Second Ave. Sagas

Category: Asides

  • Article of the Day: On the destruction of Pei’s Terminal 6

    As JFK Airport looks to expand to meet its ever-increasing demand, history has a way of getting in the way. Jet Blue constructed its new Terminal 5 behind Eero Saarinen’s TWA Flight Center, and plans to use the landmarked building have been in limbo for the past few years. Now that Jet Blue is expanded again, it has its sights set on I.M. Pei’s understated Terminal 6 building next door.

    Today, at City Room, David Dunlap reports that the Port Authority will be tearing down Terminal 6 as Jet Blue builds out Terminal 5. The “crisp island of aesthetic tranquility” will be no more. In the piece, Dunlap speaks with Henry Cobb, an architect who worked with Pei on the original design, and Cobb is sad to see the terminal go. “This is not pure greed,” he said. “This is the myopic view of engineers. They just can’t figure out how to reuse it and they don’t put enough value on it to figure out how to reuse it.”

    It is the last line of Dunlap’s piece that truly resonates. “Serenity, generosity, clarity, spaciousness, simplicity and dignity” — all used to describe the terminal — “aren’t words that describe jet travel today.” Monstrosity replaces subtlety, and history is bulldozed away. We’ve seen it as the Archer Ave. stations replaced an elevated train, and we’ll see it again and again and again. That’s how New York City grows.

  • TWU: MTA debt a Wall Street problem

    Over the past few weeks, as the MTA has unveiled its budget projections for the next few years while grappling with ways to fill a hole in its capital budget, debt has become us. State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli issued a report again warning of the MTA’s debt bomb, and transit advocates have been sounding the alarm with more rigor. This week, the Transport Workers Union Local 100 joined the chorus.

    The TWU, which has lend its support to the Occupy Wall Street protests — more on that over the next few days — issued a statement on the MTA’s ledger, and Channel 13’s Metro Focus blog highlighted it yesterday. “The New York City Transit Authority has been in debt to Wall Street for 50 years with no hope of repayment,” Kevin Harrington, acting vice president of Local 100, said. “Wall Street has hurt the transit system with their usurious loans, and a good portion of the Transit Authority’s budget is paying back the interest on these loans without even attacking the principal.”

    As Alice Brennan and Alexander Hotz report, the MTA has paid off hundreds of millions in fees. A large group of underwriters have earned close to $40 million dollars by guaranteeing the MTA’s debt, and investment banks have earned substantial fees as well. As long as the state refuses to investment in subway and commuter rail infrastructure improvements and expansion efforts in the New York City area, though, the MTA is left with only Wall Street as a source of money. Yet again, as the TWU notes, the riders are the ones who come out behind.

  • When 117 phone numbers become one

    For years, one of the most obvious signs of bureaucratic issues with the MTA concerned its public phone numbers. The authority had, at its high point, 117 different phone numbers depending upon which service callers needed, and no one really knew which number to call. As part of its effort at cutting down these severe inefficiencies, the MTA has consolidated to one, state-run number. Those who need information from the MTA can now just call 5-1-1.

    The 511 service, the authority said in a press release, will provide a portal to an interactive voice response system that will connect calls to customer service and travel information for all MTA agencies. Services include all rail and transit schedules; trip planning; lost and found; MetroCard, rail ticket, or Bridges and Tunnels tolls; and Mail & Ride. Furthermore, as 5-1-1 is a state service, this move costs the MTA no additional dollars. “This is a great example of how we are working to make it easier for our customers to get information and interact with the MTA at the same time that we reduce the MTA’s administrative costs,” MTA Managing Director Diana Jones Ritter said. “Customers now have a single phone number for all transportation-related questions, instead of a long and sometimes confusing list of agencies and departments.”

    The MTA noted that 5-1-1 has been available as a transportation resource for a while, but the offerings have been refined. Call transfer paths will “better direct customers’ inquiries to the appropriate departments,” and functions such as Lost & Found, MetroCard Balance Protection and general comments and concerns are now available at one phone number. Ads promoting the new service will soon appear in buses, subways and rail cars throughout the area.

  • Study: After a while, prerecording messages ignored

    “Ladies and gentlemen, this is an important message from the New York City Police Department.” We know the words. We hear them every day. There’s something about keeping your belongings safe, checking yourself and saying something if you see something. Then there are others — about unlawful sexual conduct, riding on the outside of train cars, panhandling, etc. At this point, veteran subway riders simply sigh when the same prerecording announcements we’ve been hearing for five years starts to play. We’re suffering from noise overkill.

    Now, a recent study suggests that not only are we annoyed by these announcements, but we generally just flat-out ignore them. A professor of psychology from the U.K. says prerecorded announcements create complacency as they become a part of life’s background noises. “People habituate to any kind of stimulus and eventually filter it out and the same thing happens with warnings and announcements,” Judy Edworthy said. “It is rather like crying wolf – people get warning fatigue. It means people could actually be at more risk of what they are being warned about.”

    As one U.K.-based reporter found, 27 prerecorded messages played at one rail station within the span of 30 minutes, and researchers are blaming the fear companies have that they will be “accused of failing to alert customers to potential dangers.” In New York, the epidemic isn’t as bad as the one described in The Telegraph, but sometimes, all we want is a little bit of quiet. We’ll say something if we see something. Now stop berating us.

  • DOT, New Jersey come to terms on ARC dollars

    It’s been almost a year since New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie canceled the ARC Tunnel and made a move to keep the federal dollars explicitly earmarked for the project. After months of wrangling between the government and Christie’s high-dollar attorneys, the two sides have come to an agreement, U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said this afternoon. In the final settlement, New Jersey will return $95 million to feds while spending a significant portion of the rest on DOT-approved projects.

    Per the DOT press release, the federal government will recover all of the $51 million in New Starts money provided to New Jersey for the ARC Project, and those funds will be made available to other areas for transit projects. The other $44 million were provided to New Jersey via the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and it will be returned to the U.S. Treasury. Furthermore, New Jersey must spent around $128 million it has from the Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality project funds on transit-related projects that DOT approved and reviewed. I guess the remaining funds — approximately $48 million — will remain with the Garden State.

    “We appreciate the support and encouragement of Senators Lautenberg and Menendez in reaching an agreement that is good for the taxpayers of New Jersey, but also helps to improve infrastructure in the state,” Secretary LaHood said. “I thank the governor and his legal team for reaching this agreement.” Now how about that Gateway tunnel or the 7 train to Secaucus?

  • Times: Ward set to leave PA post

    Over the next few weeks, Gov. Andrew Cuomo will have an opportunity to make a long and lasting impact on the New York City region’s transportation future for a week after Jay Walder is leaving the MTA, Chris Ward will resign as the Port Authority’s Executive Director, according to a report in The Times. Ward’s departure comes after months of speculation and seems to stem, as Walder’s did, in part, from a similarly icy relationship with the New York state governor. Neither Ward nor Cuomo offered a comment to The Times.

    For the Governor, then, the challenge facing him is a tough one. As Michael Grynbaum writes, Ward earned accolades from the transit community. “Under his tenure,” he says, “the Port Authority froze its operating budget for three consecutive years, lowered its number of employees and reduced its budget for major capital improvement and maintenance projects.” Yet, similarly to Walder, Ward has also presided over some steep fare and toll increases and progress at the World Trade Center site, while moving forward, is very slow.

    Despite this legacy though, Ward had, as Kate Slevin from the Tri-State Transportation Campaign noted, a “very strong and convincing case for more investment in our infrastructure,” and Cuomo will now have to find not one but two people who are both qualified and willing enough to enter the New York City area transportation morass. It will not be an easy task.

  • East Side Access completion date postponed to 2018

    When the MTA Board gathered for its most recent meeting in July, the authority’s leaders addressed concerns over the East Side Access Project’s rate of progress. With federal officials predicting a 16-month delay, the MTA admitted that it had exhausted its schedule contingency for a variety of reasons. This week, we learn that the authority has officially delayed the project completion date to April 2018, sixteen months later than scheduled. “This is a project facing significant challenges,” MTA CEO and Chair Jay Walder said during subcommittee meetings yesterday.

    Ultimately, shaky project management as well as conflicts with Amtrak over the Harold Interlocking has led to these delays, and the news is only going to get worse for LIRR riders. Beginning in October and continuing through 2015, Amtrak is set to replace the track in all four of its East River tunnels after inspections following a May derailment found significant track damage. The work will take place in 55-hour spurts over nearly every weekend until 2015. Tracks will be out of service from 10 p.m. on Fridays through 5 a.m. on Mondays and during some weekday overnight periods. The LIRR says the work will have “little or no impact” on its service, but the work will leave less operating flexibility during the weekends. This tunnel work will delay work on the Harold Interlocking which, in turn, will delay the East Side Access project.

    Meanwhile, official recognition of this delay leaves me worried over the fate of the Second Avenue Subway as well. At the same time they predicted this postponement, the Feds also said that SAS was likely headed toward a similar fate. Such a substantial delay along the Upper East Side would be disastrous for the neighborhood and for the MTA politically. Meanwhile, as foreign transit agencies build at a quick rate and for less money, the MTA is stuck with a deep cavern north of Grand Central for upwards of $8 billion and 12 years of construction. That’s a problem.

  • Dispatches from New Jersey: Tolls up, driving down

    When the Port Authority raised its river crossing tolls and PATH fares a few weeks ago, I viewed it as a trial run for a congestion pricing scheme. With such a substantial toll increase, the city would finally see first-hand what impact a significant charge for entering Manhattan would have on both traffic and the public transit infrastructure. According to anecdotal evidence from the first week of travel, the changes have been substantial.

    As The Post reports today, “thanks to the hikes, buses are now packed to the gills, NJ Transit and PATH trains are standing-room-only, and dust is gathering in Manhattan parking garages that used to be filled with commuters’ cars.” In its infinite wisdom, The Post makes it seem as though fewer cars entering Manhattan is a negative, and it even has the requisite whine over higher fees. “My wife usually drives over the George Washington Bridge,” one New Jersey resident said. “She carpools now. It’s too expensive to drive by herself.” Can you believe that? She has to carpool.

    But the reality is that less traffic and fewer cars is a net positive for the city. I feel for the garage owners who lose business, but I also feel that the city has devoted too much dead space to those garages in the first place. Now, with tolls up, riders are flocking to PATH and finding more efficient and environmentally friendly ways of reaching the city. It’s too early to draw definite conclusions from the fare hikes, but everyone has their price when it comes to ditching a solo car ride into Manhattan.

  • Metro-North Quiet Car pilot coming to Hudson, Harlem Lines

    As New York City Transit’s underground stations are on the verge of getting nosier with cell service to debut next week, Metro-North may be getting quiet. The commuter railroad announced today a Quiet Car pilot for the Hudson and Harlem Lines and an extension of a similar pilot along the Port Jervis and Pascack Valley lines.

    The details are simple: Starting October 17, on certain peak trains, the last (AM) and first (PM) cars will be set aside for commuters who would like to avoid ringing cell phones, loud conversations and other gadgetry sound effects. These trains will carry a Q with them on the timetable. The program, says Metro-North, will be voluntary with customers self-monitoring. Conductors, though, will issue so-called “shh” cars to non-compliant riders. That’s sure to go over well with petulant cell-phone users. Those who wish to converse in the Quiet Cars must use subdued voices.

    Along the West-of-Hudson routes, a similar pilot has been wildly successful. According to a July study, 82 percent of riders were satisfied with the Quiet Car program with nearly 20 percent moving to the Quiet Car and only four percent sitting elsewhere. After a few months, Metro-North will evaluate the East-of-Hudson pilot before deciding whether or not to expand it. “We are pleased that Metro-North’s West of Hudson quiet car program has proved popular with riders and support Metro-North extending this initiative to East of Hudson lines, as our Council has urged in the past,” David Buchwald, chair of the Metro-North Railroad Commuter Council. “We believe that giving riders a choice in their commuting environment will make for a more pleasant traveling experience.”

  • Report: Transit Wireless cell service pilot set for Tuesday launch

    In September of 2007, I wrote a short article about an impending plan to bring cell service underground. Since then, Transit Wireless, the MTA’s contractor chosen for the pilot program, failed to sign up carriers, appeared to be a bogus company, went belly-up for a few years and emerged in late 2010 with a mandate from Jay Walder along with cell carriers and a late 2011 launch date. That day may be drawing even nearer.

    According to a brief report in amNew York, Transit Wireless’ subway cell service pilot will go live on Tuesday at various platforms downtown. The first stations to receive a cell signal will be along the 14th St. L train corridor as well as the A/C/E platform at 14th St. and 8th Ave., the 1/2/3 station at 14th St. and 7th Ave., the F/M stop at 14th St. and 6th Ave. and the local stop at 23rd St. and 8th Ave. Neither Transit Wireless nor the MTA have confirmed the Tuesday launch date, but they have not denied it either. Initially only T-Mobile and AT&T services will be available underground. If you’re a Verizon subscriber like me, you’re out of luck.

    Transit Wireless believes it can outfit the rest of the MTA’s underground stations by 2016. The era of “can you hear me now?” and mindlessly inane cell conversations on subway platforms is drawing ever closer.