I've never seen an adequate explanation for why the 5 miles of the Second Avenue Subway cost $19 billion. I've seen blame placed on the cost of stations, 3 in particular. But these collectively amount to less than $2 billion.
By comparison, Crossrail in the UK cost a similar amount with a truly massive amount of new track, new tunnels and new stations. London is a reasonable comparison to NYC. London may even be worse given the age of the cities and the whole thing being full of ruins going back to Roman Britain.
This article mentions layers of consultants. Honestly, I think we'd be better off if the government was never allowed to spend another dollar on McKinsey, Bain, BCG, etc. They're just an exercise in wealth extraction from the government, providing negative value.
The linked blog is written by a transit expert who writes extensively on costs, including this report: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2022/10/24/the-transit-co.... I'm not an expert, though, so if you read that and found it to be inadequate/incorrect, I'd be curious to hear why.
It’s sad but the US peaked sometime in the last 30-40 years. NY is the only semi-functioning metro system in the whole country and it will likely crumble in the next few decades unless something on the order of the New Deal is enacted.
> unless something on the order of the New Deal is enacted
I think when people say this, or hear it, they mostly think of spending money on more infrastructure projects. But the problem today isn't having money to spend, its that the money is spent spectacularly ineffectually. NYC transit itself is famous for this.
We don't need a New Deal nearly as much as we need something more like a reckoning for the failure to use money effectually.
> Harry Dobson, a Metro-North structures supervisor, boosted his regular pay of just over $113,000 to over $345,000. At $54 a hour, that means he worked 4,255 hours of overtime.
> Kendell Ward, an assistant station master on the Long Island Rail Road, boosted his base salary of nearly $109,000 to over $335,000. At $52 an hour, that was 4,353 hours of overtime.
Suggest complete operational failure. Would be insane to give this org more money.
I'd disagree with your statement about NYC being the only one. The Chicagoland CTA, Metra and NICTD (Indiana) is certainly not at its best, but is nonetheless at the very least "semi-functional".
I don’t think anyone needs reminding. Anyone who lives in NYC implicitly understands that we’re stuck with approximately the subway system we have now, forever.
They changed the schedules around to have some trains go to grand central from every line but there’s limited numbers of trains, track space, and platforms at Jamaica. The upshot is that there are fewer peak express trains at good commuting times and transfers at Jamaica are no longer synchronized by time and track.
The Oyster Bay line has been hit particularly badly.
On top of that because of how far underground the gcs platforms are and the fact that the old Hunters Point Ave method wasn’t that bad, even people that work on the east side aren’t seeing big benefits, if any.
The problem is that NYC doesn't control the MTA: it was taken under state control back in 1968. And the governor has too many other issues on his/her plate to care enough to give the agency the top-to-bottom revamp it desperately needs. No one gets elected governor of the whole state of NY by campaigning on 'I'll fix NYC's subways' as a message, and indeed some of the more recent governors (Pataki, A. Cuomo) seemed to delight in stomping all over the mayor of NYC and use that for political gain.
New York voters are increasingly anti development. The only thing that protects it from going San Francisco is (a) Manhattan is joint to the other boroughs and (b) developers existing as a voting and lobbying constituency to counterbalance NIMBY homeowners and misguided tenants. Much of e.g. the Second Avenue subway’s delays were due to community roadblocks, not Albany.
There's a lot of Community Board BS, where in my opinion it's just another symptom of how Small Government can not work well at scale (i.e. many small governments behaving as elected or appointed officials that only very narrow interests pay attention to).
I took the opportunity to rant broadly, but I want to ask how that impacted the 2nd Ave Subway project?
> But the biggest lifeline arrived in April, when Gov. Kathy Hochul and state lawmakers agreed to include new and recurring funding for the M.T.A. in the state budget.
The MTA doesn’t need more money. At least not yet. It needs a complete and total overhaul in all aspects so it’s no longer the least efficient transit agency in the entire world.
When it costs absolute bullocks to actually build/revamp any sort of infrastructure, I’d say it’s kinda hard to level up the quality to other cities’ levels.
One priority would have to be getting the NY state government out of the city’s public transportation organizations. Right now, everything is subject to state politics because the state controls the MTA.
Another would be making motorized individual methods of transit more and more painful and expanding bicycle/pedestrian infrastructure (this is often two birds with one stone). This will get the public to support politicians that make public transportation the priority.
That’s not a policy priority or choice - NYC bankrupted mass transit decades ago and the bailout consisted of a grand merger between the bridge tolls and transit. The current situation is a result.
It’s a public authority secured by bonds. Unless the feds decide to pump billions of dollars into NYS/NYC, nothing happens unless the organization is insolvent again.
How does shoving more people into the subway system help? The income? The trains are packed on the 'in the office ' days like Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. And pre pandemic the 45, F and other trains were rush hour torture. Now more apartments are built. But the trains run less frequently.
But we're installing elevators everywhere and making all stations accessible, and that, plus the ridiculous running of trains overnight, are priorities.
People vote along ethnic/racial lines (look at the primary voting for Adams versus Yang versus Garcia) which means that infighting overtakes quality of governance as a priority. New York has been like that forever: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tammany_Hall
It’s the same story all over the world where you have similar sectarian politics.
Everything that I read suggested that Adams had a broad constituency of Black and Hispanic votes.[1,2,3] This was also a point that you made repeatedly, while noting that politics was more significant than racial voting lines:
> I think this illustrates my point, though. In the primary, Black and Latino New Yorkers overwhelmingly supported Adams, while Asians supported Yang. But the Black, Latino, and Asian progressive activists mostly opposed both and sided with the candidates preferred by white progressives.
> voting in New York seems to be more third-world style ethnic warfare
> People vote along ethnic/racial lines (look at the primary voting for Adams versus Yang versus Garcia)
This seems to imply something quite other than a broad cross-racial constituency. It also seems to fit oddly with the fact that progressives of all races voted against Adams. And why mention Garcia if there "wasn't a major Latino candidate"?
Look, I'm clearly not inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt here. You make incendiary trolling claims, and when asked to explain yourself, backpedal into vacuous, but reasonable-sounding, contradictions. And you get leeway because you played the role of a Burkean foil for other popular commenters here. But at this point, it just seems like you're showing contempt for the site, and for its users.
In both america and Bangladesh, moreso in the latter, secularism is a structured form of elite oppression against the masses. In America it reflects the American elites’ belief in the moral superiority of the French, while in Bangladesh it reflects the Bangladeshi elites’ belief in the moral superiority of Europeans.
My family is Ahmedi, (not a community historically disposed to the moral superiority of Europeans or Christians and not an upper class family either) so secularism was and is a way of making sure the masses don’t turn us into mincemeat (in Bangladesh too)
What I’m trying to drive at is that this ignores indigenous leftist as well as minority (historically Ahmedis were never leftist with exception of 1970) movements.
It does, insofar as religious minorities have very little influence on Bangladeshi political dynamics. The overriding force for secularism in the country is the notion that Islam is for poor and backward people. Similarly in the US, religion is what actually poorer racial minorities have in common with the dominant group. Secularism actually arose in the US in response to poor Catholic immigrants.
I might find Adams’ criticisms of white progressives amusing, but it’s not a recipe for building a city focused on getting the trains to run on time.
> It also seems to fit oddly with the fact that progressives of all races voted against Adams.
Progressives make up a small percentage of the electorate. The fact that racial conflict plays a major and destructive role in city politics doesn’t mean there aren’t also other issues in play.
I don’t know what makes you think I’m “trolling.” Show me a city that, like NYC, has an established history of ethnic partisanship in politics but also has an effective government?
As you well know, when you're wading into volatile arguments here --- and the racial dynamics of elections are obviously that, for multiple reasons! --- the onus is on you, the commenter, to prevent spontaneous conflagration by writing carefully and hedging away the most noxious interpretations of what you're writing. You share responsibility for how your writing is interpreted. You've long since given up on that, which is why you're finding so much of what you write so unwelcome here.
OP isn’t overreading my point, he’s disagreeing on the merits. Correcting the misconception about Garcia’s race, I don’t see how anyone could disagree that NYC has quite bitter racial politics, and that’s long been true.
The crux of our disagreement seems to boil down to him wanting to avoid the implication that New York’s racial politics is a bad thing for the city’s governance, and me not caring about doing so. That’s fine, we don’t need to defensively write around each other’s pieties.
Ironically NYC used to have an absolute ton. In fact a number of the underground lines we have today were direct replacements for the overhead lines, which were unsightly and very noisy.
These days I have to imagine we could create something much quieter but very few people are going to advocate for their sunlight to be blocked by an overhead train line.
Ok, that made me laugh. His only contribution to MTA in the 90's was to replace the old metal subway tokens with (first paper, then plastic) swipe tickets.
I mean a mayor like Giuliani would see the state the city is in and improve it. Unlike this clown Adams, who is doing absolutely nothing. Keep laughing though.
The congestion tolls are both going to send tourists and business fleeing. Manhattan will be a beautiful playground for the people who live there until things start failing.
>will be a beautiful playground for the people who live there
Which is the attitude that a lot of people who live in larger cities have. "I don't want people driving or otherwise coming into my city." But most cities aren't sustainable on that basis.
Nonsense. People don’t want people driving into their cities and making noise/ taking up a bunch of space with their cars. We have zero problems with people taking transit in. Suburban residents want to treat the city as both a low density car friendly space and a place filled with culture/concerts/plays/restaurants, not realizing that the two are opposites.
Except that taking transit in, especially for an evening event, is often not a reasonable option. I'll happily take commuter rail in if I have to go into our urban office for the day but it's utterly unworkable for an evening event given how few trains there are and how long they take.
And this is a city (Boston/Cambridge) with relatively good transit options. If driving in for the evening became any more difficult than it is today (which is not trivial) I simply wouldn't come in. So your comment boils down to not wanting people to come into the city for a night activity because they don't have a reasonable alternative to driving in most cases.
> taking transit in, especially for an evening event, is often not a reasonable option
If it’s that much of a hassle, for most entertainment one commutes into Manhattan for, you are fine paying the toll on an Uber. People driving themselves in and sensitive to the toll are, by definition, not adding much to the local economy.
I'm basically $200-300 round-trip to get a car to take me into the city. At that point, I'm probably going to make a weekend out of it whether I take commuter rail in or not--and I'm not going to do it very often. We're talking probably a thousand dollars at that point between hotel and transportation and whatever the actual activity is.
(And I'm not sure from a driving in perspective what's actually been gained relative to me taking my own car in and parking in a garage which is what I usually do.)
> basically $200-300 round-trip to get a car to take me into the city
The congestion charge will be between $9 and $23. For certain parts of Manhattan. During certain hours. It sounds like your problem is where you live, fundamentally, not the charge.
> a thousand dollars at that point between hotel and transportation
You do see how, from a resident's perspective, you spending more money less frequently is not a downside?
> what's actually been gained relative to me taking my own car in and parking in a garage
A reduction in space wasted to parking. Also, congestion: your car adds a car to the road. (You're also a non-professional driver in a dense urban environment.)
The things that people want to deal with the PITA of living in Manhattan over depend on volume of people. COVID and WTF killed commercial office traffic - now that it's getting dark early take a walk up 3rd Avenue in the late afternoon - the offices are empty.
So the residents don't want to deal with commuters, don't want to deal with drivers, etc. Cool. I don't want to hear about bailing people out of their $2M mortgages on 800 ft^2 apartments when the cultural, dining and entertainment that brought them to Manhattan migrates to Brooklyn and Jersey.
I don't get this. Garage parking + bridge tolls + gas can't cost more than $100 to drive into NYC. Boston even less due to no bridge tolls and shorter distances.
The context was the claim I shouldn't drive into Boston. That's the cost for getting a taxi or other car service. Which, as I said in another comment, isn't clear to me how it makes a difference but it apparently does because I'm not a "professional driver."
The money saved from reduced vehicles in the city can and should go into expanded commuter service, I absolutely agree. There is a cultural element to this as well - many suburbanites feel that transit is beneath them.
The lack of regional electrified rail even on the Providence line is a blight on the Boston area. It is perfectly feasible to run regional trains every 15 minutes which would solve your problem.
Of course we won't get that until the 2050s at best...
The NY Metro North railroad is so much better than the MBTA Commuter Rail that it's not even in the same category. You absolutely can take it into the city for the evening.
There's a whole cultural aspect to it as well as the actual physical infrastructure. But it's probably unique in the US in that regard.
The MBTA commuter rail is commuter rail. And, outside the occasional other event, no one looks at it differently and it is empty (and probably loses a bunch of money) whenever it runs outside of rush hour.
I don't think the 1% that pay their share are very relevant. The only example I know of a suburb that pays its fair share is the beach front suburb near Charleston, SC and that's very wealthy area that we couldn't expect to replicate on a widescale.
Otherwise, why are city mayors desperately opposing WFH, with the goal of putting suburban commuters back into their hellish commutes into the city to patronize urban businesses?
You could argue the suburbanites need their urban jobs - but WFH has proven at least many of these jobs do not necessarily require workers to have their butts planted in urban offices to be productive.
Because people like the propaganda of the suburbs more than they like looking at hard numbers. The entire American dream is based on the notion of suburban car-centric infrastructure: each family a single unit home with a lawn and a car. We've been peddled this lie for 70 years now. It's hard to break free from something like that, especially when the consequences of suburban maintenance are so delayed. This lie has socioeconomic value because it maintains the narrative that rich people contribute the most to the economy and they're carrying the weight of the "inner-city" poor
City mayors still think that the suburbs are profitable because they're just as vulnerable to this propaganda as you and I are. The Feds help maintain this lie too.
Many/most of the people in suburbs/exurbs around me go into (or don't go into) suburban/exurban offices and local businesses. They rarely go into the major city 40 miles away. When I do, it's mostly to go to the airport or a play every 2-3 months.
From a tech perspective, until the West Coast companies started opening satellite offices in the city, it basically didn't have any tech companies any longer and was losing population.
I’m sorry, which tourists are going to be turned off by congestion tolls? Tourists are, by and large, not driving in and out of lower Manhattan. Same with businesses, only a very small number have a significant number of customers drive to visit them.
Tourists don't drive in Manhattan and businesses there don't rely on vehicle traffic. And delivery vehicles are not charged as far as I am aware in the current proposal. The people who will suffer the most are people who drive in for work and suburban families that drive in for weekend day trips. The latter can afford to pay for the privilege. The former tends to be people under-served by transit, which is unfortunate and they should probably be given a discounted weekly pass or something.
There's absolutely no reason to expect any kind of collapse in anything other than asthma rates and traffic congestion.
Funny how people who tend to proclaim that they are pro-business also tend to oppose textbook classical liberal free market solutions to textbook externality problems.
The city already is and has been a playground for the rich for 10+ years. That's largely due to real estate. Small businesses in the city are also struggling due to real estate, as well as the chaotic and difficult regulatory environment.
> The people who will suffer the most are people who drive in for work and suburban families that drive in for weekend day trips. The latter can afford to pay for the privilege. The former tends to be people under-served by transit
It's even less of a problem than you think.
The people who drive in for work are rich executives and lawyers etc. who can afford to park in Manhattan. Not maids or baristas.
They're not under-served by transit at all. If they wanted, they could commute like most people by driving to the nearest train station and taking the train into the city.
Do you think the hybrid office environment might change the equation a bit? The commute or not questions has a spectrum of answers now. If commuting norms drop from three days a week to two days a week, that's half the amount of congestion (from a certain source anyway), but it's also a drop in certain kinds of economic activities.
as if cars are the primary form of transit in NYC. The congestion tolls will make us more reliant on public transit, but that’s exactly the point. We don’t want to build car-centric infrastructure.
It's a city of almost 10 million people with a metro area of 20 million people, and a broader region of 60+ million people depending on how you look at it.
The value of NYC in 2023 isn't NYC, there's no industry per se. It's a financial, cultural and administrative center -- a hub. The marginal changes have huge impacts on the region, nation and maybe the world. If 1% of NY metro people need something, that's 200,000 impacted people; more than the entire upstate NY region where I live.
The activists living in Manhattan who are wound up about Manhattan being congested, etc are living in a bubble. Their world depends on the outsiders.
The actual dollar value of toll isn't relevant. The perception is. If there's a thing in Manhattan that isn't a commute to a job, you need to do the calculus if the pain in the ass of getting to Manhattan is worth it. If you're not young or particularly mobile, it's a hard no.
Why does it matter? Huge industries in NYC depend on NYC being NYC. If you're fighting cancer, are you going to go to MSK, NYU or Cornell in Manhattan? There's no hotels of note north of 66th St, so on top of everything else, you're facing more hassle and expense. How does that impact the tens of thousands of people working at these places long term?
I don’t see anything in your comment that makes me think congestion toll is a bad idea. NYC infrastructure can’t maintain increased traffic and we shouldn’t build out to accommodate it. If you need to get into manhattan, just use public transportation.
The perception, as far as I can tell, comes from a bunch of car brains who think they should be able to drive wherever they want and be 100% accommodated without taking one second to think about the consequences of car-centric infrastructure. Spending our time and energy accommodating them is a net negative to our community.
Edit: it seems like you’re doing your calculations based on the idea that increased access via car leads to increased sales. The data actually shows the opposite: The more walkable the area is, the more sales at storefronts. Locations that shutdown lanes of traffic to increase walkability or increase bike traffic see a massive jump in revenue.
> Nothing there is truly designed to optimize how to improve in a place that can’t build. London can’t build either, even if its costs are a fraction of New York’s
Maybe I'm misunderstanding this statement, but between 2009 and 2022 London finished the 73 miles (118 km) long Crossrail Project (Elizabeth Line), with 26 miles (42 km) of new tunnel, 10 new stations, and 31 refurbished stations (some of which were entirely rebuilt).
The CrossRail, and the DLR in all fairness isn't so far back in history.
Paris. Paris has all sorts of continuous transit improvements to turn the suburbs into denser areas, and exoburbs into suburbs. Grands Paris, is the name of the general long-term project, and the biggest transit upgrade is this: https://www.railway-technology.com/projects/grand-paris-expr...
The US will continue to fail at public transit because rich people do not use it. As an oligarchy, the government prioritizes the whims of the rich and there are no signs of change. From 1880-1950, trains and public transit were utilized heavily by the American rich in NYC and other US cities because it was the fastest way to get around. Once highways and air travel came about, they stopped. You routinely see celebs on the Tube and other European metros. You hardly see them on the NYC subway anymore. The 2000s were a bit of a golden age for the NYC subway and other US metro systems because Uber and Google Maps navigation did not exist, but now they do. It's going to cause a death spiral for alot of metros unless something changes.
> the norms is that not only is design done with consultants, but also the consultants are supervised by another layer of consultants
Consultants. Is this the whole problem?
My own experience with consultants is that this model rarely works. Consultants are usually not knowledgeable enough about what you are doing to do a good job. They’re also incentivized to drag things out and create dependencies and if this harms the project or the business they just skate on to the next one.
I really do wonder if a shift to outsourcing and consultants is the entire reason America can’t build.
It's a good question. Consultants fundamentally have different incentives than the organizations that engage them. Look at the "gilded age" of Rockefeller, Carnegie, JP Morgan, Vanderbilt... did any of them build their business empires on the advice of consultants?
This report is basically just advance warning for people who live in NYC to start planning to not have it around.
You don't put stuff like this into a final public report unless you think it's the most likely outcome.
We know for a fact the US has neither the leadership, funding mechanism nor the incentive structures to actually build for BEYOND those 20 years anyway, so even if they were able to shore things up for now until 2043, it would crumble not long after that
As a counter example, the Hoover Dam, (for whatever you think of it's environmental impact) is in fine operation today and with no major engineering issues on the horizon projected until 2067 (which is the furthest they go out on contracts) despite the population growth that it has had to serve.
The kind of socialists that brought us the Hoover Dam don't exist anymore. We shouldn't expect any great social programs or systems in our lifetime.
> The causes of high American (especially New York) costs are institutional, and fixable, without a revolutionary upending of the legal or social system. We can’t tell you how New York can build for the costs of Nuremberg or Turkey, both around $100 million per km, but $200 million per km, slightly higher than Italy and slightly lower than Sweden, is achievable.
Many other advanced, rich, highly unionized countries.. like say, France.. are able to build subways at 1/10th the per-mile cost of NYC. So its far more than that.
But that doesn’t give the socialism bad windbags a venue to derail (ha) the conversation. Building a working mass transit system shouldn’t be a partisan (ha) shitshow.
The US cares about none of those things and still pays insanely high prices for bad infrastructure. The US cares about businesses, and building good public utilities is fundamentally at odds with a for-profit model.
I'm amazed how everyone (present company excepted) is OK with one woman, Hochul, deciding to build the IBX and one man, Adams, deciding not to build QueensLink. Where's the outrage when important studies like the 20-Year Needs Assessments are manipulated to support pet projects that may bear little resemblance to the most deserving ones?
High costs is a double whammy for transit systems. High costs mean you need to spend more to build transit. At the same time, it means you can build much less transit. That, in turn, reduces how useful transit is to the public, and ultimately, public support for building transit.
That's the fate of all large cities: infrastructure gets more and more complicated, and bureaucracy always keeps growing.
The way to fix it is to stop building large dense cities. We need tax incentives for companies to create jobs in sparsely-populated regions and for remote jobs. Also probably something like cap-and-trade for dense office space.
This way, eventually we won't need Downtowns with super-concentrated offices.
NYC’s problems are specific to the city. Take a look at the transit Paris has built in the last decade or so. It’s been built faster and far more cheaply than any MTA project.
Cities also appeal to people for reasons other than dense employment opportunities. Small towns are hardly free of bureaucracy. So on and so forth.
In another article about high speed rail, someone pointed out there's a big difference in France: once the govt votes the build, it becomes law and can't be preempted whereas the US, any entity can pause infra projects with a suitable complaint. Perhaps something similar applies to this comparison.
Humans have been aggregating into cities for thousands of years because they are more economical than living sparsely.
With sparsely populated areas you also have logistics problems but no economy of scale. Every stand-alone dwelling adds new infrastructure requirements to the road/power/water/fuel system and increases maintenance costs. Cities tend to be net tax payers while suburban and rural areas tend to be net tax beneficiaries, subsidized by the taxes from cities.
Both types of places are important, but rural and suburban are already heavily tax-advantaged.
> That's the fate of all large cities: infrastructure gets more and more complicated, and bureaucracy always keeps growing.
This is simply not backed up by reality; the article cites examples of European major cities without this problem. And do you really think Tokyo, Seoul or Shanghai have trouble building the transit they need?
The issue is that American institutions specifically are not fit for purpose, not an issue with large cities in general.
By comparison, Crossrail in the UK cost a similar amount with a truly massive amount of new track, new tunnels and new stations. London is a reasonable comparison to NYC. London may even be worse given the age of the cities and the whole thing being full of ruins going back to Roman Britain.
This article mentions layers of consultants. Honestly, I think we'd be better off if the government was never allowed to spend another dollar on McKinsey, Bain, BCG, etc. They're just an exercise in wealth extraction from the government, providing negative value.