How Engineers Are Building a New Railroad Under New York City
wired.com
wired.com
Express trains.
All across the US, municipalities keep building annoying light-rail systems and basic commuter lines. They have one class of train: stop everywhere and waste your time.
What NYC has that I love is express trains on almost every line. Want to go from Penn Station straight to JFK airport? Easy. Want to go from uptown right down to Wall St.? There's a train for that.
Most cities - and nations - could learn a lot from NYC being able to handle such a diverse set of schedules.
Now if they could only do something about the rats...
By contrast, modern-day government civil works projects serve political purposes first and foremost, with quality of service coming in somewhere lower on the list of considerations. Everybody's going to vote for a politician who brings transit to their neighborhood or business; nobody's going to flip that vote because the trains are slow.
So not quite the invisible hand. Today we'd call it a public private partnership, if we were feeling charitable, or maybe government-sponsored duopoly if we weren't. The closest modern analogy is probably the U.S. defense sector. The BRT and IRT were "competing" in the same way that Lockheed and Boeing "compete." The government figures out what to build, while private companies figure out how to build it, and the government foots the bill. I personally think it's an incredibly effective structure, but then again I think there is a place for oligopolies that are quasi-extensions of the government.
The "stop everywhere and waste your time" is called S-Bahn in Germany. The Express options mostly connect larger quarters or cities and range from the already quite fast (meaning: get you from one to the other in a few minutes) R and RE trains to the faster and city-connecting-only IC and EC up to the big-cities-connecting ICE. For the "very regional", you have your standard subways (U-Bahn) and Trams (Straßenbahn).
I like our trains.
What I don't like in the US is the "Hey, we built light rail!" and then not providing a layer of systems that actually provide the right types of speed/stop mix.
Germany has that, through several different networks, in the same region/metro area.
And then there's the rush hour based skip-stop service on the J/Z. The elevated J/M/Z line in Brooklyn has three tracks part of the route. In the morning, an express train uses it to go into Manhattan. In the evening, an express train uses it to go to Brooklyn. Great flexibility for a line that's used almost primarily for getting from the outer borough in to Manhattan.
As for the rats .... if only they'd enclose the platforms (so edible debris didn't end up swamping the tracks), it'd go a long, long way. And also cut down on passengers being struck by trains after falling/being pushed on to the tracks.
That said, with the newer subway cars coming online locked into specific trains, they could start to do this.
Also the line's route is questionably useful to the locals. Somewhere someone is filling his pockets with an evil grin.
Unfortunately, the line's route is definitely useful to the locals.
It's called the 2nd avenue line :/
Want to know why? It is because it is missing a hundred year ( or more ) old feature: double rails. Thus there is no.express.line, it is slow, and every time something breaks, even if it is really small and.simple, it fucks up.the whole city because all.other trains must wait the track to clear.
And why it does.not have double rails but have all.the bells and whistles? Because the bells impress investors and stakeholder, and are cheaper than double rails.
The trash strewn tracks are worth a look, while the total lack of electronic signage as to when the next train is like stepping back in time 40 years.
NYC has this in most stations now.
Yes, but those countries also believe in public works.
But it's beside the point. It's not like you are a nation of "spartans" that spend all they money in "defence" and live in relative poorness.
More like a nation of couch potatoes, which has relegated their defence to paid specialists (like in feudal times), and which spends more on pet food, Netflix and similar BS than they do in public works and infrastructure. Especially in areas where poor and/or black are living.
20 minutes saved in a round-trip, times 250 days a year, times 160,000 people is 800,000,000 man-minutes, or ~13,000,000 man-hours a year. With an average NYC income of $20/hour, and time being worth a third of hourly income... that's $87,000,000 of life saved, per year. At 8.4 billion dollars for the construction, that does look bleak.
If you bump up the commuter's average wage to ~$50/hour, though, we'd be looking at ~220,000,000 of life saved, per year.
However, that's the lower bound on the public benefit of the project. Some of the costs will be paid through user fees. Others through economic development among the areas served by the line. As far as ditch-digging projects go, this one's probably on par for public ROI.
If we did nothing but count coppers, America would never have built the Interstates.
You also can put in gains that those not taking the subway will get from this. 160,000 fewer people on buses and in cars means faster traffic above ground.
Finally, they will simply pay for it from taxation. I know it sounds stupid to some, but IMO, that is the right thing to do. It is just extra costs that have to be made to make new high rise buildings commercially viable.
A more realistic estimate would be 80% or so (you lose 10 hours (8 hours at work + 2 hours travel) of your live in exchange for the money you get)
If you only factor in salary.
How about the improvement in their quality of life?
It's not like everything has to be justified by it's effects on businesses.
People work as many hours as workforce pressure, norms and laws have them too. If they could get the same salary working for 5 hours a day, they would, and if they could get by, pay for food and rent and stuff for less salary and/or without working they would to. (I mean that for the huge masses, whose jobs don't "define" them -- not for the (far fewer) geek coders, artists, workaholics, etc.).
So I don't think you can put a value on "free time". This only tells you how much people are payed for the hours they are forced to put in to work. It doesn't automatically mean that we can assume their free hours are worth as much.
Not to mention: is an hour of free time for a top lawyer (which makes $1000 per hour) worth more than an hour of free time for a McDonald's employee? Does that also mean their lives are not worth the same?
It would also reduce crowding on the subway lines that run between Penn Station and the East Side, like the E train.
Another way to look at it: NYC issues municipal bonds at 3-5%. Let's say 4.5%. People pay an NYC income tax of 4%, precisely for services like this. Assuming 75k average income for those riders, NYC is collecting about $500m in city income taxes per year from those riders. Interest on $8 billion of bonds is $360m per year. Over 50 years, that income tax revenue is going to increase exponentially, while those interest payments will only increase as interest rates vary (will probably stay within a factor of 2).
But this project is specifically for the LIRR.