Aggressive deployment of eminent domain and exemption from CEPA and all the other “think of the children” NIMBY rules.
* Fear that a metro will bring in "undesirables" (i.e. poor / lower-class people)
* Concerns about noise (whether real or imagined)
* Some people just hate change
In US suburbs, a lot of people are going to drive even if they live next to a train station. So there’s no convenience or property value benefits. To them, they only see downsides.
That’s not true of most modern metro lines that are generally bored and not cut and covered.
Bored metro lines create no noise on the surface and are preferred nowadays because there is barely any constraint on the routes you can create.
Cut and covered are only used when creating whole new districts.
The article paints a somewhat biased view of the construction process. It gives too much credit to Gallardo and the pp and conveniently ignored the serious issues in the sam Fernando de Henares área created by too rapid construction that ignored environmental and design issues in the Sandy soil near the Jarama river. Several hundred apartments have been condemned because of it and a whole neighborhood affected ...
But it is the best metro I've seen in Europe or north america. Most usable and cheapest to use.
Many people who visit me for the first time comment on this.
On the very quietest summer night, when there's no ventilation systems running etc, I can sometimes hear an occasional dum-dum, dum-dum when I lie in bed. The tunnel is directly under the building.
In suburbia closer is also better, but away from the track is better than along the track of it's above ground.
The idea of security concerns sounds ridiculous to me.
I had a lady parade around my neighborhood handing out fliers saying that extending the bus stop to our neighborhood was going to bring rapists and pedophiles into the neighborhood. I thought she was an odd one out and insane so I made a joke about it at a neighborhood event a few weeks later.
Turns out, I was the odd one out…