7 Line Extension

Rendering: A mezzanine at 34th and 11th

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on January 6, 2012

The new Manhattan terminus for the 7 train will feature a lengthy mezzanine and a direct entrance into the Javits Center. (Click the image to enlarg)

During the one and only time I went into the construction site for the 7 line extension, I wasn’t allowed to bring a camera. It is, as any subway construction site is, a grandiose cavern with equipment everywhere. When I saw it this past summer, eventual platforms were under construction and the two-story cavern was receiving its finishing touches.

Today, The Architect’s Newspaper shares some photos and renderings from the site. Tom Stoelker had a chance to journey down to 34th ST. and 11th Ave. late last month, and today, he published his piece on the site. It has photos of the work in progress as well as the latest in renderings. The scene above shows the station mezzanine, complete with entrance to the seemingly doomed Javits Center, and his post also features a nifty cutaway of the 7 train’s new deep cavern station.

The 7 line extension is still set to open in December of 2013, less than two years from now. By then, hopefully, work will have started at the Hudson Yards site, and we’ll have a better sense of what the future holds for the Javits Center. The subway, which has long ushered in development to the city’s wilds, will be there waiting for it all to grow.

33 comments
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Manhattan

69th St. NIMBYs rear their ugly heads again

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on January 6, 2012

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.

46 comments
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
MTA EconomicsMTA Politics

Bloomberg punts on MTA financing schemes

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on January 6, 2012

The MTA is in trouble. A creature of the state that runs the city’s most vital transportation network, it has enjoyed nearly no support for New York’s current governor, and those who have argued for its long-term health have been marginalized at best and exiled to Hong Kong at worst.

The brouhaha this week started when Jay Walder finally broke his silence on his tenure in New York. As I reported on Wednesday, he did not have kind words for the MTA’s condition or Albany’s treatment of the network. We’ve heard that Walder and Gov. Andrew Cuomo did not have a great working relationship, and Walder’s statements seem to bear that out.

Two days ago, I excerpted just a part of Walder’s statement but later learned what more he had to say. “New York, when I arrived there, was in a financial crisis,” he explained. “The system simply did not have enough money to continue to operate. The assets were not being renewed. And the infrastructure was in terrible condition. What I did was to be able to right that financial basis and to be able to put the system back on firm financial footing.”

That so-called “firm” financial footing may have been a mirage. The state stripped to the MTA of some expected dollars by reallocating supposedly dedicated funds, and a partial repeal of the payroll tax has left a good chunk of the MTA’s budget in a state of flux. Furthermore, that “firm” financial footing relied on assumptions concerning debt financing and labor expenditures that could still turn out to be far from the eventual reality.

Walder wasn’t the only one speaking out on the MTA though. More immediately, Mayor Bloomberg has joined the fray. In a press conference yesterday, Bloomberg essentially punted on helping transit secure better financing. “We gave it our best shot,” the mayor said of his congestion pricing plan. “We came up with an idea. We worked very hard to get every good-government group behind it, every union behind it, the public behind it, every newspaper behind it, and then when it got to Albany, it didn’t get passed. So I think at this point it behooves us to just stay out of it.”

Speaking directly to Walder’s comments, the Mayor elaborated: “Keep in mind, it’s all relative. When I came to New York in 1966, the subway cars were covered in graffiti, they broke down all the time, they had no signaling. Having said that, if you compare today’s MTA system here to modern systems — and I have been on the Hong Kong system — it’s an order of magnitude more modern, and that’s what we have to do. It’s a state problem. They’ve got to find the monies.”

A state problem. Even though Bloomberg appoints four of the MTA Board members and city taxes fund the MTA, finding a long-term solution has become a state problem. Ironically, that’s why the MTA first came about all of those decades ago. Somehow, the city had to remove politics from transit fare policy, and a state agency that could reappropriate road tolls to fund transit while unifying Metro-North, LIRR and NYC Transit seemed the way to do it. It no longer seems to be working.

If it’s a state problem then, the state should do something, but instead, we have a governor with no real appreciation for transit. After avoiding much mention of the MTA in his State of the State speech, Cuomo drew heavy fire from transit advocates.”While the Governor is right to call for greater investment in infrastructure, Albany cannot continue to give short shrift to funding transit across our state,” Transportation Alternatives Executive Director Paul Steely White said. “Public transit projects create a jobs dividend that stretches from the five-boroughs to Upstate New York. From manufacturing jobs in the North Country to construction jobs in the metropolitan area, fully funding public transit not only helps get millions of people to work every day, it creates good-paying jobs for New Yorkers.”

Ultimately, then, what remains for the MTA? The state won’t tackle this difficult challenge; top transit experts and executives willing to do so have been pushed out; and the mayor, the last public figure who could affect real change by demanding more city control of the TA, is effectively wiping his hands of the matter. It’s looking bleak out there, and those fighting for better transit know it.

“The State of New York’s public transit is poor,” TransAlt’s White said. “From Buffalo to Brooklyn, New Yorkers are losing affordable public transit options because of the fare hikes and service cuts that are the result of a chronic lack of transit funding. To protect businesses and jobs in this state, Governor Cuomo would do well to consider the millions of businesses around the state that are wed to transit.”

But is anyone else listening?

29 comments
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
View from Underground

Photo: Spying headways through countdown clocks

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on January 5, 2012

With countdown clocks, it's easy to see how train bunching can impact wait times. (Photo by Kim Last)

I have been a big proponent of Transit’s PA/CIS initiative. In addition to vital behind-the-scenes communications upgrades, the new displays finally deliver countdown clocks to New York’s waiting masses. We now when our next train will arrive and how many minutes we must wish away while sitting in subway station on our way home.

With these new clocks, though, come some hidden glimpses into an infuriating part of the subway system: inconsistent scheduling. Take, for instance, the photo above my girlfriend snapped on the way home last night. She was waiting for a 1 train on the West Side to go down to Chambers St., and at 8:54 p.m., she had a nine-minute wait. To make matters worse, the train after hers was only two minutes further behind. That, of course, averages to a headway of around 5-6 minutes per train, but something clearly went wrong somewhere.

I too had a similar experience last night. I caught a movie at Court St. in Downtown Brooklyn last night, and while making my way over to the IRT local, I had to walk along the Manhattan-bound 4 platform at Borough Hall. The next 4 train at 9:45 p.m. was 14 minutes away, but the subsequent train was just six minutes behind that one.

I don’t have the hard evidence to back this up, but I’ve noticed this quite frequently. Downtown express trains on the 2 and 3 will arrive in bunches — an inexplicable happening considering the 3 makes only one stop after the Lenox Ave. terminal before meeting up with the 2 train at 135th St. After the bunches comes a very long wait, sometimes upwards of 10 minutes.

If anything, the countdown clocks allow us an anecdotal glimpse at the way trains are scheduled to arrive, and in my experiences, off-peak coordination is severely lacking. If trains are set to run every 6-8 minutes, a 3 train shouldn’t be two minutes behind a 2 train. Without better wait-assessment metrics and a more granular understanding of headways, all the promises in the world can’t make the actual schedules more reliable, and riders end up paying for the intricacies in variable and infuriating wait times.

23 comments
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
AsidesMTA Economics

Thoughts on the price of a subway ride

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on January 5, 2012

Forty years ago today the cost of a subway ride jumped, literally overnight, from 30 cents to 35, as the New-York Historical Society reminded us via Twitter. At the time, the MTA had just gotten approval from Albany and D.C. to raise the fares, and so barely 13 hours after voting for a fare hike, the new price went into effect. That five-cent jump, as Matt’ Johnson pointed out, is the equivalent of an increase from $1.62 to $1.89 in 2011 dollars. All of these figures got me thinking about the fare structure.

Today, with all of Transit’s various per-ride discounts and unlimited-ride cards, the average subway fare is $1.64. That essentially corresponds to the pre-Jan. 5, 1972 fare of $0.30 in 1972 dollars. Without the average fare from 1972, it’s tougher to draw a comparison, but the only discounts then were for seniors. Many New Yorkers were subject to a two-fare zone as well. So essentially, after the Jan. 5 fare hike, New Yorkers paid more for worse subway and bus service in 1972 than they do in 2012.

What then does all of this math mean for our current fare structure? Is it too low? Is it too complicated? Over the past few years, the MTA has been aggressively trying to tie its fares in with inflation, and as they point out every month, the current average fare still trails the pre-Unlimited Ride average fare by 27 inflation-adjusted cents. It seems to me as though we don’t pay enough for our subway rides, but who really wants to make that argument anyway?

14 comments
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Queens

To build a convention center in Ozone Park

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on January 5, 2012

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.”

75 comments
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Queens

Rail advocates object to QueensWay trail

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on January 4, 2012

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.

36 comments
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
AsidesMTA

Walder: MTA infrastructure in ‘terrible condition’

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on January 4, 2012

When Jay Walder announced in July his abrupt departure from the MTA, transit advocates viewed his resignation as a major blow to the authority. His was an independent voice with a mind for both fiscal savings and progressive transit policies, and his decision to move to Hong Kong was viewed as another sign of brain drain impacting the MTA due to a lack of support and investment from Albany. I had hoped that Walder would conduct an exit interview, but in an effort to avoid burning bridges, he never did.

Now that he’s settling into his new high-paying job in Hong Kong and must get the MTR budget into shape, the Hong Kong press has asked him about the numerous layoffs he instituted in New York. Vowing not to do the same in Asian, he spoke of the way New York politicians simply failed to support transit. “The assets were not renewed and the infrastructures were in terrible condition,” he said.

That pretty much sums up the state of the city’s vital transportation infrastructure. The assets aren’t there and haven’t been for decades. Yet, the aging system must transport over 5 million people a day and plays a major role in driving the city’s economy. Will anyone wake up to this reality before it’s too late?

24 comments
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Abandoned Stations

Ghost subway stations and a system that never was

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on January 4, 2012

WNYC's interactive map provides a glimpse into the lost ambitions of New York subway planners. (Click for the interactive version)

Long-time SAS readers know that I have a bit of a love affair with the New York City subway system’s abandoned nooks and crannies. I’m fascinated by the shuttered stations and the never-used shells. I’m impressed with the foresight of planners who built provisions for unfunded future expansion. I’m enthralled by the maps of the Second System, a dream unfulfilled that would have changed the city forever.

Every day, millions of New Yorkers commute through a subway system that has largely been static for decades. Although the Queens Boulevard connection opened a little over a decade ago and the Archer Ave. stations debuted back in 1988, the system has been largely as it is today since the mid-1930s. Yet, behind the facade of the subway map lies a handful of secrets. An abandoned station at 91st St. and Broadway flits past riders on the 1 train, and a redundant and closed platform at 18th St. and Park Ave. South can be seen from the downtown 6 train. Atop Broadway in South Williamsburg, a shell of a station never finished is host to both lost dreams and the Underbelly Art project. Near the Manhattan Bridge, a shuttered station plays host to the Masstransiscope.

We ride largely oblivious to these relics of another era and other plans. Maybe we know that the Second Ave. Subway has been a long time coming, but most don’t know that it was once designed to connect into the Bronx and Brooklyn. Yesterday, Jim O’Grady went inside the city’s lost subway stations and expansion plans. The team at WNYC produced an interactive map, and I’ve embedded the audio below. It’s a fascinating glimpse into the history of almosts under the streets of New York.

What strikes me most about O’Grady’s story are the way he and those he spoke with characterize the unrealized plans. “We built the subway into farmland on the assumption that people would live there and use them to get to work,” Moses Gates, an urban explorer who brought O’Grady into the tunnel underneath Nevins St., said. “We built a humongous shell station on the G line, or right off the G line, because there was going to be two other lines and two new tunnels under the East River that were going to converge there.”

Today, we can’t even gather the political will or money to build anything more than the barest of provisioning for a future station at 41st St. and 10th Ave. We can’t realize more than a few stations along Second Ave. We can’t envision a subway system stretching further out into or better connecting Queens and Brooklyn or one that better crosses the Bronx. Instead of living in the minds of planners, these dreams live only in fantasy maps found on various message boards throughout the Internet.

Costs, of course, are an issue. The increased construction costs coupled with the Great Depression and then later World War II and the rise of the automobile torpedoed the Second System plans before they could get off the ground. Today, we hear tell of inefficient capital building brought about by arduous work rules and NIMBY opposition. We are content with what we have when all around us are reminders of a past that could have been. Dream big, I say, because that’s how New York and its subway system became great in the first place. It’s fascinating to hear of South Fourth Street, but it would be even better to see a city with a line that passes through that station on its way east.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

31 comments
2 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
BrooklynNew York City Transit

NYU inching closer to deal on 370 Jay St.

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on January 3, 2012

NYU wants to bring the Center for Urban Science and Progress to 370 Jay Street in Downtown Brooklyn. (Rendering via NYU and The Real Deal)

For the past decade or so, every Brooklyn politician has called upon the MTA to do something with the former NYC Transit HQ building at 370 Jay St. while the MTA has been waiting out the $150 million in capital funds they need to renovate the Downtown Brooklyn eyesore. Even as Kings County has enjoyed a renaissance of late, the big building atop the Jay St. subway stop has remained untouched but shrouded in scaffolding. NYU, we learned in October, wants to convert it into a Center for Urban Sciences and Progress, and the deal might just be moving forward as long as the price is right.

According to a report in Crain’s New York from New Year’s Day, the three stakeholders — NYC, the building’s owner, the MTA, its leaseholder, and NYU — all want to see the plan realized, but for the cash-strapped authority, the kicker will be the dollars. Daniel Massey writes:

All three parties to an NYU deal seem amenable to the idea, but money is the sticking point. The MTA controls the site via a master lease and has the right to stay in the building as long as it is using it. The 459,000-square-foot property contains vital communications equipment, and the negotiations hinge on just how much it would cost to move or replace it.

“The real question becomes, what does the MTA want?” said a source close to the talks.

NYU has asked the city for $20 million to help buy out the MTA, based largely on numbers thrown around during previous attempts to revive the beleaguered building, sources familiar with the proposal said. But the MTA’s asking price has now ballooned to $50 million to $60 million. “We are working with the city to provide a facility that better serves the needs of the community and to ensure that the MTA receives fair value for the building,” an MTA spokesman said.

As Massey notes, it’s unclear how much money the city has leftover after delivering Roosevelt Island to Cornell. NYU, on the other hand, is not hurting for bucks and will have to contribute something to this project. The Crain’s story also notes that NYU’s new CUSP center will be working with the MTA by “giving university researchers access to scientific and engineering challenges it faces in coming years.”

As a Brooklynite, I’d like to see something happen with 370 Jay St. sooner rather than later. The borough has seemingly moved on while this building has been stuck in limbo. Yet, I recognize that the MTA needs to protect its bottom line. As both Columbia University and Carnegie Mellon University remain interested in the space, I have to believe something will happen sooner rather than later. Someone will blink first, but will it by the city or the MTA? Urban development history isn’t really on the authority’s side.

7 comments
1 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Load More Posts