Why New York Can't Have Nice Things

It costs three times more to build a subway station in New York than in Paris. We’d be living in a whole different kind of city if we could change that.

- Josh Barro

Imagine being able to get from the North Bronx to the Financial District in less than half an hour by train. Or being able to take a train straight from Peekskill or Greenwich or White Plains that, instead of terminating at Grand Central, ran straight through the city—stopping in midtown, at Union Square, in the Financial District, in Downtown Brooklyn, and then proceeding on to JFKairport— offering a one-seat ride to most any place you might need to commute to.

If you live in London, you won’t have to imagine it for long: London is nearly finished with work on Crossrail, a mega project that will funnel commuter trains from London’s eastern and western suburbs into a new, 14-mile underground line that will serve seven stations across London’s urban core. Crossrail is not arriving quite as soon as expected—like many megaprojects, it has suffered some delays and cost overruns— but it should open in 2020 or 2021 or so. When it does, it will enable a new service, to be called the Elizabeth line, which will increase the capacity of London’s railtransit system by 10 percent. It will shorten and simplify commutes, letting workers get off their suburban trains at stops near their offices instead of changing from commuter trains to the subway.

By building this project, London is just catching up to its peers. Paris has had a similar system, the five-line RER, since the 1970s. Berlin’s S-Bahn predates World War II. The genius of these systems is to create a hybrid of subway and commuter rail, serving long- and short-distance commuters alike and quickly connecting far-flung parts of a metropolitan area. That’s why the E in RER stands for express and the S in S-Bahn stands for