Webcast of Town Hall Meeting on Future of Roosevelt Island Tram!!

The Webcast of the Town Hall Meeting on the Future of the Roosevelt Island Tram is now available here. If you were not able to attend this meeting please take the time to watch so that you are informed of the various options.

It is critically important for the future of Roosevelt Island to upgrade and improve the transportation infrastructure of this Island particularly with all of the new residents coming to the Southtown Riverwalk buildings.

Don't let any of our neighbors or visitors get trapped dangling over the East River for hours again.

The Main Street Wire has more here.

• Alternative 1 would take care of the track ropes, replace some critical components, and involve only two months of downtime. It would cost only about $5.6 million. But the engineers give it a life expectancy of only seven years; one reason is that the system would not be fully modernized, and would mostly use mechanical parts equivalent to the current 30-year-old setup.
• Alternative 2 would involve a "fundamentally new system" with a probable 30 years of useful life ahead of it. The cost would be $14.25 million - just about the amount the State has set aside. Six months of downtime would be involved.
• Alternative 3 would result in a system very similar to that in Alternative 2, but it would add an alternative drive motor, increasing reliability. The hit in downtime would be seven months, and the cost would be $17.25 million.
• Alternative 4 would involve a departure from the present "jigback" or "clothesline" system in which cabins move simultaneously in opposite directions. In this scheme, the two sides of the system would be separated, and they would be able to operate independently. Cost: $20.4 million and seven months of downtime.

In regard to the subway:

Residents were concerned about another set of alternatives - what to do for transportation without a Tramway to relieve subway overcrowding, especially at rush hour, or to cope when the F line is out of commission for one reason or another. Extra subway trains are simply not operationally feasible, according to the MTA, so reliance could be placed on buses taking rush-hour commuters to Queens Plaza to board subway trains there. But Shane and others observed that buses going all the way to Manhattan were slow at times, inconvenient almost all the time, unreliable, and underutilized in previous Tramway outages.

Image is from wnbc.com