It's been a while since I have written about infrastructure. The conventional wisdom is that American infrastructure is subpar. The big local infrastructure story in my neck of the woods, which I have devoted multiple blog posts to, was the deterioration of the Tappan Zee Bridge, which spans the Hudson River, and the construction of a new bridge. Yesterday, Governor Andrew Cuomo cut the ribbon on the westbound span of the bridge, which has been named after his father, the late Governor Mario Cuomo. While a fan of the late governor, I really don't think that the bridge should have been named after anyone- the old name honors both the original indigenous people and the Dutch settlers of the Hudson Valley, so I will stick with calling it the 'Tapp'.
The eastbound span of the bridge should open to traffic in the fall, just in time for the main upstate Autumn foliage tourism. It's nice to see a local infrastructure project come to fruition. My one beef with the new bridge design is the failure to incorporate a light rail line into the structure to connect the I-287 Corridor to the three lines of the Metro North railway system, thereby linking New Jersey to Connecticut via rail. Oh, well, that's me, ever the curmudgeon... at any rate, at least something has been accomplished.
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It's cool. Just yesterday was the opening day for the SMART Train. That would be the Sonoma-Marin Area Rail service. After over 30 years of screaming, arguing, bickering and lying, they have finally actually build a light rail system that connects the North Bay.
There's no good (read less than a billion dollars) way to get the system connected with San Francisco and the South and East bay systems, mainly BART. It's either build another transbay tube or hang it under the Golden Gate bridge, both are non-starters. But the fact that you can at least take the train to the Ferry is something, at east...
Yeah, those water obstacles pose a challenge for the urban planner... NYC is a city of islands, so we deal with this sort of stuff all the time.
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