The Skyway travels along the track that takes passengers from the LaVilla neighborhood into Downtown. 26 J MAGAZINE | WINTER <strong>2019</strong>
{ } “I had a number of people who were whispering in my ear, when are you going to tear that thing down? You had folks who were commenting about tearing down the Skyway who have never ridden it.” – NAT FORD – The future is almost here One of the reasons Ford sees things differently from you and me is his way of looking at old problems in new way. His team doesn’t just include transit specialists. “A lot of folks we brought in are private-sector folks. Our head of the U2C program is from Amazon. His No. 2 is from Amazon, where they were steeped in robotics and artificial intelligence and things of that nature. We are attracting talent to the JTA that is not ‘transportation’ or ‘transit’ talent, but people who are innovative and creative, and we are excited about the energy inside this organization.” Now that JTA has updated most of the existing transportation system, Ford wants to figure out how to create a more effective system using new technology to serve a revitalized Downtown and surrounding neighborhoods. Perhaps testing the limits of his New York cockiness, Ford began to eye our most visible symbol of transportation failure: the Skyway, the 30-year-old, 2.5-mile monorail people mover that, despite being free, moves relatively few people. “I had a number of people who were whispering in my ear, when are you going to tear that thing down, you gotta tear that thing down,” he said. “You had folks who were commenting about tearing down the Skyway who have never ridden it. They didn’t realize that you have escalators, elevators, you’ve got a roof system, you’ve An Ultimate Urban Circulator autonomous vehicle that the JTA is considering is trailered to a display in Hemming Park. got a lighting system, you’ve got a lot of infrastructure. And over in Brooklyn, you have a very large control center that has been built there and a maintenance facility.” So Ford put together a diverse advisory group that studied the Skyway and found that the original 12-mile planned route for the Skyway was remarkably similar to the current Downtown revitalization plans. And if those plans work, with many more people living in and visiting Downtown, the city will need those other roughly 10 miles of transit. It’s clearly impractical to expand the Skyway. “Cost prohibitive, takes forever, casts shadows, all of those different issues. But you’ve got the core, you’ve got a skeleton, 2 1/2 miles that gives you time savings above the fray of automobiles. Why not leverage that?” It turned out that the original Skyway proposal was a roadway, for rubber-tire vehicles. “At the same time, we started hearing about this technology around autonomous (driverless) vehicles,” Ford said, “and that’s when the light bulb went off.” What emerged was the current plan to convert the existing Skyway from monorail into roadways and, where they end, build ramps to go down to ground level to continue the roadway. “We do these autonomous vehicles, take them at grade, and we could get from 2 1/2 miles to 10 miles a whole lot faster than an aerial structure at a lot less cost.” He figures that, by the time JTA secures the funding for the expansion, “the AV technology should be mature enough in another five to seven years, it should be more than mature enough that we can operate it in mixed traffic or dedicated lanes.” At that point, the old Skyway will become the Ultimate Urban Connector, or U2C, with at least 22 stops in Downtown and surrounding neighborhoods. Meanwhile, JTA is evaluating different AVs at its test track on East WINTER <strong>2019</strong> | J MAGAZINE 27
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