Hamas was able to construct over 300 miles of tunnels in Gaza, with telephone lines and electricity, for just a few hundred million dollars. Yet New York City will spend around $8 billion just to construct 1.76 miles of subway. So journalist Matthew Yglesias has a cost-saving plan: “My unorthodox ceasefire plan is that instead of New York spending $7.7 billion on less than two miles of subway, the MTA should hire Hamas to do it.”
As transportation expert Marc Joffe notes, New York is spending a ton of money for a minuscule extension of its subway, that is not even needed because a bus rapid transit line already serves the area, and subway ridership has fallen:
The New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority is moving forward with plans to extend its Second Avenue Subway, incurring unprecedented costs and potentially jeopardizing the transit system’s state of good repair. Before shovels go into the ground, federal and local officials should consider shortening or even shelving this project.
The Second Avenue Subway Phase 2 promises to add 1.76 miles of track and three new stations in Upper Manhattan at an estimated cost of $7.7 billion, working out to more than $4 billion per mile….Overall subway ridership peaked in 2014 and fell 6 percent by 2019 before cratering with the onset of the COVID pandemic. Ridership is now rebounding but is expected to remain below pre‐pandemic levels for the foreseeable future….
Project advocates contend that East Harlem is a transit desert, a place where underprivileged residents have insufficient access to public transportation. But a bus rapid transit line already serves the area.
New York is not alone in wasting money. California is spending $5.1 billion to bail out wasteful transit systems few people even use, even though an almost empty rail car or bus results in more greenhouse gas emissions than an automobile.
Even worse, the Biden administration wants to spend $8.8 billion just expanding D.C.’s Union Station, which handles only a small fraction of the traffic it used to. The subway line that runs through Union Station has far fewer users than before the pandemic, only about 40 percent of pre-pandemic levels. Commuter rail lines running through Union Station have even worse statistics. As of December 2022, Virginia Railway Express ridership was only a quarter of its 2019 levels. Its average rail car is only about 30 to 40 percent full on a weekday. Maryland Area Regional Commuter rail carried only a third of the people it carried just before the pandemic in February 2020. Rail ridership will never return to pre-pandemic levels, because of the rise in remote work. A third of the Washington D.C., metropolitan area population now works remotely, quadruple the number who worked remotely before the pandemic.
Trying to get people to ride mass transit systems was difficult even before the rise of remote work, because it takes so long for most people to commute to and from work on mass transit. It can take an hour and a half to take buses or trains to work for a commute that would take only half an hour by car. Most train and bus stations are not right near where people live or work, and people taking mass transit often have to ride multiple different buses or trains to get to work.
