Except that the 2nd Ave Subway is still over budget, over time, and scaled back from the original plan. Not as if they’re running trains on that line. What’s the excuse there?
It’s not only unions, BTW. It’s bureaucracy and politics. Projects get scaled back, changed, redesigned to be less functional, etc, for political reasons, then killed, then the design process gets to start all over. Look at the saga of the Penn Station railroad tunnel expansion for a particularly egregious example of this.
Tunnel capacity from Penn Station to NJ is sorely lacking. One tube each direction, built for early-1900s-era trains. If a train breaks down, traffic is snarled for hours. New tunnels were originally supposed to connect to Penn Station, then the plan was changed to connect to a dead-end underground station under Macy’s. This project was killed for fiscal and utilitarian reasons by Gov. Christie of NJ. Thankfully.
Now, 4-5 years later, there’s a new design phase of a tunnel that will connect to Penn Station and to the Penn Station annex being built in part of the general post office building on 8th Avenue. Fortunately, they’re including provisions to make this happen in the Hudson Yards project (building a few office and apartment buildings on a bridge above an open-air rail yard). Meanwhile, years of time and lots of contractor money have been flushed down the bog. If this were Switzerland, Germany, or Malaysia, the tunnel would have been built 10 years ago and would have been up and running, to Penn Station.
As far as people spending an hour on the subway, fine. Just what we need — everyone yap-yap-yapping and texting instead of holding on to the handrails on a crowded car. What’s wrong /w just reading a book?
