I call bullshit.

What's needed is a federal investigation. Enough with this crap.

Nebula, if the current wiring is set up to handle Edison bulbs (and as anyone who's been on a train creeping through a work zone can attest, they currently use rows of bog-standard incandescents), it can handle screw in CFLs (self-ballasted, btw) of the same wattage without a problem. If anything, by ordering in massive quantities, the MTA should be able to procure them at a sizable discount to the offerings at Home Depot. Arrogant attitudes like yours (suggesting that laypeople can't possibly comprehend the complexity, and the attendant expense, of subway work) may explain why effective oversight is so lacking. If you can explain why such a straightforward job (hardly meriting classification as a "capital expense," if you ask me) necessitates an outlay of $96 an inch, please do so.

whats funny is that comments on a blog are probably a more through audit of their budget than the people who approve the budget do.

Well put, and very true. It's that kinda thinking that had the Pentagon buying $900 toilet seats. They just don't get it because it ain't their money.

I agree with the others -- enough with the crisis mongering. Last week it was the doormen, this week (and at least once a month), it's the MTA. With the latter, the sums involved are so stupefyingly large as to be meaningless to the general public. However, on the few occasions the layperson does have some means of making sense of the figures, it doesn't add up. Look at the 2010-2014 Draft (of course, this sort of thing is always preliminary -- better to be a political football that way) Capital Budget linked to in an earlier post. Scroll down to page 22, where it talks about replacing incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents -- now, this is a job that most people can relate to -- unscrew one, screw in the other, done. Look at the estimate: $110 million to convert 18 miles of track. OK, whatever...at least it isn't billion, right? We've become so inured to millions and billions being thrown around...but do some math on that figure, and the job works out to $96 per INCH of track. WTF??? So color me unalarmed by the latest bleating from these featherbedding jackasses. The guy who joked about it costing at least a cool mil to change the locks on those gates wasn't kidding.

Scroll down to page 22, where it talks about replacing incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents -- now, this is a job that most people can relate to -- unscrew one, screw in the other, done.

Really? A layperson can relate to changing lightbulbs in a damp, dark, rat infested environment with 35-ton trains passing within feet of you, powered by an open rail carrying 600 volts of direct current? What does your living room look like?

I think you are doing your argument a disservice by oversimplifying this. I wouldn't want to speculate on the actual procedure costs involved but one would think mandated safety regulations have a lot to do with the high cost of this project.

I hope you know the tunnel lights don't use the same power system as your house lights do. Not like you can go buy a bunch of bulbs at Home Depot and screw them in. They use a different power system from the 1900's that needs to be upgraded to support CFL lights, including new wiring and ballasts.

Nice try at poking holes in something you don't fully understand.

Different power source, same bulbs. Power is converted so bulbs don't blow. Take a look at the bulbs in tunnels--they are the same ones you buy at Home Depot.

thats great info about the bulbs. it seems to me they can and do invent any $$ amount for any number of capital projects like that to justify the need to raise fares or cut services.

its never going to change. I get that. what bothers me is the fake accountability, the false sense that its an open system and that we have some say in it.

when all the evidence says, that at every level we have no say. its just rhetoric.

I blame the Big Bang theory which got us into this mess in the first place...

that and evolution

Just because the ancestors of most of the current MTA workers started walking upright just a generation ago, you can't blame evolution for that.

You can blame the MTA until the end of time, but when you do, make sure you blame the City and State as well.

The MTA is the state. It's a state-created and state-run agency. There is no difference between the two. The state is stranging itself by shortchanging the MTA, and by extension, strangling NYC. We need to stop thinking in terms of city, state and MTA. They are all one and the same, though you'd never know it by the way they independently of one another. Once they start working in concert, things may get back to "normal", which in New York is a relative term.

monopoly is the biggest nightmare of capitalism.

Maybe the MTA should be optimizing its profits by going with the highest bidder on deals like the Vanderbilt Rail Yards, instead of selling out at below-market rates to stooges like Bruce Ratner.

+1

Add in those new keys, locks, and labor and that'll be another $50 million to the deficit.

This is unusually bad reporting. The MTA did not make a mistake with its budget projections. The STATE, which administers the tax, has, for the third time, told the MTA that the tax has not produced the projected revenue (indeed, the current figure is well below even the most pessimistic forecast).

This is on the STATE, not the MTA. In fact, the MTA is so fed up with the situation that they are thinking of doing their own tax analysis, even though that is seemingly inefficient, because the STATE has been so incompetent.

the news we are fed about the MTA seems to me mostly meaningless

theres a surprise short fall of 50 million!

they make much of their money from taxes on re transactions!

theres a 26 billion dollar 5 year budget!

'Under the new plan, MTA workers would be able to fix individual problems that would keep stations open and in good condition.'

I dont know if its in Gothamist retelling, but to me these stories have no context, there are no details. you can't have an opinion outside of damn the mta, or damn the city or state.

It feels orwellian to me. Like we're given news to get us to rally from one side to the other with no real anyalsis to back it up.