Grand Central Madison, the new train station bored into the rock beneath Grand Central Terminal, is finally open. When it’s fully operational it’s expected to serve 160,000 daily Long Island RR riders. And by freeing up space at Penn Station (once dominated by LIRR), some Metro-North trains will be able to terminate there instead of at GCT.
As a friend from an
engineering consultancy put it in social media:
“This new station proves we CAN build great things (in the US).” Yeah… a decade late and 400% over budget.
I hate always to be the cynic,
but if we don’t understand our mistakes we’ll keep repeating (and over-paying
for) them.
The New York Times did an investigation
in 2017 showing that the construction cost for Grand Central Madison and its
new tunnels was seven times the average of such projects elsewhere in the
world. Why?
Feather-bedding for one: 200
of the 900 construction workers digging the huge tunnels were being paid $1000
a day but effectively doing nothing.
This was discovered in 2010 and the excess workers were laid off, but
the incident was not reported to the public which is paying for the project.
Right now the MTA is facing a
fiscal cliff: it doesn’t have enough
money to keep the region’s mass transit running without a fare
increase. But they’re still burning
through $51
billion on capital projects like this one:
new ADA access at subway stations, new signal systems, important stuff
but never cheap.
During the pandemic the MTA
paid McKinsey consultants millions to predict when transit ridership would
return (thereby reducing their operating deficits). The consultants told them what they wanted to
hear, that commuters would soon be back in droves! Wrong.
Subway ridership is now only 65%
of pre-COVID numbers, buses about 62% and Metro-North only 68%. On the subways the perception (and reality)
of crazies and criminals is discouraging riders further… while actually
encouraging fare beaters. The MTA says
it loses a half billion dollars a year in uncollected fares!
Those are facts. So too is the reality, finally, of a brand
new train station in New York City! But will
it deliver on the promises that were made to justify its expense?
The MTA (parent of the LIRR
and Metro-North) says the new Grand Central Madison will save “40 minutes
commuting time” for Long Island riders heading to the east side of Manhattan. Maybe.
Just emerging from the new station, 15 stories below street level, takes almost 12 minutes riding one of the four ginormous 182 foot long escalators. I have a pool going as to how quickly one of them breaks down. (Email me if you want in.)
Metro-North can’t keep a
single story escalator from the lower to upper level of GCT working… or the escalators
constantly broken down connecting to Madison and Park Avenues, let alone these
monsters.
But next time you’re in Grand
Central, go take a look… while the new station is still sparkling, bright and
in full working order. After all, you
paid for it.
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