New Subway Cars Are In The Works

Gov. Andrew Cuomo revealed details of a new fleet of subway cars Monday, part of a “redesign of the MTA on every level” that will bear the unmistakable mark of Albany.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority announced plans to build 1,025 new cars, which will feature Wi-Fi and USB jacks and connect openly to one another. A rendering of the new train showed a diagonal stripe of yellow and a panel of blue along the cars’ exterior, the latest sign that Cuomo is color-coding his legacy into the city’s transit system.

New buses that Cuomo deemed “Ferrari-like” in March and an e-ticket app that debuted this month feature the colors that New Yorkers might recognize from a state trooper’s car or all of Cuomo’s materials—blue and what this reporter mistakenly referred to as yellow at a press conference at the New York Transit Museum in Brooklyn. 

“The state color is not yellow,” Cuomo corrected. “Gold.”

Cuomo spoke at the New York Transit Museum in Brooklyn on Monday.

Cuomo’s office has previously denied a rebranding of the MTA in the state colors, but Cuomo said Monday it is “fair to say you’re seeing a redesign of the MTA on every level, and when you’re building new cars and you’re building new buses, you’re building new stations, etc., colors schemes are a part of that, and the attractiveness is part of that.”

The new cars, announced as Mayor Bill de Blasio was heading to Italy for a week-long vacation, are part of the $27 billion, five-year MTA capital plan. The transit agency will also rebuild 31 subway stations across the five boroughs. Granite floors will replace concrete, and iron bars will be exchanged for glass barriers, according to the preliminary designs. At new subway entrances, the classic green globes are out, and electronic boards showing train status are in.

The governor has previously touted plans for Metro-North and the Long Island Railroad, but at Monday’s press conference he emphasized that the subways are a priority for him as well, though he would not expressly confirm his signature on the new cars.

“I’m sure [MTA] Chairman [Thomas] Prendergast, when he’s done, is going to put on every door and every train, ‘Thank you New York state for the $27 billion,’” Cuomo joked. “As long as the train is on time. If the train is not on time…”

The new cars will also feature open gangways, allowing movement along the entire train.

Not all of the $27 billion actually comes from the state. New York City, the federal government, and, of course, riders also contribute to the capital plan, which includes $15.8 billion for the city's transit system (the MTA also reaches seven suburban counties in New York). Also, the state has yet to identify the source of all of the funds it has committed, which has made transit advocates nervous.

Design experts Debbie Millman and Steven Heller, co-founders of the branding master’s program at the School of Visual Arts, said that if the color stamp is meant to refer to the governor, the signature is subtle.

“I’m a native New Yorker. I’ve lived in all the boroughs except the Bronx and I can tell you that I never once knew that the New York colors were blue and gold,” Millman said.

The e-ticket app colors looks orange and blue, she said.

“It really looks like it was sponsored by the Mets,” Millman said, whereas the buses “almost look more like the love child of the Mets and Citibank.”

Swapping classic blue-and-white buses for blue and gold seems “radical in terms of the identification of the city,” Heller said, and could have political meaning, especially in light of Cuomo’s relationship with the mayor.

"If you take into account Cuomo’s ongoing feud with de Blasio— which could be ego, it could be ideology, it could be any number of things—it’s kind of a slap in the face to a mayor to have something so overt changed on him,” he said.

NYC Subway Use Nears All-Time Peak As U.S. Public Transport Use Declines

The New York subway is unlike any other transit system in the United States. This system extends for 230 miles (375 kilometers) with approximately 420 stations. It serves the four highly  dense boroughs of the city (Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx), each of which is 20 percent or more denser than any municipality large municipality in the United States or Canada. Much of the fifth borough, Staten Island, looks very much like suburban New Jersey and has no subway service, though has a more modest system, the Staten Island Railway.

Overall, the older Metros (Note 1), New York's subway, along with London's Underground and the Paris Metro dominated the world's urban rail systems for decades. Until the recent emergence of Chinese urban areas (Beijing and Shanghai), London had the longest extent of track in the world, followed by New York.

As one of the original Metros in the world, it might be thought that the New York City Subway's best days are over. That would be a mistake. It is true that ridership reached a peak in the late 1940s and dropped by more than half between the late 1970s and the early 1990s. However, since that time ridership has more than doubled, according to American Public Transportation Association data. And it is not inconceivable that new records may be set in the years to come.

Perhaps the most incredible thing about the New York City Subway has been its utter dominance of the well-publicized national transit ridership increases of the last decade. According to annual data published by the American Public Transportation Association (APTA), ridership on the New York City Subway accounts for all of the transit increase since 2005. Between 2005 and 2015, ridership on the New York City Subway increased nearly 1 billion trips. By contrast, all of the transit services in the United States, including the New York City Subway, increased only 800 million over the same period. On services outside the New York City subway, three was a loss of nearly 200 million riders between 2005 and 2015 

The New York City subway accounts carries nearly 2.5 times the annual ridership of the other nine largest metro systems in the nation combined (Figure 2). This is 10 times that of Washington’s Metro, which is losing ridership despite strong population growth , probably partly due to safety concerns (see America’s Subway: America’s Embarrassment?). Things have gotten so bad in Washington that the federal government has threatened to close the system (See: Feds Forced to Set Priorities for Washington Subway).

The New York City subway carries more than 11 times the ridership of the Chicago “L”, though like in New York, the ridership trend on the “L” has increased impressively in recent years. The New York City subway carries and more than 50 times the Los Angeles subway ridership, where MTA (and SCRTD) bus and rail ridership has declined over the past 30 years despite an aggressive rail program (See: Just How Much has Los Angeles Transit Ridership Fallen?).

With these gains, the New York City Subway's share of national transit ridership has risen from less than one of each five riders (18 percent) in 2005 to more than one in four (26 percent) in 2015. This drove the New York City metropolitan areas share of all national transit ridership from 30 percent in 2005 to over 37 percent in 2015.

Subway ridership dominates transit in the New York City metropolitan area as well, at 67 percent. Other New York City oriented transit services, including services that operate within the city exclusively and those that principally carry commuters in and out of the city account for 28 percent of the ridership. This includes the commuter rail systems (Long Island Railroad, Metro-North Railroad and New Jersey Transit) and the Metro from New Jersey (PATH) have experienced ridership increases of approximately 15 percent over last decade (Note 2).

Other transit services, those not oriented to New York City, account for five percent of the metropolitan area's transit ridership (Figure 3). By comparison, approximately 58 percent of the population lives outside the city of New York. The small transit ridership share not oriented to New York City illustrates a very strong automobile component in suburban mobility even in the most well-served transit market in the country.

Last year (2014), APTA announced that the nation's transit ridership had reached the highest in modern history, having not been higher since 1957. In fact, the ridership boom that produced the record can be attributed wholly to the New York City Subway. If New York City Subway ridership had remained at its 2005 level, overall transit ridership would have decreased from 9.8 billion in 2005 to 9.6 billion in 2015. The modern record of 10.7 billion rides would never have been approached.

Thus, transit in the United States is not only a "New York Story," but it has also been strongly dependent on the New York Subway in recent years. After decades of decline, the revival of the New York subway is a welcome development.

L Train Shutdown Details May Finally Be Coming From MTA

There's still a lot that we don't know about the possible shutdown of the L train. What we doknow is that it may be necessary to facilitate repairs to Superstorm Sandy-damaged equipment in its tunnels, and that it could be happening as soon as 2017, but the MTA hasn't exactly been forthcoming with details beyond that.

But some clarity on the situation may finally be coming. According to DNAInfo, state assemblyman Joseph Lentol (who represents L train-adjacent neighborhoods like Bushwick and Williamsburg), confirmed that the MTA agreed to brief community residents on the forthcoming repairs. "We are working with the MTA to secure a location for the first town hall in Brooklyn," he told DNAInfo, stating that it could happen as soon as the first week in May.

Per the report, the MTA may be asking for community feedback and recommendations on the impending shutdown. Considering how many people could be affected by this action—Brooklyn and Manhattan residents, business owners, developers, the list goes on—we're guessing it'll be a fairly heated event.

Penn Station's $3B Renovation Plans, Revealed! - Curbed NY

Within hours of word spreading that Governor Andrew Cuomo waspoised to announce a radical plan for the renovation of Penn Station, that plan has arrived. On Wednesday, Cuomo announced a forthcoming Request For Proposals that will be issued by Empire State Development, Amtrak, and the MTA later this week for the renovation of Penn Station, as well as the remaking of the neighboring Farley Post Office, into the Empire Station Complex at a total cost of $3 billion. The $2 billion redevelopment of Penn Station may entail razing Madison Square Garden's Paramount Theater and adding new entrances on Seventh Avenue or 33rd Street and a glass wall and entrances along Eighth Avenue, the Times reports. Whichever developer's proposal is chosen will control all the retail in Penn Station, and that's huge.

Another Request For Proposals will be issued for the $1 billion remaking of the James A. Farley Post Office into a waiting area for Amtrak passengers, complete with shops and office space. One developer can nab both projects if their proposals are chosen. Developers Related Companies and Vornado Realty Trust, who were chosen to redevelop the post office into Moynihan Station in a decade-old agreement, aren't out per se: they're welcome to submit proposals, and if their vision for the site is not selected, the state is required to reimburse the developers upwards of $30 million. The two developers are at an advantage, though—they're intimately knowledgeable about the station and post office, and that'll be a boon being that the state wants proposals submitted within 90 days. The Real Deal says Cuomo is gunning to have the redevelopments complete within the next 3 lightyears.

The main goal of the $3 billion redevelopment is to bring more light and air into the station while alleviating some congestion. "Frankly, it's a miserable experience," Cuomo said of the existing terminal. The Executive Vice President of the Municipal Arts Society, Mary Rowe, applauded the project in a statement but doesn't think it will be enough to deal with the station's influx of passengers, "[I]n the long term, these improvements won't be enough to fully address Penn Station's severe overcrowdingor meet the growing needs of its rapidly developing neighborhood and our regional economy."

Exactly how the project will be financed is up in the air, but Cuomo is expected to address it in next week's State of the State speech. At least $325 million will come from government sources, like Amtrak, the Port Authority, and the federal government. The Wall Street Journal suggests that the station's and post office's air rights may be leveraged to finance the project. In July, Cuomo announced a similarly ambitious plan to revamp LaGuardia Airport.

Source: Penn Station's $3B Renovation Plans, Revealed! - Transportation Watch - Curbed NY