- Mayor John Lindsay at the groundbreaking of the Second Avenue subway, October 27, 1972.
Barely three years after the groundbreaking ceremony, the Second Avenue line was "indefinitely postponed", and with it went most of the rest of the MTA's hopes for expansion of its rail systems. Work never quite stopped completely, but continued at a glacial pace on a few related projects such as the Archer Avenue line and the 63rd Street tunnel. Even today, construction continues on the eastern end of the 63rd Street line.
Now, twenty-five years after Mayor Abe Beame suspended the project, the MTA has issued a five-year plan allocating major funding for route extensions, including a Second Avenue subway. Unfortunately, the MTA has split its planning among a number of studies that are only minimally related to one another. In many ways the agency is revisiting the same issues it dealt with in the late 1960s: East Side transit, access to the airports, more rail connections to Manhattan. These transportation needs are, if anything, even more crucial today. Yet this time around there is no attempt to set priorities; each study is focused mainly on its own narrow set of goals. The goals themselves are not always clear. Mayor Guiliani supports a westward extension of the #7 train, but is this to serve a new Yankee Stadium, his more recently proposed football stadium, or some other project that will evaporate once he exits office?
Three major studies are examined here in more detail.
Manhattan East Side Alternatives
The Second Avenue subway plan of thirty years ago was a single project running from the lower tip of Manhattan to the North Bronx. Today it has been split into three segments, with the Manhattan East Side Alternatives (MESA) study recommending a line for the Upper East Side, the Lower Manhattan portion deferred or handed-off to the Lower Manhattan Access study, and the Bronx ignored for the time being. The new five-year plan gives $700 million towards the subway, an amount that is supposed to allow some actual construction to be resumed.
Last summer the MTA released a Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) that examined a Second Avenue subway running from the existing 63rd Street line up to 125th Street. This would use the two completed tunnel segments (99th to 105th Streets and 110th to 120th Streets) that were built in the 1970s. The line would curve west from the existing tunnel around 116th Street and end at a new deep level station at 125th and Lexington.
From 63rd Street the line would use the express tracks of the Broadway BMT to reach lower Manhattan. The express and local tracks at Canal Street would be reversed or "flipped" so that the local tracks fed into the Manhattan Bridge. The effect would be to give priority to riders from the Upper East Side of Manhattan over those coming across the bridge from Brooklyn. A possible service pattern would be to have the R train run as a Broadway express to the Second Avenue line, the N run as a Broadway local, and a new T train local would take over service to Forest Hills.
In the 1970s four widely separated segments of the Second Avenue line were started. The MESA plan concentrates on a limited section of line. There will be provisions for eventual extensions to the north and south, but for now the MTA seems to be avoiding a commitment to a longer project. One of the problems with this cautious approach is that it doesn't consider factors beyond its study area, which covers the eastern half of Manhattan. The Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens get little or no attention. Additionally, there is little consideration of the impact of the future Long Island Railroad connection to Grand Central, a project receiving $1.5 billion by 2004. The study mentions that data about Long Island passengers transferred to the subways at Grand Central "are continuing to be developed as part of the Long Island East Side Draft EIS." Thus the MTA is proposing a course of action in one study while waiting for the results of a related study.
Light Rail Component of MESA
A Lower East Side light rail line (see Vol. 1, #2) is an option in the study, although the new plan does not provide funding for it. The MTA seems to be reluctant to upset the auto-dominated status quo on Manhattan streets; reserved right-of-way is proposed only on Avenue D. For Water Street, East Broadway, and East 14th Street, trolleys are to run in mixed traffic. At the latter location the DEIS admits, "the most significant issues raised result from its operation on 14th Street." However, the MTA is reluctant to challenge automobile priorities. The trolleys will have to compete for space because "otherwise there would be little capacity for crosstown traffic on this important street." Unfortunately, as designed now, the rising levels of vehicular traffic in the city could swamp this $1 billion investment. However, any progress on this line seems to be deferred for the next few years.
One of the reasons the project is so costly is because of the tunneling work needed to run trolleys through the Chambers Street subway station. Rerouting the line on surface streets through Chinatown could lower the cost while making the line more accessible for riders in a busy area that would otherwise be bypassed.
Lower Manhattan Access Study (LMA)
This study, which considers the needs of Metro-North and Long Island Railroad riders going to lower Manhattan, is scheduled slightly behind MESA. A draft EIS is expected to be ready by Spring, 2000. The five-year plan allocates $75 million for planning and design to be shared among LMA and two other expansion items (Metro-North access to Penn Station and extension of the 7 train to the Javits Center.)
Several big-ticket projects are in the running as long-term LMA alternatives. The lower half of the Second Avenue subway is found here, with a spur added to Grand Central. The commuter rail options include a new tunnel from Penn Station to the World Trade Center area, or a new Metro-North tunnel under Madison Avenue that would basically bypass Grand Central for a direct run to the Financial District.
A competition may thus develop between commuter rail and subway needs. The LMA study defines these as alternatives, when in fact they may serve different purposes. Perhaps both are worthy ideas, in which case priorities would have to be assigned. The LMA study does not bring up this question, so it will probably not provide an answer.
Transportation issues involving New Jersey have been segregated in a completely different project, the Access to the Region's Core (ARC) study, which has now settled on a single option: expanding the tunnel capacity under the Hudson into Penn Station and connecting this with Grand Central. This joint MTA-Port Authority-NJ Transit effort focuses on entry into Midtown, while LMA deals only with Lower Manhattan. The two projects are clearly going to affect each other, yet there doesn't yet seem to be an attempt to coordinate these now separate efforts. Ideally the commuter rail system should be transformed into a regional rail system tying together the far-flung New York metropolitan area. The present commuter studies (LIRR Access, LMA, ARC) concentrate on the traditional pattern of suburbanites traveling to the Manhattan core. Not only do they have little relation with each other, but they also offer little to the resident of Paterson who wants to go to Valley Stream, or a rider in Co-op City who wants to travel to New Brunswick. There are many kinds of trips like these through and around New York that are not well served by the present systems. Tying together the operations of Metro-North, the Long Island Railroad, and NJ Transit may be a difficult task because of equipment incompatibilities, and new tunnels through Manhattan may indeed be needed, but a solution could provide a huge boost in ridership. One Committee for Better Transit proposal would connect the three commuter systems and allow for a variety of through-running options.
LaGuardia Airport Access
The five-year plan proposes $645 million for a rail link to LaGuardia, but many uncertainties remain about how to accomplish this. Recently the MTA was down to a list of only two alternatives, both based on the 60th Street subway tunnel and the Astoria line. The simplest plan both for construction and operations would be to extend the N train beyond the Ditmars Boulevard terminal to the Airport. Unfortunately, this would require building elevated tracks past three blocks of apartment buildings and houses on 31st Street in Astoria, and this generated a great deal of community opposition. (Ironically the end of the elevated tracks were designed nearly eighty years ago to allow for further extension.)
The alternative plan was to build an extension off the elevated station at Queensboro Plaza and construct a new route along Queens railroads and highways. This option had three main drawbacks:
1) a separate LaGuardia service would be needed, which is probably beyond the capacity of the 60th Street tunnel to handle; 2) a long, non-stop new line would have to be constructed, which might not be justified by the amount of ridership generated; 3) the Marine Air Terminal, the base for Delta Airline's shuttle service, would be bypassed.
While facing these drawbacks, the MTA has prepared a new long list of alternatives using subways, railroads, people movers, or ferries; some of these options are revivals of previously discarded ideas. Perhaps a new branch of the Long Island Railroad, including a Metro-North connection over the Hell Gate Bridge (options included on the new list) would provide more capacity and flexibility than plans based on the N train. Using conventional rail would also allow the possibility of future Amtrak service to the airport, allowing some short-haul connections to be shifted from the airlines to rail. The project also should have been coordinated with the planned BQE reconstruction. At the moment, however, the MTA is in the strange position of trying to allocate $645 million to a project that has a dozen alternatives back on the table.
Rethinking the Program
In 1969, the MTA set out to juggle two-dozen major projects. It didn't really attempt to set priorities beyond grouping these projects into three "phases", of which the first was expected to be completed within ten years. It may not have been clear how all of this was to be paid for, but at least there was an attempt to look at the needs of the whole region. Today the agency has a collection of studies, each moving with its own momentum. The Long Island East Side Access project may be the furthest along, with the others trailing behind at their own pace. Perhaps the MTA prefers this situation, because if projects seem to have a life of their own, then tough decisions and potentially conflicting priorities can be sidestepped. Once a study like MESA is "set", it becomes difficult to modify it or introduce new ideas.
The full funding for these plans may be as uncertain as the situation that prevailed thirty years ago. Perhaps the worst thing that could happen is that work begins on certain projects that are then, in a repeat of the 1970s, suspended before completion. It is fortunate that the MTA has finally recognized the need to increase transit capacity after years of work rebuilding the existing system. However, before searching for more money the MTA has to fit its various pieces into a coherent whole.
The price tags on some of the expansion projects seem far out of line with comparable projects in other cities, even allowing for higher costs in New York. If Los Angeles can build subways for about $300 million per mile, a figure that dismayed some people in that city, New York cannot justify spending about $1 billion per mile. CBT has offered ideas for cutting the cost and speeding the construction of one project, the LIRR East Side Access line, an item now so costly that it threatens to swallow most funds available for expansion in the next ten years (see Regional Transit Advocate: Fall, 1998).
Right now the political debate about the Second Avenue subway revolves around whether to build a full-length line or just the northern portion advocated by the MTA. (Both sidestep the fact that the proposed Second Avenue subway is a two-track, all local line.) However this issue is resolved, it will still be many years before trains run on any portion of the line. The MTA seems to think that the northern segment to 125th Street wouldn't be ready until 2015, although this may be a deliberately cautious estimate. (The MESA study also offers an earlier opening of the line only to 86th Street, a sort of initial segment of the initial segment.)
Clearly some relief has to be offered to the East Side before 2008 or 2015. The MTA itself has proposed "New York Bus Lanes" on First and Second Avenues, which would be full-time, two lane busways. (The M15 is already the busiest bus line in North America.) There is a hint in the MESA DEIS that electric trolley buses could be used on this route. Perhaps when New Yorkers realize how long they will have to wait for a Second Avenue subway, they will be willing to look again at light rail, an option dropped early in the planning process. MESA's double-width transitway opens up an interesting possibility: trolleys could provide limited stop service in the outer lane, while buses could provide local service in the inner one.
CBT Views
CBT has long advocated getting better use of the commuter rail network within the city limits. Metro-North's Harlem and Hudson lines are already heavily used by suburbanites, but the MTA should explore ways of increasing their utility for Bronx residents; this in turn would take some of the burden from the Lexington Avenue subway. One possibility would be to experiment with lower fares from some or all of the Bronx Metro-North stations. Fares matching the cost of Bronx express buses (now $3 for a one-way trip) could be offered; even lower fares could be tried from well-located but lightly used stations such as Melrose and Tremont. Schedules could be examined for ways to cut headways at Bronx stations that are now served every twenty-five to thirty minutes in rush hours. There likely would be capital costs associated with this program, including additional railcars, lengthening of station platforms, and more ticket vending machines; however, the MESA study gave only a cursory glance at the potential of Metro-North. A study is already in the works to bring Metro-North service from the East Bronx over the Hell Gate Bridge to Penn Station (and later to Grand Central). This would take provide an alternative for 6 train riders originating in Co-op City, Parkchester, and Hunts Point, and, as a bonus, give new reverse commute service to Westchester County and Connecticut. As a relatively quick and inexpensive project, it should get a high priority from the MTA.
The MTA's goals should allow for flexibility and multiple solutions to various problems. Short and long-term projects can complement instead of competing with other.