Building underground in the most congested, densely populated infrastructures in the world? You mean like the undergrounds of Hong Kong ($500M/km), Fukuoka ($300M/km), Singapore ($500M/km), Cairo ($300M/km), Sao Paolo ($250M/km) and Seoul ($100M/km)?
I feel like you took only one part of my comment to disagree with out of context with the rest- I'm not even disagreeing that the MTA is inefficient, I'm just saying that by looking at only one data point (cost/mile), you're disregarding many others.
I think NYC is a bit of a perfect storm situation:
- 24 hour operations
- High labor costs, coupled with strong unions
- Legacy infrastructure to maintain (vs. new subways)
- extremely dense infrastructure to manage (NYC under-street infrastructure is famously messy/complex)
- Huge distance of track to maintain
- Large square mileage of city area to contend with
Surely this has to play a big part in the cost of building subways in NYC vs. simply, "The MTA wastes money"?
Apparently turf wars ("Your job is to keep the LIRR out of Grand Central") and union contracts do contribute a lot to this perfect storm. I don't understand why you disagree with my use of the word "waste" to describe this.
But the cost of labor in those countries is much lower than in the US, no? (It actually makes sound $1B/km in the US sound way better than $500M/km in HK.)
https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2013/06/03/comp...
(Admittedly, one of the Sao Paolo lines is 16% above ground.)