If you ride the subway in New York City or take the train in chances are you're having a miserable year and it's about to get even worse. Transit trouble. This time for the subway riders out there's some signal issues with synical problems which cause massive delays on seven lines the A, B, C, D, E F subway riders delayed and even stranded on stuck trains because of signal problems have had enough. Service is back up and running, but it seems those problems are happening more frequently. Delays have become rampant, people are getting stuck installed subway cars, and overcrowding has become the norm. Meanwhile, Penn Station, which is the hub for trains from Amtrak, New Jersey and Long Island, is braced for a summer of hell with the closure of several tracks for repairs and corresponding reductions in service. Today on Benchmark, will hear about how this all adds up to one thing, bad news for the economy in the world's financial capital. I'm Scott landman and economics editor with Bloomberg in Washington. Joining me today as our guest host is Henry Goldman, a Bloomberg reporter who covers New York City. Henry, thanks for being with us today. It's a pleasure to be here. So, Henry, what exactly is happening with the subway up there in New York. Well, the subway is showing its stress. It's got, you know, an ancient signal system. It has, some of its rolling stock is more than fifty years old. A lot of it's electrical wiring and signals were damaged by sandy saltwater flooding. When you go to try to build something, you come up against the highest construction costs in the country, and there's a lack of political accountability because the m t A and the Port Authority, the transit systems are all kind of run by bifurcated agencies that are partly New York, partly New Jersey, partly the city, and the accountability is diffused. And when all this happens, this is something that can really gum up the lifeblood of the city's economy. Right usually because the subways are basically the circulatory system of the city when they're when they're operating well, or just their mere presence. The Second Avenue Subway increased the real estate values about along that spine of Second Avenue running from nineties Street to seventy s. Well, it's hard to imagine what life is going to be like if the subway really breaks down and nothing can get done. But maybe it's something we have to contemplate. And we have two distinguished guests today who are going to help put these issues into context. Later we'll be speaking with Tracy Gordon, a senior fellow with the Urban Brookings Tax Policy Center in d C. But first we're going to bring in our first guest, Jim Venturi, who's sitting in our New York studio with Henry. He's a technology entrepreneur, urban planner, and the founder and principal designer of Rethink Studio and Rethink and y C. And in that capacity, he's created a transportation vision for the whole New York City region to better connect all suburban transit lines together, fixed Penn Station, and even build new transit hubs outside of Manhattan. Jim, we appreciate you coming to join us today on Benchmark. Thank you for having me. Jim. We know what's wrong with the subway, but what's wrong with the broader transit infrastructure in the New York City region. I think to a large extent, it's a mindset issue that stems from the bifurcation that Henry was talking about earlier. You have three different agencies that handle commuter rail in the region, Metro North, Long Island Railroad in New Jersey Transit. Each represents one of the three land masses that adjoin Manhattan, and these stemmed from private railroads that later became state agencies. And so there's a lack of unity of thinking about things. And that's what we did with rethink m y C, as we rethought it without these constraints in mind. Can you just briefly explain what your vision is in rethink andy C. Sure. Rethink y C is the idea of creating a regional unified network, which we call RUN, which unifies the networks of New Jersey Transit, Long Island Railroad, and Metro North so that there can be a transportation spine that connects all of the region together. Um this we see as a foundation for a larger transportation system to upgrade the New York area to be more in line with other global cities such as London, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, etcetera. And it's something is that the kind of thing that we can even get to. Can we can we implement a new transit infrastructure before we even fix basic things with the subway or with the tracks underneath Penn Station. Well, well, yeah, those are two different things. The subway obviously has to be fixed, and that takes a long time because investment in this it's a twenty four hour system and it has to be fixed at the same time as it's operating with commuter rail. There's a lot of investment happening already for Amtrak's gateway tunnels. There's also the Port Authority Bus Terminal proposal UH and a significant amount of other investment. What we propose doing is thinking of all of these things together and using the investment for a new paradigm of transportation in the region. Well, I would just say that that's a vision that would certainly improve things. It's it's so difficult politically to get all of these different jurisdictions together because you have systems that serve not only New Jersey, New York Long Island, but a series of counties upstate. You have the state legislatures involved politically it's an incredible morass. It's a wonderful goal. I think that it's uh, it just I I don't have the imagination to conceive of how it could happen given the current state of our political structure or rhetoric or political will. Well, even if it is hard to imagine, is it, is it possible to agree on that you know in order to support the region's economy that you do need some level of investment, either in the subway or in the infrastructure. Jim, I think there is investment that's happening right now obviously, and mentioned the Second Avenue subway. There's Phase two coming up of that project. Um, there's Amtrak's Gateway tunnels, the first phases twelve and a half billion dollars um. And it's a question of how you use this right now. If you live, let's say in Montclair, New Jersey, and you want to go to somewhere else in New Jersey, oftentimes Google will tell you to take a bus to the Port Authority, take a subway to Penn Station, and then catch a commuter rail line from there. Um. We believe that the system should be unified in such a way that you shouldn't have to go twice across the Hudson to take public transit to get from somewhere in New Jersey to somewhere else in New Jersey, or to be able to get from somewhere outside of Manhattan anywhere to somewhere outside of Manhattan. And I think that the car networks are a huge strategic economic liability for our region. And if we can unify the nine different regional net commuter networks in in some way so that let's say there's common ticketing between the systems using an iPhone app or something along those lines, we can have a much more attractive region for companies to come and invest in. Whereas if New York is considered to be broken, we're gonna not only lose future investment, we lose companies that are already here today. Definitely doesn't sound very efficient the way you describe those connections from New Jersey and growing up in central New Jersey, I'm well aware of those inefficiencies. But let's let's talk about some more hard numbers here in the broader economic picture with our second guest, Tracy Gordon, who's in the DC studio here with us. She's a senior Fellow with the Urban Brookings Tax Policy Center, where she researches and writes about fiscal challenges facing state and local governments, and her previous job include working as an economist on the White House Council of Economic Advisors under President Obama. Tracy, thanks for coming in today to chat with us on Benchmark. Great to be here. Thanks now. Also, Tracy, as someone myself who rides the metrorail subway in Washington, I have a message for my New York friends and colleagues, and that message is welcome to the club. We've had a one day shutdown of the whole system in the past year. We had a UH smoke inhalation accident that killed somebody. We had this head this huge collision about eight years ago that killed about ten people. They're shutting down parts of the system. They're hiking fares, they're cutting service. People are abandoning the system in droves. If it all keeps going downhill, you're probably going to hit the region's economy in some way. So, Tracy, how would you describe the relationship between investment in transit infrastructure such as rails and subways and the economies of city, region or even the whole country right, Well, you hear so much talk about infrastructure and the macroeconomy, and it's very often at a sort of thirty six thousand feet level. So, especially during the recession, you've heard a lot of calls from more spending on infrastructure, as if there was just this machine that you could sort of start and you would get more g or more government spending. But certainly the cost of borrowing is low right now, and so there's been a lot of exhortations at the federal level to try to get people at the state and local level to borrow and to spend more in infrastructure. And they point to um the Safe Track experience in Washington that you alluded to, or New York Summer of Agony as motivation for spending more on infrastructure. So that the studies are are all over the map in terms of how much bang for the buck you get when you spend on infrastructure, anywhere from a dollar for each dollar spent to two dollars reached dollar spent. But the key caveat whenever people talk about this at the national level is well chosen infrastructure projects. So when you have well chosen infrastructure projects, you can get a certain UM. You know, beneficial effect in terms of growing the economy, enhancing productivity going forward, putting out of work construction workers back to work. But how do you choose those projects? I think that's really the key question. So what would be well chosen projects in your view? A lot has been written about UM the selection of infrastructure projects and how they often don't rely on cost benefit analysis. So the Congressional Budget Office, for example, has said that if if state and local governments would just increase their use of cost benefit analysis, we wouldn't necessarily need to spend that much more money. We would just get more use out of current systems. But as the previous speaker alluded to, there are political complications in choosing infrastructure projects, and oftentimes you've got a number of overlapping jurisdictions that all have to sign off on a given project. So the Bay Own Bridge project, for example, um straddle's New York and New Jersey and any number of local governments. So things like getting environmental approvals or rights of way can take a long time just because of the number of UM bodies involved in the unions and all other sort of thing. You know, it's very interesting that you raise this issue because the Partnership for the City of New York, which is a group of chief executives corporate chief executives, did an economic study of the infrastructure projects now going on, and they found that the capital costs, for example, of the Second Avenue Subway, including debt service, exceeds the value of the economic benefit that it's going to produce by about two point seven billion dollars. Tracy, you actually wrote about this a couple of years ago about why it costs so much to build in the US compared with other nations. Did did you figure out an answer to that? Unfortunately, no, we just posed a bunch of questions. But some of the hypotheses that we had were sort of this fragmentation story that I was telling earlier. Um. But the point of that blog was really to point out that some of the facile explanations people come up with that, for example, the Second Avenue Subway is expense of because New York is a really dense city. Uh. We found counter examples in places like Tokyo, which are also dense and have lower cost per kilometer for rail projects, or others would say, well, it's because it's so highly regulated in the United States, there are all these labor provisions that Davis Bacon um law and that sort of thing. But then you could point at Spain, which also has a pretty tightly regulated labor market. Or you know, New York is an older city, um and so you have to get lots of permissions. But that's true in Paris as well. So really that piece was sort of a number of examples and counter examples to point out that there's really not a clear obvious explanation for why this is, but we think it might have something to do with this political story. The politics of this stuff is really unbelievable. I mean, the Port Authority built a four billion dollar terminal in Lower Manhattan. It's gorgeous, it was designed by Calatrava. It's called the Oculus. It's a fabulous place, but it costs we're billion dollars. It's almost empty every day. It serves less than fifty thousand people a day. And on the other side of the city, going north, we have Penn Station, which is probably busier than LaGuardia Airport on any given day. And that's a place that Senator moynihan described as a RATS warrant. You know, it's completely dysfunctional and has been for for decades now. So the process of making the choice is so fraught with political interests and grandstanding and all kinds of irrational reasons that that's a major problem for moving ahead with a rational policy along the lines that Jim would suggest. But let me let me ask Tracy one more question before and then we'll go back to UM. Tracy, we've been talking about investing in infrastructure, the return on projects, you know why it costs so much. Is there any precedent for talking about whether neglect on projects such as the subway in New York will actually detract from economies in the city or region. Right, I actually was going to say. Implicit in what Henry was just saying is that there are political rewards to expanding the existing system, whether you're talking about roads or transit, rather than maintaining what you've got. UM. So elected officials like going to ribbon cutting ceremonies, But there are no rewards to just basic incremental maintenance. Although the Congressional Budget Office again and others have said that really that's where the biggest bang for the buck is in in maintenance and fixing UM rather than expanding what you have, so UM again sort of the selection process doesn't necessarily reward that, but it could. You could have funding formulas that are tied to the degree of road roughness, for example, UM, rather than things like UM contributions to the Highway Trust Fund, which is how it works now at the federal level, UM, we've got funding formulas that UM disproportionately allocate money to small and rural states and not necessarily UM places where the people are and where the jobs are. So you have these bottlenecks UM that can you know, cost the economy in terms of individuals who are losing time in their commutes, or even the movement of goods that is not going as quickly as it could. One more thing on public transit. There's also this distinction between UM bus and rail, and a lot of economists have pointed out that bus can be much more efficient and and at a lower cost, is more flexible. If people in jobs move, you can reallocate the roots, whereas once you build rail it's fixed in place. So New York is actually an exception a place where rail has continued to work very well, but there are lots of examples of other rail systems that are no longer performing. Let's go back to Jim for a minute here. Donald Trump during the election campaign talked a lot about infrastructure investment. We've written a lot, I know, I've edited a number of stories about the supposed one trillion dollar infrastructure plan, and the details just haven't really been that forthcoming on that so far. And yet there still is some kind of enthusiasm in the administration for at least doing something on infrastructure. Maybe it wouldn't be as much as during a democratic administration, but you still have something there. Jim, do you think the viewpoints or the positions in the current administration will help at all in terms of developing transit in New York City or is it really just going to be up to the politicians in New York to take care of it themselves. Well, I I hope so. I mean, I don't think any of us have a crystal ball in terms of the Trump administration. But I wanted to get back to something that Henry had said about the study on the Second Avenue subway and and something that relates to Trump in this way, which he is fond of saying, you're not thinking big enough, and you know, there's an issue of the cost, and we know that the costs of the Second Avenue subway were high and perhaps could be lowered in through more efficiency in future UM. But there's the other thing, which is the benefits. And the Second Avenue subway plan that they moved forward with is a truncated version of the Lindsay plan. From the Lindsay plan would have connected to the dire Avenue line in the Bronx, which presently feeds the two and five line. UM. It would have provided structural relief which would have benefited commuters on the two, three, four, and five lines by direct redirecting passengers upstream from these networks. So I think that we can't be thinking about subway improvements only on one level. We have to think structurally and systemically. And there's another analogous project which now Amtrak is pushing forward as part of their Gateway plan. UH. We very much support the new gateway tunnels, but they're planning to build the only new terminal in the world UM after east Side Access, which is Penn Station South, which they're planning to demolish an entire city block of New York, including a church from one to build an obsolete transportation object, and this is really a terrible idea. It's designed to solve one problem, which is to bring in more trains from New Jersey, but it ceases to offer the opportunity that an analogous project, or potentially analogous project, which would be the London Crossrail project, to unify the entire region's network. And really that's really the difference between what we're proposing, which is a systemic system. I mean, in other words, that it's thinking more on a network as a whole rather than piecemeal solving one problem at a time. And I think it's that piecemeal thinking which is giving us this lousy return on investment that Henry was talking about. So you think the motto of transportation investment should be go big or go home. I think it should be that that transportation is a network and networks have to be thought of an holistic manner, and if you don't think of it that way, you're leaving a lot of money on the tab able tracy. You did mention Tokyo for a second there. I visited Tokyo a few years ago, and it does have a pretty old subway and rail system, at least in the downtown area, and yet it seems to run incredibly well, what are they doing there that can't be replicated in the United States? I think they reap a lot more efficiencies out of the system. The ridership numbers are much higher, and so getting more people in the system lowers the average costs and you can you know, do things besides raising fares and you know, driving people away. So you know, here we've got this difficulty as you know in d C. You know, fars keep going up and people feel like they're not getting enough from the system and so they stop writing, and then you have this death spiral where it becomes harder and harder to raise the revenue that you need to maintain the system. UM. So, certainly there are different models in different countries, but you always have to be sensitive to what the commuting patterns are here. And uh again, you know New York is a is a rare case where people actually ride commuter rail, they ride public transit. Um. There are a number of cities where there are mayors that want to build big, new, shiny projects and it might actually be a better investment to have more high speed buses or to encourage more rides sharing any number of things to get people to the jobs and opportunities that they need. One of the aspects of New York system, which is extremely egalitarian, is that you have one fair uh, and you can go anywhere in the city that is served by a subway. London and many other cities have a fair structure that's based on how far you travel. You know that demands that you have a certain level of income. I'm going to sound a little Pollyannish here, but I have to say that considering the scope of New York subway system and the millions of people whom it serves, uh, it has existed now for more than a hundred years, and uh it needs help in terms of maintaining its ability to serve even more people. But it basically is, as I said before, the circulation system for one of the largest local economies in the world. I mean, it's a one point three trillion dollar a year economy, and uh it's functioning pretty well. One last question before we wrap up, Jim or Henry, do you have any horror stories to share of writing the subway this year? Actually, I've been very lucky. It's uh, it's run pretty well for me. My horror story really was on nine eleven, which in which thousands of people had horror stories where the subway that I was writing to City Hall on stopped and it was really in a tunnel for about an hour. Uh. And I have to say that the m T A conductors on that train performed really really well. Uh. They cared for people who got sick on that train, They kept the panic down. Uh, they coordinated a very complicated evacuation effort. And uh. You know, when all of a said and done, this system is it could be, and I hope it doesn't become a lot worse. It It functions pretty darn well and a lot better than it did thirty years ago. Well that's a good thing to keep in mind. And we'll end it there. Jim, thanks so much for being with us today. Thank you for having me, and Tracy, thanks for coming into and Henry, thanks for being the co host. Thanks. Benchmark will be back next week and until then, you can find us on the Bloomberg terminal, Bloomberg dot com, are Bloomberg app, as well as on Apple Podcasts, pocket casts, and Stitcher. While you're there, take a minute to rate and review the show. So more listeners can find us and let us know what you thought of the show. You can follow me on Twitter at Scott Landman, Henry is at H Goldman seven seven. Our guest, Jim Venturi's firm is at at Rethink NYC Plan and Rethink and YC dot org for the website, and Tracy is at at Gordon t r a C. Benchmark is produced by Sarah Patterson and the head of Bloomberg Podcast is Alec McCabe. Thanks for listening, See you next time.

If you ride the subway in New York City or take the train in chances are you're having a miserable year and it's about to get even worse. Transit trouble. This time for the subway riders out there's some signal issues with synical problems which cause massive delays on seven lines the A, B, C, D, E F subway riders delayed and even stranded on stuck trains because of signal problems have had enough. Service is back up and running, but it seems those problems are happening more frequently. Delays have become rampant, people are getting stuck installed subway cars, and overcrowding has become the norm. Meanwhile, Penn Station, which is the hub for trains from Amtrak, New Jersey and Long Island, is braced for a summer of hell with the closure of several tracks for repairs and corresponding reductions in service. Today on Benchmark, will hear about how this all adds up to one thing, bad news for the economy in the world's financial capital. I'm Scott landman and economics editor with Bloomberg in Washington. Joining me today as our guest host is Henry Goldman, a Bloomberg reporter who covers New York City. Henry, thanks for being with us today. It's a pleasure to be here. So, Henry, what exactly is happening with the subway up there in New York. Well, the subway is showing its stress. It's got, you know, an ancient signal system. It has, some of its rolling stock is more than fifty years old. A lot of it's electrical wiring and signals were damaged by sandy saltwater flooding. When you go to try to build something, you come up against the highest construction costs in the country, and there's a lack of political accountability because the m t A and the Port Authority, the transit systems are all kind of run by bifurcated agencies that are partly New York, partly New Jersey, partly the city, and the accountability is diffused. And when all this happens, this is something that can really gum up the lifeblood of the city's economy. Right usually because the subways are basically the circulatory system of the city when they're when they're operating well, or just their mere presence. The Second Avenue Subway increased the real estate values about along that spine of Second Avenue running from nineties Street to seventy s. Well, it's hard to imagine what life is going to be like if the subway really breaks down and nothing can get done. But maybe it's something we have to contemplate. And we have two distinguished guests today who are going to help put these issues into context. Later we'll be speaking with Tracy Gordon, a senior fellow with the Urban Brookings Tax Policy Center in d C. But first we're going to bring in our first guest, Jim Venturi, who's sitting in our New York studio with Henry. He's a technology entrepreneur, urban planner, and the founder and principal designer of Rethink Studio and Rethink and y C. And in that capacity, he's created a transportation vision for the whole New York City region to better connect all suburban transit lines together, fixed Penn Station, and even build new transit hubs outside of Manhattan. Jim, we appreciate you coming to join us today on Benchmark. Thank you for having me. Jim. We know what's wrong with the subway, but what's wrong with the broader transit infrastructure in the New York City region. I think to a large extent, it's a mindset issue that stems from the bifurcation that Henry was talking about earlier. You have three different agencies that handle commuter rail in the region, Metro North, Long Island Railroad in New Jersey Transit. Each represents one of the three land masses that adjoin Manhattan, and these stemmed from private railroads that later became state agencies. And so there's a lack of unity of thinking about things. And that's what we did with rethink m y C, as we rethought it without these constraints in mind. Can you just briefly explain what your vision is in rethink andy C. Sure. Rethink y C is the idea of creating a regional unified network, which we call RUN, which unifies the networks of New Jersey Transit, Long Island Railroad, and Metro North so that there can be a transportation spine that connects all of the region together. Um this we see as a foundation for a larger transportation system to upgrade the New York area to be more in line with other global cities such as London, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, etcetera. And it's something is that the kind of thing that we can even get to. Can we can we implement a new transit infrastructure before we even fix basic things with the subway or with the tracks underneath Penn Station. Well, well, yeah, those are two different things. The subway obviously has to be fixed, and that takes a long time because investment in this it's a twenty four hour system and it has to be fixed at the same time as it's operating with commuter rail. There's a lot of investment happening already for Amtrak's gateway tunnels. There's also the Port Authority Bus Terminal proposal UH and a significant amount of other investment. What we propose doing is thinking of all of these things together and using the investment for a new paradigm of transportation in the region. Well, I would just say that that's a vision that would certainly improve things. It's it's so difficult politically to get all of these different jurisdictions together because you have systems that serve not only New Jersey, New York Long Island, but a series of counties upstate. You have the state legislatures involved politically it's an incredible morass. It's a wonderful goal. I think that it's uh, it just I I don't have the imagination to conceive of how it could happen given the current state of our political structure or rhetoric or political will. Well, even if it is hard to imagine, is it, is it possible to agree on that you know in order to support the region's economy that you do need some level of investment, either in the subway or in the infrastructure. Jim, I think there is investment that's happening right now obviously, and mentioned the Second Avenue subway. There's Phase two coming up of that project. Um, there's Amtrak's Gateway tunnels, the first phases twelve and a half billion dollars um. And it's a question of how you use this right now. If you live, let's say in Montclair, New Jersey, and you want to go to somewhere else in New Jersey, oftentimes Google will tell you to take a bus to the Port Authority, take a subway to Penn Station, and then catch a commuter rail line from there. Um. We believe that the system should be unified in such a way that you shouldn't have to go twice across the Hudson to take public transit to get from somewhere in New Jersey to somewhere else in New Jersey, or to be able to get from somewhere outside of Manhattan anywhere to somewhere outside of Manhattan. And I think that the car networks are a huge strategic economic liability for our region. And if we can unify the nine different regional net commuter networks in in some way so that let's say there's common ticketing between the systems using an iPhone app or something along those lines, we can have a much more attractive region for companies to come and invest in. Whereas if New York is considered to be broken, we're gonna not only lose future investment, we lose companies that are already here today. Definitely doesn't sound very efficient the way you describe those connections from New Jersey and growing up in central New Jersey, I'm well aware of those inefficiencies. But let's let's talk about some more hard numbers here in the broader economic picture with our second guest, Tracy Gordon, who's in the DC studio here with us. She's a senior Fellow with the Urban Brookings Tax Policy Center, where she researches and writes about fiscal challenges facing state and local governments, and her previous job include working as an economist on the White House Council of Economic Advisors under President Obama. Tracy, thanks for coming in today to chat with us on Benchmark. Great to be here. Thanks now. Also, Tracy, as someone myself who rides the metrorail subway in Washington, I have a message for my New York friends and colleagues, and that message is welcome to the club. We've had a one day shutdown of the whole system in the past year. We had a UH smoke inhalation accident that killed somebody. We had this head this huge collision about eight years ago that killed about ten people. They're shutting down parts of the system. They're hiking fares, they're cutting service. People are abandoning the system in droves. If it all keeps going downhill, you're probably going to hit the region's economy in some way. So, Tracy, how would you describe the relationship between investment in transit infrastructure such as rails and subways and the economies of city, region or even the whole country right, Well, you hear so much talk about infrastructure and the macroeconomy, and it's very often at a sort of thirty six thousand feet level. So, especially during the recession, you've heard a lot of calls from more spending on infrastructure, as if there was just this machine that you could sort of start and you would get more g or more government spending. But certainly the cost of borrowing is low right now, and so there's been a lot of exhortations at the federal level to try to get people at the state and local level to borrow and to spend more in infrastructure. And they point to um the Safe Track experience in Washington that you alluded to, or New York Summer of Agony as motivation for spending more on infrastructure. So that the studies are are all over the map in terms of how much bang for the buck you get when you spend on infrastructure, anywhere from a dollar for each dollar spent to two dollars reached dollar spent. But the key caveat whenever people talk about this at the national level is well chosen infrastructure projects. So when you have well chosen infrastructure projects, you can get a certain UM. You know, beneficial effect in terms of growing the economy, enhancing productivity going forward, putting out of work construction workers back to work. But how do you choose those projects? I think that's really the key question. So what would be well chosen projects in your view? A lot has been written about UM the selection of infrastructure projects and how they often don't rely on cost benefit analysis. So the Congressional Budget Office, for example, has said that if if state and local governments would just increase their use of cost benefit analysis, we wouldn't necessarily need to spend that much more money. We would just get more use out of current systems. But as the previous speaker alluded to, there are political complications in choosing infrastructure projects, and oftentimes you've got a number of overlapping jurisdictions that all have to sign off on a given project. So the Bay Own Bridge project, for example, um straddle's New York and New Jersey and any number of local governments. So things like getting environmental approvals or rights of way can take a long time just because of the number of UM bodies involved in the unions and all other sort of thing. You know, it's very interesting that you raise this issue because the Partnership for the City of New York, which is a group of chief executives corporate chief executives, did an economic study of the infrastructure projects now going on, and they found that the capital costs, for example, of the Second Avenue Subway, including debt service, exceeds the value of the economic benefit that it's going to produce by about two point seven billion dollars. Tracy, you actually wrote about this a couple of years ago about why it costs so much to build in the US compared with other nations. Did did you figure out an answer to that? Unfortunately, no, we just posed a bunch of questions. But some of the hypotheses that we had were sort of this fragmentation story that I was telling earlier. Um. But the point of that blog was really to point out that some of the facile explanations people come up with that, for example, the Second Avenue Subway is expense of because New York is a really dense city. Uh. We found counter examples in places like Tokyo, which are also dense and have lower cost per kilometer for rail projects, or others would say, well, it's because it's so highly regulated in the United States, there are all these labor provisions that Davis Bacon um law and that sort of thing. But then you could point at Spain, which also has a pretty tightly regulated labor market. Or you know, New York is an older city, um and so you have to get lots of permissions. But that's true in Paris as well. So really that piece was sort of a number of examples and counter examples to point out that there's really not a clear obvious explanation for why this is, but we think it might have something to do with this political story. The politics of this stuff is really unbelievable. I mean, the Port Authority built a four billion dollar terminal in Lower Manhattan. It's gorgeous, it was designed by Calatrava. It's called the Oculus. It's a fabulous place, but it costs we're billion dollars. It's almost empty every day. It serves less than fifty thousand people a day. And on the other side of the city, going north, we have Penn Station, which is probably busier than LaGuardia Airport on any given day. And that's a place that Senator moynihan described as a RATS warrant. You know, it's completely dysfunctional and has been for for decades now. So the process of making the choice is so fraught with political interests and grandstanding and all kinds of irrational reasons that that's a major problem for moving ahead with a rational policy along the lines that Jim would suggest. But let me let me ask Tracy one more question before and then we'll go back to UM. Tracy, we've been talking about investing in infrastructure, the return on projects, you know why it costs so much. Is there any precedent for talking about whether neglect on projects such as the subway in New York will actually detract from economies in the city or region. Right, I actually was going to say. Implicit in what Henry was just saying is that there are political rewards to expanding the existing system, whether you're talking about roads or transit, rather than maintaining what you've got. UM. So elected officials like going to ribbon cutting ceremonies, But there are no rewards to just basic incremental maintenance. Although the Congressional Budget Office again and others have said that really that's where the biggest bang for the buck is in in maintenance and fixing UM rather than expanding what you have, so UM again sort of the selection process doesn't necessarily reward that, but it could. You could have funding formulas that are tied to the degree of road roughness, for example, UM, rather than things like UM contributions to the Highway Trust Fund, which is how it works now at the federal level, UM, we've got funding formulas that UM disproportionately allocate money to small and rural states and not necessarily UM places where the people are and where the jobs are. So you have these bottlenecks UM that can you know, cost the economy in terms of individuals who are losing time in their commutes, or even the movement of goods that is not going as quickly as it could. One more thing on public transit. There's also this distinction between UM bus and rail, and a lot of economists have pointed out that bus can be much more efficient and and at a lower cost, is more flexible. If people in jobs move, you can reallocate the roots, whereas once you build rail it's fixed in place. So New York is actually an exception a place where rail has continued to work very well, but there are lots of examples of other rail systems that are no longer performing. Let's go back to Jim for a minute here. Donald Trump during the election campaign talked a lot about infrastructure investment. We've written a lot, I know, I've edited a number of stories about the supposed one trillion dollar infrastructure plan, and the details just haven't really been that forthcoming on that so far. And yet there still is some kind of enthusiasm in the administration for at least doing something on infrastructure. Maybe it wouldn't be as much as during a democratic administration, but you still have something there. Jim, do you think the viewpoints or the positions in the current administration will help at all in terms of developing transit in New York City or is it really just going to be up to the politicians in New York to take care of it themselves. Well, I I hope so. I mean, I don't think any of us have a crystal ball in terms of the Trump administration. But I wanted to get back to something that Henry had said about the study on the Second Avenue subway and and something that relates to Trump in this way, which he is fond of saying, you're not thinking big enough, and you know, there's an issue of the cost, and we know that the costs of the Second Avenue subway were high and perhaps could be lowered in through more efficiency in future UM. But there's the other thing, which is the benefits. And the Second Avenue subway plan that they moved forward with is a truncated version of the Lindsay plan. From the Lindsay plan would have connected to the dire Avenue line in the Bronx, which presently feeds the two and five line. UM. It would have provided structural relief which would have benefited commuters on the two, three, four, and five lines by direct redirecting passengers upstream from these networks. So I think that we can't be thinking about subway improvements only on one level. We have to think structurally and systemically. And there's another analogous project which now Amtrak is pushing forward as part of their Gateway plan. UH. We very much support the new gateway tunnels, but they're planning to build the only new terminal in the world UM after east Side Access, which is Penn Station South, which they're planning to demolish an entire city block of New York, including a church from one to build an obsolete transportation object, and this is really a terrible idea. It's designed to solve one problem, which is to bring in more trains from New Jersey, but it ceases to offer the opportunity that an analogous project, or potentially analogous project, which would be the London Crossrail project, to unify the entire region's network. And really that's really the difference between what we're proposing, which is a systemic system. I mean, in other words, that it's thinking more on a network as a whole rather than piecemeal solving one problem at a time. And I think it's that piecemeal thinking which is giving us this lousy return on investment that Henry was talking about. So you think the motto of transportation investment should be go big or go home. I think it should be that that transportation is a network and networks have to be thought of an holistic manner, and if you don't think of it that way, you're leaving a lot of money on the tab able tracy. You did mention Tokyo for a second there. I visited Tokyo a few years ago, and it does have a pretty old subway and rail system, at least in the downtown area, and yet it seems to run incredibly well, what are they doing there that can't be replicated in the United States? I think they reap a lot more efficiencies out of the system. The ridership numbers are much higher, and so getting more people in the system lowers the average costs and you can you know, do things besides raising fares and you know, driving people away. So you know, here we've got this difficulty as you know in d C. You know, fars keep going up and people feel like they're not getting enough from the system and so they stop writing, and then you have this death spiral where it becomes harder and harder to raise the revenue that you need to maintain the system. UM. So, certainly there are different models in different countries, but you always have to be sensitive to what the commuting patterns are here. And uh again, you know New York is a is a rare case where people actually ride commuter rail, they ride public transit. Um. There are a number of cities where there are mayors that want to build big, new, shiny projects and it might actually be a better investment to have more high speed buses or to encourage more rides sharing any number of things to get people to the jobs and opportunities that they need. One of the aspects of New York system, which is extremely egalitarian, is that you have one fair uh, and you can go anywhere in the city that is served by a subway. London and many other cities have a fair structure that's based on how far you travel. You know that demands that you have a certain level of income. I'm going to sound a little Pollyannish here, but I have to say that considering the scope of New York subway system and the millions of people whom it serves, uh, it has existed now for more than a hundred years, and uh it needs help in terms of maintaining its ability to serve even more people. But it basically is, as I said before, the circulation system for one of the largest local economies in the world. I mean, it's a one point three trillion dollar a year economy, and uh it's functioning pretty well. One last question before we wrap up, Jim or Henry, do you have any horror stories to share of writing the subway this year? Actually, I've been very lucky. It's uh, it's run pretty well for me. My horror story really was on nine eleven, which in which thousands of people had horror stories where the subway that I was writing to City Hall on stopped and it was really in a tunnel for about an hour. Uh. And I have to say that the m T A conductors on that train performed really really well. Uh. They cared for people who got sick on that train, They kept the panic down. Uh, they coordinated a very complicated evacuation effort. And uh. You know, when all of a said and done, this system is it could be, and I hope it doesn't become a lot worse. It It functions pretty darn well and a lot better than it did thirty years ago. Well that's a good thing to keep in mind. And we'll end it there. Jim, thanks so much for being with us today. Thank you for having me, and Tracy, thanks for coming into and Henry, thanks for being the co host. Thanks. Benchmark will be back next week and until then, you can find us on the Bloomberg terminal, Bloomberg dot com, are Bloomberg app, as well as on Apple Podcasts, pocket casts, and Stitcher. While you're there, take a minute to rate and review the show. So more listeners can find us and let us know what you thought of the show. You can follow me on Twitter at Scott Landman, Henry is at H Goldman seven seven. Our guest, Jim Venturi's firm is at at Rethink NYC Plan and Rethink and YC dot org for the website, and Tracy is at at Gordon t r a C. Benchmark is produced by Sarah Patterson and the head of Bloomberg Podcast is Alec McCabe. Thanks for listening, See you next time.