The Sidewalks of New York

In New York Magazine Josh Barro laments that infrastructure project in New York are so expensive:

New York’s infrastructure problems are not the same as the whole country’s. This is not an article about “our crumbling roads and bridges.” Some of New York’s roads and bridges (and tunnels and stations) are indeed crumbling, but those can be fixed in normal ways through normal financing mechanisms. The experience of New York City Transit head Andy Byford’s “speed team,” which is accelerating service by fixing faulty speed sensors and raising unnecessarily low speed limits in the subways, shows some of those fixes can even be inexpensive. And the repairs requiring significant additional labor time can be addressed by making maintenance a spending priority, as the MTA already did once when dragging the subways out of the malaise of the 1970s.

Where New York stands out is the massive price tags associated with proposed and actual new projects, and the delays and limitations of vision they impose on new construction. Second Avenue — perhaps the most appropriate corridor for a subway line in the United States that, as of 2016, did not have one — has taken nearly 100 years to go from proposed subway service to actual service and then only along a fraction of the planned route. Dense but unserved corridors in the outer-boroughs, like Utica Avenue in Brooklyn, are unlikely to see subway lines in your lifetime. They would simply be too expensive to build.

Why are these projects so expensive in New York?

Preferred project alternatives are chosen by politicians, and then review and outreach processes are run to support those preferences, even when they add cost and even when they provoke community objections that must be expensively addressed. Design choices are often grand instead of practical. Environmental reviews take too long and do not consider the cost and negative environmental impact of tying transit projects up in environmental review. Government agencies do not work well together. Projects are overstaffed, and labor rules — often made more complicated by the difficulty agencies have in working together — reduce productivity. The MTA tries to shift the risk of cost overruns onto outside companies it contracts with, even if those overruns are caused by factors outside their control; the companies are not stupid, and they respond to this by inflating their bids for work on MTA projects in what’s known as the “MTA premium.” New York has unusual laws about contractor liability that make insurance very expensive. And on and on.

I think that Mr. Barro would be astonished to learn that New York’s problems are exactly like those everywhere else. Roads and bridges are more expensive everywhere in the United States because of a network of corrupt arrangements that guarantee they will be expensive. They are so pervasive they aren’t even recognized as being corrupt any more.

And it isn’t limited to infrastructure projects. It extends to the military, to education, and to health care. It extends to everything we attempt to do through the government. In a sense it’s the price we pay for our lack of social cohesion relative to the comparatively small ethnic states of Europe.

I’m not arguing for no government. I’m arguing for limiting our goals more realistically or, as my many times great-grandfather put it, “don’t set the fence too far”. And better, more transparent government with fewer people becoming wealthy through its actions.