One of the worst decisions Robert Moses ever forced upon the city of New York involved dedicated transit lanes along the Van Wyck Expressway that could have served as the right-of-way for a high-speed raillink to JFK Airport (then Idlewild). Moses refused to compromise with transit advocates, and we’re stuck with the set-up we have today. Across the city, along the Hudson River crossings, transit has always been an afterthought. While extensive tunnels lead into Penn Station, none of the major crossings have space reserved for transit. But now that these crossings are showing their ages and are up for replacement, the Port Authority is planning, tentatively, to rectify this historical oversight.
According to the Daily News, the Port Authority’s plans for a Goethals Bridge replacement contain tentative plans for mass transit lanes. Of course, tentative plans are always the first to go when budgets climb, and this crossing won’t see the light of day by 2015 at the earliest. But we have to applaud this news now and urge our politicians to switch that label from “tentative” to “definite” by the time construction begins in a few years.
12 comments
I was thinking the other day that whatever replaces the Pulaski Skyway ought to link up the Newark Subway with Hudson-Bergen light rail.
As for the Goethals, I don’t know what kind of rail would make sense. Maybe if they extended the HBLRT from Bayonne to SI? A dedicated bus lane might be way more useful.
Where are they going to fit in the tracks for the HBLR? The bridge seems to have two parallel decks with a significant space between them.
Whoops! Wrong bridge. Still, what are they planning for mass transit on this new span? I still don’t see any place for separate transit lanes.
Could you provide more info on the once-potential hispeed JFK rail/lanes on the BQE?
Did I write BQE originally? My bad. It’s really the Van Wyck. I’ve corrected the post.
Oh-so what were these transit lanes reserved for? Were they HOV style?
I’m pretty sure it was to be an extension of the Queens Blvd IND subway line. A short-lived subway stub/spur ran along that right of way to serve the 1938 World’s Fair, but it was removed when the fair closed and then the Van Wyck was built.
I’ve wondered for years why the George Washington Bridge design never included a spur for either the existing IRT subway in northern Manhattan or the then-under-construction Eighth Avenue IND (A train). You can’t blame that on Robert Moses. I suppose they just figured a bus terminus on 179th street would serve the purpose. I think that was short-sighted, imagine if today buses could drop off passengers on the Ft. Lee side of the bridge rather than make the trip into Manhattan. (Not to mention the potential for extending the subway into a dense suburb.)
Maybe the PA is floating the idea of a mass transit setup on the new Goethals as a way to encourage other agencies to propose uses for it.
Well, Moses was notoriously car-friendly (and along with that goes bus-friendly). With the GWB it was mostly a design issue. Not adding rail trusses saved a lot of weight.
Moses was anything but bus-friendly. He even constructed parkways with overhead bridges too low for buses to pass.
Moses was against any form of public transit. In his eyes it was filthy and for the lower class. I think his vision was to build highways all over the place to serve the new suburban middle class as he felt that the car was a big luxury that the middle class should be allowed to enjoy to its fullest.
Have to give the man credit for getting stuff done, but he was stubborn and short sighted. He even had some crazy ideas like building a highway right through lower Manhattan.
[…] days ago, I told you about plans to include space for transit on the new span set to replace the Goethals Bridge replacement. Yesterday, Mobilizing the Region […]