A New Penn Station, Hochul Style

the governor has updated Cuomo's renovation plans [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( [VIEW IN BROWSER]( [DONATE]( [WNYC Politics Brief] Hochul Backs Cuomo's Penn Station-And-Midtown Mega Project, With A Twist Plus: MTA worker vaccination rates are still extremely low. Taxi drivers are getting additional debt relief after a two-week hunger strike. And one man's meltdown on the bus. By James Ramsay --------------------------------------------------------------- 🚆 --------------------------------------------------------------- [Eric Adams on a CitiBike] Courtesy of the MTA New York Gov. Kathy Hochul plans to go ahead with a redesign of Penn Station and the surrounding neighborhood, but will put her own spin on the project [originally proposed]( by her predecessor, Andrew Cuomo. Hochul's approach, which she announced Wednesday afternoon, won't immediately require getting rid of the buildings on a block south of Penn Station in order to build a new structure, as Cuomo had intended. But she does plan to raise the existing station's notoriously low ceilings, which are currently only seven feet tall in some places. In addition to the governor calling Penn Station "depressing," "crowded," and "confusing," the MTA's acting chair, Janno Lieber, called present-day Penn "reviled," and Regional Plan Association President Tom Wright said it was a "humiliating" experience for commuters. The renovated Penn Station would be a single-level train hall with a 450-foot-long concourse, bigger than Moynihan Station and Grand Central Terminal combined, Hochul said. [two cops push a passenger through a subway station exit] FXCollaborative/VUW Both Cuomo's and Hochul's plans call for creating nine new tracks and five new platforms at Penn Station, which would primarily be used by NJ Transit. However, Hochul emphasized that her version would not be as disruptive to the neighborhood as before. One aspect in which the plans seem to diverge is the creation of public space — Cuomo would've created a 30,000-square-foot pedestrian plaza between buildings on West 30th and 31st streets. Hochul’s plan appears to add eight acres of public space. Hochul said her plan would take four to five years, at a price tag of $6-7 billion. She said urgency was needed, because costs go up as projects get delayed. She did confirm that some buildings south of Penn Station would need to be demolished, but not at the scale as Cuomo had proposed earlier; the space would be needed for development, which would help fund the project. Cuomo’s plan expected to use a mix of air rights, leases on space, and tax abatements to generate funds. Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer, who won a City Council seat Tuesday night, had opposed the Cuomo plan, partly on the grounds of how it would be funded. Yesterday, however, she praised Hochul’s new tack. “I commend Gov. Hochul for announcing that critical Penn Station improvements are moving ahead and will be taking precedence in the state’s plan for the neighborhood," Brewer said. Several other parties that have been protesting the project since Cuomo proposed it have not changed their mind. Lynn Ellsworth of Humanscale NYC, which includes community and civic groups concerned about overdevelopment, told Gothamist that Hochul's pitch does not appear to "chang[e] the Cuomo vision enough to make the project different," but added that "it’s great that she doesn’t want to demolish some part of the neighborhood." The Penn Station redevelopment plans are still in the early planning process, with the state now preparing the federally required Environmental Impact Statement. — [Reporting by Stephen Nessen]( --------------------------------------------------------------- 🚆 --------------------------------------------------------------- Amidst Hunger Strike, NYC Taxi Drivers Get Better Debt Relief Deal [two cops push a passenger through a subway station exit] Stephen Nessen/WNYC After taxi drivers staged a two-week-long hunger strike, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced yesterday that an updated debt-relief program for medallion owners would cap certain debt payments at $1,122 a month and make New York City the guarantor for all taxi drivers' debt. Drivers and their union, the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, had criticized [an earlier iteration]( of the program which led to some drivers paying $2,000 a month and did not include the city as a guarantor — even though the Taxi and Limousine Commission, a city agency, was instrumental in driving up the costs of medallions in the first place. The TLC said yesterday that 173 driver-owners — i.e., individual drivers who own no more than five medallions — have been approved to get their loans restructured at a lower rate, or settle their loans altogether. The agency said that in total, these drivers owed $52.3 million, but that under this new program, $21.4 million of that debt would be cancelled. The cost of a yellow cab medallion had soared to $1.2 million in 2014, with figures like the late "Taxi King" Gene Friedman driving up their prices. Since then, the entry of Uber, Lyft, and other app-based for-hire vehicles has driven medallion prices all the way down to about $100,000. In 2018, eight taxi drivers took their lives after finding themselves under crippling debt. For driver Mouhamadou Ailyuwho, who still owes $650,000 on his medallion loan, yesterday's news came as a massive relief. "It’s a new beginning, I’m free," he said. "It means everything to me — I got my life back." — [Reporting by Jen Chung and Stephen Nessen]( --------------------------------------------------------------- 🚆 --------------------------------------------------------------- Here's What Else Is Happening Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito suggested this week that it should be easier to get a concealed carry permit in New York City because commuting at night is dangerous. "All these people with illegal guns, they're on the subway," said Alito, "but the ordinary, hard-working, law-abiding people I mentioned, no, they can't be armed?" His comments came as the court heard oral arguments in a case over New York's 108-year-old law requiring people to show "proper cause" in order to get a permit to carry a concealed gun outside their house. ([Gothamist]( The MTA's half-priced MetroCard program now has a record 255,000 enrollees. After a recent publicity blitz for the Fair Fares program, which offers discounted MetroCards to New Yorkers living at or below the poverty line, the transit agency saw a boost in enrollment. Even so, only 35% of eligible riders have now signed up. ([AM New York]( Only 68% of MTA workers have been vaccinated, which is a worse rate than any city agency besides the Department of Corrections. While much has been made of the comparatively low vaccination rates among the FDNY and EMS workers, an even smaller percentage of New York City Transit employees have gotten a shot. But because the MTA is a state-run agency, its workers don't have to abide by the mandate for municipal workers. MTA employees who aren't vaccinated can opt to be tested weekly, though there's scant evidence of any enforcement so far. ([NY Daily News]( The nearly 2-mile protected bike lane on Crescent Street in Astoria is boomin'. A local activist who set up a camera to count cyclists has recorded an average of two bikers a minute riding on this stretch that connects the Triboro and Queensboro Bridges. Though local Assembly Member Cathy Nolan suggested in 2019 that biking should be banned on Crescent because of the heavy truck traffic, the street has seen a significant decrease in crashes and injuries since the bike lane was put in place in October of 2020. ([Streetsblog]( Ray Kelly's semi-famous son had himself a frustrating experience on the bus this week. It appears that Greg Kelly, a conservative rabble-rouser and public transit user ("find me on the D train"), took one of the MTA's high-speed rapid buses that runs alongside a bike lane and makes fewer stops, thus causing him to cruise past where he'd intended to get off. It became a Thing. ([Curbed]( --------------------------------------------------------------- 🚆 --------------------------------------------------------------- And Finally: One Commuter's Cozy Vibe [a picture of an ad on the back of an MTA bus]( [@jil_slander/Twitter]( --------------------------------------------------------------- 🚆 --------------------------------------------------------------- Support WNYC + Gothamist Make a donation to support local, independent journalism. Your contributions are our largest source of funding and pays for essential election coverage and more. [DONATE]( [Facebook]( [Facebook]( [Twitter]( [Twitter]( [Instagram]( [Instagram]( [WNYC]( [WQXR]( [NJPR]( [GOTHAMIST]( [WNYC STUDIOS]( [THE GREENE SPACE]( Copyright © New York Public Radio. 160 Varick Street, New York, NY 10013 All rights reserved. [Terms of Use.]( Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your [preferences]( or [unsubscribe]( from this list