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Comment by systemvoltage | Hacker News Reader

I was just thinking, when was the last time we did something like this in the US? The California rail project has been going on for years, no one dares to even suggest building something like this. All great bridges were built over 50 years ago. If you suggest to do something major in the Bay Area, you would be booo'ed into oblivion for a mere suggestion.

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In the NYC area off the top of my head there's been the Tappan Zee bridge, the East Side Access project bringing the Long Island Rail Road into Grand Central Terminal, and 2nd Ave Subway Phase 2. Penn Station Access is being discussed, as is the Triboro RX line.

ETA: If you're curious NYC has a dashboard of capital projects >$25 million here: https://www1.nyc.gov/site/capitalprojects/dashboard/dashboar.... I think the complaint that we don't build anything in this country anymore is sometimes overstated.

ESA and 2nd Ave Subway Phase 2 are kind of the poster children of what's wrong with American infrastructure projects.

ESA was started in 2006 and planned to be finished in 2009 at the cost of $4.3B. It is now projected to be finished in 2023, at a cost of $12B.

Phase 2 of SAS costs $6B despite the fact that most of the tunnel actually already exists, and won't open until possibly 2029.

It's not even really about saving money to save money, but the high costs of these projects suck money away from other projects and needs. It's basically unfathomable at these prices for NYC to do something like Paris and build out 200 km (124 mi) of metro in the next decade.

The East Side Access is also a project that would never be built in Europe. What they should've done is built a through-tunnel through Manhattan connecting Long Island Railroad and New Jersey Transit, with two or three smaller stations across midtown.

Basically, instead of ESA and (ultimately cancelled) Gateway projects, calling for new tunnels connecting to giant carvern terminuses in the city, u connect these projects into one long tunnel without terminuses.

A terminus requires a lot of platforms and tracks because trains need to get completely emptied and turned around. If you stop at multiple stops and terminate at the other end of the city, you can do that a that a place where's plenty of space (or multiple different points). You also spread the passenger loads across multiple stations, meaning less passenger flow per station, less dwell time for trains (=higher frequency), and people will be closer to where they need to go (i.e. you can connect to all subway lines in Manhattan).

The eastern span of the SF-Oakland Bay Bridge was rebuilt (checks notes) a decade ago.

Not only is that far more recent than 50 years ago, it's also in the Bay Area.

I'm not sure they are doing that much better than the US. The completion date for this bridge is (currently) estimated at 2029. Fun sequence of sentences from its wiki page...

"and the tunnel idea received support from a large majority of the Danish parliament in January 2011. By 2012, therefore, the completion date had been pushed back to 2021, and in 2014 was estimated to be 2024, and then in 2015 delayed further to 2028. In 2020 it was delayed to 2029."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fehmarn_Belt_Fixed_Link

Well, the 2nd Ave subway was first proposed in 1920. It only took them a hundred years to build the first section.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Avenue_Subway

I absolutely love to complain about the 2nd Ave Subway, but it's worth noting that the "100 year" figure includes ~50 years of NYC mostly just promising to build the line.

Actual construction began in the 70s, and was subsequently suspended for another 20 years because of the city's poor finances. So that gets us closer to a merely ludicrous 30-50 year construction timescale instead of an egregious 100 year one.

NYC Water Tunnel No. 3[1] is somewhat comparable in scale, although not in geologic considerations (NYC is situated on top of solid bedrock, and they're boring directly through it well below ground level).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Water_Tunnel_No....

You only have to go back 19 years for the Zakim bridge in Boston.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_P._Zakim_Bunker_Hill_M...

The Sunshine Skyway was completed in 1987, under 40 years ago. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshine_Skyway_Bridge

Not quite the same scale, but still impressive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evergreen_Point_Floating_Bridg...

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