that too

This is a federal requirement, unfortunately. One of those "sounds good on paper" ideas that have been a disaster for any project that might actually be good for the environment. Other countries don't do this. The cost is usually in the low millions for project of this size, but the real killer is just how long they take. 4 years for something like NYC congestion pricing sounds about right to me. Although maybe not, since it's not like there's no tolls currently, congestion pricing is largely just standardizing tolls across the board.

They were originally supposed to be short studies, just be a paragraph or two, but now in practice they look like this. Entirely to try and avoid frivolous lawsuits.

So in practice highways keep getting built, while bus ways, bike lanes and transit projects get held up for years by these things

Yeah, I mean. I live in the same neighborhood as this councilman and make roughly the same amount. There are plenty of units in the ~2k range. Nothing really good, but they exist. Dog-shit compared to what you would get in other cities though.

And that's the problem. For what you pay to get your own place in an outer borough in NYC, you could get a brand new apartment with a dishwasher/washer/dryer, balcony, gym, pool, etc in LA. And LA is not a cheap city.

150k a year is more like 7k a month

For whatever reason drivers think they don't inconvenience anyone else and don't view the enormous amount of space given over to them as a problem

Not to mention the importance of institutional knowledge, and just having the bandwidth to manage projects.

NYC used to have hundreds more planners and engineers on staff. All those jobs and more get outsourced to private consultants at 3x the cost now, while they're managed by an overworked skeleton crew.

Yeah. Most places keep costs down by having more internal staff. We've largely gutted public staffing across the board, NYC's planning staff is a fraction of what it used to be.

Everyone is run ragged, so everything gets outsourced to contractors at 3x the cost.

Paris builds new rail constantly, at a fraction of NYC prices, despite being an old system, in an old city, with a river and riddled with catacombs below ground, with a heavily unionized workforce.

The big "trick" is they do it all in-house, only outsource if absolutely necessary, and keep contractors on a tight leash. Also, they don't have to do multi-year long environmental reviews and feasibility studies for every little project, they just do them.

And the MRT has only been around since like 1990

Or Paris or Spain or Korea or Taiwan...

NY state increasingly seems to be run by a bunch of esoteric appointed boards nobody has ever heard of

we're doomed

> I’d love if we could work out a deal to fund all day 6 minute service, which I’ve seen estimates between 250-350 million dollars in extra costs per year and would dramatically improve ridership.

This was literally in the MTA Capital Plan that they approved right before covid hit and blew everything up. The plan was to modernize signals on all the lines, which would do more than anything else to improve service across the whole system

Haven't heard shit about it since covid though. I believe they're still working on it but who knows

yeah. so frustrating reading any comments thread about infrastructure

one of the chief reasons stuff is so expensive in the US is the insistence on using consultants and private contractors for literally every little thing

and to control costs, all these laws and regulations were created, very reasonable sounding, that were supposed to prevent govt waste and corruption

things like being forced to always take the lowest bid, always bidding on the end of every single contract, blind bids, etc

in a sane world, if you had a contractor who did a great job, you'd keep them. in the land of govt contracts, they're often forced to re-bid for the work, and often lose out. no way for them to lower their bid to match, they're just out. never mind that the new consultant is gonna burn 6 months of cash just getting up to speed, we're saving!

or on literally any infrastructure project. if someone bid honestly, i guarantee you the planners/engineers etc could tell you they're the ones to go with. but in reality, a shitty contractor can underbid on purpose, the choice is completely out of the hands of anyone competent, and once they have the job what is the govt going to do? build half a tunnel? switch contractors halfway through?

the entire system has been designed to fail, all because our main assumption about public employees is they can't be trusted to make good decisions. that private industry always does it better, and to prove that we're going to take away all agency from those awful government bureaucrats and give it to private consultants... at 3x the cost.

and if you are a competent govt employee, this system is almost certainly going to drive you out - why work somewhere where nothing you do matters and everyone hates you?

How does Paris build so much, so cheap, with heavily unionized 1st world labor in a densely packed, old, catacombs riddled city? They let boring public bureaucrats handle the planning and engineering, and then when they're ready to build they keep their contractors on a tight, tight leash. That's how

NYC has an insane amount of playgrounds, even per capita. They're just not very evenly distributed or well maintained or equal in quality. A lot of the NYCHA playgrounds look post-apocalyptic

That being said I'm all for better and greener playgrounds, just kinda hope that means old decrepit ones get improved or new ones get build in neighborhoods that need one

you know, everything infra-wise that gets built was an RPA proposal at some point. they never talk about that, or how there are these grand, inspiring plans for the region they're cribbing from. the tri(bi)-boro, east side access, gateway, the metro-north expansion in the east bronx, etc, all part of the RPA's set of transit related suggestions going back decades

So who knows, maybe we'll get an overpriced, watered-down version of this sometime before 2070

Isn't there already a skate park under one of the bridges on the manhattan side?

would be cool if skate parks just became a standard feature of bridge underpasses. they're certainly not being used for anything useful at the moment

The fact that our 3 (or 4) major regional rail systems are still behaving like they're private operators in competition instead of a single unified system is a disgrace

Build the T-REX already you cowards!

the nypost title is shit. it's 4 new stations in the bx on the east side, trackwork for existing lines and adding additional tracks for the nearby amtrak line

not bad for the cost and not complicated work compared to things like east side access so these predictable comments about waiting decades etc are dumb

We have big cities but not as much suburban sprawl compared to the rest of the country. Once you get to upstate NY or new england, it's all woods and rivers and mountains. Pretty nice

People really sleep on how beautiful the NE is just because they get their first impression from NYC or Philly or whatever

This didn't happen in NYC, but during Occupy a coworker of mine was biking home after work in Oakland and cops clothes-lined him off his bike, zip tied him, tossed him in a van and took him a whole county over

Dude just had a black hoodie on and was only guilty of living in the general vicinity of Occupy Oakland and apparently that was all it took

He missed the next day of work and had to call in from jail

Cops lie all the time. They arrest people without probable cause. All. The. Time. They can't be trusted, and they absolutely will do whatever it takes to spin things in their favor and most media outlets generally go along with it

People in this subreddit will often act otherwise, but during the BLM protests the cops were putting out overwhelming shows of force for every little tiny demonstration, while simultaneously looking the other way when looters were hitting up 5th ave. They absolutely had the manpower to prevent opportunistic looting like that, they just choose not to because they know damn well who will get blamed for it. Whether crime goes up or down doesn't matter, they spin it to their benefit either way

All cops care about is maintaining and growing their own power, that's it. They don't care about helping you, or preventing crime, or keeping the city safe at all. As far as they're concerned, you're all sheep, civilians, potential perps, and anything they do to you is justified just because, occasionally, they actually arrest someone who deserved it

I'm personally convinced the overwhelming and unaccountable power local police has accumulated in the US is a direct threat to democracy, but here we are still shoveling billions their way while everything else crumbles