At the Regional Plan Association’s annual conference Friday, U.S. Senator Charles Schumer said he believed New York could simultaneously construct the Long Island Railroad-Grand Central connection, the Second Avenue subway, the #7 subway extension to the far West Side, a Long Island Railroad link to lower Manhattan and a cross-harbor freight tunnel.

Schumer said these were all possible because of different funding sources — the MTA capital program and Federal Transit Administration aid for the LIRR-Grand Central project and the Second Avenue subway, the city’s financing plan for the #7, Sept. 11 funds for the downtown project and special federal funding for the freight tunnel.

The Senator called on Governor Pataki to abandon the idea of a West Street tunnel in lower Manhattan so that Sept. 11 funding could be focused on the LIRR-downtown project. He also said the #7 subway project was so important that it should be paid for from the MTA capital program if the city’s funding scheme breaks down.

Schumer said he was reserving judgment on the idea of a new Jets football stadium above the west side rail yards. But he said far West Side development is crucial to the city’s economic future and that the #7 project is the key to unleashing that development.

Senator Schumer’s vision for pursuing all of these large-scale system expansion projects at once is very optimistic. Funding for the MTA’s next capital program seems uncertain at best. So does the city’s bonding plan to finance work on the #7 (and the city’s insistence on linking the project to stadium development). Further, there is anything but consensus regarding the expenditure of huge amounts on the downtown LIRR link. Transit experts believe the latter project will have limited ridership, and if officials choose an option that displaces subway capacity for the service, the scale and fury of the public battle it will cause may over-shadow other funding and project issues.