Surprise, surprise.

Estimates have now placed the MTA's $21 billion 2005-2009 capital program--which includes the Second Avenue subway, the LIRR-Grand Central connection, and the westward expansion of the 7 train--as being $1.4 billion over-budget at what is roughly its halfway point. Rising materials and real estate prices have made building anything in Manhattan almost prohibitively expensive, which means fewer contractors are bidding on large-scale transportation projects, and those that are have been setting prices substantially higher than the MTA intended.

I can't say I'm particularly surprised. It's not as though New York City, or the MTA, has established a proud tradition of on-time, under-budget infrastructure enhancements. Naturally, maintaining the fleet (and its operators) needs to be the authority's top priority, but unless this budget crunch stops getting worse--if it doesn't start getting better, though I'm not holding my breath--then some of these projects will almost certainly be canned. Probably the westward push on the 7 train and much of the southern portion of the Second Avenue subway.

But above all, someone needs to start going back to the drawing board now, and come up with some realistic alternatives in the event that any of these projects get the axe. If there's anything we could learn from a situation like that, it's that waiting 80 years for a situation to replicate itself is a waste of time and money. It makes perfect sense to me: if you only propose transit projects once a city gets too crowded, you'll only be maximizing your own costs since a crowded city means an equally crowded and expensive construction market. So New York either needs to come up with something cheaper or bite the billion-dollar bullet, but we need this thing pushed through now.

Les nouvelles rames de la RATP

A hale and hearty "Bonjour" from Paris, France, the focus of this post (the first in far too long). A tiny article on page 27 of today's Le Monde reads "The new cars of the RATP." The RATP, la Régie autonome des transports parisiens, is the Paris metropolitan transit authority, responsible for operating and maintaining the city's extensive network of subways, buses, and trams (and of course the Montmartre funiculaire).

The Paris Métro has at its disposal a veritable cornucopia of mass transit technology, notably the slighly newer generation of cars which run on pneumatic tires instead of conventional railcar trucks--their effect can't so much be seen as it can be heard, as this makes the many elevated segmets of the system much quieter to live around than their North American counterparts. Newer, fully-articulated and more energy-efficient trainsets are running on the woefully busy #1 line which roughly bisects the city.

The absolutely newest generation of revenue rolling stock, the MF 2000 (matériel fer du millésime 2000) has just rolled out on the #2 line, retaining the tube-like articulated design of the #1, but also including air conditioning, video displays for transit updates, surveillance cameras, and ridership-tracking equipment in every car. By 2016, the RATP expects to use this equipment on lines 5 and 9, replacing the current 1967 trains, which use 30% more energy and require more time for acceleration and deceleration.

This is roughly the same timeframe and rationale for New York's expected replacement of R-32, R-38, R-40 and R-42 cars (in service on the BMT/IND divisions for as many as 40 years) with the newer R-160 model. The projects have a number of things in common: efficient accel/decel, video screens, and Bombardier/Alstom, who will be at least partially outfitting both. What the MF 2000s do not share with any American transit system--so far--is the articulated design. For some reason, this aspect has never caught on in the states, though New York's systems did experiment with it in their adolesence. Articulating a trainset means easier movement for huddled masses of urban commuters, and faster speeds for high-speed intercity trains (a wheeltruck beneath each articulation point rather than simply at each end of each car helps shave weight off of high-speed TGV and ICE trains in France and Germany, respectively).