Call me crazy but if the "outside consultants" will have the best ideas shouldn't they have been consulted BEFORE the PA and Cuomo put forward this cockamamied AitTrain plan?

My architecture school thesis involved a lot of research on Haussmann in Paris and Moses in NYC. I spent a lot of time at the NYPL and Parks Dept archives.

with the passing of uncle joe’s infrastructure bill, this is the targeted nyc region haul — per the post:

Rail: $58 billion

$22 billion for Amtrak improvements, including the Gateway tunnel project under Hudson River.

$24 billion for Northeast Corridor modernization.

$12 billion for Intercity passenger rail, including high-speed rail.


Mass Transit: $9.8 billion

$9.8 billion for Clean Buses and Mass Transit


“Tip of the tongue projects likely to receive immediate assistance will be additional relief for the MTA/LIRR, the Gateway Tunnel project, Penn Station access, the East River Tunnels, and the Second Ave Subway,” Angelo Roefaro, a spokesman for Sen. Schumer told The Post.

The cash will also mean faster ferries, completing a high-occupancy vehicles (HOV) lane on the Staten Island Expressway, and upgrading the city sewer system to better handle flooding and more.

For reference, the UMTA of 1970 allocated $10 billion for mass transit. So in 2021 we're getting maybe 25% as much accounting for inflation.

^Important note

i think we are getting the same, at least as concerns the region -- $10B dollars in 1970 is worth $69B today, which is exactly in line with the total amount earmarked per the post tally above.

UMTA predated Amtrak. It was just for rapid transit systems. It's what built most of the Washington Metro, Miami Metrorail, Baltimore subway, MARTA, Buffalo's light rail subway, and...the never-used sections of the Second Ave. subway.

Both the Portal North Bridge and the Gateway Tunnel are independently funded separately from this new Infrastructure bill and would have gone ahead even if it hadn't passed.

yeah i know and as i said it was worth the same in today's dollars as just the ne region is getting now, because actually the full national public transit/rail total is $105B, so a little more than half of that is earmarked for around here. as these are all payer states in the ne, that's refreshing to hear for a change.

this is really a big deal and is not counting some of the already funded gateway work i guess. it's also rather different from 1970 because so much more upgrading to older systems is needed now vs new starts back in 1970 (ie., the ne corridor and amtrak), but hopefully some $ will lead to new rail services (ie., second avenue, new gateway tunnels).

anyway, this is the nyc transit thread, not the new national infrastructure plan thread. i would like to catch up with what other areas are getting and comparisons to umta and other worldwide major transit investments on their own threads. i'm sure we will get them. :tup:

mo money coming back.

mo money.

mo money.

nyc is getting the same amount in covid relief $$$:



New York public transit gets nearly $11 billion in federal COVID relief after months-long dispute with New Jersey, Connecticut

By Kevin Duggan
Posted on November 9, 2021


New York public transit will get $10.85 billion in federal COVID-19 relief to keep service running and avoid layoffs, after the governors of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut reached an 11th-hour agreement for how to divvy up the funds from Washington.

“As a result of a series of productive conversations with my fellow governors, I’m glad that we have reached an agreement that is beneficial to all,” said Governor Kathy Hochul in a statement Tuesday, Nov. 9. “The New York City and tristate region can’t fully recover from the pandemic without our transit agencies effectively and efficiently moving millions of people in and out of New York City each day.”

...

The money is separate from the $10 billion the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is slated to get from the $1 trillion infrastructure bill that just passed in the House on Friday, Nov. 5.


more:
https://www.amny.com/transit/new-yor...y-connecticut/

I wasn't able to find it in 60 seconds of google searches but I don't doubt that the UMTA was passed in 1970 in part because of the Penn Central collapse that same year. They knew there would be a bailout for that railroad specifically - Conrail was created to continue Penn's freight service and Amtrak was created to continue its passenger service and to relieve the nation's other railroads of the passenger services mandated by the ICC.

I suspect that UMTA was passed to separate the transit items from those other more drastic activities. By contrast, we now have intercity passenger rail and mass transit wrapped into the same bill, along with a bunch of other completely unrelated crap or stuff that works in direct opposition to rail, like highway expansions.

thats because there were no other more drastic activities, the interstate highway system was built less than ten years earlier, so it was still in great shape, although the final sections continued to be built out into the late 60s-early 70s.

the infrastructure bill as it is now couldn't be anything else than more all encompassing as all these systems today are old and worn down from lack of investment. particularly bridges, some of which are in dangerous conditions.

‘Tear the BQE down’: NYC construction big urges expressway’s reconstruction with federal infrastructure dollars

By Kevin Duggan and Ben Brachfeld
Posted on November 10, 2021



Government leaders must use new federal infrastructure dollars to demolish the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and rebuild it to meet 21st century needs, according to an influential construction industry honcho.

“I have one mission in life [on] infrastructure and that is to work with communities and create, I believe, the largest infrastructure [investment] in America,” said Carlo Scissura, President of the New York Building Congress at a morning panel discussion Wednesday, Nov. 10. “It’s called knocking down, redesigning, and rebuilding a Brooklyn-Queens Expressway for people, for communities, and for all of us in our city.”

The head of the building trade advocacy group said money from President Joe Biden’s recently-passed $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill, along with a new governor and a soon-to-be new mayor will make for the perfect time to redesign the highway.


more:
https://www.amny.com/transit/constru...structure-bqe/


https://www.amny.com/wp-content/uplo...2048x1361.jpeg

A deep tunnel from the curve at Tillary to a point along the Hicks St trench in Cobble Hill should at least be on the table. A single "super exit" from a tunnel under Tillary could ramp up between Brooklyn Bridge Blvd and Flatbush allowing access to both bridges. An even more ambitious plan would be have a tunnel start as far north as Wythe Ave and go all the way to 478. The Hicks St trench could accommodate thousands of new residential units after removal.

capping the cross bronx:


Bronx Rep. Ritchie Torres and Sen. Chuck Schumer want to “cap the Cross-Bronx” — i.e., build a deck over 40 percent of the 6.5-mile Cross-Bronx Expressway to create a High Line-style park. But beware the pols’ easy promises: The idea is a lot more complicated and expensive than they might have you think.


more:
https://nypost.com/2021/11/14/cappin...er-torres-say/

Im all for capping, but such an immense engineering expense for a park, something the Bronx has plenty of, makes zero sense. In addition to that, the construction of the Cross-Bronx ledt many instances of the backside of apartment houses being visible. This should be rectified in any capping endeavor. What a capped CBE should be is the site of about 50,000 new units of affordable and market rate housing in air rights buildings ranging from 8-40 stories. It would obviously be the largest housing undertaking in the countries history but it woyld put a dent in the cities housing crisis. The reconnected streets alone would help heal the South Bronx and the health and wellness benefits would be enormous.

I don't know why people keep talking about health. Capping the Cross Bronx doesn't make the air pollution go away. Electrification will fix a lot of it in the next few decades, although you will still have particulates from tires and brake pads.

Its not what I would personally lead with, I'd go with healing a torn apart neighborhood/reparing urban fabric and maximizing real estate, but you just acknowledged even with EV the pollution will likely continue for decades so I think the health concern reasoning is a valid aspect. And yes, even if you eliminate co2 i think residing over an open trench that sees 300,000 vehicles a day with brake dust and the other associated "off-dusting" for lack of a better term would be like residing in a foundry.

i would think that despite the health issues there can and would be a mix of park and housing in a major cap project like this.

note that they are already building new housing right up against the cross bronx now as it is. if you want to streetview something an example that comes right to mind for me is 1450 plimpton at w172nd st, a new apt building i work near sometimes and watched go up just east of university avenue.

Its pretty simple. Theyre going to have to make the cap pay much more for itself than this notion that the feds are gonna flip the bill and the local residents demands for a park. Some short segments could accomodate open space/parks but you don't engineer a multi billion dollar capping project to squander it on parks - something the Bronx has an abundance of. The local community, like many poor neighborhoods, is kowtowed to by pols with their unfounded concerns that development=displacement. This has already happened numerous times, most recently with the Southern Blvd rezoning where the objections, many of which boil down to rezoning leads to racial purging as well as the absolutely absurd claim that rezoning would bring about large buildings and density "out of character" with the area. Keep in mind the audacity of this statement. This area was the epicenter of the 1970s S. Bronx arson crisis and many of the vacant land after the fires where built on with cheap two-families in the 80s/90s. Let that sink in for a second.

Anyways ive ridden a tangent here. The point I'm trying to make is if this is going to happen the city has got to show some balls and say an investment on this scale isn't going to happen without a huge housing component. The city should seriously consider partnering with an engineering/development entity like an AECOM to master plan this thing from the beginning. You could construct tens of thousands of affordable and market rate housing units on these platform air rights.

As for the how, obviously this capping would be an epic undertaking. You are talking about one of the largest civil construction projects in NY in decades - probably since the Moses highways were built in the firatst place. Enormous piers woild have to be constructed along the median line of the current XBE as well as likely new retaining walls or at least building new stronger retaining walls in front of the old ones at a new height to support development above. This will further squeeze a highway thats already kind of tight through these cuts. Quite a bit of creative engineering will be required to say the least. Ironically it may very well be the case that a platform engineered for structures would actually need to be less robust than a platform engineered for parkland since the loads for structures would concentrate on transferring to the piers whereas a parkland platform would have immense weight spread laterally across the platform requiring significantly more substantial structure to accomodate. Its the reason some green roof projects are infeasible due to the incredible weight of soil. Im not an engineer so if someone else can speak to this with more authority please feel free.