> an alternative interpretation is that the union workers know more about how to safely do underground work than accountants and supervisors do.
As someone in New York who supports congestion pricing and public transit, I will say this: yes, there is a ton of waste and mismanagement at the MTA, and the TWU is unfortunately frequently one of the impediments to progress here. They have a history of opposing things like industry-standard safety improvements, sometimes even things which create jobs for their members, for arcane political reasons that require a deep understanding of their internal politics to comprehend. It would be nice if the TWU were a more consistent force for efficiency and progress, but they are not. You can compare to unions elsewhere in the world, or even to other unions in the US, and the TWU still winds up as an outlier in many of these areas.
That said, OP is pointing the finger at the wrong party. The MTA is overseen by the state. The responsibility for these inefficiencies and cost overruns lie with the state legislature and the governor. Andrew Cuomo, who was the governor at the time that article was written, famously washed his hands off the MTA. He was so brazen as to even publicly claim that he had no authority over them, at the same time as he was making unilateral management decisions on their behalf, including ordering the MTA to write a check to an upstate ski resort, to bail the resort out after a low-business season.
Fortunately, the money from congestion pricing is legally earmarked by state law and under a settlement from a federal lawsuit (the lawsuit was unrelated to congestion pricing, but the funding was offered up as a settlement term), so there's a lot less wiggle room for things to go wrong.
Congestion pricing is a solid policy win. That doesn't mean the governor (Hochul) and the state legislature don't need to step up and do their jobs - which means real, material oversight - but criticizing congestion pricing on those grounds, when it's one of the few budget items which actually has been legally overseen and structured - is completely off-base.
I think that particular theory is addressed by the "four times more laborers than elsewhere in the world" bit, if it includes the developed world. (Which I strongly suspect it does.)
