Read in the Daily News that the 2nd Ave Subway has been postponed... AGAIN!! It seems everytime they try to restart this train tease, the economy tanks, and we get stuck with empty promises. They could've built an EL for less, and faster. I know, the property owners would B***H, but I think it could be done so that it was aesthetically pleaseing, as well as somewhat quieter than older Els. Chicago has done okay with it's EL. Its really sad that NYC cant seem to get its act together. We have a 16 acre hole downtown where the WTC should be. (and I for one think it should be REBUILT, terrorsts and whining naysayers be damned) and another series of holes under 2nd Avenue. Oh well, maybe they can make wine cellars out of them....

The Second Ave El service was closed in 1940 from the Bronx and Harlem and in 1942 from Queens with the anticipation of its replacement with the planned second Ave subway. Its planning goes even further back as part of the plans for the IND system. The Court Street station which houses the Transit Museum was to be a dtop on the second avenue line. Its almost 70 years and still no subway!

In 1952 when I was at the Coast Guard COTP office in New York we used to ride the 3rd Ave EL as i was less crowded than the Lexington Ave. subway line.But soon things would change the 3rd Ave. El would soon be replaced by the Second Ave. subway. God would be in his heaven and all would be right with the world. It is now 57 years later and nary a wheel has turned on he Second Ave. line
When you subway modelers complain about MTH or Lionel subway delivery times they are only adhering to prototype practice.I hope you dont have to wait 57 years for your delivery.

I am not surprised, i figured this would happen, though last I heard it wasn't 'put off' as much as the opening date being pushed off a couple of years. The problem with the 2nd avenue subway is that it just isn't "sexy" as such, so it takes a lesser priority even though in transit terms it should be at the top of the heap. For example, they are moving ahead with the 7 line expansion to the Javits center, which although it is needed in some respects, I could argue easily that the Javits does okay right now without that expansion, but the power brokers behind the center want it, and that takes precedence over ordinary commuters who are forced to take the east side lines.

Likewise, the connection of the LIRR to grand central via the 63rd street tunnel has political clout, because that would be a convenience to people coming in from Long Island, that has much political clout and thus influence with the MTA.

What is sad is the 2nd ave subway (at least to me) from a transit standpoint is a basic necessity, given the unreal conditions on the lex line, but the 'sexy' projects like the 7 expansion and the LIRR connection seem to take the priority.

Either that, or maybe Robert Moses left behind one hell of a curse?

I sometimes regret that we dont have our own Robert Moses to lead us to a "promised Land" of updated, modern subways and completed projects. I grew up hearing of Westway, and the Archer Ave line, and the Second ave subway, all these great transit projects. NOTHING came of them except higher fares, congestion, and the stark reality of empty promises. So many projects seem to get derailed by politics and people crying about NIMBY and all that nonsense. meanwhile, averything goes to hell sloooowly......

quote:

Originally posted by Pelham Express:
I sometimes regret that we dont have our own Robert Moses to lead us to a "promised Land" of updated, modern subways and completed projects. I grew up hearing of Westway, and the Archer Ave line, and the Second ave subway, all these great transit projects. NOTHING came of them except higher fares, congestion, and the stark reality of empty promises. So many projects seem to get derailed by politics and people crying about NIMBY and all that nonsense. meanwhile, averything goes to hell sloooowly......

I was very glad westway wasn't built, a highway that size in a city like Manhattan made no sense from the beginning IMO, all it would have done is load further traffic into the city and would have made the problem worse, not better (one of the axioms of new road constructions is the bigger you make the roadway, the more congestion it generates). Westway was the last gasp of the Robert Moses era, where he and the federal planners he influenced saw cities as obstacles to highway travel and whose vision was to put highways right through cities to be convenience for those travelling through over those living there. And the park belt they have now built on the west side, along with the lovely way they redid west street, makes whatever fetid promises they made about new parkland with westway look like what it was, dismal.

It would be good to have a Robert Moses for mass transit projects, that is for sure, but unfortunately the real Robert Moses influence seems to keep going into this day and age, or at least his kind of thinking goes on. As with Moses, the automobile is king, we spend tons more money on highways and roads then mass transit, and instead of seeing mass transit for what it is, a required service to keep a region healthy, people keep trying to run it like it is a profit making business, where it has to in effect 'show a profit to be useful', so any real investment in mass transit is seen as a cost, while investing in highways and roads that just further problems as seen as 'investments'.

In all likelyhood the 2nd avenue subway will probably be nothing more then a small strip subway, I doubt even the scaled down version of the 70's will be built. The time when it could have been built properly, during the 50's, when there was a bond issue to in fact build it, was lost mostly because of Robert Moses efforts (he hated mass transportation,he saw it as a rival to the automobile which he championed and also saw it as the conveyance of the 'lower classes' which he saw, if at all, with contempt). Because of his power to help get financing, when the TA got a 500 million dollar bond issue passed with Moses help it was likely that he helped with the caveat that it not be used for the second avenue subway. The arguments of the TA at the time were lame, they said the 500 million was needed to improve the existing subways, that a brand new subway line with the rest of the system in bad shape was not the way to go, but almost every writer on both NYC and the subways (Robert Caro, Stan Fischler, Brian Cudahy) all agree that that was bogus (actually, most of that 500 million was wasted from what I have been told; at last half of it was used in an attempt to unify the subway system power grid, which resulted in hundreds of miles of copper cable being laid but never used, and the city eventually buying power from Con Ed. An uncle of mine told the story to me years ago,I thought he was lying, but a friend of mine in grad school, who was the senior electrical engineer for the ta at the time we were in the program, confirmed that story, he said he knew of that plan and also that basically the cable that was laid was pretty much lost,no one really knows where it was laid, and even at the point I am talking about, they still found sections of it in the oddest places, laid in but not connected to anything).

Depressing, isnt it? sad to say that you are probably right. the plans I saw for the second ave subway has it dead ending around 125th. it doesnr go into the BX, where it would be useful. Almost a third fo Lex traffic comes from the BX (4,5,6 lines) an extension through to co op city/baychester (even on an "el" type structure) would br a LOT more useful. The archer ave line should be extended to the Nassau border, maybe sharing a right of way with the LIRR. The real need for Mass transit should be to get these people off the roads. period. one bus can carry as many as 20 car loads, a subway at least 10 bus loads. In San Francisco and other places, I've seen how conveinient their mass transit can be. Of course, those places arent as huge as NYC.

Yeah, the 2nd ave subway as currently planned is a feeder from 125th down to the 60's I believe, where it will go onto an existing subway line track (the stretches built further down on second ave in the 70's will remain empty tunnels for the foreseeable future).

Mass transit has been given short shrift in this country, the automobile is still king and policy seems to think this is still the 1950's..meanwhile, in the burbs where I live, highways during rush hour are bursting at the seams and people are moaning and complaining about how it takes 45 minutes to drive 10 miles....and when it comes to spending on transportation, expanding highways and working on roads is funded at levels that make mass transit look puny. In solving issues with energy, instead of looking at ways of making mass transit more available to people, the answer is to find ways to make cars either more efficient or develop alternative fuels/technology (for the record, I am not anti car, too much of a gearhead for that, but I am against cars being used where mass transit should be used).

What amazes me is places see huge increases in population and they never think about how those people will get around. Office parks and new developments go up in the burbs, and people are shocked to find traffic follows (and of course, office parks are built here and there, wherever they get the best deal, housing is built wherever, then they wonder why traffic is screwed up). Part of the problem is that many of the same people who complain about traffic,about the difficulty of commuting, associate mass transit with socialism or 'loss of freedom'. Even in NYC, where the population has increased more then a million people since the 1970's, the transit system has stayed static (improved many fold from those days of graffitti covered decaying wrecks of trains), but still static.