Part of living in New York involves realizing that basically any highly touted public or even private project is probably going to involve delays and waiting. Second Avenue subway? Citi Bike? The Brooklyn Barge Bar? Atlantic Yards? These and many other projects have failed to open when we thought they were going to open. So obviously color us shocked, just shocked, that we can throw the reopening of the Squibb Bridge and the debut of C trains that weren’t used during the Wagner administration on that list. Even if we’re not surprised, it raises the question: Will you see progress on either project before you take your final breath on this planet?
First, there’s the Squibb Park Bridge. The fun bouncy bridge linking Brooklyn Bridge Park to a small park in Brooklyn Heights has been closed for a full year today, and no one is quite sure why. First it was a mysterious engineering issue that was supposed to close the bridge until spring, but then spring came and went and no bouncy bridge still. On the one-year anniversary of the closure, the Brooklyn Bridge Park is swearing that all they’re waiting for is the city to inspect things and give them the go-ahead. Still, there’s no timeline for the bridge to reopen, so let’s just go ahead and say that various bureuacratic hassles will keep it from opening until 2020, which is a more concrete guess than has been given by anyone in charge of the bridge.
Then there’s the C train, which as much as some Brokelyn writers love it, could probably use some new trains that don’t break down all the time. The R32 trains, which have been in service since 1964, were supposed to be replaced by 2018. Now though, that’s being pushed back to 2022, with the car manufucaturers and the MTA not saying why. We can probably assume at least one more delay in the push for new cars, and if it works like this one, we’ll get a sevenyear delay announcement three years before the debut, which means a 2018 announcement and a 2025 debut of C train cars that are “modern.”
As for you, when will you die? Well, going by this map, let’s call the average life expentancy in New York City to be 79, as we’re too lazy to add up all the numbers on it. If you’re 28 at the moment and in relatively good health, you’ll live another 51 years, which would have you passing away in 2061. So you think, “Oh well I’ll see both of those.” However! Death is always lurking around the corner. You could be hit by a car. You could fall down a manhole or be hit by a stray bullet. You could get so mad about something on the internet you have a fatal coronary at the age of 31 or you could move to the Connecticut suburbs, which is basically the same thing as dying and will probably happen within 6 years if you’re going do it.
Most importantly, you always have to rememember that the 2nd Avenue Subway has taken almost 100 years to finish and only a section of it will be opening when it (allegedly) opens next year. So if we were you, we’d put our money on the sweet release of death, which faces fewer layers of bureaucracy than the Squibb Bridge or the C train.
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