The Rockaway Beach Branch LIRR tracks and the High Line

Queens residents have renewed efforts to turn old Rockaway Beach Branch Long Island Rail Road tracks into an outer borough version of the High Line, the New York Daily News reported.

The tracks, which run above street level for 3.5 miles from Rego Park to Ozone Park, have been out of service for nearly 50 years, and have already become overrun with trees and vegetation.

“It’s green, yet it has economic development opportunities,” said Andrea Crawford, chairwoman of Community Board 9, who met with city officials to discuss preliminary plans for the transformation. [more]

The Long Island Rail Road is looking to revamp its Penn Station space, according to the Wall Street Journal. LIRR officials would like to improve the space by adding better signage and more natural light to facilitate passenger flow. “It’s a facility that’s showing its age,” said Helena Williams, LIRR president. “It’s cluttered visually, functionally.” The railroad plans to solicit designers early next year to study the problems at Penn Station and come up with proposals for fixing them, which should take less than a year, Williams said. [more]

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has approved its $1 billion deal with the Related Companies to redevelop the 26-acre former Long Island Rail Road site along the Hudson River, the Associated Press reported. Related must pay $20 million when the contract is signed and an additional $21.7 million over the next year, according to the agreement. But the developer is also allowed to delay closing until the city’s office vacancy rate drops to 11 percent and apartment prices reach $1,200 per square foot. [more]

The inspector general at the U.S. Department of Transportation has launched a probe into how government funds were used in some of the city’s largest transit projects, many of which have fallen years behind schedule and have been plagued by major cost overruns. The projects in question — the Second Avenue Subway, the Fulton Transit Center, the new PATH terminal and the Long Island Rail Road extension to Grand Central Terminal — have received $7 billion in federal funds, which were overseen by the Federal Transit Administration. The investigation, which began March 25 and is expected to last 10 months, will look into whether the FTA muddled its regulatory job and allowed the projects to stray so far from their original plans. The PATH terminal is a Port Authority project; the other three projects are backed by the Metropolitan Transit Authority. [Post]

In a bid to create worthwhile, sustainable growth on Long Island, urban planners are encouraging the development of downtown areas on the island, according to the New York Times. The 2010 indicator study from the Long Island Index released last week, which focuses on the commercial and residential development of the island, looked at 156 Long Island towns and neighborhoods, singling out 111 as easily-developable downtown regions. Nancy Douzinas, president of the Rauch Foundation, which helped fund the report, said that the study concluded developing more urban parts of Long Island was preferable to adding more homes and facilities in suburban sections of the area. She said that developers should look to build near public transit, such as the Long Island Rail Road, to attract younger residents — a move that would be “a boost to the local economy.” Jack Martins, the mayor of Mineola, one of the towns singled out in the report as being particularly ideal for downtown development, said he favors enhancing the town’s transit hub with more development. “In a community like ours it would be fantastic to have all of these dimensions,” Martins said, adding that building up the city’s downtown sector would help preserve existing suburban neighborhoods.

Transit officials are downsizing plans for the rail yard being rebuilt
beneath Bruce Ratner’s Atlantic Yards project from nine tracks to
seven. The M.T.A.’s interim executive director, Helena Williams, said
that it reached a tentative agreement to allow Ratner to cut back costs
on a $445 million transit improvement plan to Long Island Rail Road’s
Vanderbilt Rail Yard that Ratner promised to deliver in exchange for
approvals for the $4 billion project. Ratner was supposed to pay the
agency $100 million, and provide $345 million in transit upgrades, but
was allowed to renegotiate because of the credit crunch. Sources said
that Ratner might pay the M.T.A. only $50 million, half the amount
originally promised. At a public hearing on Friday, laborers showed up in support of the jobs they said Ratner’s project would create. [NYDN] and [Post]