The Price Of Salving New York’s Architectural Conscience Is An Uninspired Matchbox (And $1 Billion!)

It’s not clear whether Sheldon Silver’s intransigence is due to the removal of the original roof trusses, but the Times’ David Dunlap notes that plans for the proposed Moynihan Station have changed over the years:

To judge from architectural renderings, the design is much less imaginative than it was two years ago, and far more utilitarian.

It has been easy to lose track of the design in recent months. The political battle over Penn Station between the Republican governor and the Democratic speaker has demanded attention. So has the real estate intrigue over the future of Madison Square Garden, which may also move into the Farley building, permitting an expansive renovation of the station in its current location. All of this is complicated by the prospect of a new governor.

But design is critical in what would be one of the most important public spaces created in New York in a generation. Its name, Moynihan Station, would commemorate Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who cared deeply about civic architecture. And many New Yorkers probably don’t realize how much the plans have changed.

. . .

The best-known design for Moynihan Station, by David M. Childs and his colleagues at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (architects of the Freedom Tower at the World Trade Center site), was unveiled in 1999. It would have involved removing the sorting room floor and creating a multilevel concourse in which passengers waiting above could glimpse the train movements below. The original roof trusses would have been preserved under a new skylight.

Last year, that was supplanted by a design from James Carpenter Design Associates and Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum. Their plans showed a single-level hall under an undulating skylight supported on slender columns. This was intended to evoke the concourse of the original Penn Station by McKim, Mead & White.

This year, Skidmore returned with the sparest design yet: a single-level hall under a barrel-vaulted skylight. Absent any other bold architectural flourishes, it seems to defer to the original facades facing the inner court, which are historic but aesthetically undistinguished. After all, they were never really meant to be seen.

“I remain partial to the more ambitious (and expensive) scheme,” said Prof. Hilary Ballon of Columbia University, an architectural historian who devoted 45 pages to the original Skidmore project in her 2002 book, “New York’s Pennsylvania Stations.”

Eric Marcus, an author who was working on his own book about the reconstruction of Penn Station until the development project became hopelessly delayed, described the latest version of the train hall as an “uninspired matchbox covered with a glass roof.”

The Question Is What Is 180 Seconds Worth?

Answer: about $20 million:

Five bus routes, one in each borough, will be part of a pilot program that will use special lanes, computer-controlled stoplights and other means to speed bus travel, in an effort to change the prevailing image of tortoiselike service.

. . .

The program is known as bus rapid transit, which may seem an oxymoron to people accustomed to buses that crawl rather than sprint through traffic.

The new souped-up service would replace current limited-stop buses on the five routes, but current local service would be retained, according to plans.

Stops would be spaced from one-half mile to a full mile apart. The bus lanes would be painted a special color, and the buses would get a distinctive paint job, to differentiate them from their pokier cousins. Cameras would be mounted on buses and bus stops to photograph trucks and cars blocking the bus lanes, so tickets could be sent to the vehicles’ owners.

To help speed buses along, on some of the routes they will have devices that transmit their location to a computer system that controls traffic lights: a green light could be kept on a few seconds longer, or a red light could turn green a few seconds earlier, to let the buses pass. At some bus stops, passengers would pay their fare at sidewalk turnstiles rather than on the bus, to make boarding faster.

For all that, the projected increases in speed are less than heart-stopping.

A report prepared for the city’s Transportation Department and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority estimated that the greatest time saving would come on the route along First and Second Avenues, where the new buses would run as much as 22 percent faster than the limited-stop bus service currently available. That means that if a trip on the current First Avenue limited bus takes 30 minutes now, it would take about 23 1/2 minutes on the new buses.

The smallest saving would be on a route that would run along Pelham Parkway and Fordham Road in the Bronx, where the projected difference was only 8 percent, according to the study. There, a trip that takes 30 minutes now would take about 27 1/2 minutes on the revamped buses.

The other buses are the Merrick Boulevard route in Queens, where buses would move an estimated 16 percent more quickly; the Nostrand Avenue route in Brooklyn, with an estimated time saving of 20 percent; and the Hylan Boulevard route in Staten Island that would run across the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge into Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, with the time saving estimated at 21 percent.

The transportation authority has earmarked $20 million for the program.

Buried in there is the novel and probably controversial concept of buses equipped with cameras to ticket scofflaws . . . can this work?

But What Would Matthew Modine Have To Say?

Now this sounds useful:

Outside Colombia, Bogotá is better known for its association with cocaine trafficking than for its traffic congestion.

For many of the city’s 7 million residents, however, it was the bumper-to-bumper traffic that topped their list of grievances as of 1998, when Enrique Peñalosa was elected mayor. During his three-year tenure, Mr. Peñalosa devised and implemented a comprehensive city bus system that has eased congestion in Colombia’s capital and cut Bogotános’ commutes to work by hundreds of hours a year.

In his keynote address today at a New York transportation conference, Mr. Peñalosa will discuss the overhaul of Bogotá’s mass transit system, and ways traffic could be eased along New York’s car-clogged streets. More than 500 people, including elected officials, mass transit advocates, community activists — and even celebrities such as actor Matthew Modine and the musician Moby — are expected at the day-long conference, hosted by Manhattan’s president, Scott Stringer.

. . .

Acknowledging the vast differences between New York and Bogotá, the latter of which is far poorer and has no subway system, Mr. Peñalosa said not all of the recent transportation reforms instituted in his hometown would be applicable here.

Metal Machine Music

This city is making you deaf:

Researchers at Columbia University found subway noise inside the cars and on station platforms regularly exceeds safe limits. Riding the trains for just 30 minutes a day can eventually lead to permanent hearing damage, experts say.

“By itself, riding long enough could definitely put your hearing at risk,” said Dr. Robyn Gershon, a professor at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health and lead author of the study. “Once the damage starts, it passes a threshold and keeps adding and keeps adding, and pushes you over the edge.”

Regular subway noise averages about 95 decibels, but Columbia researchers found it reached 106 decibels at some subway platforms. A diesel truck generally produces 100 decibels of noise and a lawn mower 107 decibels.

Environmental Protection Agency standards recommend keeping exposure to 100 decibels of noise to less than 90 seconds.

The article goes on to note by way of comparison that rock concerts are about 110 decibels.

See also: In The Eternal Words Of Jimi, Cover Your Ears!

MTA To Train Enthusiasts: Sit Down!

The “Rail-fan Window” is slowly being phased out by the MTA:

Rachael Lambert, a 24-year-old office worker and part-time student from Howard Beach, Queens, took a practiced stance on Tuesday at the head of a J train that was clattering eastward across the Williamsburg Bridge into Brooklyn. Peering out the scratched window at the front of the train, she offered in her slight Midwestern twang a running commentary on the view.

“You see the green-yellow?” she said, pointing to a pair of signal lights beside the elevated tracks. “We’re going, but we’re being diverted to the middle track.”

A few minutes later, the train reached one of Ms. Lambert’s favorite spots, near the Myrtle Avenue station, where the M line veers northward across the J line, and in doing so crosses a spaghetti-like tangle of rails.

“It’s great in winter,” she said. “When they’re afraid the switches are going to freeze, there are little pilot lights on them, and they light them, and it looks like the tracks are on fire.”

But Ms. Lambert’s is a dying pastime. Over the last few decades, and with increasing speed, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has been phasing out cars with publicly accessible windows in front, a feature that is often called the rail-fan window because of its appeal to subway buffs. In 2000, nearly half of all cars had such windows, according to Charles Seaton, a spokesman for New York City Transit. This year, they appear in only about one-fifth of the fleet’s roughly 6,200 cars.

And over the next decade, rail-fan windows will probably disappear entirely. A new model of car that lacks the rail-fan window is currently being tested on the A and N lines; the city has ordered 660 of the cars, set to arrive in 2008, and has an option to buy an additional 900 or so.