As far as I can tell, you didn't provide an argument here, merely reasserted "unions in the US are a cancer".
In particular, we're looking to understand why transit construction is so much more expensive in the United States than Europe or Asia. You posit that it's due to unions. But this can't be the explanation, at least not without something more, because many of the countries with cheaper transit construction costs have stronger unions and higher levels of unionization. So your explanation doesn't have much going for it, at least as it stands. Is there some reason American unions are particularly cancerous in comparison to French, German, or Scandinavian unions, all of which are stronger than American unions? If so, what can we do to move American unions more in the direction of German unions? Perhaps strengthen labor laws and increase rates of unionization, to aim towards a more consensus-based and less adversarial framework?
If I were hazarding an explanation, however, I'd guess something to do with the U.S.'s court-based regulatory framework and federalist style of government, that dumps everything into agency decisions and lawsuits, and has that all happen at multiple levels. When Denmark approved a new Copenhagen metro line, the details were negotiated for some time (including with the unions). One the plans were agreed on, the project was wrapped into a law passed through the national parliament, which authorized the construction. It was then, by statute, definitionally legal in all aspects (unless it somehow contradicted the constitution). It was impossible to sue over the construction, because the metro-construction plan was itself written into the law, superseding any laws that might otherwise conflict. By contrast, in the U.S., new metro lines have to go through a series of agencies at many levels of government (local/regional/state/federal), and can be challenged on the basis of any number of existing laws.
In particular, we're looking to understand why transit construction is so much more expensive in the United States than Europe or Asia. You posit that it's due to unions. But this can't be the explanation, at least not without something more, because many of the countries with cheaper transit construction costs have stronger unions and higher levels of unionization. So your explanation doesn't have much going for it, at least as it stands. Is there some reason American unions are particularly cancerous in comparison to French, German, or Scandinavian unions, all of which are stronger than American unions? If so, what can we do to move American unions more in the direction of German unions? Perhaps strengthen labor laws and increase rates of unionization, to aim towards a more consensus-based and less adversarial framework?
If I were hazarding an explanation, however, I'd guess something to do with the U.S.'s court-based regulatory framework and federalist style of government, that dumps everything into agency decisions and lawsuits, and has that all happen at multiple levels. When Denmark approved a new Copenhagen metro line, the details were negotiated for some time (including with the unions). One the plans were agreed on, the project was wrapped into a law passed through the national parliament, which authorized the construction. It was then, by statute, definitionally legal in all aspects (unless it somehow contradicted the constitution). It was impossible to sue over the construction, because the metro-construction plan was itself written into the law, superseding any laws that might otherwise conflict. By contrast, in the U.S., new metro lines have to go through a series of agencies at many levels of government (local/regional/state/federal), and can be challenged on the basis of any number of existing laws.