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It's not a question of whether "one of the richest cities on the planet" can "fund serious upgrades." It's how much money are New Yorkers willing to throw into a system where it takes several times as much money to do the same thing as other countries? https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-.... New York is rich, but so is London. Based on that wealth, there is a certain amount of money New Yorkers are willing to pay for subway service. If it costs twice as much to do the same thing, half as much service will get purchased. (Indeed, it's worse. Crappier subway service reduces demand, which decreases the money available to fund it.) Costs are the fundamental problem with the MTA (and D.C.'s WMATA), and those are union problems, not management problems. If it cost Lenovo twice as much to build the same laptop as Acer, Lenovo would simply cease to exist. Transit systems generally cannot go bankrupt for political reasons, but they can decline to a state of government-funded life support where nobody uses them except people who have no other choice. (See, e.g., the transit systems in most cities outside NYC/Chicago/DC/Boston). Consider: > France’s unions are powerful, but Mr. Probst said they did not control project staffing. Isabelle Brochard of RATP, a state-owned company that operates the Paris Metro and is coordinating the Line 14 project, estimated there were 200 total workers on the job, each earning $60 per hour. The Second Avenue subway project employed about 700 workers, many making double that (although that included health insurance). This is a large-scale problem in the U.S. Our public services suck, which means that they turn into safety nets instead of something that are broadly used by the population. In turn, people have limited willingness to fund them (because people naturally are less willing to spend money on safety nets versus something they also use and benefit from). Unions aren't the only reason for our public services sucking, but to the extent they drive costs out of alignment with what is the case in other countries, they're a big part of the problem. If you can buy less service with the same amount of investment, that's a problem. One of the things that's happened in the last 30 years that nobody talks about is that Europe became far more market oriented, and their unions adapted. Anti-union rhetoric in the U.S. yielded a very different result, with most private unions dying out, and the public sector unions that survived remaining a bulwark of the "old way" of doing things. |
The contractors that do the negotiation are more than happy to oblige the union's demands, as long as their margins are fat, and so far the MTA has not cried uncle about the costs being passed on, although that looks to be (very slowly) changing.