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Daily Archives: April 3, 2007

News Bulletin: Terms Accepted

By | | Housekeeping
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We interrupt this week of transit follies to announce that DanS and the Antiplanner have agreed on the terms for a bet regarding measure 37.

Those who read the comments to a post about Oregon’s ballot measure 37 will remember that DanS predicted that measure 37 “will be repealed in the 2008 election or a special election in 2009.” Then, in a comment on a later post, he offered to buy the Antiplanner dinner if the ballot measure is not repealed by April 30, 2009.

After some intense negotiations (well, a couple of emails), we agreed on the following terms:

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Transit Follies #2: The Second Avenue Subway

By | | Planning Disasters, Transportation
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Today we continue our April Fools week of transit follies with the Second Avenue Subway. This hugely expensive project proves that, if Manhattan didn’t exist, no one would build it today.

Phase I of the Second Avenue Subway will extend all the way from 63rd Street to 96th Street, a distance of 2.3 miles. As the name implies, it will go underneath Second Avenue, meaning it is just two blocks from the Lexington Avenue Subway. Eventually, the city wants to extend the subway in both directions to a total length of 8.5 miles.

The cost for this modest little rail line? A mere $4.7 billion for phase I, and a total of $16.8 billion for the entire length. That works out to about $2 billion per route mile. (Since there are two miles of track per route mile, that means a mere $1 billion per mile of track.)

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