And Spanish corporate work is from 8 to 18 with 1 hour for lunch. Unfortunately commuting time makes impossible for most of us to go home for lunch, let alone sleep the siesta.

And the Socialized medicine doesnt’ mean the government happily pays for everything. Companies have to pay the government the “social security” fee for their employees, that more or less is the same amount as the money the employee gets.

And hahaha as you brilliantly apoint all this is irrelevant to TBM’s which have to be powered 24/7

Besides this, I’ve read some interesting points in people’s posts about how that 10:1 difference in costs is possible, and one of the key reasons in my opinion is what one fellow reader commented, that costs are not linear, and are way cheaper the more you build. In the city of Madrid they built a circular underground mile like 40km diameter ‘all at once’ and it was the cheapest per-mile cost of all extensions, while tiny, one-station expansions in the densest parts of downtown probably have a comparable cost to NY’s.

But even there, I wonder if the secret dream is to one day extend the extension another 12 or 15 blocks south from 26th St. Then the #7 trains would run from the 34th St station over those long tail tracks a mile or so down the Far West Side. A fairly short tunnel could meet the tracks of the crosstown L on 14th, which now has tunnels to somewhere west of 9th Ave.

And I said “to meet” the L, not to connect exactly, because I realize that the tunnel and train widths of the #7 and the L are incompatible. But it would not seem be too difficult to construct a station, at 14th or 23rd St, that allowed cross-platform transfers from an extended #7 to an extended L line.

Serving West 23rd St would be worthwhile, as that area builds up. The L leads to other reviving neighborhoods where the population is growing. Adding a second set of transfers to the other lines via the L would add the PATH line, for an important connection to New Jersey when, we should live so long, the area around the Convention Center and new 34th St station gets crowded with offices, hotels, and apartment towers.

So again, I’m not too upset if they threw five blocks of extra tunnel and track into the current #7 extension if that gives a head start to a future meeting with the L.

I wouldn’t criticize tail tracks on SAS, for the reasons you mention. But phase 1 doesn’t even include long tail tracks; the tunneling is only between 96th and 63rd.

Once Phase I was sufficiently funded to reach a point of no return, it made sense to load costs from Phase II onto Phase I. That will make the northern extension seem more affordable when the MTA is gathering up commitments to start building Phase II — already partly begun with those cut-and-cover segments from the 1970s — of the Second Avenue Subway.

Digging in Barcelona is not an easy task. There are huge differences in the composition of the soil in just a few hundreds of meters, so the construction of the line has been cumbersome, having constantly to readapt the machinery to the type of soil that needs to be crossed. In addition to this, differences in labor cost exist, but are not as big as one could imagine. We’re talking about a country with price levels on average pretty similar to the ones found in the US.