To consolidate, disseminate, and gather information concerning the 710 expansion into our San Rafael neighborhood and into our surrounding neighborhoods. If you have an item that you would like posted on this blog, please e-mail the item to Peggy Drouet at pdrouet@earthlink.net
Wednesday, September 17, 2014
Next Up For Brooklyn, an Urban Gondola
The East River Skyway aims to alleviate transit congestion along the Brooklyn waterfront by taking commuters off the grid.
By Kriston Capps, September 16, 2014
Certain neighborhoods in Brooklyn have earned a
reputation for their whimsicality. This proposal won't help counter that
stereotype one bit. But it might make it a little easier to get around
New York's fastest-growing waterfront areas.
The East River Skyway
is a proposal for a multi-phase urban gondola to connect the growing
residential and commercial corridors between Manhattan, Brooklyn, and
Queens. The proposal calls for an aerial transit system to be built out
in stages, with the first line connecting the Lower East Side and
Williamsburg. Subsequent lines might include a connection between Lower
Manhattan, Dumbo, and Brooklyn Navy Yard, as well as a line threading
between Midtown, Roosevelt Island, Long Island City, and Williamsburg.
The Skyway is the brainchild of Daniel Levy, president of CityRealty,
an online real-estate company—though it is not his idea alone, of
course. The Skyway builds off the successes of the Roosevelt Island
Tram, which Creative Urban Projects president (and Gondola Project evangelist) Steven Dale describes in a release as "the most reliable piece of transportation in New York."
Can
that earnest but modest success be replicated across a broad swath of
New York? There's not enough detail in this early-stage proposal to say
for sure, but the general outline sure sounds pleasant. A cable car
could convey riders from Williamsburg to Manhattan in under 4 minutes.
More than 5,000 people could take the gondola in each direction in an
hour, according to CityRealty.
While an urban gondola might sound rather fantastical for Brooklyn—or
all too fitting, depending on your read of the place—it's a transit
option that's increasingly viable. Oregon Health & Science
University operates and largely funds the Portland Aerial Tram, which
ferries riders from Portland's South Waterfront neighborhood to the
university's Marquam Hill campus. While that's the only other urban
gondola system in the U.S., Frog Design sketched up a mass-transit gondola system for Austin called the Wire two years ago.
Outside
the U.S., urban gondolas are more common, especially in South America,
where a few major metro areas have really taken to them. MedellĂn,
Colombia—which kicked off the urban-gondola transit revolution
in 2004—announced the construction of a third Metrocable line last
week. In La Paz, Bolivia, the third and longest line of the city's
gondola system, the Yellow Line, started operations yesterday. The city
of Manizales, Columbia, joins Caracas and Rio de Janeiro as cities that
have embraced the gondola as a form of mass transit. Santiago has one in
the works.
Many more gondola systems are built in places like Squamish, British Columbia—the
"Outdoor Recreation Capital of Canada"—where it serves primarily as a
draw for sightseers. (Though Squamish is close enough to Vancouver that
the gondola is probably used by some who work in Vancouver but call
Squamish home.) Whether it works for Brooklyn depends in part on how
well the existing transit infrastructure can meet ridership needs,
especially as new housing projects emerge at the former Domino Sugar
Factory, Greenpoint Landing, and Brooklyn Navy Yard.
Levy's report notes that expanding additional infrastructure is
difficult. (Some Brooklynites, especially existing homeowners, cite the
strain on infrastructure as a reason to challenge new housing
developments across the borough.) The CityRealty report notes that
ridership at the Bedford Avenue station has increased 50 percent since
2007. If you had any question about the riders the East River Skyway
gondola aims to serve, it's gentrifiers.
It's not clear that ridership in Williamsburg is close to capacity, though. As Stephen Jacob Smith reported in The New York Observer
last year, the L Train boasts a maximum rush-hour capacity of 26 trains
per hour. A bit more than the current capacity, and a lot more than the
present load for nights and weekends.
"The L’s excess capacity is measured in the tens of thousands
of riders per day, while [Domino developer] Jed Walentas is only looking
to add 2,284 new apartments to the waterfront—apartments that will be
as close to the Marcy Avenue stop on the J/M/Z as they are to the
Bedford Avenue L," Smith writes.
Which is not to say that a gondola couldn't help matters,
especially when mega-projects like Greenpoint Landing come online. The
urban cable car can also prove cheaper to build than alternatives.
"Running subway lines under a city can cost about $400 million
per mile," said Michael McDaniel, a designer with the firm looking to
bring the gondola to Austin, in an interview with Marketplace. "Light
rails systems run about $36 million per mile. But the aerial ropeways
required to run gondolas cost just $3 million to $12 million to install
per mile."
Building
a gondola line in Dumbo, Williamsburg, or Long Island City is a
different proposition than building one in Austin or Portland. Not just
because the costs would be higher (though they probably would). Building
a transit system that appears to benefit the most promising parcels in
gentrifying New York has greater obstacles to overcome than cost.