ReThinkNYC is a com­pre­hen­sive plan to expand New York City’s “car-optional” region beyond Manhattan by uni­fy­ing and recon­fig­ur­ing the City and the region’s dis­parate trans­porta­tion sys­tems into a sin­gle func­tion­ing net­work serv­ing the greater New York City area. In this new real­ity, pas­sen­gers would be able to trans­fer seam­lessly between com­muter rail, sub­way, bus or light rail sys­tems regard­less of oper­a­tor (e.g. NJ Transit, MetroNorth).

To do this, we pro­pose a new regional plan for New York that would include:

• The NYC SmartTransit Zone: This fare zone would include NYC and adja­cent parts of Westchester, Nassau, Hudson and Bergen Counties. Unified fare col­lec­tion would be via smart­card (RFID) or smart­phone app.

• The NYC Trunk Line would be a spinal cord of over­lap­ping inter­modal con­nec­tiv­ity along the Northeast Corridor between Secaucus, NJ and Port Morris, the Bronx that would unify the four land masses that make up the NYC area. 
  • All of the region’s 26 com­muter rail lines would be con­nected, includ­ing Metro-North’s Harlem and Hudson Lines and NJ Transit’s Bergen County Lines.
  • Secaucus, Penn Station, Sunnyside, Port Morris would be major tran­sit hubs where pas­sen­gers could trans­fer from the local scale (buses/light rail) to the city or regional scale (subways/regional rail).
• New Local Light Rail and Bus Networks directly con­nected to the NYC Trunk Line at Secaucus (NJ), Sunnyside (Queens/Brooklyn) and Port Morris (the Bronx).  The details of this plan will be released in mid-August.

These plans would trans­form the region’s patch­work of pub­lic tran­sit sys­tems into a uni­fied web of over­lap­ping mul­ti­modal mass tran­sit con­nec­tiv­ity. The NYC Trunk Line would provide a foun­da­tion for more rail-con­nected ameni­ties, includ­ing:

• ReThink LGA would expand LaGuardia Airport into Rikers and con­nect it to the NYC Trunk Line at Port Morris trans­form­ing it into a world-class global air­port that is eas­ily acces­si­ble to every­one who is con­nected to mass tran­sit in the region.
• Midtown East in Queens would be a new office dis­trict the size of Midtown Manhattan directly con­nected to the NYCTrunk Line at Sunnyside, Queens. This plan would provide mil­lions of square feet of new office space that would be con­nected to the entire regional rail net­work, seven dif­fer­ent lines of the NYC sub­way net­work and the new light rail/bus net­work envi­sioned for Brooklyn/Queens.

These plans, along with the rise of smart­phone-based car shar­ing and car pool­ing ser­vices (e.g. Zipcar and Uberpool), make it pos­si­ble to expand the car-optional area through­out the region, obvi­at­ing the need for an auto­mo­bile. In doing so, the plan would provide the New York City area the foun­da­tion it needs for the next cen­tury of eco­nomic and pop­u­la­tion growth.

...More is available at www.rethinkstudio.org/rethinknyc