bobtehpanda

I don't think bus or subway service changes all that much. It'd be a faster line in the grid, but if you're far enough away it's still faster to just take a parallel bus than to go in on subway, connect to IBX, and come back out on subway. Maybe on parallel routes, you see some fall in ridership that is going end to end, but this is a much smaller change on the network than say expanding subways east and south in Queens.

So there are a few segments where trains will intersect streets and a few places where they run alongside streets. Intersecting is not a big deal. You could slap down four quadrant gates and that would be one way of solving that problem. This is the norm on some light rail lines in other cities. The alongside segment depends on the details. There is one segment from Metropolitan Av to what looks to be Juniper Blvd. This alignment actually has few street crossings, only at Metropolitan Av, 69 St, and Juniper Blvd S. Three intersections and some other minor ones you could close off are probably not a huge deal. The killer may be whatever path it takes into Jackson Heights.

They actually put in an engineering analysis in the Penn Station Access study. It was considered doable, located right above Astoria-Ditmars, but at a 4-car length. Notice the length of that station box. How long are trains on Metro-North usually? That could be a potentially expensive bottleneck.

This is because there is too much congestion to run buses through reliably, or for more buses from the east or wherever to go through there is no space for layovers for additional buses running through Jamaica the bus runtimes for all the routes terminating in Jamaica are too long to combine with other routes. What would you combine that would have a reasonable runtime and reliability?

You don't pay fares unless you start/end at Howard Beach or Jamaica, so at least at Lefferts Blvd that isn't a major issue.

One interesting thing to note: the proposed renderings have no faregates. Even the rail version does not, having direct exits to the sidewalk in a similar fashion to Murray Hill station in Queens. Perhaps SBS-style proof of payment?

They did an alternatives screening already! So this is already more progressed than the Utica Study. Things of note: Diesel was categorically rejected, probably for the pollution Automated Guideway Transit (AirTrain JFK) and subway was also rejected, probably due to the ROW constraints Runtimes are 45 minutes, 39, 41 for Rail, LRT, and BRT respectively. The projected yard is either 65th St, Brooklyn Army Terminal, and for BRT Jackie Gleason depot Annual ridership estimates range from 22M for BRT to 26M for light rail And a nice little callout, I guess:

At this point, the thread is mostly a "glass half empty or glass half full" situation. We should probably wait for the study to actually reject anything outright though. Not sure why people like to just dismiss things out of hand. At the MTA's rate, the study'll come out in like five years. Where's that Utica study?

I am kind of surprised NY has never embarked on wholesale replacement, considering the MTA gets sued over noise on a fairly regular basis, and other cities have reconstructed elevated lines as concrete structures (Philadelphia has done it, Chicago is doing it). It's part of how those cities have attacked ADA among other things.

Ugh. Meant to post https://youtu.be/HAZosllcM74

The horns are at least solvable through setting up Quiet Zones. https://railroads.dot.gov/elibrary/how-create-quiet-zone LIRR trains do not sound horns at the Little Neck grade crossing. This is what the River Line sounds like:

The bus situation wouldn't be any worse than today, where no such service also exists at all. In the area, Metro-North also doesn't run 24/7. If you account for it, you can run 30 or even 20 minute service on a single track.

Right, but what I'm saying is that movement on Bay Ridge can still be done on those off-times, as it is done on the rest of the network. Most of the freight customers are out east where there are similar if not more restrictions on when one can actually run a freight train. The Babylon Branch is also only double-tracked with frequent services.

So I could be wrong, but don't the NY&A trains run mostly off-peak and nights and weekends anyways? It's not like there's room for those trains on the Main Line during peak as it is.

Probably south. I'd imagine that the yard would be in the Sunset Park end; it does run in the vicinity of Fresh Pond but my understanding is that NY&A is already very busy over there with freight in the yard.

For what its worth, RiverLine in Trenton is considered "light rail" in the US, but the Stadler GTW it uses is actually used as a mainline rail vehicle by most of its operators. The definition of light rail is very arbitrary.

Dude, no one is personally attacking you. Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from questioning and debate. This is a forum. That's what the whole point is.

This is a weird take. The closest "crosstown" bus lines to the RX's path (e.g. the Q58, the B6, the B8, the B9) tend to be the slowest bus routes and also some of the busiest bus routes per mile in their borough. Asking someone in Maspeth about the Triboro RX is missing the forest for the trees, because it's about providing citywide connections. If you look at a map of Brooklyn and Queens, your options for getting between the two are: detouring all the way west, either to the or BQE detouring all the way east, either to Woodhaven or the Van Wyck This is a trip that's not exactly currently being made in large numbers because it's not possible to do so in a timely manner. It literally takes 2 hours by public transportation to get to Queens from Brooklyn. And Census trends continue to show that more outer borough residents are now working in other outer boroughs. And yet segments of the route are already incredibly busy on slow buses. Also, part of the regional inequality in this city is that Midtown is basically the only place with access to the entire region's employees and jobs in a reasonable time and commute distance. Anything to close that gap for other parts of the region will level out the playing field.

LMAO, this is a hell of a take. This screwed over a lot of riders. As an example, the whole blue/red subway-express vs local thing was unnecessarily complicated. Splitting a long bus route subway feeder bus may have its merits, but not at the cost of totally preventing riders from the outer half of the route to get off at the inner half without a bus transfer. Making the subway expresses closed-door with limited connections to intermediate stops and destinations would've screwed over a lot of riders. What generational changes to land-use patterns was this supposed to facilitate? The zoning map for Queens has not changed significantly; if anything, the city continues to dogpile residents and jobs around subway corridors and particularly in Jamaica and Flushing.

I will just say this. If you're afraid of liberal policies, high taxes, and high cost of living, Boston is the same or worse in literally all of those things.

There is, and it's called the laws of physics. The financial industry, particularly investment banking, is about executing transactions as fast as possible, because if you let someone in front of you go first they can snatch a better price before you can. They will literally spend billions of dollars laying new cable across the Atlantic to save 5 milliseconds. 5 milliseconds could be the difference between hundreds of millions of dollars in profit. How that comes into play is that New York is the physical home of the stock exchange one of the closest big cities to London and Europe, which is why it's the landing point of nearly all major transatlantic cables Any firm moving to another city to do financial transactions would have to add in the additional transaction time of the distance it takes to send information from wherever they are to New York and onwards. The speed of light is not instant, it still will be slower for messages to travel a longer distance. The only cities with shorter distances would be in New England or eastern Canada, neither of which is particularly appealing compared to New York.

Right. The politics is not helpful, particularly when locally both sides basically don't admit the MTA has a spending problem, and if they do, they signed off on that every two years fare hikes thing and called it a day, maybe sprinkled in some good ol' "two books auditing" to make it sound like they wanted to do something. Uncle Sam cannot fix the fact that the MTA's financial problems are structural in nature. Quite frankly, I don't remember the last time we had a Governor, State Assembly Speaker, or State Senate Leader who did not eventually have some federal indictment against them. I'm not holding out my hopes for Hochul, Stewart-Cousins, or Heastie either.

The is not very busy, why would you need to get rid of the Manhattan service?

Time to wait for the members of the Legislature to do the right thing. May as well wait for the heat death of the universe.

https://nypost.com/2021/11/17/mta-to-test-wide-aisle-turnstiles-at-five-subway-stations/ Personally, I like paddle gates more than turnstiles, so I welcome this development.