Now, that’s a good-looking transfer.
The sleek rendering you’re drooling over, at right, is what the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has just started building underneath Downtown, a $162-million passageway that will allow free transfers between Jay Street-Borough Hall’s A, C and F trains and Lawrence Street’s M and R trains.
It’ll take four years to build, according to a Transit Authority spokesman, but when the passageway is completed, it will include handicapped-accessible entrances, four new elevators, two new escalators and bathrooms.
Yes, bathrooms.
But the main goal is to link the BMT lines — which you youngsters know as the M and R trains — to the IND lines (the A, C and F), giving commuters myriad new options (all of which are better than the above-ground transfer).
“It’s just another way to make it convenient for riders to transfer,” said James Anyansi, a spokesman for MTA New York City Transit.
Of course, not everyone saw this subway glass as half-full.
“We’re big fans of interconnectivity, so it’s a positive,” said Gene Russianoff, who runs the Straphangers Campaign at the New York Public Interest Research Group.
“But once you leave that spruced-up corridor, you’ll still end up in Lawrence Street, which is a station in huge need of repair. There are exposed wires, holes, etc. It looks like it was designed by the guy who wrote ‘A Clockwork Orange.’ ”
