School buses: Heck yes. For free.

Corporate shuttles: For free, possibly. For a fee, definitely.

I am actually not opposed to counting corporate shuttles too, difference is they are negligible in scale compared to public transit and yellow school buses.

Saw a statistic that national public transit ridership is ~34 million/day, while yellow school buses are 21 million. No idea if these statistics are up to date, but to me this says our transit ridership (though not *public* transit ridership) is actually quite a bit higher than commonly thought.

Counting school buses would nearly double the number of weekday public transit trips in the US.

Perhaps "hidden" is the key word.

As in, They're there, but nobody has any idea where the hell they are, because over the years, nobody has really bothered to keep track of it all, in spite of the importance.

Perhaps that is the "Only in New York, Baby!" angle here.

It gets worse than 1916. 1916 is probably a 100 year event.

In 1791 (Daniel Boone/Davy Crockett era) settlers reported a flood 5' higher than what was seen in 1916, in the vicinity of what we call Biltmore Village today. That is the 500 year event.

I think the 100- 500- and 1000- year events are probably underestimates, just about everywhere.

Like... if we do all the things:
-Bring more engineering in-house
-Minimize excavation volume
-Use the proper balance of tunneling methods
-Accept a reasonable amount of surface disruption
-etc, etc

... and costs don't decrease, then what?

The question could be, then, why does it cost so much in spite of doing many things better than the usual N. American transit project?

Leaving room to expand the platform? Add crossovers?