you cant blame slowness on wages

Sure, but wages + census makes a difference. The NY Times did a comparison of the construction of the 2nd avenue subway project after the governor took the 5th or 6th victory lap.

As I recall, the TBM used in NYC was “mannned” by 5x more workers than an identical machine in Paris. We’re talking like 50 people. France isn’t known for labor efficiency, but between the various labor agreements, minority/women owned employee and subcontractor requirements, etc that many extra hands were being paid. Whether they did anything is another story.

Transit Costs' full analysis (https://transitcosts.com/executive_summary/) decomposed the 2nd avenue subway costs into

- station sizes (causing spend on stations to increase by a factor of 2)

- nonstandard systems (elevators, escalators, etc) (causing an increase over nominal best practices of approximately 1.35)

- inefficient procurement (how contracting works) (increase by a factor of 1.85, although this is a squishy)

- soft costs (design, planning, construction management, contingencies) (factor of 1.2, again fairly squishy)

- labor costs (factor of 1.5 over a well run transit system baseline)

so it's both the case that the labor costs are outrageous and that they're insufficient to explain the outrageous project costs.

> so it's both the case that the labor costs are outrageous and that they're insufficient to explain the outrageous project costs.

Which is what I said, the difference in labor costs "helps", not that it's the sole explanation.

Wages are lower in Spain, but not by anywhere near enough to explain the cost difference.

France does a vastly better job than America at things like HSR and one could hardly call the highly unionised and regulated labour environment 'cheap' over there.