It was a business trip, so many of my expenses were paid, and I was there for seven full days and nights, which gave me the sort of opportunity to experience the city that I’d never had on any of my previous half-dozen or so visits. Indeed, I went into the week with a very, very sketchy mental map of London, and now have a very clear one — at least of the central and eastern parts where I spent the most time, Mayfair to Hackney or thereabouts.

I vastly preferred the bus to the Tube — the Oyster card works the same on both, maps and signage at the stops are exceedingly clear, every stop is clearly announced, and from the top of a London bus you can actually see what you’re passing through. (Only once in the week did I see a single bus stop without a full complement of maps; entertainingly, it was when waiting for the night bus with a group of logic-impaired drunks, who took forever to decide whether to walk in the direction of Old Street or Shoreditch High Street. Shortly after they left, their bus arrived.) And London is proof that clearly marked bus lanes (separated or not), enforced with lane cameras, make the bus an efficient choice even in heavy traffic. Londoners complain about
TfL, but it seems exceptionally well-managed to me. I even got to ride the East London Overground line, which has barely been open six months.

Most of the week I was at our office, in Clerkenwell, with some limited tourist time in the evenings — which I mostly spent shopping and orienting myself with regard to the central landmarks, though I didn’t do much in the way of touristy things — but I spent the Sunday and the Saturday roaming from Soho to Islington to Brixton trying to see things a bit off the tourist path. I spent a lovely afternoon in Stoke Newington with my new friends Graham and Keri, eating gourmet fish and chips and sipping espresso beside a neighborhood high street. And I took myself to Brixton, expecting — well, I’m not sure what I was expecting, but what I got felt more or less like Flatbush, only with a well-stocked Marks & Spencer and vastly better transit connections. Here’s a map of my Saturday adventures.

If you want more of this (God help you), including dozens of photos, take a look at my Twitter feed for the week of 13 September.

In a stroke of great good fortune, I get to go back to London next month, so I’m sure I’ll have more to say.

The occasion is this story about cafe life in Portland — you can read it. Myrick’s point is that if you want people to organically gather on the streets of your neighborhood, you need food and drink, suitable for all ages and stages in the community, sold and served in a way that lets people consume them in an organic fashion outdoors or visible from the street.

All true. But argh!

I don’t disagree with any of this, it’s all true, and I mean no disrespect to the exceptionally committed people at PPS — my reaction is more a sense of frustration and missed opportunity that this isn’t intuitively obvious, that it has to be said, and re-said, and re-re-said every decade or so, to every generation. If you, dear reader, are just figuring this out now, what have you been doing to your own downtown for the past 25 years? And how many young people have you driven away, how many working-age people have you effectively locked in their office buildings all day for how many days/weeks/years, how many old people have you consigned to spend their waning days sitting in their apartments (or, worse, sitting on a bench in the mall) because there’s nowhere worth going to?

Let’s get with it, America!

Anyone older than about 60 who grew up in a healthy community probably already knows that food is at the center of everything social. Nevermind community events like church socials and picnics — every town over a thousand people had a drugstore, with big plate-glass windows and a soda fountain or lunch counter, once upon a time, where you could see people going about the private business of eating in a semi-public way. And even younger people know it, if we’ve lived part of our lives in a healthy big city. I was living in the newly minted municipality of West Hollywood when the first round of modern artisanal coffehouses appeared in the early 1990s; the moment cafes started to appear, whole new populations began to use the street. Nothing has driven the sidewalk re-revitalization of Santa Monica Boulevard over the past decade more than streetfront dining.

Closer to home, think of New York: the most transformational change to the streetscape in the five years I’ve been here has been the simple addition of lots of chairs and tables all over the place, including in what used to be traffic lanes in the middle of Times Square. People want to sit down and, very often, eat and drink, in public. What are the healthiest public spaces in Lower Manhattan? One of them is Stone Street, which today is given over almost entirely to street dining. (Photo above: the pop-up cafe thrown up by the DOT on nearby Pearl Street last month.)

Or look at the opposite case. I was on a message-board thread this week about Fulton Mall, the tattered retail strip in downtown Brooklyn that (due to the volume of people passing through, and the lack of local alternatives) commands among the highest retail rents in New York City, despite the fact that nobody can stand it. Sure, Fulton Mall is filthy and disorderly and way too crowded, but if you’ve ever been to, say, the Venice boardwalk in Los Angeles, you know that filth and disorder and crowds are not sufficient to make a place unlovable. There’s something else. And something landscape designer Gil Lopez said on the list reminded me that one of the reasons everyone hates Fulton Mall is also one of the most obvious: there’s nothing to eat except junk, and there’s nowhere to sit down and eat it!

Which is why I’m always excited to see signage like this in American cities, in urban cores and near transit stations and so forth. (This photo courtesy of John Massengale.)

Actually, that’s London, which isn’t an American city, and of course they do it better than we do, but increasingly it’s showing up here, too. Like in this photo — you can see a large, easy-to-use city map on the oblique (left-facing) side of the kiosk at right, which are placed all around the central core of …

… Montreal. Doh! But I swear, Americans are catching up, at their typical slow-but-steady pace. And the quality is improving. WMATA just announced that they’re improving their walk maps in Metro stations. A sample (click map image to enlarge; download full map, 2.7 MB PDF):

That map’s too busy, but it’s a lot better than the current iteration. We need more of this — this sort of thing is part of the evidence people need that changing their longstanding behavior is a rational thing to consider.

Like most positive assessments of LA’s urban scene throughout my life (including some that have come out of my own mouth over the years), this one seems like it’s reaching a bit — in particular, I don’t think the spaces among all those downtown microneighborhoods are so “easily [navigable] on foot or on a bike” — but the fundamental point he’s making is right on:

Gentrification has decelerated in several parts of downtown into a kind of limbo, leaving them sufficiently changed to feel newly vital but not enough to seem overexposed. At the same time, plummeting housing prices and the conversion of several ill-fated condo projects into rental buildings means not only that the area is continuing to attract new residents but also that it may see a more compelling mixture of people — more teachers and designers, fewer real-estate speculators — than it did when forgettable two-bedroom units were selling for $800,000.

Something similar is happening in New York. Nevermind the neighborhoods that shouldn’t have been gentrifying at all, and wouldn’t have been if the market hadn’t gone crazy. Whole desirable swaths of the city — including parts of Manhattan, like the Financial District where I live — have become living choices again for people whose means are within the range of “ordinary.” And the projects representing the worst of the excess (on the Williamsburg waterfront, and the far West Side) are mostly in trouble, and at the very least have had to ratchet back the most odious of their marketing in order to attract a broader range of clientele.

I pay more to live here than I was paying in Brooklyn — but if rents hadn’t tumbled a year ago, I wouldn’t have considered it. And there’s a much wider range of people living down here than there was two years ago — and a lot wider than a few blocks away in Tribeca, which has managed to hold its position as the most expensive neighborhood in the city.

I enjoyed my visit to downtown LA last spring, and can see the evidence of revitalization everywhere. It was exciting, given that I don’t think I ever knew a single person who lived or played downtown in the first 30 years I was alive. No one would be happier than me to see the central core continue its upswing, so I’m glad to see Hawthorne shining some light on the things that are worth paying attention to.

See for yourself. Via Information Aesthetics, via Chris Lysy.

There’s a piece of the project that isn’t about the World Trade tower reconstruction, isn’t about the memorial, that’s much more important than these to those of us who live down here. And that’s the Fulton Street Transit Center construction, which is just over halfway through its nine-year construction. It got a kick in the pants from the WTC project, and a $424-million-dollar jolt of energy from the stimulus, but we needed it in any case.

Being built mostly by Skanska USA, the Swedish construction behemoth you’ve never heard of but that dominates civil engineering projects here in New York, the project will link 13 underground train lines that currently pass through about six unconnected station complexes, serving hundreds of thousands of people a day. These train lines currently run through infrastructure that’s as old as the subway system itself, and they all have to continue running throughout the duration of the project, so this constitutes a massive project from the standpoint of both capital investment and logistics.

We see the logistics everywhere in Lower Manhattan, where we’re constantly detouring around construction equipment, Skanska employees, and Jersey barriers on the sidewalk and in the street. Fulton Street has been torn up, for this and other projects, the entire time I’ve been living in New York. (DeLury Park opens next month!) But the project is sorely needed, and those of us living and working down here are trying to be patient. When it’s done, we’ll have a shiny new station and vastly improved transit usability down here in Manhattan’s original dense urban neighborhood.

Well, here’s a fun fact: the baseball game near the end of the movie was filmed in Encino Park, across from my elementary school — on the very same baseball diamond where we once played a “students vs. teachers” softball game when I was in the sixth grade — which was, incidentally, right about the same time the movie was made. In fact, if you squint, in one scene you can see my school across the street.

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Also filmed in and around Encino Park: parts of Where Have All the People Gone (1974), an unjustly forgotten low-rent sci-fi flick.

Incidentally, while Googling for that, I found this gem (click for more), courtesy of Encino realtors Marsia and Eugene Powers:

In theory I get around to reading all these; in practice, I read the ones that look interesting and accumulate the others until the next winnowing. But at least I got to touch them and look at them. That’s something, isn’t it?

Today’s arrival, which someone from one of the many urbanism lists I’m on recommended: My Kind of Transit: Rethinking Public Transportation in America, by Darrin Nordahl.

I’ve used the BIXI bikes myself, and I think this is a great implementation of bike share: well-designed bikes, easy-to-understand rental system, pricing that’s advantageous for heavy users, hardy infrastructure.

Photo credit: yours truly

Also, the green point-of-interest signs I mentioned are called “trailblazer signs” by the DOT.

Regarding the decades-out-of-date Ed Koch sign: we visually pinpointed the location tonight as we went past at 60mph, and it’s within a block or two of Southern Boulevard and Leggett Avenue in the Bronx.

Three observations today:

(1) Who is the woman on the main PA system in Penn Station during the day shift? I really like her voice: authoritative, knowledgeable, confident, calm.

(2) I don’t understand the point of the ticket-checking in the Amtrak terminal at the track gates. It obviously isn’t security, because all the tracks are accessible via unguarded open doors on the lower concourse.

Most people wait for their trains to be posted on the big board, and then rush to a chokepoint of a gate to stand in line and show their tickets — but why? If you go down the escalator and stand at the little monitor, you can see the train posted at the very same time it appears on the big board — and then walk right onto the track through the open door, beating most of the crowd.

Even better, the ticketed waiting areas have separate terminals showing arrivals as well as departures, just like in the airport. The departure terminal shows what’s on the big board, but if you’re waiting for a through train (as most Penn Station Amtrak passengers are), your train will show up on the arrivals monitor five or ten minutes before the track is posted on the big board. (See train no. 95 in the photo below.). If you trust the laws of physics — as I do — then you can assume that a train that arrives at track no. 10 will also depart from track no. 10, and head for the lower-level door as soon as the arrival track is posted.

(3) Hooray for the quiet car — which not only exists on most Amtrak trains nowadays but also seems to be enforced, often to library standards — from which i am writing you now.

Most of the trends in favor of plug-in vehicles are strongest in densely populated urban cores. The city is obviously where the people are. It’s often where the disposable income is, where the densest “green” sentiment is, and where the willingness to spend the one in the service of the other can often be found, It’s also, frankly, where you’ll find people who can most easily tolerate the compromises associated with electric cars (smaller passenger and cargo capacities, shorter ranges), because their lifestyles are already organized around less frequent trips and less hauling. This in part is due to the presence of alternatives, in the form of community infrastructure that’s already built and paid for, social habits like “walking your own groceries home,” and traditional market responses like neighborhood delivery.

Unfortunately, electric cars will only begin to gain market share with the advent of a charging infrastructure that’s as convenient (all things being equal) as the existing filling station infrastructure. That’s a very high bar to clear, and it’s much higher in congested urban areas like New York, where even filling stations (whose economics are clear and long established) are disappearing, crowded out by other land uses with (presumably) better short-term returns.

What this presumably means is a couple of things:

(1) In the US, initial electric car adoption will start off highest in certain affluent suburbs, and will be driven largely by in-home garage charging infrastructure, at the will of individual homeowners. This isn’t optimal for society: on balance, electric cars probably do more social good per unit in Hoboken or Somerville, where average trips are shorter and the marginal congestion externalities are greater, than in Santa Monica or the San Fernando Valley. But Santa Monica and Studio City are where the “green” money is, so expect the fun to start there.

(2) There’s a network effect at play here, so if you believe that widespread adoption of electric cars sooner rather than later would be good for society, you should also support subsidies for early development of public charging infrastructure so that the tipping point comes sooner. It probably doesn’t matter how those subsidies are structured — the more active the public sector is able to be, the more quickly the public charging infrastructure will grow.

(3) What I’m waiting for: car sharing (on the Zipcar model) paired with electric vehicles and charging “docks” where the cars live. Zipcar is doubtless already heading in this direction. This will require consumer-friendly (i.e., idiotproof) “miles remaining” indicators and dependable batteries (you wouldn’t want to end up unexpectedly dead in the middle of nowhere because the car was mistaken about how much range it had left), not to mention some consumer retraining (“sir, before I complete your reservation, please acknowledge your awareness that this is a short-range vehicle by saying the word ‘yes’ after the tone”), and there will be hiccups, but in the long run this model will work, and an early version of it will probably be here relatively soon, in the context of the electric car adoption curve.

I wasn’t disappointed. This is a kind of sci-fi I’ve always liked: urban and social in orientation, set in a future or alternative present that’s a recognizable evolution (or imaginary transformation) of our own. In this case the transformation is far less than you’d see in, say, Ursula Le Guin; this is fully recognizable as our realistic near future, the way that (say) Oryx and Crake is.

It doesn’t hurt that there’s nanotechnology here and there, along with Internet goggles (described in detail as to their function) that would fit right into a Rudy Rucker or Cory Doctorow story.

The basic premise is that we’re in a postindustrial near future, or at least that resource shortages and climate change and the inevitable social strife have started taking their toll. The oil-based industrial economy is obviously still functioning in the background, to some degree for some people, but we’re a fair distance along a long road of decline toward Jim Kunstler’s post-industrial America. And those who can are taking refuge in isolated, protected urban arcologies — built around or on the bones of the old American cities — that are very different from one another.

According to Scalzi’s intro, the five of them got together ahead of time to set the ground rules and define the rough social structure of their not-too-distant-future world, and although the five stories are very different, there’s enough thematic continuity running through them that you do indeed feel like they’re five different takes on the same set of social conditions in the same world at the same time. Great job.

Bonus: implied gay social relations in two of the stories, in both instances treated so matter-of-factly that I almost missed it and had to back up to be sure. Go team!

Incidentally, this project was an audiobook first and a book afterwards; to some of you that will be notable, but as I will never have either the time or the patience for an audiobook, it’s merely one fact among many others to me.

When I lived in Jersey City and worked at home, the car had practical usefulness: not only did I have it available for daily shopping and errands, but on evenings and weekends I was 10 minutes via the Holland Tunnel from Lower Manhattan, where evening and weekend street parking is pretty easy to find.

After that, in inner Brooklyn, I lived in a neighborhood where storing a car on the street was possible, if not convenient, as long as you resigned yourself to one street cleaning ticket a month; I got fewer than that, on average, and still had the car available not just for weekend trips, but also for on-demand use when the need arose.

Moving back into Manhattan, however, has pretty much eliminated the on-demand use, because my car now lives in a parking lot across the Brooklyn Bridge in downtown Brooklyn, 4 subway stops from my apartment or a $9 cab ride each way. Yes, dear reader, my car and I live in different boroughs, and as I write this, I’m just back from dropping the car off at the end of the weekend and coming home in a taxi.

What makes this crazy-sounding situation rational is the pricing. Manhattan parking is priced like the scarce resource it is — in the $400-600/month range with very rare exceptions — and so I save upwards of $300 a month this way, even taking into account those taxi rides over the bridge. And this despite the fact that the category of parking I pay for, “storage,” requires me to fork over an additional 5 bucks plus a tip each time I pick up the car. (I can still get at the car 24/7, I just need to pay the 5 bucks each time I do.)

Now that I’m so used to the situation that I no longer dwell on its apparent absurdity, let me make a few observations:

Storage parking is a good idea. People like me are willing to live with a little inconvenience in exchange for saving a lot of money, and everybody wins: the garage keeps occupancy incrementally higher, the city gets a bit more parking tax, and I have a place to park.

My willingness to park in Brooklyn is evidence of a healthy market, not evidence that I’m somehow being “forced” to do something I “don’t want” to do. On the continuum between cost and inconvenience (given the underlying economics of providing this good in this city at this time), it so happens that a vendor is occupying the very position that I feel maximizes my happiness. Lucky me! This is a good thing, and in general, fostering new and creative ways of letting buyers and sellers “settle” their supply/demand transactions is a good thing. Let a million flowers bloom.

To whatever extent I’m typical, congestion pricing will work. I’m responding to a market disincentive (a $5 per-use fee plus inconvenience valued at $X) by using the car only when I really need it. I can afford the 5 bucks whenever I decide it’s worthwhile or don’t have an easy alternative, but every time I choose not to, that’s an incremental bit of public benefit in the form of foregone externality. There have been dozens of times when I opted for the subway because getting the car out seemed like too much of a pain. There have even been a couple of hauling jobs where, all things considered, it made sense to leave the car parked in Brooklyn and pick up a Zipcar on 7th Avenue, and I did.

It should be hard to have a car in the city! The infrastructure needed to support city cars is finite and expensive, and the land used for parking in Manhattan comes out of the same finite supply of land that’s used for everything else on this narrow island. We’ve made a philosophical decision as a society that most of our automotive infrastructure will be supported out of general revenues, but at the margins, whatever portion we can allocate back to the users will help keep the market for that scarce resource a little more honest, by discouraging whatever portion of demand can be satisfied just as well by less socially onerous means.

Your price may vary. There may be times when that 25 minutes you save on the Acela between New York and Washington really are worth the extra money; but this morning I’m on the Keystone to Philadelphia, which is a good hundred bucks cheaper than the morning Acela, and (more surprisingly) 40 bucks cheaper than the Northeast Regional service that leaves and arrives 10 minutes later. I’m not sure why, since between here and Philadelphia it runs on the same tracks to the same station at roughly the same speed, but it doesn’t matter; I’m no fool, and a $46 ride beats a $150 ride any day.

Newark Penn Station is a secret that ought to get out. From Lower Manhattan, where I live, it’s an easy 20-minute PATH ride to Newark, where I can catch the southbound trains about 16 minutes into their routes. Given the inconvenience and general ugliness of Penn Station, this is much preferable; the Newark concourse has everything I care about that the Penn concourse has (including a Zaro’s) but your schlepping is cut by 80 percent. Not to mention the fact that in the early morning, I can leave my house half an hour before the train leaves Penn Station and still head it off at Newark, with time to spare to load up on coffee. Try that on the C train. Which leads me to…

Bring your own mug. It sounds ridiculous, but trust me. Navigating the station and negotiating a crowded train car is much easier if you’re carrying your coffee in a metal mug with a tightly seated lid, rather than whatever paper/plastic combo you happen to be handed at the coffee spot. I know you’re thinking “I don’t want to schlep that thing all the way back to New York later,” but, again, trust me, it fits in the bottom of your briefcase, and the morning benefit is worth the incremental evening inconvenience. Just try it. I use a nothing-special stainless mug with a plastic top, which I bought at the Edgewood Target in Atlanta about 5 years ago for under 10 bucks.

More news as it develops.

To those of us who came to live in the city in the last decade, it’s sometimes difficult to imagine the Upper West Side, and New York City generally, as Podhoretz (like Saul Bellow, and a parade of others) assures us it was: physically neglected and crumbling, the social fabric frayed, at times menacing to the point of anarchy. Neighborhoods that today are overrun with $900 strollers and yoga studios and some of the most expensive brownstone real estate in the city can be difficult to imagine otherwise. But it was not always this way, and the documentary evidence exists of how it used to be: in the Times, in contemporary news footage and in the photo archive of the Museum of the City of New York (seen in the current exhibit and in the “Lindsay Years” documentary recently shown on WNET), in the memories of three generations of people born between 1920 and 1980. All those people didn’t move to Westchester and Merrick (and, on the coast I grew up in, to Northridge and Anaheim and Walnut Creek) for nothing; they were searching for a place where they could be free of the weight of a place where (in their view) the social contract seemed to have broken down. I knew a family of Brooklyn refugees in the San Fernando Valley in my early childhood; they obviously longed for the sweet place they had known, but they longed for it with (as I inferred) the resolution of people who knew that, at least for now, it was gone.

Even I am old enough to have had experience of New York in its anarchic and menacing days, or at least the tail end of them, in the 1980s, when the chattering classes were unified in the sense that something had to change — that the old responses to the breakdown of the old ways weren’t going to work — but nobody was yet quite sure how to pull it off. When I first visited the city in 1982, the overwhelming impression was of a place where people had lost the daily experience of routine social order, though they never lost the hope of regaining it. A city where armed guards sit in the entranceways of college dormitories is a city that is gritting its teeth in the face of an onslaught it can’t quite marshal the resources to defeat, waiting for a savior to come along.

We all know what happened: the city bounced back, changed in some ways but not in others. Podhoretz seems pretty emphatic that all the changes are for the better; I’m not so sure. The corporatization and homogenization of the city have exacted their costs (most notably in pushing popular cultural activity out of the central core). But, re Podhoretz, what right have I to expect otherwise from someone who in childhood was serially mugged, grew up in a world where assault was routine, watched a generation of failed attempts to tame the chaos in his own neighborhood? If you’re the one being punched in the face and knocked to the ground, it’s hard to take the long view.

The parochialism would grate eventually (as it did when I lived in Atlanta, Washington, and for that matter San Francisco), but then in Philadelphia you’re so close to so many other interesting places, including New York, that I don’t think it would matter as much.

Coming later today: bonus pic of me on a park bench with Ben Franklin.

Ryan points out that for many people in neighborhoods like Bushwick, Williamsburg, and Ridgewood, life will actually improve, because they’ll now have a one-train route into Manhattan.

Fresno’s Fulton Mall pedestrianization project (which was originally planned to cover roughly a 20-square-block area) was the largest of its kind I’m aware of in any American city, and was hailed (in part by Gruen) as a transformative model. We all know what happened to those pedestrian malls, which were all the rage for about 10 years; their regravitation of their city centers was no match for the centrifugal force of suburbanization, and in any case (we know now) came too late. With very rare exceptions (like Miami Beach’s Lincoln Road and Santa Monica’s Third Street, both of which have been carefully curated and serve populations that include hundreds of thousands of strolling tourists), this kind of brutal pedestrianization has been a failure, at least on its own terms. (In contrast, more organic and porous pedestrianization and “auto diet” programs very often work well, like the new plazas along Broadway in Times and Herald Squares.) Only a force greater than urban renewal — namely, the organic reurbanization of America over the past fifteen or so years — has been able to start bringing the people back to places like these and reanimating them with some of the spirit they were originally intended to have.

This video is worth a watch if only to capture the sense of hopefulness in the narrator’s voice. There’s a wistfulness to the experience. Everyone was so sure this was going to solve everything! In Fresno, I can assure you (having stood on Fulton Mall myself roughly halfway through its current lifetime), it didn’t. Despite the blistering heat in the summer of 1986, I enjoyed my visit to Fresno, which had a sense of place and pride that was missing in the suburban neighborhood I grew up in; but it was in spite of, not because of, Fulton Mall. But oh, how I wanted to believe!

History and photos are on the excellent Downtown Association of Fresno Web site, which is also the source of the postcard photo you see above.

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Accreted urban infrastructure (today’s, yesterday’s, Robert Moses’, and on and on back to whatever motley crew of Dutch and English filled in Lower Manhattan’s canals) is everywhere in New York. Indeed, metro NYC must benefit from the densest infrastructure (especially given its land area) of any settled place in human history, with the possible exception of London. And infrastructure is the single most important reason that New York, and especially Manhattan, remains such a desirable place to live and do business. Infrastructure is what makes Manhattan levels of density bearable in the first place, which in turn enables all the positive second-order social effects of such a dense environment.

And all that infrastructure is the result of hundreds or thousands of smart, forward-looking choices made over the past 300 years.

Consider the infrastructure I’m using right now: from where I live and work, I have my choice of two separate and mostly non-overlapping public transit pathways to JFK, and three or more to Newark Airport. All of of those routes will get me to their respective airports in about an hour, give or take; all cost about $12 or less. (Apparently, Google Maps’ transit planner isn’t yet aware of the Newark AirTrain; any human smart enough to make it to Newark Penn Station can probably do better than Google thinks.) We in New York take these things for granted, but they should not be taken for granted, as a visit to any place of comparable size with an “infrastructure gap” (like, for instance, Los Angeles, where I grew up) will make immediately clear to you.

Those smart choices didn’t happen by accident; in each case, someone decided that they were worth the pain and cost of planning, construction, ongoing operating subsidies perhaps forever. (Don’t discount the costs of coordination and promotion, either: the fact that I consider “A train to Penn Station; LIRR commuter rail to Jamaica; Port Authority dedicated rail to the terminal” as simply “the train to JFK” constitutes a marketing triumph by the Port Authority.) And each component of these systems took years, sometimes decades, to put in place. New York City has been extending and tinkering with the subway system more or less continuously for 106 years.

What are we going to need in 50 years? 100 years? We’d better get moving.

Now, if only someone would build a dedicated high-speed link to La Guardia Airport, we’d be in business. Then again, La Guardia is the most overtaxed (and the most convenient to the central core) of our three major airports, so it was probably smart policy to link to the others first.