![]() ![]() Last but not least, it’s time to replicate the success of forward-looking cities like Dallas, Seattle and Portland, Ore., by bringing back streetcars. We should extend the Jackie Robinson west toward the BQE. Nowadays, it dumps that highway traffic at Jamaica Avenue in East New York (there used to be a major train station there). The obvious solution is to extend the Jackie Robinson Parkway, which currently begins at the Grand Central and Van Wyck Parkways in Kew Gardens. ![]() Even old-timers who curse Robert Moses for destroying the Bronx recall with a shudder the horror of sitting for hours on Broadway in upper Manhattan, waiting to get to the Bronx as stuck cars overheated, making congestion worse.ĭriving from Long Island to Western Brooklyn, and/or on to New Jersey via Staten Island, requires extremely circuitous routes: Via the congested LIE and BQE, or skirting around the bulbous outline of Brooklyn. I’d go with 70th Street, more or less splitting the distance between the Lincoln Tunnel and the George Washington Bridge either bridge or tunnel would be fine.Ĭonventional wisdom among liberal transportation types dictates that highway construction begets increased traffic: Build them and they will come. Crossing the Hudson River during rush hour, as impenetrable as the Berlin Wall back in the day, could become slightly less hellish by executing one or more of the numerous forgotten plans for bridges at 23rd, 57th, 70th and 125th Streets. ![]() Andrew Cuomo recently floated a proposal to build an elevated AirTrain to link LaGuardia to the subway system, but transportation blogger Ben Kabak would better fix the airport access problem by extending the N along the Grand Central Parkway.Īnyone who drives in New York knows we need to add bridges and tunnels. Not here, mostly due to NIMBYism and highway-obsessed Robert Moses. In most major metropolises, rail systems connect directly from the city-center to the terminals. Let’s revive the Staten Island-Saint George tunnel between Brooklyn, which the city abandoned in the early 1920s. Chris Christie has been blocking the century-old dream of running a subway line under New York Harbor from Brooklyn to Staten Island to New Jersey, but half the idea would still be an improvement. No borough is more subwayless than the city’s redheaded stepchild, Staten Island. Huge swaths of Southern Queens, currently off the grid, should be connected via a new line arcing west-to-east through the Bronx, then north-south through Queens and Brooklyn, parallel to and east of the G. (Photo: Wikipedia)Īny transit expert would look at a NYC subway map and ask with puzzlement: Why isn’t there a line running around the city’s outer perimeter along the Westchester and Nassau County borders? To get from the Jamaica section of Queens and to Flatbush, Brooklyn, you have to head halfway to Manhattan to switch subways, or endure long rides on local city buses. The Center for an Urban Future recently concluded that too much of our “essential infrastructure remains stuck in the 20th century,” posing a barrier “for a city positioning itself to compete with other global cities.” Ditto for JFK, despite the half-assed AirTrain. Aside from a few extensions on the outer borders of Queens and the minor 63rd Street tunnel, the subway looks much the way it did during World War II. For many New Yorkers, getting to LaGuardia still requires a cab. Then that was it-unless you count the link between Rikers Island and Queens in 1966. New York’s second-newest major bridge, the Throgs Neck, opened nine days before JFK delivered his “ask not what your country” inaugural address. A time traveler from 1961 would find the city’s traffic patterns, street grid, highways, subway lines, river crossings and airports basically the same. Aside from the long-delayed Second Avenue subway, civil engineers haven’t had much work to do in the past five decades. ![]()
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