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The NYC's MTA 20 year needs assessment reminds us they can't build
- FlatGov 3y agoI'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?
- School-Cotton 3y agoI 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.
- jgalt212 3y agoIndeed, parts of East Side Access cost $1 million per foot. https://www.ocregister.com/2015/11/04/tunnel-to-grand-central-rolling-along-at-1million-per-foot/ https://www.ocregister.com/2015/11/04/tunnel-to-grand-centra...
- bradleyjg 3y ago… and it’s made commutes worse for almost everyone. Imagine spending that much money and that many years and ending up with a net negative.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> it’s made commutes worse for almost everyone How?
- bradleyjg 3y agoThey 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.
- jseliger 3y agoVoters don't seem to vote in ways that are consistent with improving subway building functionality.
- NovemberWhiskey 3y agoWhich way would that be?
- lotsofpulp 3y agoOne 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.
- Spooky23 3y agoThat’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.
- mancerayder 3y agoHow 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.
- MarcusDJ 3y ago[dead]
- throw7 3y agoIs that why byford failed? Meaning that do you know that byford did not recognize what "anyone needs reminding" knew that nyc "can't build" is the problem?
- bobthepanda 3y agoByford recognized it, and then his boss proceeded to undermine him so he left. He wasn’t there long enough to effect the solution to decades of poor investment and managing.
- squirrel6 3y agoWe just need another Robert Moses /s
- booleandilemma 3y agoWe need another Giuliani (90s Giuliani, not what he's become).
- officialchicken 3y agoOk, 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.
- booleandilemma 3y agoI 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.
- Spooky23 3y agoOh no, it will get far worse. 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.
- ghaff 3y ago>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.
- decafninja 3y agoSomeone will inevitably reply that the suburbs are not sustainable and it’s the cities that are propping them up.
- ghaff 3y agoMany/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.
- kouru225 3y agoThis is an objectively true statement. Suburbs do not pay for their own maintenance and cities have to carry their economic weight: https://youtu.be/7Nw6qyyrTeI?si=zYfcwVLx0DYoexnM https://youtu.be/7Nw6qyyrTeI?si=zYfcwVLx0DYoexnM
- Retric 3y agoDepends greatly on the suburb, many are subsidized but it’s a long way from all.
- downrightmike 3y agoYall are going to need some elevated trains as building underground is just insane.
- afavour 3y agoIronically 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.
- kouru225 3y agoWe could build something quieter but I don’t think it would be compatible with the rest of the subway system
- downrightmike 3y agoYeah, this is what I was referencing
- Wowfunhappy 3y agoNYC has lots of elevated trains. And other cities around the world are able to build tunnels more cheaply than NYC, there's nothing insane about it.
- redwood 3y agoCan we at least have mobile data please
- AndrewKemendo 3y agoThis 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.
- bushbaba 3y agoWe care about the environment, human life, and workers rights. That comes at substantially greater cost to build.
- steveBK123 3y agoMany 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.
- sitkack 3y agoBut 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.
- wunderland 3y agoThe 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.
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- jmyeet 3y agoI'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.
- bobthepanda 3y agoThey did not cost $19B. That projection was the 2007 cost for building it from Harlem to the tip of Downtown. Phase I ended up costing around $4.4B.
- singhrac 3y agoThe linked blog is written by a transit expert who writes extensively on costs, including this report: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2022/10/24/the-transit-costs-project-conclusion-is-out/ 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.
- xnx 3y ago"How excessive staffing, little competition, generous contracts and archaic rules dramatically inflate capital costs for transit in New York." 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-...
- cyberax 3y agoThat'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.
- afavour 3y agoNope. 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.
- marmaduke 3y agoIn 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. Edit: prolly this too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37813487 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37813487 does not apply to Paris
- _3u10 3y agoNah it’s North American thing lots of stuff gets built in South America reasonably efficiently, and certainly much more quickly. Look at how much the Rio subway has expanded recently despite being about the same size as NY
- crazygringo 3y agoWhat are you talking about? The Rio subway has barely expanded at all -- and where it has it has been neither quick nor efficient.
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- api 3y ago> 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.
- SoftTalker 3y agoIt'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?
- wunderland 3y agoIt’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.
- MollyRealized 3y agoI'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".
- NOT_RICK 3y agoThe DC metro is great
- simonsarris 3y ago> 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. eg: https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/mta-overtime-pay/ https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/mta-overtime-pay/ > 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.
- mensetmanusman 3y agoWon’t work. Demographics are too risk averse, bureaucracy has strangled the system.
- rayiner 3y agoHigh 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.
- iuafhiuah 3y ago> 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). https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/mar/13/elizabeth-line-crossrail-opening-london https://web.archive.org/web/20180730181725/http://www.crossrail.co.uk/news/crossrail-in-numbers
- mancerayder 3y agoThe 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-express/ https://www.railway-technology.com/projects/grand-paris-expr...
- tsudounym 3y agoThe 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.