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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe Most Expensive Mile of Subway Track on Earth
New York TimesThe budget showed that 900 workers were being paid to dig caverns for the platforms as part of a 3.5-mile tunnel connecting the historic station to the Long Island Rail Road. But the accountant could only identify about 700 jobs that needed to be done, according to three project supervisors. Officials could not find any reason for the other 200 people to be there.
Nobody knew what those people were doing, if they were doing anything, said Michael Horodniceanu, who was then the head of construction at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs transit in New York. The workers were laid off, Mr. Horodniceanu said, but no one figured out how long they had been employed. All we knew is they were each being paid about $1,000 every day.
The discovery, which occurred in 2010 and was not disclosed to the public, illustrates one of the main issues that has helped lead to the increasing delays now tormenting millions of subway riders every day: The leaders entrusted to expand New Yorks regional transit network have paid the highest construction costs in the world, spending billions of dollars that could have been used to fix existing subway tunnels, tracks, trains and signals.
The estimated cost of the Long Island Rail Road project, known as East Side Access, has ballooned to $12 billion, or nearly $3.5 billion for each new mile of track seven times the average elsewhere in the world. The recently completed Second Avenue subway on Manhattans Upper East Side and the 2015 extension of the No. 7 line to Hudson Yards also cost far above average, at $2.5 billion and $1.5 billion per mile, respectively.
Big story around the office...
VMA131Marine
(4,158 posts)$250k/year
Great non-work if you can get it.
eleny
(46,166 posts)"From spending $150 million on private villas for a handful of personnel in Afghanistan to blowing $2.7 billion on an air surveillance balloon that doesnt work, the latest revelations of waste at the Pentagon are just the most recent howlers in a long line of similar stories stretching back at least five decades. Other hot-off-the-presses examples would include the Armys purchase of helicopter gears worth $500 each for $8,000 each and the accumulation of billions of dollars worth of weapons components that will never be used. And then theres the one that would have to be everyones favorite Pentagon waste story: the spending of $50,000 to investigate the bomb-detecting capabilities of African elephants. (And heres a shock: They didnt turn out to be that great!)"
https://www.thenation.com/article/only-the-pentagon-could-spend-640-on-a-toilet-seat/