• @[email protected]
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    82 months ago

    i dont know why we build such extravagant stations… or who convinced who to spend bank… or how treasury didnt hack the project to bits for being $10b over budget… but absolutely zero complaints from me.

    if you are going to coax the car brained out of their precious cars, public transport needs to be at least nice.

    • @[email protected]
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      2 months ago

      The space will reduce congestion (and not being squashed into a sweaty crowd in a narrow corridor is a quality of its own), and space overhead will reduce the risk of airborne viruses spreading. Also, for those prone to claustrophobia, it’s an accessibility issue.

      Yes, it could have been done cheaper and smaller, if one wanted to reinforce the late-20th-century ideology that public transport is a bare-bones soup-kitchen service for those too poor to drive, in which case the money saved could be spent on cutting petrol taxes. Though thankfully we have moved on from there as a society.

    • finley
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      42 months ago

      It’s good to build nice stations, but hyperstylized stations like this will look weird and dated in 30-40 years.

      As for the cost? Don’t be so sure that a station built this way necessarily cost too much more than some dull drum station design. 99% of the cost of underground metro stations is in digging out the thing.

      • @grue
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        2 months ago

        but hyperstylized stations like this will look weird and dated in 30-40 years.

        Yeah, but if they survive another few decades after that without being torn down / remodeled, they graduate to historic and become cool again.

        The key is to not let the the public get a hold of them in that interim period when everybody thinks they suck (looking at you, brutalism).


        Personally, I’m a fan of the style of the 1970s-1980s era metro stations in my city and (unlike the transit authority) don’t think they need to be renovated.

        • finley
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          2 months ago

          Yeah, but if they survive another few decades after that without being torn down / remodeled, they graduate to historic and become cool again.

          Maybe, maybe not. The TWA terminal at JFK - and exemplar or mid-60s modernism - is an eyesore.

          And Brutalism, to many, was always an eyesore.

          • @[email protected]
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            12 months ago

            The Futurist one designed by Eero Saarinen? That has certainly survived the test of time.

          • @grue
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            12 months ago

            The TWA terminal at JFK - and exemplar or mid-60s modernism - is an eyesore.

            What? Why? I’ve never been there in person, but I’m looking at pictures of it and I like it.

            (I will admit it doesn’t look very ADA-compliant, though.)

      • @[email protected]
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        22 months ago

        Not just this, other stations on line are really fancy, lots of sandstone, huge open spaces, extravagant artworks… it’s really impressive for a city that’s usually pretty tacky.

        Ya I think most of the budget issues are tunneling related.