Report: Balance Needed for New York's Manhattan-Centric Transit System

"The outer boroughs have more residents commuting within them than to Manhattan. But you wouldn't know it from looking at a map of New York City's transit network," according to a post by the Regional Plan Association.

That information is one of the findings of a report released this week by RPA titled "Overlooked Boroughs." Here's more on the counterintuitive balance of commuters in the outer boroughs as compared to Manhattan:

"New York's transit network was designed in the early part of the last century to bring residents to the urban core and out again. Yet more people commute within the outer boroughs than from Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island or the Bronx to Manhattan. Roughly 1.7 million residents of the four outer boroughs commuted to jobs within those boroughs in 2010, an increase of 18% from a decade earlier. Fewer New Yorkers - about one million -- commuted to jobs from the outer boroughs to Manhattan, up 12% from 2010."

The report includes a number of transportation planning recommendations to address the future (and present) needs of the New York metropolitan transportation system. A few examples:

• "Increase the frequency of bus service on dozens of outer-borough route"
• "Run a 24-mile overground rail line running on an existing rail right-of-way from Bay Ridge in Brooklyn, through Queens, to Co-Op City in the Bronx, to carry passengers directly from one outer borough to another"
• "Extend the Second Avenue subway both north to the Bronx and south to Lower Manhattan"

There is a lot more in both the executive summary [pdf] and the full technical report [pdf].