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Lankience t1_j5yl872 wrote

>It is difficult to throw $11 billion at a transit-dense region and not accomplish something at least by accident. But those benefits are outweighed by its astronomical cost and other ways to accomplish those same goals. It is impossible to regard East Side Access as anything other than a transit disaster.

I wonder if this author is biased at all.

What I will say I agree with is how long it takes to get from the terminal to the subway, but that's a problem Grand Central has already. I commute out of GC every day, and for awhile my train was on the lower level. It was really annoying to come all the way up from the subway, then back down again. This new terminal is just a more dramatic example. Ideally there would be a plan to connect the lower terminal directly with some subway platforms so you don't have to go through a rigamarole to transfer once you arrive, but that feels like another multi-billion dollar project in itself.

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mowotlarx OP t1_j5yq35r wrote

>I wonder if this author is biased at all.

I mean, you want high praise for a project 14 years late and 7.5 billion over budget that provides minimal improvements in travel time mostly to out of city commuters? It's not a huge leap to see this project as the boondoggle it is.

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oldtrenzalore t1_j5z139s wrote

> mostly to out of city commuters

How is this, in any way, a bad thing?

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Ok_Yogurtcloset8915 t1_j5z8vim wrote

The author is trying to use the facts that the station took too long and cost too much to argue that it should never have been built at all, but that doesn't actually follow and it's really obvious to everyone who reads it. Are you the author?

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6two t1_j5zsi2t wrote

If this were an article about runaway transit costs and how planning and construction could change to reduce costs, that might be useful. They get completely lost in the weeds arguing about why the project wasn't useful -- that doesn't fly here where people actually use the thing.

Do you commute into/regularly travel through Manhattan? I can tell you that being able to access different subway lines as a direct transfer from LIRR, or direct between LIRR and MNR is useful. Absolutely, it should it have cost less and happened much sooner, but the article does very little to examine the why and how in detail.

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