Why Is American Rail So Costly?

Planners are supposed to resist unreasonable requests, but it’s easier for them to “push the yes button” to placate a potential enemy, as one MBTA manager quoted in the NYU case study put it. GLX, for instance, was redesigned at a late phase to accommodate activists’ demands that it include an extension of a suburban bicycle path, requiring tens of millions of dollars of extra spending on wider retaining walls. New York built the Second Avenue Subway by removing soil through a narrow access shaft rather than cutting open a street from the surface—an approach that avoided a few temporary street closures but added several years to construction.