RailRunRob

13 hours ago, Wallyhorse said:

Logically, we know why this can't happen.  I've in my lifetime dealt with too many people who insist on things done a certain way even if it is NOT logical to do such.  

Those "whiny" NIMBYs are likely to Cuomo votes he needs to win the New York primary in 2020 if he runs for President.  Cuomo may be looking to bend over backwards for THEM in spite of the  doing things logically because he's more concerned with a Presidential race a year-plus away.

I agree with @R68OnBroadway the Math doesn't add up. I'm not sure what more could be done in regards to the plan besides tweaks in the Mitigation Plan. More money might be able to get it done a little faster. But even that has a limit it's a diligent process with a systematic process and inspections. The Cuomo visit seems more on the optics side. 

12 hours ago, T to Dyre Avenue said:

Cuomo wearing a safety hat in the Canarsie Tunnel tomorrow night really should be the first thing that comes up when you do a Google Image Search for “political stunt.”

Can you imagine working on the planning for this shutdown for 2 years  Just to have to Cuomo, Cornell and Columbia staff second guess everything you've done?  My question is if the State is ready to open there wallet if need be to get it done right.

Final designs!

3 hours ago, CenSin said:

The MTA has an absolute right to withhold money from things that it does not think will be useful in the foreseeable future.

IMO here lies the problem. The MTA doesn't seem to have any proper planning arm as it did under City control. Pre-MTA Subway plans were in lockstep with Civic/regional planners.  Think were giving to much credit by even thinking the MTA/MTACC even knows what's useful moving forward to even withhold.  The MTA currently is a maintain and short game organization not in the game of prediction or building the future one bit. The 1970's SAS was an idea born and put in place in a different era and executed under a totally different regime and mindset plus the added external factors.  A casualty of a transitional time.

On 12/8/2018 at 12:10 PM, RR503 said:

A quick methodological note from my earlier sheet: the square footage data was not lifted from NYMTC; their stats are unreliable. I instead subtracted 3' from all car lengths to account for couplers, anti-climbers, end doors, etc, and set the widths to 8.5' for IRT and 9.9' for B div. I am well aware this fails to account for cabs, seats, etc, but without knowledge of car assignments, those stats are impossible to know. Here's the sheet on which I did those calcs; do point out any errors you see. 

Isn't he the guy who did this?

https://www.newcivilengineer.com/moving-block-signals-finally-go-ahead-on-jubilee-line/796921.article

Am I reading this correctly how many trains via 14th street tubes 19 TPH with CTBC? 

12 hours ago, shiznit1987 said:

IMHO, are we really sure that Phases 3 and 4 are even a good idea? Where I'm coming from is that 2nd Ave below 63rd St is *not* really part of the East Midtown CBD. 2nd and 1st Aves are pretty much pure residential all the way down Manhattan, and if we're going to spend multi-billions on subway extensions it really should be either 1) Expanding capacity into Core Midtown or 2) serving transit deserts like 3rd Ave (Bronx) or Utica Av. My fear is everyone is drawing up plans for QB 2nd Ave services that to be honest I don't think anyone is going to really want to use (I live along QB BTW). People want anything between 8th and 3rd Aves and a lower SAS is at best convenient to 3rd Ave offices which already have decent subway access. 

I know some advance the argument that the city will somehow upzone or adjust Far East Midtown to become another office district but I doubt that's going to happen. The reality is that 1) That area is really well heeled and 2) with the general anti-development mindset of many city leaders I doubt the political will is there to have 2nd Ave morph into a business zone. 

Long story short, I think we are making a very big assumption that the SAS below 63rd st will be as big of a hit as the Uptown/Bronx section, and I personally don't see it.  

 

Even if phase 3 is mostly residential how is that any different from the UES? Even with a transfer, it's still coverage. Area likes Murry Hill, The East Village, and the LES are seeing a fair amount of growth. A Phase 3 would probably spur more development and offer more options.  East Midtown would see some spill over. I'm not going to walk over a few hundred feet to Second Ave for service? Besides blocks are shorter on the eastside. New York is a hot frying at this point for transport In Manhattan more so. Any inch of new line will evaporate and spur development to make use at very worst case. There's so many unreachable points on the east side you won't have to reach to far.

27 minutes ago, RR503 said:

Isn't he the guy who did this?

That would be correct sir. For 1500!

Welcome Pete Tomlin to the Table

https://www.progressiverailroading.com/people/news/MTA-hires-signaling-expert-to-fix-NYC-subway-signal-system--56273

14 hours ago, Wallyhorse said:

That I agree with.  

 

This might spearhead such a movement. 

One would think.

1 minute ago, RR503 said:

I did. I know this is beside the question of development in the SBx, but I find it the pinnacle of hilarity that they're putting up condos a few feet from one of the largest trash processing facilities in the city. Good luck selling those while railcars full of refuse literally lie right below...

I saw calling it the Piano district. There just shooting these up developments I wouldn't be surprised if there shortcutting the hazard testing and clean up the process after rezoning.

2 minutes ago, RR503 said:

Bronx. You're never gonna beat Lex express, but if you can pull riders from the  at 3rd-138 or the  at 3-149 then you're already creating systemic benefit (not to mention economic boon in the South Bronx). 

https://ny.curbed.com/2018/4/18/17252368/nyc-soccer-stadium-south-bronx-related

You see this?

6 minutes ago, R68OnBroadway said:

The way I see it, we should split upper SAS two ways; the  would run to 125th-St Nicholas while the  would run to Fordham Plaza via 3rd. As for the  ,I'd have it run to a new lower level at 72nd and then run out to the bypass and along Union Tpk.

Real world scenario. Phase 2 funding in place and you can only pick one which would it be?

1 hour ago, Wallyhorse said:

By the time the SAS reached Broadway, you are also talking about very possibly a new Metro-North station at 125th/12th Avenue that can include an SAS connection.  If need be, you could build a portal after St. Nicholas and make 125th/Broadway-12th Avenue an elevated station (which can be done more easily given 125 in that area is in a valley).  Main reason beside Columbia is transfers to ALL of the other lines on 125 PLUS possibly provisions for a connection to the 8th Avenue Line going north at St. Nicholas, which would open up future possibilities (plus in an emergency allow the 8th Avenue line to use the SAS to 63rd and then run via 6th).

As for The Bronx, that does need to be done, most likely reclaiming the area lost when the 3rd Avenue EL was lost in 1973. 

I'm with you any new transit connections would be a welcomed asset. But there are way too many possibles and variables with that plan.  All im saying if there building to Lenox Ave anyways if you went straight without turning on 125th with that same distance you'd be in the Bronx already. Usage is easily justifiable with the projected growth of the South Bronx alone not to mention the extra growth generated by the added capacity that way. IMO the Bronx is a better use than 125th. I just feel like it's the easy way out a shortcut a way to say see we gave you the second Ave line bare minimum on what's acceptable and can get away with.

17 hours ago, RR503 said:

In a rare moment of free time over this past weekend, I sat down with NYMTC's hub bound reports and the 1949 and '54 BOT service maps (big thanks to Stephen Bauman for this resource and general help). I wanted to analyze the way peak hour (8-9AM) subway capacity and ridership had changed over the years, to help contextualize all the strum und drang about CBTC, and the perceived lack of capacity in the system. The initial (I'm still very much working on this) results of these analyses are below.

So we all know that rhetoric around capacity is questionable; system operation/service design is more of a constraint than folks appreciate. Just how questionable? Well...

Each point represents a year for which I could find data. The red point was maximum recorded capacity (I'm relatively certain it went even higher in the early 60s, though I couldn't find a source to corroborate), and the dashed line is the number of trains we could run into the core if we ran 30tph on every track (yes, I am aware that that's a reductive assumption). The increases in that last data point in '89 and '17 are 63rd and SAS, respectively. (On a methodological note, I excluded the 3rd Ave. El from these charts to strengthen my case)

That chart alone is an indictment of NYCT's backwards polices. Operational incompetence, circularity in service guidelines, and sheer ignorance have driven a significant loss in peak-hour capacity -- one that has taken place in the face of an overall system track capacity increase. The corridor-by-corridor breakdowns of this loss are below: 

What makes this all the more stinging is the associated change in ridership. It would be one thing if the MTA's operational incompetence had been met with increasing ridership; that would at least provide a modicum of reason for the spate of dwell-associated delays we have seen. But no. In what came as a surprise to me, peak-hour ridership is actually down significantly from the '70s (the earliest time period for which I could find such data). In 1973, peak-hour core bound ridership was 478,110. Today, it's 373,011. That decrease (of about 22%) is in fact so large that on a passengers/train basis, the subway is actually less stressed today than it was back then (an average of 1146 people per train in 1973, versus 1059 today). As folks will correctly point out, pax/train ignores train length and car size, but with 10-car trains now all but universal on the IND/IRT, I'd posit that the people/square foot impact has been equally positive (that analysis is in the works). 

What I believe this speaks to is the obfuscatory nature of the push for CBTC. There is historical precedent for more core-bound throughput and higher fixed-block capacities; there is current precedent for passably competent block signal ops (QB express comes to mind). In the end, CBTC is just a mediator of train spacing, one whose performance is not determined by its technology, but by the variables that determine transit capacity otherwise (acceleration, braking, dwell time, schedule adherence). I do not deny that CBTC is vastly more flexible than fixed-block, but given its cost and the existence of all this unused capacity, do we really believe that it's the wisest use of 40 billion? Can't we just install incrementally, and reinvest in basic maintenance? Please, please share your thoughts. I will be posting more of these analyses as time goes on. 

________

If any of you are interested in the spreadsheets involved here, please PM me -- as with everything else I have/will post here, I'm happy to share. 

Man somebody's been working love it!!  We should try to get these data points into some type of simulation.

Just now, Via Garibaldi 8 said:

It seems like there are no salt trucks all around the City, and usually in Riverdale they have them waiting along Kappock so that they can clear and salt the hills, otherwise you can't get up them.  Only two ways in for the buses. Up the hills...

I was just on the roads ive seen none all afternoon. I honestly didn't think it was going to be this bad. Until I had to go out. My Mom had to detour off the Bronx River Parkway near the Bronx Zoo she said there were (60ft) buses jackknifed everywhere. Madness.

3 minutes ago, Via Garibaldi 8 said:

Ha please.  I have another co-worker who has been stuck in the Port Authority since around 04:30 this afternoon and I am stuck in my office... I don't how long this mess is going to go on before the damn roads open up and they start plowing the streets.  I want to get home so I can eat dinner. Quite annoyed to say the least.

Yeah it's bad out here. Just got in...  I didn't see any salt trucks at all today they dropped the ball majorly!! 

13 hours ago, Via Garibaldi 8 said:

It’s a pain in the @ss to be honest. Even if it was just the DOT, they are not very receptive and that’s putting it lightly.

Definitely seems so. A lot of people are way to comfortable in these agencies. Time for shake ups.   

6 minutes ago, Via Garibaldi 8 said:

The traffic is just an example, but he noted other issues he has with service and the frequency. Unfortunately you wouldn't know this since he didn't post that here.

Got it.. That gives some reference to the context of previous comments.  So yeah way more moving parts with the between the County local Townships and Cities (ie Yonkers/WhitePlains) plus State. Homework.. Homework..

1 minute ago, Via Garibaldi 8 said:

Actually he does. We have spoken in person, hence my comments. If it was just traffic, I don't see the point in starting an advocacy group for that.

If that's the case I stand corrected.

8 minutes ago, Via Garibaldi 8 said:

Right... I think it’s enough dealing with Bee Line, but given what those buses come into NYC territory for, he’s almost bound to have to deal with some NYC or State agency.

Simply put from my POV I don't think it's that deep NYCDOT solves the issue for the MTA routes it solves 90% of the issue for the BL 20.21 and 4 as well. I Don't perceive he had any issues with frequency or schedules just traffic within NYC's borders. @Lawrence St correct me if I'm wrong. 

10 minutes ago, Via Garibaldi 8 said:

We know that. The point still stands regarding my comments... Anything outside of that is in Westchester, so nothing I’ve stated changes.

I'm just speaking on the ride delays which is all on the NYC side of the border. The 10,16,28,30,34,and 38 all are affected . Your comments stand for the overall Advocacy group homework needs to be done on the Westchester side for that.

On 11/8/2018 at 4:14 PM, Via Garibaldi 8 said:

He's right though. Bee Line is a different animal. Some buses may run through the Bronx, but these buses are run by the county of Westchester and the streets that they run on in Westchester have nothing to do with NYC DOT, so it's important that you do your homework. You can't model what I'm doing with the . You need understand how Bee Line is funded, who are the different agencies you have to deal with etc. This is why it's so difficult to get things done. Too many agencies involved. It took me almost three weeks to set up that meeting with the MTA for one hour.

The section of the route he's referring to is under the NYCDOT Jurisdiction. NYCTA buses are also affected. I know CB12 is working on getting the DOT on it.  @Lawrence St still reach out and do your homework!

5 minutes ago, Wallyhorse said:

One reason I do the 125 extension: Columbia University, which already has done some serious expansion.

They have the  already.. and private transport. Columbia is developing a few square City blocks were talking Neighborhoods on the Bronx side. I'd put that above a Westside link. Plus the geology issues that might have to be tackled west of Amsterdam.

4 minutes ago, Wallyhorse said:

And why I agree with changing Phase 2 to the Bronx with plans for an extenstion that replaces the long-gone Bronx portion of the 3rd Avenue EL (Either as EL or Subway, if an EL with provisions to also go to a rebuilt 3rd Avenue EL as I do think eventually with all the building in midtown you will need BOTH a full SAS AND fully-rebuilt a 3rd Avenue EL or subway to handle that).

This is doable now. A reroute to149th shouldn't be that much extra in cost tunnel wise..  The MTA needs to start taking private investment. The Developers of Mott Haven should at least be pitching in for Stations. It would be in their best interest for access and value for the land and properties there developing. 

10 minutes ago, Wallyhorse said:

If you do 125th, in my view you do it to Broadway so there are transfers to every other line on 125 and also with provisions at St. Nicholas Avenue to have it eventually have a connection to the Concourse Line. 

That side of town has transit bandwidth already why would you add extra weight to an area without creating extra arteries to alleviate pressure. 

@RR503  1:24 in he speaks briefly on it this is was the 1st time it came up. Then we spoke about it on the way out again in as well in a little more detail with Rogers added but the same message.