Why It’s So Expensive to Build Urban Rail in the U.S.

By Alon Levy, CityLab; January 26, 2018

In late December, The New York Times published a bombshell article by Brian Rosenthal about high construction costs on the New York City subway. Doing painstaking investigative work building on a set of numbers I blogged about in 2011, Rosenthal showed how, at $2.6 billion per mile, New York’s Second Avenue Subway broke records for its costs, and that all of the reasons subway officials offered were excuses. The article documented poor contracting practices, bad management, and union featherbedding.

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