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Press
/ Dec 02,2019
Why Is American Rail So Costly?
In “Why Is American Rail So Costly?” Connor Harris of City Journal summarizes the recent webinar hosted by the Transportation and Land-Use program team of Research Scholars Eric Goldwyn and Elif Ensari and Fellow Alon Levy, which featured The Boston Case: The Story of the Green Line Extension. Harris writes:
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.