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Status:
"Let this year be over..."
(set 22 days ago)
Location: Where my bills arrive
19,219 posts, read 17,091,524 times
Reputation: 15538
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Joe461
That's probably why the crossing was part of the original area highway plan. It wasn't killed because it didn't make sense. It was killed because some people didn't want outsiders driving through their towns. They still don't, which is why they have their own police department and "resident" stickers on their cars so the police know who don't belong there. Not to mention the poor road infrastructure. That's the North Shore of LI..
I think it was killed because Robert Moses had very grandiose ideas and not every concept was feasible.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Joe461
True. But Greenwich and Stamford have grown tremendously in the past few decades. A Syosset/Rye connection would make Long Island a viable place for commuters to live. (In theory, it might also allow businesses to locate here by giving access to the pool of workers currently in Stamford/Greenwich, along with viable road access to the rest of the country).
The connection makes a driving commute to Greenwich or Stamford about the same as an LIRR commute (and less time than a rush hour drive) to Manhattan for many people.
Regardless of their growth I think a person working Greenwich/Stamford area commuting from Syosset is not the best choice, they should consider living somewhere on the other side. Just as the people working in Manhattan who are commuting from Pennsylvania, too extreme to be practical 5 days a week.
Last edited by VA Yankee; 06-13-2018 at 08:27 PM..
Not counting that the ferry goes to Bridgeport, which limits its usefulness to points North/East and New England. Anyone commuting to Stamford/Greenwich/Port Chester or those trying to access the rest of NYS or points west/south still have a long drive south on 95.How does that limit it's usefulness? Almost all of New England is east of Route 8, which runs north from Bridgeport. With the exception of a small slice of CT, MA & VT, most of NE can be easily accessed by departing from the ferry.
Even if you live a block away from the departure point and you cut the sailing time down to 30 minutes, it is still longer than driving when you add the extra time for arriving early. How do you figure?
Living within a few miles, an having a constant departure time I know that it will take me X number of minutes to be in Bridgeport vs. the unknown traffic/accident potential of the NSP or LIE.
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Bear in mind that most of us on LI have to travel west to get off LI in order to travel east into New England.
The question is how far east do you have to go on LI to get to PJ vs how far east you need to go in CT. It is almost as though we backtrack since we have to go west to get off LI and then back east to get where we are going.
How could ythey make it and it would go under the water and if it is a bridge it would be very very big? You can do it and get their on a boat called ferry and put cars on it even so why do they need it?
The bridge would go from Mount Misery straight to Salem, Massachusetts...
If the tunnel starts anywhere near the SOB (which I believe is where the idea is currently heading) it is a relatively minor issue to connect it right to the expressway.
On the Rye side, the I-95/287 interchange is right next to the Sound. Essentially, it would be connecting one Expressway to another. No local streets involved.
Your points about rail are well taken. I agree that rail should be a part of the plan for many of the reasons you mention. I also don't think that's going to happen.
Currently, I doubt many commute from Eastern Nassau or Suffolk to Rye or points beyond. A connection (rail and/or car) could change that but it would take years (if it ever happened).
I also don't believe that the majority of traffic creating the eternal bottleneck we currently have is vacation traffic.
There is a considerable amount of truck traffic and other commerce that goes on between Long Island and the continent. A commuter rail line doesn't help any of that. A rail line MIGHT open up things by giving Long Islanders more employment options, but it does nothing to address the traffic situation or improve access for all the non-commuters currently creating the traffic problem.
Do you reckon they'd tunnel far into Long Island and on to the SOB? I hadn't thought about that, but that makes sense. The tunneling cost when on land isn't usually terrible (unless you do something like how New York state goes about it with crew sizes two to three times what is standard in the rest of the developed world) and vents and emergency access are easier to make.
I think electric rail should be the only part of the plan for reasons mentioned earlier. Currently, people don't commute from Long Island to Westchester or Connecticut cities very much, because that would be fricking awful. That can be changed by this, but there'd have to be some pretty strong job centers developed for that to be worthwhile.
One thought occurred to me is to have part of this potential rail route split with the Oyster Bay Branch and then another that forks from the Port Washington Branch. One potential route is to make this Port Washington Branch split east of the Great Neck stop which is heavily used and go underneath Northern Boulevard with maybe a station at Port Washington Boulevard (and/or W Shore Drive) before surfacing and joining with the Oyster Bay Branch west of the Greenvale stop. Flushing Main Street is now a major business and retail district so there's that to anchor it as well as events at Mets-Willet Point. It'd also make the dumb AirTrain proposal for LaGuardia somewhat more useful if they end up going through with that. One other note is that supposedly much of the right-of-way for the West Hempstead Branch to Mineola that used to have running trains (and with some work, potentially can connect to the Oyster Bay Branch, and thus, this tunnel) is still intact. So supposedly, there's quite a bit of the system and Long Island that can be tapped into.
Again, though, definitely doesn't seem like a priority given the many other major infrastructural projects (including reorganizing the agencies and how they do build, maintain and operate) that already in need of work in the Tri-State Area.
I've been thinking about how mixed rail/freight operations used to run and I'm wondering if at some point a better containerization and automated loading/unloading can be done where these things can be done fast and efficient enough to again make double use of the commuter rail lines of the Tri-State Area do double-duty during off-peak hours with short spur lines breaking off from the passenger routes in places and then local trucks doing the short last mile. In abstract, this seems reasonable and should be feasible given the major advances in automation and computer vision, but who knows.
Last edited by OyCrumbler; 06-14-2018 at 03:28 PM..
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