Liberal Talk Radio

It’s part New York Fetishization, part Lionel-Industrial Complex as one man’s obsession with trains is bankrupting a nation:

You want some New York with your tropical breezes? Try the jackhammering, traffic-snarling mess that someday will be the Caribbean’s first subway.

The streets of this capital city are being ripped up because President Leonel Fernandez, raised in Manhattan, dreams of remaking it into a “little New York.” The subway project fits perfectly so far: It’s loud, controversial and over budget.

. . .

Fernandez, 54, was brought to New York when he was a boy, part of a wave of Dominicans who fled during a turbulent time under dictator Rafael Trujillo, through his 1961 assassination and a subsequent U.S. invasion.

After school, Fernandez played basketball and delivered groceries near his home at West 95th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. But his mother, despite working as both a nurse’s aide and in a factory, found that she could not support both her boys and sent Leonel at age 17 to live with relatives in Santo Domingo.

He became active in politics, first as a student and then climbing the ranks of the Dominican Liberation Party. Now, as president, he believes he can keep families from emigrating in the first place.

“Don’t leave for New York, because we are going to bring New York here,” he told The Associated Press.

. . .

Fernandez has brought in police from New York and New Jersey to train Dominican officers. He built a think tank that promotes closer U.S.-Dominican relations, with one branch off the new train and another near New York’s Grand Central Station.

But the big dream is the subway. The first 9-mile, 16-station segment is planned to open before Fernandez faces an election next May. Within 10 years, planners say they’ll get almost 1 million riders a day.

The budget line is soaring. Under planners’ original per-mile estimates, the new line would have cost $464 million, according to the newspaper Clave Digital.

Officials now say it will cost at least $710 million – more than 2 percent of the Dominican Republic’s gross domestic product. At least one Dominican geologist said even that estimate could end up doubling.

. . .

Cache Flores, a 37-year-old shoeshiner who lives across a river from the first line, says “it would be better to spend all that money on something that helps everyone, like more buses.”

Others hope it will ease traffic, cut pollution and be affordable. Officials have not yet set fares, but Carrasco acknowledged they will have to remain around the 30-cent fare Dominicans now pay in the run-down group taxis that choke Santo Domingo’s streets.

“All (subways) are controversial, because all of them are very expensive,” said Robert Puentes, a fellow with the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program. But, he added, “It’s a very bold national investment which could have payoffs for the nation as a whole.”