WTC Train Station to Cost More Than Skyscraper

The new World Trade Center is an astounding feat - rising 1,776 feet above the city as a tribute and memorial to the original Twin Towers destroyed a decade ago. Naturally it needs a decent train station nearby to accommodate the thousands of people who daily come and go, so they decided to build a new train station next door.

At just about the same size as Grand Central Terminal, the new station is planned to serve more than 200,000 daily commuters and visitors to the new World Trade Center and National 9/11 Memorial & Museum. It will feature "advanced signal systems, state-of-the-art fare collection equipment, and climate-controlled platforms and mezzanines with superior lighting and finishes. The Hub's new concourse will connect commuters and visitors to multiple New York City Transit connections and unsurpassed retail opportunities and other destinations."

So to put in the new train station, they first hired an architect, Santiago Calatrava, who explained  that his design would "seamlessly fuse state-of-the-art transportation and first-rate retail facilities." (See image above).

Calatrava is reputed to be quite demanding and has been sued several times because of his badly built buildings. But nevermind all that. It seems the project was rushed along so fast that a boondoggle of expensive problems happened.

Taking a page out of Boston's Big Dig, New York has now fumbled its way through mismanagement and incompetence to run the cost of the new train station up to an incredible figure, and the final cost - hold onto your hat - the final cost is going to be somewhere around 4 billion dollars.

According to The New York Times, "even the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which is developing and building the hub, conceded that it would have made other choices had it known 10 years ago what it knows now.

“ 'We would not today prioritize spending $3.7 billion on the transit hub over other significant infrastructure needs,' Patrick J. Foye, the authority’s executive director, said in October."