Once you get past design, procurement rules, insurance, permitting, collaborating with all impacted parties, avoiding buried utilities, easements, paying project management fees, any environmental concerns, municipal capital work like that quickly becomes more expensive than you buying a shed from a hardware store and drilling some concrete anchors.

Metal is expensive, but also they’ll be subject to considerable criticism from the opposing parties. The design needs to be solid, which means it adds cost. It needs to be pretty, it needs to last forever, and withstand significant abuse. So they’ll contract it out and that adds cost. And you couldn’t possibly reuse a design, oh. My. God. /s

The actual manufacturing I’m not sure about, but I assume the city won’t be interested in 50 contracts, so it’ll be a big shop with overhead, sales people, and steak dinners.

Government procurement is hard, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes stupid.

getting permits to place them is probably pretty expensive.

You want something that is esthetically pleasant too, so you need to pay some designers/architects to chip in. Need security and resistance to the weather. All of that add up.

There's this phenomenon called bike-shedding, about how because building a bike shedding looks simple, everyone thinks they know how to do it and feel that they to give feedback about it and the bike shedding is never built because of that.

Doubt it's that expensive. A locker can be made for like $500. But then you're thinking of sheds with a simple lock. If you want something actually safe, you'd need a bike garage, and those can go up to like $4k a piece., or $5k if we're counting cargo bikes.

To install them, you need labour as well. Assuming a a $40/hr wage (could arguably be higher, depending on source), and a team of 8 people doing this for 8 hours a day, that's $2,560 a day for labour in total. Two isolate the area, keep the area clean, two drill holes in pavement and breaks up stuff so the boxes can get in there, two transport the materials, and two assemble.

So, assuming 4 boxes a day of $5,000 each, so it's now about $22,560 in total per day (wages included). Let's assume $22,500 here per day. 500 lockers divided by 4 (amount installed per day) then yields 125 days (4 months, 3 days) to install all of them. Thus, that's $2,812,500 in total.

But we'll also need permits. The build plan needs to be assessed for transparency, environment, construction drawings, and the impact for the neighbourhood. It's complicated, but let's say $500 per balcony-like area (a balcony being about as big as one of those 3-bike boxes). So that's $250,000 in total for the permits.

We then end up with a total cost of 3,062,500, or let's call it 3,100,000. Because building often has additional hidden costs and maintenance, I'm assuming 1/3 extra, so it's even better when it turns out to cost less. Then we end up with about $4,000,000, or $0.45 per NYC inhabitant.

Even if wages were $250/hr, it'd end up costing only $36,000 a day total (labour+construction), and thus totals $4,750,000 (including permit). Hidden costs and maintenance included, that's $6,175,000 in total, a fraction of the $25,000,000 that is claimed.

This would mean all of the 500 boxes cost less than a dollar for all NYC inhabitants in total!

That while it gives much more freedom in the form of bicycles. There are no additional fuel costs, yearly checkups, and so on, and you get fitter and stronger. Bikes literally make you richer.

Welding isn’t fast, each of those could easily take 40 hours of labor, and that’s on the low side for just an ugly box.

At $100 an hour, that’s 4k alone in just labor.