Building infrastructure in NYC

From an article on the exorbitant cost of building infrastructure in New York City,

New York intends to spend $39 million per station for the next round of accessibility retrofits, which will add elevators and ramps to make stations accessible on a step-free basis. According to figures gathered by transit researcher Alon Levy, $39 million is double what it costs to make a station accessible in London, five times what it costs in Madrid, and 15 times what it costs in Berlin.

In terms of station costs, sample this, 

Madrid: $14 million per station. The three-mile, two-station Line 9 extension was completed in 2015 for a total cost of $140 million. Los Angeles: $120 million per station. L.A. spends as much as New York to dig tunnels, but “cut and cover” station construction has kept the cost of its four-mile, three-station Purple Line extension down to $2.8 billion. Paris: $168 million per station. Adding nine miles and seven stations to Line 14 will cost the city $4.4 billion in total — a lot for a city that usually spends between $90 million and $135 million per station. New York: $425 million per station. The world’s most expensive subway line per mile, the first phase of the Second Avenue Subway cost $4.5 billion after two miles and four stations.

Among the contributors to the cost problem, this is instructive,

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... City Council Speaker Corey Johnson (says)... “When the projects are being negotiated, many, many times, the MTA just signs off on what the contractors put in front of them. There’s no forensic auditing or effort to see if costs have been inflated in an unscrupulous way.”

And there is also the standard problem of lack of co-ordination and attendant delays and cost over-runs, arising from the Metropolitan Transit Authority's (MTA's) lack of institutional power. This would resonate with construction in India's metropolitan cities,

When the MTA wants to build a big new shiny thing, it’s at the mercy of a lot of people and entities it doesn’t control. The MTA often needs utilities moved in order to do construction below city streets, but it lacks the city’s power to boss the utilities around, so it pays more for the same sort of utility relocations that the city might demand. It can’t force the city to make zoning changes that would aid its capital projects or its finances... things go to hell when agencies have to work together... executives overseeing the MTA’s capital construction may lack the authority to boss around its operating agencies such as Long Island Railroad (LIRR) and NYC Transit. And even when the MTA’s internal units work constructively together, they are dependent on outside agencies like Amtrak to cooperate and make rights of way available for construction in a timely manner; when they don’t, which is frequent, expensive labor time is wasted. In the case of East Side Access project, the new LIRR tracks to Grand Central must connect with existing tracks at the Harold Interlocking in Queens, which is already the busiest rail junction in America. Coordinated labor is often required, with Amtrak and LIRR employees and workers for various private contracting firms needing to be present simultaneously. But sometimes Amtrak’s crews don’t show up and everyone else sort of stands around, getting paid but not building East Side Access... In an April 2018 letter, MTA chief development officer Janno Lieber alleged that Amtrak’s failures to cooperate on the East Side Access project — for example, by canceling planned service outages and not providing its workers as scheduled — had added $340 million to ESA’s costs over four years...

Megaprojects built in New York today are subject to extensive delays and costs imposed by community input, as with the requirement that all the excavation spoils from East Side Access be carted out via tunnel to Queens, avoiding disruption in midtown Manhattan but adding significant costs and delays to the project. Those costs and delays don’t just mean a longer wait for LIRR trains to roll into Grand Central; they impose opportunity costs that mean other projects don’t get built or proposed at all. A more empowered MTA would mean fewer costs like that, but it would also have to mean a reduction in the fetishization of community input. As a public that has chosen Jane Jacobs over Robert Moses, we would have to get more comfortable with the idea that sometimes things won’t be built exactly as we want them.

Clearly New York is illustrative of the problems that contribute to cost over-runs in many cities of India. And the counter-point to NYC and MTA is perhaps London and its Transport for London (TfL).