bobtehpanda

I've always thought the Q60 should be two routes, the Manhattan portion to Queens Center and Queensboro Plaza to Jamaica.

The notion that the LIRR can really just push back on everything and anything at MTA HQ is laughable. Ask Helena Williams how that went for Penn Station Access.

In addition to the other comments Siemens doesn't really make metro cars in the US. Their existing plants are pretty much at capacity because they handle nearly every light rail and Amtrak order in the US. CAF has had some reliability issues with their sets produced in the US Stadler in subway equipment is relatively new in the US, their first and only order so far has been MARTA in 2019, and those have not been delivered yet

That would require either the legislature to pass a law allowing a referendum, or amending the state constitution to allow voter-proposed initiatives. The recent transit expansions in the US are funded by voter-proposed initiatives, which is mostly a thing in Western states.

To be quite frank, if that's your dream you probably won't achieve it. Planners first, and foremost, are bureaucrats. They implement policies to fit officials' desires, but they do not have the mandate or the authority to start imposing their own ideas willy nilly. The primary problem with the MTA's building, is political, not technological, so if you want to fix that a better bet is probably to run for office.

CBTC is basically *the* modern standard at this point, there's not much reason to arbitrarily have not busy lines without it.

Also IIRC the IND currently has some of the oldest signals anyways, right?

It probably just makes sense to complete the lines where there is already CBTC equipment, and try and minimize the amount of other lines and rolling stock that need to be upgraded as well. The only new trunk lines that get dragged into the current schedule would be and . and are getting 211s. And these lines should probably get them anyways so that they can continue to operate GOs where CBTC is active.

While the AirTrain is dead (at least for now, the airports lobby is pretty powerful and LGA is like the darling airport of business travelers), one interesting thing to note is that this probably means the optimal route to LGA might actually be a surface light rail extension of the IBX via Junction Blvd/94th, jogging over on Northern.

That's not the reason why the extension was rejected. An LGA runway directly ends at the GCP. If you have ever driven in the area you'll notice very stubby streetlamps. Indeed, if you look at that neighborhood on Google Maps, there is a whole-ass clear zone where there are no buildings that are legally allowed to be built. Nothing can be in the general path of that runway and taller than those streetlamps. So you can't really build an elevated line from the west. There's also a 90 year old storm and wastewater pipe that is apparently critical for serving hundreds of thousands of people in Queens that is also underground in this location, so it's not easy to build a tunnel either. Here's the report: https://www.panynj.gov/content/dam/port-authority/press-room/press-kits/lga-mass-transit/2023-03-13-Full-Report%2bExecutive-Summary.pdf

I mean, it's not really shorter, and you already have the transfer, so why bother? There's not much point in transferring between 8th and 7th Av services either, plenty of places to do that throughout the system.

It's worth noting the very specific case of "off the shelf". Off the shelf means that they're going to be pretty much exactly the same as all the other units in the country (which makes me thinks Siemens S70/700 is the obvious choice) and it means that parts are cheap. Also, all those agencies around the country using those vehicles already have spares, already have people trained, etc. so it's clearly not very hard. On the other hand we don't really have off-the-shelf high floor cars; LA Metro has been off doing its own thing for a while now, and the high-floor S200 has exactly two operators. The NTTs are notable in that they are actually fairly expensive per car, and a good deal of that is because no one else really operates trains like NTT.

Unsightly is not the issue. ADA compliance is. For the most part, low floor LRVs are basically flush with the curb, or a little bit higher. The ADA limits slope, so a high floor platform needs a longer, more expensive ramp. Not to mention the cost of the additional concrete and whatnot.

It's probably going to be low platform. They specifically mention using off-the-shelf rolling stock, and all of that in the US is low-floor. You can have flat cross platform transfers between light rail and subway, the light rail trackbed would just be higher.

5.5bn for 14 miles comes out to about $240M per km. The cost per rider actually compares favorably with SAS; this is 5.5bn for 115,000 riders, SAS Phase II is is $6.3B for 110,000 riders. In general this is cheaper than a subway but at inflated New York costs

I assume, like that Rt 110 BRT I keep hearing on and off again, that it's died a quiet death like most Suffolk projects tend to do.

There is a huge gap between what we ended up building as part of Third Track/Elmont and what LIRR actually wants to operate, or is good for the long term operation of LIRR. I think that the alternating between GCM+Penn is probably going to be a massive headache, when we could rely on "Change at Jamaica" for so long, and it wouldn't have been hard to set up schedules so that people just change trains across platforms. And now all these flat junctions will ruin service too. Here's what my fantasy would look like, transfers with platforms on all tracks in bold Port Washington - GCM All trains stop at Woodside Main Line Local - Penn Woodside Forest Hills Kew Gardens Jamaica Hollis Queens Village Elmont Bellerose Floral Park the rest of the Hempstead Branch, or crossover to the Main Line Express Main Line Express - GCM Jamaica Queens Village Mineola Carle Place Westbury Hicksville Thoughts Mineola should have two platforms, and honestly maybe a specific fourth track for Oyster Bay services since having them terminate on the same track as Main Line services sounds like a disaster If Elmont is going to be an important events station it needs all tracks to have platforms like Willets Point I think the all-tracks station west of Mineola should be moved from Floral Park to QV. Floral Park has never been that busy, it's not a great place to make transfers today anyways, and on top of that if you're starting from anywhere in the Hempstead Branch you're better off taking the bus to the LIRR than to try and backtrack at FP anyways. FP should still have crossovers, but I think it would be more similar to how 74-Broadway operates on the than a full-time express stop The overpass dates back to the parking garage so I don't think they really had "run over" in mind when they put it in. Also, heights on the railroads do have to be higher, since the LIRR operates those double decks through Mineola on a regular basis. It would be better at this point if Mineola used an underpass. But also in general Mineola is a shitty intermodal transfer given that's what it was explicitly designed to do.

Even if they were less noisy, and I can believe that, most NYC roads are too narrow to host an el without doing at least some of the following blocking most of the sunlight from the road requiring ripping out street trees. This would get people really mad. People love trees (for good reasons!) You'd basically be left with the highways and highway like roads. The highways are mostly DOA because they were not initially designed to host rail lines courtesy of Robert Moses. The Van Wyck only really happened because the highway was simultaneously being widened for the better part of two decades, but anyone dumb enough to suggest highway widening in 2022 for, say, the LIE or BQE would be committing political suicide. Not even because of the recent green and bike pushes but because it would be physically impossible to do without displacing tens or hundreds of thousands of people and businesses. There are highway like roads (Ocean Parkway, Conduit Blvd, Woodhaven Blvd, Pelham Pkwy, Queens Blvd etc. to name a few) but it would mostly be pointless; Queens Blvd already has subway lines for nearly its entire length Few people live near Conduit Blvd Ocean Parkway has two parallel subway lines not very far away. Woodhaven just rejected a rail line near it Which, more or less, leaves pretty much just the western section of Pelham Pkwy as the road wide enough to have an el, that wouldn't piss off anybody, that has actual unmet transit demand. And I think the proposal to get the to Co-op that has always floated around would have to be a el in the highway median.

Based on the timeline, my guesses would be either the massive post 9/11 exodus of jobs from Downtown (and the transformation into a more residential district) or the transit strike.

Pros and cons of embankments: dirt is cheap and we know how it works. To a large extent, a lot of the embankments were created before we had extensive concrete technology From a pure materials standpoint, dirt is still cheaper than concrete Embankments are wider than an equivalent concrete structure because they need to slope and drain properly. Their profile needs to look like a hill to be stable. This makes them too expensive in places where land costs too much; what are the suburbs today in the 1800s was very empty Embankments are more prone to certain kinds of damage over time (like erosion) and don't deal well with certain kinds of disasters (like earthquakes)

Unfortunately, the LIRR has never cared about intra-island or reverse peak travel, unlike Metro-North, which at least doesn't charge an arm and a leg for shitty non-peak oriented service.

Maybe they should consider adding a turning point at Willets Point. But then, you need the to get to Flushing anyways, so maybe that would just be pointless.

I think the bigger thing is that for some people this might turn a three seat ride into a one seat ride and be much more attractive. (Not to mention potentially eliminating an extra fare or two.) How much more, I'm not sure. I don't think this would really solve any sort of issue widening the Turnpike would address, but I don't think widening the Turnpike would either, since the bottleneck is always going to be crossing the Hudson. Extra lanes would basically just become more waiting space if you've still got the exact number of lanes across the river.

I have never heard of this. I always just picked stuff up at stations or the library.

"near a subway stop" meaning two blocks away from any actual entrances? You could technically call pretty much every crime in the area "near a subway stop" with that logic.