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The cost per mile of infrastructure development in the US is wholly out of whack compared to other developed countries even when adjusted for purchasing power parity coupled with mass transit funding given short shrift. It's an incredible combination. Fulton Street really was an incredibly expensive mess. It would have been worth it had part of the project been connecting the 6 train terminus to through-run to the WTC PATH train as IRT and PATH are mostly compatible. There was a giant hole in the ground after all--but nope, Port Authority flatly rejected even considering the option.
Various advocacy groups and planners have been talking about joining up the various agencies for decades and it's simply not going to happen. Too many fiefdoms would get broken up for it to be politically feasible. NYCT would have to absorb PATH wholesale to make a 6 to Newark work and between now coming under FRA jurisdiction (PATH is a "railroad"), PATH's debt burdens/costs-to-operate and who knows what kind of deferred maintenance backlog the MTA would never even consider the idea.
Any major infrastructure project in NY has to go through a ton of environmental reviews, lawsuits, community workshops in which various causes/lobbies basically extract concessions ($$$) in order to not cause a fuss and shut things down. Even the slightest inconvenience/impact to anyone results in massive legal fights, media circuses, political soapboxing, etc. Then since the US doesn't build public infrastructure at the same clip as Europe or Asia we don't have the same network of contractors/heavy builders with the institutional knowledge to undertake the work, just the same 3 or 4 players a couple of whom might not even have room on their plate to even take on an MTA/Port Authority job, since they do private work too.
I've always said things like East Side Access, SAS, New Hudson Tunnels, et al should be outsourced to some Japanese/French/German outfit to design/build. We could use the business as a carrot in trade negotiations even....
It's the poor planning and management, ask why our military with over 300+ F-35 fighter jets, who are we looking to beat with those jets? Russians? Military folks were saying that our F18A Super Hornets are a fraction of the costs are more than enough but you got military hawks that wants to spend billions of taxpayer money just because they can.
Right, that's definitely part of it. Major projects in recent years, though it would have added to expenses, made incredibly short-sighted moves.
I already mentioned the PATH-WTC/6 train connection which were terminals incredibly close to each other and this was the one chance where traffic had grown down and there was literally massive holes in the ground as staging areas.
Another one is breaking up the Second Avenue Subway line into four phases instead of a maximum of two--which means that each time you need to assemble the permitting, the design, the utility relocation team, the tunnel boring machine shipment, the tunnel boring machine assembly and running, and then disassembling, the goddamn everything again and again and again when it should very well have been at least a combined first and second phase (and then a combined third and fourth phase if you weren't going to do it all at once).
Another one is the incredible stupidity of making another lower level terminal for Long Island Railroad at Grand Central which requires a massive interlocking going into massive twin bore terminal stations deep underground that are two levels and two platforms each and cost an exorbitant amount when for probably a similar or perhaps lower price they could have just kept boring as two tracks the way it already comes in from Queens and make smaller stations going to downtown Manhattan and then to Atlantic Avenue as through-running. That would have likely have been cheaper and at the same time have been far more useful to riders and operationally a lot more efficient for LIRR.
Now we're embarking on reworking Penn Station as well as trying to finance a new set of necessary twin tunnels across the Hudson, but they're looking again to build massive interlockings and berths for the new set of tunnels at Penn Station when NJT Trains actually currently has to send trains past Penn Station into Queens (without any passengers) because it's the only way to operationally turn around the trains during peak hours since turnarounds at terminal berths are incredibly inefficient--this instead of just combining NJT Train and LIRR services through-running Penn Station. This one at least isn't a done deal, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's the same balkanized fiefdoms fighting each other and no one on top with any vision and will to change this.
Last edited by OyCrumbler; 08-06-2020 at 09:11 PM..
Various advocacy groups and planners have been talking about joining up the various agencies for decades and it's simply not going to happen. Too many fiefdoms would get broken up for it to be politically feasible. NYCT would have to absorb PATH wholesale to make a 6 to Newark work and between now coming under FRA jurisdiction (PATH is a "railroad"), PATH's debt burdens/costs-to-operate and who knows what kind of deferred maintenance backlog the MTA would never even consider the idea.
Any major infrastructure project in NY has to go through a ton of environmental reviews, lawsuits, community workshops in which various causes/lobbies basically extract concessions ($$$) in order to not cause a fuss and shut things down. Even the slightest inconvenience/impact to anyone results in massive legal fights, media circuses, political soapboxing, etc. Then since the US doesn't build public infrastructure at the same clip as Europe or Asia we don't have the same network of contractors/heavy builders with the institutional knowledge to undertake the work, just the same 3 or 4 players a couple of whom might not even have room on their plate to even take on an MTA/Port Authority job, since they do private work too.
I've always said things like East Side Access, SAS, New Hudson Tunnels, et al should be outsourced to some Japanese/French/German outfit to design/build. We could use the business as a carrot in trade negotiations even....
I don't think it should be accepted that it's simply not going to happen.
Environmental reviews and community workshops are fine and all--they exist in many developed countries. There's a lot of things that are dysfunctional in the mix. There's even crazy little things like lack of auditing of contractors as well as there being no national healthcare system so the costs of such are essentially getting baked into the tab the MTA has to pay directly. There's a lot of things to work through and it can be done even if it may require far larger political reforms. Outsourcing design/build to Japanese/French/German firms can do some good things, but they'd still be mired in a lot of the same muck.
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