11 ms·

NYC should stop building subways with tunnel boring. Instead, tear up the street, build the darn thing and then rebuild the street over it. This method is calle

by temuze 8y ago

NYC should stop building subways with tunnel boring. Instead, tear up the street, build the darn thing and then rebuild the street over it. This method is called cut and cover and it's what many countries do because it's substantially cheaper and faster: https://ny.curbed.com/2017/9/19/16335068/nyc-subway-mta-state-of-emergency-solution https://ny.curbed.com/2017/9/19/16335068/nyc-subway-mta-stat... Imagine if the 2nd ave line was done this way - sure you'd get a lot of pissed Upper East Siders, but their property value is going to skyrocket from the project anyway. As far as I'm concerned, they could deal with a year of inconvenience instead of getting it built over decades for magnitudes of money more. Of course, the City Council would never agree to this plan. It's easier for them not to disturb anyone if they want to be re-elected...

bigdubs 8y ago
2nd avenue already got pretty torn up with access tunnels, it's not like tunnel boring helped a ton. Also a good chunk of NYC subways were built with cut & cover (sections of IRT 2/3 lines as an example).
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Nav_Panel 8y ago
The alternative solution is to build stations "inline" with the bored tunnels. This can be done quite cheaply, assuming modern ventilation/engineering are used. Note that $2bb of the $4bb for the 2nd Ave line came from station construction...
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  > Note that $2mm of the $4mm for the 2nd Ave line Billion.
  - Nav_Panel 8y ago
    Good catch, thanks.
- bobthepanda 8y ago
  You still need access shafts. New York builds subway stops that have access from the sidewalk; purchasing property for that would be too expensive. And if you build entrances from the sidewalk you also need a way from a sidewalk to access tracks going in both directions. So you end up digging up the entire street anyways.
yongjik 8y ago
From what I've seen in Seoul, "cut and cover" doesn't take a year, but more like five years. And Seoul isn't exactly known for slow construction problems, so I think it probably can't be made much faster. It can still be cost effective, but it can be rather unpleasant during the construction period.
JumpCrisscross 8y ago
> Of course, the City Council would never agree to this plan. It's easier for them not to disturb anyone if they want to be re-elected Oh no, democracy... On a more serious note, boring causes far less disruption to street-level commerce. I haven't seen an analysis which includes the lost tax revenue and economic activity from cut and cover. Moreover, something deeper is going on as even boring in NYC costs more than in other countries.
- mschuster91 8y ago
  You are certainly right with "deeper". I wouldn't dare digging anywhere near the foundations of a skyscraper, and cut&cover isn't doable in a city with dozens of decades of uncharted pipes, tunnels, cables and whatever you're gonna find once you start digging. And I certainly don't want to know the insurance costs for this kind of project, no matter the method...
- chimeracoder 8y ago
  > Moreover, something deeper is going on as even boring in NYC costs more than in other countries. Corruption. Rampant, unabashed corruption. That's what's going on. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
- Animats 8y ago
  Deeper is possible, but expensive. See NYC Water Tunnel #3.[1] Under construction since 1970. Several sections already in use; completion 2020. As deep as 800 feet down, 24 feet in diameter. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Water_Tunnel_No._3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Water_Tunnel_No....
dmix 8y ago
What's the estimate economic cost of a cut & cover, which shuts down a major NYC street for 1yr, vs the projected cost of a tunnelled subway line x2 (because modern government is always 2x the budget, at least)? Some shops on the street could very well go out of business due to lack of local traffic... would they be compensated?
- Endama 8y ago
  Yeah I would assume that there is no way that they would be compensated for the lost revenue. I would also imagine calculating the lost revenue for those shops, and subsequently trying to get the government to reimburse them for it, would be prohibitively expensive both politically and financially.
- bobthepanda 8y ago
  Second Avenue Subway construction lasted a decade and the stations still had to be built as cut and cover (you do need access shafts to the stations). In light of that cut and cover sounds downright peachy.
kbar13 8y ago
i think sf is doing cut and cover on stockton for the new muni line and it's been in construction since i moved here 3 years ago
- jakelarkin 8y ago
  those are just the stations, the tunnel is bore
notatoad 8y ago
Cut and Cover is cheaper, for sure. But tunnel boring is also cheaper everywhere else than it is in NYC. The problem doesn't seem to be the construction method so much as the beaurocracy and politics surrounding the construction. Moving to a more disruptive construction method might help projects get completed faster, just because there will be the political capital to complete the project quickly to resolve the disruption. but i wouldn't expect it to solve the cost problems.
- cperciva 8y ago
  Indeed, a more disruptive construction method is likely to drive costs up, since it gives unions more extortion material to work with.
Joeri 8y ago
You may be overestimating how easy cut and cover is. I live in the city of Antwerp where they decided to dig up the central crossing that connects the main shopping street with the main traffic hub, to redesign it so cars would go underneath and shoppers can walk across the crossing unimpeded. It was planned for 18 months, and now is projected to be closer to 3 years. This is what it looks like when you do such a thing: https://gvacdn.akamaized.net/Assets/Images_Upload/2017/08/18/12224bba-837c-11e7-b40e-532a965b2906_web_scale_0.0592116_0.0592116__.jpg?maxheight=465&maxwidth=700 https://gvacdn.akamaized.net/Assets/Images_Upload/2017/08/18... The stores in the neighborhood are complaining that they'll probably go out of business before the works are done.
- andys627 8y ago
  Give subsidies to the businesses that are affected...
- steve_adams_86 8y ago
  In Vancouver, BC, many business did go out of business when a skytrain line was built through a few communities. It can be devastating.
  - brailsafe 8y ago
    Where are you thinking of? Many skytrain stations are either built away from businesses or now have businesses depending on them.
    - kridsdale1 8y ago
      Canada Line in 2010
- tibbon 8y ago
  I concur; just replacing some sewer pipes on Cedar St in Somerville is taking 2+ years of construction, and plans have been underway since 2013 and still aren't done. It's a residential street without too much odd about it. https://www.somervillema.gov/cedarstreet https://www.somervillema.gov/cedarstreet https://www.somervillema.gov/sites/default/files/cedar-street-overview-presentation.pdf https://www.somervillema.gov/sites/default/files/cedar-stree...
rootbear 8y ago
Parts of the DC Metro were built with cut and cover. We moved to the Maryland suburbs of DC during construction, and it was a nightmare. There were no accurate maps of DC. Maps would show a street as one way East, but Metro construction had changed it to one way West! It was so bad, my father, who loved maps, completely gave up on driving in DC, ever. I can understand the economic argument for cut and cover, but the up front cost in inconvenience is high.
gregmac 8y ago
Part of the problem with that is you uncover all sorts of other stuff under the roads: water mains, sewer, gas, steam, electric, telephone, fiber, etc, and especially in a city like NYC it's not all documented. In some cases, old abandoned pipes are used to run new wires. When you dig, you have to deal with all of this. If you break something, you have to fix it -- and in the case of fiber or multi-hundred-pair copper, you can't necessarily just "splice" it or easily reroute around your construction site.
- pasbesoin 8y ago
  Having watched new gas lines go into my neighborhood last summer, with non-trenching, small-scale directional drilling/boring, I can only imagine at the tangled mess some places may be or be becoming. Here, the gas company (contractor of same, really) put in detection wires so that the location of the new, plastic pipes can be sensed. However, the contractor ran them in the most convenient fashion for them, meaning often on angles from a single starting point, and also rather close to the surface in places. Their are minimum depths they are supposed to maintain at various positions from the main to the meter. I'm not sure they always did so. Some homeowners who landscape or garden more aggressively, may be in for a surprise.
- bobthepanda 8y ago
  You have to do this with subway construction anyways, because New York ended up boring relatively close to the surface. If you're boring twenty or thirty feet (eight to ten meters) down you're still in the danger zone of misplaced utilities. Going deeper is possible but does have drawbacks; access shafts must be deeper and it takes a longer time for people to move between platform and street level. New York's older cut-and-cover sections also do not deal with ventilation systems, because regularly installed grates to the surface essentially use the piston effect to circulate air in and out of the system.
  - paublyrne 8y ago
    Going deeper is possible but does have drawbacks; access shafts must be deeper and it takes a longer time for people to move between platform and street level. Quite a few of London's lines are deep, but they generally have escalators which I don't see a lot of in Manhattan.
sho 8y ago
> NYC should stop building subways with tunnel boring Plenty of other cities worldwide use tunnel boring and get far better cost per mile than in the states. That's not the issue.
- lobf 8y ago
  Which cities? What is the issue?
  - bobthepanda 8y ago
    Paris is old, narrow, and managed to build a subway tunnel through/under the Catacombs for far less. The major issue seems to be that construction unions do not negotiate with the public authorities paying for it, but the construction contractors, and the contractors are more than happy to just pass along the cost and pad their margins. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
    - pzone 8y ago
      It's not just that, it's an entire stack of unaccountable entrenched interests from top to bottom. Unions, contractors, MTA management, all the way up to the squabbling governor and mayor.
  - raesene9 8y ago
    The elizabeth line in London is about to start service. from http://www.crossrail.co.uk/news/crossrail-in-numbers http://www.crossrail.co.uk/news/crossrail-in-numbers it includes. "42km of new rail tunnels"
    - tialaramex 8y ago
      Crossrail (the project which is to be branded "Elizabeth Line" although all the other "lines" are lines within some larger modal network, so arguably this branding makes no sense) was a huge project. From funding to today it's ten years and the basic idea (East-West tunnels through central London) is from the mid-20th century. It's taken so long that projected peak system congestion _with_ the extra line is predicted to be worse than it was without the line when it was funded, even though its capacity is about 10 passengers per second through the core. The lines it's "relieving" are hopelessly over-capacity, so it will fill immediately when it opens AND it's expected to increase total usage because hey, there's this line from outside London right into the core, why not live there and commute... But certainly it's a comparable problem, in the sense that e.g. Crossrail had to "thread the needle" fitting the new tunnels between existing escalators and the Northern Line underground rail tunnel that both remained in use during construction.
rayiner 8y ago
Better idea: ditch subways and bring back elevated lines. Works just fine in Chicago.
- szatkus 8y ago
  When I was in London many parts of the underground was elevated, so I guess it works for them as well.
  - leoedin 8y ago
    Pretty much all the elevated train lines in London were built a long time ago - often before any of the houses which surround them. I don't think any new elevated lines (with the exception of bridges and the occasional longer section to join existing elevated lines) have been built for decades, perhaps significantly more.
  - ZenoArrow 8y ago
    There are elevated trains in the New York subway system as well. For example... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9-nA0DNvqg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9-nA0DNvqg
    - ekianjo 8y ago
      This was featured in the Blues Brothers right?
      - hexane360 8y ago
        Are you kidding? The Blues Brothers was set and filmed in Chicago (although they did shoot a scene in Milwaukee). It showed the "L" rapid-transit system.
        ZenoArrow 8y ago
        > "Are you kidding?" I don't think that was necessary. Yes, The Blues Brothers was centred around Chicago, but it might have been a while since GP saw the film, so their memory may have been hazy. Aside from that, The French Connection featured a famous car chase that included the elevated trains in New York City: http://youtu.be/2TVyJ-51jzc http://youtu.be/2TVyJ-51jzc
cimmanom 8y ago
Cut and cover also doesn't work as well when you have hundreds of mapped and unmapped utility lines and pipes only a few feet below the surface.
elahd 8y ago
In addition to the problems related to working around utilities, subways built with cut and cover create a lot of street level noise when operating. Also, buildings vibrate every time a train runs by. Bored subways are imperceptible from above ground.
- spiralx 8y ago
  > Bored subways are imperceptible from above ground. Not entirely true - the Crossrail in London goes under the Barbican arts centre, and that section of the track has special floating tracks to reduce noise and vibrations: http://www.crossrail.co.uk/construction/railway-systems/ http://www.crossrail.co.uk/construction/railway-systems/
woodruffw 8y ago
In addition to what others have said about the disruptiveness of cut-and-cover, it's worth noting that Manhattan's bedrock is almost entirely schist[1]. I don't know whether that was ever factored into the decision to bore instead of cut, but I'd bet that cutting through schist is a lot harder than the chalk and clay of London and Paris. [1]: https://blog.epa.gov/blog/tag/manhattan-schist/ https://blog.epa.gov/blog/tag/manhattan-schist/
- nerdponx 8y ago
  The original subway tunnels were built with cut and cover, so that isn't an issue.
  - woodruffw 8y ago
    I did some research, and it looks like the IRT was constructed with a mixture of cut-and-cover and boring[1]. The schist apparently isn't too much of an issue when you have dynamite[2] ;) [1]: https://mhdh.library.columbia.edu/exhibits/show/irt/laying-the-groundwork https://mhdh.library.columbia.edu/exhibits/show/irt/laying-t... [2]: https://www.nypl.org/blog/2015/05/04/subway-construction-then-now https://www.nypl.org/blog/2015/05/04/subway-construction-the...
nerdponx 8y ago
This is how the original subway tunnels were built.
oh_sigh 8y ago
As someone who was in the UES a lot, right in the area where 2nd ave construction was happening, I can't imagine cut and cover being much worse than what they did there. Constant explosions, tons of dust, a lot of restaurants had to close because no one would go there.
fouc 8y ago
Toronto is doing cut and cover on Eglinton street over the past few years. It seems to be going quite well, I'm sure it affected some businesses, but most of Eglinton is not quite gentrified yet.
- amitdeshwar 8y ago
  No, Eglinton line is bored tunnels, only the stations are cut and cover. http://www.thecrosstown.ca/stay-informed/fact-sheets-backgrounders-and-infographics http://www.thecrosstown.ca/stay-informed/fact-sheets-backgro...
  - fouc 8y ago
    Ah right, my misunderstanding
dirkdk 8y ago
in Amsterdam they used a drill. Very soft soil, no elevation soever. But underneath a lot of buildings and not always following the streets so Cut and Cover would not have been an option. Most interesting thing: freezing the area (with often wooden foundation poles in it) before drilling through it for stabilization. http://www.urban-hub.com/landmarks/amsterdam-subway-line-now-on-track/ http://www.urban-hub.com/landmarks/amsterdam-subway-line-now...
- com 8y ago
  And the Noord-Zuid Lijn almost bankrupted the city after all the historic houses at the end of Vijzelstraat started collapsing and people had to be evacuated in minutes for multi year hotel stays! The cut-and-cover stuff they did when they built the original metro was much more destructive to places like Waterlooplein, but also much lower risk...
- akvadrako 8y ago
  What's your point? This project is a massive failure. For a good short documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMhjxp_CZng https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMhjxp_CZng
mataniko 8y ago
One of the biggest problems with that approach in NYC is that they simply don't know what's under the streets. There's multiple articles about the issue, but this article from the NY Times does a good enough job illustrating the problem: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/08/18/nyregion/new-york-101-streets-repair-and-maintenance.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/08/18/nyregion/new-...
donarb 8y ago
Cut and cover only works well if there is accessible territory underground. Manhattan is a Swiss cheese of tunnels, pipes and wires that were dug using cut and cover a century ago. If you want a tunnel now, you have to put it further down underneath everything else.
adrianratnapala 8y ago
> cheaper and faster: Faster is reasonably objective. But one reason it might be "cheaper" is that the extra cost is paid as an externality by all the people who just have to lump being inconvenienced.
thirduncle 8y ago
sure you'd get a lot of pissed Upper East Siders, The owners of the forever destroyed street-level businesses, you mean?

by temuze 8y ago

bigdubs 8y ago

2nd avenue already got pretty torn up with access tunnels, it's not like tunnel boring helped a ton. Also a good chunk of NYC subways were built with cut & cover (sections of IRT 2/3 lines as an example).

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

Nav_Panel 8y ago

The alternative solution is to build stations "inline" with the bored tunnels. This can be done quite cheaply, assuming modern ventilation/engineering are used. Note that $2bb of the $4bb for the 2nd Ave line came from station construction...

JumpCrisscross 8y ago
> Note that $2mm of the $4mm for the 2nd Ave line Billion.
- Nav_Panel 8y ago
  Good catch, thanks.
bobthepanda 8y ago
You still need access shafts. New York builds subway stops that have access from the sidewalk; purchasing property for that would be too expensive. And if you build entrances from the sidewalk you also need a way from a sidewalk to access tracks going in both directions. So you end up digging up the entire street anyways.

yongjik 8y ago

From what I've seen in Seoul, "cut and cover" doesn't take a year, but more like five years. And Seoul isn't exactly known for slow construction problems, so I think it probably can't be made much faster. It can still be cost effective, but it can be rather unpleasant during the construction period.

JumpCrisscross 8y ago

> Of course, the City Council would never agree to this plan. It's easier for them not to disturb anyone if they want to be re-elected Oh no, democracy... On a more serious note, boring causes far less disruption to street-level commerce. I haven't seen an analysis which includes the lost tax revenue and economic activity from cut and cover. Moreover, something deeper is going on as even boring in NYC costs more than in other countries.

mschuster91 8y ago
You are certainly right with "deeper". I wouldn't dare digging anywhere near the foundations of a skyscraper, and cut&cover isn't doable in a city with dozens of decades of uncharted pipes, tunnels, cables and whatever you're gonna find once you start digging. And I certainly don't want to know the insurance costs for this kind of project, no matter the method...
chimeracoder 8y ago
> Moreover, something deeper is going on as even boring in NYC costs more than in other countries. Corruption. Rampant, unabashed corruption. That's what's going on. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
Animats 8y ago
Deeper is possible, but expensive. See NYC Water Tunnel #3.[1] Under construction since 1970. Several sections already in use; completion 2020. As deep as 800 feet down, 24 feet in diameter. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Water_Tunnel_No._3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Water_Tunnel_No....

dmix 8y ago

What's the estimate economic cost of a cut & cover, which shuts down a major NYC street for 1yr, vs the projected cost of a tunnelled subway line x2 (because modern government is always 2x the budget, at least)? Some shops on the street could very well go out of business due to lack of local traffic... would they be compensated?

Endama 8y ago
Yeah I would assume that there is no way that they would be compensated for the lost revenue. I would also imagine calculating the lost revenue for those shops, and subsequently trying to get the government to reimburse them for it, would be prohibitively expensive both politically and financially.
bobthepanda 8y ago
Second Avenue Subway construction lasted a decade and the stations still had to be built as cut and cover (you do need access shafts to the stations). In light of that cut and cover sounds downright peachy.

kbar13 8y ago

i think sf is doing cut and cover on stockton for the new muni line and it's been in construction since i moved here 3 years ago

jakelarkin 8y ago
those are just the stations, the tunnel is bore

notatoad 8y ago

Cut and Cover is cheaper, for sure. But tunnel boring is also cheaper everywhere else than it is in NYC. The problem doesn't seem to be the construction method so much as the beaurocracy and politics surrounding the construction. Moving to a more disruptive construction method might help projects get completed faster, just because there will be the political capital to complete the project quickly to resolve the disruption. but i wouldn't expect it to solve the cost problems.

cperciva 8y ago
Indeed, a more disruptive construction method is likely to drive costs up, since it gives unions more extortion material to work with.

Joeri 8y ago

You may be overestimating how easy cut and cover is. I live in the city of Antwerp where they decided to dig up the central crossing that connects the main shopping street with the main traffic hub, to redesign it so cars would go underneath and shoppers can walk across the crossing unimpeded. It was planned for 18 months, and now is projected to be closer to 3 years. This is what it looks like when you do such a thing: https://gvacdn.akamaized.net/Assets/Images_Upload/2017/08/18/12224bba-837c-11e7-b40e-532a965b2906_web_scale_0.0592116_0.0592116__.jpg?maxheight=465&maxwidth=700 https://gvacdn.akamaized.net/Assets/Images_Upload/2017/08/18... The stores in the neighborhood are complaining that they'll probably go out of business before the works are done.

andys627 8y ago
Give subsidies to the businesses that are affected...
steve_adams_86 8y ago
In Vancouver, BC, many business did go out of business when a skytrain line was built through a few communities. It can be devastating.
- brailsafe 8y ago
  Where are you thinking of? Many skytrain stations are either built away from businesses or now have businesses depending on them.
  - kridsdale1 8y ago
    Canada Line in 2010
tibbon 8y ago
I concur; just replacing some sewer pipes on Cedar St in Somerville is taking 2+ years of construction, and plans have been underway since 2013 and still aren't done. It's a residential street without too much odd about it. https://www.somervillema.gov/cedarstreet https://www.somervillema.gov/cedarstreet https://www.somervillema.gov/sites/default/files/cedar-street-overview-presentation.pdf https://www.somervillema.gov/sites/default/files/cedar-stree...

rootbear 8y ago

Parts of the DC Metro were built with cut and cover. We moved to the Maryland suburbs of DC during construction, and it was a nightmare. There were no accurate maps of DC. Maps would show a street as one way East, but Metro construction had changed it to one way West! It was so bad, my father, who loved maps, completely gave up on driving in DC, ever. I can understand the economic argument for cut and cover, but the up front cost in inconvenience is high.

gregmac 8y ago

Part of the problem with that is you uncover all sorts of other stuff under the roads: water mains, sewer, gas, steam, electric, telephone, fiber, etc, and especially in a city like NYC it's not all documented. In some cases, old abandoned pipes are used to run new wires. When you dig, you have to deal with all of this. If you break something, you have to fix it -- and in the case of fiber or multi-hundred-pair copper, you can't necessarily just "splice" it or easily reroute around your construction site.

pasbesoin 8y ago
Having watched new gas lines go into my neighborhood last summer, with non-trenching, small-scale directional drilling/boring, I can only imagine at the tangled mess some places may be or be becoming. Here, the gas company (contractor of same, really) put in detection wires so that the location of the new, plastic pipes can be sensed. However, the contractor ran them in the most convenient fashion for them, meaning often on angles from a single starting point, and also rather close to the surface in places. Their are minimum depths they are supposed to maintain at various positions from the main to the meter. I'm not sure they always did so. Some homeowners who landscape or garden more aggressively, may be in for a surprise.
bobthepanda 8y ago
You have to do this with subway construction anyways, because New York ended up boring relatively close to the surface. If you're boring twenty or thirty feet (eight to ten meters) down you're still in the danger zone of misplaced utilities. Going deeper is possible but does have drawbacks; access shafts must be deeper and it takes a longer time for people to move between platform and street level. New York's older cut-and-cover sections also do not deal with ventilation systems, because regularly installed grates to the surface essentially use the piston effect to circulate air in and out of the system.
- paublyrne 8y ago
  Going deeper is possible but does have drawbacks; access shafts must be deeper and it takes a longer time for people to move between platform and street level. Quite a few of London's lines are deep, but they generally have escalators which I don't see a lot of in Manhattan.

sho 8y ago

> NYC should stop building subways with tunnel boring Plenty of other cities worldwide use tunnel boring and get far better cost per mile than in the states. That's not the issue.

lobf 8y ago
Which cities? What is the issue?
- bobthepanda 8y ago
  Paris is old, narrow, and managed to build a subway tunnel through/under the Catacombs for far less. The major issue seems to be that construction unions do not negotiate with the public authorities paying for it, but the construction contractors, and the contractors are more than happy to just pass along the cost and pad their margins. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
  - pzone 8y ago
    It's not just that, it's an entire stack of unaccountable entrenched interests from top to bottom. Unions, contractors, MTA management, all the way up to the squabbling governor and mayor.
- raesene9 8y ago
  The elizabeth line in London is about to start service. from http://www.crossrail.co.uk/news/crossrail-in-numbers http://www.crossrail.co.uk/news/crossrail-in-numbers it includes. "42km of new rail tunnels"
  - tialaramex 8y ago
    Crossrail (the project which is to be branded "Elizabeth Line" although all the other "lines" are lines within some larger modal network, so arguably this branding makes no sense) was a huge project. From funding to today it's ten years and the basic idea (East-West tunnels through central London) is from the mid-20th century. It's taken so long that projected peak system congestion _with_ the extra line is predicted to be worse than it was without the line when it was funded, even though its capacity is about 10 passengers per second through the core. The lines it's "relieving" are hopelessly over-capacity, so it will fill immediately when it opens AND it's expected to increase total usage because hey, there's this line from outside London right into the core, why not live there and commute... But certainly it's a comparable problem, in the sense that e.g. Crossrail had to "thread the needle" fitting the new tunnels between existing escalators and the Northern Line underground rail tunnel that both remained in use during construction.

rayiner 8y ago

Better idea: ditch subways and bring back elevated lines. Works just fine in Chicago.

szatkus 8y ago
When I was in London many parts of the underground was elevated, so I guess it works for them as well.
- leoedin 8y ago
  Pretty much all the elevated train lines in London were built a long time ago - often before any of the houses which surround them. I don't think any new elevated lines (with the exception of bridges and the occasional longer section to join existing elevated lines) have been built for decades, perhaps significantly more.
- ZenoArrow 8y ago
  There are elevated trains in the New York subway system as well. For example... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9-nA0DNvqg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9-nA0DNvqg
  - ekianjo 8y ago
    This was featured in the Blues Brothers right?
    - hexane360 8y ago
      Are you kidding? The Blues Brothers was set and filmed in Chicago (although they did shoot a scene in Milwaukee). It showed the "L" rapid-transit system.
      - ZenoArrow 8y ago
        > "Are you kidding?" I don't think that was necessary. Yes, The Blues Brothers was centred around Chicago, but it might have been a while since GP saw the film, so their memory may have been hazy. Aside from that, The French Connection featured a famous car chase that included the elevated trains in New York City: http://youtu.be/2TVyJ-51jzc http://youtu.be/2TVyJ-51jzc

cimmanom 8y ago

Cut and cover also doesn't work as well when you have hundreds of mapped and unmapped utility lines and pipes only a few feet below the surface.

elahd 8y ago

In addition to the problems related to working around utilities, subways built with cut and cover create a lot of street level noise when operating. Also, buildings vibrate every time a train runs by. Bored subways are imperceptible from above ground.

spiralx 8y ago
> Bored subways are imperceptible from above ground. Not entirely true - the Crossrail in London goes under the Barbican arts centre, and that section of the track has special floating tracks to reduce noise and vibrations: http://www.crossrail.co.uk/construction/railway-systems/ http://www.crossrail.co.uk/construction/railway-systems/

woodruffw 8y ago

In addition to what others have said about the disruptiveness of cut-and-cover, it's worth noting that Manhattan's bedrock is almost entirely schist[1]. I don't know whether that was ever factored into the decision to bore instead of cut, but I'd bet that cutting through schist is a lot harder than the chalk and clay of London and Paris. [1]: https://blog.epa.gov/blog/tag/manhattan-schist/ https://blog.epa.gov/blog/tag/manhattan-schist/

nerdponx 8y ago
The original subway tunnels were built with cut and cover, so that isn't an issue.
- woodruffw 8y ago
  I did some research, and it looks like the IRT was constructed with a mixture of cut-and-cover and boring[1]. The schist apparently isn't too much of an issue when you have dynamite[2] ;) [1]: https://mhdh.library.columbia.edu/exhibits/show/irt/laying-the-groundwork https://mhdh.library.columbia.edu/exhibits/show/irt/laying-t... [2]: https://www.nypl.org/blog/2015/05/04/subway-construction-then-now https://www.nypl.org/blog/2015/05/04/subway-construction-the...

nerdponx 8y ago

This is how the original subway tunnels were built.

oh_sigh 8y ago

As someone who was in the UES a lot, right in the area where 2nd ave construction was happening, I can't imagine cut and cover being much worse than what they did there. Constant explosions, tons of dust, a lot of restaurants had to close because no one would go there.

fouc 8y ago

Toronto is doing cut and cover on Eglinton street over the past few years. It seems to be going quite well, I'm sure it affected some businesses, but most of Eglinton is not quite gentrified yet.

amitdeshwar 8y ago
No, Eglinton line is bored tunnels, only the stations are cut and cover. http://www.thecrosstown.ca/stay-informed/fact-sheets-backgrounders-and-infographics http://www.thecrosstown.ca/stay-informed/fact-sheets-backgro...
- fouc 8y ago
  Ah right, my misunderstanding

dirkdk 8y ago

in Amsterdam they used a drill. Very soft soil, no elevation soever. But underneath a lot of buildings and not always following the streets so Cut and Cover would not have been an option. Most interesting thing: freezing the area (with often wooden foundation poles in it) before drilling through it for stabilization. http://www.urban-hub.com/landmarks/amsterdam-subway-line-now-on-track/ http://www.urban-hub.com/landmarks/amsterdam-subway-line-now...

com 8y ago
And the Noord-Zuid Lijn almost bankrupted the city after all the historic houses at the end of Vijzelstraat started collapsing and people had to be evacuated in minutes for multi year hotel stays! The cut-and-cover stuff they did when they built the original metro was much more destructive to places like Waterlooplein, but also much lower risk...
akvadrako 8y ago
What's your point? This project is a massive failure. For a good short documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMhjxp_CZng https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMhjxp_CZng

mataniko 8y ago

One of the biggest problems with that approach in NYC is that they simply don't know what's under the streets. There's multiple articles about the issue, but this article from the NY Times does a good enough job illustrating the problem: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/08/18/nyregion/new-york-101-streets-repair-and-maintenance.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/08/18/nyregion/new-...

donarb 8y ago

Cut and cover only works well if there is accessible territory underground. Manhattan is a Swiss cheese of tunnels, pipes and wires that were dug using cut and cover a century ago. If you want a tunnel now, you have to put it further down underneath everything else.

adrianratnapala 8y ago

> cheaper and faster: Faster is reasonably objective. But one reason it might be "cheaper" is that the extra cost is paid as an externality by all the people who just have to lump being inconvenienced.

thirduncle 8y ago

sure you'd get a lot of pissed Upper East Siders, The owners of the forever destroyed street-level businesses, you mean?