The NYT article inadvertently addresses the problem: dozens of workers were at the site.
Dozens.
Not hundreds or thousands. Dozens. With all that capital equipment laying around and all the opportunity costs being ignored.
There's a road project near my home that's been going on for more than 90 days now. Many days nobody is on the site at all, even though all the cranes and other equipment are left on site at all times. When the site is being worked it's by at most half a dozen people, five of whom are watching the sixth guy work.
You'd think that lowest-bid contracting would have fixed this but for some reason it hasn't.
It reminds me of a story my father told me recently about a mining company and a plastic dinghy.
They had a job to complete that required access to a caustic pond, so they organised a small plastic dinghy to get out and take their measurements.
Even though it was just a dinghy, they still required a certified skipper on board, plus a saftey officer and then the technicians to take the measurement.
They had estimated an 8 day job, not realising that the pond had shrunk by half since the original satellite imagery.
So the technicians fly out and get prepared, but the mining company hadn't organised half the things they needed to. So for the next 8 days the technicians are waiting for saftey and job approvals and twiddling their thumbs.
Meanwhile the skipper and saftey officer are back at the port awaiting the technicians go ahead.
Now the dinghy, it was sitting on the grass at the boatyard. These resources are all charged per day, and while they're booked for the job they are on standby.
At this point, the dinghy on the grass and it's hardy crew had cost the mining company $16000 just for standby costs.
Eventually the job goes ahead, it only takes 4 days because the pond had shrunk so much, and the dinghy is only used for 2 days.
Total cost for the little plastic dinghy and crew was $25000. The mining company was fine with this.
I work as a consultant/developer in the B2B software space. Part of my job involves documenting clients' existing processes and converting them to requirements.
The type of inefficiencies you describe are EXTREMELY common. The fact of the matter is that the vast majority of American companies are simply stuck in the 70s/80s (sometimes the 60s) when it comes to how things are done. Most of their business processes are manual and paper-based and communication is archaic, usually relying on many single points of failure, who happen to be human operators. As a result, stuff falls through the cracks all the damn time.
I've been thinking about how companies can manage to stay in business even when they're run so poorly. I've come to the conclusion that it's because many of them, especially the larger ones, face no real competition. All the other companies in their space are run similarly. As long as a decent amount of revenue keeps coming in, the leaders (many of whom are approaching comfortable retirement) simply don't care.
I've also realized that, at the aggregate level, the primary reason the American economy is so ahead of other economies today is due to the head-start it enjoyed following World War 2, when most of the developed world had been devastated while America was virtually untouched. If there had been any sort of real competition, things would be very different today - and we're starting to see that as other economies are starting to catch up.
> I've come to the conclusion that it's because many of them, especially the larger ones, face no real competition. All the other companies in their space are run similarly.
I'd argue that a better way to describe this is that there is competition and possibly even a lot of competition, but all competitors have to deal with the fact that their employees are not perfect, management is not easy, teamwork is inherently hard and that over time every company accumulates its own set of weird workarounds and inefficient procedures, so this in itself does not lead to a competitive disadvantage.
Your work sounds interesting. Do you capture what really happens in the manual system (trust based work-arounds(1) and all) or do you work from what the procedures say should happen? Just wondering.
(1)E.g. An reference number is needed to set up X on a system. To get a reference number you need to get Y to sign off. Y is notoriously slow, and I have been doing this for years. Z lets me have a reference number on trust knowing that Y will sign off because my paperwork will be in order. Someone new would not get that trust until a few successful cycles. C.F. Lave and Wenger, communities of practice.
We capture what really happens in the manual system, as well as what should happen. Sometimes the latter is pretty vague, or (believe it or not) simply unknown, in which case we learn the very final goal (e.g. "all invoices should be approved in under 24 hours") and work backwards to discover bottlenecks. This can take many weeks, sometimes months, because it requires interviewing subject matter experts.
Implementing the software comes at the very end, ideally when the underlying process itself has been re-engineered. We found that you can't simply take an existing manual process and implement it in software, because if you do then you also capture many of the inefficiencies and bottlenecks.
One wonders how you identify the 'subject matter experts', and the extent to which you rely on their answers to questions versus direct observation of what they do.
My experience (anecdotal, informal) is that there can be quite a difference between a verbal description and what actually happens, and the difference has to do with situational knowledge (as in "oh yes, I forgot about Fred. With Fred we do ZZ instead")
Just under 40 years ago, I worked along with half a dozen other people (all on overtime) until 8pm on Christmas Eve so that a ship could leave Liverpool on the last tide before Xmas deadline, thus saving significant charter costs. We got free takeways and naughty beer afterwards.
> Total cost for the little plastic dinghy and crew was $25000. The mining company was fine with this.
Because if they piled a couple of guys into the dinghy, and it happened to capsize, they'd end up paying out seven figures at minimum to the dead technicians' families.
This is a great example. However mining is typically a private endeavor where the mining company and thus the customers of its production (and shareholders) bear the cost (typically.) What gets me is when it involves taxpayer money.
I would be distinctly liberal with spending tax money on projects if the funds were more efficiently spent. However it irritates me to no end when I see vast inefficiencies with our tax money while we perceive ourselves as working hard every day to earn money. When someone talks about raising taxes, I scoff because I feel like if public projects weren't so wasteful, our money would have a higher return on investment -- that has led to me be very conservative in terms of public expenditures because I feel that the government is not a good steward of our hard-earned tax dollars. For example, the famous 'rubber rooms' for NYC teachers -- teachers and education always ask for more money but they find a way to waste it in salaries for people who quite literally do nothing all day due to the influence of union special interests and labor board rulings that favor the special interest over the greater public. Henry Hazlit (and Bastiat before him,) explained these issues very well.
I am not opposed to taxes or public spending, but when I see our money being pissed away with blantant and obvious inefficiencies, I get very stingy with my political will.
Construction contractors (and boards of education members,) would never spend their personal money this way, yet they happily spend public money like it's from an unlimited fountain.
> This is a great example. However mining is typically a private endeavor where the mining company and thus the customers of its production (and shareholders) bear the cost (typically.) What gets me is when it involves taxpayer money.
Why would we expect public organizations to be any more efficient than private organizations? All large organizations have this kind of inefficiency, just like in the mining example. It's unreasonable to demand perfection just because it's the government doing it.
> For example, the famous 'rubber rooms' for NYC teachers -- teachers and education always ask for more money but they find a way to waste it in salaries for people who quite literally do nothing all day due to the influence of union special interests and labor board rulings that favor the special interest over the greater public.
Weren't the "rubber rooms" due to the school administration not paying their agreed portion of arbitration fees? I can't imagine anyone in those rooms wanted to be there (they sound incredibly depressing), but if you have a false complaint against you what else can you do? It'd be very hard to get another teaching job with that complaint on your record, and you don't want to let whoever filed it win by giving in; all you can do is wait to make your case to the arbitrator.
>Why would we expect public organizations to be any more efficient than private organizations?
We wouldn't expect that, of course, but there are a lot of people out there who do assume as an axiom that any publicly provided resource is going to be handled much more efficiently than the private sector could. It's worth emphasizing that's not usually the case.
equipment is leased, and the leasing companies finance it and make earnings on the margin of rent and payments. a $100k truck or $250k crane costs shockingly little on a monthly basis. construction finance companies are getting into the technology finance industry, by the way -- they have reached out to me many times - to them there is no difference between a tractor rig and a Xeon/GPU/SSD/40G compute rig. in fact you could argue that tech is more resilient than construction, from a financial point of view. anyway, i digress...
as per usual, the people are what is expense, even 'cheap' construction workers. likely those people are being sent around to multiple jobs because the crew+foreman are experienced and reliable and unlikely to cause general fuckups or financial liabilities.
I might be jaded, but that doesn't sound like such an awful example at all. There is some excessive overhead, but that's par for the course. And they did do the job :)
Some of the other examples mentioned (with costly machinery just sitting there) probably cost millions per day.
(Back in the day, contractors were hiring black workers and bypassing the more expensive white-only unions. Davis Bacon was passed to fix the "problem" of free markets overcoming racism.)
> Thus it has, according to a study from the conservative Heartland Institute, calculated prevailing wages at 22 percent above BLS figures, forcing higher prices.
The pay isn't shit. Have a look at a NYC union contract. Skilled construction workers make a very good amount of money. The problem is that unions create a monopoly of labor thus not allowing the free market to determine wages (I am speaking specifically to union projects in places such as NYC.)
If you want a short outage you have to ask for it.
1: Publish a request for bids, stipulate that price and outage duration be specified. 2: Wait. 3: Take the bids that are within 30% of the lowest bid, 4: Sort by outage duration. 5: Sign the contract.
Or another variation. Just don't expect bidders to optimise for something that isn't mentioned in the spec.
The biggest problem is usually that they have to work at night, due to requirements to keep roads available during normal usage hours. That really slows things down and raises costs.
I wish. That would be the sane way to do it. The way it seems to be done around here is they don't start until 10AM because of rush hour, then they come in, uncover the trenches, work for an hour, cover the trenches back up, and kick off at 3PM because of rush hour again. There seems to be only 2 hours of real work done in the day.
If the cities were willing to just close the road these projects would be done in a day or two.
That may be true, but the NYC Second Avenue subway is a bad example for comparison. The main reason that it took so long to complete was a number of extreme challenges in construction. Subway construction is rarely simple or cheap, but using one of the most complex and expensive subway lines as a point of reference might not be realistic.
By way of comparison: Shanghai's subway was started in the 1980s and according to [1] is now "the world's largest rapid transit system by route length and second largest by number of stations [...] It also ranks second in the world by annual ridership."
Not really a fair comparison. How much does labor cost in Shanghai vs NYC? How much existing 100+ year old underground infrastructure does Shanghai have?
New subway lines in NYC can't use the latest technology. They're being integrated into an existing 112-year-old subway system with the highest station count and track mileage in the world. I'd make a software development analogy, but it would be woefully inadequate at comparing the scope of the situation.
Well unless your idea of expansion is digging a new hole that's not connected to any other hole, it matters. Also NYCs system being so old, the control mechanisms are horrendously difficult to modify. The entire subway system is basically a mechanical computer so they can't just add another track and then type a few lines of code into a computer to control the new line.
Why are those control systems so old? Well, a 24/7 system is difficult to do maintenance on!
24/7 does raise the bar a bit, but if you have three tunnels not two per line, the problem isn't all that bad. NY has three tunnels as far as I'm aware. In contrast, London's underground has only two which makes it rather difficult to do maintenance at the same time as operate a line.
Digging new tunnels should mostly be independent of operations in existing tunnels.
Only in some areas, mostly in Manhattan. The outer boroughs, especially in areas where the tracks are elevated, usually only have two.
When major track work has to be done the MTA has a habit of just shutting down a line temporarily. For the past couple of years they've been shutting down the 7 train (which goes from 34th street through Times Square in Manhattan to Flushing in Queens) multiple weekends during the summer, and it has had an impact on businesses.
Sure but there are times when the lines aren't operating, which is a more crucial point than whether there are three tracks (which is not the case across all of NYC).
When you expand a hole, the only connection is at the end of the hole. Also, line expansions usually get connected to existing tail tracks. The 2nd Ave has a connection to an existing line that's not at the end, but that single connection isn't the reason for the cost or the slowness of construction.
This argument is pure BS that tries to explain New York's incompetence when it comes to planning and building infrastrucure by citing its exceptionalism.
No one claimed it's "the reason," and anyone who offers "a reason" for it is lying to you. There are countless interconnected reasons for it, one of which is probably incompetence, sure. One of which is also, in fact, its exceptionalism in being an enormous, ancient, nonstop transit system.
You yourself made that claim two hours ago: "Most of the NYC transit system is also operating 24/7, which makes expansion and maintenance pretty difficult."
Eh, if you read that as me saying that's the sole reason, despite that comment itself being an addendum to another person's comment re: the complexity of this tunnel in particular, then that's just garden variety misunderstanding. Sorry if you read it that way, that's not how I meant it.
The articles linked in the grandparent post suggest the opposite: That all the procedural barriers the US sets up in an effort to prevent corruption tend to run up the costs.
For example, lowest-price bidding rules tend to result in more expensive projects overall because the agencies feel the need to do a whole bunch of up-front micro-planning in order to try and prevent the contract awardee - who, as we already know ahead of time, will be the lowest bidder - from cutting too many corners. Or to put it more simply, we've essentially mandated that public projects have to be the waterfalliest of waterfally waterfall projects.
Our "starve the beast" approach to funding public agencies, also inspired by our hysterical attitude about government corruption, comes into play, too. Since agencies end up with limited resources for permanent staffing, they don't necessarily have in-house resources available for project planning. But they can use funding set aside for projects to hire consultants, who are naturally expensive and less worried about what happens to the project 5 years down the line. They'll be long gone by that point.
You nailed it. There's a whole crazy litany of procurement rules procedures and other nonsense that you have to do.
A project like this will have monitory and women owned business goals, which usually translate into somebody's wife forming a shell company fronting money and skimming a profit. There are various labor agreements,which include quotas for various groups. Plus dozens of other crazy legal requirements.
I worked in government for many years. The work was great and rewarding, but the absurdity of the procurement process and the waste associated with it was really disheartening to me personally.
Re: starve the beast, you're 100% correct. Out of hundreds of projects, I can think of 5 (all huge rollout type things that had to be down quick) where using consultants to run the project was a best value. But probably 70% were done that way, and usually redone by government staff.
> That all the procedural barriers the US sets up in an effort to prevent corruption tend to run up the costs.
Similarly, one of the leaders in the U.S. defense industry, former Lockheed CEO Norm Augustine, recently had this to say:
Q. I often hear people blame procurement regulations for preventing communication between government and industry, but then I’m told there’s actually less communication happening than is even permitted by law. Do you find that to be the case? Is the problem the regulation or people’s understanding of the regulation?
A. ... Clearly the regulations are very controlling, ... everybody wants to be very, very careful on both sides. So you sort of build walls that weren't intended. It’s unfortunate, and I think [it] handicaps our system. At the same, time you don't want to have conflicts of interest. Having seen the Defense Department from both sides, and [while] I have my own complaints about the acquisition process, it’s 99.9 percent honest. I can't say that about everything I've seen in federal, state and local levels but the Defense Department by and large is honest. We don't want to lose that. So maybe part of the price to pay is to have this barrier that we live with.
> Our "starve the beast" approach to funding public agencies, also inspired by our hysterical attitude about government corruption, comes into play, too.
There's a vicious cycle here:
bureacratic rules -> government inefficiency -> perception of government ineptness and corruption -> more bureaucratic rules
Back in the day, we had corruption, but that didn't stop us from getting things done. If you look at New York or Chicago during the early 20th of the century, they were dominated by machine politics like Tammany Hall that openly traded votes for party jobs. But they also built most of the modern infrastructure that we take for granted today.
> Back in the day, we had corruption, but that didn't stop us from getting things done. If you look at New York or Chicago during the early 20th of the century, they were dominated by machine politics like Tammany Hall that openly traded votes for party jobs. But they also built most of the modern infrastructure that we take for granted today.
There is a more recent example: the reconstruction of major Japanese cities after WWII. They currently have excellent infrastructure, the best public transit in the world, and surprisingly affordable housing prices whether you rent or buy.
There was quite a lot of bribery, kickbacks, and illegal campaign financing going on the whole time between construction companies and politicians, but that may have actually helped. Local officials are a lot more motivated to push a project through the bureaucracy quickly when they are going to get a kickback.
You might be onto something. Phase 2 of the Delhi Metro (77 miles of track, 85 stations in 3 years) cost roughly the same as Hudson Yards (1 mile of track, 1 station in 9 years).
Delhi is hardly known for it's lack of corruption.
> inspired by our hysterical attitude about government corruption
It wasn't too long ago that graft was rampant at all levels of government, and it's still a major issue. We've set high standards, but they used to be pretty low.
Honestly, I think bringing more things like construction in house would solve a lot of this. Fly in the Army Engineering Corps? I feel like you could find enough people interested in large works that wouldn't mind being public servants. And since there's no financial incentive, simple budgeting processes could solve most things.
I'd rather have them building airports in NJ than airfields in Kandahar.
I still think there's a strong case for re-creating a program like the CCC[1] to A.) provide meaningful employment and job-training, and B.) build and maintain neglected infrastructure.
Both Hillary and Trump says they are going to boost infrastructure spending. I think its better to wait and see how self-driving/mobility as a service develops before spending money on transportation infrastructure
What a myopic, Valley-centered view. Self driving cars still need to drive on roads and bridges, automated trains still need tracks. Four, even eight years is a lot of time to do infrastructure repair and upgrades, I highly doubt self driving services will take off exponentially in that period.
In Boston, the presence of a nearby T stop massively boosts property prices, creates businesses, allows people to live without cars, and so on. Nothing improves an area holistically like mass transit improvements.
In Houston, TX we actually had a mayor run and win on an anti-rail platform! As with any construction project delaying it just made it cost more later. And yet when it was finally built the Red Line was a stunning success.
Among other things it linked most of the city's major stadiums, creating a relief valve for major event traffic, it linked parking and medical center sites, cutting traffic to and from our congested Medical Center and almost since inception it has carried more people on a daily basis than the combined ridership of our spoke and hub "Park and Ride" system which brings commuters in from the suburbs to downtown.
Development along the Red Line has ramped up and the gentrification that comes from it is obvious along its recent Northern expansion. So just like in Boston bringing rail has a net-postive effect on property values once construction is done.
Considering those ridership numbers are based on paid rides and ours is an honor system with loose enforcement Metro is putting up some decent ridership numbers!
Unfortunately due to Bob Lanier's intentionally blocking such expansion we don't have the desperately needed heavy rail system to cut freeway traffic between Houston's higher density bedroom communities.
And more frustratingly we still have only part of the rail plan implemented due to ongoing efforts to block rail funding. The rail line proposed to link our downtown and Galleria commercial district has been blocked for 10+ years by a single Congressman and some vocal business owners in a 1.5 mile stretch of road. If they had just sucked it up the construction would be done and those same businesses would be benefiting from their increased accessibility.
People make the same claim about Washington Metrorail stations, while conveniently ignoring (1) said stations nearly always have excellent road access as well, yet the road gets no credit for the development; and (2) areas around some stations are zoned to develop more densely, so maybe such zoning, not the presence of the station, deserves some credit. I agree that transit can help improve land values, but transit alone does not deserve all the credit when other factors may also be relevant.
I lived in Washington before stops like U Street, Petworth, and others had been built, and the major roads in those neighborhoods were not responsible for the growth they've experienced since the station's openings.
There has been practically no development by the Cheverly station and it also has great road access, and there has also been a lot of devepment in Trinidad and Ivy City even though they have no stations nearby. People are quick to claim that transit stations are responsible for development activity when even a cursory look reveals that the reality is not nearly this simple.
Well of course there are always other factors - but citing zoning will get you no traction here, sir. Beyond some very basic limits on things like opening a "vice"-related business of some kind near a church or a school Houston has no zoning laws. I can open a nail salon next to a restaurant and there's nothing anyone can do about it. See the infamous "Ashby Highrise" http://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/real-estate/article... as an example of residents taking matters into their own hands and suing developers after City of Houston rubber-stamped a traffic study that would have allowed a high rise complex in the middle of a neighborhood. The residents were forced themselves to sue because they had no other remedy.
Houston's near town development has a long history unique to our area - everything from a former Freedman's town that left lots of prime real estate in the hands of people who really preferred not to sell for development to local management districts using tax money to buy property outside their taxation area in order to prevent or slow gentrification. The area recently expanded to by the Northline extension was considered a blue collar area at best and frankly too crime-ridden and dangerous at worst for any redevelopment. That has turned around with the rail - and since Houston's is an at grade rail, we actually lose one-two lanes of the thoroughfare when rail goes in. Yet North Houston which was the site of the Moody Park Riots is now the target of development and gentrification and you can track that against the rail's expansion.
I disagree. We can't rely on self-driving cars as the solution to our transportation problems. Roads can only handle so many cars no matter how automated it is. Light rail is also a lot more efficient I'd imagine than a ton of cars using gas / batteries.
I'd rather take the 2.50 rail fare than the way more expensive lyft/uber/whatever.
It won't be a revolution. The fundamental constraint for our most economically productive zones is that you still need to unload x number of people in y time with z space available, and autonomous cars aren't any better at that than the regular kind. Look at the people walking across London Bridge or out of Cannon Street every morning, and imagine how much space it would take if each of them had to arrive in an individual car (or even 4 to a car) that had to pull over to unload them.
I fully agree. If you can hail a robot at the price of driving using a car sharing service (as in short term rental, not as in "ride sharing"), the threshold to carless will fall a considerable bit. A lot more people are in the nearly-carless-but camp than actually carless.
Current car sharing schemes only really work for short two way trips without much of a stay at the destination, since you would block the car for the whole duration. Robot taxis (just like their conventional counterparts) on the other hand could be booked separately for each direction,taking the duration of the stay out of the equation (except when it is so short that it is cheaper to keep the taxi waiting). Once on this level, it's just natural to replace the easy trips with public transportation.
Sure, but the thought is more that it makes it easier to live in marginal car-less areas (which should then attract the investment to make them less marginal).
I don't understand this perspective. Look at the person-hours spent in cars every day worldwide. Most of those are not in "our most economically productive zones" and a lot of them are spent just sitting in traffic.
I can understand thinking that autonomous cars aren't going to happen anytime soon (it's harder than it looks) but I can't understand thinking it will happen and not be a hugely transformative shift.
It can happen. I think right now, we are on path where it will happen. But it is simply the most expensive, inefficient, and environmentally damaging route we could take.
In big cities it may indeed help reduce the need for cars, making the few cases where public transportation is wildly inefficient (i.e. getting from Manhattan to somewhere in Jersey <30 miles away) bearable.
But besides the literal handful of U.S. cities with workable public transportation, this automated car revolution will not help anything besides making things more convenient. It will not allow us to come to terms with the massive pollution that cars generate. It will not help us achieve truly affordable transportation (even when this technology is perfected, it will not be able to give us $2.50 rides like public transportation can do today). Etc.
With this autonomous cars movement, it looks like more Americans are finally ready to accept the idea of massive investment into transportation infrastructure (albeit by private companies instead of government). But the solution they are happy with is to re-purpose vehicles designed for individuals and make them into an adhoc transportation system. We need to think at true scale.
Well, autonomous cars have real advantages in terms of transportation flexibility and comfort. Those are two factors that are very important in people's transportation decisions.
On comfort, it's not going to be a robotic BMW that is used for autonomous traffic, it's going to be a robotic subcompact with fiberglass seats and can't be ruined by vomit. Think: carnival ride with a better seatbelts and airbags.
Uber hemorrhages cash. Why is this so hard for people to understand? It is not a business success and we shouldn't be modeling our infrastructure after it.
It might be successful someday, maybe, but how about we wait until then.
I lease a car for about $200/month. I don't own it but until the lease is up it's my car. I can put the driver's seat the way I want and it stays there. I know where all the features are and how to use them. It's comfortable, clean, and smells nice.
I find it hard to believe I'll still get all of this for the same relative price in a future when I'm renting rides from an autonomous fleet.
I think the profit motive would lead to somebody serving the top end of the market. People aren't going to give up their BMWs unless the experience is better.
You mean like how Uber itself began with black cars only, then started moving further and further downmarket with increased investor pressure, even reaching the humiliating step of dealing in subprime loans?
You're right to imply that initially there would (probably) be a luxury factor to get the sector off the ground -- what's the opposite of a loss leader? -- but the invisible hand reaches through the centuries and demands satisfaction, or so the story goes.
People will pick based on cost. Look at air travel: everyone bitches about the low-cost airlines with their narrow seats and $5 sandwiches, but they fly with them anyway.
Hong Kong Airport made me realize how idiotic it is that we don't have these rail links:
- PATH to EWR
- 7 to LGA
Not only does Hong Kong have a subway terminating inside the main terminal, it runs separate from their MTR line, takes 30 mins to get into Central and makes a handful of stops at major MTR junctions along the way. It felt like public transit working exactly as it should.
There are more than one around the city, but I usually take http://www.nycairporter.com to get to/from JFK/LGA and Manhattan when I don't want to take public transit (usually because I have a lot of luggage).
I live within easy access of one of their pickup/dropoff stops in Manhattan, so it's quite convenient.
I had a 3 hour layover at JFK, once . . . It was barely enough time to change terminals at one airport, never mind changing airports. Immigration was part of the problem, but still . . .
The lack of the 7 or any other subway to LGA is thanks to rampant NIMBYism. Everyone wants it but nobody wants it to run down their street.
EWR has the Airtrain instead of the PATH. That was more practical than building a new right-of-way for the PATH. PATH trains couldn't run on the NJ Transit/Amtrak tracks because of incompatible power systems (third rail vs overhead.) Also those tracks are at capacity at peak times and couldn't fit Path trains in addition.
Chicago as well. The blue line goes from downtown to inside ORD within 45 minutes, and the orange line goes to MDW. Not sure how long as haven't flown to / from MDW in years. I generally ask visitors to take the CTA instead of a cab because it's much faster during the day. Getting to any airport in NYC via public transportation is a pain, including JFK. Which is strange because the MTA is otherwise very impressive.
SFO-OAK is pretty easy (despite that ridiculous, overpriced cable car at OAK).
Tokyo's great too even if you don't understand Japanese. Haneda is in a great location and has tons of connections. Haneda to Narita is also pretty easy (bonus: monorail).
Airports are, by design, generally out in the middle of nowhere and their connectivity suffers as a result. You get things like London where Heathrow and London City are reasonably accessible, but things like Stansted are out in the middle of bloody nowhere.
Sure, and from Liverpool Street the Stansted Express is quite expensive (> 30 GBP) especially when compared to simply taking the tube to Heathrow (<= 6 GBP). That is, IMO, bordering on expensive enough to consider that poor connectivity.
I always take the Heathrow Express, so I guess you aren't on an expense account! If I read the rate card correctly, the Stansted Express is cheaper than the Heathrow Express.
> Not only does Hong Kong have a subway terminating inside the main terminal, it runs separate from their MTR line, takes 30 mins to get into Central and makes a handful of stops at major MTR junctions along the way. It felt like public transit working exactly as it should.
And you can check your bags at the train station and you don't have to see them again until you get to your final destination
Getting PATH to EWR would be a huge win. It's a pain to deal with the various schemes of getting from the airport to the city. PATH to EWR would probably put many taxi companies out of business. When I fly into Newark, the last thing I want to do is take the Airtrain to connect to something to connect to something else.
Heathrow definitely has it correct in terms of trains into London.
Sadly the current proposal seems to be to extend PATH to the same station so you still have to take the infuriatingly terrible monorail. Honestly they'd probably be better off spending some money running the monorail straight over the scrapyard/parking lot instead of taking a massive curve at 2mph
NYC is missing a lot of connecting lines for instance in Brooklyn. Most of them run in parallel, and something like circular or orthogonal connecting lines could be have been really useful.
But MTA funding is controlled by the state, meaning that all subway funding needs to be balanced by upstate highway funding, meaning that super high return projects like this (which could probably justify themselves based on the improvements in real estate values as Hong Kong does) are not happening.
There's not enough density to justify trains in upstate New York. But we should be spending tens of billions to upgrade the Acela corridor (which runs east of upstate NY) to something comparable to Europe's high speed trains.
While you're right that the 3 new stations are in a rich, white neighborhood, it will hopefully reduce congestion on the 4,5 and 6 lines which service many poorer neighborhoods in the Bronx and harlem.
97th to 104th between 2nd & 3rd is basically all public housing, and there's public housing along the east river that will also have closer, less crowded stations.
A lot of the tunnels for Phase 2 (extending the Q to 125th) were built or partially built in the 1970s, and this phase already has funding commitments.
Next phase of the SAS stretches north up to 125th street. Funding is in place, and tunneling is already happening, and the project should be done by 2019. Is that good enough for you?
Well…the Lexington line is at capacity, while there are a lot of outer borough feeder bus lines that lose money. (Maybe they should lose money since they feed main lines so the MTA might not lose money overall per passenger they service). If the center of the city isn't healthy the outer boroughs aren't going to be healthy either. You need to show the better investments elsewhere, instead of hand-waving about 'rich white neighborhoods.' (if I wanted to be hand-wavy I could say, 'where people pay taxes and don't trash the public investments in their neighborhoods')
> If the center of the city isn't healthy the outer boroughs aren't going to be healthy either.
It might be necessary (I'm not sure), but it's not at all sufficient. It's trickle-down economics. Investing in wealthy neighborhoods makes wealthy neighborhoods better.
> where people pay taxes and don't trash the public investments in their neighborhoods
Can you name specifics? It sounds like a stereotype of poor communities.
that was my point, the parent comment didn't provide any evidence better investments were available.
if they built massively on the far east side and it's a subway void, and the Lex is maxed out, maybe that's where they should invest. they should also have decent transit to/from outer boroughs so people can get to jobs in Manhattan or elsewhere.
if someone thinks 'rich white people' getting public services is automatically suspect, they can hardly complain if someone else thinks investment in services for 'poor non-white people' is suspect.
anyway, guess what, there is some politics and cronyism and corruption in these transportation projects, there is graffiti and vandalism and drugs in public housing projects (even if 90+% of residents aren't involved and terrible management and incentives are why the projects suck), and the day there's a big investment in a subway in the outer boroughs, people will complain about that too, and say it's a line to nowhere, or it's driven by real estate interests and gentrification.
"Better investments were available" is a hard one, given that construction on the 2nd Avenue line has been going on for many decades - it's a fair bit of sunk cost. But yes, it will help the Lexington Avenue line, which does suck at rush hour.
strangely, I think all the tunnel that was previously dug is to the north and south of the route that's being opened now. maybe not as much sunk cost as one might think. although it looks like they will use existing tunnel north of the route as a maintenance area / train yard.
I've been in plenty of stations in poor areas. Besides a lack of upkeep by the government, it doesn't seem much different to me. Maybe it depends on where in the world you are.
These lines last for a long, long time. Inevitably, they will provide transit for rich and poor areas alike at various times in their lifespans. Not to mention that the people who work in a neighborhood don't always live there, and that includes people in low wage jobs who are especially dependent on public transit.
Also, this particular line will relieve traffic on other lines that go through the heart of some rougher neighborhoods.
It's the lowest-effort of low-effort virtue signaling, that's why. Look at me, I'm so not racist, unlike all you racisty racists who have the gall to talk about a subway line instead of something I care about.
It's actually a very pertinent issue to NYC subway lines, as many of the severely congested ones (such as the J/M/Z line) run through minority neighborhoods but they don't receive very much maintenance, upgrade, or fanfare in the way of these three new stops which, in all fairness, will do little to alleviate the growing capacity problems facing the MTA.
Furthermore the comment never once referred to anyone externally as a racist. It simply highlighted a problematic disparity. Projecting much?
While I meant no "racism" my original comment, I did use the "rich white" adjectives. Race has nothing to do with it, my apologies, but classism still remains.
I remember when the last subway extension was completed in the late '80s (E/F extension into Queens). That truly did serve marginalized neighborhoods. Back then, the income disparity was far less.
> the comment never once referred to anyone externally as a racist.
"X didn't explicitly say Y" is the online commentary version of holding a hand an inch away from a sibling's face in the car, saying "I'm not touching you".
This comment seems inappropriate. HN, and any other forum, would be better off without it. Attributing something to another commenter and then criticizing them for it is senseless, meaningless, and inflammatory.
Are socioeconomic issues not important? Or are the well-to-do non-minority programmers of HN above discussing them? For all you know, donretag is directly affected by this and wants to voice their displeasure. Calling it virtue signaling is dismissive and refuses to actually acknowledge or even touch on the problem.
