Consultants have begun whittling away at the 27 mass transit alternatives for the Nassau Hub major investment study, County Executive Thomas Suozzi explained at the project’s third public meeting last Tuesday.

A commuter rail extension and trolley bus service have been eliminated from future analysis, as has an alternative to reactivate service on the LIRR Garden City secondary line. A connection to NYC Transit’s Far Rockaway station has also been nixed, according to project documents. Bus rapid transit, light rail, and automated guideway transit (similar to the AirTrain at JFK) are the three remaining transit technologies under consideration. Plans that involve limited service, such connecting Freeport or Hicksville to the Hub, have been thrown out as stand-alone alternatives. However, they may be included within a larger transit network plan.

Qualitative factors that lead to the elimination of these options included difficult engineering. For example, commuter rail trains cannot make the sharp turns necessary for service into the Hub.

One interesting option under study would be replacing and connecting existing LIRR service on the Oyster Bay and West Hempstead branches with more frequent, speedier light rail or bus rapid transit service. Another is a transit service in the Meadowbrook Parkway right-of-way between the south shore and the Hub area.

The next stage of the analysis will include ridership projections and capital and operating cost estimates. So far, there has been little to no discussion about which agency would actually run new transit services, how they would interact with existing train and bus lines or how MTA or county operating agencies would pay for transit operating costs.

Another possible barrier for the project’s success is convincing local towns in the Hub area, such as Hempstead and Garden City, to approve "smart growth" zoning regulations that allow the increased densities and reduced parking requirements that could support local rail transit.

The main idea of the Nassau Hub study is to build up and fill in land uses in central Nassau County and develop a much more intensive mass transit system to serve them than presently exists. Central Nassau today features major shopping, cultural, workplace, parkland and sports attractions but they do not sit together well and most are difficult to reach or travel between except by car. v