Why Bus Rapid Transit Will Never Work

For the MTA, words like “buff” and “enthusiast” are euphemisms for “putting the fox in charge of the henhouse”:

[Jason] Brown had just gotten the subway fan’s equivalent of a Broadway callback. A year and a half earlier, he had taken the examination to be a conductor, and now he was being called in for a medical exam and an interview.

Had Mr. Brown scored lower, he might have waited even longer. The current list of conductor candidates, which is based on the 2004 exam, had 21,749 names on it in 2005. If previous lists are any guide, only about a third of those names will have been called by the time the list expires in 2009.

This wait is frustrating enough for ordinary applicants. But it is agonizing for subway buffs, the people who linger in stations waiting for a rare new-model test car to pass, stay up for 24 hours trying to travel every inch of the city’s tracks, or speculate online about how conductors relieve themselves in an emergency.

Some passengers may not want a starry-eyed hobbyist at the wheel of their train, but for a transit buff the chance to drive a subway car is a dream come true, a dizzying intersection of the workaday world and the realm of fantasy.

“When I was a kid, I’d always had a crazy little dream to drive a subway train,” said Vincent Sbano, 48, a retired tax lawyer from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, who took the exam in 2003 and started as a trainee train operator on April 30.

. . .

Mr. Sbano does not consider himself a through-and-through subway buff, but he confirmed a piece of advice widely dispensed to job candidates on Rider Diaries: When applying for a job with the M.T.A., keep your subway enthusiasms to yourself.

The transportation authority denies that it discriminates against train fans, but on Rider Diaries the idea is alive and well. As a fellow transit fan wrote to Mr. Brown: “Don’t even hint you are a buff.”

Catch 22(0 Volts)

Chutzpah, and by being unable to deliver basic services because of a lack of money for infrastructure improvements give them bonus points for the perverse Catch-22 scenario:

Consolidated Edison asked state regulators for permission yesterday to substantially raise electricity rates next April — by 17 percent for a typical residential customer and by 10.7 percent for a typical business.

Under the proposal, which met with immediate criticism, the total monthly electric bills for the utility’s 3.2 million electricity customers in New York City and most of Westchester County would rise by 11.6 percent in 2008.

Bills would increase by another 3.2 percent in 2009 and by 3.7 percent in 2010.

The rate increase request, the first since 2004, raised hackles among politicians and community advocates who were infuriated by the utility’s sluggish response to a nine-day blackout in western Queens last July that affected some 170,000 people.

. . .

Kevin M. Burke, the chairman and chief executive of Con Edison, defended the rate increase yesterday in a statement that made no mention of the blackout, although it did cite improvements planned for the underground network in Long Island City, Queens, where the blackout began.

. . .

Under the Con Edison proposal, the average monthly bill would increase to $82 from $70 for a typical residential customer and to $2,435 from $2,200 for a typical business.

Con Edison said it planned to spend billions of dollars on improvements over its next three-year rate plan, including $942 million on substations, $899 million on transformers and related equipment and $467 million on new underground primary cables.

Con Edison’s chief financial officer, Robert N. Hoglund, said the company would need an average of nearly $2 billion in new investor capital each year to pay for such improvements. The company needs the increase to obtain such capital, he said. Con Edison has $12 billion in annual revenues.

Empire State Building: 1 Year, 45 Days; Rockefeller Center: Seven Years; Mount Freaking Rushmore: 14 Years

So if the Atlantic Yards project is going to take 15 years, it must be the most awesome development ever:

Forest City Ratner claims it will take 10 years to construct its Atlantic Yards development, with an arena opening for the 2009-10 basketball season.

But earlier this week Chuck Ratner, cousin of Bruce and CEO of FCR’s parent company Forest City Enterprises, stated that it would take longer.

“This is going to be a 15-year buildout,” Chuck Ratner said at the Citigroup 2007 Property CEO Conference in Naples, Fla. The arena would open by the 2010 season, he added.

The comments, which were first reported yesterday by Atlantic Yards watchdog blogger Norman Oder, come on the heels of landscape architect Laurie Olin telling The New York Observer he believed the project would take 20 years.

Location Scout: Atlantic Yards.

Every Good Development Deserves A Holdout

In the same way as the great cities have pie-shaped buildings, every development worth its salt has at least one quirky holdout that serves to humble ego-driven architects and pointy-headed planners. So will Bruce Ratner’s Atlantic Yards project get its very own version of Hurley’s? The courts are paving the way for that possibility:

A property owner threatened by the Atlantic Yards project enjoyed a victory after a judge ruled that two of his leases were improperly acquired by the developer, Forest City Ratner.

Property owner Henry Weinstein can keep his six-story building and a parking lot on Carlton Ave., Supreme Court judge Ira Harkavy ruled Tuesday.

But it was unclear how the ruling would affect the project, which broke ground last month.

“The leases in question clearly and unambiguously required tenants to first obtain the written consent of the landlords before any assignment of the leases,” Harkavy ruled in an 18-page decision invalidating both leases.

Weinstein leased his property to Brooklyn developer Shaya Boymelgreen in 1999, but he didn’t expect Boymelgreen to sell the leases to Forest City Ratner, Weinstein said.

Weinstein, a critic of the Atlantic Yards project, never gave consent to the deal between Boymelgreen and Ratner, which would have allowed the latter to hold onto the leases until 2048.

“We believed from the beginning that Ratner and Boymelgreen had no right to do what they did, so this decision is no surprise,” said Candace Carponter, a member of the opposition group Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn. “As far as I’m concerned, this decision is unassailable upon appeal.”

Location Scout: Atlantic Yards.

See also: Architectural Holdouts.

That’s M’all, Folks

Shouldn’t at least someone out there mourn the potential loss of the Pier 17 mall? Or not:

South Street Seaport’s Pier 17 probably will be razed to make way for a retail, residential and open-space development, a spokeswoman for the property’s leaseholder said yesterday.

Though the company is exploring a range of options, the three-story shopping mall named for the pier upon which it was built likely will be demolished, said Cheri Fein, a spokeswoman for General Growth Properties, a Chicago-based real estate company that owns and operates more than 200 malls nationwide. Fein did not elaborate on the specific plans.

Asked how high a new structure might go, Fein said: “The lower you go, the less open space there is — but nothing has been decided.

“There is also the recognition that it is not just a land-bound place,” she said. “We want to make it 360 [degrees], so that it can be reached by the ferry as well.”

According to one person familiar with the developer’s initial plan, General Growth is considering a tall building for the site, and would build a ferry landing and relocate the landmark Tin Building of the former Fulton Fish Market. The rest of the pier would be left as open space.

. . .

Most waterfront advocates would not shed tears over the loss of the Pier 17 mall, a mix of chain stores, restaurants and specialty shops completed in 1983. The mall is a cumbersome structure, said Lee Gruzen of SeaportSpeaks, a group of local stakeholders.

Location Scout: Pier 17.