Subway: Yes or No?

After years of promises and planning, the Second Avenue project may be kaput.

By: Ryan Hartley Well the city government is at it again. The Second Avenue Subway project, the on-again off-again project that mayors and governors have been talking about for years, has just suffered what may be its final death blow. The ralk of service cutbacks at MTA coupled with the city's financial woes may mean that the transit authority may heed warnings that the $3,000 per minute that they are paying to dig a useless hole in the ground under Second Avenue isn't a sound investment. According to Gene Russianoff, “The M.T.A. just proposed cutting a fifth of their core capital program. That included dropping fixing 19 stations, and hundreds of millions for emergency fans in the tunnels. At some point, maybe not yet, how vigorously can we proceed on these expansion projects if we don’t have the money to keep fixing the existing system?” Perhaps the most glaring example of financial mismanagement is the "schedule" signs that are designed to display the time between trains. Those signs, which were supposed to be delivered in 2006, are now being slated for delivery in 2011, at a total cost of nearly $200 million. Some public transportation advocates are lobbying the MTA to focus more closely on its city bus program. The bus system is less expensive, and doesn't require digging a hold to nowhere. The cost of preparing surface streets for bus transportation is only $1-2 million per mile, as opposed to the nearly $1 billion per mile that underground tunnelling costs.