On the one hand, Gelinas’ coverage of the MTA’s budget is usually pretty spot-on. She’s highlighted the ever-increasing labor costs and the impact pension obligations have on future fare hikes and service cuts. But on the other hand, her claims in this week’s columns are off base. I’ve been told by a few sources within the MTA and outside of it that their repair estimates were not just cobbled-together guesses. The FTA, the federal body that approves these funding requests, reviews the assessment process and helps estimate repair costs. Essentially, anything under water will have to be replaced, and the MTA and FTA worked to figure out what exactly was under water and how much replacement parts and efforts would cost. The MTA is still working on mitigation plans that will not come free or cheap either.

In fact, Gelinas’ piece runs the risk of drying up the well of federal money for disaster relief and mitigation. All governing bodies, from the state-run transit agencies to municipality-run DOBs, need flexibility in assessing spending requests, and the MTA has only just begun its work. Extensive efforts to replace parts in the East River Tunnels will commence soon enough and a plan for South Ferry will be put in place. Instead of objecting to costs reasonably estimated by everyone involved, maybe a better investigation would involve focusing on why everything costs so much to build in the first place. That is, at least, a legitimate concern.

The ugliness of these temporary signs has struck a nerve at the Daily News. (Photo via MTA New York City Transit / Marc A. Hermann)

As Second Ave. Sagas skips toward its seven anniversary, I’ve seen transit beat writers across the city come and go, and right now, we’re in a bit of a golden age of transit coverage. From Matt Flegenheimer at The Times and Ted Mann at The Journal to Matt Chaban at Crain’s New York and Stephen J. Smith at The Observer, a bunch of smart, open-minded reporters are tackling the city’s transportation beat, and they’re doing a great job of it. Yet, some coverage in other papers makes me slump my shoulders in defeat or throw my hands up in disgust.

Today’s Daily News features one of those pieces, and although the story is a minor one, it’s worth a few minutes of our time. The piece in question comes to us from not one but two reports, and it focuses on obviously temporary signage at Smith/9th Sts. and the way the signs look. The sub-hed on this groundbreaking piece of reporting tells us all we need to know: “Fake signs are only temporary. But they are ugly.”

At issue are some identification signs at the ends of the Smith/9th Sts. platform. At some point, the MTA will install proper mosaics in these locations, but to ready the station for passenger service after years of delay, the agency posted temporary paper signs designed to mimic tiling. “The signs were fabricated and installed as a temporary measure for the station reopening and will be replaced by the contractor with new mosaic tile signs,” a Transit spokesman said.

Meanwhile, in typical man-on-the-street fashion, two Daily News reporters even managed to track down someone to complain. This is, after all, still New York. “That’s pretty terrible considering the amount of money that went into renovating the place,” said Dennis Nemirovskiy, who likely hadn’t even noticed the signs let alone dwell on them before the reporters approached him. (Another rider had a more practical take. “Unless it’s going to improve the service it really doesn’t matter,” she said.)

And that’s the key to the Daily News article. Even though I’ve spent 300 words discussing it, it really doesn’t matter. The MTA is facing myriad problems that actually matter. It’s recovering from a crippling hurricane that has drastically reduced the expected lifetimes for key pieces of equipment. It’s heavily in debt with no end to the borrowing in sight. It can’t get out of its own way on capital projects and can’t garner political support for needed expansion efforts. And the Daily News is making a scandal out of a temporary sign.

When everyday New Yorkers bemoan the state of the subways, think back to this article because this is why. It’s lowest common denominator coverage that leads to politicians who don’t know how the subways are run or why services are constantly being threatened or cut. It’s why two sets of books has persisted for ten years. It’s great for instant outrage and absolutely terrible at generating a modicum of support transformative, long-range solutions to regional transportation problems.

During the CPC’s proceedings today, commission chair Amanda Burden spoke about her desired course of action. “I don’t think anyone would disagree that the best outcome for New York City would be a relocated Madison Square Garden and a rebuilt Penn Station,” she said. I, for one, do disagree. The best outcome would involve keeping MSG where it is and improving and reconstructing Penn Station for increased transit operations. Still, I won’t quibble with the vote.

Meanwhile, somehow, supports and opponents of the limited permit expressed disappointment. MSG wanted an unlimited right to use the space while the Municipal Arts Society wanted to force the issue in 10 years rather than 15. MAS also warned against a special provision that could allow MSG to stay put if it can reach an agreement, not subject to public review, with Amtrak, LIRR and NJ Transit for Penn Station improvements. The City Council will take up the issue within the next two months.

Click the image to read Anthony Weiner’s Keys to the City.

It finally happened, and we have to talk about it. Last night, shortly before midnight, Anthony Weiner’s YouTube video announcing his mayoral candidacy leaked, and today, his website is up to date. Polling just behind Christine Quinn — though with high unfavorables — Weiner has the name recognition to be a major player in this year’s mediocre mayoral field and a $4 million war chest to buy his way to the top. So how’s his platform look?

Based on the video and early campaign literature, Weiner is running on an appeal to the middle class. He grew up middle class and wants to return the focus of New York City politics to a group of residents who have increasingly felt left out and marginalized. Anything middle class-related in NYC should focus on transportation, and although Weiner recognizes that the subways are “the great equalizer, used by New Yorkers at every point on the economic spectrum,” his proposals do not underscore real improvements. “Modernizing our infrastructure and transportation systems needs to be a high priority,” he says. “In the most densely populated region in the country, we need to look at alternative modes of moving people from Point A to Point B.”

“Alternative modes of moving people” is a buzzword these days for kitschy ideas that don’t solve any real mobility problems, and Weiner’s platform highlights just that approach. First up are ferries. Weiner wants to launch ferry service in all five boroughts — which essentially means bringing ferry service to the Bronx since the other four boroughs already have ferries. “What about Rockaway, Sheepshead Bay, Riverdale, and Harlem? Ferries are good for the environment, reduce congestion, and are vital lifelines in an emergency.”

The environmental arguments are the least compelling; fuel-burning ferries pollute the air and water. But from a practical standpoint, do these areas need ferries and can they support the service? The Bronx is hardly lacking in subways or express buses, and the Rockaway/Sheepshead Bay ferry idea has long suffered from lack of ridership. The idea of a Harlem ferry is simply strange.

Next up, Weiner is proposing something that’s been in the works for years at the behest of state agencies over which the mayor has no control: He wants cell service on every subway platform. It is a tried-and-true voting-trolling technique to put forward a plan already in the works and then attempt to take credit for it later on.

His last two ideas are worthwhile but of a rather marginal impact. Weiner wants to extend tax credits to employers who encouraging biking to work, and he wants to replace Access-A-Ride with 2000 new medallions that would be reserved only for handicapped-accessible yellow cabs dispatched to all corners of the city. A full Access-A-Rode replacement could save the MTA upwards of $400 million annually, but such an initiative would face a steep uphill climb. Additionally, for better or worse, it impacts the majority of New Yorkers only tangentially.

And that’s it. On the one hand, Weiner doesn’t argue for pie-in-the-sky impracticalities as Christine Quinn did when she requested city control over the MTA. He seems to recognize the limits of the office and is planning accordingly. On the other, he doesn’t go even a quarter as far as Sal Albanese does. There is nothing about safe streets. DOT and its ability to dictate bus lanes and speed up the Select Bus Service rollout is roundly ignored. The only nod to congestion pricing is to call it “dead,” and East River Bridge tolls garner nary a mention. Weiner proposes smart parking meters and thinking hard about stemming truck traffic in the form of a “renewed focus” as ways to improve traffic flaw in the city.

All in all, it’s a disappointing early platform. If someone wants to champion the middle class in New York — or any class, for that matter — a grand vision for transportation improvements has to be a part of that plan, and we’ve yet to see that from any mayoral candidate with a real shot at claiming the crown.

The Williamsburg Bridge Trolley terminal as seen in its younger and more vulnerable years.

The Low Line — the ambitious and futuristic plan to send sunlight into an underground trolley terminal while turning the space into a park — is the project that just won’t die. For the better part of three years, we’ve heard about the efforts to convince the city to support this project at the expense of transit space. The Wall Street Journal in particular seems to be in the pocket of the Low Line’s proponents, and the paper has run yet another glowing article about the park plan with nary a nod to potential transit uses for the old Williamsburg Bridge Trolley Terminal.

The latest piece of pro-park prose comes to us from Gabrielle Hamilton. She calls the Low Line plan a “startlingly vivid apparition of an evanescent and vanished city.” Even though it’s been six decades since the trolley terminal was still in use, turning it into a hyper-gentrified, hyper-yuppified park that is designed to be intentionally imitative of Chelsea’s High Line is somehow evocative of the grittier New York from the 1970s and 1980s. Along with this nostalgia for a much worse time in the city’s history, Hamilton writes of the Low Line as though it’s definitely happening and nothing can stop it. In her words, she writes of the impact the Low Line plans made upon a first viewing:

It was living in a walk-up, with a decades-defunct buzzer. Friends hollering up from the street and you throwing the key down in a balled-up sock. In the sweltering summers you hung out on the fire escape, took cold showers in the tub in the kitchen and reached your wet hand through the curtain to turn off the burner under your hissing stove-top pot of Café Bustelo…

It may not have been like 30 years ago, when the cool kids who would shape the future met each other Monday nights at the Pyramid Club on Avenue A or, later, sobering up with blintzes and coffee at the Kiev as dawn broke. But [Dan] Barasch, 36—the computer-game-playing ultra smartie, who’d worked at Google and also for New York City government and who can speak in easy, fluid paragraphs about “silos of knowledge” and “curating global intelligence”—had met [James] Ramsey, 35, here in New York, through a friend. Their work reflects the politics and aesthetics of their generation’s sensibility, which is all about being green, recycling, repurposing and community building through technology. But the connection to my generation—and to all New Yorkers, both permanent and transient—is that Ramsey and Barasch’s inclination toward technology, green space and community stands tall, but not so tall as to cast in shadow their dedication to art, the urban and the gritty…

Ramsey and Barasch’s vision of the Lowline has become anything but fiction. There’s been a Kickstarter campaign backed by 3,000 supporters. The $150,000 they raised online financed a full-scale model, with working remote skylights and parabolic dishes, which the duo and their dedicated team exhibited for a month…There’s been legal vetting; a budget and a business plan; and endorsements from community board #3, the City Council, the State Assembly and the New York State Senate. What they most need now—apart from the $55 million it will take to build—is for the MTA to let them have the space. It may take another 5 years, or 10, but the Lowline, with its even spread of political, financial and community support, is poised to become the New Yorkiest thing to happen to New York City since the Double-Dutch tournament at the Apollo Theatre.

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard such an over-the-top adulation of the Low Line from The Journal. Earlier this year, in the Real Estate, Journal writers spoke of enhanced property values the park could bring, again ignoring any potential transit uses. The Journal has decided the Low Line shall exist, and exist it shall.

But those hurdles Hamilton mentions aren’t insignificant. She speaks of $55 million as though it’s a drop in the bucket, but it is exactly the opposite. Barasch and Ramsey won’t be able to fund that total through Kickstarter, and if we cast a glance across town, even the High Line raised only $44 million from donors for its first two sections. Will the city fork over the dough for the Low Line? Should it?

Meanwhile, getting the MTA on board won’t be easy either. There is no real reason for the agency to give up on valuable transit space. True, it has sat unused for longer than it was in use, but as Cap’n Transit explored last year, it could and should be in use again. Until we know for sure there are no transit uses for the space and until the MTA is adequately compensated for the terminal, it will remain in this limbo of past ghosts and future promises.

A few years ago, the Low Line had the ears of some higher-ups at the MTA, but those higher-ups have long since moved on and out. The Low Line gets press because it’s a unique idea, but ultimately, we don’t even know if it’s a sustainable or realistic idea. The MTA would have to go through an RFP process for the space, and build-out and maintenance costs won’t decrease. It’s not going to be five years or ten, as Hamilton imagines, and it probably shouldn’t be ever.

Basically, this FASTRACK moves up the regular weeknight service patterns by about an hour or so and will have a small impact on commute times. It’s barely a bump in the road. The next overnight closure will be during the first full week of June on the Queens Boulevard lines between either 5th Avenue-53rd Street or 21st Street-Queensbridge and Roosevelt Avenue.

“We recognize the critical importance of both Metro-North Railroad and Amtrak to the regional economy,” said Metro-North President Howard Permut. “Although reconstruction and testing of the second track will not be completed until late tonight, enough work has been completed to allow us to operate this limited service in advance of resuming our regular schedule on Wednesday.”

Trains will pass through the area at just 30 miles per hour, and for seven miles around Bridgeport, Connecticut, trains will be single-tracked. Metro-North is warning its customers to expect delays. Amtrak, meanwhile, will run an Acela leaving Boston at 3:15 p.m. and an Acela departing New York at 4 p.m. Service along with the Northeast Corridor will run as scheduled after those two trains.

No matter what happens with Madison Square Garden, this Penn Station, shown here in 1910, isn’t going to return.

For the last few months, we’ve heard a lot about the future of Madison Square Garden and its relationship to Penn Station. Community groups and various city stakeholders believe MSG should not be granted an unlimited license to operate about Penn Station, but there’s a sneaking suspicion that these efforts are fronted by those who care first about reclaiming a grand building for Penn Station and second about expanded transit access into and through New York City. The debate may soon come to a head with a time limit on MSG but also an out that could render the time limit pointless.

In a story published last night on Capital New York, Dana Rubinstein reports on a gift for Madison Square Garden from the city that could arrive as early as Wednesday. Here’s her take:

The city will in fact propose a 15-year renewal, rather than a 50-year one, which is in theory a victory for the planners. But the proposal also contains a major loophole: if the Garden meets certain conditions during those 15 years, it can get a permit to remain on top of Penn Station in perpetuity.

Namely, the Garden would have to come to some sort of an agreement with the three railroads that run beneath it to make improvements to the station, like adding new escalators and elevators. If such an agreement were to reached, and the City Planning Commission’s chair (who is appointed by the mayor) were to approve it, then the Garden could remain where it is, on top of the ever-more-crowded Penn Station. Its special permit, in other words, would have no expiration date.

“We think this exception would be a mistake,” wrote Robert Yaro, president of the Regional Plan Association, and Vin Cipolla, the president of the Municipal Art Society, in a letter to planning commissioner Amanda Burden last week. “Although the City Planning Commission cannot solve this problem singlehandedly, we would like to underscore that the only way to regain a train station worthy of New York’s status as a global city and to meet the needs of a growing economy and population is to relocate the Garden and build a new station from the track and platform level up.”

Without knowing the full details of the agreement, I’m withholding full judgment on the deal. There has to be more to it than some new escalators and elevators as those are instead seemingly the centerpieces of the $1.6 billion Moynihan Station plan. Hopefully, there is more to it, and we’ll find that out on Wednesday.

On the other hand, Yaro’s concern again seems to focus around the building, but if you read his statement closely, it’s more of an appeal to sensibility. He wants that new station from the track and platform level up, and that’s the key. New York City needs to redesign Penn Station from the bottom up, and if it comes with a new headhouse that looks nice and doesn’t cost an arm and a leg, then fine. If MSG can figure out a way to improve the track, platform and station concourse levels while maintaining an arena above ground, that’s fine too really. Simply put, we need to focus on the transit experience at Penn Station first.

Of course, not everyone agrees. In The Post yesterday, Steve Cuozzo penned a persnickety piece on Penn Station. Comparing a potential new Penn to the absurdly expensive and functionally questionable buildings at Fulton St. and the PATH WTC Hub, he writes, “Penn Station remains tolerably clean, safe and functional. Its lack of sex appeal hardly justifies the cost and years of chaos that trying to beautify it would entail… Let Penn Station be Penn Station. Remember, many thought it a fine idea in the 1960s. Let it remind us that change is not always to our good.”

But that’s quite right either. Penn Station has stretched the boundaries of functionality, and at rush hour, frequent users would question even that limited appeal. It also has no room for growth in ridership or trans-Hudson service. Right now, all we know is that something needs to be done. We don’t know what or how, and if it means keeping MSG on ice for a few years, so be it. The arena will still recoup of the costs of its recent renovations and then some, but the chance to right the Penn Station transit wrongs doesn’t come around too frequently.

The MTA, meanwhile, reported that 750 people took the train/bus combo from Bridgeport to Stamford. That figure represents that 20 percent of the usual a.m. peak ridership at New Haven, Milford and Stratford. But overall peak ridership declined by just 20 percent on Monday as Connecticut travelers drove to nearby stations to catch their trains. The Harlem Line saw a bump in ridership by around six percent over a typical Monday.

Despite Metro-North’s good news, Amtrak has yet to announce restoration of service along the Northeast Corridor from Boston to New York. I’ll have more as news breaks.