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And now it’s happening in midtown. First it was the 9/11 memorial that got too expensive and had to be reconsidered. Then it was the MTA’s Fulton Street transit hub that to be redesigned to cut costs: Its soaring glass dome has become less soaring and entirely stainless steel. Then, last week, it turned out that Santo Calatrava’s World Trade Center PATH station — for a long time, the only ground-zero building that seemed to be getting anywhere — was a billion dollars over budget and would also have to be scaled down. Now today’s Times brings word that, oh, yeah, the planned extension of the 7 train is likely to come hundreds of millions of dollars, or even maybe a billion dollars, over budget, and the MTA won’t grant any contracts to start work on the project until the city comes up with a new deal to finance the thing. And so it becomes clearer and clearer why it’s taken 80 years to build the Second Avenue line.
M.T.A. Says It Can’t Handle Cost Overruns on No. 7 Project [NYT]
