There’s often delays of 15 minutes or longer for passengers riding the New York City subway. It’s no surprise for commuters who are riding the nation’s largest and most crowded transit system. However, waiting for a train for almost 100 years is agonizing, that has been the case for the Second Avenue Subway.
The Second Avenue subway was opened on the 1st of January 2017 for the first time in New York City. The project has taken so long to complete, almost one hundred years back. The planning for the project started during Woodrow Wilson’s tenure as president of the United States of America. The Second Avenue subway has been used as the ultimate joke to poke fun at the ineffectiveness of infrastructure development in the U.S. since 1919.
The media has also made fun of the project several times, a front-page article written in the New York Times back in 1957 declared that it was highly improbable that the second Avenue subway was ever going to materialize.
The majority of delayed projects always suffer from poor management and embezzlement of funds, the Second Avenue subway is no exception, the Metropolitan Transit Authority has been under heavy criticism for the high expenses of the Second Avenue subway, many people have pointed out that it was massive.
Richard Barone, the vice president of transportation for the Regional Plan Association made a statement in which he pointed out that there’s a need to figure out how to build the next phase of the Second Avenue subway quicker and cheaper. Adding that a $4.5 billion expenditure for three stations was too much.
This comes after City officials pledged sometime last year that all of the New York City’s underground subway stations would have WiFi by 2017. This pledge has been fulfilled, good news to New Yorkers, every station now has access to the internet thanks to the Transit Wireless which made it a reality.
