New York needs an Olympic goal: Paris shows how a city can improve its permanent infrastructure

If there was one thing that became clear to me during an inspiring trip to this summer’s Olympic Games, it’s that their legacy won’t be measured just in medals or memories, but in the leaps of progress and pride that they brought about for the city of Paris.

It’s been a quarter-century since a bid for the Olympics was launched here, when Dan Doctoroff recognized the power of the Games as a catalyst for change — and a decade since the close of Mike Bloomberg’s mayoralty, which implemented much of the Olympic plan’s city-building vision even after New York lost out to London for the 2012 Games. 

That was a long time ago. These days, we are short on vision, and our existing infrastructure feels creaky. New York is sorely in need of a burst of Olympic-sized ambition. We probably shouldn’t chase the Games themselves again, but we can draw inspiration — and some specific ideas — from what Paris just pulled off.

Modernize the subway

The glue of Paris’ operational success during the Games was a truly modern subway system. Traveling on the Metro was fast, reliable, even pleasant — and gave this proud New Yorker a serious inferiority complex. 

New York’s subway remains a marvel for its reach and capacity, but Paris’ made me realize just how much we have come to accept: unpredictability, squalor, and a real decline in safety.

Paris’ reliability and frequency of service comes from its high-tech signaling technology, called communications-based train control (CBTC). In New York, two subway lines, the No. 7 and the L, have transitioned to similar technology — and they are the most reliable lines in our system. Converting the rest to CBTC will take years and billions, but it’s a hurdle we must clear without further delay.

Paris, like London, feels safer underground in large part because the system is tightly cordoned: tall, paneled fare gates make it much harder to get in without paying. In New York, wherever harder-to-jump fare gates sit on the MTA’s to-do list, they should be moved up. Nothing would produce a bigger, quicker boost to riders’ sense of safety and order.

For the games, Paris built a 17-mile, 8-station extension of a key subway line. New York can do the same. The Interborough Express, a 14-mile, 19-station light rail line proposed by Gov. Hochul, would create transit connectivity for nearly 900,000 residents of Brooklyn and Queens — if it gets to the finish line. 

Reclaim the river

In one of its most ambitious Olympic undertakings, Paris set out to make the River Seine safe for swimming. They haven’t quite gotten there yet, but the water was clean enough for Olympic athletes to plunge in.

New Yorkers swam in our rivers until about a century ago. Beginning in the 1870s, “floating baths” dotted the Hudson and the East River to allow swimming protected from the currents. Millions used them, but they fell out of use as the water became environmentally degraded in the 1920s.

Returning New Yorkers to the water would require a full-scale plan to reduce “combined sewer overflows” (CSOs) — the mix of stormwater and sewage that discharges, following rainfalls, into our waterways. Four years ago, the city committed $72 million in a plan to reduce CSOs in open waters by 2% to 4%, pinpointing some of the most polluted spots. That will not get anyone swimming in the Hudson; Paris has spent $1.5 billion cleaning the Seine. 

Costs aside, this would be no easy undertaking, as Paris learned, but what a glorious thing it would be to reclaim one of our iconic rivers as the city’s swimming pool. 

Build the village

Paris built its Olympic Village on 128 acres in Seine-Saint-Denis, a beleaguered area on the outskirts of the city, and plans to convert it into a mixed-use neighborhood with 2,500 apartments.

In the midst of the massive housing shortage facing New York, it’s worth asking where we might build an Olympic Village’s worth of apartments today. There’s one obvious place: Sunnyside Yards. At these Long Island City rail yards, a 115-acre deck could be constructed to create space for 12,000 units of housing and an array of parks, schools, and community facilities. 

There are massive obstacles: The site is one of the busiest passenger rail facilities in the country. The deck would be 10 times as large as what was built for Hudson Yards. It would be located just blocks away from where the proposed Amazon headquarters suffered a quick and bloody political death. And though the project could pay for itself, that is directly at odds with maximizing the amount of income-restricted housing that gets built.

That’s a big part of why you haven’t heard much about Sunnyside Yards since a master plan was published four years ago. It feels impossible at best, radioactive at worst. But the severity of our housing shortage should spur the same sense of urgency that the Olympics would create to find a path forward.

Transform the streets and sidewalks

Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo has attracted global attention — and local controversy — for creating hundreds of miles of bike lanes and hundreds of acres of pedestrian plazas. In the process, air pollution has been reduced by 40%. Paris streets, in general, feel more vibrant and better balanced than ours — they are less dominated by cars, with broader sidewalks and outdoor cafes everywhere. 

Another reason for the vibrancy of Paris’ streets is something they don’t have: hundreds of miles of scaffolding. Paris does not share New York’s addiction to these structures, even though Paris’ building façades are much older. It goes to show — just as with what we’ve normalized in the subway — that it doesn’t have to be this way. 

Make a compact with New Yorkers

As Paris prepared for the Olympics, a bargain was struck, in effect, between Parisians and their government — one in which the costs of big plans, the sacrifices required, and the promised results were all clear, if not universally popular.

Things rarely function that way here. Difficult choices too often go unresolved, which means difficult things don’t get done. Inaction and stagnation ensue. 

What we need is a clear compact for our city’s future, in which everyone understands what is being asked of them and what they can expect in return. 

New Yorkers need to know, for example, that there is no viable, long-term plan for fixing the subway that doesn’t include congestion pricing — and that even more revenue will be necessary to fund the MTA’s next capital plan, which starts next year. But this should come with a credible set of promises and clear timetables for tangible improvements and exciting new projects that, together, will modernize the system. 

Sunnyside Yards should be rebooted right now, along with a frank acknowledgement that most of the housing that gets built will need to be market-rate in order for the project to be financially viable. The state should form the planning entity envisioned in the master plan, and do a General Project Plan to enable development to proceed. Of course, one project, no matter how large, will not solve our housing crisis. We need more housing everywhere, and we should enact state laws — as California has done — to require every community to do its part to build new homes. 

We should follow Paris’ lead and mount a far more serious effort to stop dumping sewage into our rivers. As an interim step to reconnect New Yorkers with our waterways, both the state and city are laudably pushing ahead on +Pool, a plan for a permeable, filtering pool that would be installed in the East River. It will require continued investment and a sustained spirit of innovation, especially on the part of city and state environmental and public health officials, to turn vision into reality.

And it is time to stop pretending that we are making New Yorkers meaningfully safer by blanketing our sidewalks with dark and dirty scaffolding. The single biggest thing we can do: instead of requiring façade inspections every five years, let’s make it 10. As it happens, that’s the law in France. 

This is by no means an exhaustive to-do list for our government. But doing these things — even just some of them — will make New York easier to get around, healthier, more affordable, more fun. 

Beyond that, there’s something about bold ideas that adds up to more than the sum of their parts. When we think big — and government demonstrates its capacity to deliver — we build excitement about the city’s future. With too many New Yorkers — particularly families — leaving the city, creating that sense of excitement is critical, now more than ever, to maintain New York’s strength and our position as a world-class city.

We shouldn’t need the Olympics to do it, we just need its spirit of creativity and determination.

Lasher, a candidate for state Assembly, previously served as director of policy for Gov. Hochul.