The estimated cost of the Long Island Rail Road project, known as “East Side Access,” has ballooned to $12 billion, or nearly $3.5 billion for each new mile of track — seven times the average elsewhere in the world. The recently completed Second Avenue subway on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and the 2015 extension of the No. 7 line to Hudson Yards also cost far above average, at $2.5 billion and $1.5 billion per mile, respectively. — New York Times

Rikers Island looms large in New York’s imagination. It is home to a notorious complex of prisons, one whose excesses are still being discovered by the media and the courts. Many would like to see the Rikers Island closed forever, or barring that, to at least change the name to something that does not honor a slaveowner.

One group of designers has a different goal for Rikers Island—one that is within reach and, in fact, already at hand. — CityLab

Moving from one subway car to another is no easy task.

There is the dart-and-hustle option, entailing a sprint between entrances before the doors close, and the perilous — and prohibited — passing between the doors at the end of the car.

But the Metropolitan Transportation Authority wants to examine another route: a new generation of subway trains with open pathways between cars. — the New York Times

By shutting down New York City’s subways, commuter rail, and roads for this week’s storm-that-wasn’t, Governor Andrew Cuomo and the state-run Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) made the right call. [...]

The city has learned the hard way that the best way to keep people off the streets is by shutting down mass transit. [...]

Preemptively shutting down subways before Hurricane Irene in 2011 and Superstorm Sandy in 2012 worked well in keeping people home. — city-journal.org

The Second Avenue Subway is the stuff of legend in New York City, the locomotive who cried wolf. Plagued by funding shortages, the project has been stop-and-go since the 1920s. Now construction is back to go; in late September, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) [...] requested $1.5 billion [...]. Michael Horodniceanu, head of construction for the MTA, has stated that the long-awaited line may be ready by 2029. In the meantime, the MTA is learning about, and acting on, geology. — cafe.com

With so many crossovers in private operations, public data, and private uses, our future transit agency would blur the line between public and private sectors in a way we haven’t yet pioneered. The challenge is one of governance, bureaucratic turf, organizational development, planning, and public policy, not simply one of technology. Technology is just a tool, and our human institutions can either make use of it or try to ignore it. — urbanomnibus.net

In New York City history and lore, the Second Avenue subway is the Loch Ness Monster crossed with the Abominable Snowman. Politicians, transit planners, and everyone in between have witnessed this East Side subway line face countless stops and starts [...] And yet, the Second Avenue line has become a beacon for New York's future and a symbol of the numerous challenges facing a global city that must, in light of massive costs and slow build-outs, expand its transit network to stay competitive. — citylab.com