What do you think could be done to make subways, buses and commuter railroads better? We’d like to hear from you.
Good morning. It’s Friday. We’re looking for your ideas on how to improve mass transit in New York. We’ll also look at how the collapse of the commercial real estate market has affected the big development project around Pennsylvania Station.
Mass transit in New York — the subways, buses and commuter railroads — are whined about. Complained about. Cursed at, or maybe just cursed.
And yet New York, and New Yorkers, put up with it.
This week my colleague Ana Ley looked at five ideas from experts to address the problems facing the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the agency that runs the complicated network of subways, buses and commuter rail lines that tie the city together.
Now it’s your turn. What do you think would make mass transit in New York better? Should the subway be free? What could the transit agency do to bring ridership closer to prepandemic levels? Would making subway and bus service more frequent help? And what about congestion pricing, which would impose tolls on drivers who head into the business parts of Manhattan? The revenue from congestion pricing, some $1 billion a year, would go to mass transit. Will that help?
Send your ideas to transitfix@nytimes.com. We’ll publish some if not all of them in New York Today. Please keep your ideas short and concise — no more than 250 words.
There’s nothing new about trying to fix the M.T.A., or at least improve it. In 2017 the agency announced a “Genius Transit Challenge,” a contest for New Yorkers to brainstorm with abandon.
This was shortly after Andrew Cuomo, the governor at the time, declared a state of emergency for the subway system. By then, subway meltdowns seemed to be happening regularly: A few days earlier a derailment had injured dozens of passengers. Cuomo, in signing an executive order that made the state of emergency official, also promised $1 billion for improvements.
This week I called one of the winners of the genius challenge, Craig Avedisian. I had interviewed him in 2018, after he was named one of the 19 finalists. He is a lawyer. I wrote then that he was not one of those rumpled-looking Nobel Prize types like Albert Einstein or John Nash, of “A Beautiful Mind.”
This time around, I asked what had happened to his idea.
“At the awards ceremony” in 2018, he told me, “they said they were going to work with me over the next year to do a pilot project with the idea. I ran into one of the guys who was involved in the contest a couple of months later and he said, ‘Yeah, they said that they will.’ P.S. They never did.”
His idea, as he described it in 2018, was “simple” and “user-friendly” and would have expanded capacity on subway trains by 40 percent on average and by 65 percent on some trains. The transit agency said at the time that he had proposed “adding up to four cars to trains currently in operation to increase both train capacity and passenger comfort.”
He said this week that he had heard, from a former colleague of his wife’s who now works at New York City Transit, that the agency had done “a computerized model of my idea, and it worked. That was interesting to know.”
But there is a but. Back when he hatched the idea, some subway lines were chronically overcrowded.
“Post-Covid, they have the opposite problem,” he said. “They need to get people on the subway.” (A transit spokeswoman made the same point this week while also saying the agency was “always welcoming new ideas on how to better the customer experience.)
Still, Avedisian is not the type to give up easily. “Unless we all assume the problem of overcrowding is never going to come back,” he told me, “when things are not in a crisis mode, at least do a pilot test of it and see what happens on the 7 or the L.”
I pointed out that there are times when the 7 line is packed with another species that does not give up easily: Mets fans on the way to or from Citi Field.
“We might want to do it in the off-season,” he said.
Weather
Expect a warm, sunny day in the mid-80s. The evening is mostly cloudy, with temperatures dropping to around 60.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
Suspended today (Orthodox Good Friday).
The latest Metro news
Trump
-
Trump civil suit: Donald Trump was questioned under oath in the civil case brought by the New York attorney general, Letitia James, which accused Trump, his family business and three of his children of “staggering” fraud.
-
Michael Cohen sued: Trump filed a lawsuit in Florida against his former fixer, Michael Cohen, who is expected to serve as a star witness in the Manhattan district attorney’s case against him.
-
Writer’s suit: Trump’s lawyers accused E. Jean Carroll, the writer who has accused him of rape, of concealing the fact that a nonprofit linked to a Silicon Valley billionaire and harsh critic of Trump had covered some of her legal expenses.
-
Get to know Alvin Bragg: The Manhattan district attorney is in the eye of the storm after the Trump indictment. Here’s what to know about Bragg’s background and career.
Crime
-
Homicide charges for building collapse: Three contractors have been charged in the death of an Ecuadorean construction worker who was crushed in a Bronx building collapse nearly four years ago.
-
Police chiefs charged: Two New Jersey police chiefs were charged with committing sex-related crimes involving women who worked in their departments.
More local news
-
Manhattan’s federal prosecutor speaks: Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, recently sat down with The New York Times for his first extensive interview since taking office.
-
Carbone reservations for sale: A website called Appointment Trader is letting people sell their existing reservations (like prime-time seats at Rao’s, Carbone and Don Angie), giving diners a chance to snag tables for a price.
Uncertainty about Penn Station development
“The whole thing has been a tremendous waste of time, given the collapse of the commercial market,” said State Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal.
He was talking about the project to reimagine Pennsylvania Station at the center of one of the largest commercial real estate projects in history, a thicket of new office towers. But the project has been put on hold, delayed by a pandemic shift to remote work and, more recently, by rising interest rates and fears of a recession.
My colleagues Matthew Haag and Stefanos Chen write that other firms have rushed to present alternatives in the two months since Vornado Realty Trust, the developer involved when the massive project was announced, said that plans for the Penn Station site could be delayed for at least two years. Vornado’s chief executive, Steven Roth, told shareholders in a letter last week that Vornado remained committed to its plans around Penn Station but warned that “we are approaching the eye of the economic storm.”
Gov. Kathy Hochul, who scaled back the plan after she replaced Andrew Cuomo in 2021, has not said whether she would modify the plan again in light of Vornado’s hesitation about going forward.
In recent days Vornado executives have met with state lawmakers in hopes of shoring up support. Their message was that the delay was only temporary. But the delay has renewed criticism about how state officials involved Vornado from the beginning. State Senators Liz Krueger and Leroy Comrie have urged the state agency overseeing the redevelopment, Empire State Development, to re-evaluate the process. Krueger represents the Penn Station neighborhood, and Comrie serves on the state’s Public Authorities Control Board, which would have to approve each new tower before construction could begin.
Comrie said that three groups had shown him proposals that would help pay for the Penn Station overhaul in other ways than with new buildings. One group is ASTM North America, an infrastructure company led by Patrick Foye, a former chief executive of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Comrie declined to describe the two other proposals.
The ASTM proposal, which would create a new aboveground station around Madison Square Garden, has impressed key legislators and civic leaders. Hochul’s office declined to answer specific questions about the ASTM plan or the other proposals.
METROPOLITAN diary
Up early
Dear Diary:
I get up early because I have a long commute to work from my Brooklyn neighborhood. On one pre-dawn October morning, I arrived at my car just as a sanitation truck pulled up alongside it.
I opened the door, got in and slumped down in the seat, resigned to the fact that I was going to be stuck behind the truck while it finished its collections along the rest of the block.
As I sat there, the truck’s driver looked down from his cab and, without words or gestures, put the vehicle in reverse and allowed me to slip out of my spot ahead of him.
Off I went.
— Jonathan Struthers
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you on Monday. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Melissa Guerrero, Maia Coleman and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com.
"Idea" - Google News
April 14, 2023 at 12:00PM
https://ift.tt/sToQuz0
Have Ideas on How to Fix the M.T.A.? Now It's Your Turn. - The New York Times
"Idea" - Google News
https://ift.tt/40hTBnr
https://ift.tt/Z6j4liX
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Have Ideas on How to Fix the M.T.A.? Now It's Your Turn. - The New York Times"
Post a Comment