Will there be any room left for office buildings?

This is pretty big news:

In the budget plan he issued Monday, President Bush proposed using $2 billion in Sept. 11 aid to build a $6 billion rail link connecting the World Trade Center site to the Long Island Rail Road and Kennedy International Airport.

[...]

Planners estimate that the rail link project could be completed by 2013. It would allow travelers heading to Manhattan from Kennedy Airport to travel aboard new trains on existing AirTrain tracks that loop around the central terminal area and then run along a viaduct in the middle of the Van Wyck Expressway to Jamaica, Queens.

There, a new 1,500-foot elevated connector would carry the trains from the AirTrain tracks to the Long Island Rail Road tracks heading toward Brooklyn. Near the Atlantic Terminal in Brooklyn, the trains would enter a new three-mile tunnel and travel beneath the East River into Lower Manhattan. An underground station would serve both the tunnel and the Atlantic Terminal.

The tunnel would allow access to Hanover Square, the intended terminus of the prospective Second Avenue subway, and the World Trade Center station, the existing terminus of the E train.

So in one complex downtown, you have the train to Kennedy, the E train and Second Avenue subway terminals, some LIRR trains and easy underground connections to PATH trains to New Jersey and the soon-to-be-upgraded Fulton Street tangle of subway lines. While I'm not sure there will be enough money to build another tunnel under the East River for quite some time, this has the potential of being the intermodal masterpiece that spurs development elsewhere and eases congestion across the entire road and rail system.

Potential benefits:

- It allows some LIRR trains that terminate at Atlantic Avenue to go through to Manhattan, allowing some commuters in deepest Brooklyn to avoid long rides on the subway and allowing some Long Islanders to skip transfers at Jamaica or Penn Station, both of which are a mess.

- It creates the one-seat ride from the international airport to downtown, like every other civilized world city.

- It will include a terminal for the Second Avenue subway. Hopefully, that will help get the darn thing built.

- It makes it far easier to get from JFK to Newark, which is a good thing if you're a cheapskate on airfare like me and are willing to trudge across the width of the nation's largest city to save $40 on a flight.

- At $5 to get you from the airport to a distant rail crossing on the outskirts of town, the AirTrain is a ripoff. Now it'll be a steal, assuming they don't bump up the prices.

Potential problems:

- The train goes to Lower Manhattan. The hotels are in Midtown.

- A one-seat rail link is needed more urgently at LaGuardia, where shorter flights mean more domestic riders who are likely to want cheap downtown access.

- Sometimes people forget just how small Lower Manhattan is. Imagine the City of London surrounded by water on three sides. The streets are narrow and thousands of more cabs idling at a train station won't make things any better.