Yeah. Most places keep costs down by having more internal staff. We've largely gutted public staffing across the board, NYC's planning staff is a fraction of what it used to be.

Everyone is run ragged, so everything gets outsourced to contractors at 3x the cost.

Paris builds new rail constantly, at a fraction of NYC prices, despite being an old system, in an old city, with a river and riddled with catacombs below ground, with a heavily unionized workforce.

The big "trick" is they do it all in-house, only outsource if absolutely necessary, and keep contractors on a tight leash. Also, they don't have to do multi-year long environmental reviews and feasibility studies for every little project, they just do them.