Purple Line extension down to $2.8 billion. Photo: Sebastien Berda/AFP/Getty Images; LA Metro. Source: Regional Plan Association..
Where New York stands out is the massive price tags associated with proposed and actual new projects, and the delays and limitations of vision they impose on new construction. Second Avenue — perhaps the most appropriate corridor for a subway line in the United States that, as of 2016, did not have one — has taken nearly 100 years to go from proposed subway service to actual service and then only along a fraction of the planned route.
“People will say to me, ‘Why are MTA construction costs so high?’ And the answer is ‘Everything,’ ” says Julia Vitullo-Martin, a senior fellow at the RPA and co-author of its 2018 report comparing New York’s construction costs to those in peer cities. “Every factor you look at is flawed the way the MTA does business, from the first step to the end.”
“It’s sort of like a dark money pit where money just keeps getting thrown at projects,” says City Council Speaker Corey Johnson, who is running for mayor on a platform that includes giving the mayor direct control over the city’s subways and buses. “When the projects are being negotiated, many, many times, the MTA just signs off on what the contractors put in front of them. There’s no forensic auditing or effort to see if costs have been inflated in an unscrupulous way.
The mess with Amtrak and East Side Access is a great example of how daunting New York’s construction-cost problems are. On the one hand, $340 million is a ton of money, and it would be great if New York’s elected federal officials, who spend a lot of time decrying President Trump for not financing our infrastructure needs, had devoted more attention to pushing Amtrak to be helpful.
While you may think of the subway as a tunnel, what made the project expensive to build wasn’t the tunnels. The cost problem with the Second Avenue Subway was primarily in its stations, whose construction cost $425 million each, according to the RPA. A similar extension of Los Angeles’s Purple Line subway is currently under construction with stations on track to cost just $120 million each.
“If they’re projecting that the cost of an elevator or accessibility in a station is $50 million, the actual elevator itself is 15 percent of that cost,” Johnson says. “The other 85 percent is all sorts of stuff, but a big portion of it is utility relocation. When you don’t have coordination between Con Edison and DEP and DOT and the city and the MTA, and you do it in a vacuum or siloed, it inflates the cost significantly and it takes a lot longer.
This was a choice Massachusetts officials faced in 2015: The Green Line Extension project, a planned 4.7-mile, seven-station, aboveground extension of Boston’s light-rail system, was expected to cost $2 billion. When the bid came in, it turned out the price was going to be $3 billion. So the state announced it would delay the project, tear up its existing contract, and put it out to bid again with a mandate: The project could cost no more than $2.3 billion.
You could start with all the projects that get kicked around but haven’t been funded. The full Second Avenue Subway, from 125th Street to the Financial District. An extension of the 7 train to Secaucus, New Jersey, where it would connect with train lines and a relocated bus terminal. The N train to La Guardia airport. A subway under Utica Avenue. The Gateway Program.
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