The Manhattan transit expansion’s multibilllion-dollar price tag reflects the spiraling complexity of US construction practices, a team of NYU researchers says.
New York City’s Second Avenue Subway, which opened in 2017 after a long and troubled genesis, was a transit milestone for the city — the first major subway expansion in 50 years, and a boon for those who lived on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. But behind its wide platforms and mosaic-lined stations is the world’s most expensive subway line — and it’s not even finished.
The new 96th Street station on the Second Avenue subway line in New York City in 2017.
Photographer: John Taggart/Bloomberg
At $2.5 billion per mile, construction costs for the 1.8-mile Phase 1 of the Second Avenue Subway were 8 to 12 times more expensive than similar subway projects in Italy, Istanbul, Sweden, Paris, Berlin and Spain, according to a report from New York University’s Marron Institute of Urban Management.Authors Eric Goldwyn, Alon Levy, Elif Ensari and Marco Chitti offer a host of explanations for the markup. New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the authors conclude, “struggled to manage intergovernmental and utility coordination [and] achieve cost savings in labor wages and staffing.” Other inefficiencies stemmed from the project’s engineering and construction, with the MTA choosing “expensive station designs that differ from what we have found in our lower cost case studies,” the report says.
The report builds on the work of NYU’s Transit Costs Project, which Goldwyn and Levy help lead. The group has compiled a database comparing urban rail construction spending across more than 50 countries since the 1990s. The aim is to help US cities and transit agencies adopt the kinds of practices and techniques that keep costs down in other countries, and encourage transportation authorities to deliver more service for each construction dollar.
New York’s experience with the Second Avenue Subway offers an instructive case study in how expenses can spiral, Goldwyn said. The MTA, which operates the city’s subways, buses and commuter trains, must coordinate its efforts with many other city agencies, as well as state and federal authorities. To dig a hole in the street or power down an electric line, for example, the transit authority has to negotiate approvals from the New York City Department of Transportation and utility company Con Edison. Colliding bureaucracies can lead to poor coordination and uncertainty about who is ultimately in charge. “Transit agencies need to placate people in order to get stuff done,” Goldwyn said. “That creates not just costs — in terms of we are paying for things maybe we shouldn’t be paying for — but it also delays things.”
The NYU team singled out the $656 million in fees that the MTA paid to design and engineering consultants, a larger share than European transit agencies typically devote to outside firms. With its spacious stations, the final design also lent itself to high construction costs. The digging proceeded more slowly than it typically does in Europe: It took three years to excavate the “launch box” for the subway’s tunnel boring machine, for example — a chore that projects in Spain and Italy accomplished in a year or less. The project also ran into problems with building foundations in the area adjacent to the launch box. Goldwyn said those are the “types of things that you really need to catch before you start digging — that’s what the planning process is for.”
Workers digging the Second Avenue Subway line in 2014. Photographer: Spencer Platt/Getty Images North America
The NYU report’s portrait of the city’s infrastructure-building process rings true to K.N. Gunalan, former president of the American Society of Civil Engineers. “You have layers and layers of bureaucracy built into it,” he said. “I am not a native of New York, but I have worked on a few projects [there]. I honestly don’t know how people do business in New York because of the bureaucracy.”
But off-the-rails costs and delays have also bedeviled urban transit efforts in many other US cities, too. Projects like Los Angeles Metro’s Regional Connector and Purple Line Extension and the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority’s Green Line Extension have all seen their soft costs — which include design, planning, insurance and other non-material expenses — rise to 25-30% of total hard costs, the NYU report notes. In Italy, soft costs make up only 10% of hard costs; in France, Spain and Turkey, the are typically between 5-10%.
In the Washington, DC, area, it took the city’s Metrorail authority 13 years and $3 billion to complete an 11.5 mile link between the capital and Dulles International Airport. The Silver Line extension opened in November 2022 — 60 years after the airport did.
Runaway transit costs aren’t exclusive to the US, either: The Grand Paris Express, a massive metro build-out set to add 200 kilometers and 68 stations to the inner suburbs of the French capital over the next decade, has also seen its costs balloon. If it achieves the expected two million daily riders and meets its €36 billion ($38 billion USD) cost estimate, the project’s cost-per-rider would be on par with the Second Avenue Subway’s Phase 1, the NYU report states.
Some of the issues that the NYU reports singles out, such as political turnover, are beyond the control of transit agencies. Projects can be launched under one governor and then changed (or cancelled) by a succeeding administration, only to be revived by a third. Asked about the findings of the NYU report, MTA CEO Janno Lieber pointed to the Second Avenue Subway’s lengthy timeline at a press conference on Feb. 8. “I’m slightly mystified about why people want to talk about projects that were conceived under Governor Pataki and executed under Governor Paterson or Governor Spitzer, and some under Governor Cuomo, and not to talk about the projects that the MTA is actually been doing since this team has been in charge, or Governor Hochul has been in office,” he said.
In a statement, MTA spokesperson Sean Butler defended the subway expansion’s costs and benefits: “The Second Avenue Subway is delivering tremendous benefits and value for New York and is more cost-effective per rider than comparable projects in other cities,” he said. “In addition, that project was planned and built under different management and the MTA has successfully improved project delivery since the creation of the MTA Construction and Development agency in 2019.”
Bringing down transit construction costs is a topic of growing interest as funding from President Joe Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act begins to flow to states and cities. While the bulk of those resources will be devoured by highways and roads, public transportation stands to receive a $39 billion boost, too. Several big-ticket items are vying for their share: Along with the second phase of the Second Avenue Subway, which is slated to cost at least $6 billion, New York City leaders are looking to build the Interborough Express, a subway line to connect Brooklyn and Queens that is currently in its environmental review process.
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To make transit investments go further, the NYU report recommends that US transportation officials make use of project advocates — experts from abroad who can offer new perspectives on cost-effective construction practices, help different agencies collaborate and improve transparency.
The authors also outline a set of reforms for planning and engineering, emphasizing such changes as smaller stations and more standardized designs. “The entire procurement process must be reformed,” the report concludes, recommending that the process of hiring contractors “must be based on the principle of public-sector expertise, with an in-house engineering team that is competent enough to do planning and design.”
“The best thing we can do is to make smart decisions faster and better,” said Bernie McNeilly, Northeast Region president of the engineering firm WSP, which has been involved the Gateway Hudson Tunnel project and Moynihan Train Hall at Penn Station, among other projects across the New York City area.
Source: bloomberg.com
