I submitted this mostly to see how Rayiner would react, since this is one of his beats.
> But New York’s transit stations are still overdesigned. All recent stations have full-length mezzanines, which require larger station caverns and therefore more expense. (Why must all these new stations look like the Batcave?)
In DC, you’ve got these cavernous underground stations, a testament to brutalist architecture. In Chicago, you’ve got a wooden platform on some steel girders. Which is more expensive to build and refurbish? Chicago rebuilt 10 miles of the red line in five months for half a billion. DC has spent years just trying to get the tracks to stop catching fire.
The new stuff is just so overdesigned. The silver line has these giant stations high in the air over freeway medians, with air bridges to connect them to the entrances. Many METRA stations are just a wood platform on an embankment.
And the article really hits the point. It’s not just the inefficiency. It’s about imagining how much more transit you could build if our costs were lower.
Take DC's metro as an example. The stations are mostly raw concrete, but they are massive. The underground stations are cavernous vaults with sprawling mezzanines.
The decor undoubtedly adds a bit to the cost, but it is nothing close to the cost of excavating two or three times as much space.
Seconding this. We spent as much as entire cities spend on a new line on a single stupid station in FiDI that looks like a stegosaurus carcass [1].
Add to that the overcapacity in builders on sites and endless reviews and you get the present mess. Some problems, like those owing to our common law system and higher wages, are unavoidable. But a lot of them are.
[1] http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2015/03/santiago-calatrava-wo...
Meanwhile, in Moscow... https://hypebeast.com/2015/10/moscow-metro-stations https://www.rbth.com/arts/2017/06/19/dont-miss-these-5-stati...