From New York:
1972: Workers use cut-and-cover to break ground on the Second Avenue subway line; only a mile of tunnel is completed before the seventies financial crisis halts construction. . . .
2007: Ground breaks once again on the Second Avenue subway, to be called the T line.
Slow, yes, but not off-the-charts slow:
Between 1965, when construction of the Beijing subway began, and 2001, workers laid only 42 km of track.
Faster is possible:
By next year, Beijing aims to have another 100 km of track up and running.
As I searched for Beijing subway info, I came across this surprising blog on the Beijing City Government English website. It reminds me of something that happened to me in Alaska. I went to visit a glacier. Near the glacier was a visitor’s building, which had a small room with a slide show. The taped narration told how the glacier shrank during the summer and grew during the winter and described the animals that lived nearby. It was all very bland but you could tell the narrator really cared about the glacier. I was struck how rare that was: To see that someone really cared about something other than themselves and their family. I suppose this is why I was impressed how much Penn State students love Penn State. This blog gave me the same feeling. The writer likes (or rather liked) living in Beijing and, much more impressively, manages to convey that. I nominate it for best blog on a government website. Unfortunately it has stopped. It’s so much easier to learn when the person you are learning from really cares about the material. There’s a lot I can learn from that blog.
A nice video about building Beijing’s subway.
I assume the increasing progress in Beijing (at least in the underground part of the system) is due in large part to a big change in digging technology. I don’t know if this link will come through, but here’s a fascinating article on the Swiss company that developed the new machines: https://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/09/15/080915fa_fact_bilger
Kevin, the video I link to discusses the role of these machines in Beijing subway building. There’s only one in Beijing.
You can find lots of people who really care about all the species that will go extinct as isolated islands of habitat heat up, driving them out but offering no places left to move to.
I wonder how Tokyo compares. It seems there is a new subway line or extension every year that I had never even known was under construction. You can go anywhere within the Yamanote Line circle of central Tokyo and easily walk to one station or another in a few minutes.
They have some lines now that are really, really deep, many escalators segments down, because they have to tunnel under other subway lines. There was a book by an ex Japanese TV journalist about “underground Tokyo” that I started to read (before I figured out it was an insane conspiracy theory book about secret underground bases and institutions) that had some interesting subway construction data, including that the cost doubles with every X meters of depth. Among other things, the amount of water seepage gets worse and worse the deeper you go.