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Comment by temuze | Hacker News Reader

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-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...

View on HN

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...

The stores in the neighborhood are complaining that they'll probably go out of business before the works are done.

In Vancouver, BC, many business did go out of business when a skytrain line was built through a few communities. It can be devastating.

Where are you thinking of? Many skytrain stations are either built away from businesses or now have businesses depending on them.

Canada Line in 2010

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/sites/default/files/cedar-stree...

I'm not sure it's possible to dig a hole in Massachusetts without it taking 10x longer and costing 10x more than planned...

Or touch a bridge for that matter

@Joerie the 2nd ave/Q lines has literally taken more than a decade.

If the cost savings on the construction are enough you could probably just pay off the local businesses.

In NYC that'd be tough. Those businesses go through a lot of money to survive. A single restaurant near me on the 2nd ave route, back in 2010, was paying $50k/month just in rent. That was just 1 diner. And on taxpayer's expense?

Rents go down too if there is construction.

Genius

By what, magic?

Most businesses sign long-term leases, often 10 years. Landlords are under no legal obligation to offer rent breaks while construction is underway.

In fact, landlords would probably prefer the businesses go under so they can sign more lucrative deals post-subway construction -- see the current NYC store vacancy problem: http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/change-math-keeping-nyc-s...

You're assuming the area will become undesirable during construction and landlords will be forced to offer cheaper rates to lure tenants, but as we see above more likely they'd prefer to wait. Especially if a subway is about to be built there.

That's how it goes in other countries: if the construction work lasts longer than N days and affects a business, there is a compensation.

> in the city of Antwerp

So, Belgium.

> and now is projected to be closer to 3 years.

Right. Belgium. :P

You're being downvoted for profanity.

National slights aren't ok on HN, so please don't post them here. (Unless I've misinterpreted this comment and it means something I've missed completely, in which case sorry.)

> You may be overestimating how easy cut and cover is.

You're right. In fact, the Market Street passage of BART/Muni in San Francisco was a cut and cover. The closure of Market Street and delays in construction caused a lot of damage. Not the least of which the collapse of businesses[1]

The Theaters went out of business, became porn cinemas and liquor stores. Much of what Civic is today was a result of that era.

Not to say Cut and Cover was the 100% cause - but it was a major, major contributor.

1: https://hoodline.com/2016/07/in-their-words-the-convergent-h...

Vancouver too. The Canada line expansion killed the vast majority of cambie's family owned / small businesses.

In contrast, it didn't kill the downtown businesses on Granville St. While any long term construction is probably going to negatively impact adjacent businesses that doesn't mean cut and cover is going to be the wrong decision to make in every case.

Having recently witnessed the boom in construction around the Canada Line stations, I'm not sure I agree. Many businesses on Cambie are doing very well, including some that hung on through the difficult time when the line was being built. Yes, some went out of business and that is sad, but many survived and fortunes seem to be up as a result.

These are the vultures who got fat on the carcasses of those that didn’t survive.

Simultaneously, BART construction had a similar detrimental effect in downtown Oakland. Arguably, it is only now recovering.

FWIW, the Crown Zellerbach Building, completed in 1959, was "controversial due to the decision for the building to face Bush St. instead of Market St., Market St. being in decline during the time it was built."[1][2] 1959 was years before the Market St subway construction began.

Aside: I'm not a student of architecture, and Modernist (and especially International Style) architecture didn't really click for me until someone explained the design of that building. All building services (restrooms, stairwells, elevators, etc) are located in the giant, black, windowless monolith. To my mind that feature is most descriptive of the style and its motivations, particularly regarding the relationship between form and function and the emphasis on the latter. Its shape and materials are, at least superficially, almost entirely dictated by its pure function. Yet it's the defining characteristic of the form of the building and clearly intentionally imposing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Bush_Plaza [2] https://noehill.com/sf/landmarks/sf183.asp

EDIT: You can't see the monolith from the Wikipedia or Wikimedia photos. Which is actually sort of strange given how imposing it is in real-life. Here's a better photo, https://www.som.com/FILE/16472/crownzellerbachhq_788x900_gab... , from the SOM website (see https://www.som.com/projects/crown_zellerbach_headquarters).

> FWIW, the Crown Zellerbach Building

I've always loved that building.

Very different neighborhood from Civic though -- even though they're only 20 minutes walk apart.

During and post-war that end of town was much less desirable. That changed significantly when the shipping moved. Also that building marks arrival of modern building techniques suitable for an earthquake zone. That triggered a construction boom in FiDi.

Mid-Market on the other hand was in a post-War retail boom. Civic was a major hub of retail and Theaters -- and was impacted a lot more by the BART construction.

All that said, the arc of San Francisco neighborhoods does baffle me at the best of times.

I stopped going to theaters because everyone brings their loud kids. Are you sure there isn't a larger draw for porn cinemas and liquor stores?

> Not to say Cut and Cover was the 100% cause - but it was a major, major contributor.

I don't think it's the cut and cover method per se. Here in Minneapolis when they built a surface light rail line from Downtown Minneapolis to Downtown Saint Paul iirc nearly 200 businesses closed along the LRT and cited the construction as the primary reason. Any construction that impedes travel to businesses for a long time is going to be negative for businesses. Here we subsidized about half the affected businesses along the line during the 4 years of construction but it apparently was not enough.

Give subsidies to the businesses that are affected...

Isn't this temporary? The government should be concerned with the long term benefit to the city overall. The businesses that come in afterwards would likely benefit from subway access.

Nope. The Bart trench appears to have turned Market St into a slum for generations (and this is despite all the municipal money being poured into transbay and other nearby sites).

Well, it IS getting better, slowly. Maybe it will take 75 years to recover. How long-term are you thinking?

Sure it is temporary and the businesses established afterwards would benefit greatly. However you're discouraging the establishment of new businesses in general if your policy includes not caring about the short term effects.

What if that subway needs major maintenance in two years because of a mistake during construction? Why would I open a business on that street if the city has already shown it'll put me out of business to work on it?

> The government should be concerned with the long term benefit to the city overall.

The government should first be concerned by not crushing individuals' rights. That is what Rule of Law is for. Many societies have been utterly destroyed by putting "the general good" as a pretext for policies.

What “rights” do individual property owners have to public streets adjacent to their property?

Contingency.

That's just a standard good governance principle.

Doesn't the government subsidize these businesses while construction goes on? I guess I was under the impression they would be subsidized.

> The stores in the neighborhood are complaining that they'll probably go out of business before the works are done.

Even with the tunnel boring they did on the Upper East Side of NYC for the 2nd Ave Subway, half the avenue was dedicated to construction entrances and other above-ground activities. Ultimately, may stores did go out of business. My point is, tunnel boring is also quite disruptive to what happens at the street level.

The tunnels were built with TBMs. The actual stations were cut and cover.

You can't really build stations any other way. New York is way too expensive to buy property alongside the road as an access shaft, and in any case you need to be able to access both tracks from any given entrance. So either you have an island platform directly under the middle of the street or two side platforms on either side, both of which would need a connecting passageway the width of the street, from street to platform.

The problem is that the alternative is not necessarily better. The Second Avenue Subway stub took about a decade to build, and even though New York opted to use less disruptive surface methods, it ended up taking much longer. 3 years is better than 10.

This is now reminding me of this blog I found on HN yesterday:

http://www.michaelnygard.com/blog/2015/07/the-fear-cycle/

Once you have enough sewer/natural gas/electric/cable/telephone/fiber/water/who knows what else/ lines buried under the streets I can totally understand how nobody would want to touch that with a ten foot pole, just like legacy code :)

You probably also underestimate the amount of infrastructure under the street - not just power, water, sewerage but also network, fibre, etc. It is not remotely a small job to do such a thing.

Not to say that it can't work out (or that some of those services don't have to be moved for tunnels) -- but cut and cover was a lot easier when we had less infrastructure.

These problems are obviously 10x in such a dense city as NYC.

I've read before that in many places, they don't even know exactly what's below the street. These sorts of surprises are the bane of budgets and schedules for massive public works projects.

> You may be overestimating how easy cut and cover is.

Not only that, it's not always feasible depending on the depth of the tunnel. The 2nd ave tunnel is 80 feet deep, and in a city with heavy underground infrastructure already in place.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Cut and cover worked back in Sherlock homes days as there was very little buried plant at that time.

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.

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

> 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.

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...

> 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-...

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....

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.

> 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.

Which cities? What is the issue?

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-...

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.

The elizabeth line in London is about to start service. from http://www.crossrail.co.uk/news/crossrail-in-numbers it includes. "42km of new rail tunnels"

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.

> From funding to today it's ten years

This seems pretty reasonable to me, to be honest. And most of it is done ahead of schedule isn't it?

How quickly do you think it should take from zero to a 21 km tunnel underneath London? It seems insanely fast now I think about it.

Very fast. And not just that. A big part of the cost and complexity of Crossrail isn't the tunnelling but rather the (re)builds of the stations, the remodelling and reconstruction of the above-ground street areas to increase capacity there too, and many other subtleties that people don't tend to think about.

It's the biggest civil engineering project in Europe, or so they say. And a big part of that is because you don't just massively increase transport capacity into the core of a major metro area. That would just overload all the other infrastructure.

> A big part of the cost and complexity of Crossrail isn't the tunnelling but rather the (re)builds of the stations, the remodelling and reconstruction of the above-ground street areas to increase capacity there too, and many other subtleties that people don't tend to think about.

The BBC's documentaries on the Crossrail are great at showing all of the complexity of building the thing and dealing with historic buildings, super-hard brickwork, archaeological discoveries, concert halls and more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SD77jr6M6cs

Crossrail is a well-done project. But just to be clear: there were fully 68 years of feasibility and planning studies prior to getting the funding for construction. Since then, it's been laudably smooth sailing -- but if one considers the pre-construction planning work, there's substantial room for improvement.

One of the most discussed is Madrid, but most every other city outside the U.S. has lower expenses, even those with comparable (or worse) labor and other costs. A simple Google search will provide plenty of articles and studies, such as http://lab.rpa.org/building-big-less/

> What is the issue?

Overreaching unions. Layers of consultants. Squabbling jurisdictions. And as the article mentions, the fact that they build so infrequently that they essentially have to skill up from scratch every time and can never optimise or learn from previous mistakes.

There's a lot of information about this out there but that about covers it I think. Here's a nice quote from a nytimes article:

"Trade unions, which have closely aligned themselves with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and other politicians, have secured deals requiring underground construction work to be staffed by as many as four times more laborers than elsewhere in the world, documents show."

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...

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?

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.

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.

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...

> Note that $2mm of the $4mm for the 2nd Ave line

Billion.

Good catch, thanks.

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.

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/

The original subway tunnels were built with cut and cover, so that isn't an issue.

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-t...

[2]: https://www.nypl.org/blog/2015/05/04/subway-construction-the...

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

When I was in London many parts of the underground was elevated, so I guess it works for them as well.

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.

There are elevated trains in the New York subway system as well. For example...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9-nA0DNvqg

This was featured in the Blues Brothers right?

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.

> "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

Yeah, that's fair. My surprise came because The Blues Brothers is, in my mind, the Chicago movie. It couldn't really be more Chicago if it tried.

As far as I can remember none of the London Underground is elevated.

Because London's transport is all integrated under control of the local government (an option which is prohibited in most UK cities to facilitate "competition" ie price-gouging by foreign owned corporations) you might not have realised that you weren't using the Underground but one of the other modes, almost all of which are covered by the same ticketing system (the "Dangleway" isn't and neither are the boats).

If you travelled on ordinary seeming trains above ground, those weren't the Underground but instead ordinary "heavy rail" trains on National Rail infrastructure within London. Many of those lines are indeed far above the ground in parts of central London, but those are just called viaducts and aren't usually considered an "elevated railway" per se.

If you travelled on small trains in East London that didn't have a driver (you can sit at the front like a roller coaster), that's the Docklands Light Railway, almost all of which is elevated, it was built towards the end of last century during regeneration of the "Docklands" area.

If the trains seemed to be sharing a road with cars at street level, in South London, that's the Tramlink.

If the trains were smaller and red, that's a bus.

There are parts of the Underground that are, in fact, above ground and elevated (especially farther out like Ealing and Stratford). Then there’s also the Overground, which I think counts as light rail, but is generally on ground level.

The Overground is just a (branded) part of the normal National Rail heavy rail network that serves London. Same track, same stations, same rolling stock, just operated by TFL (Transport for London) like the rest of London's public transport.

TFL control two heavy rail networks - the Overground and TfL Rail - although the latter will become part of the Elizabeth Line when it opens.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TfL_Rail

We have some parts of the subway in Paris which are elevated, but the street under the rail can't be used for trafic, it's usually parking space or empty. So now the city is building tram or bus lanes above ground.

You're probably thinking of the Dockland's Light Railway.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docklands_Light_Railway

It's not part of the Underground, but it's also managed by Transport for London as part of its integrated network of public transport.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_for_London

As long as they are quieter than the elevated BART lines.

They're only too loud if you're under them. Maybe if you live right next to it with a real old window facing it as well.

I could hear the elevated Bart line at Daly City station two miles away in Colma, where all the graveyards are.

I'd be interested to know where you find this to be true. I have noticed that BART trains through Rockridge don't make much noise. But the track noise is so bad through Fruitvale, you can hear the trains over a mile away.

Looks like it wasn't that clear, but I was referring the elevated lines in Chicago (El) not BART.

Monorail! Monorail! Monorail!

Yeah! Specifically I'd like to see more Schwebebahn installations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuppertal_Suspension_Railway

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.

> 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/

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-...

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.

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.

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.

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.

No, Eglinton line is bored tunnels, only the stations are cut and cover. http://www.thecrosstown.ca/stay-informed/fact-sheets-backgro...

Ah right, my misunderstanding

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).

> 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.

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...

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...

What's your point? This project is a massive failure.

For a good short documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMhjxp_CZng

This is how the original subway tunnels were built.

sure you'd get a lot of pissed Upper East Siders,

The owners of the forever destroyed street-level businesses, you mean?

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

those are just the stations, the tunnel is bore

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