'Summer of hell' begins for New York commuters: Massive eight-week track-reconstruction [tr]

UK Daily Mail ^ | July 10, 2017 | Staff

[C19fan]

New York City's suburban commuters are bracing for the start next week of what has been called the 'summer of hell' as the United States' busiest train hub partly shuts down for extensive track repairs. The work at Pennsylvania Station is due to begin Monday and run through Sept. 1, leaving the roughly 600,000 commuters who arrive there each morning from New Jersey and Long Island scrambling for alternate ways into the city.

[Mmmike]

As long as the political climate prevents the expansion of the transportation infrastructure, these problems will not get any better.

[Alice in Wonderland]

I’m from The Rockaways where the Cross Bay Bridge connects two Queens neighborhoods. The original toll was a dime ... it’s now $4.25 each way.

[ml/nj]

As long as the political climate prevents the expansion of the transportation infrastructure

Whadaya mean no expansion! They extended the IRT #7 line one stop, and built (part of) a new 2nd Avenue line (proposed 1919, construction began 1972, "first phase" opened this year). There's also a "new" 63rd street line with one station in Manhattan.

ML/NJ

[firebrand]

Lindsay ruined transportation by giving MTA workers that suicidal health plan because he didn’t know how to negotiate when they struck on his first day in office, a petrifyingly cold day, January 1. We are still paying for that, as the children who were covered are still alive.

[firebrand]

Old book by Robert Daley, The World Beneath the City, covers other ground too but his history of the subway system is superb. The subway is ancient and so complicated that there is a vocational high school in the city just for future subway workers.

We have bigger problems than just not enough track.

[firebrand]

There's a funny story about the language the MTA uses in our local paper:

subway-speak.

NEW YORK CITY GOP MAN said his favorite explanation was "There's another train in front of this one. As soon as that train moves, this train will move too."

[backwoods-engineer]

Attempting to experience sympathy... failed.

Sorry, I just don't have any sympathy for anyone that lives in that freak show of a city-state by choice.