Planning from the Bottom Up

This chapter recounts how New York City Transit Authority rail service planners Peter Cafiero, Chuck Kirchner, Glenn Lunden, and Jon Melnick resurrected the Second Avenue subway in 1988. Even though the Transit Authority was in the early stages of its 1987–91 capital program, the planners' bosses wanted to start getting ready for the next program, which would run from 1992 to 1996. The first step would be to create a document that assessed the authority's long-term needs and identified projects that would rehabilitate the subway system, increase ridership, improve productivity, and expand system capacity. One proposal the planners wrote to address the Lexington Avenue's problems was an idea that the MTA planner Bob Olmsted had first championed in 1975—a Second Avenue subway north of 63rd Street. As the Second Avenue subway proposal moved up the Transit Authority hierarchy, the authority's president, David Gunn, agreed that the time was right to begin thinking about expanding the subway system. Before he could devote significant resources to advancing the Second Avenue subway, however, it would have to compete with other potential megaprojects under discussion at the MTA's agencies.