In the winter of 2012, I was in Nanjing, China, on a journalism fellowship. On our first trip out of the city to see shiny new technology centers, stadiums and university campuses, we repeatedly passed what appeared to be the same subway construction site: a gigantic bridge crane, earth-moving equipment and swarms of men working around a long trench. Was our driver lost, or was this the Chinese equivalent of “Groundhog Day”? In fact, multiple crews were completing segments of each line simultaneously so that the extensive system could be completed within a few years. I couldn’t help thinking of New York City’s Second Avenue subway line, decades in the making and still unfinished.

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