There’s a reason you wait until the last minute to publicly address traffic and parking concerns:

IKEA officials yesterday revealed plans for how they plan to pacify Red Hook, Brooklyn once thousands of shoppers start heading there daily on June 18 when the Swedish home-furniture giant opens its first New York City store on the Beard Street waterfront.

Highlighting the transportation improvements arranged specifically for the new IKEA is free water-taxi service to and from lower Manhattan.

The service, to be provided by New York Water Taxi, will run every 40 minutes during store hours, said store manager Mike Baker. Water taxis will dock along a 6.5-acre public esplanade that IKEA had to build behind the store to help garner elected officials’ support for the controversial $100 million project.

Other transit improvements will include beefed-up bus service and free shuttle service connecting to the three closest subway stops, which are still over a mile away.

. . .

Red Hook itself is fenced off from the rest of the borough by the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel and Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, and even the nearest highway entrance on the BQE is over a mile away from the 346,000-square-foot store.

IKEA is offering 1,400 parking spots, although the project’s environmental impact statement estimates about 14,000 cars arriving on Saturdays. [Red Hook Civic Alliance co-chair John] McGettrick says he believes it will actually be 20,000.

But IKEA spokesman Joseph Roth said he expects most New Yorkers to leave their cars home and use the new transit options.

For example, IKEA is offering free shuttle service every ten minutes from three subway stations: Borough Hall/Court Street in Downtown Brooklyn, Smith/9th Street in Carroll Gardens, and 4th Avenue/9th Street in Gowanus.

And the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is extending the B61 and B77 bus routes to stop directly in front of the store.

Seventy years after the Sixth Avenue el ceased operations, the elevated train is back. Sort of:

The people don’t always ride in a hole in the ground. Those aboard the No. 1 train in Lower Manhattan are now riding part of the way through the air.

There is no view to admire. The trains are still well below street level, on tracks running within a box-shaped concrete tunnel that bisects the World Trade Center site. But instead of soil, the south half of that 975-foot stretch of subway rests on a newly built network of brawny steel beams atop a forest of minipiles reaching down to bedrock.

And in recent weeks, workers have dug out so much soil from around those minipiles that they have created an underpass beneath the subway large enough for construction machinery to pass through. In the reconstruction of the trade center, it is a significant milestone of east meeting west.

Gradually, the entire volume under the subway box will be cleared of soil, until the section from Liberty to Vesey Streets is structurally more like a viaduct than a tunnel.

That will open up nearly 40 feet of vertical space under the tracks. And given how many purposes the site must serve, every cubic inch is precious.

The subway box will eventually be an integral part of the larger, multilevel subterranean structure at the trade center site. Meanwhile, it must be supported on a sturdy but temporary structure while everything is built around it.

Of course you can’t fly a plane into it during a test, but that probably won’t ever happen again:

One World Trade Center has not yet emerged from below ground, but its facade has already survived earthquakes, hurricanes and an explosion that shook the earth a quarter-mile away.

In recent months, two full-size mock-ups of a few floors of the glass and aluminum facade have been built and tested. One is outside Los Angeles, in Ontario, Calif. The other was at a site in central New Mexico that can be reached only over dirt roads in four-wheel-drive vehicles.

At 1,368 feet, with 23 acres of glass-clad surface area, 1 World Trade Center will be subject to tremendous natural forces. The building, also known as the Freedom Tower (at a symbolic 1,776 feet, when its mast is counted), will be the tallest in New York City and as the skyscraping phoenix on the site of ground zero, it may be the target of terrorist attacks, too.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which is building 1 World Trade Center, and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, which designed it, said both mock-ups performed well. The facade, called a curtain wall, is being made by Benson Industries of Portland, Ore. The engineering firm Weidlinger Associates is the consultant in blast-resistant design.

“Physical testing is a confirmation that curtain-wall contractors are in fact meeting performance requirements,” said Carl Galioto, a Skidmore partner. “Full fabrication of the curtain wall cannot begin until the mock-up specimen passes these tests.”

. . .

The first mock-up was subjected to a blast test in Socorro, N.M., at the Energetic Materials Research and Testing Center, a division of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. Because details might arm a prospective attacker — providing information like how much force the curtain wall is designed to withstand — officials would say almost nothing about the test of this mock-up.

“The simple answer is, yes, it passed,” said John McCullough, the project executive for the Port Authority.

Time was, streets were there to move people and things. The new, improved street makes room for mental detours, make-work programs and jazz:

These street reformers — planners, architects and urban officials from around the globe — are questioning the conventional street-curb-sidewalk motif, challenging the dominance of cars, and devising ways to use street furniture, plants and even radical new vehicles to transform the experience of the street.

. . .

Slower traffic can make for a friendlier city. But slowing traffic can be done in harsh ways: Speed bumps, traffic circles and the intentional bottlenecks known as chokers are auto-hostile tactics that do little for pedestrians. Gentler measures include tweaking the timing of traffic signals, or using what David Engwicht, an Australian traffic expert, calls “mental speed bumps” — street-side social activities that slow drivers without their knowing the foot is on the brake.

A community project called Ninth Avenue Renaissance, for example, proposes the use of on-street parking spaces on Ninth Avenue in Manhattan for barbecues and the like, adding a dose of intrigue to the street scene that will lead motorists to become curious, and slow down. “New York has these sorts of mental speed bumps,” said Mr. Kent, of the Project for Public Spaces, “but we’ve slowly degraded them by designing a more and more frictionless city for fast walkers and fast drivers.” But street-level friction, he said, is actually good.

. . .

Converting parts of city streets to pedestrian lanes is fine, but champions of “lanescapes” go further and dress up those spaces in various imaginative ways. At Columbus Circle, for example, two lanes of Broadway could be devoted to Jazz at Lincoln Center, with bebop bands spilling into the street. At Times Square, portions of the streets could accommodate legions of out-of-work actors reliving the movie “Fame.”

. . .

More than 10 years ago, Michael Sorkin, who is the director of the graduate urban design program at City College, proposed a plan to channel growth and to encourage a lively social scene in East New York, Brooklyn, a community with large tracts of vacant land.

First, plant a bodacious tree in the middle of an intersection, Mr. Sorkin said. Landscape the rest into a green berm, radiating coolness and quiet. “Immediately it calms the traffic in its lee,” said Mr. Sorkin, who calls his as-yet-untested idea urban acupuncture.

This greened intersection would be linked with vacant lots and pedestrian paths, creating green zones that force development toward the center and encourage pedestrians into those unscripted seductions for which the city is renowned.

“Cities are generators of accidents,” Mr. Sorkin said. “And to the degree that they are happy accidents, that’s the indicator of a good city.

“It is absolutely critical that the people on foot are at the top of the hierarchy,” Mr. Sorkin continued. “The alpha mode is the shoe.”

It’s even easier to vote on something which you have no confidence will ever pass:

Under intense pressure from the mayor, Ms. Quinn and their allies that continued almost until the voting began, council members approved the plan to charge most drivers $8 to enter a zone below 60th Street by a vote of 30 to 20, with no abstentions and one absence.

At a news conference after the vote, where Mr. Bloomberg made a rare appearance on the speaker’s side of City Hall, officials sought to play down the narrowness of their hard-won victory, among the closest of this administration in a body that typically votes in near unanimity.

Approving the proposal, Ms. Quinn said, would send a message to the Legislature that the “people who were elected to represent the New Yorkers who live in our five boroughs are sick and tired of our streets being clogged with traffic, we’re sick and tired of the children who live in our city literally having to fight to be able to breathe, and that we see congestion pricing as a solution to this problem.”

But the ultimate fate of the proposal now resides in Albany, where the intentions of lawmakers whose approval is needed remained unclear. Gov. David A. Paterson and the Senate majority leader, Joseph L. Bruno, have expressed their support. But Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, who has derailed Mr. Bloomberg’s ambitions in the past, remained noncommittal, telling members of the Democratic conference on Sunday night that he would not take the issue up until the state budget was completed.

If the Assembly waits to act until after the budget, it could threaten the bill’s chances in the Senate, because it would come before the Legislature as a stand-alone item, making approval more elusive. Several council members complained as they voted that the mayor had reneged on a promise that they would not be asked to take up the measure until the State Legislature had agreed to support the proposal.

But other council members took the vote as a sign that Mr. Silver would ultimately back the plan, since Ms. Quinn had said privately that she would not call for a vote until she had an indication that it would gain approval from the state.

But Mr. Silver said that he had made no such assurance.

“I told her it’s not before us until they vote on it,” he said. “And we will deal with the issue after we pass a budget.”

You mean to say that you asked to skirt the City’s conflict laws for this? Nice legacy:

Given current economic realities, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s selection on Wednesday of a team led by Tishman Speyer to develop the West Side railyards seems like a wishful fantasy. Yet even if the project takes decades to realize, it is a damning indictment of large-scale development in New York.

Like the ground zero and Atlantic Yards fiascos, its overblown scale and reliance on tired urban planning formulas should force a serious reappraisal of the public-private partnerships that shape development in the city today. And in many ways the West Side railyards is the most disturbing of the three. Because of its size and location — 12.4 million square feet on 26 acres in Midtown — it will have the most impact on the city’s identity. Yet unlike the other two developments, it lacks even the pretense of architectural ambition.

On the contrary, as a money-making venture conceived by a cash-starved transit authority, it signals a level of cynicism that should prod us to demand a moratorium on all such development until our public officials return to their senses.

. . .

. . . [A]t ground level, the project is miserably depressing. Although it is described as a public park, the central garden is a meager strip of grass, trees and walkways that would be overshadowed by the buildings on either side. Tishman Speyer envisions a gantlet of stores and cafes, further chipping away at any notion of noble public space and threatening to transform the garden into a glorified outdoor mall.

I’m sorry. Did I say threatening? In fact the park’s eastern end, which would be developed first, would be a glorified mall anchored by a vast outdoor plaza. Encircled by rings of shallow steps, the plaza would extend northward to connect to a proposed pedestrian boulevard. Both the plaza and an adjoining multistory mall suggest the kind of pseudosuburbia that has been eating away at our urban identity since the Giuliani years.

. . .

If recent history teaches us anything, it is that the project is only likely to get worse. This is because of the nature of the urban planning process in New York, which tends to lock in the worst parts of a design while allowing a developer to chip away at what is most original and often most costly.

New York is experiencing the repercussions of such thinking at ground zero, where Daniel Libeskind’s master plan, unveiled by Gov. George E. Pataki to mixed reviews in 2003, is now a distant memory. Various design components have been watered down until they are barely recognizable.

In the Atlantic Yards project, Forest City Ratner acknowledged last week that it would delay building most of the elements of Frank Gehry’s design for that eight million-square-foot development because it is short of financing. If built, the project would be a pathetic distortion of the original design. And the developer already has city approval.

There will be a similar predicament if the city manages to steamroll the Tishman Speyer railyards proposal through the public review process. The broad outlines will be virtually set in stone, from the position of the park to the location of a yet-unchosen cultural institution. So will the site’s density, among the highest in the city. And the architecture within the plan will gradually diminish in quality. The West Side railyards is as good a place as any to start rethinking this disastrous approach to charting the city’s future. The transportation authority could begin by taking the planning process out of the hands of bean counters who have little interest in anything but profit. It could bring in more thoughtful voices from the urban planning and architectural fields. It could take into account the ups and downs of the area’s economy and how a neighborhood of this scale might evolve.

But that would mean championing the public good rather than hustling for money.

If you gave me nice new trains like the ones on the L line — instead of these 40-plus-year-old dinosaurs — maybe I’d be less likely to chuck my chicken bones any which way:

Wet, sticky spots on the train floor, chicken bones, nut shells, spilled coffee, hot dogs and “lots and lots of rolling bottles” often greet subway passengers who travel on the E and the Q trains — rated the dirtiest lines in the New York City subway system in the latest survey by a rider advocacy group.

Riders on the L line, however, are getting the cleanest ride, according to the group, the Straphangers Campaign, which released its findings on Tuesday.

$57 million from old seats is a tidy sum. But add $25 baggies of dirt to that, and you’ve got a lot of money:

The Yankees and Mets are in secret talks with the city to buy their old ballparks before the wrecking balls hit — so they can plunder them for lucrative memorabilia to peddle to fans, The Post has learned.

A spokesman for Mayor Bloomberg confirmed the negotiations but would not say how the deals might go down — specifically, whether the city would hope to get a lump sum from the teams or a percentage of the profits of any sale or auction of items.

“At other stadiums, everything from the scoreboards to the dugout urinals have been snatched up by fans, but Yankee Stadium is in a whole other league of collectibles,” said Mike Heffner, president of Lelands.com, which has handled several stadium garage sales.

“Each brick could sell for $100 to $300,” Heffner said. “I doubt we’d have any trouble selling every seat in the house for as much as $1,000.

“With its huge fan base, Shea Stadium will also fetch a big payday.”

Yankee sources and a Mets spokesman separately confirmed the teams’ negotiations with the city but refused to give details, citing their ongoing talks.

While the city owns the two stadiums, experts said the teams are in a far better position to bring in bigger bucks from a sell-off because of the emotion factor.

A tiny baggy of infield dirt from Yankee Stadium could fetch $25, experts said.

. . . a note saying you lied about inspecting something you were supposed to inspect but didn’t and then that thing you were supposed to inspect ended up killing several people:

A city inspector, charged with ensuring the safety of the giant crane whose catastrophic collapse killed seven people last Saturday, admitted that he lied about checking the equipment, authorities said yesterday.

Edward J. Marquette, 46, of Hell’s Kitchen, was arraigned in Manhattan Criminal Court yesterday on counts of falsifying business records and filing a false instrument that could bring a four-year prison term.

. . .

Marquette was released without bail.

He was assigned to inspect the crane at 303 E. 51st St. on March 4 after a retired building contractor reported to 311 the crane did not appear to be properly attached to the building.

“Caller states crane does not appear to be braced to the building. There are only tie-backs on five or six floor[s], but upper part which is 100 feet up is unsecured,” a Buildings Department complaint form said.

Marquette filed a report stating he inspected the crane and found it safe.

“No violation warranted for complaint at time of inspection,” he reported.

Well, it’s a good thing they rushed to tear down all those people’s homes:

The slowing economy, weighed down by a widening credit crisis, is likely to delay the signature office tower and three residential buildings at the heart of the $4 billion Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, the developer said.

“It may hold up the office building,” the developer, Bruce C. Ratner, said in a recent interview. “And the bond market may slow the pace of the residential buildings.”

Mr. Ratner, chief executive of Forest City Ratner, did not specify the kinds of delays possible, but suggested that construction could be put off for years. His comments are his first public indication that the darkening economy has slowed the ambitious project, spanning 22 acres at the intersection of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues.

The developer did say he was confident about starting construction on a $950 million basketball arena for the Nets by the end of the year. The arena was to be surrounded by the office tower, known as Miss Brooklyn, and three residential buildings in the first phase of the project.

But Mr. Ratner has yet to secure an anchor tenant for the Miss Brooklyn building, and now plans to phase in the residential buildings slowly.

Location Scout: Atlantic Yards.

The BQE is historic, but not in a good way:

A state agency has lifted a puzzling bureaucratic roadblock that significantly delayed a long-awaited plan to replace the traffic-choked Kosciuszko Bridge.

The Historic Preservation Office last week abandoned its push to preserve the deteriorating bridge, thus ending an inter-agency squabble that delayed final approval of the project by at least six months, the Daily News confirmed Wednesday.

The state Transportation Department had originally anticipated receiving federal authorization for the roughly $700 million project — the final regulatory hurdle — by the end of last year.

However, as The News first reported last month, the DOT was forced to shelve the project last November after Historic Preservation objected to final design plans that call for the Kosciuszko to be demolished and replaced by two new parallel bridges.

Preservation officials deemed the aging span “a significant and unusual variation of the Warren truss type bridge” and argued that a rehab was “a prudent and feasible alternative to demolition,” according to a letter obtained by The News.

In response, DOT officials presented Historic Preservation with a report justifying replacement of the 1939 bridge, which carries the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway over Newtown Creek between Maspeth, Queens, and Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

The report addressed safety concerns, such as its steep grade and substandard merging lanes — factors responsible for bottlenecked traffic and a high accident rate, according to the DOT.

In a written response on Friday, Historic Preservation officials threw in the towel.

“We concur that there are no prudent and feasible alternatives to the demolition of this historic bridge,” an official wrote. “We find that correction of many of the substandard safety features would significantly alter character-defining features of the bridge.”

How to change a lightbulb on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge:

. . . Two carry up a 50-pound red beacon light fixture, while the third distracts a peregrine falcon with a mean streak, lest it rip them all to pieces with its sharp talons.

By the way, all this requires sidestepping piles of pigeon heads, as the predatory falcons seem to have a habit of eating everything but.

. . .

The electricians usually make about 20 bulb-changing trips a year among the beacon lights, red “obstruction lights” on the cables and the bridge’s 340-plus decorative white “necklace lights.”

But burned-out bulbs have been a less-frequent occurrence these days, with the Verrazano the first MTA bridge to break in new ultra-efficient LED (light-emitting diode) bulbs.

With a life span of between five and 11 years, the new bulbs, which so far have replaced those in only the required red lights, already have decreased energy consumption by 90 percent, according to Maintenance Superintendent Charles Passarella.

With any luck, the new bulbs will mean fewer emergency trips to the top, and fewer dangerous run-ins with the falcon, which is particularly aggressive during mating season.

“Once they lay eggs around June, we can’t go up,” [MTA senior bridge and tunnel maintainer Kenny] Dybing said. “We don’t want to interfere with the process.”

Before the eggs hatch around early July, the male falcon is usually fairly well-mannered, but “the mother gets very protective,” Dybing said.

If a critical red light goes out during that window of time, the men go up with Chris Nadareski, a biologist and falcon expert from the city Department of Environmental Protection. Nadareski, who wears protective clothing, and is well-versed in falcon behavior, is able to distract the mother while the lights are changed, Dybing said.

“The same pair returns every year to breed,” Passarella said. The birds are banded so biologists can track their movements. Babies hatched on the Verrazano have been found far up the Hudson River.

Location Scout: Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.

Time was, New Yorkers only concerned themselves with jumbo jets flying into buildings. Now they worry about cranes, as well:

New York has always been a city of construction cranes: They are the steel crutches of the skyline, forever pulling it upward. But when one of them collapsed on the East Side on Saturday — killing at least four people, demolishing a building and damaging at least five others — the disaster exposed the often-uneasy relationship cranes have had with the New Yorkers who walk below them.

Officials said that about 250 cranes were now in operation in the five boroughs, a telling sign of the city’s building boom. Construction cranes are towering behemoths, signposts of the city’s prosperity that dominate the skyline for months but often go unnoticed.

Yet on Sunday, those who lived, worked or happened to be walking near the cranes looked upward with anxiety, their nerves rattled by Saturday’s collapse.

A gas station cashier who works below a crane at West 24th Street and 10th Avenue said he trusted God to protect him. A neighbor who lives across the street, Ana Gonçalves, puts her faith in the builders and hopes they know what they are doing. Victor Simpkins, another neighbor, has watched the crane for weeks, but now he looks up at it with a new suspicion.

“If that thing would fall over, my building would be toast,” said Mr. Simpkins, 53, a designer and filmmaker.

. . .

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg acknowledged the danger of high-rise construction, but said residents near cranes were generally safe. “Do I think that you should worry if there’s a crane across the street?” the mayor said at a news conference on Sunday. “No. This is such a rare thing that I don’t think we should worry about it.”

But as cranes have proliferated, so, too, have accidents associated with them. Last year, there were eight crane-related “accidents,” up from five in 2006; and 21 crane-related “incidents,” up from 14. As the city’s Department of Buildings defines them, “accidents” involve fatalities or injuries, and “incidents” do not.

The collapse of the 205-foot crane on Saturday — described by city and union officials as one of the worst crane accidents in memory — gave rise to a grim New York City parlor game, one that pedestrians have doubtlessly played in the back of their minds over the years: If that crane fell, where would it hit?

“We thought about it, and we think if it falls, it will probably fall into the park or bounce off that clock tower,” said Jarrod Shandley, 25, who lives with two roommates in a penthouse that looks out onto a crane at East 23rd Street and Madison Avenue.

. . .

Some New Yorkers showed no fear of cranes. Mr. Shandley, who lives in the penthouse, said crane anxiety after Saturday’s collapse was “an irrational fear.” Mr. Shandley, who works for a financial research company, added, “I don’t think you should be any more worried about a crane than crossing the street and getting hit by a cab.”

I certainly don’t need my name inscribed on the facade of a landmarked building, you know, right at waist level, but since you asked:

The New York Public Library’s venerable lion-guarded building on Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street is to be renamed for the Wall Street financier Stephen A. Schwarzman, who has agreed to jump-start a $1 billion expansion of the library system with a guaranteed $100 million of his own.

The project, to be announced on Tuesday, aims to transform the Central Library into a destination for book borrowing as well as research. The Mid-Manhattan branch, on the east side of Fifth Avenue at 40th Street, will be sold and its circulating collection absorbed into the new space.

The gift from Mr. Schwarzman, a library trustee and buyout guru who made fortunes as the chief executive of the Blackstone Group, is among the largest to any cultural institution in the city’s history. The 1911 Beaux Arts structure on Fifth Avenue will be called the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building after construction is completed around 2014. The building is protected by landmark status, and the library expects the name to be etched on the building should approval be granted by the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission.

“We hope to incise the name of the building in stone in a subtle, discreet way on either side of the main entrance about three feet off the ground,” said Paul LeClerc, president of the library’s board of trustees. “It’s in keeping with the dignity of the building.”

. . .

Mr. Schwarzman said it was the library that proposed renaming the landmark building. “They said, ‘We’d like you to be the lead gift and give us $100 million and we’d like to rename the main branch after you,’ ” he said. “I said, ‘That sounds pretty good.’”

Form follows function, and function follows security at JFK’s new terminal 5*:

From the moment that passengers first arrive at JetBlue Airways’ $750 million terminal at Kennedy International Airport in September, they will face an unmistakably post-9/11 world.

Most airline terminals have been jury-rigged since 2001 to accommodate all the extra security workers and equipment. But JetBlue’s new Terminal 5 is among the first in the United States designed from the ground up after the terrorist attacks.

The 340-foot-wide security checkpoint will dominate the departures hall the way ticket counters once did, occupying the focal point of the Y-shaped building.

There will be 20 security lanes. “They were sized with the idea that passengers have luggage, have children, have wheelchairs and have special needs,” said William R. DeCota, director of aviation at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs Kennedy.

After running the security gantlet, travelers will find a lot of benches where they can pull themselves back together.

There will be subtler touches, too: resilient rubber Tuflex floor (instead of cold, hard terrazzo) for the areas where one has to go shoeless.

Location Scout: JFK.

*Not to be confused with the old Terminal 5 or other variations thereof.

A cab driver who knows he’s driving around the former transportation reporter for the Post and still refuses to take his credit card is basically an idiot:

I went to taxi court, won my case and still wound up feeling guilty.

My cabdriver, Surjit Singh, had been completely in the wrong, but as I watched him squirm on the hot seat three feet away from me as though he were being tried for high treason and not Taxi and Limousine Commission Violation No. 2-61A1, I began to regret ever calling the city to complain.

Back on Dec. 28, Singh took me from Kennedy Airport to Brooklyn.

I told him that I used to be the transportation reporter for The Post and well understood the concerns about the new GPS and credit-card systems that had sparked two strikes. We even talked about a slew of recent news stories about how drivers were being fined for refusing to allow passengers to pay by plastic.

Then, as I watched the meter tick off the fare, I realized I wasn’t going to have enough cash to also give him a tip. But when I asked if I could pay by credit card, he lied and said the system was broken. I told him that it was clearly working and that I would tip double, more than covering the 5 percent transaction fee, but he insisted I go to an ATM.

After the ride, I called the city, and they scheduled a hearing for six weeks later, by which time I was no longer the slightest bit upset about it. Due to this cooling-off period, as few as 20 percent of passengers actually end up following through on their complaints, officials said.

. . .

An hour later, the judge came back with her decision. Singh was fined $500 for refusing to let me pay by credit card and for fraud, violations that put four points on his hack license. Two more points within a 15-month period and he would be suspended for 30 days; six more and his hack license would be revoked.

The whole thing seemed so excessive that if I had had the $500 in my wallet, I might have handed it to him.

Go ahead and psychoanalyze America’s state of mind:

Prewar used to refer to sturdily built apartment houses with high ceilings, walls so thick you couldn’t hear your neighbors and perhaps black and white tiled floors in the bathroom.

It also used to mean stately edifices built before World War II.

Such fine points apparently have not stopped developers who are building a 20-story luxury condominium at 535 West End Avenue at 86th Street, with apartments of up to 14,000 square feet and prices from $8.5 million to more than $25 million. The developers are describing the building as prewar, both in advertisements that have appeared in recent weeks in anticipation of the building’s opening in summer 2009 and on a large sign wrapped around the scaffolding at the construction site.

. . .

. . . The label, [Gary Barnett, president of Extell Development Company] said, is intended to refer to the grand foyers, high ceilings, elegant moldings and spacious living and dining rooms, as well as to a brick exterior and limestone base that echo that of the building’s elegant older neighbors.

“It’s meant to evoke the style of prewar, right smack in prewar country on the Upper West Side,” Mr. Barnett added. “Of course, somebody called us and said, ‘What war are you planning in the 21st century?’”

The Times checks the numbers and determines that congestion pricing is bogged down in the City Council:

It’s the signature policy item of his second term, but Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s congestion pricing plan may be in serious trouble, not only in Albany but in the New York City Council, which after two years of bowing to much of the mayor’s agenda seems suddenly emboldened to resist him.

A New York Times survey of the Council’s 51 members this week found opposition to the plan running at nearly a 2-1 ratio among those who have taken a position.

Mr. Bloomberg needs 26 votes for approval of the plan, which would charge drivers $8 to enter Manhattan below 60th Street.

Asked how they would vote if they had to decide today, 12 council members said they would vote yes, 20 said they would vote no, and 11 said they were undecided, but with serious concerns. The other eight did not respond.

The informal tally bodes poorly for the mayor, who must now split his attention between swaying undecided members of the State Assembly, where opposition up to now has been loudest, and assuaging concerns among council members. It also raises the question of whether council members are more willing to depart from the mayor’s agenda as they turn their focus to their next political campaigns.

And the City Council, known for its courage, seems set to do the right thing:

“It’s going to go down,” said Lewis A. Fidler, a Brooklyn Democrat who opposes congestion pricing. “I think the council members, recognizing it’s not going to pass in Albany, want to assert the integrity of this institution.”

The mayor’s plan must be approved by both the Council and the State Legislature by March 31 for New York to qualify for about $350 million in federal financing.

The mayor and his aides, along with Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn, have started an effort to woo council members and legislators in recent weeks.

They stepped up their courtship Thursday night with a dinner at Gracie Mansion to which more than a dozen council members from Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island had been invited. Only six attended, and gathered around a table with the mayor and the speaker over grilled salmon and wine. In a cordial tone, Mr. Bloomberg made his pitch, warning them of the risk of losing federal money just as the city’s economy appears headed for bleak times, according to some members who attended.

Isn’t the point of building a subway to “change the lifestyle”? No, never mind the people who live past First Avenue:

The MTA will re-evaluate a planned entrance to the Second Avenue subway slated for East 72nd Street in the wake of two lawsuits filed by area residents, their lawyer said yesterday.

In suits filed last month, four co-ops are seeking to have the entrance, now set to be built between First and Second avenues, moved to a corner or scaled down.

The residents also want the MTA to redo an environmental review.

“Before we make any final determination to proceed with an entrance . . . we will complete the additional evaluations,” agency lawyer Anthony Semancik told a community meeting last night.

The project would “change the lifestyle of the people who live there,” said Susan Chandler, who lives in one of the buildings affected.

But really, doesn’t the concept of a dedicated funding stream take the state off the hook for transit improvments? That’s a good thing when New York City is trying to recoup more of the money it sends to Albany? And then there’s the question of how much of an impact 15% would even have:

Supporters of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s plan to charge people who drive into the busiest parts of Manhattan have promoted it as a way to provide a steady flow of money to pay for improvements to public transportation for decades to come.

Trains would be less crowded. Stations would be spruced up. A new subway line would be built.

But under a new spending plan released Wednesday by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, so-called congestion pricing would cover a relatively small portion — 15 percent — of money needed for transit improvements. That would leave the authority still scrambling for money.

The authority said that it would need $29.5 billion from 2008 through 2013 for system improvements (like thousands of new buses and modernized subway signals) and expansion (like work on the Second Avenue subway).

It tentatively identified $20 billion in potential sources of funds, including $4.5 billion that could be raised by borrowing against congestion pricing revenue. But officials were unable to say where the remaining $9.5 billion would come from at a time of city and state budget tightening. They planned to ask the governor’s office and the State Legislature to come up with a financing formula to make up the shortfall.

Elliot G. Sander, the authority’s chief executive, said that unless its plan is financed in full, the transit system risked sliding back into the disrepair of the 1970s and 1980s.

. . .

Under the plan, the $4.5 billion in borrowing that would be made possible by congestion pricing accounts for just 15 percent of the authority’s infrastructure needs through 2013.

. . .

Mr. Bloomberg, who first proposed congestion pricing in April, said in a statement that it provided “one of the only reliable sources of funding” for the authority’s capital program “and without it, the projects in this plan will not happen.”

But the spending plan also exposed lines of tension between the authority and City Hall over how congestion revenues would be used.

Aides to Mr. Bloomberg said revenue from the system should allow for a total of $6 billion in borrowing — $1.5 billion more than the authority proposed.

The authority said it came up with a lower number because some congestion revenue should be set aside to cover operating costs, which would rise as it adds service to accommodate people who switch from cars to public transit once the system goes into effect.

The mayor has said that all congestion revenue should go to support capital spending.

The majority of money under the plan would go for the upkeep and modernization of the current system. It calls for the purchase of 590 subway cars, 2,976 buses and 440 commuter rail cars. It includes rehabilitation plans for 44 subway stations and the modernization of signals in parts of the subway system.

*As per PlaNYC 2030 Transportation Report (.pdf)

Now that he’s a lame duck, other initiatives seem to be stalling:

A growing number of Assembly members say it’s extremely unlikely their house will support a revised congestion plan backed by Mayor Bloomberg, with at least two dozen now backing a different alternative that doesn’t charge to drive into parts of Manhattan.

“It’s not going to happen,” said Assemblyman Mark Weprin (D-Queens) of the Bloomberg-backed congestion pricing plan.

Assemblyman Joseph Lentol (D-Brooklyn) added, “I never say never, but I think it’s pretty unlikely given the feeling of the [Democratic] conference.”

The question remains how you get trains off an island:

They were a vision in disco-era orange and yellow when they debuted in the 1970s, subway cars to put a smile on the face of the most jaded New York straphanger.

A bunch were delivered in 1973 to Staten Island, where they became the workhorses of the railway.

They’re still reliable and mechanically sound. But all this time later, the cars are as dowdy as leisure suits and as passe as The Hustle.

To buy more time before new cars are purchased some five to eight years from now, the 64-car Staten Island Railway fleet is scheduled for an upgrade.

An $11 million mini-overhaul is planned to spruce up the floors and seats, repair leaky ceiling panels to prevent soaked bottoms, and beef up the climate-control system.

Later this year, the cars will taken two at a time to New York City Transit’s Coney Island maintenance shop in Brooklyn. Each pair will stay in the shop for about a week, and the entire fleet should be rehabbed over 12 months.

At some point it may make more sense just take your chances:

Law enforcement officials have major concerns about security weaknesses in the planned World Trade Center complex, a Daily News investigation has found.

The potential problems expressed to the Port Authority and others involved in the most high-profile development project in New York City history include:

* A row of three mostly glass towers positioned too closely to city streets, increasing their vulnerability to attack.

* Difficulties in inspecting some 2,000 delivery trucks and sightseeing buses that will enter or leave the site daily.

* A vehicle security center that hasn’t been fully designed and relies on vehicle inspection technology that hasn’t even been developed yet.

. . .

Towers 2, 3 and 4 — which will rise between Greenwich and Church Sts. to 79, 71 and 64 stories, respectively — contain too much glass, sources familiar with the issues said.

They also are not set back far enough from the two streets — where uninspected trucks will whiz by — to meet the most rigorous security standards, the sources said.

. . .

Another concern: The buildings do not meet Department of Defense or Department of Homeland Security blast standards. That means they can withstand certain types of explosions - but not more powerful blasts.

The DOD blast standards — rarely applied to U.S. skyscrapers — are typically used in U.S. embassies and missions abroad, sensitive government facilities and military bases.

Sooner or later everything can be landmarked:

When New Yorkers talk about landmarking, they often think of genteel townhouses on tree-lined streets or distinguished cast-iron buildings. But concrete high-rises built in the 1960s?

Tuesday, the Landmarks Preservation Commission is expected to schedule hearings on preserving I.M. Pei’s Silver Towers, a modernist courtyard of concrete high-rises that towers above Greenwich Village.

“Even though this tower in the park superblock model was for the most part a failure, this was one of the most sensitive and well-designed ones,” said Andrew Berman, executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, which has pushed for protecting the structures for five years. “The complex weaves itself more sensitively into the neighborhood than most, and it is one of the few superblocks in the country designed by one of the greatest architects of his era.”

. . .

“A landmark is something that was built years ago, that is historical,” said a longtime local resident who would only give her name as Dorothy. She added that she has lived in tenements in the neighborhood “for 80 years.”

“They look presentable enough, sure, but what were they built, 30, 40, years ago? That doesn’t sound like a landmark to me.”

Spending $157 million for a brand new vacant lot. Which is probably the point of the MTA pitting Lower Manhattan against West Side redevelopment proponents (and who is that exactly now that Dan Doctoroff is gone?):

Soaring construction costs could force the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to scrap plans for an architecturally ambitious glass-domed subway station in Lower Manhattan and lead to more than $1 billion in cost overruns for the authority’s major expansion projects, officials said Monday.

The rising costs could slow progress on the three so-called mega-projects needed to expand the capacity of the public transportation system, including a Long Island Rail Road link to Grand Central Terminal, a westward extension of the No. 7 subway line and the first leg of the Second Avenue subway.

The news represents another setback for the subway station project, known as the Fulton Street Transit Center, which was envisioned as a central element in the recovery of Lower Manhattan after the terror attack of Sept. 11, 2001.

. . .

Several underground portions of the Fulton Street subway project have been completed or are close to being finished, including a renovation of the platform and mezzanine serving the Nos. 2 and 3 trains.

The authority planned to finish the project by letting out a contract to cover the construction of the entrance building and oculus and several remaining pieces of the underground work.

But the authority received only one bid, of $870 million, far exceeding the $370 million the authority had budgeted for the contract.

Mysore L. Nagaraja, the authority’s president of capital construction, said the authority rejected the bid and would now split the project into smaller pieces, in the hope of attracting more bidders and greater competition.

He said the underground portions of the work could be completed by late 2009, which will make the connections between subway lines fully functional for riders.

But officials said that it was unclear now what would go on top.

“I’m sad to say that we cannot build the transit center as currently envisioned in this market with the budget that we have,” Mr. Sander said.

As it is, even without a station building, the project will reach a total cost of about $930 million, which is nearly $30 million more than the authority has in its overall budget for the project.

It is not the first time the project has run into budget trouble. The cost of acquiring real estate to make way for the project rose to $157 million from an early estimate of $50 million.

The authority has already razed several buildings at Fulton and Broadway to make way for the project, and Monday’s developments raised the prospect of the site’s remaining virtually vacant above ground for an extended time, or of a much more modest entrance building.

Funny thing about engineering, that:

A landmarked 1872 cast-iron building is looking strangely similar to the Tower of Pisa, leaning precipitously to one side after the demolition and excavation of an adjacent site. Engineers have placed long wooden supports against the wall to keep the building, on 287 Broadway, from tipping over.

“It’s terrible. One day you own a business and the next you are out of business for nothing that you did,” said David Jaroslawicz, the lawyer for the Yenem Corp., the group that owned a basement diner in the building. “It’s only in New York that you build big buildings and no one pays attention to these details. It’s like capitalism has taken away humanism.”

Settlement over time caused the building to lean slightly to the south by approximately four inches, according to city buildings officials. After John Buck Co., a Chicago-based developer, began excavation work on the neighboring property to develop a 20-story residential tower, monitors installed on 287 Broadway recorded further movement of between 3 and 4 inches. In November, residents and businesses were told to vacate the building.

Today, the diner looks like it belongs in a ghost town residents evacuated.

I can understand the park (even if “Pataki Park” sounds totally wretched) but a big old ugly bridge? Apparently he would have been happy with a bridge:

It has been an enduring wish of the Kennedy family that the Triborough Bridge be renamed in honor of Robert F. Kennedy, the former New York senator who was assassinated almost 40 years ago.

According to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Governor Carey in 1975 said he was planning to permanently attach the senator’s name to the bridge until the proposal was scuttled by the man responsible for its construction, Robert Moses. Governor Pataki, the younger Mr. Kennedy said, considered the idea but never acted.

A month ago, Governor Spitzer called Mr. Kennedy and told him that he would grant the family’s wish and launch an effort to rechristen the monumental complex of water crossings, a viaduct, and 14 miles of approach roads that connects Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx. The bridge also serves as a pathway to the airport named after RFK’s older brother.

“He would be really, really happy that the bridge was going to be named in his honor,” Mr. Kennedy, 53, told The New York Sun yesterday.

. . .

Mr. Spitzer is expected to announce the plan tomorrow in his annual State of the State address to lawmakers in Albany.

Originally, the Democratic governor intended to use the speech to publicize his intention to rename another important New York site, a source in the administration said. Early drafts of the speech highlighted a plan to name Hudson River Park, the yet-to-be-completed span of walkways and bike paths running along Manhattan’s West Side, after Governor Pataki.

Mr. Pataki, a Republican, won’t be attending the address, a factor that apparently led to removing mention of the plan from the speech, according to a source.

Location Scout: Triborough Bridge.

Staten Island is not the best place to live if you’re terrified of bridges:

The Verrazano-Narrows bridge has been called a study in grace.

For Jan Steers, it was a study in terror.

Even thinking about driving across the 4,260-foot suspension span made her start to feel dizzy, made her heart race, her breath tightening into short rapid gasps.

Mrs. Steers, 47, suffered from a little-known disorder called gephyrophobia, a fear of bridges. And she had the misfortune of living in a region with 26 major bridges, whose heights and spans could turn an afternoon car ride into a rolling trip through a haunted house.

Some people go miles out of their way to avoid crossing the George Washington Bridge — for example, driving to Upper Manhattan from Teaneck, N.J., by way of the Lincoln Tunnel, a detour that can stretch a 19-minute jog into a three-quarter-hour ordeal. Other bridge phobics recite baby names or play the radio loudly as they ease onto a nerve-jangling span — anything to focus the mind. Still others take a mild tranquilizer an hour before buckling up to cross a bridge.

The Tappan Zee Bridge, rising more than 150 feet over the Hudson River, appears to inspire particular panic — so much so that New York State offers the skittish a chauffeur who will transport them across the span.

Similar rescue measures are provided in other places around the country with especially fearsome bridges. Authorities at the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, for example, will dispatch a tow truck to pull panic-stricken drivers to the other side. The Mackinac Bridge, connecting Michigan’s Lower and Upper Peninsulas, provides a transport service like the Tappan Zee’s. Mrs. Steers’s phobia was so severe that she was virtually trapped on Staten Island for 13 years. She missed her brother’s wedding in Brooklyn. She sent her husband and two children off on family vacations without her. She had never seen her sister’s house at the Jersey Shore.

As subway “grades” consistently come out C or C-minus, why is the MTA continuing the charade of asking? There should be one grade — “needs improvement”:

The R and V subway lines received mediocre grades in the latest rider report card results released by New York City Transit.

Straphangers gave both Queens-to-Manhattan lines an overall C-minus grade.

The R received its lowest grades, Ds, for inaudible station and train announcements and uninformative station announcements. The V also received a D for inaudible station announcements.

Seriously, just do whatever it was you planned to do and get on with it! And on a related note, wouldn’t you feel dumb if your subway got an A? What would happen then?

The “galvanizing power” of a 7 train extension leads to . . . a renovated-but-no-more-expanded Javits Center:

Gov. Eliot Spitzer declared in a speech eight months ago that he would build a “thoroughbred” of a convention center in New York City and scrap the $1.8 billion plan he had inherited to expand the black-glass Javits Convention Center on the West Side.

Since then, state officials — struggling with escalating costs, competing demands and limited land — have had to shrink their ambitions, devising a series of alternative plans that provide a far more modest expansion than envisioned three years ago.

Now, in the latest blow to the governor’s ambitions, the city’s hotel association is balking at requests to triple the hotel tax earmarked for the expansion. That could force state and city officials to abandon plans for an expansion and settle instead for simply renovating the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center.