This is what it looks like when you do such a thing:
https://gvacdn.akamaized.net/Assets/Images_Upload/2017/08/18...
The stores in the neighborhood are complaining that they'll probably go out of business before the works are done.
You're right. In fact, the Market Street passage of BART/Muni in San Francisco was a cut and cover. The closure of Market Street and delays in construction caused a lot of damage. Not the least of which the collapse of businesses[1]
The Theaters went out of business, became porn cinemas and liquor stores. Much of what Civic is today was a result of that era.
Not to say Cut and Cover was the 100% cause - but it was a major, major contributor.
1: https://hoodline.com/2016/07/in-their-words-the-convergent-h...
Aside: I'm not a student of architecture, and Modernist (and especially International Style) architecture didn't really click for me until someone explained the design of that building. All building services (restrooms, stairwells, elevators, etc) are located in the giant, black, windowless monolith. To my mind that feature is most descriptive of the style and its motivations, particularly regarding the relationship between form and function and the emphasis on the latter. Its shape and materials are, at least superficially, almost entirely dictated by its pure function. Yet it's the defining characteristic of the form of the building and clearly intentionally imposing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Bush_Plaza [2] https://noehill.com/sf/landmarks/sf183.asp
EDIT: You can't see the monolith from the Wikipedia or Wikimedia photos. Which is actually sort of strange given how imposing it is in real-life. Here's a better photo, https://www.som.com/FILE/16472/crownzellerbachhq_788x900_gab... , from the SOM website (see https://www.som.com/projects/crown_zellerbach_headquarters).
I've always loved that building.
Very different neighborhood from Civic though -- even though they're only 20 minutes walk apart.
During and post-war that end of town was much less desirable. That changed significantly when the shipping moved. Also that building marks arrival of modern building techniques suitable for an earthquake zone. That triggered a construction boom in FiDi.
Mid-Market on the other hand was in a post-War retail boom. Civic was a major hub of retail and Theaters -- and was impacted a lot more by the BART construction.
All that said, the arc of San Francisco neighborhoods does baffle me at the best of times.
I don't think it's the cut and cover method per se. Here in Minneapolis when they built a surface light rail line from Downtown Minneapolis to Downtown Saint Paul iirc nearly 200 businesses closed along the LRT and cited the construction as the primary reason. Any construction that impedes travel to businesses for a long time is going to be negative for businesses. Here we subsidized about half the affected businesses along the line during the 4 years of construction but it apparently was not enough.
http://www.michaelnygard.com/blog/2015/07/the-fear-cycle/
Once you have enough sewer/natural gas/electric/cable/telephone/fiber/water/who knows what else/ lines buried under the streets I can totally understand how nobody would want to touch that with a ten foot pole, just like legacy code :)
Even with the tunnel boring they did on the Upper East Side of NYC for the 2nd Ave Subway, half the avenue was dedicated to construction entrances and other above-ground activities. Ultimately, may stores did go out of business. My point is, tunnel boring is also quite disruptive to what happens at the street level.
https://www.somervillema.gov/cedarstreet https://www.somervillema.gov/sites/default/files/cedar-stree...
Most businesses sign long-term leases, often 10 years. Landlords are under no legal obligation to offer rent breaks while construction is underway.
In fact, landlords would probably prefer the businesses go under so they can sign more lucrative deals post-subway construction -- see the current NYC store vacancy problem: http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/change-math-keeping-nyc-s...
You're assuming the area will become undesirable during construction and landlords will be forced to offer cheaper rates to lure tenants, but as we see above more likely they'd prefer to wait. Especially if a subway is about to be built there.
Not only that, it's not always feasible depending on the depth of the tunnel. The 2nd ave tunnel is 80 feet deep, and in a city with heavy underground infrastructure already in place.
Not to say that it can't work out (or that some of those services don't have to be moved for tunnels) -- but cut and cover was a lot easier when we had less infrastructure.
These problems are obviously 10x in such a dense city as NYC.
What if that subway needs major maintenance in two years because of a mistake during construction? Why would I open a business on that street if the city has already shown it'll put me out of business to work on it?
Well, it IS getting better, slowly. Maybe it will take 75 years to recover. How long-term are you thinking?
The government should first be concerned by not crushing individuals' rights. That is what Rule of Law is for. Many societies have been utterly destroyed by putting "the general good" as a pretext for policies.
That's just a standard good governance principle.
So, Belgium.
> and now is projected to be closer to 3 years.
Right. Belgium. :P
It can still be cost effective, but it can be rather unpleasant during the construction period.
When you dig, you have to deal with all of this. If you break something, you have to fix it -- and in the case of fiber or multi-hundred-pair copper, you can't necessarily just "splice" it or easily reroute around your construction site.
Here, the gas company (contractor of same, really) put in detection wires so that the location of the new, plastic pipes can be sensed. However, the contractor ran them in the most convenient fashion for them, meaning often on angles from a single starting point, and also rather close to the surface in places. Their are minimum depths they are supposed to maintain at various positions from the main to the meter. I'm not sure they always did so. Some homeowners who landscape or garden more aggressively, may be in for a surprise.
Going deeper is possible but does have drawbacks; access shafts must be deeper and it takes a longer time for people to move between platform and street level. New York's older cut-and-cover sections also do not deal with ventilation systems, because regularly installed grates to the surface essentially use the piston effect to circulate air in and out of the system.
Quite a few of London's lines are deep, but they generally have escalators which I don't see a lot of in Manhattan.
Oh no, democracy... On a more serious note, boring causes far less disruption to street-level commerce. I haven't seen an analysis which includes the lost tax revenue and economic activity from cut and cover.
Moreover, something deeper is going on as even boring in NYC costs more than in other countries.
Corruption. Rampant, unabashed corruption. That's what's going on. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
And I certainly don't want to know the insurance costs for this kind of project, no matter the method...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Water_Tunnel_No....
Plenty of other cities worldwide use tunnel boring and get far better cost per mile than in the states. That's not the issue.
Overreaching unions. Layers of consultants. Squabbling jurisdictions. And as the article mentions, the fact that they build so infrequently that they essentially have to skill up from scratch every time and can never optimise or learn from previous mistakes.
There's a lot of information about this out there but that about covers it I think. Here's a nice quote from a nytimes article:
"Trade unions, which have closely aligned themselves with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and other politicians, have secured deals requiring underground construction work to be staffed by as many as four times more laborers than elsewhere in the world, documents show."
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
The major issue seems to be that construction unions do not negotiate with the public authorities paying for it, but the construction contractors, and the contractors are more than happy to just pass along the cost and pad their margins. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
It's taken so long that projected peak system congestion _with_ the extra line is predicted to be worse than it was without the line when it was funded, even though its capacity is about 10 passengers per second through the core. The lines it's "relieving" are hopelessly over-capacity, so it will fill immediately when it opens AND it's expected to increase total usage because hey, there's this line from outside London right into the core, why not live there and commute...
But certainly it's a comparable problem, in the sense that e.g. Crossrail had to "thread the needle" fitting the new tunnels between existing escalators and the Northern Line underground rail tunnel that both remained in use during construction.
This seems pretty reasonable to me, to be honest. And most of it is done ahead of schedule isn't it?
How quickly do you think it should take from zero to a 21 km tunnel underneath London? It seems insanely fast now I think about it.
It's the biggest civil engineering project in Europe, or so they say. And a big part of that is because you don't just massively increase transport capacity into the core of a major metro area. That would just overload all the other infrastructure.
The BBC's documentaries on the Crossrail are great at showing all of the complexity of building the thing and dealing with historic buildings, super-hard brickwork, archaeological discoveries, concert halls and more.
Some shops on the street could very well go out of business due to lack of local traffic... would they be compensated?
In light of that cut and cover sounds downright peachy.
Billion.
I don't know whether that was ever factored into the decision to bore instead of cut, but I'd bet that cutting through schist is a lot harder than the chalk and clay of London and Paris.
[1]: https://mhdh.library.columbia.edu/exhibits/show/irt/laying-t...
[2]: https://www.nypl.org/blog/2015/05/04/subway-construction-the...
Because London's transport is all integrated under control of the local government (an option which is prohibited in most UK cities to facilitate "competition" ie price-gouging by foreign owned corporations) you might not have realised that you weren't using the Underground but one of the other modes, almost all of which are covered by the same ticketing system (the "Dangleway" isn't and neither are the boats).
If you travelled on ordinary seeming trains above ground, those weren't the Underground but instead ordinary "heavy rail" trains on National Rail infrastructure within London. Many of those lines are indeed far above the ground in parts of central London, but those are just called viaducts and aren't usually considered an "elevated railway" per se.
If you travelled on small trains in East London that didn't have a driver (you can sit at the front like a roller coaster), that's the Docklands Light Railway, almost all of which is elevated, it was built towards the end of last century during regeneration of the "Docklands" area.
If the trains seemed to be sharing a road with cars at street level, in South London, that's the Tramlink.
If the trains were smaller and red, that's a bus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docklands_Light_Railway
It's not part of the Underground, but it's also managed by Transport for London as part of its integrated network of public transport.
The Blues Brothers was set and filmed in Chicago (although they did shoot a scene in Milwaukee). It showed the "L" rapid-transit system.
I don't think that was necessary. Yes, The Blues Brothers was centred around Chicago, but it might have been a while since GP saw the film, so their memory may have been hazy.
Aside from that, The French Connection featured a famous car chase that included the elevated trains in New York City:
Not entirely true - the Crossrail in London goes under the Barbican arts centre, and that section of the track has special floating tracks to reduce noise and vibrations:
There's multiple articles about the issue, but this article from the NY Times does a good enough job illustrating the problem: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/08/18/nyregion/new-...
Also a good chunk of NYC subways were built with cut & cover (sections of IRT 2/3 lines as an example).
Faster is reasonably objective. But one reason it might be "cheaper" is that the extra cost is paid as an externality by all the people who just have to lump being inconvenienced.
http://www.urban-hub.com/landmarks/amsterdam-subway-line-now...
For a good short documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMhjxp_CZng
The owners of the forever destroyed street-level businesses, you mean?
https://ny.curbed.com/2017/9/19/16335068/nyc-subway-mta-stat...
Imagine if the 2nd ave line was done this way - sure you'd get a lot of pissed Upper East Siders, but their property value is going to skyrocket from the project anyway. As far as I'm concerned, they could deal with a year of inconvenience instead of getting it built over decades for magnitudes of money more.
Of course, the City Council would never agree to this plan. It's easier for them not to disturb anyone if they want to be re-elected...