Nolan Hicks Explains the MTA’s High Transit

The most pernicious toll from Albany’s decades of mismanagement of the MTA is the opportunity cost. One of the biggest findings of the New York University examination of how the MTA builds projects and a corresponding series I authored in the Post was that the MTA—unlike its sister agencies in London and Paris—does not employ a large staff of planners, engineers and architects. Those professionals let the Europeans exercise much greater control and oversight of projects, which, in turn, keeps costs down and projects on track. The MTA cannot afford to make those hires because so much of its budget is tied up in contracts, pensions and debts ordered or protected by Albany—so it has to contract out for its planning and engineering work, which means it’s more likely to get oversized designs back and has less ability to push back on bloat. All of which leads to another generation of complaints about MTA spending and management. It’s a circle line in a subway system that doesn’t have one.

The original subway lines were designed in-house by the MTA’s forerunners, but the function was outsourced in the intervening decades as officials were forced to find money to run the trains and sought to avoid paying for labor contracts protected by Albany as lawmakers loaded the agency with debt. Albany needs to address the consequences of its actions and explicitly give the MTA room in its budget to bring these functions back in-house. This spending would pay for itself if the new unit could trim just $5 million off each ADA project.