I mean yeah.. but 5k vs 500 million.

What's more work, cutting down 100,000 trees? Or painting a couple of miles of existing roads?

Wait 500 MILLION dollars for a couple of miles of bus lanes on already existing roads?

What in the flying fuck!?

It's 3 union watchers for each union worker all the way down, hence the price tag.

Ok.. well then maybe don't start the escalator replacement in a busy station until you have all the parts needed in a warehouse. It was planned work, they had notices up months ahead of time. Did they not know what components go into the replacement escalator? Don't think supply chain issues are a valid excuse right now.

You can pay part up front and the rest based on results.

....and yes? Lots of fixed price projects don't pay until something is delivered in production. Not everything is time and materials.

Mediocrity is being nice. We are stuck accepting utter incompetence.

I have actually worked in consulting. I don't see how any of your points prevent what I'm suggesting from being possible.

Literally any non American city with a subway system. Travel a bit, the shit we get here is not how it has to be.

If they actually find a solution, worth every penny. Make the contract only pay out if they do and it is shown to work in practice.

Yeah it's wild. I'm pretty sure in most major cities an escalator repair is something they do overnight. A replacement is a weekend job, sorry for the inconvenience.

Because something is deeply rotten to the core in our process for building infrastructure to the point that it is just not affordable.

It doesn't have to be this way. Literally no other world class city in the world pays even a fraction of our costs.

The solution isn't to just somehow find 7.7 billion dollars for this, it's to figure out why the fuck it costs more than the 1 billion it would cost in London/Paris/Rome/Madrid/Tokyo/Singapore/Hong Kong/Beijing/Seoul/Osaka etc.

They are replacing one escalator at the station near my office.. October to July (target, will probably be late).

Now I'm no expert, but how does it take 10 months to REPLACE an escalator? The structure already exists, the electrical is run,. You just replace the escalator which I'm also pretty sure you get all the parts delivered and just have to assemble.

Yeah.. that it happens isn't surprising. That it's 20x more than convicted is shocking.

Only reason covid killed a lot of cops is they were always the worst maskers around.

Wait wtf is this for real? Barely 1 in 20 people arrested on a felony charge are convicted? What the fuck is this? Either the police are making a shit ton of unjustified arrests or our entire judiciary needs to be fired and start from scratch.

That won't happen. Because hospitals that say residents don't provide any value are just fucking lying.

Source: My partner is an attending physician at a teaching hospital. The residents do a lot of if not most of the work. Yes she's there to guide/supervise/sign off, but they're still doing valuable work (AND the hospital is getting paid more than the residents salary just for having them there).

It's a bluff, any hospital that decides to forego residents is stupid and their competition will happily scoop them up.

And honestly.. there should be some legal consequences for just blatantly lying for propaganda purposes like hospitals do all the time. Fraud? False advertising? I don't know, but it's crazy they can just say provably false stuff that pushes their agenda and 95% of the population that isn't really familiar with the issues in depth just takes it at face value.

The residency program is complete bullshit. It's basically slave labor and they do SO MUCH of the actual work for hospitals that have them, while getting paid worse than nurses.

IMO it's the part in medicine most in need of a change. No issue with nurses, but compared to residents they have a pretty sweet thing going. More money, less hours.

It's been a good decade for tech...

But yeah seriously, I know I'm not the median, but I'm also not a billionaire over here. There's over half a million people in NYC alone making my income or more and paying those taxes.

The problem here is never that there's no money for something, the sums allocated to various things in the city budget are mind blowing and not seen in any other city in the world. We just don't seem to get much for it.

My city tax alone was over $6000. It should cover this shit.

You are stuck in 2019 world.

The old trend line of office space value is permanently gone. Adapt or perish.

Anyway, this is about allowing those that want to to do the conversion.

If you are right, nobody will want to, so no harm done, right?

Sure, there's a bit of playing chicken with your competition.

If you and every other office owner are in the same boat, the question is do you convert first and lose less money waiting, maybe get more incentives, tap into the housing market when supply is still tight, or do you wait till your competitors do it and remove their office inventory from the market, maybe making yours more attractive again.

I think market dynamics have their faults but they're pretty good at finding that balance through pricing pressure, so I don't actually see this dilemma as a major concern. Or at least, it's not a reason to move forward with these conversions as an option.

Generally agree the current drug war is an utter failure and treating it as a health issue makes more sense but this was funny.

> The fine would be waived if you get an assessment within 45 days of your ticket, and no one could arrest you for not paying the fine.

So.. what's the incentive for anyone to do either the assessment or pay?

Nobody's saying gut renos are cheap but.. have you seen the price of getting ANYTHING new built in NYC in general?

Very expensive can still be better than absurdly, astronomically expensive for a new build.

Noone's forcing anything.

If you own an office building now and are losing a shit ton of money because it's mostly empty, this would just allow you (and maybe offer some incentives/zoning and code waivers) to convert it into apartments/condos so that you can stop losing a shit ton of money.

If you as the office owner prefer to keep it as an empty office and continue losing a shit ton of money, that's your god given right. It's also stupid, but being stupid is also your right.

The only real issue with office buildings is probably natural light. All the noise about plumbing etc, like you can't run new pipes.

Even if you have to reserve the middle 10% of the whole building going vertically the whole height and convert that into a utility shaft for new plumbing, garbage chutes, etc, so what?

As for the natural light issue, yeah you might need to be a bit creative with the floor plans. But this is a city where people willingly live in 10 ft wide railroad apartments so I think it's possible. And if it's really a problem, again, reserve the no light middle portions for amenities, or hell maybe even some creative commercial.

Personally, given how loud midtown is, I wouldn't mind having my living room on the window side of a unit and the bedroom deep toward the middle far from windows. Dark and quiet is a better sleep environment anyway.