NEW YORK.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20311, 20 January 1928, Page 3

NEW YORK.

A CITY OF MARVELLOUS PROGRESS. SKYSCRAPER APARTMENT HOUSES ADD TO CONGESTION.

From a private letter received by a Dunedin resident from a friend in New York, we are permitted to make the following interesting extract: — You would hardly recognise Now York if you were to visit it now—so many skyscrapers and residences have gone up in the last two or three years, our building trades have been at the top notch, and this is not only taking place in New York, but in Chicago, Detroit, and many other cities; but it complicates our traffic systems to have so many hundreds of thousands of people to transport from skyscrapers down town to the skyscrapiug apartment-houses p town. I have been on two traffic committees —one of the Central Mercantile Association of which I am second vice-president, and the other the Eighth Avenue Association, and the complexity of the situation makes your head swim, and it is getting worse by the minute. Very many of the office buildings down town turn out 10,000 people at the same hour every day, and many of the apartments they g. 'to have 5000 or over living within their walls.

The Eighth Avenue Subway will be completed in two years. It has been building now about three years. and_ as Manhattan is almost solid rock, it is a wonderful undertaking, and as is usual in such cases there are complications in arranging payments. When New York first started subways about 20 years ago the fare from 1 place to place was five cents, but the traffic or length of line was less than five miles, for which five cents was the chai'ge. Now you can travel 25 miles or more on our subways for five cents, and the administration is trying to keep it down to five cents in order to “ hold the voters ” in line, and are asking the surrounding property-holders to pay the rest, which means that every passenger costs from seven to eight cents to transport, and it cannot be done as a legitimate business, so it is put on to the taxpayers in the neighbourhood of the subways, of which there arc now from 200 to 300 miles, and still going on. As to the autos and the street it is worse in fact, it is most surprising that many people are not killed every day, but the percentage of accidents is very sm *p*Our traffic policemen do good work. We have just opened a vehicular tunnel from down-town to the Jersey shore. If is a magnificent piece of engineering and architecture, and while there was some doubt .about the ventilation, it is perfect. We are now working for two more vehicular tunnels further up town. The one just opened took over seven years to build, and is subject to toll, and will pay for itself in a few years. A bridge is starting now from Ne\v York, 178th street to the Jersey side, which, as I understand it, will have the highest and longest span in the world.