Most downtown-watchers greeted last week’s announced demise of the plan to put West St. in a tunnel adjacent to the World Trade Center memorial site as the end of a conflict that distracted from broader site planning issues. They hope that the decision to move ahead with the at-grade West St. plan will clear a variety of hurdles to finalizing the overall WTC site plan, and allow the pace of downtown redevelopment to quicken.

The local Coalition to Save West Street thanked Gov. Pataki for ultimately favoring the at-grade option, and said it would remain vigilant in order to develop West St. into an attractive, pedestrian-friendly boulevard.

Transportation debate downtown may focus in the future around the proposed idea of linking Lower Manhattan to the Long Island Rail Road system via the Atlantic Terminal in Brooklyn. A concept-level study released last year by the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. asserted huge potential ridership, but did not document it and transportation experts found the claim difficult to credit. It’s unclear how funding for mass transit expansion projects likely to be authorized in the 2005-2009 MTA capital program will be allocated. Studies for the LIRR-downtown project may be able to get through the five year period with Port Authority funding already allocated and from money saved by the cancellation of the West Street tunnel. 

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