engineerboy6561

If I recall correctly Tibbetts brook runs right underneath that ROW, and the current plan is to try to daylight it along the old ROW because right now it flows into the Broadway sewer and takes up a meaningful chunk of the capacity of the Wards Island water treatment plant (~2-3% on a dry day, likely significantly more during the rains), thus contributing to combined sewer overspill into the East River. The idea would be to separate it from the sewer system at Van Cortlandt Park and run it down the old ROW into the river with a trail alongside it. You could build a train up that way, but you'd probably want to run it above the Deegan in the median if you want to use that area, and then once you get below River Park Towers maybe you could take a couple of tracks out of the High Bridge Yard for a tunnel portal. At that point your stations would wind up being 145 St (underground), 155 St (underground, maybe connect to ), 167 St, Cross-Bronx Expressway, Burnside Av, Fordham Rd, Kingsbridge Rd/225 St, 231 St, and 238 St or Van Cortlandt Park South, with heavy modifications to the Lenox Yard leads to let you still use Lenox Yard. You'd likely get Riverdale ridership via the Bx10, and you might get a fair number of people willing to walk the block and a half from Broadway to the Deegan at 238 St and 225 St, and having Fordham Rd as a transfer point would take some of the congestion off the and the upper . It would likely be a faster ride than the upper , and it would take a load off the Bx40/42 and the from transfers at Tremont. It sounds good in theory, and solves at least some of the trouble with blasting additional tunnels under the existing Broadway line (plus having the line run elevated from High Bridge Yard onward should significantly reduce construction costs over adding new tunnel space from 145 to Dyckman); I'm just not sure how viable it is. Like that's a solid cheaper fix for the bottleneck on the than new tracks under Broadway (I'm figuring that 3/4 mile of tunnels and four miles of elevated track with a few stations is gonna be cheaper than three miles of new tunnel (from 137 to Dyckman), plus reconfiguring 137 St to an express stop, adding additional even deeper platforms to 168 St, and figuring out what to do about Dyckman St). Trying to do conjoined subway/rail running on shared tracks is not going to work even if we ignore all the regulatory and infrastructure hurdles involved in doing that, because the speed differential between rail and subway is high enough that you're not going to be able to run them together without capping headways for both services far below where you want it (during peaks the Port Washington branch of the LIRR runs at 6tph (three local, three express) and there's probably not room for more than 10-11tph total using that arrangement. Now consider that the Hudson Line takes up 10tph for peak service, and you're left with 1tph you can use on the subway line (which is ridiculous), and I don't think the Hudson Line ROW has room for more tracks.

Is the issue with the Bx19 also an enforcement/road layout thing? Looking at Google Maps live traffic it shows an absolute disaster right at The Hub, and decent-sized backups around it, but that area has bus lanes (unless there are so many people making right turns on and off 149 that the bus lanes back up really badly because of legally allowed moves).

So realistically we're probably looking at at least a few months to build the driver ranks back up to a point where they have the people to reliably run full schedules as it is, which means a few more months beyond that point, so at least a year (and probably a few million more dollars) to hire enough operators for decent-sized service increases (and then once drivers cease to be the limiting factor for expansion the issue becomes making sure we have the vehicles to run expanded service without compromising the spare factor there too badly, because if that doesn't happen we'll wind up with better schedules on paper but overall the same or worse performance because of vehicle breakdowns and teething issues). And that assumes there's the political will to demand that from the MTA, and the general competence at the MTA to follow through.

That's too damn bad; it's a variant of the good/fast/cheap problem. You can have a reliable network for cheap if you keep all the routes short so that any spots that back up unpredictably are largely isolated and don't drag down reliability on the rest of the network, but covering any kind of decent distance is a two- or three-seat ride; similarly, you can have a comprehensive network for cheap if you have a ton of really long routes that cover everything, but then you have buses not showing up at Williamsbridge because there's an accident on the Triboro (or not showing up at West Farms or Jamaica because of nonsense on the Whitestone). If you want to have a network with decent reliability and comprehensive one-seat coverage you need a fair amount of either vehicle redundancy (strategically stashing dispatchers and extra buses on both sides of known chokepoints; for the Bx41 SBS to LGA that would look like having 3-4 buses waiting at 136 St/Lincoln Av or 149 St, and then having a dispatcher send them up Webster as SBS short-turns to fill gaps when traffic on the Triboro gets too bad, and for the Q44 it would be a couple spares at Lafayette Av to cover the Bronx segment of the route and a couple more at 14 Av to cover the Queens segment of the route) or route redundancy (see the overlapping catchment areas on the Bx41 and my Bx55; most people who would use the 41 SBS could use the Bx55 in a pinch in the Bronx, just as most people who would use the Bx15 could use the Bx41 local when 125 St and/or the Willis Av Bridge are being disasters). The downside of doing that is that extra buses cost money, and having standby drivers and dispatchers also costs money, so you wind up spending a fair amount more money upfront, even if you make a decent chunk of that back up in farebox recovery (and if the MTA doesn't want to invest in that unfortunately I can't make them).

Now all that's missing is the Bx41SBS to LGA (which they keep intermittently proposing and then not following through on), which this would actually make at least a bit easier. The Bx41 and Bx55 catchment areas overlap pretty heavily if you use Jarrett Walker's rough upper bound (he asserts that most people are willing to walk about 1/4 mile to a local bus route, and Webster and 3 Av are about 1100-1200 feet apart or less the entire way from Fordham Plaza to The Hub), and my Bx55 wouldn't be subject to highway or bridge traffic, so should be pretty reliable even during rush. Extending the Bx41 to LGA would provide a really important interborough connection, but Triboro traffic would likely drive line reliability down during rush. If the Bx41 SBS is the only fast service west of the Grand Concourse then that could be a serious issue; if the Bx55 comes back the way I laid it out then it's much less of a big deal because people between Webster and 3rd can take the Bx55 to go everywhere the Bx41SBS goes, and people coming from the western half of the Bx41's catchment area above 167 St are more likely to use the Bx1 to a crosstown bus anyway (given that there's a decent-sized elevation change just west of Webster Av all the way from Fordham Plaza to 169 St). That way people along the Webster-3 Av catchment area who need a reliable intra-Bronx local service can use the Bx41 local (which would still run just between The Hub and Williamsbridge), people who need a reliable intra-Bronx fast service can use the Bx55 LTD, and people who need interborough connections can use the Bx15 to Manhattan or the Bx41SBS to Queens.

Thanks! Here's a link to the map; I included the Bx56 Webster Av/233 St local on there as well; I'm not sure if it's actually needed but I figured people trying to go to and from the West Side in the NE Bronx would prefer a more direct, faster route to the than the current Bx16 offers. Bx55 and Bx56 map, including Bx55 proposed stops

Not a terrible idea but Webster currently has all-day SBS service from Williamsbridge to 149 via the Bx41. I'd basically combine the old Bx55 with a new northern segment. The route would have stops at 3 Av/138 St, 3 Av/149 St/The Hub, 3 Av/156 St, 3 Av/163 St, 3 Av/168-169 Sts, 3 Av/Claremont Pkwy, 3 Av/Tremont Av, 3 Av/180 St, 3 Av/183 St-St Barnabas, Fordham Plaza, Webster Av/Bedford Park Blvd, Webster Av/204 St, Williamsbridge, Bronxwood Av/Gun Hill Rd, Bronxwood Av/219 St, Bronxwood Av/225 St, Bronxwood Av/233 St, White Plains Rd/233 St, Webster Av/233 St, Katonah Av/233 St, Katonah Av/237 St, and Katonah Av/242 St. I'm avoiding Webster above Williamsbridge because there's basically nothing along Webster between 233 St and Gun Hill Rd except for a few apartment buildings all within easy walking distance of Williamsbridge proper. The Bronxwood Av routing keeps the bus on wide streets without a ton of traffic, remains within a 5 min walk of White Plains Rd as far up as 233 St without running into the traffic issues under the El, offers transfers to the and Harlem Line at both Woodlawn and Wakefield, restores the one-seat ride to the southwestern Bronx that Williamsbridge and Wakefield used to have, offers that same one-seat ride to Woodlawn, and generally provides a much larger catchment area than a run on Webster would. Serving Webster (if needed) would probably be best accomplished with a Bx56 from Norwood to Ropes Av via Bainbridge, Gun Hill Rd, Webster Av, 233 St, Dyre Av, and Boston Rd; that would give the patch of 233 St between Katonah Av and Baychester Av a one-seat ride to 6 Av, and would capture from the Bx16 anyone from east of Baychester Av going to the , , or Harlem Line; that way, even if nobody ever used the stops I'm proposing at Selby Transportation and 3556 Webster it wouldn't matter because the route pulls enough ridership to sustain itself otherwise.

Ideally I'd serve College Point and LGA together on a branch off the Northern Blvd trunk; branch off and swing north under Junction Blvd, stop at Astoria Blvd, swing east under the Grand Central Pkwy, stop at Central Terminal and Terminals C/D, then swing northeast to College Point.

That's an interesting idea, but I wouldn't do it with the because Roosevelt is already so crowded; I'd prefer to run the Bayside and College Point extensions via a new Northern Blvd IND trunk to take a load off Roosevelt. More particularly, because of the way Main St-Flushing is constructed, building extensions off the would require closing Main St Station and routing all the buses to Shea Stadium for a while, which would be a mess. If you use a Northern Blvd IND line to cover those areas you take a huge load off Roosevelt and don't have to worry about rerouting all the Flushing buses during construction. It would be nice to extend the IND four-track trunk down Ft Hamilton Av under the narrows; send the to Coney Island via 6 Av/Culver local, the to Matrix Park via Culver/Ft Hamilton express in Brooklyn and the Staten Island Expressway median in SI, and the to Mariner's Marsh Park via Culver/Ft Hamilton local in Brooklyn and via the South Beach and North Shore SIR branches in Staten Island.

Yup; the longer-term plan at the time was to run a couple tracks down Ft Hamilton Pkwy and then either along the Verrazano or under the Narrows to connect to Staten Island; if that were to get used then it would probably be good to roll that in with the reactivation of the North Shore Line and bring back the South Beach Branch as an intermediate connection; that would let you run the out to Arlington (or maybe even Matrix Park) and finally tie SI to the mainland. More generally there are little snippets and pieces of provisions for a significantly more complex subway system littered all over the place because most of the system was built pre-Interstate system and pre-Robert Moses, and a lot of the stuff they wanted to build in the 1930s would make decent sense today if everyone in NYC had to use public transit to get around; if you're super interested you should check out VanShnookenRaggen's Second System map where he lays out all the different proposals that have floated around for the subway system: https://www.vanshnookenraggen.com/_index/docs/IND_trackmap.pdf?_t=1613769508

A teal is roughly what I proposed as well; I basically think the longer-term plan should be to replace the Jamaica el with a modern four-track trunk, and add four-track trunks along 3 Av in the Bronx and Northern Blvd in Queens in an effort to relieve almost all the heavily congested lines in the system (the in the Bronx, the Lex in Manhattan, QBL expresses and the in Queens) and clean up DeKalb a bit by pulling the off of it; the map is at https://metrodreamin.com/view/ZWUxVVR2d2tYZ2d3NnprYkFybTBoU1k2NWkzM3ww and the detailed explanation of all the things I did and why I did them is here: The benefits of this approach are redundancy (the 2 Av lines are connected to the Broadway BMT, and the 6 Av and 8 Av IND lines in Brooklyn and Manhattan, and the Queens Blvd lines in Queens) and good relief of most of the subway system's congestion pain points that I could find.

I wouldn't say they're taking over America; I would say that they've gotten the hang of using soft power/favorable loan terms/etc. to create client states the same way the US did post-WWII; we used to have that kind of soft power as a country but we spent it all in two twenty-year wars and a pile of other stupid mistakes that trashed our international credibility (and rebuilding it is gonna be hard as hell. I firmly believe that we need to manufacture more things over here because there's real value in self-sufficiency, and massive international supply chains have to be really tightly managed to work well, and are susceptible to system shocks (see the ongoing and intensifying chip shortage; I think we found the resonant frequency of the global electronics supply chain and it may take years to settle back down).

Based on my comment above, here's a map of what I'd do if I could build new trunk lines: https://metrodreamin.com/view/ZWUxVVR2d2tYZ2d3NnprYkFybTBoU1k2NWkzM3ww This combines a four-track 2 Av subway in Manhattan with a four-track 3 Av Bronx trunk and a 4-track Northern Blvd trunk in Queens on the north side, and on the south end provides a four-track Jamaica el replacement trunk. I did a bunch of things here to be able to get 45 tph all the way through, some of which are questionable and expensive. My service patterns are Jamaica Center-Kings Plaza via Queens Blvd Express, 8 Av/Worth St/Utica Av local Bedford Park Blvd-Coney Island via CPW local, 6 Av express, Williamsburg local, Brighton local Bay Plaza-Hook Creek Blvd via CPW/6 Av/Williamsburg/Jamaica express 179 St-Coney Island via Queens Blvd express, 6 Av local, Prospect Park express, McDonald Av local Forest Hills/71 Av-Church Av via Queens Blvd/6 Av/Prospect Park local Norwood/205 St-Coney Island via 3 Av/2 Av local, Broadway/4 Av express, Sea Beach Local Bay Plaza-Brighton Beach via Bronx Amtrak ROW/3 Av/2 Av local, Broadway/Brighton express Forest Hills/71 Av-Bay Ridge/95 St via Queens Blvd/Broadway/4 Av local Astoria/Ditmars-Springfield Blvd via Astoria/Broadway/Crosstown/Myrtle Av/HHE local Flushing/Main St-Springfield Blvd via Northern Blvd/2 Av/Williamsburg/Jamaica local (M) Utopia Pkwy-Euclid Ave via Bayside/Northern Blvd/2 Av/Fulton local (P) Bay Plaza-Coney Island via 3 Av/2 Av/4 Av express, West End local Springfield Blvd-Cross Island Parkway via Northern Bl/2 Av/Williamsburg/Jamaica express. I chose to extend the Middle Village line along HHE because it already makes sense to connect Middle Village to QBL at Woodhaven Blvd, and since Woodhaven Blvd is already aligned with HHE it flows fairly well as a corridor. The disconnection of Middle Village from the Jamaica trunk line was a move to maximize through TPH into East New York/Richmond Hill/Jamaica; a four-track trunk can handle 60-72tph hard maximum. In order to get the off DeKalb it needs to run through the new Jamaica tunnel, taking up one of the line slots and 15-18tph absolute max; if I have the branching off just past Marcy and the at Myrtle, now we're down to 30 through TPH to Jamaica, of which only 15 can be express. Given how packed the and the are in the mornings I wanted to get 45 through TPH all the way out to Jamaica, of which 30 in this plan are express. Express trains leaving along the new corridor would make only five stops between Jamaica and Delancey-Essex St, and I would expect to see 35-40 minute ride times between Jamaica and downtown on express trains, which is comparable to runtimes via the Queens Blvd express. The integration of the Middle Village line with Crosstown and the is rather clunky, and possibly a thing that could be handled better; I chose to do that because Montague has a significant amount of spare capacity, so tying Myrtle Av directly to Montague makes a fair amount of sense; the Crosstown connection is mostly there to allow the to use the spare track slots rather than building a parallel Myrtle Av line a ~5min walk away. The extensions out to SE Queens are intended to dramatically reduce the load on the Q4/Q5/Q85 buses, dollar vans, etc. Merrick and Brewer Blvd combined boast something close to 60 buses per hour, and during rush they're basically all slammed; 60 buses an hour comes out to somewhere in the realm of 6k-12k pax per hour, which is within the range where a subway makes sense and is self-supporting; also, if the ride via the Jamaica trunk into Manhattan is basically one-seat, and you can get a one-seat ride to 2 Av or 6 Av by staying on the Jamaica trunk train that should also help pull SE Queens people off QBL. The Bronx and Queens trunk lines are both intended to fill decent-sized holes in the subway network that we're all fairly familiar with; the 3 Av corridor replaces the 3 Av El and provides all-day express service from the northern Bronx down into Manhattan; the extension of the and (P) along Gun Hill Rd should also provide decent relief for the northern part of the (current travel time from Wakefield to Times Sq is an hour, and from Dyre to Grand Central is 45 minutes; travel times with transfers to the and (P) would likely reduce those numbers to 35-40 minutes, and help dramatically with Lexington Av overcrowding. The operating under Boston Rd should also pull a fair number of people off the southern end of the , reducing crowding further. The Queens trunk line under Northern Blvd is mostly intended as a relief line; it provides 45 tph as far as Jackson Heights, 15 to LGA, 30 to Flushing, and 15 out to Springfield Blvd; the line should be time-competitive with Roosevelt, and provides one-seat rides all along the east side of Manhattan (again, lessening the load on the Lex), and connects to the in Queens, encouraging local transfers to reach the West Side of Manhattan. The extension to the airport offers a direct subway connection to the airport (taking a load off the M60, and the connection through College Point enables the creation of a massive new yard on Flushing Airport land to support the new services. The extension along Northern Blvd out to Bayside should take a load off the Q12 and is basically a shameless ripoff of the Second System plans for Roosevelt Av (except right now we can't extend the because it's already packed during rush, and the LIRR is currently taking a whole chunk of Eastern Queens traffic that would otherwise make things worse). The to Kings Plaza is just there because I decided to play with the idea of a Worth St line, and I didn't want to turn the into a giant loop, so I just sent it south on Utica Av. I still like the IND on Utica Av as opposed to just sending the south because the turn required to send the south is going to be a massive pain to pull off, and I don't want to route more people onto the Lex. The basically runs mostly empty below 14 St right now, and so it would offer a one-seat ride to 8 Av (with 6 Av, 2 Av, and Broadway accessible at Myrtle Av) which should be enough to get it running with a reasonable load to and from Brooklyn. At that point Williamsburg would go from 38 TPH into Manhattan, only 8 of which offer a one-seat ride into Midtown, up to 100ish TPH, 75 of which go through to Midtown. Jamaica goes from 46 tph (36 express to Midtown and 10 local to downtown) to 81 tph (36 express to Midtown directly, 30 express to Midtown via downtown, 15 local to midtown via downtown), SE Queens goes from 0tph to 45tph, and the IRT gets comprehensive relief in the Bronx and upper Manhattan. Furthermore, the is able to run express from Church Av to Jay St-Metrotech full time, reducing commute times on McDonald Av while the gives Park Slope riders their one-seat ride into Midtown.

It depends a lot on what the planned goal is; if you wanted to be true to the initial IND plan you'd bring over the express tracks from Lower East Side-2 Av and combine them with two Worth St tracks to make a four-track trunk that you can send to Brooklyn (be that via Broadway/Jamaica Av as a Nassau St el replacement, or via Myrtle/Woodhaven per the older plans); the catch is that if you want to do that you need a four-track Second Ave Subway. You'd wind up with approximately the service patterns below: Bedford Park or 145 St to mainland SE Queens or Rockaways via 6 Av/new Brooklyn-Queens trunk express Norwood-205 St to mainland SE Queens or Rockaways via 6 Av/new Brooklyn-Queens trunk express 168 St to Jamaica or Aqueduct via 8 Av/new Brooklyn-Queens trunk local Jamaica Center to Jamaica (loop) or Aqueduct via 8 Av/new Brooklyn-Queens trunk local. 207 St-Far Rock/Rock Park/Ozone Park Bronx or Queens to Euclid Av via 2 Av/new tunnel/IND Court St (P) Bronx or Queens to Coney Island via West End express Bronx or Queens to Brighton Beach via 2 Av/Brighton express Alternately, you could send a two-track line along South 4th St and Utica Av, and put the on it as locals, and then use the to fill the gap left by the Fulton local (and thus avoid the need for a four-track Second Av Subway. Another interesting option would be to connect a South 4 St subway to both the LES/2 Av express track stubs and Worth St, leave the alone, and then build an underground branch connecting the South 4th St to the Prospect Park local tracks; that would still require to Euclid, but would also meaningfully decongest DeKalb by pulling the off it; for that the service patterns would be 145 St or Bedford Park Blvd to Coney Island via CPW local\6 Av express\S 4 St express\Brighton local 168 St to Kings Plaza via CPW/8 Av/S 4 St local Jamaica Center to Kings Plaza via Queens Blvd exp/8 Av local/S 4 St local 125 St to Brighton Beach via 2 Av\Broadway express\Brighton Express 125 St to Euclid Av via 2 Av\Fulton St local. My personal preference is using any new Brooklyn trunk to properly replace the Jamaica El and moving the to a new Williamsburg-based alignment connected to Brighton local; the goal is to push 45-60 tph through Jamaica/ENY/Richmond Hill/Jamaica where currently all you get is 6-12tph.

Fair; it might be worth spinning this off into a housing crisis/homelessness thread.

Strong agree; I'm in Boston these days and we have the same problem up here; I'm currently paying $1k/mo for a room in a 4br apartment. I wound up helping a friend try to take a run at Cambridge City Council to try to put a dent in the problem up here; the big thing I wanted us to do was to take state-owned land that the state was looking to sell, buy it up (since by law up here the municipality in which state land resides has right of first refusal on the land), and build actual mixed-income apartments on the land (by mixed income I mean four income slices ($0-30k/yr, $30-60k, $60-90k, $90-120k) and a fifth slice that floats at market rate, with each of the income brackets being charged 30% of net income. Now one building diced up that way is a drop in the bucket, but a few hundred, especially if they're decent sized (15-20 floors of apartments over a couple floors of retail), would likely put a significant dent in the problem. The image above is an example floorplan for one of these buildings in Sketchup; it's 22 units per floor, ranging from 900 sq ft (1br) to 2400 sq ft (5br); at 20 residential floors tall it's 440 units; spread a few hundred of those around the city and you've just housed a couple hundred thousand people, including 40-50,000 people whose income would put them at risk for homelessness (more if you break up the 5br apartments in some of the buildings into a 2br and a 3br each). Furthermore, if you do the mixed-income thing at about those proportions the buildings overall would likely run a bit better than breakeven (which means you're talking about needing construction funding, but not perpetual operating subsidies), and that mix of people should give you solidly working- and middle-class buildings in ethos, and it should avoid the problems you see with Section 8 and NYCHA properties where you have pockets of extraordinarily concentrated poverty (and then crime, both from desperation and from people preying on the poor), which means that it would likely be significantly easier to get neighborhoods to take these buildings (and easier to make a case to compel them to if you need to). If you assume the federal homelessness numbers in NYC are roughly correct (about 80k people), then building mixed income housing for about 400-450k people would comfortably absorb the vast majority of people currently on the street and in the shelter system (which then really leaves only a small number of people whose mental health issues are such that they can't hold an apartment, and honestly I'm pretty sure that once you get people addresses and onto SSI/SSDI you're only going to be left with a few hundred people who need more intervention in their lives than that, and you could probably build community housing with in-building services to cover most of that population, and then the five people left who are enough of a mess to qualify for being sectioned under existing laws can be sectioned. You'd probably still have a transient homeless population comprised of people who haven't made it into one of these buildings yet, but that combination should get rid of a lot of the encampments at Penn and PABT without having to coerce the people in those encampments into leaving.

True, but "just" getting homeless people off the streets means building enough low- and middle-income housing that you can keep most of the people who got priced out of housing back into housing, which means building enough new apartments that you can create economically integrated mixed-income housing (which prevents a lot of the crime and social ills you get when you create pockets of concentrated poverty), which requires a combination of legislation, taxes, and city-built housing that nobody seems to have the appetite to make possible. That kind of push would definitely require Albany to kick in money, and would realistically need federal money to make possible (as well as a repeal of the Faircloth Amendment). Most other approaches aren't actually going to fix the problem, or are only going to do so at the expense of a whole lot of other things we really don't want to give up; police crackdowns are just going to move the problem around and leave a lot of black and brown people beaten or dead for nothing, and relaxing the laws around institutionalization of the mentally ill is a fast route back to the bad old days of Willowbrook. I'd love to see NYC, Albany, and Washington actually work together to fix this, but I'd be surprised if that happens in the next ten years.

That would be an interesting idea; the alternative would be to slap a flying junction on the express tracks where the LIRR tracks cross Queens Blvd, then bring the up on the outer two tracks between 51 Av and 57 Av (then raise the up once you get past the spot where the Rockaway branch breaks off).

I mean, that's possible, but the question comes down to what tracks you want to use where. The LIRR mainline is currently six tracks to Woodside, two of which are dedicated to PW branch service. You could disconnect those two from the PW branch and extend them down QBL as subway tracks if you so chose; I'm just not sure that's a good idea. I'd also rather see a four-track Jamaica corridor and additional corridor service down Northern Blvd and/or Astoria Blvd than jump straight to six-tracking QBL at the moment; it's not a bad idea to create a QBL bypass but I don't really want to see all those eggs in the and 's basket. Yeah; I'm more a fan of the 2nd ->3rd->2nd alignment that came up in this thread a while back (2 Av 125 to 72, 3 Av 66 to 42, 3 Av 34 to Houston) because that enables easy transfers with the at GCT, the at 53 St, and the at 59/63 Sts while still hitting the hospitals and the points of interest on the LES.

Setting up the PW line that way with additional stops at Junction Blvd and Broadway basically creates a bidirectional express and an extension for Flushing, with your only costs being the two new stations plus the passage from Elmhurst Av to the new stop at Broadway and a fleet of Americanized Class 345s; that's the fairly low-cost option. The higher-cost option is to branch the PW line tracks off from the LIRR just before Sunnyside and tie them to the 63 St tunnel; route the through the new tunnel, and use existing rolling stock on the line to provide service to NE Queens while freeing 2 Av up to operate as a separate trunk line. You'd wind up adding about 1.5ish miles of track, an infill stop with a connection to the Astoria line at 31 St/39 Av, and two more tubes to 63 St, but that would also work (while freeing up the and to run up to 30 tph combined by eliminating the bottleneck on the 59 St tunnels).

If you wanted to do that you'd need a third track at least to enable express trains to pass locals; Norristown HSL in Philly makes that work but they only have room to run 6-8 tph or so that way max. Their schedule shows the express leaving five minutes before the local and arriving nine minutes after the previous one, and 6tph total service (with an effective headway of 15-20 minutes on either end because of the spacing between trains required to run the service that way). You could possibly push the headways a bit tighter, but you couldn't really have smaller gaps between the locals than what PW already has (which is 20-25 minutes between locals and 20-25 minutes between expresses). I really think you're better off either converting the entire PW branch to all-stops subway operation and add infill stations at Queens Blvd and Junction Blvd, or just biting the bullet and building a separate subway corridor.

If you think you can pull it off go for it; the question is whether you have the resources and the credentials to do that. I worked on a City Council campaign up in Cambridge and it was a three-ring circus (and somewhat of a clusterf**k); it's important work and people need to do it but it's damn difficult.

Honestly, for serving College Point I'd be tempted to run either a Fordham-Flushing-Jamaica crosstown line or a Co-Op City-Flushing-Kew Gardens-Far Rockaway crosstown with a connection to QBL at Forest Hills. Considering how full the Q44 runs, trainstituting it with extensions to Fordham and down Merrick Blvd would likely be a viable route in its own right, the extension to Fordham should increase ridership further, and an extension down Merrick Blvd should take a pretty big load off the Q4/5/84/85. Alternately, crossing QBL at Forest Hills and then taking over the Rockaway Beach Branch would do something useful with the Rock Park shuttle. I'd love to hear feedback: Map with alignments here

You could extend the , but the way Flushing Main St is constructed it would be a massive PITA to do so. You'd have to close Main St Flushing because of the way the mezzanine was built, redo all the wheelchair access things, and there's not enough road capacity to extend all the Flushing buses to Shea for a couple years while you do that. If you build the IND out to Flushing then closing the IRT station to do work isn't so bad.

I think it's worth the investment to have at least one four-track trunk in Northern Queens; I set my proposal up this way because it gives me the track capacity to run 60tph into Flushing should we need it, and I could see running your crosstown as an additional local service on that trunk. Just looking at the relative populaiton densities on a census map of NYC, it would probably make more sense to put a four-track trunk on Northern and then a two- or three-track local line along Astoria Blvd (and Northern Blvd also lets you take the and both off Broadway local, letting you bump the to 15-20tph), while still tying into the larger system. I tend not to be a fan of having standalone corridors as opposed to integrating things into a wider system.