The third major assignment of the term overall involved us proposing a topic that had separate debatable points and/or sides, and choosing one side to write on while still being open-minded about the other. Of course, with this being research-based, it was a requirement that you cite some number of sources in favor of your topic and against for the unbiased aspect of the writing. I hadn’t worked with databases all that much before, aside from Google Scholar, and although CUNY had a number of resources available at the students’ hands, I couldn’t really zero down which base would work best for me, so I admittedly used a number of databases, backtracking from Wikipedia, and even just the Google search engine at times to find my resources. As for the question that I’d chosen that was giving me this amount of pain, it was debating which of two major proposals for expansion of the New York City Subway system would have best benefitted the city, punctuating my interest in transit and general knowledge of it from the NYC Cultural Narrative all over again. I wrote my proposal in, as detailed below.

New York City already has one of the world’s most expansive subway systems,
standing at well over 472 stations distributed across 36 different routes winding their
way across the vast metropolitan. Even despite its gargantuan status, it is known by
many that it had at one point been much bigger, and known by fewer that there were
extensive plans over the years that sought to make it even bigger. Of these plans, the
most prominent were a series of plans in the 1930s, and the more uniform Program for
Action expansion sets from the 1960s. While these plans never did see a full
implementation, some of their routes have been built and are in service today, while
others remain as provisions for sections that never continued. As a fairly avid fan of
transportation in urban areas, I’ve always seen the expansion of the subway system as
a step forward. My personal experiences with local transit have allowed me to also see
that there are many high-density areas that, although able to connect to nearby
subway stations via bus, have long commute times and general dissatisfaction with the
current system. Knowing these plans existed makes me realize the connectivity they
could have had in current times, even if the time they were from didn’t see that just yet.
What I want to look at through this research is the potential that these routes
had to assist the development of certain areas, and which set of plans may ultimately
have been better for the city had they been constructed with the hindsight we have
now from the modern times. Furthermore, I want to look into the logistics of how these
lines would likely be built, and their practicality when put up against the rest of the
system as some solutions have already been implemented that may make them void. If
time allots by the time I conclude this section of the research, I would also like to take
a look into how these could impact the communities the proposed routes would run
through, and what interconnectivity value they would hold for the city as a whole. In
addition to two main plans, some older pre-existing routes that would have operated
complementary to them may be researched, as their reinstatement could vastly impact
the value of some of these lines. Overall, I would like to see which plan would become
most preferable over the other in terms of how they could benefit the mobility of New
York City residents, and how they could potentially help make our system world-class.

From there, I started to research. I already had some prior experience with the topic given my various look-arounds online for info on the subway at various ages before I started the essay, so it was easy to at least narrow down whatever passages I needed to be looking for for this. I gathered some minor sources off of Google Scholar, along with some backtracked from Wikipedia, including two articles written or otherwise corroborated by the MTA themselves, which would serve as the most nonbiased viewpoints on how one of the later plans, the 1960s’ one mentioned in the argumentative proposal, would affect locale in its wake. There were less concrete sources for the 1930s’ one, aside from a rather expansive transit blog and a map created by one Vanshnookenraggen, who is well known in the NYC transportation sphere for their well-researched theoretical maps. An archived New York Times article was also to be included to show the scope of the 1930s’ plans (it included the direct track mileage to be built per borough), but it was ultimately axed in favor of a multimodal source in the form of a YouTube video by Transit in New York, who practically detailed the same thing as the newspaper. With my sources in hand, I took to the essay component of the assignment, with the result coming out as such in the PDF below.

Looking back on it, it was highly primitive. Although the introductory and conclusive paragraphs introduced and wrapped up the essay well, respectively, the interior paragraphs felt like they were lumbering with no direction. The majority of it would likely be hard to interpolate and reason with from the perspective of an individual who knew little about New York City’s transportation history, and often used terms that, too often, wound up basically saying the same thing over and over again. I knew it back then as I know it now, and I wasn’t content with this product. So, in the next and final iteration, after peer reviews, I took to attempting to streamline the text in a way that would be easier for readers to look into, although… again, I may have wound up going overboard with the word count. The final product is displayed in the PDF below.

This end result was a bit more digestible for people outside of interest in transit. Despite that, again, the word count ended up going over almost 1.6x the amount ordinated in the instructions, which was around 1500, where this is 2462 in measure. Still, it wound up in leniency with my instructor, and thus I got a pass on it. Even if I still hadn’t learnt from the previous word count, I still believe that it was here where I got the skill to look through databases for research. A skill that will ultimately earn me many more high passes in the future. Out of all of the assignments in the term, I believe this one is my favorite, simply for the depth that it allowed me to dive into in terms of my own interests, as well as the fact that it allowed me to focus on a topic highly important to New York City itself. It was great all around, in the end,