[klooney]

Transit Costs' full analysis (https://transitcosts.com/executive_summary/) decomposed the 2nd avenue subway costs into

- station sizes (causing spend on stations to increase by a factor of 2)

- nonstandard systems (elevators, escalators, etc) (causing an increase over nominal best practices of approximately 1.35)

- inefficient procurement (how contracting works) (increase by a factor of 1.85, although this is a squishy)

- soft costs (design, planning, construction management, contingencies) (factor of 1.2, again fairly squishy)

- labor costs (factor of 1.5 over a well run transit system baseline)

so it's both the case that the labor costs are outrageous and that they're insufficient to explain the outrageous project costs.

[klipt]

> so it's both the case that the labor costs are outrageous and that they're insufficient to explain the outrageous project costs.

Which is what I said, the difference in labor costs "helps", not that it's the sole explanation.