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Comment by alwaysdoit | Hacker News Reader

> In Paris, as well as Athens, Madrid, Mexico City, Caracas, Santiago, Copenhagen, Budapest, and I imagine other cities for which I can’t find this information, metro stations are built cut-and-cover... There is extensive street disruption, for about 18 months in the case of Paris, but the merchants and residents get a subway station at the end of the works.

The cost of using a more expensive method ($750M per station vs $110) of building in order to prevent disruption to car traffic is almost always attributed to the cost of public transportation. But it seems to me like it at least partially should be considered a cost of maintaining car infrastructure.

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I'm actually curious: how do those businesses, particularly smaller ones, survive 18 months of highly impeded traffic?

If parent poster's numbers are even in the right ballpark, we could just directly subsidize the small businesses that are disrupted and still come out money ahead.

Some transit could pay for itself by not being built and paying the people who would ride it to stay home. There is a lack of total system optimization.

It turns out small businesses make money from customers who stop in, not people driving by in automobiles.

I had no problem walking into shops at metro station construction sites in Copenhagen or Budapest.

Many of them do not. I know the owner of a business who is really struggling for this reason.

As an example, the Los Angeles Metro actually has a "Business Interruption Fund" that they use to help small businesses in areas impacted by street-level construction (like subway station construction sites).

https://www.metro.net/projects/business-interruption-fund/

This seems like the best of both worlds. The millions in savings for using more invasive construction methods should offset the $60,000 per business they are paying.

Van Ness in SF has been torn up for years and multiple businesses have closed as a result while most manage to stay open. I think access to roads is less important in places like SF because parking is impossible anyways - people who were going to shop there are already walking.

Plus there's a minor surplus of business provided by the construction workers who have to stand around in groups of five for 7 hours a day in between lunch breaks...

The irony of Van Ness is what they're building isn't even underground.

How does bus rapid transit take so many years to build?

back in college, my favorite chinese joint just two blocks from campus went out of business because their street was torn up, and then permit issues followed by bad weather meant no one could drive or park at the restaurant for something like 6 weeks.

starting a restaurant is risky enough, forgoing a month and a half of profit while staying open is just a disaster. I had a crush on one of the waitresses, and she told me she had gotten close to the family that owned and operated the place and they were heartbroken, furious but powerless.

Progress!

There's a very busy Pho' (Vietnamese) restaurant around here in Budapest that has exactly two parking places, but it's right across from the tram stop and a bus stop.

Of course it stated knowing this, so rather different from starting with a parking provided street and then seeing that change.

Also consider that people in those places don't drive everywhere. Foot traffic is hardly ever closed during construction, and most customers reach small businesses by foot. This means that the losses aren't as pronounced as you probably thought.

Honest answer. Many don't.

At least for Madrid this is false. Not even in new development areas is Metro cut and cover, but tunneled.

The stations?

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