It's an interesting refutation. The author explicitly claims the following:
1. Construction unions in New York, specifically, cause horrific and unjustifiable cost increases.
2. But unions in most of the country aren't in New York, and don't have the same power that NY unions do.
3. The problem is that New York is responsible for a lot of construction, and more sensible areas unthinkingly copy New York's awful, union-driven policies -- those other areas don't need to do things New York's way, but they don't have enough construction experience to know better.
The author goes on to say that union-busting politics as they exist in the US won't solve the problem, but obviously believes that unions are responsible for significant parts of it. (And in fact says in so many words that in the absence of particularized US politics, union-busting would be somewhere from neutral to productive.)
An immediate implication is that if you're worried about getting things built in New York, you should be trying to break up the unions there.
- His line about the DART Orange Line is mixing three different projects (the actual Orange Line, the Trinity River Expressway, and the Dulles (VA) Metro extension)
- He is mixing actual project costs with projected costs, as if the comparison is equivalent
- The biggest problem, though, is that he is using "Right to Work" to mean "no unions", which is ridiculous. He even doubled down on that in the comments with the asinine statement "But in places with zero union density, like Texas".
Those are just the problems I saw from ~10 minutes of research on the subject. Considering that, I don't put a lot of faith in his arguments.
I noted similar issues as well. Particularly for the Silver Line (which he later calls the Orange Line) the guy neglects the fact that this is a government job, despite being in a Right to Work state, and is a federally/publicly funded project and so falls under Davis Bacon Act provisions which are strongly driven by union rates within the region. Especially for Silver Line, union rates in MD/DC have a large impact on the greater DMV area, including the Silver Line.
1. Construction unions in New York, specifically, cause horrific and unjustifiable cost increases.
2. But unions in most of the country aren't in New York, and don't have the same power that NY unions do.
3. The problem is that New York is responsible for a lot of construction, and more sensible areas unthinkingly copy New York's awful, union-driven policies -- those other areas don't need to do things New York's way, but they don't have enough construction experience to know better.
The author goes on to say that union-busting politics as they exist in the US won't solve the problem, but obviously believes that unions are responsible for significant parts of it. (And in fact says in so many words that in the absence of particularized US politics, union-busting would be somewhere from neutral to productive.)
An immediate implication is that if you're worried about getting things built in New York, you should be trying to break up the unions there.