A blog for all seasons; A blog for one; A blog for all. As the 11th most informative blog on the planet, I have a seared memory of throwing my Time 2006 Man of the Year Award over the railing at Time Warner Center.
Justice. Only Justice Shall Thou Pursue
This past week was a busy one in Lower Manhattan. Fulton Center finally opened after years of delays and cost overruns. Parts of the station have been open for some time now, but the central feature - the oculus that lets light stream down into the heart of the station - is now revealed, and the escalators and other areas are now open. Upper floors, however, are still off limits as they wont open until businesses move into retail spaces on those upper floors.
The Fulton Center (previously called the Fulton Street Transit Hub), was meant to untangle and better connect a number of subway lines that were built at different times by different competing subway companies at the beginning of the 20th century. Some were built at different depths, and some cross over other lines in a tangle that would make Escher blush.
The MTA did manage to improve the flow between some of the key lines, including the A/C and the 4/5, so that's a big improvement.
What was left on the table is that while the oculus is already an architectural darling, the MTA could have used the space above the station to sell air rights that could help defray the costs for the station or permit construction of other capital projects elsewhere.
What follows is a series of photos taken around Fulton Center:
Interior as seen from Broadway and Fulton escalator bank
Arches and architectural detail of the Corbin building access to Fulton Center
Looking up at the Oculus
Retail space along the street level of the Fulton Center
Looking up and through the Oculus
Information bank at Fulton Center
After viewing Fulton Center, I walked over to the WTC memorial to shoot some more photos, and a dramatic sky didn't hurt either:
1WTC shrouded in breaking clouds. Note that scaffold on the south side. I'll come back to that later.
Yellow roses adorn the names of those who served in the military and died on 9/11 as part of Veterans' Day remembrances.
Looking towards the 9/11 Museum, the WTC transit hub, and 3WTC. Note that the spikes are nearly completely installed.
Still my favorite view of the WTC - looking up the South side of 1WTC. Note the window washing scaffold high up in the center of the photo. This photo was taken 12:41PM. I didn't know it at the time, but within minutes, that scaffold would suffer a major malfunction requiring a high level FDNY emergency rescue operation more than 600 feet in the air.
Scaffolds on the NW corner of 1WTC.
Scaffolds and a hatch to allow a scaffold to deploy for the lower floors.
The damaged scaffold dangling at a sharp angle; this was taken at 1:25PM, about an hour before the rescue was completed.
The two men aboard the scaffold were rescued unharmed, and within 48 hours the window that had to be broken out to carry out the rescue had been replaced. The investigation into why the scaffold failed is underway.
New Yorkers have been trying to adjust to the new normal of MTA repairs to tunnels that were flooded by the storm surge from Superstorm Sandy. It included a 15-month closure of the Montague tunnel that affected many living in Brooklyn. There have been scattered closures to other tunnels and rerouted service elsewhere in the subway system, but now comes word that Amtrak is about to do its own remediation of the East River tunnels.
These tunnels service not only Amtrak, but LIRR and NJ Transit. They connect Penn Station with Long Island through the Sunnyside Yards and Harold Interlocking. Amtrak has to take two of the tunnels out of service for a year each. This will reduce the service capacity by 25% (1 out of four tunnels will be out of service at any time during the duration of the project that is expected to start next year).
The reconstruction will be similar to the work done on the Montague tunnels. It will include rebuilding the bench walls that include cable conduits for signals and power, plus railbed replacement and other work that can't be done while the tunnel is active.
The MTA and Amtrak were able to get service restored, but have been seeing an increased amount of service disruptions due to corrosion of equipment in the affected tunnels. That's why this full rehabilitation must get done.
But the East River tunnels are the easy part.
Amtrak has said that they must do the same with the Hudson River tunnels.
There are only two tunnels under the Hudson, and each are over 100 years old. They are functionally obsolete and need major rehabilitation, but that work can't be done until additional capacity is added.
After Gov. Christie cancelled the fully funded ARC tunnel project, that left a gaping hole in capacity expansion. Amtrak proposed a better project, Gateway, that would directly link in with NY Penn Station and allow through trains to run and high speed rail once service improvements elsewhere in the system are made.
Gateway is more than a decade away from seeing the light of day due to lack of funding. So New Jersey residents will be suffering with service delays for the foreseeable future.
Now some will point to Christie being short sighted in his cancellation of the project, but it was the right thing to do because NJ Transit has never met a capital project it couldn't complete overbudget and years after the scheduled deadlines. Cost overruns were likely to be in the $1-2 billion range, and even the FTA warned about the cost containment.
Gateway allows more capacity to the entire system - NJ Transit, Amtrak, and LIRR. ARC would have had limited capacity improvements for NJ Transit since the New York terminus was just that - a terminus. There was no place to store additional trains for rush hour, reducing actual customer capacity on the trains that would run to New Jersey.
The fact that we need to get additional capacity to allow for both growth in customer demand and to fix existing infrastructure is well established. What's missing is the lack of support in New York and New Jersey to find the funding for this critical work. That falls on both Gov. Christie and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Both have shown indifference to mass transit and infrastructure beyond a few car-centric projects like the new Tappan Zee bridge in New York and the Pulaski Skyway rehabilitation and NJ Turnpike expansion projects in New Jersey.
This has to change in order to improve the economic competitiveness of the region against other world-class cities.
A year ago, Hurricane Sandy was churning off the East Coast and about to deliver one of the greatest left hooks anyone had ever seen. The storm was projected to make landfall within 100 miles or so of New York City, and would do so at an astronomical high tide. While it was not the strongest storm in the Atlantic Basin's history, it was the largest storm - with a wind shield of 1,100 miles.
That combination led to fears that entire parts of the New York metro area would be flooded out.
Those fears turned out to be right on the money.
Parts of the city and Jersey Shore and Long Island were indeed flooded out and battered by Sandy. While the storm didn't produce the kinds of flooding rains that have been visited by storms like Floyd or Irene, it was the storm surge that caused tremendous damage to New York City. Here are a bunch of before-after photos showing how far we've come in the cleanup and rebuilding efforts.
More than 200 people were killed by the storm in all, including dozens in both New York and New Jersey. The Jersey Shore was battered and some of the most iconic photos were taken from Seaside Heights where the famous rollercoaster and amusement park pier were swallowed up by the angry churning ocean.
The Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island were both overrun by the waters in New York Harbor, and it has only been in the last two weeks that the Statue of Liberty was reopened to the public after its piers and electrical systems were repaired. Ellis Island is reopening to the public this week, although many pieces in the museum collection are still undergoing repairs and conservation efforts.
The flood waters inundated Lower Manhattan, Hoboken, Jersey City, and hundreds of miles of shoreline throughout the region.
Communities hardest hit included Breezy Point, Long Beach, Hoboken, and other coastal and low lying areas. Breezy Point was site of one of the worst sights during the crisis - a raging fire during the height of the storm that ended up burning more than a 100 homes with firefighters powerless to do anything. Since then, there have been accusations and lawsuits against Con Ed that they didn't turn power off to the area, which could have saved the area from the fires that started when electrical systems were inundated.
While some are still waiting for insurance to come through or have decided that rebuilding isn't worth the effort and have sought homes on higher ground elsewhere, others have started rebuilding.
Many shore communities have made an effort to rebuild damaged boardwalks. A few were able to rebuild in time for this summer, but many others were only able to get a few sections done or otherwise cleared debris so that beach access was assured.
Yet risks remain from Sandy damage. A devastating fire destroyed more than 50 businesses in Seaside Park just two weeks ago. The fire apparently started in wiring underneath a portion of the town's boardwalk that survived Sandy but was damaged by the flood waters. The damage went undetected until after it caused the fire destroying businesses and buildings that had survived Sandy.
The New York City subways, which famously run 24-7-365, were shut down ahead of the storm. Efforts were made to try and protect key assets - the tunnels and entrances in low lying areas, but those efforts failed in Lower Manhattan as the temporary measures were no match for the historic storm surge that flooded Lower Manhattan and crippled the MTA's subway system.
In all 9 subway tunnels were flooded, and repairs to those tunnels will continue for the foreseeable future. One, the Montague Tube, will be out of service for more than a year as the entire tunnel needs to be rebuild and reinforced against future storm damage. Every piece of electronic gear, every switch, every signal, and even the rails and ties, have to be replaced because they sat in the salt water that flooded the tunnels. The MTA's ability to get the system largely up and running, including a bus bridge while the subway service was being restored will be a case-study in how to deal with disaster management for decades to come. It also once again showed how and why the subway system is so critical to a functioning and growing metropolis like New York City. It's why the City and State must come up with the money to invest in growing the system and reinforcing and modernizing the system. The subways are integral to the city's very survival and nothing can replace a functioning subway system or else the city will grind to a halt under the strain of too many people trying to get to their places of employment.
While the MTA heroically managed to get service restored quickly, including to the A line to the Rockaways that was washed out by the storm surge in Jamaica Bay, the system continues to be plagued by delays and signal failures throughout the affected subway tunnels and flooded areas due to salt water corrosion. All of those issues will have to be addressed to keep the system functioning. Gov. Andrew Cuomo made a point of touting the MTA restoration efforts, but he's refused thus far to commit to increasing the state aid to the MTA to rebuild and reinforce the system further adding to the agency's debt load as it needs to borrow to make the necessary improvements. That's a substantial failure on his part.
Across the Hudson, NJ Transit is still dealing with all the damage to its system, and the fact that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie refuses to take action against James Weinstein for not implementing and overseeing the protection of the rail fleet that ended up being purposefully stored in flood zones in Kearny's Meadows Yard and Hoboken's terminal yard. It's understandable that damage to fixed equipment - the switches and repair facilities - couldn't be reduced due to their location, but the rail fleet suffered damage that continued to hamper commuters for months after. That was completely avoidable. NJ Transit ignored flooding risks and allowed hundreds of railcars and locomotives to be flooded out. The damage has yet to be completely repaired.
The Port Authority's bridges and tunnels weathered the storm mostly intact, but there was significant damage at LaGuardia Airport, where flooding swept through the terminals and into the parking lots, and PATH was completely overwhelmed between Hoboken and World Trade Center. It took months before service was restored.
The rebuilding around the region continues to be uneven as insurance companies, FEMA, and state and localities are dealing with all kinds of issues. Some areas have been bought out by the government so as to return those areas to marsh lands instead of development.
Other parts are building new and improved reinforced dune networks - steel sheet piles buried underneath sand dunes planted with sea grass. Some of those efforts have been hampered by landowners who protest the eminent domain easements necessary to allow their construction. The New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that the added value of sand dune protection must be weighed against any potential lost views. Frankly, the fact that the person lost views ignores the fact that the sand dunes act to protect those homes and the homes of their neighbors from the devastating storm surge.
The Hurricane also provided yet another clarifying moment when Congressional Republicans basically thwarted any action to fund rebuilding aid, re-funding the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), and delayed action for 91 days. Many of these same Republicans have their hands out with no strings attached and no conditions when disaster aid is requested for their own districts, but they demanded that any disaster aid include offsets from other parts of the budget, and otherwise imposed conditions on disaster aid that had not been done in any prior instance.
The delay had real ramifications - delaying the time for which people could be reimbursed from the NFIP, including for floods occurring elsewhere in the country as well as in the New York metro area.
Utilities are still dealing with the disaster too - having to ramp up their efforts to disaster-proof their systems. Sandy revealed that far too many key assets are in flood zones and that the utilities are ill prepared to deal with the scope of damage. New Jersey's PSE&G fared far better than other New Jersey utilities, but power-restoration efforts were far slower than anyone wants. PSE&G has proposed a multi-year multi-billion dollar improvement project, which includes taller power poles that are more resistant to wind and tree damage, and new gear that reduces the chances that downed lines and poles take out power adjacent power lines. Despite those improvements, there are communities that are balking at the taller poles, complaining that it changes the character of their towns. It's NIMBYism at its core, but these will be some of the same people who will complain loudest when the power goes out.
The power outages also caused significant shortages of gasoline - and while New York State is building a gas reserve to deal with future disasters, efforts to require gas stations to have generators on hand to power the pumps when the power goes out have faltered. That's a mistake.
A gas reserve doesn't matter much if the gas stations lack the power to operate the pumps. An effort should be made to require gas stations that are renovating or replacing their gas tanks to upgrade to include generator backups - whether portable generators or fixed generators on site to provide backup. The gas shortages meant long lines and the governors in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut were forced to impose odd-even rationing to make sure that lines weren't out of control.
This morning, New Jersey commuters trying to get to the Holland Tunnel found themselves navigating a maze of detours and major delays as a key route was shuttered.
Failing to invest in basic maintenance and upkeep plays a role in this. Heavy traffic pounds on these structures on a daily basis forming cracks that allow water to seep into the structures and begin the process of separating concrete from the reinforcing steel.
The closure in New Jersey is just the latest in a string of infrastructure failures across the state. Water main failures are a common occurrence and one that wastes a key resource and disrupts business in the affected areas. Water utilities and municipalities that manage their own water supplies are also failing to maintain their infrastructure - repairing emergency water main breaks rather than proactively replacing the oldest sections of mains and sewers to upgrade the system.
Heck, Newark has hundreds of fire hydrants that are inoperable because they lack sufficient water pressure or are otherwise damaged in some fashion. That affects public safety and yet there's an insufficient budget to address the concerns.
Far too many people want to see low taxes but ignore that the costs for maintaining an aging infrastructure have grown exponentially requires a growing budget to address those needs.
In New York City, the mayoral race has given little more than lip service to infrastructure and mass transit, which are keys to economic development and community vitality. The City has failed to restore funding to the MTA to help fund capital construction programs and has forced the agency to borrow to make ends meet. That has to change, or else the agency will find itself managing a system that increasingly is falling behind its attempts to get the system into a state of good repair. Hurricane Sandy exposed significant problems with the infrastructure, and not enough effort has gone in to make sure that the lessons are learned and applied to the system.
Work on the Montague tube, which connects Brooklyn and Manhattan under the East River, will likely begin in August and is expected to last 12 to 14 months, officials said.
The tube carries the R train, which takes tens of thousands of riders to Manhattan from southern Brooklyn.
An MTA official told the Wall Street Journal that lingering corrosion from the floodwaters is damaging equipment and wires, frequently causing system failures.
It will cost at least $100 million to replace the damaged parts in the Montague tunnel, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The Montague Street Tunnel serves the R train, and the MTA figures it will take about a year to do all the work.
The alternative - shutdowns on nights/weekends, would have meant service disruptions and never being able to get ahead of all the problems.
This is expected to take about $100 million and 12-14 months. This particular tunnel was the hardest hit by Sandy, and took the longest to restore to service, but has been plagued with signal and electric power problems ever since.
Work includes the demolition of existing duct banks; removal & disposal of existing tunnel lighting, conduits, wiring, fixtures, ballast & receptacles; construction of new duct banks; installation of new Power & Communications cables in the new duct banks; reconstruction of circuit breaker houses CBH # 82, CBH # 83 & CBH # 91; rehabilitation of two substations (Montague Furman Substation & Broadway-Park Row Substation); new tunnel lighting including fixtures, wiring, & conduit; replacing isolation dampers & wiring for the fan plant; replacement of three submersible pumps & new AC/DC lighting at the pump rooms; track work including new rails & plates; installation of new 8" dry discharge line in both tubes; painting & lead abatement.
The biggest problem is the one that isn't mentioned. Hardening against future storms isn't part of this plan. That means another Sandy-type storm would put the entire system back into a crisis with no option except to watch the system flood and pump it out and try to restore service.
That's not acceptable, but no one seems to have a way to find the funding to make that happen.
Every time we hear someone has been pushed on to the tracks at a station or has been run over by a train, the issue of platform screen doors (PSDs) comes up. These PSDs would prevent someone from falling on to the tracks - either accidentally, or on purpose.
The MTA has been resistant to considering them, primarily because of the immense cost of retrofitting the systems to all 468 stations in the system.
In fact, they weren't being considered for the new stations being built as part of the 7 line extension or the 2d Avenue subway. For those stations, it was estimated that the platform screen doors would add about $1.5 million per platform side.
Up to now, the MTA has resisted the idea of PSDs, but after two homicides in the past week involving people being thrown on to the tracks, the idea is being revisited.
I think it's an issue worth revisiting.
Not only can these doors prevent the senseless deaths due to being shoved on to the tracks, but they can also improve subway efficiency by reducing the amount of trash that collects on the tracks - reducing the chances for track fires, vermin that are attracted to trash, and can improve the air quality on underground platforms.
But that all runs headlong into cost.
It would likely cost $2 billion or more to retrofit the entire system.
That's money the MTA doesn't have and can't even begin to address because of the need to complete repairs due to Hurricane Sandy.
But it is something that should be considered for high volume stations, and stations as they are renovated and rebuilt.
The Star Ledger conducted its own investigation into how NJ Transit managed to flood a third of its rail fleet (more than 300 rail cars and locomotives) by staging them in their Kearny and Hoboken yards.
It's something I've been saying from the moment we learned that the NJ Transit rail fleet was serious damaged by flooding. We now have still more confirmation that the reason that NJ Transit rail service has been so slow to recover to full service is that they lost so much equipment to flooding that could have been avoided (or at least reduced the chance of damage by moving the equipment to higher ground).
A Star-Ledger examination based on interviews, analysis of scores of forecasts and computer models found that on Oct. 28, the Sunday before the storm hit, only one forecast map showed a 10- to 20-percent chance of the Kearny yard flooding on Monday. Most other guidance was far more dire. Additionally, forecasters say NJ Transit never contacted them for help in interpreting the data, and had they, they would have been told Sunday morning the yard had a high to near certain likelihood of taking on water from the storm surge.
"It’s like going to the doctor and deciphering your own MRI," said I. Ross Dickman, meteorologist in charge at the National Weather Service’s Upton, N.Y. office, which forecasts for Kearny. "To our knowledge, NJ Transit has never called our office for supplementary information, and that’s unfortunate."
It became a costly decision. NJ Transit said it sustained an estimated $100 million in damages to cars and locomotives during the storm, the majority of which were stationed in Kearny.
While other agencies, like New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, spent days moving equipment to higher ground. NJ Transit relied largely on the flawed forecast tool and past experiences. In recent days, Weinstein has testified before the U.S. Senate and in Trenton that NJ Transit needed 12 to 18 hours to shut down its system and move equipment out of harm’s way.
"We now know, under certain circumstances, that that yard can flood," Weinstein told the Assembly Committee Monday. "The dynamics of the storm changed after we shut down our system. Our common sense is now informed by this event, which none of us have seen in our lifetime."
But Dickman said his office, as early as four days prior to Sandy’s landfall, had forecast a potential storm surge of six to 11 feet. Combined with high tide, it’s more than enough to flood the Kearny yard, where the elevation is only 10 feet. He said the threat was made clear in daily webinars NJ Transit employees attended. He also said the tool NJ Transit used, called the Probabilistic Hurricane Storm Surge tool, is one of scores of forecast equipment his office uses to make a forecast and is guidance, not gospel.
Everyone was warning of serious flood risks due to the combination of astronomical high tide combined with a record-breaking storm surge that was likely to occur due to Sandy's tremendous size and wind fetch.
NJ Transit has been repeatedly telling anyone who will listen that they operated on the best information, but that's clearly not the case. The agency has been lying to the likes of the US Senate and New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg who let the agency off the hook as well as NJ State Legislators who also were far too lenient in their questioning of NJ Transit officials who bothered to show up for the hearings.
Weinstein says that they now know that Kearny and Hoboken could flood, but the flood forecasts were indicating precisely that ahead of Sandy. No effort was made to move equipment. The excuse was that moving it to higher ground could strand the equipment or expose the equipment to wind-driven storm damage. That's a debatable point to a certain extent, but leaving hundreds of cars in a flood zone exposed all that equipment to damage.
Putting equipment on higher ground would have avoided the serious flood damage. Sure, some equipment could have suffered damage due to downed trees or power lines, but that wouldn't affect entire trains (locomotives plus the normal allotment of cars they pull or push). It would have affected individual cars that could be taken out of service for repairs. Wind damage could also be reduced if NJ Transit did a better job of maintaining its right of way to trim trees that could result in downed lines or damage to equipment.
The agency failed on all accounts, and what's worse is that legislative leaders and Gov. Christie appear willing to let the agency and its top officials avoid taking responsibility for the damage.
The fact that the MTA and Port Authority utilized weather forecasters' expertise throughout the leadup to the storm shows just how off-base the NJ Transit actions were. Both of the other agencies were in close contact with the National Weather Service and other forecasters and both prepared to send equipment to higher ground. The MTA didn't lose equipment to the storm the way NJ Transit did, and were therefore able to resume service far quicker despite serious damage to East River Tunnels and other rail infrastructure.
Saying that NJ Transit will be better prepared going forward isn't sufficient. More must be done to hold NJ Transit officials responsible for their incompetence.
I'm so glad I'm not commuting into NYC this morning.
NJ Transit is an absolute mess. They claimed that they had service restored on a couple of lines, but here's what that meant.
For Main/Port Jervis, it was 7 trains inbound in the morning, and 3 would get to New York City after what's normally considered rush hour (10-11am). No reverse commute trains. In the PM, you'd have the same situation - 7 outbound trains, with staggered times that include times outside rush hour.
Those attempting to do the commute found themselves in a mess - serious overcrowding. The overcrowding was so bad that #NJTransit suspended service on the North Jersey Coast Line service and customers utilizing the Woodbridge station were told to use Metropark station for service to/from Newark and New York.
Meanwhile, bus service isn't much better. Mrs. Lawhawk who had to get to court this morning, had to let three buses pass her by with standing room only before she found one with a seat. That's crazy.
But, once she got into the city, the commute was much smoother. The MTA has done a phenomenal job in restoring service, including to Lower Manhattan and service was being added faster than the MTA cartographers could update their service maps (which are being updated daily). When you think of all the millions of people who rely on the subways, Joe Lhota has done a tremendous job in getting service restored, even though some stations may be out of commission for a while - particularly in the Rockaways and South Ferry. Other lines are being bypassed because of lower ridership and the need to concentrate on the routes that have the ability to restore service to the greatest numbers of people in the shortest time. It means that some areas are still cutoff, including Williamsburg, Coney Island, and parts of Lower Manhattan, but if someone did a time lapse of the service maps, you'd see just how fast the service was restored.
Now, going forward the question will be how to prevent the disruptions we've seen from getting as bad as they were.
For starters - the feds and states ought to consider legislation requiring all gas stations to retrofit with generators (and in flood-prone areas - sufficiently elevated to reduce chances for disruption). That would allow people to refuel, and to power their generators to get power back quicker. It would alleviate traffic considerably and hasten the recovery rather than lose time to waiting in lines for gas.
New York should have implemented even/odd gas fill ups just as New Jersey did for affected counties. It's alleviated some of the lines around Bergen County - but restoring power does that even more.
New York State has to pony up to fund the MTA to get more storm mitigation in place - better drainage/pumping systems/flood gates to prevent the tunnels from getting swamped.
And in New Jersey, they've got to take a critical look at NJ Transit and how they were ill-prepared to deal with the storm and the after-effects. Did they not realize that people would attempt a commute during rush hour and the limited trains they would run would get overcrowded due to conditions.
It's the same problem they had after last year's storms (Irene and Lee). Now, we're going to see just how slow NJ Transit will be in restoring service, though it's not all their fault - PSEG has to restore power so that NJ Transit rail signals/gates can function. But that's another place where backup generators could make a difference.
Staten Island will soon become home to the world's largest Ferris Wheel, when a 625 foot tall wheel will be installed adjacent to the Richmond County Ballpark (home to the Staten Island Yankees) in St. George. Accompanying the amusement ride will be new retail development, plus a hotel. The location is ideally located for tourism and visitors will be treated to stunning views of New York Bay, including the Statue of Liberty, Lower Manhattan, and the rest of the New York City metro region.
The New York Wheel is coming to Staten Island, along with a retail and hotel complex featuring designer outlet shops that will pump nearly $500 million in private investment into the St. George waterfront and spur economic development, tourism and job growth into the future.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Thursday is set to announce that the world's tallest observation wheel and an outlet mall will be built on 14 acres next to the Richmond County Bank Ballpark at St. George, transforming the North Shore waterfront.
"Our administration has made major investments all along the North Shore of Staten Island, because we know this area is full of potential for economic growth," Bloomberg said. "But this newest plan is the most exciting of all -- it's a once-in-a-generation opportunity for economic development."
At 625 feet, the $230 million New York Wheel will exceed the height of the Singapore Flyer, currently the world's tallest observation wheel, and will also eclipse the London Eye and a "High Roller" wheel planned for the Las Vegas Strip.
The ride is also expected to exceed a wheel planned for the New Jersey Meadowlands Xanadu/American Dream project. Critics are busy blasting the plan because of a lack of transit options - and most notably a lack of parking.
The new plan would clear existing parking lots to make way for the amusement ride, and there's no clear indication of where those spots would be relocated (if at all). The lots are used by commuters who park there because of a lack of transit options to commute to Manhattan by means other than the Staten Island ferry or express buses.
Staten Island has long been a backwater when it comes to transit options, and a new MTA plan to build a park-n-ride and new station in Tottenville isn't going to solve the problems either. The new station will be ADA compliant and have intermodal links with a bus stop, but it will replace two nearby stations that will be shuttered.
Staten Islanders need more transit options, and bus rapid transit is seen as one option, but more must be done to make commuting to Manhattan and the rest of the city easier. That would include more subway access, or light rail - particularly over the Bayonne Bridge to link up with the Hudson-Bergen light rail that includes a terminus at Hoboken (with links to PATH and ferries). It's not exactly a one-seat ride, but it would better integrate Staten Island transit options with the rest of the region and reduce pressure on the already overcrowded bridges.
Sadly, the Bayonne Bridge reconstruction to permit bigger ships to pass will not include a light rail option, and the construction has been expedited to make sure the Arthur Kill channel is ready for super Panamax shipping. Transit options take a back seat to other projects.
Some local residents are complaining about the lack of transit options and increased vehicle traffic that would result from the new amusement ride, but with most visitors expecting to arrive by ferry, the impact is seen as being minimal. The problem will be what to do with those cars hoping to park near the ferry terminal for their daily commute and there's no easy answer for that.
On a morning not all that different than the one forecast for today, it was a bolt from the blue. The skies over New York City were a crisp bright blue with nary a cloud in a sky. It was a morning full of promise.
September 11, 2001 and New Yorkers were heading to the polls to vote on the next mayor of the city. People were talking baseball and the upcoming football season, just as they are doing now. Talk of the Yankees making the playoffs. While everyone was focused on the day ahead, al Qaeda's terrorists were already on board four jets bound for New York and Washington DC and had already overpowered the crews.
I was on a NJ Transit train with my dad when I first noticed something wrong at the WTC out of the corner of my eye; it was smoke coming from the upper reaches of the tower.
The damage done on that morning was nearly impossible to comprehend. In the mere blink of the eye, nearly 3,000 people were condemned to death and the World Trade Center would soon be reduced to a pile of rubble that burned for weeks on end. Reports would come in that a third plane had struck and damaged the Pentagon. But the death rattle of the Twin Towers would continue for just under two hours and victims trapped above the fires had to make the choice to stay and choke on the heat and smoke or jump to a certain death. All too many make that decision to jump. Firefighters on the ground also succumbed before the towers fell - falling debris hitting firefighters and fleeing people alike.
All too many would unfortunately follow him - and not by their own choice.
Lower Manhattan was engulfed in smoke and debris as the towers fell. Emergency personnel, still choking on the dust that would swirl through Lower Manhattan for days and weeks to come, quickly moved to seek to help those who may have been trapped beneath all the rubble. They formed bucket brigades, moving debris a handful at a time. Occasionally, the remains of a victim would be discovered and crews would solemnly remove the remains.
Coming full circle, on May 1, 2011, the world learned that the United States finally caught up with Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan. In a daring raid on a compound near Pakistan's military academy, US special forces killed bin Laden and captured a treasure trove of intel that will help the intelligence community and military plan further campaigns against the terrorists who did so much damage. Yet, that pales in comparison to what happened on that fateful day and the nearly 3,000 people murdered across New York, Washington DC at the Pentagon, and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The profound loss is a heavy burden on all those who were there and on those who lost loved ones.
Preparing for 9/11 ceremonies at 1WTC.
Preparing for ceremonies outside the FDNY 10 Truck House on Liberty.
After an 11-year battle, the federal government is poised to finally recognize that people who lived near Ground Zero — as well as rescue and recovery workers who sifted through the toxic rubble there — got cancer as a result. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health — which is responsible for deciding whether cancer should be among the illnesses covered by the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act — is expected to announce the findings as early as tomorrow. Michael Barasch and Noah Kushlefsky, two lawyers who represent thousands of first responders and residents, said legislative aides involved in drafting the new regulations and Victim Compensation Fund staffers told them that about 50 cancers would be included.
While that is great news for those who are registered with the fund, it's cold comfort to those whose lives have already been cut short.
Emergency personnel were at Ground Zero around the clock for weeks on end before officials would claim that the site had officially been cleared of remains. Many of them, plus those living near Ground Zero would later become ill from the effects of breathing in all the dust and debris that was pulverized by the collapsing towers, and it is one of the sadder chapters from 9/11 that we are still burying victims of the attacks to this day, including James Zadroga.
People who risked their lives to save others and to help families who lost loved ones find remains of the victims are themselves victims of the attacks. The Zadroga Act isn't perfect by any means and it has come too late for some, but it's a start to compensate and aid families of responders who are suffering from all manner of ailments attributed to Ground Zero exposure.
We cannot allow petty political differences prevent the delivery of critical aid to these emergency personnel and those who selflessly strode into the unknown to help provide rescue and recovery from the debris of Ground Zero all while environmental agencies proclaimed the air was safe to breathe - it wasn't.
Even after the fires were being put out and officials claimed that the site had been cleared of remains, it turns out that victims' remains would be discovered months and even years thereafter on buildings surrounding Ground Zero including the rooftop of the former Deutsche Bank building. The death toll, which was once feared to be more than we could bear - in the tens of thousands, would eventually drop to around 2,742 at the World Trade Center. That count may rise once again as more and more emergency personnel working at Ground Zero succumb to ailments attributed to exposures at Ground Zero.
Reflecting the rising 1WTC.
The past 10 years have been a near constant reminder of the profound sense of absence. 1WTC (aka the Freedom Tower) recaptures only part of the skyline. 1WTC is still under construction, but the main tower erection is complete. The antenna that will bring the tower to its ultimate height of 1,776 feet remains.
3WTC with 4WTC in background.
4WTC has also been erected, but the same story can't be said of either 2 or 3 WTC nor the WTC memorial or PATH Transit Hub. 2 and 3 WTC are only being built as a stub capable of being completed to their originally designed heights. Unless Larry Silverstein receives commitments to lease space, they will remain as stub buildings that provide retail commercial space.
Fiterman Hall
After years of wrangling, Fiterman Hall is now open and students from the Borough of Manhattan Community College are once again able to work in buildings rather than trailers that lined their West Side campus.
While the National 9/11 memorial opened in time for the 10th anniversary, the National 9/11 museum at the World Trade Center has been delayed due to an ongoing battle over who is responsible for certain costs. The museum foundation and the Port Authority are fighting over hundreds of millions in costs, and the resulting delay means that the earliest it would open is likely 2014. That's completely inexcusable.
Aides to Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Cuomo have so far been unable to resolve their differences over which government agencies will pay the operating costs of the museum, which is intended to document the terrorist attacks of 2001 and honor the nearly 3,000 victims. The two sides also remain at odds over who will have oversight of the museum and the surrounding memorial. The negotiations are further complicated because Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey must sign off on any agreement before it can take effect. Mr. Cuomo and Mr. Christie together control the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the World Trade Center site. Mr. Bloomberg is chairman of the Sept. 11 foundation, which controls the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, and oversees commemorative events at the site. With work on the museum at a standstill for nearly a year, fund-raising and donations have fallen, and exhibits are gathering dust in fabrication shops in Buffalo and Santa Fe, N.M., according to museum executives. The delay means that the museum may not open before construction on 1 World Trade Center, formerly known as the Freedom Tower, is finished in early 2014. Aides to Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Cuomo said they hoped that the 11th anniversary, on Tuesday, might create pressure for a last-minute deal. Late last week, the two sides began circulating proposals to resolve the yearlong impasse.
The Memorial Grove and WTC Museum with 1WTC and 7WTC in background.
Then, there's the cost to operate the museum when it eventually opens in conjunction with the memorial. The WTC Memorial Foundation estimates it will cost $60 million a year to operate the memorial and museum, which is far out of line from other memorials operated by the National Park Service. It makes tremendous sense and it is logical for the 9/11 museum and memorial to be operated by the NPS instead of the private foundation because of cost containment and the ability to manage the myriad details that come along with such a sensitive site and one of international importance.
One of the stumbling blocks continues to be whether the museum will charge a fee for entry. I've long argued against any kind of entry fee, and that Congress must make that happen, but to this point, Congress has blocked any such efforts.
The museum was supposed to open this month, but construction all but ceased a year ago because of a funding squabble between the foundation and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the land the memorial sits on.
Daniels said it will take at least a year for the museum to open once construction resumes, meaning the site may not be fully complete until at least 2014.
The failure to open the museum on time has thrown off the foundation's financial planning. Officials had expected to use the museum, being built mostly with money from various government agencies, plus private donations, as its main source of revenue.
While visitors will be allowed into the above-ground portions of the memorial for free, the foundation plans to charge people to descend into the museum's exhibition space, where they will see portraits of the nearly 3,000 victims, hear oral histories of the tragedy and view artifacts such as the staircase World Trade Center workers used to flee on 9/11.
The admission price hasn't been set. Foundation officials say they may also charge a "suggested donation" where visitors would be allowed to enter for free but would be strongly encouraged to pay a yet-undecided amount.
But if the museum gets the 2 million visitors a year the foundation expects, a $12 fee, like the one charged at the memorial to the victims of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, would cover 40 percent of the operating costs. More money will be generated through fundraising and the sale of memorabilia.
The NPS does a tremendous job managing sites around the nation, and the memorial and museum should come under the NPS umbrella, although the NPS has said that it can't afford to take on the challenge of running the site with its own budget issues.
While a deal has been reached, the details have not yet been released. Since we're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars involved, it will be interesting to see which side is responsible for what.
The Port Authority, which owns the entire site, had been building the infrastructure necessary for other components of the site, including the Vehicle Security Center, the PATH transit hub, and the museum. All three are seriously over budget and are years behind schedule. The PATH Transit hub was among the worst offenders. It was supposed to have been completed in 2009 for $2.2 billion, and yet the earliest it may be finished is 2016 at a cost of roughly $4 billion.
When one looks at the recently enacted toll and fare hikes, the cost overrun for PATH turns out to be nearly the entire amount of revenue expected to be raised from the hikes. That's inexcusable; the overruns on the transit hub sap the Port Authority's ability to handle other critical infrastructure projects around the region, and commuters to Lower Manhattan and businesses that want to consider Lower Manhattan have to take into account that the World Trade Center area is still one vast construction site.
Meanwhile, nearby transit projects are slowly inching towards completion, including the Fulton Transit Center a block east of Ground Zero. That project, run by the MTA, is overbudget and late. However, it's far closer to completion than the PATH hub. When finished, the Fulton Center would link with the PATH transit hub by the Dey Street connector, and ultimately those working at the World Financial Center would be able to access Fulton Center without having to travel outside.
The new memorial has welcomed more than 4.5 million visitors since it opened last year, exceeding expectations and there has been new construction and opportunities throughout Lower Manhattan. And yet, the site will always be tinged with sadness. The skyline will never be the same. Neither will our hearts, which are heavy with the loss and supreme sacrifices made on 9/11 by the rescue personnel who bravely rushed up the towers even as people were racing to get out of the towers or gasping as people were forced to jump to their deaths to avoid being burned alive in the fires that racked the towers.
We remember.
UPDATE:
It appears that the Port Authority's claims that the Memorial Foundation owed hundreds of millions of dollars was unsupported. The Memorial Foundation will give the Port Authority $17 million to restart work on the museum and the Port Authority will find ways to save $150 million. The Foundation also has given assurances that it will cover what it expects to be $60 million in operating costs per year once the museum opens.
Meanwhile, work on the Vehicle Security Center continues. The VSC is located adjacent to the entry area to the memorial and will eventually be the portal for vehicles that will supply the site. That too had been years behind schedule due to issues with the demolition of the former Deutsche Bank Building. A deal to rebuild the St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church was also finalized in the past year, requiring the Port Authority to build a platform atop which the church will be located. As with the museum funding claims, the Port Authority was making demands that were unsupported by the facts.
On top of a trial court decision yesterday that claims that the payroll tax used to fund the MTA is invalid, the Taxi and Limousine and New York City are doing their best to screw up the transportation system in the region.
The TLC has been updating the look for the ubiquitous yellow cabs. They've already signed off on a new design that isn't fully ADA compliant - because not every new cab will be required to be accessible.
T is for taxi, and that's good enough for the TLC. The look of the New York City taxi cab is changing again, and no we aren't talking about the Taxi of Tomorrow. Five years after the Taxi & Limousine Commission turned to Smart Design to create a new logo and graphics for NYC cabs they've gone and streamlined their work. We hope you don't like checking the current price of a taxi ride on the door of a cab!
Yup, going forward the fare panel on the side of taxis are no more. After all, we now have Taxi TVs to tell us that information (sigh). Also going away are the last vestiges of the checkered cabs as those black and white checks on the back are going away. Oh, and the word taxi. Yup, now cab doors will simply say NYC T (with the T in a black circle), not NYC Taxi.
"We have no doubt that a yellow car with a roof light with a big T will be understood as a New York City taxicab," TLC chair David Yassky explains. "Even the greenest of greenhorns will know that it’s a taxicab."
The cabs will now have a logo "T" and the cab identifier, but no other information.
They used to have Taxi written out, along with rate information.
Okay, they're trying to play around with branding, and a logo can be branded, but the word taxi can't. If that's part of the plan, then I get that.
But why drop the rate information? At a time when Mayor Mike Bloomberg has been pushing restaurants to include calorie counts on menus, he's allowing a policy that takes relevant information to commuters off the outside of cabs? How is that customer friendly? It's an asinine consideration, and the design team that came up with the plan spent just how much to revise the logos and information? It was a waste of money.
Meanwhile, back to the payroll tax. Ben Kabab highlights the multitude of problems with the ruling invalidating the tax. It is a huge hit to the MTA, which is funded in part from the tax. If it's upheld by the Appellate Division or State Court of Appeals, then the MTA would see a permanent loss of more than a billion dollars annually. That's money that can't be made up without slugging commuters or spreading out the costs to all taxpayers in the form of a new tax.
At the same time, a separate ruling invalidated the Mayor's plan to bring cab service to the outer boroughs. In that instance, the Mayor sought to make the changes in the state legislature rather than go through the City Council. The big problem is once again money. The Mayor bet a billion dollars on revenue raised from the sale of new medallions, and the court decision throws the city budget out of whack.
Taxi medallion owners have an inordinate amount of power to block any changes to the medallion system. They're vested in maximizing the costs of medallions, where the sale of an existing medallion can reach a million dollars or more. Allowing more medallions would dilute the value of existing medallions. The problem is that the medallion owners have the city council in its collective pocket and they've thwarted prior efforts to expand cab service to the outer boroughs where transit service is more spotty. The Mayor sought to change the status quo by going to the legislature, but this is a home rule issue. So, the Mayor has to go back to the drawing board to figure out how to expand service and close the budget hole of his own creation.
While he's at it, he better get on the TLC to make ADA compliance required across all cabs, not just a small fraction. And he could further assist in the transit policy by allowing disabled persons to use ADA-compliant cabs instead of Access-a-Ride buses that are costing the MTA far more than it ever imagined ($500+ million annually and growing). Since most cab rides are for far less than the cost per passenger for Access-a-Ride, a solution can be found here if the mayor, TLC and MTA can hash out an agreement.
But that means getting the medallion owners to back the changes.
This would appear to be in the vicinity of where a subway station cavern was being carved out by a combination of excavation and explosive demolitions.
As more information becomes available, I will update.
UPDATE:
Fox 5 is reporting that an overloaded air compressor was involved in the explosion. However, other news outlets, including CBS News, are saying that it was a controlled demolition blast that went awry.
Lower Manhattan has some of the oldest infrastructure in Manhattan since it is home to some of the oldest portions of the city. That infrastructure needs to be maintained and upgraded from time to time, so it's not surprising that the DEP needs to undertake a 48-month sewer replacement project on Broadway from Ann Street down to Rector Street. If those blocks sound familiar, it's because the Fulton Street Transit Hub (now called Fulton Center) is nearing completion after years of construction, and John/Dey Street is a nexus of construction (for Pace dorms and Fulton Center work). Just a block away, the World Trade Center construction is slowly rebuilding the site.
In other words, it's yet another multi-year construction project that local residents and businesses will have to contend with.
City officials told residents at a meeting Tuesday night that two lanes of Broadway would stay open at all times, said Ro Sheffe, chairman of Community Board 1's Financial District Committee.
The officials also said the work would begin with the two-block section of Broadway between Ann and John streets, moving south after about 18 months, Sheffe said. The city initially planned to start at Rector Street instead and move north, but the old water pipes are causing leaks at the Fulton Center so that section needs to be fixed first, Sheffe said.
Residents at Tuesday's meeting were unhappy to hear about such a large and potentially disruptive project.
"It desperately needs doing and we all recognize that," Sheffe said. "But we've been beset by construction for 10 years down here, and to hear about four more years is very upsetting."
Other major water main projects Downtown, such as those ongoing on Hudson and Chambers streets, drew complaints from residents and business owners who said the work was noisy and unsightly and caused traffic problems.
The DDC officials promised Tuesday night to have traffic control officers on Broadway during the entire four years of the project, Sheffe said.
Considering that the World Trade Center construction will drag on for at least another half decade, the area wont finally be able to free itself from the gauntlet of construction sites along major thoroughfares for at least that long.
But, when the projects are done, the area will have new infrastructure, new access points for the subway system, PATH, and new class A office space, plus new retail and residential opportunities.
The No. 7 subway line extension to 11th Avenue and West 34th Street won’t carry passengers until mid-2014 — six months later than was widely expected — and the new station won’t be entirely finished until the end of 2015, the MTA said yesterday.
The agency had long cited a December 2013 target opening.
But “passenger train service [to the new station] is scheduled for June 2014,” an MTA spokesman told us.
The six-month delay is hopefully not a sign of greater trouble at a project that’s of paramount importance to Gary Barnett’s Extell Development Co. and Stephen M. Ross’ Related Cos.
It’s also crucial to City Hall, which heralds it as the mass-transit gateway to a redeveloped Far West Side.
The station’s at the doorstep of One Hudson Yards, the 56-story office tower Extell plans to build on 11th Avenue and 33rd and 34th streets.
There's no reason given for this latest setback, but it echoes similar problems with other MTA projects, including the East Side Access and 2d Avenue Subway line projects. The projects continue to come in over budget and are delayed long past when they were initially expected to be completed.
These delays are going to affect the real estate developers who were hoping to capitalize on the new service by building skyscrapers in and around Hudson Yards, but the real problem is that the MTA still can't seem to keep its capital costs and deadlines on schedule.
It's a problem that isn't confined to the MTA, or even the New York metro area. Nationally, it's rare to find major infrastructure projects that are coming in on budget and on schedule. We have to do better, and the problems aren't the result of greedy unions either. The companies that are providing the backbone of the work are repeatedly low-balling offers to get the work and then continue to charge overages for work until it is completed. The replacement Oakland Bay Bridge project is one such example. Back when the project was bid, it was expected to cost $1.75 billion. The low bid at the time was a joint American bid (American Bridge Company and Fluor Corporation) for $1.8 billion. The state then rebid and a the same bidder (American Bridge Company and Fluor Corporation) won the bid with a $1.43 billion offer with the state seeing this as a savings for taxpayers. American Bridge and Fluor sought to save money by using Chinese-fabricated steel. Now, the work looks like it will cost at least $1.85 billion and everyone's harping about the potential jobs that were not created by going with the Chinese steel.
Yet, the real question is why anyone thought that we'd see the same bidder with essentially the same bid coming in at $400+ less than its original figure stick to that lower figure when it knew or had reason to know that the final cost would have been closer to the final figure. Costs weren't going to drop. Construction costs only increase over time.
We've got a bunch of competing interests, but the problems start with unrealistic bidding. Everyone wants to see the bidding low-balled; politicians need to get projects started to show that they're doing stuff, and companies need the projects to get work started. Once work is underway, there's not enough incentives to keep the projects on budget - everyone figures that taxpayers will soak up the difference since politicians don't want to be on the hook for an unfinished project. Inertia drives the projects through to completion, but at tremendous cost.
Would the American bid have stayed on budget? That's doubtful given that most projects go overbudget. Would it have created more jobs in the states? That's quite possible. But would California have gone ahead with the project had the up front cost been at the $1.8 billion point? We're talking about a $500 million difference, which in a cash-strapped state is big money (including on lending terms, bond offerings, etc.).
A video of the construction process, including the tunnel boring machines that are critical to the effort.
It's interesting that they are using one machine, tunneling one bore, and then pulling the machine back to run the second tunnel. That seems to be extremely time consuming and much more costly than had they run two machines simultaneously and allowed the machines to continue running south towards Hanover Square (the 2d Avenue Line's ultimate terminus should it ever be fully funded).
While the MTA seems to be making incremental progress on carrying out routine maintenance using an expanded Fastrack program that shuts down entire segments of the subway system overnight during the week, its capital program remains in shambles.
The LIRR extension to Grand Central Terminal may cost $920 million more than the MTA’s most recent estimate, officials said Monday.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority also pushed back the East Side Access project’s expected completion date by three years to August 2019.
Officials cited the enormous complexity of a project that includes building new tunnels in Queens and Manhattan, and the reconfiguration of a massive juncture that’s being used by three different railroads.
But MTA Chairman Joseph Lhota also said authority staffers in the past had put forward unrealistic construction schedules and budgets.
“The era of underestimating the cost of big projects is over,” Lhota said after an MTA committee meeting. “We’re going to be realistic about the cost and we’re going to budget accordingly.”
That promise, however, may be of little comfort to Long Island commuters longing to take a train to Grand Central on the East Side of Manhattan rather than Penn Station.
“Frustration seems to be the commuters
’ daily lot,” said Mark Epstein, chairman of the Long Island Rail Road Commuters Council. “Fares are going up, service is cut, the commuter tax benefit is cut, and now ESA completion date pushed back yet again.”
That's completely unacceptable and the additional costs are being borne by an agency ill equipped to deal with the debt.
It should not be taking decades for incremental improvements to the subway system and mass transit. The blame isn't solely on the MTA; it's also on the contractors who underbid and underestimate the costs of the projects and know that as their costs balloon, they'll get picked up by the MTA and taxpayers.
There's no reason that construction costs for mass transit projects in New York City and the US in general should exceed those in Europe or Asia. We aren't getting the kind of value for the money spent. It means that projects take far longer to be completed, far fewer projects get undertaken, and the economy suffers.
Congress, and particularly the GOP, in its myopic vision of trying to reduce debts without consideration of tax increases, is underfunding infrastructure projects across the nation and it is already having significant effects on the economy.
It should not take three days for a freight train to transit through Chicago, but because of the bottlenecks and grade-level crossings, that's precisely what's happening. It's quicker to walk across Chicago than for a freight train to make the trip.
Various ports around the nation are losing business to Canadian ports because they've undertaken dredging to deepen the ports or don't have structural impediments to bigger ships entering the ports. In the New York Metro area, the Port Authority is trying to fast track the Bayonne Bridge rehabilitation project that would increase the height of the bridge to allow post-Panamax ships to access the region's key ports in time to maintain or gain business when the new Panama Canal channel opens in 2014.
Other countries are racing ahead with new and improved infrastructure projects at a time when our nation is barely funding maintenance and rehabilitation of existing bridges, tunnels, rails, and even water/sewer projects.
That has to change.
As for the East Side Access, it should be noted that the delays and costs as noted by the MTA are now in line with the federal estimates given several years ago. How is it that the federal government had a better grasp of the costs than the MTA on its own project?
It should be a reminder too that when NJ Transit claimed that it could keep the costs for its ARC Tunnel project to under $10 billion, that it wasn't supported by the federal estimates, which ran as high as $12.8 billion - or $4 billion more than the $8.7 billion accepted cost for the project when Gov. Christie killed the project due to leaving New Jersey taxpayers on the hook for all the overruns.
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey announced Tuesday the $270 million first phase of the project that includes expanded concourses and extra entryways on the western end of the station. The adjacent James Farley post office will also become a new passenger facility.
The new terminal will be named after late U.S. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who championed the project beginning in the 1990s.
Port Authority executive director Patrick Foye says NJ TRANSIT riders who now have to walk nearly two crosstown blocks underground will be able to get into the station or above ground quicker.
“It’s going to involve doubling the length and width of the concourse,” Foye told WCBS 880′s Peter Haskell.
The second phase will turn the basement of the post office into Amtrak’s new terminal.
The project attempts to recreate the original Penn Station's grand rail entrance to New York City, which was demolished to make way for the current incarnation of Madison Square Garden. The work involves creating new concourses, two new entry points on the west side of Penn Station, and should be completed by 2016.
Phase 2 would involve rehabilitating the post office building and build new retail and commercial spaces within the post office building. No funding has been identified for the second phase.
For those hoping that the MTA could get the East Side Access project on track, wonder no more. It will be seeing even more delays now that the construction has run into new troubles at the Sunnyside Yards.
It now appears Long Island Rail Road trains won’t be stopping at Grand Central Terminal until 2019.
That’s the word Tuesday from Joseph Lhota, the chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
The MTA is building a new tunnel under the East River to allow LIRR trains access to Grand Central. All LIRR trains now go to Penn Station.
Lhota says there have been problems tunneling underneath a rail yard in Queens. The MTA has brought in experts from Europe to help with developing a plan going forward.
Expect that the cost for the project will also increase as a result of missed deadlines and additional costs in engineering around the problems. The problems stem from having to deal with the disposal of contaminated soils and the ground in the construction site is soft rather than rocky. It's interesting that the problems aren't with tunneling under Grand Central Terminal and Manhattan, but in the vicinity of Sunnyside Yards.
Once East Side Access (allowing LIRR trains to access Grand Central Terminal rather than going to NY Penn Station) is completed, it should reduce commute times from Long Island to the East Side of Manhattan by 40 minutes and expand capacity of the LIRR by 41%.
The project began in 2006 and was originally scheduled for completion in 2012, but delays have pushed the completion and commencement of revenue service back to 2014, 2016, 2018, and now 2019. As of 2011, the expected cost of the project was $7.3 billion with a 2016 completion date (which is $1 billion higher than the costs estimated at the outset in 2006).
The latest news will surely mean that the budget will continue rising upwards.
