Standard reference that NYP is a trash rag that parrots the talking points of the rich and Republicans.

As such, the headline is misleading. The article reveals that the comparison is consultants to tunnel boring, not overall construction. That is a much bigger slice of the budget, as it should be.

Also, it says it relies on "consultants" for design. Would you rather have the MTA have full-time staff on its payroll for designing new stations and tunnels when they only do so once every generation or so? If you had that, no doubt the NYP would be complaining about an overstaffed bureaucracy.

Also, the stations were "twice as big as needed" because we wanted big stations and platforms, not the dangerous garbage where you have 1ft clearance between columns and tracks at old stations. This is the "minimum" that they are comparing to.

NYP and there backers don't want any public funds spent on anything that helps the masses. If they truly wanted to talk about cost-cutting or budgets, they could address this underlying lack of public investment in the projects. But whenever they talk about it, they talk about it as "gov'mnt is bad".

You want prices to be cheap like Euro cities? Easy - commit to building 80 miles of rails and stations and the world will open up to you. Demand volume is what drives competition and prices down - basic capitalism that NYP forgets because they have a political hit-job agenda.