The NYC's MTA 20 year needs assessment reminds us they can't build
pedestrianobservations.com
pedestrianobservations.com
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.
Phase I ended up costing around $4.4B.
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/
> 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.
https://www.ocregister.com/2015/11/04/tunnel-to-grand-centra...
How?
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.
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.
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.
But we're installing elevators everywhere and making all stations accessible, and that, plus the ridiculous running of trains overnight, are priorities.
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.
I took the opportunity to rant broadly, but I want to ask how that impacted the 2nd Ave Subway project?
Hochul just got a bunch of funding through:
> 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.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/06/nyregion/mta-nyc-subway-s...
And the mayor doesn't really have any power - although I haven't seen anything to suggest that Adams is anti-transit.
Cuomo did fuck up a good thing with Andy Byford. But fuck that guy
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.
Meaning that do you know that byford did not recognize what "anyone needs reminding" knew that nyc "can't build" is the problem?
He wasn’t there long enough to effect the solution to decades of poor investment and managing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Of course we won't get that until the 2050s at best...
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.
(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.)
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.
Real estate crashing would save NYC from itself.
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.
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.
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.
And cops
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?
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.
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.
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-numbersParis. 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...
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.
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.
Socialism IS the problem.
Edit: FYI socialism doesn’t mean the government controls or owns anything. It means that the workers own the means of production.
It concludes:
> 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.
> Hoover Dam
The irony
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.
Edit: prolly this too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37813487 does not apply to Paris
Look at how much the Rio subway has expanded recently despite being about the same size as NY
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.
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.