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  #61  
Old Posted Jan 31, 2017, 8:57 PM
plutonicpanda plutonicpanda is offline
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Originally Posted by ChargerCarl View Post
No one really knows. Probably just terrible project management. It doesn't seem to be one thing.



It's not labor costs. Other countries have high wages and strong unions yet keep their costs contained. It's an administrative and planning issue.
Thanks for the info.

I wonder but I'm not sure if these projects will last longer than previous ones due to better engineering? Wishful thinking anyways.

The Brooklyn Bridge has outlived many of other bridges that were built long after it was completed and I'm sure the standards were lower back then or I'd hope to think so. Even though the buildings don't have the detail they used to have, I would like to think the engineering is better today.
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  #62  
Old Posted Feb 1, 2017, 1:05 AM
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Originally Posted by plutonicpanda View Post
Yeah, why exactly is that? Lower standards? No environmental impact reports or not as strong? Weaker labor unions? Please explain.
as i posted, the reasons are well known and several:

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Originally Posted by a very long weekend View Post
several issues:

1) labor costs are pretty much tied with europeans, but not because of wages. they have much more streamlined healthcare and retirement systems, so we pay more on that end for having union labor;
2) almost nowhere do we have in-house engineering, so outside consultants do the work for a much higher cost than in europe;
3) europe (and asia) are much more centralized, they have a capital and that's their main focus, but also they mostly have unitary governments that make decisions from on high, even outside of the capital. in america, we don't have that, we have cities, states and a federal government that is half the time out to lunch (ie. a non-professional political class). also, a huge challenge is getting money back to the regions that want rail infrastructure: the suburbans must paid off to get money back to the coastal cities - "buy american" is a great example of this;
4) still on politics, we have many overlapping agencies responsible for reviews of all kinds (enviro, technical, etc) and overlapping agencies that must sign off to fund. in NYC, you'd have 6-7 city agencies, mta, multiple state agencies, the mostly-autonomous port authority and then the various federal programs that review and fund;
5) NIMBYs. it's far too easy here to jam up the works with lawsuits on any number of causes of action. court costs and, worse, overplanning in anticipation of lawsuits (design, insurance, the works) is something most countries need not deal with;
6) democratic failings and a people that must be "impressed." people of means are just not willing to ride public transit unless it's nice. and nice costs a lot more than merely serviceable, like most other countries do;
7) bizarre and unique specs and regulations that mean we can't just take off the shelf product and plug it in; and lastly and relatedly,
8) we don't build all that much, so we don't have a giant number of competing bidders with shops champing at the bit. a bombardier or siemens factory here or there is nothing compared to a full blown industry. and no industry means there's no lobby to influence the government to change reqs or specs to international standards, which means costs don't come down (duplicative design, no international application).

we never get any deals, because everyone has to set up shop here, and design to our old school standards. that's after dozens of agencies have agreed on all sorts of plans over many years of planning, all lawsuits have been settled (and insured against and planned around), and funding has been figured out. and then guess who builds?
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  #63  
Old Posted Feb 1, 2017, 1:38 AM
ChargerCarl ChargerCarl is offline
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Originally Posted by a very long weekend View Post
as i posted, the reasons are well known and several:
It's actually not well known at all. Theres been almost no studies on cost differentials between the US and our peer countries. Alon Levy and Stephen Smith started beating the drum about it a few years ago and its only now starting to get some attention. I think a lot of what you wrote might very well be true, but we really are just guessing here.
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  #64  
Old Posted Feb 1, 2017, 2:17 AM
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You would have to look into the total number of man-hours worked to determine if it's true, but in my experience the issue with unions in the US isn't that they are paid too much; it's that they work too little. They try to work as slow as possible to drag projects out longer and get them behind schedule to get more overtime pay which is where union workers really make their money. It's entirely possible that the issue isn't that US workers are paid substantially more per hour, but that they do substantially less work per hour.
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  #65  
Old Posted Feb 1, 2017, 2:30 AM
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^I would bet my bank account that this is true BUT on an individual basis and not some coordinated conspiracy by the trade unions to f*** over taxpayers.
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  #66  
Old Posted Feb 1, 2017, 1:30 PM
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Second Avenue Subway Relieves Crowding on Neighboring Lines
NYTimes


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So far, the new subway line on the Upper East Side of Manhattan appears to be helping — the number of riders on the closest line, the Lexington Avenue line, has fallen, though plenty of people still jockey to squeeze onto trains.

The long-delayed Second Avenue line opened to great fanfare on Jan. 1. In the first few weeks of the year, ridership at its four stations has grown steadily, from about 83,000 on the first day to more than 150,000 last Wednesday — short of the 200,000 daily riders that officials predicted, but an encouraging sign that New Yorkers are using the line.

At stops on the Lexington Avenue line between Grand Central Terminal and 110th Street, ridership fell by about 11 percent, or by nearly 88,000 trips, on an average weekday in January, according to an analysis by The New York Times of data from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

Ridership fell at every stop, but the greatest drop was at the 86th Street stop, which had about 28,000 fewer trips, or about 24 percent fewer riders, on an average weekday this month, compared with January 2016.

Some subway riders on the Nos. 4, 5 and 6 trains that run along Lexington Avenue have noticed a difference. As Charlie Allen waited for an express train at the 86th Street stop on a recent morning, he said the crowds appeared to have improved slightly.

“It’s still crowded,” said Mr. Allen, 31, a lawyer who lives in East Harlem. “I haven’t had to not get on trains as often, but they’re still very crowded when I do get on them.”


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  #67  
Old Posted Feb 1, 2017, 4:48 PM
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Any future phases of SAS should be built by "cut-and-cover" to save costs.
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  #68  
Old Posted Feb 1, 2017, 6:21 PM
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Originally Posted by mrsmartman View Post
Any future phases of SAS should be built by "cut-and-cover" to save costs.
Will never, ever happen. No way they're going to cut-and-cover some of the densest neighborhoods in the Western world. This will go right through Midtown.
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  #69  
Old Posted Feb 1, 2017, 6:24 PM
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So, at this point, the SAS has led to a net increase of around 63k new riders. Amazing that there are still a large number of Manhattan residents who, until this point, weren't riding the subway.

I'm guessing bus ridership is down quite a bit along 1st and 2nd Ave. Taxi/Uber/car-for-hire ridership to the Far East Side also likely took a hit. I doubt there was much private car usage, subway or no subway, at least for Manhattan-specific trips. Even those that own cars in Manhattan (a pretty small minority) rarely use them in Manhattan.

Also, the people who expected that the Lex line would be notably less crowded are pretty much crazy. The SAS and Lex line serve different markets, and there still are only two North-South lines east of Fifth Ave. (and four North-South lines west of Fifth Ave.; five if you count PATH). Two lines is a hell of a lot less capacity than four (or five) lines so the East Side congestion will continue.

Honestly the East Side could use two new lines (1st Ave. would make a lot of sense; York and East End Ave. are extremely dense still very far from the SAS, and most of the East Village and LES are too far from the SAS) but that wouldn't even be considered for decades.
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  #70  
Old Posted Feb 1, 2017, 7:10 PM
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Originally Posted by ChargerCarl View Post
It's actually not well known at all. Theres been almost no studies on cost differentials between the US and our peer countries. Alon Levy and Stephen Smith started beating the drum about it a few years ago and its only now starting to get some attention. I think a lot of what you wrote might very well be true, but we really are just guessing here.
has someone built an econometric model quantifying/assigning values to these different classes of variables? no. maybe i'll try to put something together over the next year.

but all of those things are known, there's no mystery here as to causes. like zero. people saying it's x or y aren't understanding that there's an ecology in america that makes our infrastructure cost what it does, and that ecology includes all of these factors.
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  #71  
Old Posted Feb 1, 2017, 11:45 PM
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Will never, ever happen. No way they're going to cut-and-cover some of the densest neighborhoods in the Western world. This will go right through Midtown.
And that's why that portion will never get built either. There is no sane reason we should pay twice as much just to keep the noise down. It's not like cut and cover is even some huge inconvenience, they start digging and then put plates down above there they're digging to get the road going again. You lose the road in sections for a month or two and then a couple of lanes for a few years.
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  #72  
Old Posted Feb 2, 2017, 12:37 AM
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And that's why that portion will never get built either.
There's no question it will get built. The costs are outrageous, but there's no constituency opposed to completion of the SAS. This is the very rare thing almost all New Yorkers agree is desperately needed.

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There is no sane reason we should pay twice as much just to keep the noise down.
There's plenty of "sane reason". Neighborhoods would fight the SAS if there were cut-and-cover. Cut-and-cover is horrifically disruptive, spews tremendous noise, pollution and chaos and you're talking about neighborhoods that are already denser and more congested than anywhere in the developed world outside Hong Kong. These neighborhoods are already plenty crazy on a "normal" weekday.

You would have to basically evacuate tens of thousands of people at a time, because many residential buildings in NYC have only one entrance and there are no alleys. You would also have to close hundreds of businesses at a time, many of whom would permanently shutter. You would be closing day cares, medical facilities, senior citizen facilities, UN consulates.

Again, not even an option worth considering.
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  #73  
Old Posted Feb 2, 2017, 12:43 AM
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It's not an issue of cut and cover vs tunneling. Yes, tunneling is more expensive, but other countries do it for cheap and we should be able to as well. It's a management/planning issue.

And as Crawford said, yes it will get built. We're a rich enough country with dumb/corrupt enough politicians that nobody even blinks an eye when we light billions of dollars on fire. Scumbag Cuomo probably sees the high costs as a benefit to his beloved unions anyways.
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  #74  
Old Posted Feb 2, 2017, 1:33 AM
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Originally Posted by Crawford View Post
There's no question it will get built. The costs are outrageous, but there's no constituency opposed to completion of the SAS. This is the very rare thing almost all New Yorkers agree is desperately needed.
I'm sure that's what they said 100 years ago when they started building this..

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Originally Posted by Crawford View Post
There's plenty of "sane reason". Neighborhoods would fight the SAS if there were cut-and-cover. Cut-and-cover is horrifically disruptive, spews tremendous noise, pollution and chaos and you're talking about neighborhoods that are already denser and more congested than anywhere in the developed world outside Hong Kong. These neighborhoods are already plenty crazy on a "normal" weekday.

You would have to basically evacuate tens of thousands of people at a time, because many residential buildings in NYC have only one entrance and there are no alleys. You would also have to close hundreds of businesses at a time, many of whom would permanently shutter. You would be closing day cares, medical facilities, senior citizen facilities, UN consulates.
Cut and cover is none of those things and you wouldn't have to close anything.

They built the old ones without disrupting the sidewalks or even the street cars. Sure, you would lose the ability to drive along 2nd avenue, but it's one street as part of a grid. Also, like I said before, you can just deck over the construction and even get the cars back after a few months (similar to how the street cars in the picture below are still running).

http://imgur.com/a/2pfJk
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  #75  
Old Posted Feb 2, 2017, 1:50 PM
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It's not an issue of cut and cover vs tunneling. Yes, tunneling is more expensive, but other countries do it for cheap and we should be able to as well. It's a management/planning issue.

And as Crawford said, yes it will get built. We're a rich enough country with dumb/corrupt enough politicians that nobody even blinks an eye when we light billions of dollars on fire. Scumbag Cuomo probably sees the high costs as a benefit to his beloved unions anyways.
The avenues of New York are wide enough for quadruple tracking. If the metro route is not aligned to major roads, then it is necessary to tunnel under buildings in city center.

It might be more feasible to tunnel through Midtown but cut and cover in uptown or outer boroughs is worth considering.
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  #76  
Old Posted Feb 2, 2017, 7:34 PM
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Tunneling is far more expensive, but is often a compromise to cut and cover as it's far less disruptive to street life.

As a straphanger, I much prefer the cut and cover stations over the deep caverns. Crawford is right though, nothing is going to change.
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  #77  
Old Posted Feb 7, 2017, 5:15 PM
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Exclamation

86th Street station has become my new friend.

I work near Rockefeller Center. I can hop on the F, transfer to the Q and take it to 86th and then walk from 2nd to Lex to grab the 5.

Much more enjoyable than walking to Times Square or Grand Central.
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  #78  
Old Posted Apr 5, 2017, 6:25 AM
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Originally Posted by CIA View Post
Tunneling is far more expensive, but is often a compromise to cut and cover as it's far less disruptive to street life.

As a straphanger, I much prefer the cut and cover stations over the deep caverns. Crawford is right though, nothing is going to change.
The Upper East Side section of IRT Lexington Avenue Subway was excavated underground in bedrock during Dual Contracts period but most of the IND subway was constructed by cut and cover, which is still the best method of subway construction.



Diagram: http://nycsubway.org.s3.amazonaws.co...wsdc1208al.gif

Source:

http://www.nycsubway.org/wiki/Chapte...ture_and_Track
http://www.nycsubway.org/wiki/Chapte...n_City_Streets
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  #79  
Old Posted Apr 12, 2017, 5:05 AM
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Originally Posted by Gil View Post
In the far long term, would it be possible to extend the T further to South Ferry or along Wall/Rector St. to Battery Park. That'd tie into the Rector Connector that the MTA's been touting, plus it'd give a cross-town route downtown (not that it's really needed as it's a lot narrower than Midtown).
Source: http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showpo...&postcount=470

I very much agree with this idea. They should also extend it further to Court Street in Brooklyn.
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  #80  
Old Posted Apr 15, 2017, 4:51 AM
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^ One of the long ago proposals for the SAS did include connecting to Brooklyn at Court Street. In this case, the still functional non-operating station housing the New York Transit Museum.

If funding can be found, a great idea.
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