Why New York City Stopped Building Subways (2018)

https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/04/why-new-york-city-stopped-building-subways/557567/

by jseliger • 7 years ago

193 207 7 years ago

dang• 7 years ago

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16851165

drtillberg2• 7 years ago

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

echion• 7 years ago

Appreciated. Is there a tldr for hacker news front page submissions? Because someone should make that, if not.

smogcutter5• 7 years ago

plowed money into autos

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

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

Spooky23• 7 years ago

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

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

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

alexhutcheson• 7 years ago

The Robert Moses explanation makes a great narrative, but it doesn't explain why every other major city in the US made the same choices at around the same time.

Tokkemon3• 7 years ago

Not really, he was just following the trends of the time. If anything, New York is in a far better place with him than without. Sure, he did some bad things, but New York wouldn't be able to cope without his expressways and bridges.

asveikau2• 7 years ago

Your summary misses an important point: I don't think you can totally discount the effect of "white flight" and the late 20th century perception of cities as being crime ridden places to avoid. The article references this indirectly as growth of car-centric suburbs, shrinking urban population, and the city's 1970s fiscal problems (caused in part by the loss of tax base from suburbanization).

ghaff2• 7 years ago

the late 20th century perception of cities as being crime ridden places to avoid

Of course, a lot of cities really were, to at least some degree, crime-ridden places to avoid. The reality is complicated and varies by city of course, but it's still pretty accurate as a sweeping generalization to say that a lot of cities in the 70s and 80s wouldn't have looked all that appealing to the sort of college-educated professional class who want to live in cities today.

As I was saying to someone the other day, with the exception of people in finance moving to Manhattan, very few of the people in my class in grad school went to live in a city when they graduated.

drtillberg2• 7 years ago

People go where transportation takes them; we built highways and they went. It's not easy to untangle cause from effect.

travisoneill1• 7 years ago

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

btown• 7 years ago

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

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

dantheman2• 7 years ago

The big things are corruption, graft, and mismanagement.

neltnerb• 7 years ago

Yes, I agree that seemed odd to ignore. The theory that loss of experience results in increasing costs sounds true, but I see nothing to back it up or any thought of alternate explanations. Like models that include economic impact I would expect to skyrocket the costs (in a total sense) when building in areas that get built up over time.

namdnay4• 7 years ago

Why on earth would you want to encourage subway commuters to switch to ride sharing?! Ride sharing is a good intermediate solution, better than individual vehicles, but it still causes noise, pollution and traffic. We need to do everything we can to encourage people to avoid cars and adopt public transport

jcranmer7• 7 years ago

There are several factors:

* Labor costs and construction material costs have grown faster than inflation.

* There are more amenities in subways (such as handicapped access in stations) now than 100 years ago, and new construction accounts for them from the beginning.

* The underground infrastructure has become more crowded, which increases the number of pipes and the like that need to be relocated or avoided during construction.

* Planning and permitting requirements have increased, so you need to spend money showing, e.g., that you aren't harming any migratory fowl resting areas, or ensuring that you can expeditiously evacuate the station in case of an emergency.

* The agencies in charge have been doing worse and worse jobs at cost-control and project management.

The proposed price tag of the second phase of the 2nd Avenue subway is absolutely ludicrous--and so far, the MTA's justification [1] for the insane cost premiums is "fire codes." Seriously. For 10× over, say, Paris Metro construction costs. The public really needs to take MTA and the New York state government to task for allowing that sort of bullshit to stand.

[1] http://secondavenuesagas.com/2019/09/23/mta-officials-cite-f...

throwaway1777• 7 years ago

How have labor costs gone up so much? Average subway workers haven’t recently started making a ton of money as far as I know, so is the money going to administration?

smadge• 7 years ago

The article suggests that the knowledge and skill required to build tunnels efficiently have atrophied over time, I suppose as the people involved in the explosion of construction between 1904 - 1940 retire.

delfinom3• 7 years ago

There's a documentary out there that details how NYC tunnel construction worked back then.

Basically almost war-like propaganda about how working on the tunnel was good for you and the country, how you are chicken if you don't go down in there, etc.

They got it done fast by literally throwing people at the tunnel and scooping out their remains.

Then they had the papers run propaganda to cover up incidents and recruit more bodies.

Incidentally, they basically had the human powered version of a TBM frame back then and still had people dying left and right.

Times are a little different now....a little hard to have people dying every hour on a construction job

beerandt8• 7 years ago

Among other factors- late 70's EPA regulations starting to kick in on late 80's projects.

shmerl4• 7 years ago

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

jcranmer7• 7 years ago

Too bad the Boring Company would rather build their own transit systems than bore the tunnels for existing subway systems.

shmerl4• 7 years ago

Why can't they do both?

mncharity2• 7 years ago

The Boring Company is a startup exploring a transformative sweet spot around very-inexpensive small simple autonomous-EV single-lane road tunnels, when constructed very rapidly at extremely large scale. If BC were to attempt a conventionally sized and outfitted subway tunnel, bid against established contractors, for one of the very few contracts available, presumably with a machine in direct competition with established TBM manufacturers... well, that would be quite a pivot.

untog3• 7 years ago

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

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

shmerl4• 7 years ago

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

objektif6• 7 years ago

Whats bizarre about the LA tunnel?

trianglem• 7 years ago

Bizarre gives me no information on what's wrong with it. Care to elaborate?

beerandt8• 7 years ago

Won't happen (yet), because it goes against everything Musk.

At the risk of downvotes... Here's my work-in-progress theory (v0.1):

Musk isn't a tech genius, (or maybe he is, but irrelevant) he's a regulation genius. (Which allows him to also be an effective fundraiser, but again, irrelevant.)

Musk's MO is to enter a niche, mostly uncontested and unregulated area of an otherwise over-regulated market. Then make a whole lot of noise about why this niche is so different and special and going to be so groundbreaking, which is really just cover for "why existing regulations shouldn't apply to me." Then as regulations (and subsidies) for that niche market are created, make sure that they favor his company (which already has a beachhead), while still being a barrier to market for any new-comers hoping to ride his coat-tails. Continue until level of regulation roughly matches the rest of the (non-niche) industry, ensuring niche status while becoming a competitor in the overall (non-niche) market. This happens as everyone realizes the final product, as finished, probably wasn't special enough to be excluded from the (non-niche) market regulations.

See: (in decreasing rank of success)

PayPal-> Banking

SpaceX-> Rockets/Aerospace

Tesla-> Cars

Giga-factory/ Tesla assembly automation -> manufacturing

Boring Company-> Subsurface Construction

Solar City-> Power Utility

Not-a-flamethrower -> flame thrower market???

Scuba rescue tank-> pedo scuba rescue market???

There are obviously some places this fits and others it doesn't. There's also some level of genius in how batteries/electric cars/solar/power-grid play off of one another, but nothing non-obvious. I suspect he wanted to make an earlier play in ride-sharing, but Uber beat him to it, with a similar strategy. This is now delayed until self-driving (re)allows for the regulatory advantage.

But the intended overall playbook starts to become obvious.

Back to Boring Company: I suspect skirting the existing regulations isn't going quite as well as desired because:

1- people realize his technology isn't all that special, even if it is (self-imposed) niche. (This is a failure in how hyperloop played out.)

2a- Subsurface engineering regulations aren't all that interesting, at least as far as looking for creative ways around them

2b- the regulations that are there have a pretty good (non-arbitrary and simple) engineering purpose. (Which is another way of saying the existing market is not actually over regulated)

3a- nimby politics plays a major role

3b- local governments (clients) don't have the power and/or money to override regulation politics

To answer: the Boring Company can't go and bid on bigger projects (yet) because then they would completely burn their niche status, which would admit to the world it's just another subsurface drilling company, and should be treated as such. They have to delay until their personalized regulatory system has been built, acknowledged, and subsidized. Then you can go after the regular projects that don't justify a special regulatory framework.

cft• 7 years ago

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

rayiner7• 7 years ago

Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia took advantage of the disastrous finances of the BMT and IRT, ravaged by the Depression and the ban on fare increases, to acquire both companies
With the subways now in municipal hands, a doubling of the fare was finally negotiated. Years of deferred maintenance by the cash-strapped private companies had become increasingly evident. But by then, fare hikes only exacerbated the problem of declining ridership.

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

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

objektif6• 7 years ago

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

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

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...

lonelappde3• 7 years ago

MTA operates near capacity during peak time. It doesn't need more riders then. But NYC lacks peak pricing.

maxlybbert• 7 years ago

Is it possible that getting rid of the subsidies might improve worker efficiency?

programmertote• 7 years ago

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

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

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

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

L_Rahman3• 7 years ago

I don't understand why this comment was voted into the negative, but I suspect that it has something to do with the world view of the people who oppose taxes on a fundamental level.

To those of you, I ask - why?

New York's flat non-distance based fare is one of the great democratic institutions of the city. Whether you live in Flushing, Rego Park or Gramercy; whether you ride one stop or make four transfers - you pay the same fare. The only way this can work is if those of us with more wealth take care of those of us with less. What seems wrong about this?

briandear2• 7 years ago

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

It isn’t odd because City Lab is generally in favor of leftist economic and urban policy. Exploring price controls might call into question their fundamental bias. Price controls are anti-market and typically so is City Lab.

atoav5• 7 years ago

Transport in quasi monopolist areas is one of these fields where markets regularily fail, to deliver the promised results as railway privatizations have shown. At least from a German perspective the single thing that did the most good for the mobility market were the actions of the national anti-trust institution, that brought us affordable inter-city buslines. The railway service is the typical mess. Privatization improved the service quality to some degree, but made infrastructure debt way worse, because the goal of the company isn’t to give us mobility, but to give their shareholders profits. So instead of maintaining bridges, they let them rot and collapse and then they ask the state to jump in and build a new one. The good old strategy: privatization of gains and socialization of losses.

Railways are one of these fields where markets regularily fail to deliver because you are in monopoly region and building another railway system to get some competition is unfeasable.

I don’t really see this as very ideological btw. I just have never seen a public transport market that developed much in favour of the general population without government intervention. So anecdotal evidence etc.

refurb• 7 years ago

Not sure why this is downvoted. Just go to the city lab website and it’s clearly apparent the political views of the website.

ummonk2• 7 years ago

How do the fare subsidies compare to other subsidies like road maintainence?

beerandt8• 7 years ago

The road maintenance subsidies that are usually funded by a gasoline tax?

Is New York any different?

jvln• 7 years ago

Not the same situation. Roads are used and paid for maintainance by business. Subways/undergrounds are not used by business.

rayiner7• 7 years ago

For public transit, they are very large compared to road subsidies. In New York it’s $0.35 per passenger mile: https://iurd.berkeley.edu/wp/2010-04.pdf. Direct road subsidies are about $0.02 per passenger mile. Nationally, road spending is 3-5x higher than transit spending, but accounts for 50x more passenger miles.

Even when you add in externalities (climate change, etc.) road subsidies are about $0.10-0.20 per passenger mile. (Of course, electricity on the east coast isn’t generated from renewable sources, so you have to add pollution externalities to the subway too.)

Roads are cheap and not heavily subsidized when you account for how many people use them. There are pollution externalities, but those can be addressed by mandating electric cars without changing the basic structure of everyone having private vehicles.

ameetgaitonde• 7 years ago

Price controls is an unfairly simple way to say that the company signed a long-term contract in which the city covered 2/3rds of the construction costs and set the fare at a maximum of 5 cents for most rides for the next 49 years.

When the company tried to raise the fare to 7 cents, they were disallowed by the courts because they couldn't prove the 5 cents fare was confiscatory.

I understand the city could raise the fare to benefit the company, but that isn't their obligation.

I would assume you're libertarian from the point you've made, and am curious whether you believe it was right for the contract to be enforced as it was agreed upon.

tomohawk• 7 years ago

So, the contract should be viewed as a suicide pact? The results of the decisions by the politicos speak for themselves: money poured into duplicative infrastructure, starvation of existing infrastructure, stagnation.

Passenger rail service in the US suffered a similar fate when the federal government called in its chips to move personnel and supplies all over the place during the command economy years of WWII. Yes, the rails received substantial subsidies in land grants, etc, to get started. Yes, there was agreement to serve the public interest in this way because of that. Yes, this was a big blow to passenger rail.

neuronic2• 7 years ago

No private companies, as usual, destroyed the system. The government had to pick up the shambles left by the ravaging capitalists.

asjw• 7 years ago

It's simply what happens when you have a military industrial complex and people are more scared of being nuked or invaded by Russians than their infrastructures being taken over by privates (hospitals, schools, transport etc. etc.)

Fares of MTA are higher than those of ATM in Milan, the service in Milan is excellent and it covers the operating costs through fares.

They are so good that have also built and now maintain the subway of the city of Copenhagen and over 100 buses and train lines in the province of Milan.

Prices are super regulated and recently fares have gone down for long distance commuters and slightly up only for casual passengers (one way tickets, tourists fares)

The company makes profits that go back to the city which in the end benefit the citizens

ChuckMcM4• 7 years ago

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

rayiner7• 7 years ago

See page 7: https://iurd.berkeley.edu/wp/2010-04.pdf

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

ChuckMcM4• 7 years ago

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

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

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

vendor c ...

azernik• 7 years ago

Was this by way of FOIA request, or another process?

(I ask because I'm looking for a pet project to test drive the FOIA process on.)

ChuckMcM4• 7 years ago

I did not use FOIA. I just showed up at there offices and worked my way up to the most senior person who would talk to me.

sytelus• 7 years ago

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

zanny5• 7 years ago

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

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

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

mxuribe• 7 years ago

THIS 100x!

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

boyadjian• 7 years ago

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

bobbydroptables2• 7 years ago

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

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

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

zanny5• 7 years ago

Nowhere on Earth is close to peak density. Concepts like Shimizu Pyramid exist demonstraing high class living with densities over 100k / km². Transit infrastructure has already been developed to handle volumes as high as the millions of persons per hour.

We are also nowhere close to peak density efficiency, since the widespread refinement of high-density building would drop the price per person way below the current aggregate costs of living considering the whole of infrastructure and housing almost anywhere.

There is a strong cultural barrier to the development of higher densities though that associate it with poverty. Thats the real challenge to overcome, because that culture operates like the anti-nuclear sentiment to stymie development and stunt the growth of innovations in the domain of urban planning.

Loranubi• 7 years ago

The population density where I am living is around 40k/km^2 and the subway system is just working perfectly.

mocha_nate• 7 years ago

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

zeveb• 7 years ago

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

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

There's a lesson there about buy-in.

Why New York City Stopped Building Subways (2018)

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