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Ugh . . . these new 'echo friendly' taxis are hideous . . .

9:59 AM
Performers Audition For Coveted MTA Subway Slots
By: NY1 News

http://www.ny1.com/content/top_stori...a-subway-slots

Quote:

Dozens of performers are warming up their vocal chords hoping to get a chance to play for a potential audience of more than eight million straphangers.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is holding its 25th annual auditions for the "Music Under New York" program today.

About 70 soloists and groups are expected to show off their talent before a panel of judges.

Among the diverse range of performers vying for a spot are an all-female mariachi band, a Latin gypsy fusion group, and a bluegrass trio.

The auditions run from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. inside Grand Central Terminal's Vanderbilt Hall and are open to the public.

L.I.R.R. Plan for East Side Needs More Time and Money

May 21, 2012

By COLIN MOYNIHAN

Read More: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/22/ny...y.html?_r=2&em

Quote:

Creating a Long Island Rail Road link to the East Side of Manhattan will take six years longer to accomplish than originally expected and will cost nearly $2 billion more than the initial estimate, Metropolitan Transportation Authority officials said Monday.

- The new completion date for the project is August 2019, and officials put the cost at $8.24 billion, up from an estimate of $6.3 billion in 2006. The 2006 estimate came after $2.6 billion in federal financing for the ambitious project was announced, and transportation officials said then that they thought the project would be finished by the end of 2013. It has been delayed a number of times.

- The announcement of the new cost and time estimates came during a meeting of the transportation authority’s board in Manhattan. The authority’s capital construction president, Michael F. Horodniceanu, described several factors that he said had contributed to the delay. Among them were the difficulty of building beneath an existing web of tracks and equipment in Queens and complications caused by unrelated projects, including building developments on the West Side of Manhattan and the planned replacement of tracks inside Amtrak tunnels running beneath the East River.

.....

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ibanesse (Post 5678435)

See, what I find ridiculous is people who come into this city and utilize its infrastructure every single day complaining that they have to pay for any part of the infrastructure because they just happen, thanks to arbitrary, imaginary lines, to not actually reside inside the municipality from whence that infrastructure is run. How is that fair? Everyone in the Tri-State area, whether directly or indirectly, avails themselves of the services of the NYC government. Either they actually use the roads and bridges and commuter rail lines and Subways and bus lines, or they in some way benefit from all of the economic activity that fuels the entire region, which is made possible by the existence of all of that infrastructure.

I can't help but feel that this particular attitude is nothing more than an extension of New York City's endless and pointlessly bizarre feud with Trenton and Albany, especially after the ARC cancellation and Cuomo raiding the MTA transit lockbox again.

It's false that those who don't live in NYC don't contribute to it's infrastructure. We pay for tolls, bus passes, state sales tax, city sales tax (yes they have that), and state taxes that go to the MTA.

New Retail Zone Proposed at Columbus Circle Station

COLUMBUS CIRCLE — The Metropolitan Transportation Authority announced on Wednesday that it plans to develop a major retail concourse at the renovated 59 Street-Columbus Circle subway station and is seeking bids from real estate firms to manage the project.
The MTA is proposing an 11,500-square-foot, 13-store retail zone on the mezzanine level of the busy station — the seventh most-trafficked in the city with 21.3 million customers entering in 2011.

http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/2012...#ixzz1yNKobtCH

I was really surprised at the lack of retail in the NY subway. In fact, I don't think I even saw a Newstand/Snackstand in any of the subway stations I used. In Toronto every station (at least every one I've been to) has at least a Gateway Newstand. Yonge/Bloor has two (one on the northbound Yonge platform, one on the soutbound Yonge platform). Some stations also have bakeries, delis, dry cleaners, coffee shops, etc.

Quote:

Originally Posted by J. Will (Post 5741060)

Are you sure about that? Most of the stations I use on a daily basis (Jamaica Center/Lexington-53rd) have newsstands.

Freeway Removal Hits a Roadblock in the Bronx

Jun 20, 2012

By Sarah Goodyear

Read More: http://www.theatlanticcities.com/com...ck-bronx/2327/

Quote:

Reports of the death of the Sheridan Expressway have been greatly exaggerated. For years, neighborhood advocates have been pushing for the removal of this elevated freeway in New York City’s South Bronx, and it looked like they had a decent chance of winning their fight to replace the aging structure with parks, housing, shopping, and reconnected streets. The Sheridan has been something of a poster child for the increasingly popular concept of urban freeway demolition. It was number two on the Congress for the New Urbanism’s list of “Freeways Without Futures,” and it made the Urban Land Institute’s short list of potential teardown projects as well, in part because of a federal TIGER grant that was awarded to New York to study options for the future of the 1.2-mile strip of asphalt, options that explicitly included removal.

But the city announced this month that it will no longer consider tearing down the road, which carries only about 30,000 vehicles per day (surrounding roads see as many as 127,000 vehicles per day). Instead, the focus will be on rehabilitating the highway. Responding to questions from WNYC’s Transportation Nation, a city official cited concerns about truck traffic headed for the nearby Hunts Point Produce Market, the city’s main wholesale outlet for fruits and vegetables, as well as other potential traffic problems. Veronica Vanterpool of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign says that the coalition of advocates for removal, the South Bronx River Watershed Alliance, will push to get the city to reconsider. "All of us in the larger South Bronx community are very disappointed," she says. "We thought it was very shortsighted. It’s really incongruent with many of the progressive transportation policies that Mayor Bloomberg has been promoting." Vanterpool points out that the administration is subsidizing the relocation of the grocery delivery service FreshDirect to the Bronx, even though that will mean increased truck traffic for the borough.

.....

http://cdn.theatlanticcities.com/img...in/largest.jpg

News 12 The Bronx

http://www.news12.com/articleDetail....news_type=news

The Bronx takes top spot for reverse commuting in U.S.

Quote:

(06/25/12) THE BRONX - Traveling to and from The Bronx is on the rise, making it the largest reverse commute market in the United States.

According to the MTA, more people are traveling from Metro-North stations in the borough to areas in Westchester County and Connecticut every morning for work. It says the commuter numbers have grown 150 percent since 1990.

Officials say more employment opportunities in northern areas are what's driving the numbers up.

(©) News12 Interactive, Inc. 2012

City Expands 20 M.P.H. Zones Across More Neighborhoods

July 10, 2012

By MATT FLEGENHEIMER

Read More: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/11/ny...imes&seid=auto

Quote:

New York City drivers, anguished by bike lanes and pedestrian plazas, have long insisted that the Bloomberg administration was slowing them down. On Tuesday, in a rare moment of harmony, the city agreed. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced a broad expansion of the city’s so-called neighborhood slow-zone program, which will lower the speed limit to 20 miles per hour from 30 in designated areas across as many as 13 neighborhoods.

Mr. Bloomberg, speaking at a news conference in Corona, Queens, cited the city’s recent safety gains, which, he said, have driven annual traffic fatalities to their lowest rates since the age of horse-drawn carriages. He called the program the latest tool in “our assault on the No. 1 traffic killer — speeding.” The city’s first and only neighborhood slow zone was instituted in some areas of the Claremont section of the Bronx in November. Janette Sadik-Khan, the city’s transportation commissioner, said speeding in the zone had fallen about 10 percent.

The new zones, which may also feature speed bumps and special signs, were tentatively selected based on crash history, community support and proximity to schools, senior centers and day care centers, among other factors, the city said. The neighborhoods include Corona, Boerum Hill in Brooklyn, Riverdale in the Bronx, Inwood in Manhattan and Rosebank on Staten Island. Ms. Sadik-Khan noted that, according to traffic data, a pedestrian hit by a car going 40 m.p.h. had only a 30 percent chance to survive. Those struck by a car at 30 m.p.h., she said, survive 80 percent of the time. At 20 m.p.h., the figure climbs to about 95 percent.

.....

Mayor Bloomberg’s transportation reforms have unclogged New York’s streets and made them safer.

Read More: http://www.city-journal.org/2012/22_...portation.html

Quote:

Back in February 2009, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that, in three months’ time, New York City would permanently close Broadway to car and truck traffic in Times Square and Herald Square. The plan would “ease traffic congestion throughout the Midtown grid,” the mayor said. Though he called it merely a “targeted adjustment,” everyone understood that the initiative marked a big shift away from a century’s worth of New York transportation policy, which had generally tried to ease traffic by adding ever more space for cars. Many New Yorkers were upset by the proposal. “I’m worried because I don’t know if it will work,” Charlotte St. Martin, the director of the theater industry’s Broadway League, told the New York Times. “I certainly don’t want things to be worse for theatergoers.” A cabdriver, Garba Mahaman, got right to the point: “Now they’re going to make it worse.” City public advocate Bill DeBlasio spoke for many when he later complained, “We cannot make such a fundamental change to Times Square without first giving the community a greater say.”

Three years on, it’s clear that the worriers were wrong and the mayor right. Midtown traffic flows better, not only for cars and trucks but for the majority of people who use the area: pedestrians. A walk down the closed section of Times Square—Broadway between 47th and 42nd Streets—makes it hard to imagine changing things back. Where stuck drivers once fumed, people sit happily in chairs munching on dumplings. More important is that the district’s huge crowds can now walk down the middle of the street instead of overflowing the sidewalk. Though drivers in New York City are a minority, outdated traffic engineering long allowed them to reign unchallenged, with clogged streets and too many accidents the results. Over the past five years, however, the city, led by transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, has devised ways to reduce that dominance. Through several new initiatives, mostly outside Times Square, New York has been rationally using its limited physical space to get more people moving more quickly—and that means not in automobiles. New York has achieved its improvements on the cheap. Better still, the changes have saved lives.

Closing Broadway was a straightforward solution to a serious problem: frustrated car drivers and even more frustrated pedestrians. Broadway wasn’t like other city avenues. A diagonal thoroughfare, it cut not only across streets, as Manhattan’s other north-south avenues did, but also through other major avenues. Indeed, its intersection with Sixth and Seventh Avenues was what created Herald Square and Times Square, respectively. So three separate sets of drivers, rather than the usual two, had to share those spots. Many were unfamiliar with the area, faced too many choices, and didn’t have enough time or room to make them effectively. The drivers competed with pedestrians, too—more than a quarter of a million daily in Times Square, ten times the number of drivers there. The number of pedestrians has been swelling yearly since the 1990s, when the seedy district was transformed into a tourist hot spot. Ellen Goldstein of the Times Square Alliance, a group of business and real-estate interests, recalls that Times Square “rehabbed itself so very quickly” that “we went from not much to huge numbers [of pedestrians] in a short time. We spent many years worrying about the lack of pedestrian space.” By the new millennium, Times Square’s walkers were crowding off the sidewalks and into the car-choked avenue. The city government had to give them more room somehow—hence Bloomberg’s solution, closing Broadway to cars.

The change hasn’t, as many drivers have fretted, made traffic worse in Midtown; in fact, it has sped things up by reducing confusion. Back in 2008, drivers averaged only 6.7 miles per hour in Midtown West, where Broadway is. In just one year, the closure improved speeds overall to 7.2 miles per hour, a 7 percent increase. By tracking GPS data from 2 million taxi trips, the city found that northbound cabdrivers between Fifth and Ninth Avenues (the area through which Broadway slices) went 17 percent more quickly in 2009 than in 2008. Southbound drivers did see a 2 percent slowdown—not surprising, since they had lost Broadway, a one-way avenue running south—but it was far exceeded by the substantial northbound gain. As a control measure, the city measured speeds on the unaffected east side of town and found that they increased by about 5 percent (the recession accelerated traffic, since fewer cars entered the city). The mayor’s plan also improved life considerably for Broadway’s primary constituents. In the first year of the pedestrian plazas, Times Square attracted 11 percent more walkers than it had the previous year, climbing to 22,381 people per hour at peak times, on average. Herald Square attracted 6 percent more people on foot, a peak-time hourly average of 17,311. The new people aren’t all tourists; they include walking commuters, who’ve switched routes because they find Times Square more pleasant, as well as local residents and workers. A Times Square Alliance survey found that two-thirds of workers in the area liked the changes. “I used to not go out at lunchtime,” Goldstein says, because the four-block walk from 46th Street to 42nd would take 20 minutes. It now takes three.

.....

http://www.city-journal.org/assets/images/22_2-ng.jpg

Does anyone know what they are doing with the schist rubble? They could easily sell that to landscapers or even give it to the parks dept. to do interesting things with...

That was my first thought too... CUNY is building a new medical-research complex in Harlem and had to import Chinese gneiss because there's no local source of schist.

I'm guessing it will be recycled for breakwaters and the like.

They could build an underground city here.

Quote:

Originally Posted by jd3189 (Post 5788441)

They could build an underground city here.

No, actually, they will have a subway. This could be built new subway station.

:previous: I know they're building a subway, but there's seems to be space for more than that. If they wanted to, they could build an underground city.

These will be large subway stations with significant space dedicated to ventilation equipment.

WABC-TV - NEW YORK

http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/story?se...rbs&id=8779793

Board approves plan for new Tappan Zee Bridge
Updated at 03:10 PM today

http://cdn.abclocal.go.com/images/wa...15_448x252.jpg

Quote:

NEW YORK -- A New York state transportation board on Monday approved an estimated $5.4 billion plan to build a new Tappan Zee Bridge in the New York City suburbs.

The New York Metropolitan Transportation Council voted unanimously to approve the project.

The county executives from Westchester, Rockland and Putnam, who all sit on the board, said last week that they would vote for the project. They did not attend Monday's meeting but sent representatives who cast votes in favor of the project.

Each of the three in effect held veto power because the council must unanimously approve a project to qualify it for federal funds.
Following the vote, Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed a letter of intent to U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood to formally apply for the funds to build a new bridge.

"We have done more in the last couple of months than we have in the past 13 years," Cuomo said of the plan's progress. "We have asked the federal government to expedite our application. We are going to Washington to apply."

When asked whether he believed the federal funding would be granted, Cuomo said: "They are going to say yes. You gotta believe, they are going to say yes."

Cuomo had garnered support from other officials but the three county executives - Rob Astorino of Westchester; Scott Vanderhoef of Rockland and MaryEllen Odell of Putnam - had expressed some doubts about the new bridge, principally over its lack of a full-scale mass transit component.

Under the current plan, the bridge would have a dedicated bus lane during rush hours but ambitious plans for a commuter rail line or bus mass transit were dropped because of high costs.

Howard Glaser, director of state operations, called the vote "an important step forward."

"There's been 10 years of study, hundreds of public meetings, and finally we'll begin to move forward," Glaser said. "The bridge is outdated, it's unsafe. Residents of Westchester and Rockland and Putnam deserve better, and it's an important economic lifeline for all of New York State."

The existing bridge, spanning the Hudson River between Westchester and Rockland counties, is overcrowded and deteriorating after more than 55 years of use.

The environmental group Riverkeeper on Friday criticized officials for giving only three days' notice for the vote on the new bridge.

In a statement Monday, Riverkeeper called the vote "a major departure from past promises of transparency and inclusiveness."

---
Associated Press Writer Fay Abuelgasim contributed to this report.

HOW FUCKING HARD is it for a bridge to contain two railway tracks that they are claiming is too expensive too pursue? What the hell is the cause of the added cost if its essentially engineering the bridge piers for the added weight of trains? If built without transit, its going to be a generational regret the moment the ribbon is cut.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Busy Bee (Post 5804954)

They rebuilt the ROW on the Rockland side and the Westchester side was to be tunneled....the BRT would have just used to the highways....the cost was 15 Billion a few years ago for a full corridor upgrade which is badly needed.

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