In SF a couple of parks needed to have new public bathrooms built. Cost: 2 million.[1] If you had to do it yourself, It'd be about 100k max. It's pure graft and greediness.
Meanwhile in Japan, they convert an above ground line into a subway line in 3.5 hours of coordinated work.[2] It's a startling difference. This is the one time I'd love to be able to bring engineering and crew from overseas and have them do the work for us and dispense with all the local corruption.
200 ghost workers -unbelievable. And they initially wanted to keep that discovery quiet. $1000/day/ghost worker for the taxpayers of New York. $200k waste per day --that's how much The City respects its citizens.
Japan also has a much different outlook on blue collar jobs, and (from studying the culture and spending ~3 months there) people seem to take genuine pride in their job regardless of what it is.
Contrast that with the MTA subway workers I see regularly huddled into groups, shooting the breeze and playing on their phones -- it's a widely different outlook on work.
Also regarding you [2] link, I can't remember where I read it, but I believe that operation took years of planning.
I mean, to be sure Japan has institutionalized pork too[1]. They offer contracts to build retaining walls where no one lives. But damn, when they have to do something they are experts in they do it right. And given the JRs are private orgs, they can't just ask for another bond measure or other tax or more pork from the govt.
And of course it took years of planning. In the US you'd have years of "planning" [pork dealing] and then the line shut down for a year or two probably, doing things as slowly as possible.
Sitting in a cafe in Shibuya, Tokyo ( at the moment ), I would say there's a "oneness" to everything they do. Inconveniencing others is the height of moral crimes you can do here ( see your family being fined for your suicide [1] ). I think this permeates their culture to the point where they're more efficient so that they do not affect others, i.e. how on time trains are in Japan [2]. Of course, this is speculative, but it certainly does not feel like a, "I'll get mine, before you get yours culture" here.
I ran into a term some years ago, giri. Seems to be a remnant from their feudal times.
Something about reciprocal duty or some such, meaning that workers put their honor into their work with the expectation that they get looked after by the boss/lord in return.
This also seems to be the background for a lot of "drama" in their entertainment, where a character will struggle between upholding giri and their emotions regarding the task.
>Japan also has a much different outlook on blue collar jobs, and (from studying the culture and spending ~3 months there) people seem to take genuine pride in their job regardless of what it is.
The west seems like the weird culture here. The middle class looks down on people who make our coffees in Starbucks, drive the buses and man the trains but realistically they're the ones everybody would miss if they all suddenly didn't turn up to work on Monday morning.
> In SF a couple of parks needed to have new public bathrooms built. Cost: 2 million.[1] If you had to do it yourself, It'd be about 100k max. It's pure graft and greediness.
I dislike when this sort of disingenuous description is used. It cost a lot of money to do infrastructure work, and entities generally schedule and package work as a bundle, not as individual items. I am quite certain they are not spending $2m on bathrooms.
From [1]: "Additionally, the funds will cover new water, electrical and sanitary utilities services to Lincoln Way, as well as [ways] to improve the pedestrian path that would meet ADA access requirements.
The construction work, which will adjust the playground's irrigation and add new landscaping, is slated to begin next month."
> Meanwhile in Japan, they convert an above ground line into a subway line in 3.5 hours of coordinated work.[2] It's a startling difference. This is the one time I'd love to be able to bring engineering and crew from overseas and have them do the work for us and dispense with all the local corruption.
London did something roughly comparable in fifteen hours during the construction of the Victoria line in the 60s: https://youtu.be/GwRRSJ_wtIg?t=1074
Minor correction but neither project in the story is managed by New York City. Although the city owns the subway, it's controlled by the MTA state agency (which is also responsible for East Side Access to Grand Central).
The MTA was formed in the 1960s to take over operations of the then–bankrupt privately owned Long Island Railroad, assuming operations of New York City transit in late 1960s. NYCT had itself been formed in the 1940s after the then-private companies running various subway, elevated and bus routes went under.
Specific to today and the article in question: The government of NYC has little to no control over the MTA, including the subways, other than bickering with the governor over funding.
> Specific to today and the article in question: The government of NYC has little to no control over the MTA, including the subways, other than bickering with the governor over funding.
The MTA is an independent entity, but the state government has plenty of control over it through the contracts that control both its funding and its expansion projects.
However, as the article explains, the government chooses not to exercise that authority of oversight, delegating it instead to the MTA itself (!).
Right. My point is that the MTA is controlled by New York State, not New York City. HN comments tend to conflate the two and then gloss into a general "ultra liberal bankrupt NYC" critique. Many things to criticize NYC over, but management of the subways…is a state problem.
I don't see what those two comparisons have to do with each other. That's like saying "The marketing department spend $10m on new ads last quarter. Meanwhile, the development team released a new feature in one sprint."
Keep in mind that's 62 miles of rail, both above and below ground. Not saying it's a good price, but ~$900 million a mile is a bit better than ~$3.5 billion per mile.
That’s mostly above ground rail through suburbs. DC built the silver line for 1/3 that in similar areas. (Still breathtakingly inefficient compared to $450 million for digging under fricking Paris).
That’s not true. The majority of the costs in the light rail project discussed (ST3) involves ROW acquisition, for above grade or underground rights of way.
You may be thinking of the original light rail or Sound Transit 2.
The original light rail was kind of a disaster but since then the management has changed; we will see how ST2, currently in construction, plays out.
The cost is dominated by the price of the underlying land, which is privately owned. The actual construction cost is much lower than $900 million a mile.
Is it though? Considering it's light rail with 3 or 4 cars max vs 2nd ave subway being heavy rail with far longer trains, I'm not sure how much better it is.
The cost overruns are because the cost of land and contractors are rising at an astronomical rate. I forget the exact numbers, but they planned for land appreciation of something like 10%, and the real cost has turned out to be double that.
This is yet another proof against the narrative that govt run internet Monopoly would be infinitly superior to private run internet. We just cannot count on govt with our future.
> “We thought ours was expensive,” said Laurent Probst, managing director of Île-de-France Mobilités, which controls transit in the French capital.
> The small number of workers has not slowed the Paris project. The line, which will run driverless trains every 85 seconds, is set to open by 2020, six years after groundbreaking. The Second Avenue subway, by contrast, took a decade to build.
> M.T.A. officials declined to comment on the Paris project.
French inefficiency used to be a joke in the US when I was a kid. Joke’s on us now I guess.
American inefficiency has been a joke in Germany as far as I can think back.
Also, a recurring theme in what I hear about American customers from people working in manufacturing is that US companies insist on providing extremely detailed specs and strict tolerances but then run into issues because their own (presumably US sourced) parts don't actually match the same specs.
For people not familiar with that particular flustercuck: BER is the new Berlin Brandenburg airport.
After a lot (more than 15 years!) of planning they began building in 2006.
By 2011 October, it was ready or so they thought. In 2011 November they actually ran trials with some 12 000 people.
8 May 2012 it was announced due to the failure of the fire protection system the opening is postponed. In a 2016 audit, they concluded the airport was at less than 60% readiness in reality at 2012 May.
Right now the opening is perhaps late 2020 or even 2021...
We are getting to the point where the 2016 audit should've concluded it is better to tear it down and build a new one.
Actually, it's worse than that, if you read the article.
NY Government (Governor Andrew Cuomo): Let's build a new subway station. Hey MTA, why don't you negotiate for us and figure out how much it costs.
MTA: Hey TWU, you can figure this out for us, right?
TWU: Hey contractors and vendors. How much will it cost us to have you supply parts and do some of the work for this project?
Contractors/Vendors: Oh, that'll be $500,000, which allows us to make a healthy profit margin of 20%.
TWU: That's not enough - you should be charging us $800,000, so we can make a healthy margin as well without cutting into yours.
Contractors/Vendors: By golly, you're right!
TWU: Also, add another $200,000, because we need an "operational readiness" consultant to help us when we're ready to finish. The project won't be ready for another ten years, but we should employ them the whole time just in case.
Contractors/Vendors: Sounds good to us. We're not the ones paying.
TWU: Hey MTA, this will cost $1,450,000. We added on an extra $450,000, because they're using a fifty-year-old piece of technology, and our contract stipulates that we get an extra $450,000 every time they do, to offset the job loss from this "technological advancement".
MTA: That sounds like a reasonable price for this. Hey Cuomo, you're the governor of NY. Can you please rubber-stamp this proposal to increase our budget by $1,450,000? Look how strapped for funding we are.
NY Government (Governor Andrew Cuomo): Well, you supported my last election bid, so I don't see why I should start questioning your prices now. Let's go!
...seriously, read the article. This isn't even an exaggeration.
Remember the part where only two bids were made for the job. It’s the same principle of having Comcast and DirectTV as your ISP choices. They can charge you whatever they want, and what are you going to do?
... or tried to get some software written. The IT department of a BigCo operates in the same way, except that their currency is time rather than money.
But I think the problem is that we have no decent middle ground between "screw the worker" and "screw the employer."
I don't belong to a union, yet I get treated fairly well. But at the same time, my skill set is in short supply and high demand. And I possess a considerable amount of mission critical knowledge that exists nowhere but in my head.
“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
They probably got sued by a hapless white collar lawyer that spilled his Starbucks and got shocked when he tripped over a power cable laid by someone that didn't care that the cord was over the main walking path.
Trade unions get seriously bunched panties about power to conference booths. Organizers are forced to play along, ostensibly for fire marshal and safety rules but really for union getting its cut.
Think that’s bad — visit a Hollywood film location. I was a camera assistant for a film and I literally couldn’t drive dailies from the airport in my own car — that’s the Teamsters. I couldn’t touch a broom to sweep up our camera loading area — that’s another Union. I couldn’t plug a surge protector into an outlet — that’s the electricians. I couldn’t touch a dolly upon which we were to mount a camera — that’s Grip. I couldn’t move a $500 light five centimeters — That’s Lighting — despite being trusted to load a $100k+ Panavision camera or attach at $85k lens. And god forbid shooting take 30 seconds longer than the schedule — the entire crew on the set gets overtime.. costing thousands of dollars.
However to be fair, Hollywood is a private enterprise so it’s what the market allows — but when it comes to public money, it’s infuriating for such egregious waste and inefficiency.
I don't understand how the union/employer relations in the US seem to always get that crazy. It seems it's either the employer trying to exploit workers to the max or the union demanding terms that clearly impede even legitimate work. I have worked in Germany in a unionized company and it was fine. There was a framework for overtime and other things but we still could do what was needed to get our job done. I really don't get it. It's either one party exploiting the other or the other way around.
I've worked in union and non-union shops, most have been pretty unexceptionable to the point I'd never tell a story about them. You mostly just hear about the edge cases.
I've seen both sides. The town I went to college in was heavily unionized. The majority of them were fine.
We once needed to hang a network rack in our building. It was on the unions work list for 6 months. We finally just did it, a grievance was filed, and the company was fined for having a non-union person do a union job.
This was sadly the norm at that job. But it wasn't anything too exciting - nice guys, too much work to do, company wouldn't get more of them.
America has always been hostile to unions. American business especially, but Americans generally. In America even union workers hate unions. It's baked into our cultural DNA. (This is my takeaway from reading the excellent American history book, There is Power in a Union, by Philip Dray.)
By contrast, European elites settled into a power sharing arrangement with unions long ago, at the end of the 19th century.
Because there's less conflict over power in Europe, there's less tension between unions and business. But because even at the height of their power (circa 1930s) unions were perpetually under siege in the U.S. by business and political interests, American unions are constantly fighting just to exist.
In the past few decades, as American unions face extinction in the private labor market, they're literally left fighting for survival. This manifests in a lot of defensiveness--i.e. the conference workers, Hollywood workers. Even in places where they're seemingly secure, they don't feel secure, and in truth aren't actually very secure. Even the most liberal, union friendly corporation or municipality has trouble resisting the pursuit of cost savings through automation and out-sourcing.
In some places unions have literally pivoted to selling themselves as jobs programs. Some government worker unions and contractor unions are in many respects a tool for wealth redistribution. In some cities and states politicians and policy makers will openly tell you that, e.g., the point of having so many unionized workers manage a conference hall is simply to provide stable jobs--jobs to gainfully employ people that might otherwise stand on the corner all day, jobs that pay enough to support a solidly working- or middle-class family.
In other words, these unions are doing precisely what so many conservatives claim the country should be doing with entitlement reform--predicate it on working. But assuming it's not just an insincere excuse, the reality is that you literally need to manufacture and distribute work in ways that are at odds with a meritocratic and especially market-driven model. Unions are literally structured to distribute work and maximize employment, which means they're a better mechanism to distribute social payments in exchange for nominal labor. Even back in the days when corrupt union leadership siphoned wealth, the disparity between leadership and wage workers wasn't nearly as great as in private business. That's especially the case today, as union financing is much more heavily regulated while, conversely, in the private labor market shareholders and managers have substantially increased their share of the profits.
Of course, these social arrangements create weird incentives for inefficiency and corruption, especially when they're as informal and ad hoc as in the U.S.
Not the idea of unions, just how the US ones turn out: a mountain of political corruption, inefficiency, and organized crime motivating an entrenched and self-perpetuating attitude. Big unions are more about their benefit than about their members, here.
Hah, once we needed some extra wiring for some lights at our booth, the electrician came to have a look and said “sorry I’m not insured to add wires” and just left. And nobody wanted to do the job on such a short notice. Luckily no one said anyting when we just plugged the cables ourselves
While I agree that the $450 bracket installation is crazy, $900 for the TV is not bad at all. Say the TV is $500 retail. If it breaks you are out $1000, and you have to scramble to buy a new one. When you rent, the spare is in a road box behind the curtain, and a professional shop would not charge you for damages unless something smelled really funny.
Source: used to work in corporate event technology
What are the chances that a new tv will break during a 3-day trade show? I'm going to be generous and guess it's less than 10%. If the conference bought TVs for everyone, plus an extra 20% to cover the ones that break with extra breathing room, it would cost $600 to get a TV.
This assumes the conference throws out the TVs at the end. The rental company is supposed to be able to amortize these costs over years of renting the same TV. Even at the 10% breakage rate, you'd expect to rent a TV 9 times before it breaks on the 10th rental. This should allow you to rent a TV for closer to $50 plus labor and a little margin for profit. That's why renting is usually much cheaper than buying and not slightly cheaper than buying 2.
You never produce a live event like that without spares, everything can and will break.
Your idea about the conference buying spares for everyone is interesting. Unfortunately for one, the financial incentives are just not setup in that way. Generally each booth is responsible for its own gear. Second, everyone needs different sizes, resolutions, mounts, color profiles, refresh rates, input types, network control options, blackout behavior, etc, etc.
Also, the discount vs extra expense of the gear is correlated to the cost of the gear. A $100,000 projector (mid-range) will obviously costly less to rent for three days, and is well worth it. With a TV though, they rental company is able to charge a premium because their customers simply will not purchase that type of equipment for all of the reasons above.
If we're just saying that the rental companies can charge $900 for the TV because that's what people are willing to pay, the same applies to paying $450 for bracket installation. In a competitive environment, you should expect the price to be close to the marginal cost of providing the service.
The marginal equipment cost for providing a TV is the cost of the TV divided the number of events you expect it to last through. This doesn't change if you have spares. To get close to $900 for a $500 TV, you either need extremely high overhead and labor costs or TVs that break a little more than halfway through the rental. If a TV can generally survive 30 days of use, equipment costs only justify $50 of the bill for a 3-day rental. I don't see how you would get anywhere near $900 from there.
grivescorbett assumes you buy one and discard it after the trade show. If that one breaks, you have to buy a second one and discard it, too. Total cost: $1,000.
Of course, at a (US) trade show, if your rented $900 tv breaks, even if they have a spare one, they will take a day to find a cart (for which you have to pay rent) to ride it to your booth (which has to be done by two union members, can’t be done while the trade show is open, so has to be done after 5 PM, doubling labor costs and requiring you to pay for keeping the floor open, too (even though they can charge that to almost all exhibitors)), and you have to pay for union members to plug in that new tv. All that hopefully after other union members unplugged the old tv, or you will be charged for using two power plugs.
(I have limited experience with this, but from that experience, the above seems only slightly exaggerated. On the trade shows I worked on, you weren’t allowed to carry the booth material you carried all the way from the airport to your booth)
In the U.S, public transportation has the same problem as healthcare. That problem is that spending more money on it won't make it better since the costs are already many times higher than any other country. However, there is always a demand that to get better public transportation and healthcare we must continue to raise taxes. Finding out what is so expensive and fixing that never occurs to anybody, probably because it's some well connected person's cash cow.
We need to have a meaningfully competitive electoral system.
I live in New York, although not in NYC. I call elections “affirmations”, as there are never meaningfully contested general elections, and probably a meaningfully contested primary about 1/3 of the time. All of the bigger offices (mayor, county exec, Congress) attract enough money that the incumbent can find an African American or other bloc voter candidate to run on a third party line and split the opposition vote. State legislative offices are only involuntarily vacated by death or felony conviction.
It’s difficult to envision a brighter future as the national GOP platform is so poisonous.
It's way worse than that. Even primaries in NY are essentially coronations - the party, not the voters, is able to choose the candidate it wants to win. And since the two parties have a gentleman's agreement not to compete in each other's districts, the candidate that the party leadership chooses is guaranteed to win both the primary and the general election.
This is why I'm so happy about the California top-two primaries - they've created competitive elections in a dominant-party state. But they were only created through a ballot initiative over the objections of the legislature.
Political parties will always resist the disempowering of the party, and things like runoffs, preferential and range voting, etc. gives more choice to the voter and fragments parties. It fragments them because the voter isn't punished as often for taking a chance on what are otherwise considered fringe candidates.
The U.S. is one of the older representative democracies now with the oldest written constitution, which is also difficult to change. Making elections more modern, fair, and actually representative will take a lot of effort by citizens.
If SCOTUS finds in favor of existing extreme gerrymandering practices in the Gill v Whitford case, it will be necessary for citizens to actively crack the grip of the two incumbent political parties, or accept generation long single party rule disconnected from representation of the citizenry. Gill v Whitford is the easier path, but modern elections still need to be a goal: city, state and federal. It will take time.
And House rules give the top positions based on seniority, so states are incentivized to gerrymander to protect their senior representatives. We need to change Congressional rules in that regard as well. Due to top-two, California lost a 40-year incumbent in Fremont who was fifth in seniority in the 435-member House. Sometimes California takes it on the chin with its referendum when doing things that are against its current best interests but provide a useful experiment and forcing function.
> This is why I'm so happy about the California top-two primaries - they've created competitive elections in a dominant-party state.
Have they really? It seems more like they've pulled candidates towards the center slightly and relegated third parties to the sidelines even more.
When the initiative was passed, third parties opposed it because they said it would make it more difficult for them to run competitive or even influential (but unsuccessful) campaigns.
For statewide races, the jungle primary approach seems to come down to which two Democrats attract enough votes away from other parties (and other Democrats) in order to make it to the final two.
A 40-year incumbent in Fremont actually lost to a younger candidate who seemed less controversial. In a primary, the younger / newer candidate may not have won due to lower turnout. Of course, the incumbent was 5th in seniority in the 435-member House, so California is hurt in that way due to House rules, which perversely, favor long-rooted incumbency and states with strong gerrymandering.
Well yeah. In a FPTP system those third-party candidates hurt the major-party candidates closest to their viewpoints, whereas now their voters end up having a say once it becomes clear that their favored candidate is not viable.
Same with Republicans in liberal districts; a choice between two Democrats is just what the voter profile of those districts leads to, and at least this way the minority party gets to influence the final winner.
> GP was specifically talking about NYC, so calling out the specific party in power there seemed relevant.
The original post really concerns the state government, not the city, and New York is definitely a two-party state. The Assembly is always controlled by Democrats, and the Senate is always controlled by the Republicans, even when Democrats win a majority of the seats.
Both parties benefit from this stasis, so they have no incentive to upset the balance.
Not only that does it occur, but it also occurs that the same people messing it up have bought off both sides. So it's not like voting for Dems or Republicans will magically make it cheaper. They'll just change who pays the insane prices, if that.
Most European countries have a multi-party system, usually due to not using first past the post voting systems.
As a result you have more parties, more diversity of choice and less polarization and of course more competition. Parties can actually go away and they do, usually every few decades.
The downside is that you can get deadlocks as no party can get a majority sometimes, even after making coalitions with smaller parties.
Still better end result than the US end result, in my opinion.
You also have two parties, the "government" and the "opposition". They are created after the election. At that point, the voters no longer get any say. The voters don't even know what they will get.
Consider a situation that starts with 12 parties. One gets 45% support, and the others each get 5% support. When the 12 parties merge into the 2 that will actually govern, that party with 45% may be the loser. The other 11 can merge to become a party with 55% of the power. The party which is most popular by far is thus locked out of power.
First-past-the-post is bad, but it's not the problem here. Almost every city, state, and county election across the country is run under first-past-the-post rules, and only New York has the level of inter-party corruption that New York does. As I explain above, it's specific to New York and the way parties have written laws to preserve their stranglehold on power.
You also get small parties extorting billions in pork for their support or pet project in the UK the DUP and Libdems in the previous coalition did this and likewise the greens in Germany.
We haven't had a single-party government in Ireland since the '50s, and it hasn't done us a lick of harm. Quite the opposite, in fact, as junior parties tend to be a moderating influence on the senior one. If anything, it's typically the junior party that gets shafted the most when the elections come.
If you want real pork extortion, then you need a minority government propped up by a deal with an opposition party. That's what you have with the DUP.
The DUP and LibDems are examples of FPTP distortions in the UK.
The “extortion’ by the Greens doesn’t seem to have damaged Germany unduly, except by forcing it down the path to so-cheap-it’s-almost-free renewable energy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany
"According to Forbes, the IEA reports that in 2015, German prices were 17.9 cents per kwh for industry, and 39.5 cents per kwh for residential customers, versus 7 and 12.5 cents respectively in the U.S."
In what measure is that a result of bad policy and or a result of a desire to promote thriftiness? After all gas in the US is cheap and in Europe it's expensive and I think a major part of the price are excises meant to discourage consumpation.
As a side note, the EU is also pushing heavily energy efficiency for homes, this might be related.
The German nuclear phase-out and funding of renewable energy development through electricity taxes was started in 2000, a decade before the Fukushima event and as a direct result of a (by then) two decade old environmental movement.
The German government decided to extend the lifetime of some reactors shortly before the event but that plan was immediately scrapped again. Risk of tsunamis itself were not the reason but rather that the public overwhelmingly did not trust the operators to follow safe procedures given that the Japenese operator didn't. But again, nuclear power was really unpopular even before that.
> Are there any examples of states or countries that handle this the right way? Can this be applied to NYC?
New York State is the source of the problem, not New York City (although the city government is affected by these as well).
The problem is that the two political parties have passed a series of laws that empowers the party leadership and ensures that voters have essentially zero influence in the so-called democratic process.
Party leadership, not voters, is able to nominate the candidates that they want to represent the party in each race[0]. The parties have a gentleman's agreement not to compete with each other in the other party's claimed districts[1], so the general election is almost always uncontested.
Due to fusion voting, third parties are pressured to endorse first-party candidates in order to maintain ballot access, so you'll almost always see the same candidate running (oftentimes uncontested) on multiple party lines. The only "choice" you have is in choosing which party to use to vote for the all-but-guaranteed victorious candidate.
Party registration is fixed as well, so it's impossible to switch between parties in order to influence party direction. The deadline to change parties for the 2018 cycle passed in October. If you submitted a change of registration on October 13, 2017, it won't' take effect until 2019. Yes, you read that right.
And the party leadership is controlled by a series of local clubs (yes, they literally call them clubs). For example, the dominant party in my district is the Democratic party, and my local Democratic club is run by the son and daughter of the last Irish mob boss in Manhattan[2]. The son, incidentally, openly jokes about how similar the system is to Tammany Hall when violating election laws[3]. If I wanted to have any influence in local politics, I'd have to influence the Democratic party, and if I wanted to influence the Democratic party, I'd have to pay the steep membership fees to join this club, and then hope that this dynastic family listened to what I have to say.
Any initiatives to change this have to go through the New York State legislature, and any bills have to be approved by the top three ranking members of the government, who are coincidentally the most powerful members of the two parties[4]. Unsurprisingly, they have little incentive to reduce their own power.
Unlike other states, New York doesn't have a ballot initiative process, so we can't bypass the legislature. Any statewide ballot initiatives have to be first approved by the legislature.
Regarding healthcare, the problem is that, regardless of how that industry got to the point it's at right now, it's in the state it's in, and doing anything to jeopardize that would destructure a lot of things.
There are things that could be done to make US healthcare a lot healthier economically.
They are all politically impossible to get through our political system.
One important thing to understand is that the billions and trillions that are wasted are income and livelihoods for millions of people, and they have huge political power.
It takes leadership of a kind we don't have any more. The electoral process has been hacked and it's not really fixable without some larger dislocations happening first.
Well, one of the issues is that it'd probably take bipartisan effort to fix the cost problem in transit, but one party wants to "fix the problem" by just cutting it entirely.
"Construction companies, which have given millions of dollars in campaign donations in recent years, have increased their projected costs by up to 50 percent when bidding for work from the M.T.A., contractors say."
That's because you've legalized bribery. Your political system rewards corruption. Every actor in the described mess is (re)acting rationally. Is this somehow a surprise?
> That's because you've legalized bribery. Your political system rewards corruption. Every actor in the described mess is (re)acting rationally. Is this somehow a surprise?
Ugh, please stop saying this. Bribery is not legal in the US. We literally just tried a sitting US senator for corruption including bribery, and we just convicted the former Speaker of the New York State Assembly for corruption, including bribery and kickbacks. It's very much not legal.
New York politics is an outlier - in fact, New York has literally the most corrupt government in the country. The problem isn't that it's legal (it's not legal); the problem is that New York has such a wide and extensive network of corruption (as this article shows) that it's damn-near impossible to actually address any of it.
> But campaign donations by corporate interests and lobbying _are_ essentially legal bribery.
Campaign contributions and lobbying are not at all the same thing.
First, "Corporate interests" are prohibited from making campaign contributions.
Secondly, lobbying is simply the process of petitioning elected officials to persuade them to advocate your causes. That's not unique to the US; every democracy has a mechanism for that process.
Bribery absolutely is legal in America -- as long as the funds go towards campaign finance, rather than directly into the politician's personal pocket. Which then gets them a job, which puts funds in their pocket; and in exchange for which, they ensure that government contracts and regulations look favorably upon their donors.
Call it what you want, but this is absolutely homomorphic with corruption.
> Bribery absolutely is legal in America -- as long as the funds go towards campaign finance, rather than directly into the politician's personal pocket. Which then gets them a job, which puts funds in their pocket; and in exchange for which, they ensure that government contracts and regulations look favorably upon their donors. Call it what you want, but this is absolutely homomorphic with corruption.
What you're describing is completely illegal. Politicians can be (and are) prosecuted for it, even in incredibly corrupt states like New York.
Rubbish. As long as there is no explicit link between the money and the results, this is completely legal, open, and standard practice.
Consider Senator Richard Shelby[1]. He is a staunch advocate of the "Space Launch System" -- a rocket program that looks the 2nd avenue subway look like a paragon of efficiency. He is an equally staunch opponent of "new-space" companies like SpaceX, which don't take cost-plus contracts or make significant campaign contributions.[2]
Of course one could argue that he's just acting in accordance with his principles, and that it's just a crazy coincidence that Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon -- the prime SLS contractors -- are among his top 20 campaign contributors.[3] Nope, he's just acting in accordance to his principles, and they're, uh, just acting in accordance with, uh, theirs. No cause-and-effect here, nope, nothing to see.
Bullshit. There's clearly a cause-and-effect, and this is completely standard practice across the whole of the government, and would absolutely be classed as bribery anywhere else in the world.
> Of course one could argue that he's just acting in accordance with his principles, and that it's just a crazy coincidence that Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon -- the prime SLS contractors -- are among his top 20 campaign contributors
That sounds a lot less scandalous when you realize that those top 20 campaign contributors listed aren't the companies themselves - the contributors are all employees of those companies. Companies are prohibited from making campaign contributions; all of those contributions are from the employees themselves, using after-tax money, and the only reason employer information is collected is to prove that companies aren't funneling money to campaigns under their employees' names.
It's not surprising that employees of Lockheed Martin - the largest government contractor in the country - would support the candidacy of a politician who advocates awarding government contracts. What do you expect them to do - vote for a candidate who wants to eliminate government contracts?
The idea that a politician takes actions in order to appease the people who voted for them (or persuade those who might vote for them) isn't scandalous; it's exactly what we'd expect in a healthy democracy. New York isn't a healthy democracy, which is why this doesn't happen in New York at all.
So get back to the problem at hand, the issue with New York government specifically isn't that we have too much of this process - it's that New York politicians aren't accountable to voters at all in the first place, as I've explained throughout this thread, and as been documented by the New York Times in this and other articles.
No, what you've done is substitute "campaign contributors" for "voters". They're not the same thing, especially when those campaign contributions -- while they may originate with individuals -- are routed through PACs such as the "Lockheed Martin Employees' Political Action Committee (LMEPAC)", making it explicit what those contributions are buying (as opposed to, say, just being generally supportive of a candidate's political philosophy).
Shelby is indeed responsive to his campaign contributors. He is not responsive to voters. Conflating those two things is the very essence of the corruption of American democracy.
New York is really no different: politicians are responsive to their campaign contributors, not to voters. I'm not saying this to excuse New York: it's a serious problem there. But to say that this is a uniquely New York problem is completely wrong and fails to see the forest for the trees.
> Shelby is indeed responsive to his campaign contributors. He is not responsive to voters. New York is really no different: politicians are responsive to their campaign contributors, not to voters.
That's where you're wrong. Campaign contributors have basically no influential power over New York politicians, any more than voters themselves do.
Ironically, New York serves as a great counterpoint to your argument, because it has some of the strongest - if not the very strongest* public campaign finance laws in the entire country.
> But to say that this is a uniquely New York problem is completely wrong and fails to see the forest for the trees.
It sounds like you really don't understand the extent of the problems that exist in New York. Yes, it is a problem unique to New York, because no other state has a political system structured the way New York's is (and no other state has a government as corrupt as New York's is).
But again, that's not because "bribery is legal", because (a) it's not, and (b) focusing on "bribery" misses the heart of the actual corruption problems that New York has.
> Ironically, New York serves as a great counterpoint to your argument, because it has some of the strongest - if not the very strongest* public campaign finance laws in the entire country.
There are limits to what individual donors can give, but politicians in New York can still receive unlimited campaign contributions in total.[1] This means that large companies and unions can pool their resources to buy influence, exactly as anywhere else.
New York proves that well-regulated bribery is not any better than poorly-regulated bribery.
> Campaign contributors have basically no influential power over New York politicians, any more than voters themselves do.
So you're saying that the politicians in New York are not receiving substantial campaign contributions from the unions, consultancies, and contractors that are profiting from the 2nd Avenue Subway? Are you quite sure of that?
> There are limits to what individual donors can give, but politicians in New York can still receive unlimited campaign contributions in total.[1] This means that large companies and unions can pool their resources to buy influence, exactly as anywhere else.
No, they can't, because corporations (including unions) can't contribute to political campaigns.
If you know of a corporation (including a union) that's actually pooling their resources and giving them to campaigns or politicians, you should report it, because that is illegal. You can't keep asserting that that is legal - it's not.
> So you're saying that the politicians in New York are not receiving substantial campaign contributions from the unions, consultancies, and contractors that are profiting from the 2nd Avenue Subway
People who work at those companies might decide to donate their own money to politicians, yes. That doesn't mean they're buying special influence with them on behalf of their employers.
I'm getting rather tired of this discussion, because you seem to be mostly interested in hammering away at the same (misguided) point about bribery, despite the fact that this very article outlines the evidence that unions don't need to bribe or buy politicians with money; they already hold that influence over elected officials, without needing to pay anything for it.
If you'd like to keep pounding the same drum, there are plenty of other articles on which to do it, but it's a real distraction from the point at hand here, and I'm getting tired of carrying on a conversation about a point that's contradicted by the article were commenting on.
> People who work at those companies might decide to donate their own money to politicians, yes. That doesn't mean they're buying special influence with them on behalf of their employers.
And the company might decide they deserve an extra Christmas bonus equal to their contributions to candidates the company likes plus enough to cover the income taxes... It was however, a discretionary bonus available to all employees. It might not be legal, but it happens all the time.
> And the company might decide they deserve an extra Christmas bonus equal to their contributions to candidates the company likes plus enough to cover the income taxes... It was however, a discretionary bonus available to all employees. It might not be legal, but it happens all the time.
There is literally no evidence for the extraordinary and outlandish claim that this happens "all the time".
Please don't distract from the actual topic at hand - the wide corruption within the MTA and the New York State government - with completely unsubstantiated conspiracy theories.
> There is literally no evidence for the extraordinary and outlandish claim that this happens "all the time".
I've worked at multiple medium sized companies that bonused executives who went to optional political fundraisers, but it is anecdotal evidence at best.
Some companies also run very public PAC's for the same purpose. They may or may not discretionarily bonus employees who donate to the PAC, I haven't worked at these places so I don't know first hand, but I wouldn't be surprised.
> If you know of a corporation (including a union) that's actually pooling their resources and giving them to campaigns or politicians, you should report it, because that is illegal. You can't keep asserting that that is legal - it's not.
That is how it's done, and it's completely standard and legal. Everybody (who wants to buy influence) does this. The message this sends is reinforced by much more spending on third-party lobbying groups. In 2016, for example, this PAC channeled $2.6M worth of employee contributions directly to candidates[1], plus an additional $13.6M to lobbyists to ensure that the message was received as intended[2].
> I'm getting rather tired of this discussion, because you seem to be mostly interested in hammering away at the same (misguided) point about bribery, despite the fact that this very article outlines the evidence that unions don't need to bribe or buy politicians with money; they already hold that influence over elected officials, without needing to pay anything for it. [...] I'm getting tired of carrying on a conversation about a point that's contradicted by the article were commenting on.
Again, sorry, you're wrong. Quoting from the article, emphasis mine:
"Construction companies, which have given millions of dollars in campaign donations in recent years, have increased their projected costs by up to 50 percent when bidding for work from the M.T.A., contractors say."
"The unions working on M.T.A. projects have donated more than $1 million combined to Mr. Cuomo during his administration, records show."
"WSP USA, formerly known as Parsons Brinckerhoff. The firm, which designed some of New York’s original subway, has donated hundreds of thousands to politicians in recent years, and has hired so many transit officials that some in the system refer to it as “the M.T.A. retirement home.”"
Finally, let me add: in my previous career I was a consultant for public transport infrastructure planning. This is something I have direct experience of. Politicians are specifically disinterested in cost savings on infrastructure projects because that would work against the interest of their donors. In private, this is something they will tell you without shame. So I've seen this problem point blank.
How did you figure out that the cause isn't "getting the most Federal money spent in Alabama"? Newspace doesn't have any Alabama facilities, except for Blue Origin offering to build a factory there if their BE-4 engine is selected for ULA's new Vulcan rocket, which seems likely to happen.
> The labor deals negotiated between the unions and construction companies also ensure that workers are well paid. The agreement for Local 147, the union for the famed “sandhogs” who dig the tunnels, includes a pay rate for most members of $111 per hour in salary and benefits. The pay doubles for overtime or Sunday work, which is common in transit construction. Weekend overtime pays quadruple — more than $400 per hour.
The article correctly identifies the number of people are working on a job is about 4x the normal rate when compared to Asia and Europe. However, when you take the hourly pay rate you quickly see it for what it is. This is fraud.
> The critics pointed to several unusual provisions in the labor agreements. One part of Local 147’s deal entitles the union to $450,000 for each tunnel-boring machine used. That is to make up for job losses from “technological advancement,” even though equipment has been standard for decades
They literally have to pay the union $450,000 for using machines that have been standard around the world for fifty years.
The politician pays the union. The union pays the politician.
So both are getting paid, out of money taken by force from the population. Neither has an interest in making this stop.
About the only hope is that 1-sided political donations will sufficiently tick off a political party at the national level. There is a tiny chance that national law could change because of that.
> ...and people scoff at Elon Musk for saying he can significantly reduce the cost of tunneling in the US...
Nobody scoffs at Elon Musk for suggesting he could reduce the cost of tunneling in the US. It's not like it's a mystery why tunneling is so expensive. They scoff at the suggestion that he's somehow unique or exceptional for making that claim.
This is what is killing US public transit. Most things are reasonably priced in the US by global standards. Why are our public works projects always so ridiculously expensive? It has to be some structural or cultural difference.
I'm not an expert, but it seems the mix of unions, politicians, kickbacks, corruption, favoritism, etc., leads itself to abuse.
Maybe, maybe if we just used something similar to the Army Corps of Engineers to handle all major infra construction in the US, keeping local politicians out of the fiscal and contractual aspects, then maybe we could get what we pay for. In the meantime, it seems like a bunch of backscratching and pocket stuffing --I mean, someone's making money.
While it's part of the military, organizationally speaking, they are composed of both military and civilian staff.
They have the expertise in engineering, construction, management and budgeting.
And, since these sorts of projects don't happen often in a given place, but do happen periodically around the country, the expertise gained can be leveraged for other similar projects rather than have the MTA and other Transit orgs reinvent the wheel.
While there may be some pork in there, it's be much less than you'd find when you get local politicians and state politicians all trying to get something out of it [I'll vote for your subway, if you vote for my bridge and don't raise hell about hiring my son in law's firm, etc.]
Can't be worse than local politicians. The Corps would do the management and contract with local engineering concerns --at reasonable prices. Bring them from Texas, Illinois, who cares, so long as they can do the job.
Reading this makes me want to throw up. How these people are not in jail is beyond me.
First Wall Street and now the MTA.
My dad would always say this expression to describe the difference between a criminal on Wall Street and in construction. The only difference is a suit.
> My dad would always say this expression to describe the difference between a criminal on Wall Street and in construction. The only difference is a suit.
Also, the construction worker or MTA worker is probably making more money and working fewer hours.
For those who don't believe me, read the article - or even look up the salaries online, since they're often public. This is not even an exaggeration.
Waste and corruption in a public good as vital as rail transport is truly sad. It happens everywhere though. In Melbourne, contracts for their new ticketing system were given to a totally unqualified company and ran several hundred million over budget. Rather than just eat the cost, the corrupt city officials have doubled down by wasting more money of worthless ticket inspectors to attempt to recover some of the costs from fare evaders.
The leaders entrusted to expand New York’s regional transit network have paid the highest construction costs in the world, spending billions of dollars that could have been used to fix existing subway tunnels, tracks, trains and signals.
The estimated cost of the Long Island Rail Road project, known as “East Side Access,” has ballooned to $12 billion, or nearly $3.5 billion for each new mile of track — seven times the average elsewhere in the world. The recently completed Second Avenue subway on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and the 2015 extension of the No. 7 line to Hudson Yards also cost far above average, at $2.5 billion and $1.5 billion per mile, respectively
Having just visited Melbourne, I truly hated being forced into paying $7 (AUD) for the privilege of getting a myki card to make a $4.10 trip each way (so $8.20). There is no longer any way to buy paper tickets, and unlike San Francisco which can print out reasonable RF-enabled single ride tickets for MUNI, everyone took it as obvious that $7 AUD was simply the cost of doing business. Thanks for the backstory on myki!
Melbourne had a disposable ticket system in place for Myki - the tickets had already been made[1]. The Liberal government threw them out, wasting 15 million dollars in the process. And probably more on the equipment to dispense them.
This is the same party that on a federal level threw out the nationwide fibre to the premises project, wasting 50 billion dollars on installing new DSL connections instead. I am actually being serious, they will be installing new DSL at a cost of 2400$ per premises until at least 2020.
> First, the contractors said, the vendors add between 15 and 25 percent as an “M.T.A. Factor” because of how hard it can be to work within the bureaucracy of the transit authority. Then they add 10 percent as a contingency for possible changes. And then they add another 10-12 percent on top of all that for profit and overhead.
There is the core problem. Extreme horrid bureaucracy in the MTA (or any public sector), combined with the change stuff - it's not unusual for decades-long projects to have politicians demand changes, new regulations (fire protection!), court orders (environmental protection) or the discovery of historic sites leading to, sometimes expensive, change requests.
If I were a contractor, of course I'd calculate with this risk in mind. I'd run bankrupt if not.
> insisting on extravagant station designs
And yet another problem: public projects don't like doing stuff with "standardized solutions". It always ends up with specific weird customizations - designed to e.g. force the project to buy parts from a specific vendor in the home region of the politicians (hello NASA, Airbus), or to prevent political undesirables from getting the contracts.
In addition, with public-sector works there is often a lack of competent in house oversight and planning - and a lack of preventing any small politician to cause change requests in the first place.
Sometimes I wonder why the heck I should live in NYC and pay so much in state and city taxes.. and then I can’t even deduct them starting in 2018... But then i get depressed so I try not to think of it too much.
Meanwhile, progressive-leaning organizations have been pushing for the elimination of SALT deductions for years, on the logic that it primarily benefits the wealthy residents in high tax states.
The Center for American Progress was urging the Obama administration to eliminate those tax deductions[1]. Politifact fact-checked a Pelosi claim, and came to the same conclusion, that the SALT deudction "is a tax deduction that disproportionately benefits higher-income taxpayers[2]". Only 10% of filers earning under $50k a year even bother claiming the deduction[3][4].
This to me is one of the biggest problems talking about taxation and wealth in the US. $50k is nothing you can really live off in most (by population) parts of California. $100k would make you well-off elsewhere but makes you poor in the Bay Area. While I'm generally for some degree of wealth redistribution, I'm afraid this will hit many people who aren't actually wealthy, but just scraping by.
There is a large difference in the cost of living between areas like SF and NYC and the average, but it is not nearly that high. The living wage for a family of two adults, and two children, with one working, for San Francisco is $72k according to http://livingwage.mit.edu/counties/06075 Chattanooga TN has the lowest of a major city at $47k in income for the same size family. Over 50% of households in the bay area make less than $75k a year. It is a hyperbole to say that $100k is poor even in the bay area
It may or may not. I'm admittedly not an economist, and even if I were, I'm not remotely informed on California tax policy.
That said, it's confounding to me that eliminating the mortgage deduction, and eliminating SALT deductions were considered progressive ideals, right up until the Republicans implemented it. I don't know if it's people preferring policy ideals that sound good on paper, or if they're being applied to some richer population than the one whomever happens to be in, or if this is just the result of tribal echoing, but what we're left with isn't pretty.
Folks making $100k in the Bay Area aren’t scraping by. Living in the Bay Area itself gives them opportunities and advantages they wouldn’t have in say Des Moines.
The folks making $100k are incredibly under taxed in the US. In Sweden, the top tax bracket kicks in at about $77,000.
Really? The numbers say otherwise. Take half that 100K for various taxes. Take $24K for rent. Leaves $24K for transportation, food, health care. Kind of a skinny chicken.
In Des Moines, you can buy a house for $100K. You can rent for $12K a year. Can ride a bike all over town, or live blocks from work. Its a whole different world.
PaycheckCity calculates $65,000 net on $100k salary in California, for a single person. Take out $24k for rent, and that leaves $3,400 per month for other stuff. That’s extremely comfortable.
If Des Moines offered similar opportunities, people would live there instead of San Francisco. Those opportunities are themselves a benefit that can’t be ignored. And if people live in SF even though the benefits don’t outweigh the increased cost of living, why should th government subsidize that lifestyle choice?
Public policy does more than enough already to reward sprawl and punish urban centers. Billions for freeways and a pittance for transit, FHA bias towards single family homes, etc. For the environment and the economy, we should be rewarding and encouraging people who move to megacities.
To make that worse, historically problematic movements like the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge and large parts of the Chinese communism found better support in rural areas. I strongly recommend Ian Buruma's "Occidentalism". It's short, packed with information, well researched and completely changed how I see the world. I would go so far to say that we need everything we can to have as few people live in rural areas as possible. Otherwise we will keep getting movements of rural people feeling left behind by the cold, calculating, greedy and immoral urban dwellers which will ultimately result in them yet again dragging everything down with them.
Living in the Bay Area is a choice. If someone is scraping by but could effectively make more relative to cost of living elsewhere, they should consider moving.
> But the government worked closely with vendors, trying to build the type of collaborative relationships that are rare in New York.
This comes just a handful of paragraphs after:
> A Times analysis of the 25 M.T.A. agency presidents who have left over the past two decades found that at least 18 of them became consultants or went to work for authority contractors, including many who have worked on expansion projects.
> “Is it rigged? Yes,” said Charles G. Moerdler, who has served on the M.T.A. board since 2010. “I don’t think it’s corrupt. But I think people like doing business with people they know, and so a few companies get all the work, and they can charge whatever they want.”
So which is it? Is the MTA not close enough to the vendors, or too close?
Because most countries have nationalized health care, projects abroad do not have to fund worker health insurance. That might explain a tenth of the cost differences, contractors said.
That's a wrong analysis. Healthcare is funded of workers compensation in countries with nationalized healthcare. The real issue is that Americans pay much more for the same healthcare, but that only have repercussions on prices when it's actually financed and not a burden on society.
> So it’s not a wrong analysis. Helth care costs distort entire markets in the US.
It's a completely wrong analysis. It's not even an analysis - it's just quoting a talking point straight from the MTA justifying their high payroll.
And, as the article demonstrates, it's completely off-base. If you look at the numbers from the article, it still doesn't add up, even assuming that every employee is given the most generous healthcare plan available, the kind that venture-backed Silicon Valley startups might give to their employees.
There's simply no excuse for not tracking spending. With software, every $1 box of nails should be tracked. Everything else is fraud, that the NYC DA seems to be willingly ignoring. Once again, no consequences for bad behavior. Almost every single issue here boils down to no consequences for harmful behavior or horrific consequences for normal behavior. It will be interesting to see if we ever implement a justice system to fix these problems or just keep pretending like whatever the fuck we're doing now is working.
The Manhattan DA is Cyrus Vance Jr., son of Jimmy Carter Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. Jr has come under fire for refusing to prosecute Weinstein and there is some evidence that his office received campaign donations from high profile people he refused to prosecute.
Vance is about as old school “NY Democrat machine politics” as it gets. He’s pretty much a modern Tamminy Hall. If he’s DA you will never see any prosecutions for politically-connected corruption — at least not as long as the campaign donations are rolling in. By the way, I am not implying that Republicans are any better or worse — Vance is just in the dominant party of NYC politics — the problem is the “machine” not the specific flavor of that machine. If you are in New York, stop voting for Vance and other stuff like him. There is a lot of talk about “resisting Trump,” but really I have yet to see any equivalent outrage over the guys right in your neighborhood that are essentially enabling theft and corruption. Most New Yorkers can spit fire over Trump, but seem to be asleep when it comes to this ground level corruption. Tip O’Neil once said “All politics is local,” — perhaps voters should act like it and start holding local politicians’ feet to the fire. In a city packed full of lawyers, Cyrus Vance is the best y’all could do? For sure national politics matters, but the real bleeding happens on the street: on school boards, the DA’s office, City Hall, in the boroughs.. NYC is a great city — despite the politicians New Yorkers insist on re-electing.
Lack of anti-fraud measures in the law as well as in the project contracts. Where's the auditing and prosecution budget? There should be an independent auditor making referrals for prosecution to an independent prosecutor. Th
$3.5 billion for each new mile of track
At a certain point of a project, whether business or personal, you pull the fucking plug. Done. Scrape it. Cut the loss. And that's what should be done here. Fire everyone, fire the contractors, they don't like it, sue, the gravy train has come to an end.
It's worth pointing out that a situation like this is often the endgame of anti-corruption rules.
It always starts simple: you put in a rule, say, that a contract can't be awarded to a contractor who has some relationship to the person making the decision. Then someone quite reasonably objects that a bureaucrat from a different department might try to influence the decision-maker to award to their friend for a kickback. So now you add a rule that there are multiple entities, ideally adversarial, involved who all have to agree before the contract gets awarded. Then you pile on yet more rules as people come up with ever more creative ways to get around them.
And then one day you wake up and realize you have a literal maze of reports and applications and audits and inspections and committees that all have to be fulfilled for even the simplest project, and it's grown so complex that only a couple of companies put in the (extreme) effort of figuring out how to navigate it; everybody else has given up. Now those have a guaranteed lock on future contracts, and no longer have any incentive to be honest or control costs, since who else are you ever going to legally be able to give a contract to? Plus, the system is so complex that even the people in charge of it don't always know how to manage or enforce it. And then the costs start going up and up and up...
I guess I see what you're saying but...how about people are just reasonable and not greedy? But I suppose that goes against basic human nature, or something.
Many cultures make this work, including Japan. They also have very involved, ritualized, negotiations. I don't know whether the contracts are any longer, or if they depend substantially on long standing norms.
What I see in America's big projects right now is a lot of selfish narcissism. Greed stems from that. It's, "I am a whore, and you should go right ahead and treat me like one because I'm gonna treat you like one." It's really adversarial. There is no pride in anything other than making money.
Contrast with the big industrial boom period of the 20th century, when massive public and private infrastructure was built, with really high taxes on the high end - I think they took a lot of pride in their work, the fact that so many people, a civil society, were going to use and benefit from using that infra - and it was going to make everyone richer.
I understand the feeling(1), but if only a small number of contractors are bidding for the work, and you pull the plug on a major contract, how do you move forward? Abandon any plans for extensions? Demolish buildings to build more roads?
(1) In the UK, national government IT projects famously go over cost and sometimes, arguably, under-deliver. Much finger pointing. Very limited number of companies that have the scale to bid for projects.
If the tunnels have a 20 ft diameter, that's $2100 per cubic foot of material removed. Give me a jackhammer and shovel and I'll happily do it for 50% off.
More and more I think that US/europe should adopt expat worker models. Having a bunch of chinese companies bidding on this sort of work and then bringing over ships full of temporary workers and equipment to do the job seems to make sense. We outsourced manufacturing, now we need to outsource infrastructure projects. It alleviates poverty in china, and ensures that our country doesn't become a useless calcified relic.
Stories like these are the reason that much of the public hates unions -- especially public sector unions and unions employed/contracted on public sector projects. If public sector unions negotiated work rules and compensation that were more in line with the private sector, I suspect that their public image would benefit tremendously.
Unions have a necessary function; as a check and balance against corporate power. But unions acting like this are just as bad as monopoly companies. Anti-trust legislation or similar should be brought to bear here to break the unions into smaller competing unions or place them under a consent decree. Just like a monopoly company should be broken up or placed on a consent decree (Google - search, Amazon - online shopping (although Amazon have yet to seriously part take in rent seeking), Microsoft - desktop software) so should abusive unions. Abuse of collective power; union, corporate, government should be constrained and where reasonably possible pre-empted.
> Anti-trust legislation or similar should be brought to bear here to break the unions into smaller competing unions or place them under a consent decree.
We can't. US law explicitly exempts unions from the monopsony and anti-trust laws that would allow us to force them to compete with each other. Unions successfully lobbied for that special protection decades ago, and now it'd be very hard to reverse.
Doesn't mean we shouldn't try. I love unions, and I love companies too. One represents the capital and the other the labour; both should be forced to compete. But of course if a company tried to deal with only one union to force the hands of the others then the one they dealt with would wound up being broken up too. So problems wouldn't go away. And employees could chose the union that represents their interests best; i.e. charges reasonable fees, negotiates reasonable wages, etc.
You left off the most important piece. If your going to quote it, provide the right context.
>The budget showed that 900 workers were being paid to dig caverns for the platforms as part of a 3.5-mile tunnel connecting the historic station to the Long Island Rail Road. But the accountant could only identify about 700 jobs that needed to be done, according to three project supervisors. Officials could not find any reason for the other 200 people to be there.
“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.”
$1,000 a day?! $400 an hour for overtime on the weekend?! Holy shit, what a corrupt scam machine. The politicians that signed off on these projects at these costs after receiving generous donations should be flayed alive.
> Trade unions, which have closely aligned themselves with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and other politicians, have secured deals requiring underground construction work to be staffed by as many as four times more laborers than elsewhere in the world, documents show.
The Left decries the death of the unions, but it's this kind of nonsense that kept Obama from getting any sort of fiscal stimulus passed in the wake of 2008.
My previous career was as a consultant for public transport infrastructure. I was involved in consultations in roughly two dozen countries, depending on how you count, including India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and other localities not well-known for efficiency and innovation. Of these, however, public-sector America was overwhelmingly the least efficient and least innovative.
(I'm American myself, but emigrated to the UK to find less crazy-making work in this sector.)
This isn't just a New York problem, although the 2nd Avenue Subway is a really excellent example. It's a problem everywhere in America. I feel like this article does an excellent job of digging into some of the lower-level symptoms, but only touches lightly on the root cause.
At its core, this is a product of not just a broken political system, but of two broken political cultures. Rhetoric has polarised into "we need to spend more money on the public good" (health care, infrastructure, etc.) vs. "we need to spend less money on the public good" -- Democrats and Republicans, respectively. I say "rhetoric" because what either side says has very little bearing on what they actually do, spending-wise, but nonetheless the rhetoric is important because of what it excludes.
Missing from this dichotomy is: "we need to get smarter at spending money on the public good" -- independent of any argument about whether more or less should be spent. One simply isn't allowed to make this statement: the "spend more money" crowd reads such a statement as being fundamentally in opposition to a funding increase, while the "spend less money" crowd takes umbrage because of its implicit endorsement of spending money on the public good in the first place. Everybody hates the argument that spending can and should be done more smartly. It has no real supporters.
But why not? Digging deeper, I submit that this isn't a broken system, but one which is working precisely as intended. It boils down to campaign finance: politicians need campaign funds to be re-elected, and unions and planning/engineering/construction companies are both major campaign contributors, on a bi-partisan basis (unions skewing Democratic of course, and the companies mostly skewing Republican). If public funds were spent more efficiently, they would get less money, full stop. Therefore they don't give campaign contributions to politicians who advocate such positions, and therefore there are no such politicians.
So what we get is a system intended to redistribute money to major campaign contributors. It is working exactly as intended. In infrastructure this enriches both unions and corporates; in healthcare it enriches doctors, health insurers, drug companies, medical device companies, and lawyers. Those are the stakeholders that the systems are designed to serve. Recipients of actual transport / health care services are a tertiary concern at best.
This problem won't be fixed until those "stakeholders" are held to better account, required to do more work for less money. And that won't happen as long as they are able to buy influence in the political system. Everywhere else in the world, the kind of influence-buying that happens in America is regarded as corruption and is highly criminalized; in America, corruption is legal as long as it goes through the right channels, and this is the result.
So nothing will change without major campaign finance reform, and that seems to be a very distant prospect.
Taking redundancy and linkbait out of submission titles is standard here. "On Earth" was redundant because where else would the subway track be? And it was hyperbolic, therefore linkbait, which is presumably why they put it there to begin with.
That's not editorializing because no particular interpretation is being pushed; we're just being good Strunk-and-Whiters and omitting needless words.
> "On Earth" was redundant because where else would the subway track be?
Without qualifiers, given the provenance of its source material, one could reasonably assume it to mean "in the US". Saying "on Earth" or "in the world" would clarify that it's being compared against all other subway building occurring, even (perhaps especially) against notoriously corrupt countries with artificially high construction costs.
...would clarify that it's being compared against all other subway building occurring
Sure, but it's not that kind of article. The title is rhetorical, rather than conveying a demonstrated fact.
The article isn't about some study that establishes with certainty that it is actually the most expensive length of track, anywhere in the world, ever, in real terms.
Sure it seems plausible given the facts conveyed in the article, but the world is big and the history of rail is fairly long, and the article is not describing an exhaustive comparison with every other railway ever built.
So it seems reasonable for dang to decide that the original title is a little too baity for HN.
we're just being good Strunk-and-Whiters and omitting needless words.
What if the title was 'The Greatest Show on Earth'?
The two titles have a slightly different flavour - calling one linkbait is silly (hyperbolic, even!), as is claiming this is being 'good Strunk-and-Whiters' (beside whether 'Strunk and White is really that great a writing standard to begin with).
HN editing leans strongly towards desaturating, flavour removal and tone flattening. That's fine, but it's a preference and you should own it as such - it's not some sort of stylistic virtue. Nothing awful would have happened if you just left in the original. You just didn't like it.
I agree. The original title is better and the strange editorializing feels like an overcorrection. Headlines can convey scale without being "clickbait" (I hate that word, it's like Fake News, the definition is relative). The HN title looks like it was run through a programmers/engineers efficiency flowchart and lacks feeling.
> An accountant discovered the discrepancy while reviewing the budget for new train platforms under Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan.
> The budget showed that 900 workers were being paid to dig caverns for the platforms as part of a 3.5-mile tunnel connecting the historic station to the Long Island Rail Road. But the accountant could only identify about 700 jobs that needed to be done, according to three project supervisors. Officials could not find any reason for the other 200 people to be there.
> “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.”
People may disagree with the following view and downvote, but still...
Where can I read an account of what the accountant found and how they reached their conclusions?
I can only trust/hope that the accountant had experience in construction and/or could consult with trustworthy advisers.
But the two things that came to mind as I read these three paragraphs were that
a) this is a puff piece written from the POV of "spending too much money" for whatever agenda this spin would help
b) this is cost-cutting being re-spun to look good
Some balance:
I live close by to a brand new driverless underground metro network that's being developed. I'm super excited to travel on the new trains when they arrive. I even hope to work there at some point.
When I was poking around the websites at an early point in the construction process, I found that one site's design/layout was clearly mobile-first to the extent that it was mobile-only and displayed Amusingly™ on a desktop PC; I also found a bit of a headscratcher with another site's DNS setup that I didn't know where to report; and when I poked around the bid platform that let any contractor sign up to be recruited to be part of the construction, I decided the whole system (bid platform and everything else) felt very very rushed-through.
So I have no industry experience but I've had a very tiny whiff of what a multi-billion project looks like on the ground as it's developing. Tons of overhead, lots of space for little things to fall through, etc etc.
I wouldn't be surprised if what's happening here is really just most of the same kinds of industrial-scale rounding errors.
But that makes it equally possible that what's reported really is unambiguously what happened, or that this is the uncomfortable norm and there's some spin.
Taking the statement at face value, there were attempts to inquire what the seemingly superfluous ~20% of the people were doing--that means 1 of every 5 of people is seemingly doing nothing. The only plausible permissible explanation for people seemingly doing nothing I can think up is some sort of hot standby/on call work, but that shouldn't account for so much.
It really does sound like featherbedding, especially giving that these people are being paid ~$250k/yr to do nothing (skilled construction salaries you'd expect to see more like $100-$150k/yr) [1]. With people being paid that much, you'd really expect them to have good defense for why you're paying them to do seemingly nothing, and that motivation should be strong even through multiple levels of contractor/subcontractor relationships mid-audit.
There’s a lot of context for these projects that an accountant would grok.
There are things like MWBE goals, where minorities must be contractors and have qualifying employees on these projects. Sometimes finding those employees is challenging. There are also labor peace agreements where the union demands a certain number of positions to keep their membership happy. (Laid off construction guys won’t vote for the union leadership)
There are a lot of stories about this stuff. Keep reading if you’d like to learn more.
Hmm maybe this is what the boring company is trying to do. If they can use their tech to tunnel the same distance at 90% less would truly redefine transport.
There was initial skepticism regarding Musk's predicted [reduced] costs --perhaps he was taking into account the removal of all these excess construction costs much of the public isn't privy to.
Boring itself is highly optimized - the oil industry likes their holes long, stable and cheap. So the tech is there. It is the other stuff that bogs down a project.
It's an inherently hard project that's costing way too much.
The East Side Access involves building another level of station underneath Grand Central Station, without disrupting service. The tracks are 150 feet below Park Avenue. They're working around skyscraper foundations, and adding supports for buildings above. Look at some of the pictures on line.
The article goes into this though, these challenges are something that comparable international projects have faced in much worse ground conditions (which extenuates the issue).
The magnitude of cost difference does not stem from engineering challenges.
Exactly. Crossrail in London had some insanely difficult challenges (like threading a new subway tunnel between two existing ones with only a few cm of distance between them), and hitting an enormous ancient Roman burial ground at Liverpool Street.
Despite that (and many more) it is currently 6 months ahead of schedule.
There's a great documentary about the project called the fifteen billion pound railway which covers a lot of these challenges.
“The estimated cost of the Long Island Rail Road project, known as “East Side Access,” has ballooned to $12 billion, or nearly $3.5 billion for each new mile of track — seven times the average elsewhere in the world.”
More "fleecing of America" alarmist journalist bullshit. This type of ill-informed journalism is largely what creates the red tape (i.e. extra layers of unnecessary oversight, insane requirements, and irrational spending restrictions) in government agencies that would otherwise be very lean.
I'm a government contractor and I see first hand every day (painfully) how this type of reporting has resulted in the Governments inability to attract and retain talent, as well as the loss of corporate knowledge. It's the same irrational logic that prevents non-profit orgs from attracting/regaining talent because people thinking that wvery dollar spent goes directly to those in need without regard to the need to build an infrastructure to deliver fund/aid.
I have no knowledge of New York subterranian transit, but at some point you have to step back and ask yourself if the expenditure is worth it, simply based on the value of the dollar. I think it is. This journalist apparently doesn't, but seems to have all the answers, so I say fire the 200 'excessive' workers, hire Todd Heisler (the journalist) and put him in charge of the teamining 600 workers (and associated budget) to get the job done. Apparently 900 isn't good enough for Todd.
> I have no knowledge of New York subterranian transit, but at some point you have to step back and ask yourself if the expenditure is worth it, simply based on the value of the dollar. I think it is.
That may be true. But if NYC could get five times the amount of new track for the same money, I'd prefer that. Or spend the money revamping parts of the crumbling control systems. Or pay down debt.
The point is that NYC shouldn't spend more money than it has to.
The people being hurt are the people who don't make a lot of money. NY spends all this money and the subway is still a mess.
If a goldman employee is an hour late because trains were delayed, he'll be fine. If a minimum wage worker is late, he's going to miss out on an hour of pay and could get fired for being late.
Just because NYC generates enough value to make an over-budget project still "worth it" does not mean everybody should be sucking on the government teat and seeing nothing wrong with it.
Meanwhile in Japan, they convert an above ground line into a subway line in 3.5 hours of coordinated work.[2] It's a startling difference. This is the one time I'd love to be able to bring engineering and crew from overseas and have them do the work for us and dispense with all the local corruption.
200 ghost workers -unbelievable. And they initially wanted to keep that discovery quiet. $1000/day/ghost worker for the taxpayers of New York. $200k waste per day --that's how much The City respects its citizens.
[1]http://hoodline.com/2017/10/golden-gate-park-playground-land...
[2]https://youtu.be/wIbZqqLra9k?t=80