Extraordinarily high construction costs are keeping the MTA from meeting the demands of a growing city, elected officials who rallied for spending reforms charged on Monday.
The politicians from the city and the state — all Democrats — called on the MTA to create an independent commission of experts to study why the agency’s capital projects cost nearly three or four times that of projects in similar cities like London, Paris or Los Angeles.
The focus on costs comes in the wake of rising subway delays, as well as high-profile service failures that continue to plague morning commutes. On Monday morning, signal problems at midtown stations caused delays and service changes on eight lines, leading to the suspension of B and M trains.
“The MTA has the highest construction costs compared to any other city on the planet. The MTA regularly spends three to six to ten times more money for a capital project compared to anywhere else,” said Manhattan City Council member Helen Rosenthal. “New York City cannot afford to keep spending more and getting less as service delays and disruptions have been growing from bad to worse.”
12 comments:
The cost of living is too high. Has anyone seen the cost of new apartments/condos in NYC?
I'm working on mta work. The design of the 3rd rail is a higher cost. A living wage is a good thing. Ricky T.
The PLA law is a he part of the high costs. The politicians can't point at the MTA when they must use PLA rules that at a minimum raise the cost by 4x.
Honest graft. You let things like parks fall apart, over development trash the subways, and then promise union thugs capital budgets that is mostly payoffs for union support. Things cost 2, 3, or 4 times what they should.
Meanwhile union members live out in Nassau and Suffolk. You don't see their kids playing in broken down parks or schools or their families taking Citibikes to run errands in the rain or snow.
Then they pay everyone overtime on top of that! This city is a joke!
Probably all the above comments are true or mostly true-- the practical question is what do you do about it? When the day comes that it requires a $15 subway fare so the MTA can do bare minimum maintenance, how long can the system last?
Let us waste MORE moneys to study, investigate, and analyze why costs are too high.
Endless reams of gibberish that no one will ever read, nor implement.
Most can tell you,
WASTE, FRAUD AND ABUSE!!!
And our elected officials' solution to this out of control MTA spending on projects? "Put tolls on the East River bridges and in Manhattan so the 'dumb taxpayers' will pay for new MTA projects, also at an super-inflated cost!" We should all be voting in November!
Have a old high school friend who works for MTA he told me that a lot of people who are hired to fix the trains are Russian's who speaks very little English or none at all. Maybe that is part of the problem if you don't believe me just Google it.
Someone motioned MTA wanting to add more bridge tolls. And where have that gotten us. Most bridges are falling apart if we really knew what we are driving over you will be scared to death. They raised that tolls every other year and that money only goes to MTA employees benefits and there overtime.
The politicians from the city and the state — all Democrats — called on the MTA to create an independent commission of experts to study why the agency’s capital projects cost nearly three or four times that of projects in similar cities like London, Paris or Los Angeles.
And the conclusions from that commission:
We blame the Republicans!
Plain old fashioned corruption.
While you are at it, we need the UK media to tell us about the NYPD and their lovely PETS program:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4997774/NYPD-say-database-cash-seize-broken.html
>The judge said that was 'insane' and 'deserves an expose' in the media
Figures it's only being reported on in British newspapers.
Post a Comment