Henry Grabar details radical reconceptions of 14th Street in response to the city’s scant plans to adjust to the L Train closure.
“Last summer, I had hoped the shutdown would force “an all-out reconsideration of the way that New York City uses its most transparently mismanaged asset: its streets.” You’d need to run a full, double-length bus into Manhattan every 12 seconds to replace the subway’s rush hour capacity. But nine months later, neither New York City’s Department of Transportation nor the state-run MTA has released a plan, which increases the odds that whatever is devised will be slapdash effort mired in parochial political concerns.
Officials believe 80 to 85 percent of riders will take other subway lines, an outcome that would see tens of thousands of new riders transferred to other lines—including the 7 and A/C trains—that are already at or near capacity. It will be messy unless the city tries to make surface transportation competitive with the subway.”
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New York’s Coming Subway Crisis Is a Chance to Try Something Radical. Instead the City Has No Plan., Slate