Earlier this year, a Connecticut woman died after she fell trying to carry her 1-year-old daughter in a stroller down a staircase in a New York City subway station. Nine months later, Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority has provided us with the answer: It costs $81 million to make a station wheelchair-accessible—between three to 10 times what peer cities pay for the same work. Eighty-one million dollars for an elevator, or perhaps two. It’s a scandalous figure, and one that says as much about the state of American public infrastructure at large as it does about New York. We’re...
