BQX is not the plan favored by many

From AMNY:

As the de Blasio administration looks to move forward with the proposed Brooklyn-Queens Connector, called BQX, there’s renewed hesitation among local elected officials, experts and some residents about the merits and prudence of the project.

The latest skepticism comes after a summer report in which the administration outlined that the streetcar, now envisioned to run along the waterfront of Brooklyn and Queens from Red Hook to Astoria along an 11-mile route, would cost more and take longer than estimated to build while running a shorter route.

"We would be able to add additional bus service — bus lines, express bus, Select Bus — we’d be able to do that extremely quickly, much more efficiently and at much lower cost,” said City Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer, whose district includes Long Island City, Queens, which the streetcar would transverse.

BQX somehow became shorter and more expensive

From Crains:

The de Blasio administration today released plans for its Brooklyn-Queens Connector, a streetcar officials envision running along the waterfront between the two boroughs. It has been delayed by complex infrastructure challenges.

The original streetcar was expected to cost $2.5 billion and run roughly 16 miles between Astoria, Queens, and Sunset Park, Brooklyn. But the updated plan calls for a shorter route to Gowanus instead and will cost $2.7 billion. That translates to an increase in per-mile cost from roughly $156 million to $248 million.

De Blasio first announced plans for the streetcar in February 2016. But as officials looked further into potential routes, they found that the rat's nest of underground infrastructure presented enormous potential for increasing costs and would need to be thoroughly studied. As Crain's reported late last year, the problem presented officials with a catch-22: By studying the infrastructure more carefully, the city insulated itself from risk in the event it had to scrap the project, but doing so caused delays and drove up costs.

The original project was supposed to be completed in 2024 and be paid for through property tax revenue as the land around the route increased in value. The updated version of the project is now expected to be operational in 2029 and would require $1 billion from the federal government, according to a report in The New York Times, which noted that the city tax revenues originally thought to be available for the BQX are being spent on other priorities, including affordable housing.

The new reason for new streetcars

From Forbes:

The revival of American cities over the last 20-25 years has also coincided with the revival of a relic of the earlier urban heyday -- the streetcar. But don't mistake the streetcar revival for a newfound affinity for mass transit. Today's streetcars -- indeed, streetcars throughout American history -- are about stimulating development and rising property values, and not about improving job or neighborhood access.

Curiously, this is happening just as transit ridership seems to be on the decline nationally.

It's been done before. Streetcars were initially developed in the late 19th century to open up new areas for urban -- and suburban -- development. Streetcars enabled the development of areas beyond the edges of old, crowded cities, and led to a new, more dispersed development pattern.

As for today's iteration of streetcar development, however, I'm ambivalent. Streetcar development is happening now for two reasons: 1) there is a new and growing demand for city living, and 2) the demand for city living currently outpaces the supply. Streetcars systems are being built as a recognition of those factors, and an attempt to spark similar development in areas where it hasn't yet taken off. Just as parks and highways have been used as economic development tools in the past, streetcar systems are being utilized in the same manner. Their use comes into question as we consider the broader impacts of streetcar development. Do they improve access for the region? Are they playing a role in reducing the rapidly growing levels of inequality we see in our cities? Or are the new systems simply being constructed to serve a select group of favored urban newcomers?

Gentrification trolley on track

From NY1:

A proposed street car line that would link Queens and Brooklyn is still on schedule, according to Mayor Bill de Blasio.

The mayor said Friday that construction will begin in 2019 or 2020.

"There's been a series of community meetings. There's a lot of folks in the community who want it because a lot of these areas don't have transportation options," de Blasio said on "The Brian Lehrer Show" on WNYC. "There are a lot of folks who are raising real concerns and critiques that we are trying to address."

BQX = gentrification

From the Daily News:

Rather than wrestle with real congestion problems, Mayor de Blasio is pushing an expensive boutique project for new transit infrastructure that will fail to address any of the city’s most pressing transit needs or significantly reduce traffic congestion.

The Brooklyn-Queens Connector, or BQX, would run from Astoria in Queens to Sunset Park in Brooklyn. It is the brainchild of a group of developers who are sprouting luxury towers on the Brooklyn-Queens waterfront. They corralled celebrities and willing non-profit groups to create Friends of the BQX, a vanity group set up by the developers . The mayor is using the city’s time and money to close the deal with this group.

It is time the city proposed long-term solutions that go beyond absurdly expensive projects like the Second Ave. Subway, No. 7 extension and BQX, which are more about promoting high-end real estate development than solving transportation problems.

A serious bus rapid transit system (Select Bus Service is a modest beginning) and improvements to pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure need to be part of the plan. The city must look many decades ahead and not just to the next election, and beyond the 20-30 years during which developers typically recover their investments.

Finally, it makes no sense to sink billions of dollars into a trolley line lying in one of the city’s most vulnerable flood plains. No one can be certain how many feet the waters will rise in decades to come. The added costs of elevating buildings, protecting infrastructure and buying flood insurance will be considerable. Protecting the BQX rails at street level during floods would be difficult if not impossible.

Enough reasons to nix the BQX

From AM-NY:

Streetcars, America’s transit de jour, have proven difficult operations in other cities like Atlanta and Washington, D.C. Beyond the latent ire of community boards in New York, there are major hurdles revolving around nearly every aspect of the project, including how the streetcar will interact with vehicles; the use of value capture financing; and its placement in a flood-prone corridor.

Other transit experts believe the city is oversimplifying the scope of the project. De Blasio’s streetcars would carry almost 50,000 riders per day at a speed of about 12 miles per hour, according to city estimates. When you weigh costs and capacity against the Second Avenue subway, the BQX doesn’t add up, said Jon Orcutt, a spokesman for TransitCenter.

The streetcar was first proposed by the Friends of the BQX, a support group with several large development firms on its executive committee and board of directors. De Blasio has had to vehemently fight the perception that the streetcar isn’t a handout to developers in an area that is not quite the “transit desert” that he describes.

A trip on the BQX would cost the going rate of a MetroCard, but it’s still unclear if the BQX will be integrated with the MTA’s fare payment system.

A streetcar named cha-ching!

From the Daily News:

The Daily News undertook a comprehensive examination of the mayor’s fund-raising tactics, interviewing officials, lobbyists and donors, as well as reviewing thousands of pages of records to determine who made donations, how they came to make their donations, their possible motivation for giving and what, if anything, they got from de Blasio.

Collectively, the findings point to a concerted City Hall effort to target those doing business with the city for checks far in excess of routine campaign donations.

Investigators looking at de Blasio’s fund-raising tactics have found evidence that donors expected something from City Hall in return for their generosity.

From the Daily News:

All aboard the mayor’s money train, a planned streetcar from Brooklyn to Queens that appears to have triggered developers with projects along the route to donate big money to his favorite causes.

First came the push to get Mayor de Blasio to back the $2.5 billion taxpayer-supported streetcar running from Sunset Park, Brooklyn, to Astoria, Queens. Supporters call it the Brooklyn Queens Connector, or BQX.

Then came the checks from seven developers, totaling $245,000, to support de Blasio’s favorite causes. The developers sent the checks to the mayor’s nonprofit Campaign for One New York.

Then came the mayor’s announcement, in his State of the City address in February, that the city would go full steam ahead with the 16-mile trolley line.

Shortly after de Blasio took office in January 2014, chief fund-raiser Ross Offinger drew up a list of business and real estate leaders from whom he planned to solicit “support” for the mayor’s newly formed Campaign for One New York.

Brooklyn doesn't want streetcar

From DNA Info:

Downtown Brooklyn residents “don’t need” the mayor’s proposed streetcar running through their neighborhood, locals told city officials at a Tuesday meeting, citing the high cost to taxpayers and the disruption to traffic.

Officials from the Department of Transportation and the Economic Development Corporation presented proposed routes for the Brooklyn-Queens Connector, dubbed the BQX, through Downtown Brooklyn and the surrounding neighborhoods at a Community Board 2 Transportation Committee Meeting.

Proposed routes such as Flushing Avenue and Cadman Plaza East would take riders past the transit-starved Brooklyn Navy Yard and make connections to transit hubs including Borough Hall.

“You cannot maintain all the lanes of traffic, maintain all the sidewalk width, all the bike lanes and all parking lanes — that’s not possible,” BQX Director Adam Giambrone said. “There will be tradeoffs that need to be made.”

Residents and community board members raised opposition to the streetcar — which will cost $2.5 billion to build and $30 million annually to operate — calling the costs unnecessary and instead suggested the city spend the money on additional buses in the area.

Bogus BQX poll

From the Daily News:

Mayor de Blasio’s Brooklyn-Queens trolley would be a streetcar desired, according to a poll released Thursday from a real estate-backed group pushing the project.

The poll for the Friends of the BQX — also known as the Brooklyn-Queens Connector — shows that voters in seven City Council districts along the route back the project, 74% to 16%.

Tom Angotti, a Hunter College urban planning professor and BQX critic, dismissed the poll results as “foreordained” with a “self-promoting set of messages.”

He said that city officials have dumped this project on waterfront areas, without considering whether it’s even needed.

“If you were to ask any transportation expert, what would you do with a couple of billion dollars to improve the surface transportation system, you wouldn’t build a waterfront trolley line,” he added.

$100M needed for huge streetcar depots

From Crains:

Missing from maps of a proposed streetcar route along the Brooklyn-Queens waterfront is where the de Blasio administration would locate the transit line's maintenance yard, which would likely be one or more facilities totaling several acres. The yard or yards would be needed to store and service the 47-car fleet.

The Brooklyn Queens Connector is a 16-mile streetcar line that would run from Astoria, Queens, to Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Currently, the de Blasio administration is conducting a wide-ranging study that will include recommendations on the streetcar's ideal route, along with how large the maintenance yard or yards would be and where they could be located.

Here in New York, Friends of the Brooklyn Queens Connector, a nonprofit that has promoted plans for a streetcar that were eventually adopted by the de Blasio administration, has suggested building two maintenance facilities at a total cost of $100 million. The group believes the yard or yards would require less than five acres.

All aboard the gentrification express

From Crains:

The proposed Brooklyn Queens Connector would run 16 miles from Astoria, Queens, to Sunset Park, Brooklyn, passing through Two Trees’ Domino site, several public housing complexes and rows of glassy waterfront condos in Williamsburg. The commuter line would also traverse commercial-job centers including the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Industry City and several other designated manufacturing zones in Long Island City and Red Hook. “We privately refer to this as the ‘gentrification express,’” said one industrial advocate who did not want to be named because of dealings with City Hall.

The unease felt by manufacturers boils down to two basic concerns: Hotels, commercial offices and nightclubs are already allowed to operate in certain manufacturing districts, and those businesses can afford to pay much higher rents than industrial companies, which typically look for space under $20 per square foot. Second, if the trolley proves a quick and reliable form of transportation, commercial tenants and developers are sure to show up in greater numbers, ready to outbid manufacturing companies for the newly prime real estate.

To address those concerns about encroachment, de Blasio pledged last November to require hotels and self-storage facilities to get a special permit before moving into industrial business zones, a designation that applies to much of the manufacturing areas along the path of the BQX. But while the administration has budgeted $442 million to bolster city-owned manufacturing sites, set aside additional cash for an industrial development fund and launched an advanced manufacturing network called Futureworks NYC, officials haven’t codified any of the promised zoning changes discussed last fall. And even if they had, it would likely take at least a year to implement them.

By then, many changes will be well underway. According to one estimate, the streetcar’s design and financing mechanism will be finalized by mid-2017 and then go through a public review process. Already, developers are eyeing opportunities along the route. In July, real estate developer Madison Realty Capital announced the $40 million purchase of two buildings near a proposed streetcar stop in Sunset Park that it plans to convert to office space. That site sits just across the street from Industry City, a six-million-square-foot industrial and office complex whose owners recently put forward plans to build college housing. The dorms were envisioned to accommodate students at New York University and the City University of New York, with priority placement for manufacturing and engineering applications that would dovetail with the kinds of businesses operating in Industry City. That bid was abandoned under pressure from local officials, but the company is still pursuing plans for a hotel, which industrial supporters such as City Councilman Carlos Menchaca see as the first step toward turning the waterfront residential.

All this has convinced members of the industrial community, including those who support the streetcar, that the administration must make good on promised zoning protections before plans advance too far. “I’m really looking forward to [the streetcar] happening,” said Michael Spinner, who runs car-wash and recycling-equipment businesses in Sunset Park and sits on the board of the Southwest Brooklyn Industrial Development Corp. “But you’ve got to tailor the zoning laws and give manufacturing businesses the advantage.”

DeBlasio hires real winner to pitch BQX

From NY Magazine:

In a sign that the planned BQX rail line along the Brooklyn and Queens waterfront is chugging toward reality, the de Blasio administration has hired a streetcar czar: Adam Giambrone, sometime archaeologist, ex-Canadian politician, light-rail booster, former head of Toronto’s transit system, and, for one disastrous week in 2010, candidate for mayor of Toronto. Tall and athletic with a spiky crew cut and a Boy Scout demeanor, the 39-year-old Giambrone comes to the job with both experience and baggage — and with knowledge of New York sketchy enough that at one point during an interview he referred to the “Downtown East Side.”

Since for now the BQX remains an unfunded fantasy-in-progress, Giambrone will have to push the project past the point of no return before the next mayor can quash it. That’s a hard-earned lesson: In Toronto, he spent years working on a network of suburban streetcars called Transit City that mayor Rob Ford killed almost as soon as he took office in 2010. One element of that project, the Eglinton Crosstown line, has since been revived and is under construction, but the failure of the larger plan has left the city hobbled, says Toronto Globe and Mail architecture critic Alex Bozikovic. “The vision Giambrone was pushing made a lot of sense, and it died for political reasons.”

It’s more than a little ironic that the de Blasio administration, which has had problems with credibility and corruption in recent months, should turn to Giambrone as a trust builder, since in Canada he’s best known for an Anthony Weiner–like episode of lies and disgrace. His 2010 campaign for mayor of Toronto blew up almost before it had started, when a newspaper revealed that he’d been cheating on Sarah McQuarrie, the woman he lived with, and sent a text message describing her as a political prop. (They have since married.) After a few days of desperate dissimulating, he dropped out of politics for a while, and Torontoans elected the corrupt, clownish, boozy, drug-abusing, brawling Rob Ford.

What's an extra $1/2 billion?

From Crains:

Taxpayers could end up paying an extra half-billion dollars to build a streetcar connecting Brooklyn and Queens under current financing plans, according to a watch dog group's estimate.

In February, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced plans for a 16-mile streetcar, known as the Brooklyn-Queens Connector, or the BQX, which would run from Sunset Park along Brooklyn’s industrial waterfront to Astoria, in Queens. Typically, the city would pay for an infrastructure project this big by issuing a municipal bond, which requires the government to pay off the debt, plus interest, over a certain time period. But to fund the tram line, the mayor will likely create a nonprofit development corporation that will float the bonds instead, according to a recent article in Gotham Gazette.

Funding the entire project using that arrangement could add an estimated $400 million to $500 million in interest to the total cost over a 40-year period, according to the Citizens Budget Commission. The commission came up with its estimate by looking at 2011 bonds issued for the Hudson Yards project, which used a similar financing setup to the one proposed for the streetcar. Mayor Bill de Blasio has pegged the cost of the streetcar's construction at $2.5 billion, though that figure does not include interest payments.

Installing light rail is a fool's errand

From Forbes:

What would happen if your city, in the name of progress, started giving poorer residents vouchers for landline telephones rather than smartphones? Or if, rather than stocking public libraries with computers, so that people could write emails, your city installed fax machines? You would consider these unnecessary expenditures on outdated technologies. Yet when it comes to public transit, many cities splurge on modes designed for a different time and place—namely light rail.

Rail transit, such as streetcars, widely spurred America’s urban growth during the industrial era, when automobiles hadn’t yet been invented, and settlement patterns were dense. There are still a handful of dense legacy cities—New York City, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago and Washington, DC—that wouldn’t function without passenger rail. But rail isn’t convenient or practical in sprawling cities, although many have built entire systems nonetheless.

These projects have been championed by everyone from environmentalists, to urban density proponents, to business groups like the Chamber of Commerce, and for numerous reasons. Rail, it is thought, will get people out of cars and into transit; will spur infill growth; and will bring a “sense of place” to strategic corridors.

But it doesn’t seem to do any of this, a conclusion drawn by numerous analysts, most notably Randal O’Toole. For decades, he has written in books, blogs, and as a Cato Institute analyst about the fool’s errands of cities trying to reorient themselves around rail. They spend billions on building and maintaining systems, only to find that their cities largely function as they had before, via car use and fragmented development patterns.

For example, transit ridership rates don’t dramatically increase following rail construction, and sometimes they even decline. O’Toole believes the ridership declines result because rail strips funding from buses, which are cheaper and more flexible.

Rail transit’s role as a catalyst for dense development is also highly questionable—some lines have seen little development go up around them, and experienced high vacancy rates in existing buildings. Others have enjoyed adjacent mid- and high-rise growth. But it’s hard to know, in the latter case, whether it was rail that spurred those developments, or some combination of government subsidies for developers, organic migration back into cities, land use deregulation to allow higher densities, or the construction of other nearby public amenities.

Shocking news: Developers head streetcar organization

From LIC post:

Some of the names behind the push for a new streetcar system between Queens and Brooklyn will sound familiar to western Queens residents, due to major projects they are developing here.

The Friend of the Brooklyn-Queens Connector (BQX) – which has been working on the Connector plan since 2014 – has released its board of directors list (online here).

That list includes some big players in Astoria and Long Island City development.

Tishman Speyer is represented on the Friends of the BQX board by public affairs managing director Michelle Adams, who is also a member of the Long Island City Partnership board. Tishman Speyer is the developer behind 2 Gotham Center at Queens Plaza South and 28th Street and is also working on a two-tower commercial building next door.

Jordan Barowitz of the Durst Organization, which is developing the Hallets Point megaproject on the Astoria Waterfront, also sits on the BQX board. The $1 billion project involves more than 2,000 units of housing, plus a supermarket and a school. The development broke ground in January.

Streetcar a developer's fantasy

From Patch:

City officials held a public “visioning session” on the proposed Brooklyn Queens Connector (BQX) streetcar in Astoria Monday night — the first of what they promised would be many outreach efforts to gather feedback on the $2.5 billion proposal.

Bus lanes might be cheaper to implement, the head of the EDC said, but a streetcar could carry twice as many passengers — a critical perk for a system that would transport an estimated 50,000 riders on weekdays.

Torres-Spring also argued a rail system would increase property values along its route. This, she said, would allow the city to fund the BQX using a cut of rising property values along the rail line.

[AHA! I think we're on to something here.]

Also present at the meeting was Ya-Ting Liu, recently named executive director of Friends of the Brooklyn Queens Connector. Liu's organization was behind the project’s first feasibility study, and is currently advocating for its construction.

While developers like Two Trees are well-represented in the Friends group, Liu noted that many non-developers are also members — including Paul Steely White, executive director of Transportation Alternatives, and Thomas Wright, president of the Regional Plan Association think tank.

[Oh, you mean reps of groups funded by developers?]

A streetcar named de Blasio

From Politico:

A city-commissioned study of the proposal, which the city shared with POLITICO New York, fleshes out the projected travel habits of the communities through which the line would run, bolstering de Blasio’s argument that the $2.5 billion streetcar is theoretically doable, and underscoring some of the challenges ahead.

According to that study of the proposal — which originated in the real estate community — the administration projects 193 Red Hook residents would use the BQX daily to commute to DUMBO. Twenty-six would take a trip in the opposite direction.

Using projections based on 2013 data, the report also predicts that Astoria would send 51 commuters a day to DUMBO, and receive none in return. It is in Astoria, the streetcar's northern terminus, where the de Blasio administration will begin to seriously engage community members about its streetcar plan.

At the Variety Boys and Girls Club on 30th Road on May 9, city officials will lead the first of three-months worth of “visioning sessions” for people who live along the proposed streetcar’s route, which would run up to 17 miles from Astoria to Sunset Park at a pace of roughly 10.5 miles per hour during peak hours.

Wouldn't it be better to spend $2.5M to improve current bus service than to build a streetcar line that hardly anyone will use?

He's doing it for his donors

From the NY Post:

Hundreds of businesses that own land near the proposed Brooklyn-Queens trolley line stand to benefit from the project, but at least 10 have something else in common — they all contributed to a nonprofit promoting Mayor de Blasio’s “progressive” agenda.

The estimated $2.5 billion rail project, which would connect Astoria to Sunset Park and promises to send property values along its route soaring, is being pushed by the Friends of Brooklyn Queens Connector.

Developers such as Two Trees Management, Forest City Ratner and the Durst Organization all have representatives in the group and have either directed money to de Blasio’s re-election campaign or to the Campaign for One New York, which critics have derided as a mayoral slush fund.

Pols think money grows on trees

From Crains:

It was fitting that the governor came to the council speaker's defense, because Cuomo has become a big advocate of the “propose now, worry later” style of governing. Consider his much-ballyhooed promise in July to overhaul the despised LaGuardia Airport. At the time, his administration said the Central Terminal would be replaced, as would Delta's newly refurbished Terminals C and D, and a new link to the subway would be completed—all for something like $4 billion.

Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported the cost of the Central Terminal alone had soared past $4 billion.

Mayor Bill de Blasio was the voice of reason this month in casting doubts on the Rikers plan, but he too has been guilty of this approach—if on a smaller scale. The $25 million cost of a new barn for carriage horses in Central Park was apparently pulled from thin air. His $2.5 billion streetcar scheme for the Queens-Brooklyn waterfront has more than a few question marks, too.

Why care about this? Because projects like these put pressure on governors and mayors to deliver something. Because they don't like to raise taxes and because both the city and state have such high debt loads, they will be tempted to make fiscally irresponsible moves to push the costs into future years.

Boondoggle streetcar line will require that new bridges be built

From the NY Times:

The Brooklyn-Queens streetcar proposed by Mayor Bill de Blasio could require the construction of two new bridges, one over Newtown Creek and a second over the Gowanus Canal, a top administration official said on Friday.

At a briefing for reporters, the official, Deputy Mayor Alicia Glen, and other administration leaders made public new details about the streetcar proposal, with the potential need for the two bridges among the most notable and expensive elements of the planned system, which would run between Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and Astoria, Queens.

While the exact route has not been finalized, Ms. Glen said, planners have determined that the Pulaski Bridge, between Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and Long Island City, Queens, and the bridge that traverses the Gowanus Canal at Hamilton Avenue near Red Hook, Brooklyn, may not be able to accommodate streetcars.

While a developer-driven yuppie connector streetcar is being planned for neighborhoods that already have subway lines running through them, residents of southeastern Queens will still require multiple bus transfers to get to a subway or the LIRR, and no one at City Hall cares.