Central Park Ghost Tunnel Will Reopen For 2nd Ave. Subway

There are countless relics from the subway’s past hidden beneath NYC, but one of the most intriguing will reveal itself again in just 10 days when the Second Avenue Subway (SAS) invites straphangers to swipe their Metro cards for the first time. As Quartz noticed this past summer, a peculiar loop cutting through Central Park appeared when the MTA released their new subway map touting the addition of the SAS. Reporter Mike Murphy immediately questioned the mysterious addition that would move the Q train further north without issue (“I felt like people would have noticed if the MTA had been ripping up Central Park to build a tunnel,” he wrote). After a bit of digging, he found out the half-mile stretch was built over 40 years ago and, at least according to archival maps, it’s only been used only twice since then.

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With the help of the Transit Museum, Murphy found that the “ghost line” runs between the 57th Street and 7th Avenue, and Lexington Avenue and 63rd Street in Manhattan, and was built in the 1970s as part of a past attempt to bring the Second Avenue Subway to life. The plan, however, was squashed when the city went into recession.

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1998 map depicting the ghost tunnel via Quartz courtesy of the NYC Transit Museum

But the line wasn’t a total waste. Working with museum archivist Halley Choiniere, Murphy found two instances, of about six months each, where the tunnel appeared on transit maps. He writes:

“In 1995, the mysterious tunnel was included on the map when the Manhattan bridge was out of service, allowing Q trains to cross back over to Long Island farther up the East River while the bridge was being worked on. Once the work was completed in late 1995, the tunnel disappeared, and the Q train went back to its regular route. In 1998, the tunnel reappeared as a special temporary shuttle service while work was being done on the Sixth Avenue line, cutting off access to lower Astoria through the regular route. Again, when the work was finished, the tunnel disappeared, and the map went back to its regular delineations.”

And now, with the SAS opening in just over a week, the Q train will once again be rerouted—but this time permanently—to travel through the forgotten tunnel and up the newly constructed line.

[Via Quartz]

First Look At The Second Avenue Subway’s $4.5M Public Art

If a sparkling new line isn’t cause enough to celebrate, once the Second Avenue Subway opens on January 1st, 2017, millions of New Yorkers will also be treated to several stretches of world-class art while navigating the 96th, 86th, 72nd, and 63rd Street stations. As the Times first reports, the MTA has poured $4.5 million into beautifying the stations with contemporary tile artworks by famed names Chuck Close, Sarah Sze, Vik Muniz, and Jean Shin.

While art seems like the last thing the cash-strapped MTA should be spending on, as the paper writes, the agency sees the project as means to “put the aesthetic front and center again in a way that evokes the ambition of the city’s first subway stations.” Indeed, integrating ornamentation like mosaics, stained glass, and tiled ceilings was once as important as laying down tracks. A prime example: the City Hall Station, which opened in 1904. Moreover, the undertaking reveals an effort by the MTA to make New York’s subway stations architectural destinations rather than just public utilities, something that’s at the center of transit design in Asia and Europe.

“At some point government adopted an attitude that its job was to build things that were functional but unattractive and unappealing,” Governor Cuomo said in a statement to Times. “But that’s not how it has always been, and it’s not how it should be.”

At today’s unveiling Cuomo added, “… while we were doing public works it was about an expression of who we were, what we believe, and was an impression and a gesture communicating that we have a character of society. Every public work was also artwork and also an educational experience. A child who had never walked into a museum or never walked into an art gallery, if they just walked around the streets of New York, they would be exposed to the art, education, and culture just by being a New Yorker, and that is where we came from and what made New York special.”

The four artists were chosen by the MTA Arts & Design, the agency’s art department, from a pool of 300-plus applicants. Each was given a station as a blank canvas. The project is the city’s largest permanent installation

Amtrak’s Hudson River Tunnels Project Could Bring Long Term Traffic Jams

Back in January, Amtrak unveiled its $24B Gateway Program, a plan that would overhaul the Hudson River rail tunnels by building a brand new tunnel and repairing another that is currently in disrepair. Work under the plan would also encompass expanding Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan and replacing rail bridges in New Jersey. While details on the course of construction were previously thin, according to draft proposals obtained by Reuters, we now know that work on the new tunnel will begin in 2019, and the West Side Highway could be subject to three years of traffic jams as a result.

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As 6sqft previously reported, the most crucial component of the Gateway is the estimated $7.7B Hudson Tunnel Project that will bring a new two-track tunnel into Penn Station station and rebuild an existing, century-old tunnel. The existing tunnel was damaged during Superstorm Sandy and continues to erode as saltwater residue clings to the interior. What’s more is that irrespective of the damage, ridership has grown tremendously over the last 30 years, and the existing setup is unequipped to handle increased demand. The Regional Plan Association has called the Hudson River tunnels “the biggest bottleneck in the metro region’s transit network, causing delays that ripple up and down the northeast corridor.” Shoring up infrastructure is imperative, and as Reuters writes, “The Gateway project is considered critical to the greater metropolitan New York City area, which produces 10 percent of the country’s economic output.”

The draft proposals was obtained from a transportation sector source by the news outlet and lays out various plans for construction. One scenario details digging up a partially renovated section of the Hudson River Park using a “cut and cover” method, a move that would lead to lane closures on the busy West Side Highway and limit access to the park. Also noted is stabilizing the ground for boring, as parts of Manhattan are on landfill; as is building a massive underwater encasement that would rise from the riverbed to protect the tunnel from things like anchors and grounded ships. Work in the water could take two years and encompass 224,000 square feet (or four football fields in size), which would also impact the Hudson’s marine life.

The plans outlined in the drafts, however, have in no way been finalized and are meant to identify the least desirable construction scenarios—a common measure taken for large-scale public projects. The proposals will ultimately be incorporated into an environmental impact statement to be released in 2017. Nancy Snyder, a spokeswoman for NJ Transit, who is leading the environmental review, told Reuters: “We are going through this process to see what is the best way to construct the tunnel with the least amount of impact to everyone involved.”

Last September, it was decided that New York and New Jersey would cover half the cost of theGateway Program, and federal officials the other half through a separate entity within the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Amtrak says it will take a decade to complete the entire project.

MTA Might Increase Subway Fare To $3.00 In 2017

Swiping a MetroCard at a subway turnstile could cost an extra 25 cents in March, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority announced Wednesday. The MTA finance chairman has suggested to raise on fares on subways, buses and commuter rails, and tolls on bridges and tunnels, to help curb increasing debt. The proposed change would go into effect in March 2017. 

Two proposals for the subway and bus fare increase have been drafted by the MTA. The first would raise fares for subways and buses to $3 from $2.75, which would increase the MetroCard purchase bonus to 16 percent from 11 percent. The second would keep the current $2.75 fare, but drop the bonus to 5 percent.

Under both proposals, the price of a weekly MetroCard card would rise to $32 from $31, and a monthly card would increase to $121 from $116.50. Likewise, tolls on tunnels and bridges, and tickets for commuter rail lines, would increase by four percent.

The board is expect to vote on the hike in January 2017.

MTA Brings Select Bus Service 23rd Street

Going crosstown can be a nightmare, and often it’s faster to abandon public transportation altogether in favor of walking. But today, the DOT and Mayor Bill de Blasio launched Select Bus Service (SBS) along the notoriously slow 23rd Street corridor in Manhattan, with the goal of hopefully speeding up crosstown commutes.

The M23 serves as a key connector between multiple other subway and bus routes but has historically been bogged down by long wait times and large ridership—it currently serves 13,000 commuters daily. The newly added SBS route, which goes from Chelsea Piers to Turtle Bay with restricted turns, will, in theory, ease that congestion while improving traffic flow.

Like other SBS routes, the M23 SBS will have off-board fare collection and dedicated bus lanes. These features have been shown to reduce travel times by 10 to 30 percent, according to the MTA.

“Communities with limited subway options will now learn that SBS has a winning formula to transform bus commutes,” Mayor de Blasio said in a statement, adding that “SBS saves commuters precious time while also making streets—including the newly added 23rd Street route—much safer.”

This marks the 12th SBS corridor in the city, one step closer to de Blasio’s OneNYC goal of equitable and sustainable transit expansion.

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REVEALED: Plans New Penn Station-Moynihan Train Hall Complex

In a presentation (pdf) Tuesday at the Association for a Better New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that plans for transforming a revamped Penn Station-Moynihan Train Hall complex into a “world-class 21st century transportation hub” were back on track and ready to roll, complete with a slew of new renderings and the selection of a developer-builder team including the Related Companies, Vornado, and Skanska AB, to redevelop the Farley Building.

With more than twice the passenger traffic of JFK, LaGuardia, and Newark airports combined, the governor called the current Penn Station, “overcrowded, decrepit, and claustrophobic” and promised the new Moynihan Train Hall “will have more space than Grand Central’s main concourse, housing both Amtrak and LIRR ticketing and waiting areas, along with state-of-the-art security features, a modern, digital passenger experience, and a host of dining and retail options.”

In the first of the project’s two major parts, McKim, Mead & White’s 1913 Beaux-Arts James A. Farley Post Office will be the site of a newly-constructed 255,000-square-foot train hall that will serve both Amtrak and Long Island Rail Road passengers. Moynihan Train Hall, as it will be known, will hold more than 112,000 square feet of retail and 588,000 square feet of office space in addition to ticketing and waiting areas for the two train lines.

The new hall will employ state-of-the-art security measures and high-tech additions like free wifi and charging stations. Renderings have been based on designs by the architecture firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) who have been attached to the project since its earliest stages. The Governor’s presentation states that, “A number of design concepts, including those received through the RFEI process, are under review that would add retail and improve passenger experience and station function.” It is possible that the selected team could proceed with a different firm.

In addition to the new hub, the MTA will thoroughly revamp the existing Penn Station’s 33rd Street LIRR concourse. This redesign will nearly triple the width of the existing corridor and result in higher ceilings, brighter lighting and new way-finding, ticketing and informational systems.

Also included in the plan is a complete renovation of both Penn Station subway stations—the A/C/E at Eighth Avenue and the 1/2/3 at Seventh Avenue–as per MTA plans, announced earlier this year, to update dozens of subway stations throughout the system.

Similar to the renderings released in January, the plans show a new glass skylight above the concourse, meant to reference the original Penn Station design, integrated into the building’s historic and architecturally dramatic steel trusses. From the architect’s description: “SOM’s design establishes a grand civic space that celebrates the unique history of the Farley Building while evoking the vaulted concourse of the original Penn Station.”

Cuomo has said the cost of the Train Hall project will be about $1.6 billion; $600 million will come from the developer of the hall’s retail space, $570 million will come from the Empire State Development Corporation and $425 million will come from Amtrak, LIRR, the Port Authority, and the federal government. The Penn Station LIRR corridor revamp will ring in at $170 million; the subway station facelifts will cost $50 million and could happen “as early as 2018.”

6sqft reported in December of last year that “… after a promise to close this year on the deal [with Related and Vornado] was left empty, Governor Cuomo seems to have had enough” of the long-stalled project, and in January posted renderings and an outline of the governor’s plans for a reboot with possible new partners on board.

650,000 people travel through Penn Station every day, more than the traffic at Newark, JFK, and LaGuardia airports combined. And if all goes according to plan, Governor Cuomo projects that number will double over the next 15 years. The project is scheduled to be completed in 2020.

New Subway Cars Are In The Works

Gov. Andrew Cuomo revealed details of a new fleet of subway cars Monday, part of a “redesign of the MTA on every level” that will bear the unmistakable mark of Albany.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority announced plans to build 1,025 new cars, which will feature Wi-Fi and USB jacks and connect openly to one another. A rendering of the new train showed a diagonal stripe of yellow and a panel of blue along the cars’ exterior, the latest sign that Cuomo is color-coding his legacy into the city’s transit system.

New buses that Cuomo deemed “Ferrari-like” in March and an e-ticket app that debuted this month feature the colors that New Yorkers might recognize from a state trooper’s car or all of Cuomo’s materials—blue and what this reporter mistakenly referred to as yellow at a press conference at the New York Transit Museum in Brooklyn. 

“The state color is not yellow,” Cuomo corrected. “Gold.”

Cuomo spoke at the New York Transit Museum in Brooklyn on Monday.

Cuomo’s office has previously denied a rebranding of the MTA in the state colors, but Cuomo said Monday it is “fair to say you’re seeing a redesign of the MTA on every level, and when you’re building new cars and you’re building new buses, you’re building new stations, etc., colors schemes are a part of that, and the attractiveness is part of that.”

The new cars, announced as Mayor Bill de Blasio was heading to Italy for a week-long vacation, are part of the $27 billion, five-year MTA capital plan. The transit agency will also rebuild 31 subway stations across the five boroughs. Granite floors will replace concrete, and iron bars will be exchanged for glass barriers, according to the preliminary designs. At new subway entrances, the classic green globes are out, and electronic boards showing train status are in.

The governor has previously touted plans for Metro-North and the Long Island Railroad, but at Monday’s press conference he emphasized that the subways are a priority for him as well, though he would not expressly confirm his signature on the new cars.

“I’m sure [MTA] Chairman [Thomas] Prendergast, when he’s done, is going to put on every door and every train, ‘Thank you New York state for the $27 billion,’” Cuomo joked. “As long as the train is on time. If the train is not on time…”

The new cars will also feature open gangways, allowing movement along the entire train.

Not all of the $27 billion actually comes from the state. New York City, the federal government, and, of course, riders also contribute to the capital plan, which includes $15.8 billion for the city's transit system (the MTA also reaches seven suburban counties in New York). Also, the state has yet to identify the source of all of the funds it has committed, which has made transit advocates nervous.

Design experts Debbie Millman and Steven Heller, co-founders of the branding master’s program at the School of Visual Arts, said that if the color stamp is meant to refer to the governor, the signature is subtle.

“I’m a native New Yorker. I’ve lived in all the boroughs except the Bronx and I can tell you that I never once knew that the New York colors were blue and gold,” Millman said.

The e-ticket app colors looks orange and blue, she said.

“It really looks like it was sponsored by the Mets,” Millman said, whereas the buses “almost look more like the love child of the Mets and Citibank.”

Swapping classic blue-and-white buses for blue and gold seems “radical in terms of the identification of the city,” Heller said, and could have political meaning, especially in light of Cuomo’s relationship with the mayor.

"If you take into account Cuomo’s ongoing feud with de Blasio— which could be ego, it could be ideology, it could be any number of things—it’s kind of a slap in the face to a mayor to have something so overt changed on him,” he said.

NYC Subway Use Nears All-Time Peak As U.S. Public Transport Use Declines

The New York subway is unlike any other transit system in the United States. This system extends for 230 miles (375 kilometers) with approximately 420 stations. It serves the four highly  dense boroughs of the city (Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx), each of which is 20 percent or more denser than any municipality large municipality in the United States or Canada. Much of the fifth borough, Staten Island, looks very much like suburban New Jersey and has no subway service, though has a more modest system, the Staten Island Railway.

Overall, the older Metros (Note 1), New York's subway, along with London's Underground and the Paris Metro dominated the world's urban rail systems for decades. Until the recent emergence of Chinese urban areas (Beijing and Shanghai), London had the longest extent of track in the world, followed by New York.

As one of the original Metros in the world, it might be thought that the New York City Subway's best days are over. That would be a mistake. It is true that ridership reached a peak in the late 1940s and dropped by more than half between the late 1970s and the early 1990s. However, since that time ridership has more than doubled, according to American Public Transportation Association data. And it is not inconceivable that new records may be set in the years to come.

Perhaps the most incredible thing about the New York City Subway has been its utter dominance of the well-publicized national transit ridership increases of the last decade. According to annual data published by the American Public Transportation Association (APTA), ridership on the New York City Subway accounts for all of the transit increase since 2005. Between 2005 and 2015, ridership on the New York City Subway increased nearly 1 billion trips. By contrast, all of the transit services in the United States, including the New York City Subway, increased only 800 million over the same period. On services outside the New York City subway, three was a loss of nearly 200 million riders between 2005 and 2015 

The New York City subway accounts carries nearly 2.5 times the annual ridership of the other nine largest metro systems in the nation combined (Figure 2). This is 10 times that of Washington’s Metro, which is losing ridership despite strong population growth , probably partly due to safety concerns (see America’s Subway: America’s Embarrassment?). Things have gotten so bad in Washington that the federal government has threatened to close the system (See: Feds Forced to Set Priorities for Washington Subway).

The New York City subway carries more than 11 times the ridership of the Chicago “L”, though like in New York, the ridership trend on the “L” has increased impressively in recent years. The New York City subway carries and more than 50 times the Los Angeles subway ridership, where MTA (and SCRTD) bus and rail ridership has declined over the past 30 years despite an aggressive rail program (See: Just How Much has Los Angeles Transit Ridership Fallen?).

With these gains, the New York City Subway's share of national transit ridership has risen from less than one of each five riders (18 percent) in 2005 to more than one in four (26 percent) in 2015. This drove the New York City metropolitan areas share of all national transit ridership from 30 percent in 2005 to over 37 percent in 2015.

Subway ridership dominates transit in the New York City metropolitan area as well, at 67 percent. Other New York City oriented transit services, including services that operate within the city exclusively and those that principally carry commuters in and out of the city account for 28 percent of the ridership. This includes the commuter rail systems (Long Island Railroad, Metro-North Railroad and New Jersey Transit) and the Metro from New Jersey (PATH) have experienced ridership increases of approximately 15 percent over last decade (Note 2).

Other transit services, those not oriented to New York City, account for five percent of the metropolitan area's transit ridership (Figure 3). By comparison, approximately 58 percent of the population lives outside the city of New York. The small transit ridership share not oriented to New York City illustrates a very strong automobile component in suburban mobility even in the most well-served transit market in the country.

Last year (2014), APTA announced that the nation's transit ridership had reached the highest in modern history, having not been higher since 1957. In fact, the ridership boom that produced the record can be attributed wholly to the New York City Subway. If New York City Subway ridership had remained at its 2005 level, overall transit ridership would have decreased from 9.8 billion in 2005 to 9.6 billion in 2015. The modern record of 10.7 billion rides would never have been approached.

Thus, transit in the United States is not only a "New York Story," but it has also been strongly dependent on the New York Subway in recent years. After decades of decline, the revival of the New York subway is a welcome development.

L Train Shutdown Details May Finally Be Coming From MTA

There's still a lot that we don't know about the possible shutdown of the L train. What we doknow is that it may be necessary to facilitate repairs to Superstorm Sandy-damaged equipment in its tunnels, and that it could be happening as soon as 2017, but the MTA hasn't exactly been forthcoming with details beyond that.

But some clarity on the situation may finally be coming. According to DNAInfo, state assemblyman Joseph Lentol (who represents L train-adjacent neighborhoods like Bushwick and Williamsburg), confirmed that the MTA agreed to brief community residents on the forthcoming repairs. "We are working with the MTA to secure a location for the first town hall in Brooklyn," he told DNAInfo, stating that it could happen as soon as the first week in May.

Per the report, the MTA may be asking for community feedback and recommendations on the impending shutdown. Considering how many people could be affected by this action—Brooklyn and Manhattan residents, business owners, developers, the list goes on—we're guessing it'll be a fairly heated event.

Penn Station's $3B Renovation Plans, Revealed! - Curbed NY

Within hours of word spreading that Governor Andrew Cuomo waspoised to announce a radical plan for the renovation of Penn Station, that plan has arrived. On Wednesday, Cuomo announced a forthcoming Request For Proposals that will be issued by Empire State Development, Amtrak, and the MTA later this week for the renovation of Penn Station, as well as the remaking of the neighboring Farley Post Office, into the Empire Station Complex at a total cost of $3 billion. The $2 billion redevelopment of Penn Station may entail razing Madison Square Garden's Paramount Theater and adding new entrances on Seventh Avenue or 33rd Street and a glass wall and entrances along Eighth Avenue, the Times reports. Whichever developer's proposal is chosen will control all the retail in Penn Station, and that's huge.

Another Request For Proposals will be issued for the $1 billion remaking of the James A. Farley Post Office into a waiting area for Amtrak passengers, complete with shops and office space. One developer can nab both projects if their proposals are chosen. Developers Related Companies and Vornado Realty Trust, who were chosen to redevelop the post office into Moynihan Station in a decade-old agreement, aren't out per se: they're welcome to submit proposals, and if their vision for the site is not selected, the state is required to reimburse the developers upwards of $30 million. The two developers are at an advantage, though—they're intimately knowledgeable about the station and post office, and that'll be a boon being that the state wants proposals submitted within 90 days. The Real Deal says Cuomo is gunning to have the redevelopments complete within the next 3 lightyears.

The main goal of the $3 billion redevelopment is to bring more light and air into the station while alleviating some congestion. "Frankly, it's a miserable experience," Cuomo said of the existing terminal. The Executive Vice President of the Municipal Arts Society, Mary Rowe, applauded the project in a statement but doesn't think it will be enough to deal with the station's influx of passengers, "[I]n the long term, these improvements won't be enough to fully address Penn Station's severe overcrowdingor meet the growing needs of its rapidly developing neighborhood and our regional economy."

Exactly how the project will be financed is up in the air, but Cuomo is expected to address it in next week's State of the State speech. At least $325 million will come from government sources, like Amtrak, the Port Authority, and the federal government. The Wall Street Journal suggests that the station's and post office's air rights may be leveraged to finance the project. In July, Cuomo announced a similarly ambitious plan to revamp LaGuardia Airport.

Source: Penn Station's $3B Renovation Plans, Revealed! - Transportation Watch - Curbed NY