Gateway to the future: Break the transportation-industrial complex
Published on Apr 4, 2019 by
Gateway to the future: Break the transportation-industrial complex
WRITTEN BY DAILY NEWS EDITORIAL BOARD
WRITTEN ON APRIL 04 2019
On Monday, hours after becoming MTA chief, Pat Foye said of the revolutionary approach to repairing the L-train using cable racking: “I think that the old L train plan represented a colossal, collective failure of imagination because it provided for building, as the Daily News editorial pages noted, with respect to the L train and Gateway, if I’m characterizing it properly, building a 1915 tunnel today doesn’t really make a lot of sense.
“The governor, in what I think was a wonderful turn of phase, took Gen. Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex phrase from the 50s and turned it into what I believe exists, but I never really thought about it as a phrase: the transportation-industrial complex. I think that complex is real.
“I think the collective colossal failure of imagination included the three firms [in the old L train plan], which are large, international publicly traded firms. I think that the industry and the MTA have got to do better.”
Voicer Carlo Scissura, of the New York Building Congress, has a letter in these pages lambasting our call to use cable racking to go back to the drawing board and dramatically cut Amtrak’s $30 billion Gateway boondoggle. Citing “years of planning, preparation and careful engineering,” he says full steam ahead and “build Gateway now.”
Those are the words of the transportation-industrial complex, plowing forward because a plan exists and costs have already been sunk.
On Tuesday, Amtrak Chairman Tony Coscia said that the railroad is studying cable racking to repair the Hudson tubes. That’s the way: cheaper, faster, smarter.
Click here to read the article at New York Daily News.
