One architect has a plan to send the L train to the United Nations. (Via nybydzine. Click to enlarge)

Via DNAInfo, here’s a fun one for a Friday afternoon: Architect David Wright, while dreaming up plans for future subway expansions, has proposed sending the L train to the United Nations via Hudson Yards. It’s an ambitious plan that carries with it numerous engineering and operational challenges along with astronomical costs, but it’s an entertain one to ponder nonetheless.

Here’s his explanation:

Suppose that L to 7 Hudson Yards Extension actually happens. The platforms are offset so the L Train could eventually extend east to Penn Station and directly connect to Grand Central Terminal.

From there, there’s a very convenient connection with the 2nd Avenue Subway and First Avenue – UN Plaza. Add in a new Herald Square L Train Station, and 3 of the busiest transit hubs become connected. There isn’t a 34th Street tunneling conflict since Penn RR lines are under 32nd & 33rd Streets.

Maybe this becomes a reversed “C” shaped SAS revised route. It would include a Harlem Crosstown extension connecting west to the 1 Train. This would greatly improve horrible bus traffic on 125th Street and provide connections with all existing subway lines across Harlem…And maybe this Crosstown L just heads north up 2nd Avenue and west across Harlem and we’re done!

A few days ago, Michael Horodniceanu, president of MTA Capital Construction, spoke vaguely of extending the 7 train if the popular will and political muscle is in place to do so. Wright’s plan, a dream more than anything else, certainly could capture public imagination. It’s thinking big, and I like thinking big.

Upper East Side NIMBYs are worried that shady folk might 'hang out' at a planned subway entrance at 69th Street and Lexington Ave.

Remember how the MTA wants to make the 68th St. station along Lexington Ave. ADA-accessible and easy to navigate by adding an entrance with elevators at 69th St.? And remember how a bunch of entitled East Side residents (along with their fireplaces) threw a fit about the plan back in October? Well, they’re back.

At last night’s Community Board 8 meeting, those overly elitist and out-of-touch residents of 69th St. once again spoke out against the MTA’s plans. This time, they brought along lawyers who threatened to defend their so-called “bucolic” lives on 69th St. between Lexington and Park Avenues in the very heart of the nation’s densest urban area.

DNA Info’s Amy Zimmer was once again on the scene. She wrote:

Residents on the tony block, many of which came to a Community Board 8 meeting Wednesday night, are worried the entrances would ruin their quiet residential enclave. “Sixty-ninth Street is a really bucolic street,” said Charles Salfeld, a resident of the Imperial House at the southwest corner of East 69th Street and Lexington Avenue. “But [by] putting this subway entrance in front of our building, you turn 69th Street into 68th Street, which is a busy commercial street…The idea of spending $57 million because you want to put in an elevator, and that elevator is going to change the character of our buildings, is madness.”

…Residents are teaming up — and hiring legal muscle — to stop the project. “The co-ops on 69th Street have gotten together and formed a block association and retained counsel,” resident Bill Roskin said, with his lawyer from Davidoff Malito & Hutcher sitting next to him.

Roskin told MTA officials that owners on the “pristine” block were hopeful to have a discussion about changing the entrances…Transit officials said it would be more complicated and expensive to build the entrances on East 67th or 70th streets, and that they have already spent a lot of time looking at alternative scenarios and narrowing them down to the most feasible ones.Roskin told DNAinfo he was particularly concerned that the unmanned station would “attract people looking to hang out.”

Few locals seemed to care about alleviating the crush of straphangers coming on or off the platforms. “So it’s congested,” Salfeld said. “Manhattan is a congested place.”

People might hang out. At a subway station. On Lexington Ave. and 69th St. If that’s not NIMBYism acting as a front for veiled classism or racism, I don’t know what it is.

According to sources who were at the meeting, this group of residents could charitably be described as an unpleasant bunch, and now they’re going to sue. Much like the residents of 86th St. who objected to subway entrances on their less “bucolic” and “pristine” block, they’re going to lose. They should be ashamed of themselves, but they’re not. It’s the ugly, ugly side of New Yorkers rearing its head. It’s NIMBYism, and it should not be tolerated.

Roosevelt Island will soon be transformed into an applied sciences campus run by Cornell.

Much like wide swaths of New York City outside of Manhattan south of 96th Street, Roosevelt Island has long been fetishized as a strange “other” amidst the urban life of New York City. Cut off from both Manhattan and Queens by water, the largely residential island with a few hospitals sits amidst the East River. The 59th St. Bridge passes over it, and only the F train, the Q0102 and a tram — how neat! — service the island. Its residents love it for its access and idyllic qualities amidst the hustle and bustle of the Big Apple.

With the announcement earlier this week, though, of a brand new applied sciences campus run by Cornell University on the souther end of the two-mile landmass, life could change on Roosevelt Island. The school will start to open in 2017, and city officials expect it to be fully built out by 2027. The plans call for housing for 2500 students and another 280 faculty members, and the Economic Development Corp. says the campus alone will create 8000 new jobs. For an island with 12,000 residents, those totals represent a large influx of people.

Already, transportation advocates are casting a wary eye on the project. In a lengthy press release on the campus, the word “transportation” appears just once, and it’s unclear at this stage how Cornell will improve accessibility to the southern part of the island. It’s a manageable half-mile walk from the F train, but that walk is a relatively long one compared with how close, say, Columbia, NYU and Fordham are to their nearest train stops.

In a post yesterday, Cap’n Transit wondered how Roosevelt Island would remain relatively car-free. The infrastructure on the island can’t really support a huge influx of cars as it is even as the current hospital areas near where the campus will go up are relatively car-heavy. “Let’s hope,” the Cap’n writes, “that the Cornell and Technion designers have more vision than they showed in that lame fly-through, and that they build something urban and scholarly, with really narrow streets, like in Paris’s Latin Quarter. Let’s hope that they don’t think they’re too good to take the train to work, or at least to park at the Motorgate and take the bus. But if they do, let’s hope that Bloomberg, Steel and the RIOC will make them do the right thing.”

One potential “right thing” could involve exploring a new subway stop for the island. The 53rd St. tunnel passes directly underneath what will be the southern end of the Cornell campus. There’s no station right now, and I have no idea if one is even technically or economically feasible. But it would serve to anchor the campus and would nearly eliminate the need to drive to Cornell-on-Roosevelt. Currently, while the F train itself at Roosevelt Island is very crowded, the station is only the 180th most popular. That figure is a bit deceptive though as the 37.6 percent increase in ridership from 2009 to 2010 was the second highest in the city. Over 2.5 million riders a year use the station, and that number will jump considerably with the campus.

It is, at least, an idea. With the Cornell campus, the city could be sending upwards of 10,000 people a day to Roosevelt Island, and the transportation infrastructure improvements must be a part of the conversation before the project moves too far along. Will transit play the proper role or will it, as Stephen Smith worries, turn into yet another academic Corbusian nightmare in New York City?

The Triboro RX line would improve transit access in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx but skips over powerful Manhattan.

Historically, the New York City Subway system has always focused on delivering people into the heart of Manhattan. It grew out of the need to bring people from the north, south and east to Wall St. and spread it tentacles through midtown, upper Manhattan and the Outer Boroughs always shuttling people to what we now know as the Manhattan Central Business District. The alluring draw of Manhattan still dictates the city’s expansionist transit policies, but should it?

The MTA likes to tout its megaprojects, and since the start of the century, they have embarked on a rather ambitious expansion plan to grow the transit network. The Second Ave. Subway will alleviate congestion on the Lexington Ave. IRT while better providing transit access from the Upper East Side to Midtown and Lower Manhattan. The 7 line extension will open up a new frontier of development along Manhattan’s Far West Side while East Side Access will bring LIRR to Manhattan’s East Side. The Fulton St. Transit Center and the new South Ferry station are all a part of the comprehensive effort to develop Lower Manhattan.

Take a deep breath because that’s a lot of Manhattan. At a time when areas in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens are undergoing rapid transformation as residential neighborhoods, job centers and desirable places for growth, the New York City subway system remains singularly focused on bringing people into Manhattan, its own job since the early 1900s. On the one hand, it should be concerned with Manhattan because most commuters want to get to and from Manhattan every day, and since Manhattan is an island, it has only so many entry points.

On the other, the Manhattan-centric nature of the subway system makes interborough and some intra-borough travel quite complicated or convoluted. It’s nigh impossible to travel from Bay Ridge to JFK Airport on the subway without a considerable investment in time, and many of the job centers focused around health care remain frustratingly out of the way for straphangers. Yet, the only non-Manhattan projects involve some Select Bus Service corridors that take forever to go from planning to reality.

Meanwhile, city officials starting at the top are making noises about another Manhattan-centric subway project. Mayor Bloomberg, as we know, wants to build an extension of the 7 train to Secaucus. Doing so would funnel more workers from Hudson County, New Jersey, into Midtown via the Hudson Yards development. It’s a developer’s dream and one that would improve both mobility and desirability west of the Hudson.

That said, I don’t blame Staten Island politicians who feel slighted over the rumored plans. The city would rather build the subway to New Jersey than ponder Outer Borough expansion plans. After all, those expansion plans wouldn’t have the same impact as a subway that funnels commuters straight into midtown would. Still, as Bloomberg draws responses to his proposal for a new high tech campus somewhere in the city, the push to add jobs outside of Manhattan will inevitably lead to demand for better transit options.

The short wishlist of Outer Borough transit projects is centered around the Triboro RX line. Last mentioned by the MTA in 2008 as part of Lee Sander’s 40-year plan, the Triboro RX line would use preexising rights-of-way and tracks to connect Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx while staying clear of Manhattan. It would pass through job hubs and offer connections to at least 17 other subway lines. It could be amended to cross the Narrows to Staten Island and would extend somewhere into the Bronx.

Beyond that, the city could use better transit access to LaGuardia, a Nostrand and/or Utica Ave. subway extension and service past Flushing/Main St. on the 7 line. None of these projects offer the sexy political allure of Manhattan, but they would do wonders for mobility in and around the region. The dollars and the will though just aren’t there, and we’ll watch as Manhattan remains, for better or worse, the center of attention.

Addendum: As the good Cap’n just reminded me, he offered up his take on Manhattan recently. Check out this piece for a different view on why Manhattan has all the fun.

According to Upper East Side residents, only criminals and marauders would use the proposed subway entrance at 69th Street and Lexington Ave.

There ain’t no NIMBY like an Upper East Side NIMBY, and an Upper East Side NIMBY don’t stop.

Let’s take a trip to 68th St. on the 6 train. There, we will find one very crowded subway station and one very loud and particularly arrogant group of NIMBYs ready to face down the MTA. It’s not a very pleasant stop during most of the hours of the day. Last year. It was the 30th busiest station last year as over 10 million people entered the station, and with hospitals, Hunter College, Central Park and a densely populated residential neighborhood surrounding the station, it is a very popular destination for exits too (although those numbers are not available). For years, people who use that station have cried out for better exits and a handicapped-accessible station, and the MTA is ready to oblige.

Last week, at a Community Board 8 meeting, the MTA along with a joint venture between Urbahn and Dewberry presented plans to make the 68th St. station ADA-accessible. These plans include, of course, the installation of elevators at 68th St. and a slew of other changes that will make the station a more pleasant one to enter and exit. The authority plans to widen the staircases leading up to the street at 68th St. and will add entrances to the back of the platform at 69th St. as well. At a station famous for its exit time — some riders say it can take around five minutes during peak hours to leave — these changes would make it better for everyone.

Plans for 68th Street include wider stairways, elevators and some back entrances on 69th Street.

But wait! As this is the Upper East Side, home of the people who want better subway access as long as it’s not going to disrupt their precious isolated existence, a group of folks on 69th St. say a subway station entrance will ruin their block. They don’t, as some residents at the meeting said, want increased foot traffic on a street on the Upper East Side in the middle of Manhattan. “It would ruin the fabric of the neighborhood,” Nancy Friedman, who lives on East 69th St. (with a roaring fireplace), told a reporter after the meeting. “It’s the most beautiful block in the city.”

DNA Info’s Amy Zimmer had a bit more from the meeting:

Particularly on the west side of the street, the entrance wasn’t needed, [Friedman] said, because “people to the west don’t take the subway. Not to be elitist, but they don’t.”

The MTA’s plans spurred one man from the ritzy block to accuse the transit agency of using the ADA requirements as a “charade.” Board members bristled at the accusation, with the committee’s co-chair calling the comment “offensive to disabled people.”

In support of the MTA’s plans, CB 8 member A. Scott Falk…told the residents at the meeting, “New York City is not a gated community. The whole idea of putting an entrance on 69th Street is going to open you up to marauding down the street seems a bit reactionary.”

But CB 8 member Teri Slater took umbrage at those remarks. “This is not an elitist argument,” said Slater, who believes that there is simply more crime concentrated around subway entrances. She didn’t think there was a “mandate” for the new entrances on East 69th Street and thought the MTA should redesign the plaza on East 68th Street in front of Hunter College to increase the size of the entrance instead. “There’s a fundamental disconnect between the MTA and the neighborhoods of the Upper East Side,” she said.

So here we have Upper East Side residents from East 69th Street between Lexington Ave. and Park Ave. bemoaning one subway entrance at the rear of the train because “people to the west don’t take the subway.” They think ADA accessibility is a “charade” and insist that “this is not an elitist argument.” And these people apparently

Now Teri Slater, for one, isn’t new to this fight. She’s been in the news for decades fighting ostensibly for Upper East Side preservation. Elizabeth Ashby, a preservationist who founded the group with Teri Slater, gave the first toast. “We’re here to protect the Upper East Side from bad ideas,” she said to The Times in 2004. “We want you to be part of our army.” Bad ideas, apparently, include anything which may draw attention to her block whether it be good or bad.

Now, the Upper East Siders claim that because their buildings are landmarked, so too must their street corner. It’s hard for me to find any compelling grounds though for giving heed to their argument (which one observer termed 28 Days Later rage rather than good old NIMBYism). They don’t want a subway entrance on their corner because they think only criminals are subway riders, and they don’t want to introduce unsavory elements to the Upper East Side. That is an insult to everyone else. It’s a slap in the face to subway riders and the handicapped. It is, truth be told, an elitist argument, and it’s why urban planning policy is stuck in a rut in New York City.