America has taken local power to an extreme. There is just no pre-emption or exception to that local power which includes numerous fiefdoms within the county, the city, the utilities, a massive complex of competing federal, state, and city regulations. And then unions. To this day, if you do a trade show in Javits and take a computer power cord and plug it into a power strip, let alone BRING YOUR OWN power strip, you will get chewed out. A worker who sees it will chew you out, tell his buddy who will chew you out, tell his boss, and he his boss, and in sequence you will have a minimum of an hour of swearing, vitriol over how you're intentionally trying to fuck them over, cost them money, take their jobs, on and on. It is one of the worst union cities I've ever experienced.

Instead of protecting a right to work concept, they protect specific tasks. So even if that task becomes obsolete, you still have to pay that union guy with that specialty to stand around doing nothing.

If it weren't for all the people you'd disenfranchise from such a process, what you'd want is a business, neighborhood, city, state delegation to create a federal law that totally preempts all state and local laws, for each major project, to cut through the red tape. shrug

Oh and middle men. There's a middle man for everything. Especially in Manhattan, it's almost not hyperbole to say the doorman has an accountant, a lawyer, and a therapist. And anybody making more money than a doorman, has two or more of each of those.

Great city. And a shit hole.

EDIT: Also, I think the 2nd Ave project is a big fat classist waste of money. The Lexington Ave/Park Ave line is not that far away, Manhattan has already a very dense subway service compared to Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn.

Kind of an aside, but the need for the 2nd Ave Subway isn't so much about having to walk a couple of blocks but that the 456 line has too many riders which leads to overcrowding and delays.