The New York Times writes:

> The estimated $500 million in capital spending would also go toward creating dedicated bus lanes along 31st Street and 19th Avenue in Queens and making the Astoria-Ditmars Blvd. station on the N and W lines accessible to people with disabilities, the Port Authority said. Some of that money could also be spent to create a mile-long lane exclusive to buses on the northbound Brooklyn-Queens Expressway between Northern Boulevard and Astoria Boulevard, the Port Authority said.

Alon responds:

> To be very clear, it does not cost $500 million to make a station wheelchair-accessible. In New York, the average cost is around $70 million in 2021 dollars, with extensive contingency, planned by people who’d rather promise 70 and deliver 65 than promise 10 and deliver 12. In Madrid, the cost is around 10 million euros per station, with four elevators (the required minimum is three), and in Milan, shallow three-elevator station retrofits are around 2 million per station. Transfer stations cost more, proportionately to the number of lines served, but Astoria-Ditmars is not a transfer station and has no such excuse. So where is the other $430 million going?

> The answer cannot just be bus lanes on 31st Street (on which the Astoria Line runs) or 19th Avenue (the industrial road the indicated extension on the map would run on). Bus lanes do not cost $430 million at this scale. They don’t normally cost anything – red paint and “bus only” markings are a rounding error, and bus shelter is $80,000 per stop with Californian cost control (to put things in perspective, I heard a $10,000-15,000 quote, in 2020 dollars, from a smaller American city).

And on the exhorbitant estimates used to dismiss a subway line extension:

> The panel realized that the best option is an extension of the subway. Such an extension would be about 4.7 km long and around one third underground, or potentially around 5 km and entirely above-ground if for some reason tunneling under airport grounds were cost-prohibitive. This does not cost $7 billion, not even in New York. We know this, because Second Avenue Subway phase 1 was, in today’s money, around $2.2 billion per km, and phase 2 is perhaps a little more. There are standard subway : elevated cost ratios out there; the ones that emerge from our database tend to be toward the higher end perhaps, but still consistent with a ratio of about 2.5.

> Overall, this is in theory pretty close to $7 billion for a one-third underground extension from Astoria to the airport. But in practice, the tunneling environment in question is massively easier than both phases of Second Avenue Subway – there’s plenty of space for cut-and-cover boxes in front of the terminal, a more controllable utilities environment, and not much development in the way of the elevated sections, which are mostly in an industrial zone to be redeveloped.