New York transit and the legacy of 9/11

Nearly a decade and a half after 9/11, it's obvious that the foreign-policy decisions Washington made after the attacks were not the best. The opening of the new PATH train terminal at the World Trade Center site on Thursday shows how New York officials, too, fell short of what they owed their state and city. The impulse is to ignore how badly New York screwed up reconstruction. But we owe it to the 9/11 victims – and to ourselves – to remember not only the attacks, but our own mistakes afterward.

Two years after 9/11, Anthony Coscia, then chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the bi-state government body that owns the World Trade Center site, said that the new train station they would build at Ground Zero to serve New Jersey commuters would “inspire the world for generations to come.”

Today, Port Authority Executive Director Patrick J. Foye says that the now-completed station is not a symbol of our soaring recovery after 9/11, but instead a “symbol of excess.”

The station is nearly five years late, and cost double its initial budget. And it does not add train service or make commuting less crowded or faster for the New Jersey subway riders who will use it.

How did we get from there to here?

It's easy to say that the mistakes New York (and New Jersey) made stem from 9/11 itself. Rebuilding office buildings and transit space to help the city's economy recover, while at the same time creating a memorial and a museum to comfort victims' families and educate future generations, all in the same 16 acres, was always going to be an impossible task.

But most of the mistakes New York made had nothing to do with 9/11. In fact, they are repeats of the mistakes that have long plagued our infrastructure decisions.

First, the Port Authority – and former Gov. George Pataki and his several New Jersey counterparts, who were ultimately in charge of the agency – failed to be realistic about costs, and how an untested design would strain those costs.

A $2 billion cost overrun on a train station is a catastrophic failure, one that many observers blame on the designer, Santiago Calatrava, for creating a fanciful, hard-to-construct building with steel skeletal wings, column-free space and an “oculus” retractable sunroof.

Yet the failure is not Calatrava's fault. New York and New Jersey decision-makers failed to see the very real risks that existed with this design and construction.

This failure to control risks and costs is an unfortunate New York tradition. The state's project to bring the Long Island Rail Road into Grand Central station was once supposed to cost $3 billion and be done by 2009, but now costs $10.2 billion and won't be finished before 2022.

The second mistake New York and New Jersey made was their failure to prioritize. Is the train station a piece of functional infrastructure – or a monument?

What New York needs, and needed before 9/11, is better transit capacity. New Jersey commuters need a new tunnel under the Hudson River before the existing one, more than a century old, falls apart. They also need a new Manhattan bus terminal for the same reason. New Yorkers need more subway trains per hour to ease crowding.

The problem, though, is that these needs aren't particularly critical in Lower Manhattan – and weren't before 9/11.

Faster subways and a new Hudson tunnel would, of course, have benefitted Lower Manhattan by benefiting the whole city. One only needs to ride the packed Lexington Avenue trains taking people from Wall Street to the Upper East Side to understand that.

But New York had federal money to spend in Lower Manhattan, so it did, and when that federal money ran out, the Port Authority ended up spending its own money – $1.2 billion – on a station it didn't need.

The third problem is our failure to think about the region holistically. The Port Authority is supposed to serve both New York and New Jersey – and do the best it can for commuters.

Instead, it runs on a “tit-for-tat” philosophy – doing one thing for New York means doing another thing for New Jersey. After the Port Authority took over Stewart Airport in upstate New York, it had to take over the Atlantic City airport – even though neither project has anything to do with the Port's mission of improving life for downstate commuters.

Similarly, Mayor Bill de Blasio thinks only about infrastructure the city controls – which doesn't include the state-run subways.

Nobody in power wakes up thinking, “What are the top three projects that are best for everyone – and how do we get those thing done?” Instead, officials think about how to protect their own little fiefdoms.

The fourth and final problem is one that afflicts the entire country: thinking that money alone will solve our infrastructure problems.

We need money to build and fix infrastructure, yes – more money than we're spending.

But if you want to see how money isn't everything, go downtown this weekend and see billions of dollars’ worth of marble and steel that doesn't help anyone get from Point A to Point B.

And remember the lesson. After all, one of the last things New York and New Jersey's 9/11 victims did before they died was commute.