I look forward to your feedback/thoughts!

During the last three Saturdays in August 2009 (Aug 8, 15, 22) Park Avenue will be closed to cars from 72nd Street down to Centre Street and the Brooklyn Bridge for the 200,000 people expected to participate.

Obviously, you’re talking about meeting the demand by distributing these people over time vertically and horizontally.

Of course, you can do this at any given time by sending them straight to their destinations. Subways cannot do this. And, remember you are spending a minimum of $2 billion per mile build costs with additional $billions ongoing thereafter.

Anyway, I do believe the SAS has reached or passed the point of no return. So much work has been done, so much has been spent, that it would be total folly to stop the project and settle for buses.

The Second Avenue Sagas blog reported that the earlier estimates were overoptimistic, and shoring up walls along the subway route, for example, turned out to be more time-consuming than forecast.

Nonetheless the Second Avenue line is worth completing, certainly Parts 1 & 2.

Ben Kabak of SAS also does a calculation re BRT:
“Articulated buses can fit 145 passengers. To meet the demand of just 200,000 passengers, the MTA would have to run around 58 buses per hour for 24 hours. Simply put, that’s impossible.”

Boring deep tunnels is straightforward; mining is straightforward; laying track and signal is straightforward; filling in a station is straightforward. Why do the feds not believe that the easy part can be completed in six years?

we should get some real oversight of the 2nd Ave project, that’s for sure.

but quitting is not the answer. big projects sometimes take a long time to complete — and that’s ok. our kids and grandkids will thank us. let’s be better than our parents’ generation — let’s not ruin what’s left of the country. that means sacrificing today for a better tomorrow — on at least this issue.

if we decided to bail on the subway system, at least we should provide surface rail. why not? i hear other countries do it. and New York City used to have a whole network of surface rail. it can be done again.

as for moving people from point A to point B, there are plenty of ways to do it, and us advocates have a large say. we should be promoting decent, dignified transportation, not jam-packing people into BRT buses, treating people like human cargo — like some sort of modern-day slave ship.

The problem, of course, is that all the federal funding after WWII went to highways, and the subways were not expanded after the 1930s.

But there is a growing realization that we need to turn around federal transportation spending to fight global warming. The fact that NY is expanding the subways again for the first time in 70 years is an early sign of this change, and the change should accellerate in the future.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b3/1939_IND_Second_System.jpg

It’s to bad all the federal money after WWII started going to road works and not to trains, otherwise this plan would be a reality.

You’d think that here in New York they could have stopped it. How did they let it happen?

Large headers and footers means that a lot of data has to be allocated to these structures and less data can be transported at a given time over a given line unless the packets can be sent faster.

Streaming data eliminates this.

They stream all about quite well without the terrific overhead required to transport their companions in large vehicles.

And, if they only had bicycles!

It is simply not true. Having lived in LA in the 1990s I saw this song and dance back then as well by the BRT people. They said it would attract people to ride it, it was a subway on wheels, with the same speed and capacity of the subway etc etc.

Reality shows it cannot carry the same amount because the buses dont carry nearly enough and you can only run them so frequently due to cross-traffic.

Look at Wilshire Blvd in LA, BRT was supposed to save it from having a subway there, and the buses are jammed with no ability to add more (and they never got their own lane either).

Plus when a bus has a crash, and they will with cross traffic etc, and people get injured the MTA will be forced to slow down the BRT.

BRT has its place but please this BRT is a subway on wheels stuff is insulting and frankly naive.

It would have higher demand than all other metro lines COMBINED.

Remember that, next time you read about BILLIONS in FTA funding being pissed away on rinky dink light rail lines in autotopia hell-holes like Phoenix, San Jose, or Sacramento.

-Bidding took place during the construciton boom when workers and materials were as expensive as they’ve ever been
-There are not as many large construction firms that are able to do the work in NYC and those firms often have deep relationships with city agencies and are able to jack up the price.
-Rules that require low bidders to be approved even if such bidders cannot adequately complete the job.

We need to be able to complete these kinds of major infrastructure projects without giving up. The momentum generated by completing more projects is fantastic. When this is done the city will have more energy to start more projects and more people with the skills and experience to get the job done. If we quit and go home it’s kind of like admitting that we will never be able to handle projects of this complexity again, and that would be an even greater loss than not building a Second Avenue Subway.