If con ed wasn’t a private org this wouldn’t be an issue. The people who live here gain absolutely nothing from their acting as a profit seeking middleman: indeed all we get is a totally unaccountable actor who can hide surprises all over one of the most densely populated places on earth.
NYC's government is entirely comprised of profit-seeking middlemen. Every mid- to high-level politician gets rich in office. That happens for a reason.
This is one of the things I find so blatent that it almost passes through being blatent into degrees of blatentness that need some new word to describe because our brains can't even process how blatently obvious it is. Our "public servants" routinely retire with public net worth that is multiples of all the money they were ever supposedly paid, 10x, 20x easily. It is prima facie true that they must have been corrupt in order to do that.
$2.5 billion per mile of tunnel, not track, on the SAS project[1].
(This is an outrageous number, but it's not a "true" benchmark for what a mile of subway construction costs in the city: similar crosstown construction in Brooklyn or Queens, which badly need new lines, would be significantly cheaper due to both lower density and the possibility of cut-and-cover instead of tunneling. Plus, no steam pipes in the way.)
Edit: for comparison, the IBX is expected to cost around $400M per mile[2]. Which is also obscenely expensive given how much of the right-of-way exists, but demonstrates that there's no clean apples-to-apples comparison here.
