Surprise, surprise.

Estimates have now placed the MTA's $21 billion 2005-2009 capital program--which includes the Second Avenue subway, the LIRR-Grand Central connection, and the westward expansion of the 7 train--as being $1.4 billion over-budget at what is roughly its halfway point. Rising materials and real estate prices have made building anything in Manhattan almost prohibitively expensive, which means fewer contractors are bidding on large-scale transportation projects, and those that are have been setting prices substantially higher than the MTA intended.

I can't say I'm particularly surprised. It's not as though New York City, or the MTA, has established a proud tradition of on-time, under-budget infrastructure enhancements. Naturally, maintaining the fleet (and its operators) needs to be the authority's top priority, but unless this budget crunch stops getting worse--if it doesn't start getting better, though I'm not holding my breath--then some of these projects will almost certainly be canned. Probably the westward push on the 7 train and much of the southern portion of the Second Avenue subway.

But above all, someone needs to start going back to the drawing board now, and come up with some realistic alternatives in the event that any of these projects get the axe. If there's anything we could learn from a situation like that, it's that waiting 80 years for a situation to replicate itself is a waste of time and money. It makes perfect sense to me: if you only propose transit projects once a city gets too crowded, you'll only be maximizing your own costs since a crowded city means an equally crowded and expensive construction market. So New York either needs to come up with something cheaper or bite the billion-dollar bullet, but we need this thing pushed through now.