Today’s Headlines

  • Cuomo’s Pricing Plan Is the Real Deal (NYT, Politico, News, Post, AMNY)
  • Andrew Lanza Early Frontrunner in the Whining Brigade (SOP)
  • George Haikalis: Route Gateway Through Hoboken and Save $19B (News)
  • De Blasio Ferries Exceed Ridership Expectations, Still < 1 Middling Bus Line (WorkBoat)
  • Electric MTA Buses Debut in Williamsburg (Bklyn Paper)
  • In NY It’s Legal for 16-Year-Old Kids to Use Cellphones While Driving (News)
  • Driver Who Hit Cop in Times Square Charged With Attempted Murder (Post)
  • Potential Weapon of Mass Destruction Left Unsecured at Port Authority Bus Terminal (Post)
  • Chris Christie Now Just Another Schmuck With a State Police Detail (Bloomberg)
  • Damn E-Bikes (Advance)

More headlines at Streetsblog USA

  • Jeff
  • AstoriaBlowin

    Would be interested to hear what Alon Levy has to say about that Hoboken alignment for Gateway. But it was great to see the plug for through running and a tunnel between Penn st and Grand Central.

  • HamTech87

    Here’s a map of Haikalis’ proposal: http://www.irum.org/20170907_GPDC_board_meeting_statement.pdf

  • foody4booty

    A bus is not a Weapon of Mass Destruction.. that’s a nuclear bomb or chemical weapon. You should be more responsible in how you write your headlines.

  • Guest

    Doesn’t pass the smell test. How on earth could you expect to save billions by making the project longer and more complicated with a new deep station in Hoboken? And the portal bridge would still have to be replaced anyway.

    The problem is not the design of Gateway, it’s the wildly inflated construction costs that come from treating transit as a welfare program for incompetent managers, unnecessary consultants, and unionized hard-hats.

  • kevd

    how to save $19 Billion?
    get spanish construction companies, transit authorities and workers to build it.

  • Flakker

    As Larry Littlefield has pointed out, the only marine traffic through the Portal Bridge is a twice-weekly garbage barge. Weld the bridge shut permanently and find another route for trash.

  • Kwyjibo

    Also there’s not really a Whining Brigade. And while some might argue otherwise, Chris Christie is not literally a “schmuck,” which means “penis.”

    Straighten up, Streetsblog.

  • bolwerk

    Given (okay, according to Wikipedia…) the Hackensack River is only navigable as far as Hackensack, it’s kind of a wonder there’s anybody using it at all. The Hudson/Erie Canal can’t even see significant freight use these days, and it’s suitable to connect barge traffic to the entire Midwest.

    Any potential freight uses left?

  • Larry Littlefield

    It’s actually the tower of a big tugboat for a sewer sludge barge that is the problem. They’d need to shift to two smaller tugboats and two smaller barges.

    There might also be a sailboat, or two.

  • Toddster

    It’s called figurative language.

  • guest

    How would getting workers and construction equipment over from Spain improve costs?

  • kevd

    because the don’t over charge the same way american construction companies and union labor do.

  • kevd

    Why the whinging brigade today about the wording of streetsblog’s headlines, though?

  • Joe R.

    Can’t wait for robotic labor to finally bring the costs of infrastructure back down to Earth. When all the on-site workers are robots, you can’t start saying we need 4 times as many workers for “safety”. In fact, the safety argument will be a good reason to have no human workers anywhere in a dangerous environment.

    $2.64 billion per mile versus 0.263? Good reason to have the Spanish (or even Chinese) build stuff for us right now.

  • kevd

    land is considerably cheaper there and their stations are probably about 1/2 as long. but that only explains a small portion of the 1000% difference in price.

    We built 3 full-length mezzanines for no apparent reason on the upper east side.

    The new lines in Barcelona are being built with single tunnel boring machines 40ft across, big enough to fit both tracks (one above the other) and platforms. So there is much less station work.
    Two lines will take the same route for about 1/2 their length (18 stops). But to assure service levels are high, they will run on seperate tracks (4 in total) I wonder why one was not made express on the other local? maybe because 9 of the 18 are interchanges with other lines?