The pricetag for a state plan to replace the crumbling Kosciuszko Bridge by 2017 has ballooned to more than a billion bucks to accommodate the eight-year inflation expected during the long-awaited and long-needed replacement.

For that price, we might get something truly stunning — a concrete cable-stayed straight out of a science fiction movie (or the downtowns of many other cities). In layman’s terms, the futuristic bridge resembles two space-turkey wishbones standing upright with diagonal connection cables.

Last month, the Kosciuszko Bridge Stakeholders Advisory Council — a Department of Transportation-appointed panel of local activists — chose three final designs for the new 1.1-mile span.

In addition to the front-runner [. . .] were a simple box girder design and a crescent arch similar to the Bayonne Bridge.

They would all cost a lot, but Adam Levine, spokesman of the state Department of Transportation, said the cost was expected.

“For a bridge that is a mile long in New York City, $1 billion is the going rate,” he said.

The concrete pedestrian ramps at the brand-new $1.5 billion city-subsidized Yankee Stadium have been troubled by cracks, and the team is seeking to determine whether the problems were caused by the installation, the design, the concrete or other factors, according to several people briefed on the problems.

The ramps were built by a company accused of having links to the mob, and the concrete mix was designed and tested by a company under indictment on charges that it failed to perform some tests and falsified the results of others. But it is unclear whether work performed by either firm contributed to the deteriorating conditions of the ramps.

. . .

One person with knowledge of the matter said the cracks and deterioration were unusual.

Location Scout: New Yankee Stadium.

Every commuter train that departs from New York City — about 900 a day — leaves a minute later than scheduled. If the timetable says 8:14, the train will actually leave at 8:15. The 12:48 is really the 12:49.

In other words, if you think you have only a minute to get that train — well, relax. You have two.

The phantom minute, in place for decades and published only in private timetables for employees, is meant as a grace period for stragglers who need the extra time to scramble off the platform and onto the train.

“If everyone knows they get an extra minute, they’re going to lollygag,” explained Marjorie Anders, a spokeswoman for the Metro-North Railroad. Told of this article, Ms. Anders laughed. “Don’t blow our cover!” she said.

Entirely hidden from the riding public, the secret minute is an odd departure from the railroad culture of down-to-the-second accuracy.

. . .

The minute was originally known as “gate time,” dating to the days when gates were used to block off the ramps that lead down to the platforms. (The gates are still occasionally used at Grand Central.)

At the publicly posted departure time, the gates would be closed; those who had already made it through would have a minute to climb onto the train.

The practice gradually extended to trains to Long Island and New Jersey that start in Pennsylvania Station and the Long Island Rail Road’s Brooklyn terminal.

More than 150 stations on the numbered subway lines, including the heavily trafficked Nos. 1, 4 and 6, will be providing the information by December 2010; in some stations the clocks will be running even earlier, according to a recently released Metropolitan Transportation Authority document.

In the timeless realm of the underground, where anguish can mount with each passing trainless second, this amounts to something of a revolution.

. . .

Although New Yorkers became familiar with the technology after its debut on the L line in 2007, that train, which snakes through Williamsburg out to Canarsie, carries only a fraction of the city’s overall ridership (though it does carry a high proportion of its well-heeled hipster set). The No. 6 train, on the other hand, handles 700,000 rides a day, more than the entire Chicago rail system.

From “The Hanger” to . . . “The Clamshell”?

Atlantic Yards developer Bruce Ratner unveiled stunning new designs for the proposed basketball arena at the corner of Atlantic and Flatbush avenues this morning, renderings that strive to silence the outrage created in May when Ratner dumped Frank Gehry in favor of a Midwest architecture firm whose first effort, a hanger-like design, fell flat.

. . .

Of course, not everyone cheered the latest incarnation of the basketball arena. Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn, the principal opposition group to the full Atlantic Yards mega-project, described the design as a “big eye ball at Atlantic and Flatbush.”

Location Scout: Atlantic Yards.

Four years after the line was banished from existence, veteran straphangers and subway novices alike have been puzzled by the re-appearance of the No. 9 sign at the entrance to the 242nd Street Station. Two stops away, at West 231st Street, a small yellow sign hanging above the track — emblazoned with the numbers 1 and 9 — also lends credence to the possibility that two trains still make the 14.7 mile trek from South Ferry to Van Cortlandt Park.

. . .

“Did they bring back the nine?” Frank Petrocelli, 56, wondered aloud as he emerged from the station Sunday. “I always liked the 9. Got me here quicker.”

Alas, New York City Transit squashed any dreams of a resurrection.

“I hope they don’t think the nine is coming back,” Deirdre Parker, spokeswoman for the agency, said of local riders. The downed vinyl covering will be reported to station workers, and the No. 9 emblem covered once again, she said. The same goes for the smaller sign at the 231st Street Station.

When told that the re-emergence of the No. 9 sign was simply a fluke, Mr. Petrocelli grew contemplative.

“Everything gets covered over at one time or another around here,” the construction worker said. “It makes it easy to forget the past.”

A subway rider says he got the shock of his life when he peered into the cab and saw a kid behind the controls alongside the driver.

“I saw him driving. He couldn’t have been more than 8 or 9,” said Jules Cattie, 41. “That has to be the craziest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Cattie, a lawyer who lives on the East Side, said he spotted the child after he got into the front car of a Lexington Ave. express train Sunday.

“I was just in shock,” he said. “I thought, ‘This is really dangerous.’”

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority yesterday said it has launched “a vigorous and thorough investigation” into the charge.

To dramatize the effects of budget cuts on subway cleanliness, the head of New York City Transit on Monday described a recent incident in which someone used an entrance to the Rector Street station in Lower Manhattan as a public bathroom.

“We are in a situation where, between 4:30 a.m. and noon, we are not staffed to deal” with that, the president of New York City Transit, Howard H. Roberts Jr., said at a meeting with the board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. (Mr. Roberts’s exact choice of words, which included a relatively graphic description of the events, elicited grimaces from many of the spectators.)

The Daily News confirms it was “human feces,” obviously the best kind of feces.

Traffic on Park Avenue may seem lighter in August than in much of the year, thanks to the summering habits of its well-to-do residents. But much of the boulevard will have no traffic at all on three Saturdays this summer, as the city shuts down 6.9 miles of Manhattan roadway in a reprise of last year’s Summer Streets program.

In its debut last August, the program attracted about 50,000 bicyclists and pedestrians on each of its three days to a path from the Brooklyn Bridge to East 72nd Street. This year’s events, announced on Monday by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, will take place on Aug. 8, 15 and 22, from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m.

Citing a positive response to the program — an idea inspired by a recreational experiment in Bogotá, Colombia, that began in the 1970s — the city has expanded it to smaller stretches of the other boroughs on weekends throughout the summer. The program will reach 13 neighborhoods, although none of the additional street closings will match the size of the main Manhattan route.

*Back then it involved closing Fifth Avenue between 42nd and 57th Streets, and the idea was referred to as a “pedestrian shopping mall” — which, if you think about it, is basically what it amounts to.