bobtehpanda

The Governor appoints a lot of members. In addition, the rest of the members are confirmed by the NYS Senate. For most of Cuomo's tenure, he engineered a Republican-controlled Senate via the IDC, so he could look bipartisan for a presidential run, and also so that people couldn't really outflank him on the left. Cuomo has been elected for three terms, so at this point everyone on the board would've gone through an appointment or confirmation during his tenure, and Cuomo doesn't really tolerate anyone who isn't an ass-kissing patsy. If the various accounts from all the scandals are to be believed, he's also an insane micromanager.

That was the original plan, more or less, which didn't go anywhere because it was proposed as an el and even then els were unpopular. The IND built that west dogleg to destroy the BMT Myrtle and Lexington, which worked to a degree. Of course, that became less useful once the destruction of the BMT was completed and then now the IND had this not-quite-duplicative, poorly connected infrastructure everywhere.

Who's getting punished? No one's asking for a punishment. It's being litigated as a civil rights suit. Last I checked no specific person or entity paid out restitution in Brown v. Board of Ed.

That didn't work out so well at Nuremberg. The case may very well decide the governor doesn't have the authority to do this. He's not a king.

1. Crosstown to Forest Hills was considered "good enough" 2. The M60 was only started up in '92, according to Wikipedia. There's a 1985 Queens bus map in the Downloads section and the only buses that go to LGA are the Q33, Q47 and the Q48. Astoria also wasn't really the area that needed a relief track. Up until the '80s policy was Queens Blvd Bypass or bust.

That wouldn't be the PA's problem, that would be the MTA's, since the MTA has the less stringent regulatory regime. And they seemed to think they could do it. No, the PA is legitimately just a PITA to work with, and not necessarily great at any of the jobs it is assigned to do. Hence why the Tappan Zee is located just outside its jurisdictional boundaries. Hence why for some godawful reason it has managed to do absolutely nothing with Stewart and Atlantic City airports. And hence why WTC has never been fully finished.

This is certainly a step in the positive direction. However, keep in mind we still have problem number one, which is PANYNJ is the entity allowed to collect PFC and they don't really play nice with others. IIRC when that post 9/11 plan to combine the with PATH was being shopped around, the MTA was actually okay with it but the PA shot it down. Also, if PANYNJ is really proposing that five track terminal in that rendering in the replies, no wonder the PATH to Newark Liberty is over a billion a mile for land that is already in public ownership.

Would be way too expensive to convert. The original interconnection would have to be totally reconfigured. And that cost $654M in 1994 money. Another baseline would be the recent study for a QBL-RBB connection. Just the tunnel to connect the right of way was at least a billion or two. I'm also not sure that it'd be feasible. Keep in mind the 63 St tunnel has two levels. QBL is above the 63rd St connector, but you can't really go lower because you'd hit the LIRR tunnels for East Side Access.

TBH, it was pretty bold of them to start proposing redesigns like that when the stations didn't even have a completion timeframe other than "sometime before 2024" and the MTA does not have a good track record of on-time project delivery. I feel like a prerequisite for cutting a route back to an accessible station requires the station to be accessible.

I'm not quite sure how I feel about 6th Av services going down only 4th. Brighton loses not only direct 6th Av transfers, but the transfer at Atlantic requires significant walking.

Dated "December 19, 2019" More recently: https://www.cityandstateny.com/articles/personality/interviews-profiles/conversation-quemuel-arroyo-mtas-first-chief-accessibility

The question is, in 2020 couldn't you theoretically do all of those things with someone on the other side of a Help Point? We've been able to open doors and gates from far away for quite a while now...

Yeah, but at that point you're only skipping three stops, at which point you may as well just stop there too, since a stop is what, a minute? People will save more time with all the frequency serving all the stops. My major concern with a subway dash is that a lot of them as proposed will unnecessarily make a lot of today's one seat rides two seat rides, and two-seat rides into three, which is a major pain that could largely be avoided since those dash routes still run on the same road as their local stop. The proposed stop consolidation is enough, IMO.

To clarify, the LA Metro is basically consolidating a local every 15 and a LTD every 15 into a single bus route running every 7.5. So as an MTA example, if the local stops every two blocks and the LTD every ten, both get replaced by one very-frequent route stopping every four/five. Yes, but LA just straight up doesn't have a "subway-dash". So it would be as if Q46 service was replaced by one red bus in it's totality, not by a red bus in one half and a blue subway-dash in the other. Which is not really saying that you couldn't also have some second route on Union Turnpike, but the blue dash is not good.

What's very interesting about the split into local/subway-dash service is that LA Metro, which is probably the biggest transit agency running the most "limited/rapid" whatever bus routes, is moving in the opposite direction as the MTA on this. LA is mostly going to get rid of the rapid/local distinction altogether, and instead run one service pattern with stop spacing that splits the difference, because they found that the rapid/local frequency split made connections worse and increased overall travel time. And I don't think anyone in their right mind would argue that Metro routes aren't long or congested. Personally, in conjunction with all-door boarding, that would make more sense to me than the current plan with the Q46. Union Turnpike traffic isn't gridlocked like Hillside, and most of the worst delay is everyone boarding at the front at Kew Gardens. It would be a lot more efficient if people could just swarm onto any bus at any door for the Q46 given that there are almost always multiple buses at the boarding area anyways during the rush.

The root problem is the same though; these states from colonial times do not have a recall mechanism, so you pretty much have to rely on the governor feeling like he should do the right thing and resign. Spitzer resigned under threat of impeachment; I don't think the NYS Legislature would be able to pull that off against the biggest fundraiser to ever hold the governor's office. Christie literally limped to the end of his term with a 14% approval rating, including something straight out of the Onion when he auditioned to be a radio jockey while still in office.

Agreed. The feds could give a rat's ass about problems that only affect the state of New York. In fact, Congress is not going to pass anything that only benefits one particular state, whether that is New York, Florida, Texas, Wyoming, or whatever. NY gets the lion's share of federal funding of transit anyways; the only way out is a transit package for every single city and state, and I'll believe that passes when I see it. Not only that, but the MTA's financial hole is so deep it cannot be fixed by the feds. The Capital Plan is $51B dollars. The total FTA allocation is $12B. You are absolutely insane if you think the FTA is just going to give a blank check to the MTA and give no money to anybody else. --- The "packed trains" narrative, as study and study have shown multiple times, is usually actually just people packing cars near exits, so that would be my guess.

Will he? Christie stuck around a long time after Bridgegate.

Bail reform, as an independent idea, is not the worst idea, particularly when the city and state both had jail overcrowding problems due to locking up too many people, and cases like the several people at Rikers who committed suicide because they weren't charged and they took too long to bring about a speedy trial. Of course, leave it to NYS to implement a fairly decent idea in the worst possible way. The real solution is probably pot decriminalization/legalization, but this is one of those things Cuomo says he wants but doesn't actually do, so he can keep pointing to it whenever he runs against a Republican and say "look at me, I'm different!" And the executives are not just out of touch on "right" leaning issues. When was the last time you heard about Fares Fair? Probably never, because despite it being a good "left" idea it didn't come from the executive, so BdB slow walked it and made it effectively dead.

7 and 8 Avenue is probably unavoidable given simply where the roads are. At some point, Manhattan simply became too dense to thread a new north-south line and reliably hit transfers. Arguably, this problem existed even when the 7th Av Line was built, because it didn't quite properly intersect the 9th and 6th Av Els either.

We gonna install doors with what money? The MTA already needs to spend billions on ADA upgrades. I'm a bit doubtful about how realistic it would be to actually introduce climate control. Modern HVAC needs a lot of ductwork, and it's not like the stations have very high ceilings or spare wall space for duct work to go in.

I don't think this would meaningfully amount to much. The best case scenario, LIB+LIRR, was not very well integrated even before the NICE split. Where I live now, there is a whole gamut of authorities, yet they all seem to have checked their egos at the door and you can get a regional pass that works on all of them. Heck, some of the suburban agencies will start truncating their downtown expresses once the regional light rail expansions open. But with MTA the top of the organization is spineless and does not break down barriers meaningfully. To be quite honest, the structure of the MTA may be hurting more than it is helping.

(So it appears that I'm mistaken on the Third Ave El and the Dual Contracts, but I can go ahead, because for the most part what the state of the Third Av El is in 1970 is what really matters.) The original IRT was built in 1904. Around the time they finished the IRT, the IRT also essentially bought out the old els, which gave them a monopoly on rapid transit in Manhattan and the Bronx. The problem the city then faced was that the IRT was perfectly happy to make a profit on packed subways and not doing anything, so the BRT/BMT was brought in to make two companies compete with each other. A lot of lines were newly built as part of the Dual Contracts to the general specification of the BMT, part of today's B-Division. Hence the SAS "recapture" plan was to convert the WPR and Pelham to B Division, which wasn't that hard because they were newly built as part of the Dual Contracts. (A similar recapture was performed on the Astoria Line, which mostly involved shaving back the platforms.) The Third Av El predates the subway, and doesn't seem like it was extensively rebuilt as part of its Dual Contracts work to add a third track. So by 1970 the MTA was already considering buying a special fleet for both it and the Myrtle Av El, because they couldn't run with standard weight subway cars. --- Is reliability good? Yes. Is it worth more than a 1.5x premium to build for new lines when we have so much of the city still not covered by subway? No.

3rd Av El is simply a much older el not built to Dual Contracts standards and can't handle the weight of normal subway cars. There is no way that any plan would have involved keeping the structure intact, and since it needed rebuilding may as well build it in a place to reduce impacts on neighborhoods. I also don't know where less capacity comes from. 3 tracks has the same capacity as 2, for the most part, since what goes in must come out and the extra third track has no place to go out.

The difference is that there are proposed to be few or no stops on the western leg. Today, an LTD bus also stops at, say, 164 St and Utopia, so bus passengers from there can also transfer and head to the eastern reaches of the route. Under the new plan, these people now have a three-legged transfer since the bus no longer stops at those cross-streets. I know that bus distances in Eastern Queens are long, because I used to live there. The proposed split into east and west is going to inconvenience many people, who will simply just choose the car because pretty much everyone in Eastern Queens has one. It's the aggressive NICE-ification of the routes, except even NICE is not this aggressive, because the buses are simply closed door in the peak direction (e.g. an eastbound bus will still do pickups at bus stops, just not dropoffs before the county line.)