A State of Collapse: How the MTA Put Riders on the

Lieber, who previously ran the MTA’s construction department before taking over as the agency’s chair in 2021, has argued he’s made reforms to avoid further gross mismanagement of projects. Still, the MTA’s sky-high building costs persist. ‘In the U.S. we pay more for stuff, and not just like 10% more, but sometimes by a factor of two, three, four, five,’ said Eric Goldwyn, who oversees NYU’s Transit Cost Project. ‘We could do better, we could do faster, we could do cheaper.’