Light rails are not for Manhattan. They may be good for Queens or parts of the Bronx and Staten Island.

Singapore has a subway/el system that goes throughout the country finished in the last 25 years. Bangkok, Shanghai, Delhi even less time…..and they still have plans to expand.

I think the MTA should stop the fancy renovation and just clean the subway and make it wheelchair acsessable. The NYC Subway is not a shiny monotonous Asian subway. It is Old and has character, let it be what it is. Just replace tiles, clean the concrete platforms of the gum and gook and polish them. Get rid of the stalagmites and stalactites. Improve lighting, Fix what needs to be fixed.
All these granite tiles and fancy station entrances is a waste and it deteriorates within a few years. Look how nasty 34th street herald sq is.

The excess in renovation should be redirected to expansion in the boroughs and the 2av Subway. i would expect a more expensive fare to go towards better service and a larger efficient system, not the ending of service on the M train.

It’s been clear from the start that the first phase of the project was being mishandled in so many ways it’s difficult to know who, what, where and how. Just that it is. The first year of construction was lethargic with a skeleton crew trudging up and down, acting more in symbolic gestures than in actual work getting done. At some point the pretending ended and work picked up with the arrival of dozens of workers and many more pieces of equipment.

It seems though that the philosophy of the first few years of work is misguided. Which has been to have a major construction site in full operation while Second Avenue remains open to traffic. The promise that the planners made was that traffic would not be impeded, that 4 lanes would always remain open. Rarely are 4 lanes open. Often there’s only one lane or two, and traffic is backed up for as far as one can see. This is the way it has to be. There’s a lot of big equipment and complex work going on. I think the city and the MTA wanted to have their cake and eat it, too. The complex plan to keep second avenue between 91st and 96th street open to traffic simultaneous with the construction is adding years to the project. Time of course, means money. And complexity means greater delays. It would have been wiser, I think, to route traffic for this quarter mile onto part of First Avenue, making it two way during the period of construction, and quickly do the work that has to be done on Second Avenue to reroute the utilities and build the Launch Box.

The fallicay is that the MTA has been pretending that the construction could be done without disruption to the neighborhood. It is highly disruptive. Since it is highly disruptive, it seems to me it would have been wiser to admit that it would be disruptive and develop an engineering plan to get the work done as quickly as practicable.

I’ve worked on complex engineering projects, and what I do not see in any of the discussion in the public realm on the Second Avenue Subway is a discussion of risk. In particular schedule risk.

The dates being discussed seemed strange to me from the start. At one public meeting before the construction started, a start date for the project and and an end date for the project were announced. When people asked about the intermediate dates, such as when work would start on 72nd Street, for example, it turned out there were no real hard intermediate dates calculated. It was all to be determined in the future. To someone with experience, this meant to me that the schedule was not really an engineering schedule, it served political and business purposes, but was not be the real schedule for building the project.

So in my mind there’s been an unreality of what this project really takes to make happen. Money and time continue to be thrown into it, perhaps not efficiently, but if enough keeps coming this way, one day there will be a Second Avenue Subway.

The original IRT was built only after 41 years of stop-gap measures, from horse-drawn omnibuses to elevated steam trains, until there was enough money and political will to build a full length subway. Fortuitously, those “legacy” transit systems that the subway ran under, provided New Yorkers with far more options for mass transit than we have today.

A Bus Rapid Transit, with routes later upgraded to light rail, can create a future legacy system to help New Yorkers maintain our car-independent lifestyle.