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by alksjdalkj 1579 days ago
In the NYC area off the top of my head there's been the Tappan Zee bridge, the East Side Access project bringing the Long Island Rail Road into Grand Central Terminal, and 2nd Ave Subway Phase 2. Penn Station Access is being discussed, as is the Triboro RX line.

ETA: If you're curious NYC has a dashboard of capital projects >$25 million here: https://www1.nyc.gov/site/capitalprojects/dashboard/dashboar.... I think the complaint that we don't build anything in this country anymore is sometimes overstated.
1 comments
bobthepanda 1579 days ago
ESA and 2nd Ave Subway Phase 2 are kind of the poster children of what's wrong with American infrastructure projects.

ESA was started in 2006 and planned to be finished in 2009 at the cost of $4.3B. It is now projected to be finished in 2023, at a cost of $12B.

Phase 2 of SAS costs $6B despite the fact that most of the tunnel actually already exists, and won't open until possibly 2029.

It's not even really about saving money to save money, but the high costs of these projects suck money away from other projects and needs. It's basically unfathomable at these prices for NYC to do something like Paris and build out 200 km (124 mi) of metro in the next decade.

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ant6n 1579 days ago
The East Side Access is also a project that would never be built in Europe. What they should've done is built a through-tunnel through Manhattan connecting Long Island Railroad and New Jersey Transit, with two or three smaller stations across midtown.

Basically, instead of ESA and (ultimately cancelled) Gateway projects, calling for new tunnels connecting to giant carvern terminuses in the city, u connect these projects into one long tunnel without terminuses.

A terminus requires a lot of platforms and tracks because trains need to get completely emptied and turned around. If you stop at multiple stops and terminate at the other end of the city, you can do that a that a place where's plenty of space (or multiple different points). You also spread the passenger loads across multiple stations, meaning less passenger flow per station, less dwell time for trains (=higher frequency), and people will be closer to where they need to go (i.e. you can connect to all subway lines in Manhattan).

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