The Long Wait for the Next Train in New York City
Last Subway is the fascinating and dramatic story behind New York City’s struggle to build a new subway line under Second Avenue and improve transit services all across the city. With his extraordinary access to powerful players and internal documents, Philip Mark Plotch reveals why the city’s subway system, once the best in the world, is now too often unreliable, overcrowded, and uncomfortable. He explains how a series of uninformed and self-serving elected officials have fostered false expectations about the city’s ability to adequately maintain and significantly expand its transit system.
Last Subway offers valuable lessons in how governments can overcome political gridlock and enormous obstacles to build grand projects. However, it is also a cautionary tale for cities. Plotch reveals how false promises, redirected funds and political ambitions have derailed subway improvements. Given the ridiculously high cost of building new subways in New York and their lengthy construction period, the Second Avenue subway (if it is ever completed) will be the last subway built in New York for generations to come.
Read below for an excerpt from the book’s introduction.
New York once had the world’s greatest subway system, but for decades elected officials have not fulfilled their promises to improve facilities and expand routes. False promises have led to unreliable service, obvious neglect, and abandoned tunnels. One of the best ways to understand why New York’s subways have so many problems and what can be done about them is by learning about New York’s near- mythical subway under Second Avenue.
Every city has its own fanciful project. In the nineteenth century, a London architect proposed building a ninety- four- story pyramid to accommodate more than five million dead bodies, a bold solution to the problem of overcrowded graveyards. When Frank Lloyd Wright was eighty-nine years old, he unveiled plans for a mile-high Chicago skyscraper, 528 stories tall, with parking for fifteen thousand cars and one hundred helicopters. Although construction never started on the London and Chicago towers, the Soviet Union did begin erecting steel for the world’s tallest building in the 1930s. The Palace of the Soviets was designed to be a symbol of a new country and a thriving socialist economy. With twenty-one thousand seats in the main hall and a three- hundred- foot- tall bronze statue of Vladimir Lenin above, the palace would have been Moscow’s version of the Statue of Liberty standing on top of the Empire State Building resting above Madison Square Garden.¹
In the capital of capitalism, New Yorkers have been talking since 1903 about building a subway under Second Avenue, on Manhattan’s East Side. When the Second Avenue subway has not been a main character in the debates about improving transportation in New York City, it has been an ambitious understudy waiting to take its place center stage. Since the 1930s, the line has symbolized New York’s inability to modernize its infrastructure and accommodate its residents. While the number of people living and working in New York City has grown, its rapid transit system of underground and elevated rail lines has shrunk. Train lines above Second and Third Avenues were torn down in the 1940s and 1950s, in anticipation of the Second Avenue subway. With less capacity to accommodate even more passengers, overcrowding would eventually become one of the leading causes of subway delays.²
While two subway lines run the length of Manhattan’s West Side, only the Lexington Avenue line trains (numbers 4, 5, and 6) operate along the entire East Side. That is why the East Side’s trains are the most crowded in the country, with ridership rivaling the number of passengers who ride San Francisco’s, Chicago’s, and Boston’s entire transit systems combined. During peak periods, passengers crowd the subway cars, platforms, and stairwells — which slows down trains at stations, reduces the frequency of service, and exacerbates the crowded conditions.
New York’s leaders blame external forces for their repeated failures to build the Second Avenue subway. After all, the project was delayed by the Great Depression, World War II, and the city’s fiscal crisis in the 1970s. Although those were contributing factors, promises of improved subway services have always exceeded available resources. While politicians have repeatedly promised a Second Avenue subway to help advance their own careers, they have failed to acknowledge the enormous challenges involved in paying for it. The media have been complicit in raising false expectations and misleading the public into thinking unrealistic plans are achievable.
After decades of promises, New York actually started building the new subway line under the streets of East Harlem, the East Village, and Chinatown in the early 1970s. But to pay for the new subway, the city diverted resources from more critical work. As a result, the infrastructure on the existing system deteriorated and riders experienced frequent service delays.
In 1989, the Second Avenue subway was resurrected. Planners agonized over its exact route, engineers designed thousands of components, civic activists mobilized support, and elected officials allocated billions of dollars for the project. Thanks to thousands of workers who toiled underground in difficult and oftentimes dangerous conditions, the first three of sixteen planned Second Avenue subway stations opened to the public on New Year’s Day in 2017. This 1.5-mile-long rail line was the subway’s first major service expansion in more than fifty years, and has alleviated some subway crowding and reduced travel time for tens of thousands of New Yorkers. The spacious new stations, featuring dramatic works of art, have been widely acclaimed.³
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Time will tell whether these stations were worth their $4.6 billion cost. The section of the Second Avenue subway in service has been disparagingly dubbed a “stubway,” and a New York City deputy mayor, Dan Doctoroff, referred to it as “a silly little spur that doesn’t generate anything other than some convenience for people who are perfectly happy to live where they lived before.” Moreover, accelerating the construction schedule to meet a politically imposed deadline contributed to a subway crisis several months after its 2017 opening.⁴
On a per-mile basis, the completed section of the Second Avenue sub-way was the most expensive subway extension ever built anywhere in the world. Costs were high because of inefficient phasing and high real estate costs, powerful unions earning high wages and dictating costly work rules, and extensive regulations and environmental sensitivities. If the Second Avenue subway’s thirteen other planned stations are ever completed, the 8.5-mile line would be one of the world’s most expensive infrastructure projects, surpassing the $21 billion rail tunnel between England and France. Given the extraordinary cost and lengthy construction period, the Second Avenue subway will more than likely be the last subway line built in New York for generations to come.
