NEW YORK SUBWAYS.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1155, 16 June 1911, Page 5

NEW YORK SUBWAYS.

1 ■ EXPENDITURE OF .£50,000,000. B.r TelenraDh—Presx Assornalion-Conyriehl New York, June 14. The New York subway project, the largest ever planned, is to cost fifty million pounds. A COMPLICATED PEOBLEM. • Historically, New York's transportation problem has always been conditioned by the fact that Manhattan is a ioug, narrow island. The system of transit in the American metropolis does not radiate, spoke-like, from a centre to the outlying districts. On the contrary, it of necessity runs from one end to the other, north and south, in spinal-column fashion. A large, if not the largest portion of the suburban traffic has always entered and left laterally by pieans of ferries or bridges over two wide rivers. Up to within the past two or three years, when the great docks of the transatlantic steamship companies began to creep uptown, almost all the oversea traffic also reached New York near the lower end of the "spine." Consequently there have always been in New York crowds, often unmanageable, indecently dense crowds, going in the same direction at the same

hnie. Durin? the last few years an attempt has been made to deal' with the transit problem as a whole, and to evolve a comprehensive policy out of the present tangle of conflicting interests. At tho end of last year there tvere 25.7 miles of subway in operation. These subways were constructed at a total cost of ,£15,000.000. Tho Public Service Commission in October last called for tenders for the construction of seven sections of subway with n , total of -tt.2 miles. The estimated cost of this, the tri-borough system, for construction alone, was .£24,000,000 excluding equipment, powor-hoiisos. and sub-sta-tion?. The system is planned to carry 1,000,000 passengers per day.