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Comment by Spunkie | Hacker News Reader

I normally can look at a government project and understand where bloat and delays come from... but 7 billion dollars for installing subway gates is absolute insanity.

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Full height barriers would require extensive rework of many aspects of the subway system -- it's not just a matter of bolting walls to the floor. There are only a handful of people who are killed when they are pushed or fall onto the tracks at a station each year. A few billion dollars could save a lot more lives deployed elsewhere in NYC.

Okay, but is it not possible to spend much less to receive most of the benefit? The article, study, and GP are all talking about big full-height barriers. What would be the cost of a 4- or 5-foot fence with some automatic gates in it (per station)? Sure, some people could hop over it. Sure, it might not go the way to the end of the platform. But it would be _something_ and it would not cost anything like what they are proposing.

It feels to me like someone was asked to come up with a reasonable solution, took a deliberate detour through Whataboutism-land, and came back with the most ludicrous price possible.

Also, according to the MTA's own financial report (https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2...), the MTA has $5.6B in COVID-19 subsidy funding remaining, and they are expected to receive $15B in increased revenue from Congestion Pricing. So it sounds to me like they could probably afford even the ludicrously-priced barriers.

Your question is answered in the article, and also the solution they deemed most feasible which is already deployed in a station.

> What would be the cost of a 4- or 5-foot fence with some automatic gates in it (per station)?

Per Alon Levy, from comparisons with installation costs elsewhere, about $10 million per station: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2022/01/20/platform-edge-...

What do you mean by “full height barriers”? Because in Japan, the barriers that exist are probably 4-5 feet tall, and pretty much are essentially walls bolted to the floor. I fail to see how those wouldn’t achieve the result while not costing nearly that much.

From the article:

> The total cost for installing full-height gates in just those 128 stations would be over $7 billion, the agency found, and half-height gates would cost $6.53 billion. Once installed, the agency would have to spend more than $119 million each year to maintain the doors.

> The total cost for installing full-height gates in just those 128 stations would be over $7 billion

54 million per station. I assume on average 3 lines in each station, maybe 8 doors per line?

$2.2M per door. That's just insane.

Right.

$54 million?

Yeah, no.

I bet you could go to Lowes or Home Depot and get the necessary materials for a couple of thousand bucks at most, and probably get the installation done for maybe $5k (or say $10k given the insane prices in NYC).

Then hire a few guys at (being generous) $100k a year to open and close the gates manually when the train reached the station and had stopped completely. Say 10 guys, so a million bucks a year.

At the quoted $54 million you could fund this low-tech setup for 54 years.

I bet a lot of middle income countries around the world could install multiple subway systems for that price tag. With security gates.

I bet a lot of them do not have governments that bend a knee to the kind of labor union interests that they have in New York.

Not even middle income. Copenhagen recently built a 10 mile long city circle line with 17 stations (opened 2019) for about $3.3 billion.

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