Second Avenue Subway

In The Build-Nothing Country, New York’s Second Avenue Subway is the marquee example of American cost disease: it became the world’s most expensive subway line, an order of magnitude more costly per mile than comparable European projects. The essay attributes the blowout to overuse of consultants, oversized stations, poor coordination, and pork-barrel spending. It sits inside the piece’s broader diagnosis that “money is not physical stuff” — earmarking billions for a subway in a spreadsheet doesn’t conjure a physical train, and the gap between budgeted dollars and delivered infrastructure is where America’s inability to build shows up.

Context: The Second Avenue Subway is a New York City Subway line running under Manhattan’s East Side. Long-promised since the 1920s, its first phase (three stations) opened on the Upper East Side in 2017 after decades of delays, and it has become a frequently-cited case study in why US transit construction costs vastly exceed those of peer countries.

Where this appears

• The Build-Nothing Country — used as the central illustration of US cost disease and the essay’s “money is not physical stuff” thesis on America’s failure to build.