Rails to Trails

One of the little realized resources of many regions is the underused/unused rail network. Many areas have turned rails to trails, and have created narrow parks that are miles in length. However, each path taken out of rail service and turned into a trail makes it virtually impossible to reuse these paths for commuter transit when population density justifies new railroad lines be established.

New York City has a surfeit of transit options, compared to what we could have had with proper planning.  If we had preserved the 3rd Avenue el until an underground line was built along 2nd Avenue, I'd have an easy commute to Lower Manhattan.  And if you think I have a hard time, think of the people who have to transit the boroughs without having Manhattan as a destination or starting point.  With the exception of one subway line (the G line), there is nothing that facilitates interborough (non-Manhattan) transit.

Of course, we still have a lot of options, but the NIMBYs would kill them all before anything came to fruition.  For example, we have an abandoned right of way that could connect the Rockaways to Kew Gardens (with a minor/short tunnel for a connection to the Queens Boulevard line).  But the people who live adjacent to this right of way want it turned into a park - even though we need greater amounts of non-street running mass transit in this region.  

I live near a rail trail on which passenger service was halted in the late 1950's.  The above picture was taken on this trail - and I would miss this rail trail if it were gone.  The New York Central railroad killed the line because it couldn't take non-electric trains into Grand Central. Today, I take a diesel train into Grand Central, and the engine is running in electric mode from Croton into Grand Central.  The same could be done with a reactivated Putnam Division - if rail were to be relaid along that path.

On the other side of the Hudson lies the West Shore Line.  The New York Central first killed off ferry service from Weehawken to Manhattan, so that it could eliminate the demand for passenger trains along the line.  Once the passengers abandoned the line, the railroad killed passenger service with government permission.  50 years later, the ferries are back, and there is no passenger service from the North to feed them.

There comes a point where a city starts to fail because of a lack of mass transit options. And I think that New York is perilously close to that point.  There are sections of Manhattan that I absolutely refuse to visit, simply because I can't reach them with convenient mass transit. Yet, the outer boroughs are even worse.  In Brooklyn, many of the els were removed - one of them being the Myrtle Avenue line.  If that el was there today, it'd be packed!

It's about time that we start to tell the NIMBYs of the world to screw themselves.  The successful cities of the future will be even more densely populated than the ones we have today, and they will have planned for (and built) enough off-street running lines to get even larger numbers of people to where they need to go in a reasonable amount of time and comfort.