Queens

New Yorkers of a certain age remember a then-ubiquitous television ditty from the early 1980s. “Take the train, take the train to the plane,” went the jingle. It was an advertisement for a supposedly super-fast airport subway service that ran express on the 6th Ave. in Manhattan, switched to the 8th Ave. tracks at West 4th St., made one stop in Brooklyn at Jay St.-Borough Hall and then bypassed the rest of the IND Fulton Line until Howard Beach.

By 1990, the Train to the Plane died. It was a slow and painful demise brought on in part because the service was ahead of its time. It wasn’t truly a train to the plane. Rather, it was a train to a bus to the plane, and no one wanted to wind up in Howard Beach still a significant ride away from any JFK Airport terminals. Today, with the success of the AirTrain and when a super-express to JFK from Manhattan would be worthwhile, ridership along the IND Fulton line has grown such that sacrificing regular service to bypass stops would create deep animosity in Brooklyn and Queens.

Yet, as plans for a convention center in Ozone Park take center stage, the Train to the Plane is back on the table. We first got wind of this idea yesterday when transit advocates expressed their lukewarm embrace of the plan. In a recent radio appearance, though, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said a super-express along the IND line is a big part of the plan and that Genting will pay for the servce, whatever that means.

“It’s a non-binding letter of intent,” Cuomo said of Genting’s proposal. “All that letter of intent means we have an intention to. It was a proposal I wanted to talk about in the State of the State — the terms, the conditions, Port Authority land, Genting would want to reinstitute the train to the plane, which they would pay the cost of. But the terms and conditions will be in a piece of legislation.”

Far from clearing up the matter, Cuomo’s statement simply leads to more questions. What did Genting volunteer to pay for? Will they fund restoration of a service that wasn’t ripe for the subway 20 years ago and isn’t a better fit today? Will they fund operating costs in perpetuity? Can they guarantee that a Train to the Convention Center that bypasses some crowded stops and used to rely on a key switch and a dead end at Queensbridge won’t have a negative impact on the 6th and 8th Ave. IND lines? What protections does the MTA have against being forced to spend any money on this new service?

On the one hand, if Genting were able to answer these questions and provide the money, a funding deal could provide the model for a so-called public-private partnership. On the other, it’s hard to see how this plan wouldn’t leave thousands of riders and the MTA holding the short straw. Redeveloping the Javits Center land is a fine idea. Having someone else pay billions to build a convention center isn’t a bad one either. But transportation planning must be a part of the process, and right now, all we’re getting are platitudes with few promises.

Behind Staten Island, Queens is the borough with the most potential for better rail service and with obvious connections as well. La Guardia Airport sits tantalizingly out of reach from the subway while the 7 line’s promise of service beyond Flushing has remained unrealized for decades. Service into and out of Brooklyn that doesn’t need to detour into Manhattan is inadequate, and transit to the eastern reaches of the county could be much faster.

Still, New York’s planners are dreaming big when it comes to Queens, and two projects that may rely, to varying degrees, on rail connections are on the table. First up is a plan from the Port Authority to replace La Guardia Airport’s Central Terminal Building. The agency released a request for information (PDF) last month, and The Journal profiled the planned upgrades late last week.

Essentially, the new terminal building will replace the 46-year-old structure that isn’t prepared for today’s modern airplanes. The Port Authority is planning a $3.6-billion construction effort that would commence in 2014 and wrap by 2021. Now, before we get our hopes up, the current project does not include a rail component simply because the Port Authority cannot control that element of the project, but while we often build without keeping future provisioning in mind, the Port Authority is requiring its bidders to do so. The RFI says:

While the Project scope does not include rail service, the new CTB shall be designed so as not to preclude future rail access. The design shall incorporate provisions for track alignment and connections compatible with current New York City plans for light and heavy rail, should future funding become available.

A faint glimmer of hope is better than nothing at all, but any such rail link would have to overcome extreme NIMBY opposition in Queens. If recent history is any indication, such a plan would involve a fight for the ages — if the money for a La Guardia subway connection ever materialized.

Across the borough, where plans to build a massive convention center are taking center stage, transit advocates are leery. As I noted last week, transit access to Ozone Park is rather sparse, and building a convention center at the Aqueduct site would raise significant transportation concerns. Transportation Nation’s Andrea Bernstein has more on the vague plan to provide express service from Manhattan to the Aqueduct:

One idea bandied about was that the MTA would run express trains along the A line. But that idea was tried once before — in the now-defunct “Plane to the Train.” That service was plagued by low ridership, and created hostility by setting up a service that whisked past waiting straphangers on the local platforms. “If one of their ideas is to create a convention express modeled after the JFK airport express, that’s going to be much harder to do than it was in the 1970?s and ’80?s,” the Straphangers’ Campaign’s Gene Russianoff said.

Russianoff noted that many neighborhoods along the A and C lines — including Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, and Bedford-Stuyvesant — have undergone rapid growth in recent years, and couldn’t withstand reductions in service.

But Bob Yaro, president of the Regional Plan Association, which is backing the convention plan, thought adding express trains might be possible. Yaro also said the air train to JFK could be extended to Aqueduct, or the LIRR Rockaway Beach line could be brought back to life. Both plans would cost considerably more.

Extending the JFK air train seems likely but useless. To reach the air train still requires a significant amount of travel time to Jamaica on the E or Howard Beach on the A. Adding an Aqueduct stop wouldn’t improve Manhattan travel times. Reactivating the Rockaway Beach line would also be an expensive undertaking that would face opposition from residents who live along the old right-of-way and QueensWay advocates who want to turn the ROW into a park. Of course, the dollars remain an issue as well.

For now, then, as the MTA’s capital dollars are focused on Manhattan, these Queens’ projects will remain on paper. The La Guardia rail connection would be a vital link for the city while a convention center cannot sprout up in Ozone Park without speedier and more reliable rail service to Manhattan. Hopefully, those pushing these plans are paying attention.

Governor Andrew Cuomo has proposed building a 3.8 million-square-foot convention center in Ozone Park, Queens. (Image via Arquitectonica)

Throughout the first year of his time as chief executive of the state of New York, Andrew Cuomo has made a name for himself. Even as he has not embraced New York City’s transit network or transportation policy overall, he has earned accolades because he Gets Things Done. In Albany, that is apparently an accomplishment in and of itself.

Yesterday, Cuomo gave his annual State of the State address. Transit was again absent. In fact, he mentioned the MTA twice and did not use the word “transit” at all. A centerpiece of his plan did concern a so-called Infrastructure Bank that would seemingly unify capital expenditures from the MTA, NY DOT and Port Authority. We’ll get to that later in the day. For now, I want to focus on another part of Cuomo’s plan: He wants to tear down the Javits Center and build a giant convention center near the Aquaduct race track in Ozone Park.

For Cuomo, the desire to build 3.8 million square feet convention center in the far reaches of the city is about job creating. “Let’s build the largest convention center in the nation, period,” he said. “It will be all about jobs, jobs, jobs, tens of thousand of jobs.”

Crain’s New York has more on this idea which has long enjoyed support from the RPA. Allow me to quote at length:

Gov. Andrew Cuomo outlined his administration’s second year priorities Wednesday in a State of the State speech that described $25 billion worth of economic development initiatives. At the top of the list for New York City is a push to build the country’s largest convention center in Queens, raze the Jacob K. Javits Center and then redevelop the 14-acre waterfront property on the far West Side of Manhattan…

He said he wanted to replace the Javits Center with 3.8 million-square-foot exhibition center at the Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens through a joint-partnership the administration is developing with Genting Americas, the gaming corporation that operates the racino…

Razing the Javits Center would leave a multi-block, $4 billion piece of waterfront property that could be parceled off and developed alongside Related Cos.’ planned Hudson Yards project and the redevelopment of the Farley Post Office into Moynihan Station. The redevelopment of Javits will be modeled after Battery Park City, where the state leases the land to developers in exchange for a percentage of their rental income. Revenue for the state would increase along with apartment values.

Economic development officials had considered Willets Point, Queens, a possible site for a new convention center because of its proximity to La Guardia Airport and infrastructure improvements that are already underway. But the Aqueduct Racetrack site in Queens has clear advantages, too: Genting could build a convention center on one story and, perhaps most importantly, finance it.

If this doesn’t seem like a clear example of the left hand not knowing what the right is up to, I do not know what is. For the past few years, the state has spent $500 million on Javits Center renovations that are still ongoing. The city has spent $2.1 billion to send the 7 line to Hudson Yards, in no small part to improve access to the Javits Center. Now, the state is willing to spend another $4 billion on a plan that would plop 3.8 million square feet into a far-away neighborhood and include 3000 hotel rooms as well.

That, of course, brings us to another point: Transportation access to the Aquaduct area is subpar as it is. Only the A train to the Rockaways stops there, and those trains don’t run too frequently. It’s also a 45-minute ride from West 4th St. and a 50-minute ride from 42nd St. on the A train. While close to JFK, it’s not a convenient location for anyone else. A fifteen-minute walk from the Javits Center has conventioneers in Herald Square. A fifteen-minute subway ride from the Aquaduct stop drops a straphanger off at Broadway Junction in East New York.

According to Crain’s, the $4 billion plan would include some transportation upgrades and perhaps a connection to the JFK AirTrain. Again, though, I view these dollars as money poorly spent. If there is only a limited amount of money for transit, spending it on a subway to a station with very low traffic on a lightly-used part of the route only because the Governor wants to place a giant convention center there is the height of foolishness.

Meanwhile, as development at Hudson Yards has been non-existence, who will take on the task of redeveloping another 14 acres of land? The 7 line extension would truly be the subway to barely anywhere at all while the city would have a giant convention center in the no-man’s land of Southwestern Queens. This isn’t urban planning around the city’s core that addresses the city’s infrastructure needs. Rather, it’s pure folly instead.

As Haywood Sanders, a professor who specializes in urban economics, said to The Times, “The convention business is a disaster everywhere. Simply building more space gets you nothing more than a big empty building. And to put it in a place where there aren’t any hotels, restaurants or amenities next door is to doom it to serving only a local or metropolitan market.”

A schematic shows the Rockaway Beach Branch service from 1955 until it was shuttered in 1960. (Courtesy of Railfan.net)

As rails-to-trails proponents move forward with a plan to convert part of the Rockaway Branch Line into a park, Queens’ transit advocates are none too pleased with the idea. As The Daily News reports today, those who want to see better rail access in Queens are speaking out against the so-called QueensWay park.

Lisa Colangelo has more:

“Certainly a quick trip to JFK Airport from the core of the city is something people have talked about from Year One,” said George Haikalis, a civil engineer who heads the Institute for Rational Mobility, a nonprofit umbrella group for transit advocates. “Nobody in the rest of the world would be so dumb as to let a valuable asset like that sit there.”

…Assemblyman Philip Goldfeder, who represents the Rockaways, jumped into the fray on Tuesday saying he opposed the creation of a park. “I believe southern Queens and Rockaway would be better served if this forgotten track once again fulfilled its original purpose as a railroad,” Goldfeder wrote in an open letter. “Those same communities that are pushing this proposal are privileged with commutes of 30 minutes or less to midtown Manhattan.”

Andrea Crawford, the chairwoman of Community Board 9 who also is a member of Friends of the QueensWay, said a park would enhance the neighborhoods and prevent future over-development. “No one disagrees that the Rockaways are underserved by public transportation,” she said. “But to say this particular right of way could be a viable rail of some sort does not have a basis in reality.” Aside from deteriorated tracks and infrastructure, the line runs close to schools and homes that did not exist when it was first constructed, she said.

This he said/she said story from the News encapsulates the debate over rails-to-trails perfectly. As I first said when I wrote about the QueensWay plans in early December, once the rail right-of-way is converted to a park, the land is never returned to its original use as a piece of the transportation network. On the other hand, the ROW has sat unused for six decades, and despite numerous calls for a reactivation, nothing has ever materialized even as the city’s needs have become glaringly obvious.

If QueensWay becomes a reality — and it still has a way to go — New York City will not be irreparably harmed. Restoring rail service to the Rockaway Branch Line is probably a pipe dream, but it says a lot that a rails-to-trails park can gain more community support than a potentially important train line would. Our urban development priorities are not in the right place.