The New York Times; satellite image by Europa Technologies, Navteq and State of New Jersey via Google Earth

By MARCIA BIEDERMAN

Published: February 4, 2007

GETTING driving directions is an easy process these days with computer software, mapping Web sites and G.P.S. systems. They will indeed get you from Point A to Point B, but they often do it in standard English, bland as a news anchor’s accent. Whether you’re headed for a Brooklyn brownstone or an Indiana office park, the route will be described as a series of intersections and turns.

For the vernacular version, inquire at a gas station. In New Jersey, you could be told to pass a jughandle. In Detroit, you could be advised to take a Michigan left. Texans could tell you to splash through a ford or take a frontage road. People in Kirkland, Wash., will warn you to watch for a pedestrian flag crossing; the city actually provides orange flags to carry in crosswalks to help drivers see walkers.

“We’re familiar with jughandles and Michigan lefts, but a lot of people aren’t,” said Christian Dwyer, director of operations for MapQuest. Regionalisms “would not be part of the MapQuest narrative.”

But they remain part of the drive in many places in the country. While these regionalisms can make directions confusing, drivers coming upon these turns and loops can become frustrated and disoriented. It may not be hard to understand what’s going on when a pedestrian waves a flag in a crosswalk, but a first encounter with a Michigan left or a jughandle can be daunting.

So some advanced knowledge would be helpful. For the perplexed, here is a field guide.

Jughandles

Craig Randall of Boise, Idaho, was certainly confused. On a business trip to New Jersey, he decided to unwind at a movie theater he could see while driving on Route 10 near Whippany. But the theater was as elusive as a mirage. He got to the intersection, but was unable to turn left from Route 10 to get to the theater.

Mr. Randall was about to discover the jughandle. It is a one-way road that loops vehicles from the right lane of a main road to a cross street where the left can be made without having to cross traffic on the main road. A jughandle is almost like an exit ramp off a highway. (An animation of this and other unconventional intersection junctions are at attap.umd.edu/UAID.php, a Web site developed by the Maryland State Highway Administration and the University of Maryland.)

So Mr. Randall, a business consultant, needed to find the jughandle for that intersection, make a right into it, then loop around to the left to get to his movie. He said the Google map he had consulted didn’t show the jughandle.

“It has a blob next to Highway 10,” he said.

Dan Stessel, a spokesman for the New Jersey Department of Transportation, said jughandles were first built in New Jersey in the late 1950s. Jughandles reduce traffic congestion and backups, he said.

“They’re well accepted in New Jersey and still relevant today,” he said.

Low-Water Crossings

If you ignore road barricades in San Antonio after a heavy rain, your car might float away. Creeks and streams in many areas of Texas are often topped with a concrete slab, rather than a bridge, where the water can rise quickly after a downpour. So if you come upon one during a strong storm, it may be best to find an alternative route.

Mitchell Welch, a corporate trainer and lifelong San Antonio resident, said he avoided the concrete crossings whenever they had water on them. “They will take your car off the road,” he said. “I don’t go near them, but some people do.”

The crossings, also called fords, are still being built in some places, including Kentucky, because they are cheaper than bridges.

The Michigan Left

“After a year, maybe I’ll stop complaining about it or just get used to it,” said Craig Gross, who moved last April from Southern California to Grand Rapids, Mich., where he is still experiencing culture shock over the median U-turn crossover. It’s often called the Michigan left because of its widespread use in that state.

Like the jughandle, the Michigan left is designed to block left turns at intersections. Drivers wishing to turn left onto a cross street from a main road must first drive past the cross street. An opening through the median is farther down the road, usually with its own turn lane. Drivers then make a U-turn at the opening, often assisted by a traffic light that stops oncoming traffic, and double back to the cross street. A Michigan left, in essence, is a legal U-turn. The theory is that the U-turn is less disruptive to traffic flow then a left-hand turn.

Mr. Gross, the pastor of an online anti-pornography ministry, XXXchurch.com, said the Michigan left had caused him to overshoot his own house and even led him to break the law.

“I end up making more illegal turns,” he said.

The Michigan left has its admirers. In North Carolina, it has been adapted into the Superstreet plan being built along Route 17 south of Wilmington. The Superstreet uses median U-turn crossovers to restrict turns from cross streets rather than the main road, “but it’s the same idea,” said Kevin Lacy, a state traffic engineer, adding that not all North Carolinians have welcomed the new design.

“It’s different, and everyone is a little concerned about different,” he said.

Frontage Roads

Another Texas tradition is the service, or frontage, road built next to a highway — thousands of miles of asphalt Mini-Me’s that offer easy access to the stores, restaurants and office parks.

So if drivers want to stop at a diner off the highway, they exit, then use the parallel frontage road to get to the restaurant.

In an effort to cut costs, the Texas Department of Transportation in 2003 proposed limiting the construction of new frontage roads. However, “the public outcry was pretty loud,” said Mark Cross, a spokesman for the transportation department, and the proposal was withdrawn.

“Texans are used to frontage roads,” Mr. Cross said. “They just did not see them going away.”

Pedestrian Flags

In more than a dozen states, including Utah, Virginia and Washington, pedestrians can carry brightly colored government-supplied flags in crosswalks to be more conspicuous.

Outsiders wonder what’s going on, but they brake. “If you’re driving and you see a person waving a flag at you, and they’re in a crosswalk, you kind of get the idea,” said David Godfrey, the transportation engineering manager of Kirkland, Wash.

He said his city’s pedestrian flag program began in the mid-1990s. At 50 locations in the city, pedestrians are encouraged to take flags from holders placed near crosswalks, hold them aloft while crossing the street, then return them to receptacles on the other side.

Some communities, including Berkeley, Calif., have abandoned their flags because few people used them and many flags were stolen. Mr. Godfrey said pedestrians in Kirkland would sometimes whirl the flags playfully while crossing, perhaps because “they’d feel foolish carrying them in a safety kind of way.”

Some of these regional oddities are finding a place in online maps. Microsoft’s Live Search maps (maps.live.com) includes a pushpin option that allows users to write pop-up captions on directions, like “Take the jughandle here to make your left.”

And MapQuest said it would also offer a way to add commentary to its maps when the company comes out with a personalizing feature later this year.

“Consumers could say,” said Mr. Dwyer of MapQuest, “ ‘This is what MapQuest tells you, but let me tell it to you another way.” ’

Rick Steves, Special to the Chronicle, Sunday, February 4, 2007

Enjoying a vanilla ice cream sundae in eastern Berlin’s Cafe Sibylle, I ponder the half a moustache carved in stone that hangs overhead. The sundae, which comes with a shot of liquor, was the standard treat back in the 1960s. And the moustache is all that’s left of what was the largest statue of Josef Stalin in Germany.

Berlin is filled with poignant memories of its communist days. And now that the city has been free and united for nearly two decades, there’s a playful nostalgia — or “ostalgia” (Ost is the German word for east) — for what some consider the good old days, back when ice cream was cheap and everyone had job security. Today, theme places such as Cafe Sibylle serve dreary food from the 1960s complete with a Cold War “ambience.”

The cafe stands on what was the grandest street of communist Berlin. Its original buildings were leveled by the Soviet Army in 1945. When Stalin decided the main drag should be a showcase street, he had it rebuilt and named it Stalin Allée. Today, this street, lined with “workers’ palaces” — apartment flats done in the bold “Stalin Gothic” style so common in Moscow in the 1950s — has been restored and renamed for Karl Marx. Social Realist reliefs on the buildings celebrate the triumphs of the working class.

Berlin’s subway comes with more evocative reminders of the Cold War. The Unter den Linden subway station is one of Berlin’s former “ghost stations.” During the Cold War, most underground train tunnels were simply blocked at the border, but a few Western lines looped through the East. To make a little hard Western cash, the Eastern government rented the use of these tracks to the West, but the stations (which happened to be in East Berlin) were strictly off-limits to East Berliners. For 28 years Westerners rolled slowly through, seeing only eerie-looking East German guards and lots of cobwebs. Within days of the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, these stations were reopened. Today they’re a time warp, looking exactly as they did when built in 1931, complete with drab green tiles and original signage.

In former East Berlin, a much-loved symbol of the old days shines red and green in the “walk/stay” sign on stoplights, proving that some German communists had a sense of humor. The perky red and green men (Ampelmännchen) were nearly replaced by far less jaunty Western signs. But after an uproar from “ostalgic” locals, the East German signals have survived.

Little remains of the grandest souvenir of Cold War Berlin, the infamous Berlin Wall. The 100-mile “Anti-Fascist Protective Rampart,” as the East German government called it, was erected almost overnight in 1961 to stop the outward flow of people (3 million leaked out between 1949 and 1961). Local guides are quick with all the stats: The 12-foot-high Berlin Wall had a 16-foot tank ditch, a no-man’s land that was 30 to 160 feet wide, and 300 sentry towers. During its 28 years, border guards fired 1,693 times and made 3,221 arrests. Meanwhile, there were 5,043 documented successful escapes (565 by East German guards).

The carnival atmosphere of those first years after the Wall fell is gone, but hawkers still sell “authentic” pieces of the Wall, East German flags and military paraphernalia to gawking tourists. The remains of the Wall have been nearly devoured by persistent “wall-peckers.” A low-key row of cobbles traces the Berlin Wall’s former path around the city.

A short stretch of the Wall survives at Zimmerstrasse. And a section at Bernauer Strasse (near the Nordbahnhof S-Bahn station) is part of the fascinating Berlin Wall Documentation Center.

The biggest surviving stretch of the Wall is the colorful East Side Gallery. Nicknamed “the world’s longest outdoor art gallery,” it stretches for nearly a mile and is covered with murals painted by artists from around the world. This segment of the wall makes a poignant walk.

Checkpoint Charlie, the famous border checkpoint between the American and Soviet sectors, is long gone. But its memory is preserved by the Museum of the Wall at Checkpoint Charlie Museum. Americans — the Cold War victors — have the biggest appetite for wall-related sights, especially Checkpoint Charlie.

During the Cold War, this museum stood defiantly, within spitting distance from the border guards and showing off all the ingenious escapes over, under and through the Berlin Wall. Today, though the drama is over and hunks of the wall stand like victory scalps at its door, the museum at Checkpoint Charlie still tells a gripping history, including those heady days when people power tore down that Wall.

Rick Steves (www.ricksteves.com) writes European travel guidebooks and hosts travel shows on public TV and radio. E-mail rick@ricksteves.com, or write him c/o P.O. Box 2009, Edmonds, WA 98020.

MANY OPTIONS: Two Bay Area projects run gamut from practicality to a grand statement

John King, Chronicle Urban Design Writer

Sunday, February 4, 2007

A green approach to development can be as simple as buying fancy toilets — or as tough as finding a place for 60,000 tons of sand.

Those are the extremes found at two very different Bay Area projects now under construction. One is Blue Star Corner in Emeryville, a collection of 20 townhouses set to open this summer. The other is the $429 million home of the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park, which is still at least 18 months from completion.

Each is an example of sustainable development, and each is seeking the blessing of the U.S. Green Building Council and its LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) program. But where one wants to make a grand statement, the other is simply trying to do the right thing within a set budget.

The statement is the academy, the bones of which now cover more than 4 acres of the park across the music concourse from the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum.

The adventurous design includes ecofriendly elements like operable windows and the use of recycled steel and other materials.

There’s also the curvaceous “green” roof that will be cloaked in 1.7 million seedlings, including beach strawberries and golden poppies; Italian architect Renzo Piano imagined it from the start as a symbol of the academy and the park being one.

All this was in the works back in 2002, when the design by Piano and local architecture firm Chong Partners was unveiled. But when academy officials found themselves trying to explain how “green” the building might be, a consultant said the project had a chance to become the largest building in the nation with a top LEED rating of platinum.

The landscaped roof, for instance, isn’t just a nice metaphor for nature. It also makes efficient use of water, because the landscaped roof absorbs rainwater that would otherwise run into storm drains. And that’s worth points toward a LEED certification level.

Projects also get points for recycling as much of a site’s excavated materials as possible. The academy saved all 60,000 tons of sand dug out for an underground level of the new building — and then reused it on local beaches and within the park.

Once academy officials decided to build as green as possible, the priciest step was spending $2 million to install photovoltaic cells on the rim of the roof to generate 5 percent of the facility’s electricity.

Among the initial skeptics: Piano, who had envisioned an airy trellis extending 30 feet beyond the walls.

“Renzo was not interested in solar panels early on,” said Patrick Kociolek, who stepped down in June as the academy’s executive director to resume work there as a researcher. “Once he saw how the technology had changed, that it was effective and more aesthetically pleasing, he got excited.”

The budget is tighter across the bay in Emeryville, where Holliday Development is building Blue Star Corner’s 20 townhouses on half an acre near rail lines. It’s also a pilot project for a new LEED certification program aimed at home builders.

By the time Holliday decided to join the pilot program, the townhouses were designed and construction were bids in place. So the project was tweaked to get enough points for basic LEED certification; for instance, the toilet budget grew by $2,055 to purchase low-flow toilets.

“We had economics to balance, and we came to this late in the game,” said Kevin Wakelin, the chief executive officer at Holliday. “But we could work with a standard townhouse platform and take it to where it’s a certified project.”

The shift boosted development costs at Blue Star Corner by only $33,000, Wakelin estimates. One reason that winning certification was so easy: The designer of the project was David Baker + Partners, a firm that emphasizes environmental issues.

As far as the Blue Star team is concerned, the key step to sustainability isn’t a rating. It’s a state of mind: the desire to create healthy spaces that treat their settings and users with care.

“You want interiors that are healthy and designs that aren’t wasteful,” said Kevin Wilcock, a partner at the Baker firm. “The point’s not to tick off items on a checklist.”

E-mail John King at jking@sfchronicle.com.

NEW DEVELOPMENT: Many companies eager to build in environmentally friendly manner

Patrick Hoge, Chronicle Staff Writer

Sunday, February 4, 2007

San Francisco is aiming to become one of the nation’s first large cities to require that new, privately developed buildings meet rigorous standards of environmental friendliness.

The decision to pursue such standards, which will need Board of Supervisors approval, follows similar actions taken in Boston and Washington. Smaller cities have also adopted such mandatory rules, including several in the Bay Area.

It is part of a nationwide “green building” revolution that experts say is prompted by government incentives and mandates, growing consumer demand and fears of global warming.

“It’s a virtual tsunami of green buildings,” said Charles Lockwood, a real estate consultant in Southern California and New York, who has written articles about green building for the Harvard Business Review and other publications. “Within the last year, the entire debate has shifted, and it’s not a question of can we go green, it’s how do we do it and how quickly.”

Green buildings minimize environmental impacts with features such as natural lighting, solar power, low-flow water fixtures, no-flush urinals that use a chemical trap instead of water, and even use of nontoxic paints, glue, carpets and varnishes. A popular new product is an elevator that produces electricity as it descends.

According to the U.S. Department of Energy, buildings use more than 70 percent of the nation’s electricity and more than 50 percent of natural gas. Roughly 15 million new buildings are expected to be built by 2015.

A 2003 study sponsored by the state of Massachusetts showed that the added cost of building according to LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) standards was less than 2 percent, but the financial benefits 10 times that amount due to less energy and water use, waste production and maintenance costs. The study estimated that such buildings were, on average, 25 to 30 percent more energy-efficient and said other studies conservatively suggested that worker productivity in LEED buildings was higher by at least 1 percent.

Publishing giant McGraw-Hill, which owns trade publications aimed at the construction industry, produced a study that predicted 2007 would be a “tipping point” for the residential green market, with most builders doing at least 15 percent of their work to green specifications.

The study also predicted that green building would comprise 10 percent of the nonresidential construction market, and last month, McGraw-Hill reported that school construction is the fastest-growing part of the green building explosion.

“We think that it’s going to become standard for building over the next 10 years,” said report author Michele Russo.

The firm estimated the green new-home building market at $7 billion a year and projected it would grow to between $20 billion and $38 billion by 2010. That is still only a fraction of the roughly $335 billion residential construction market.

Many local, state and federal government agencies already require that new public buildings meet the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED standards, which rate buildings in five key areas: sustainable site development, water savings, energy efficiency, materials selection, and indoor environmental quality. Qualified buildings are given certified, silver, gold and platinum ratings based on a checklist. This has become the nation’s most recognized rating system for large buildings.

In San Francisco, planners are considering proposing a mandatory green building program for large projects just months after starting a fast-track permitting program for developers who voluntarily met LEED standards.

“We think it probably makes sense locally. We are giving serious consideration to moving with that as a legal requirement,” said Dean Macris, San Francisco’s planning director. A spokesman said Mayor Gavin Newsom also supports the idea.

A handful of cities in the Bay Area already have mandatory green standards.

Pleasanton in 2002 was apparently the first in the state, and one of the first cities nationwide, to require that large commercial buildings meet minimum LEED standards, and that civic projects qualify for LEED silver certification. The city also has green standards for single-family homes. Other cities with mandatory programs include Cotati, Livermore, Novato and Sebastopol.

So far in Pleasanton, about 25 commercial projects and hundreds of houses have been developed to meet the standards. There, Centex Homes has almost sold out its 30-unit Avignon subdivision of $1.5 million to $3.5 million homes, each equipped with solar panels and other green features such as tankless water heaters and use of recycled materials.

There are dozens of other public and private projects around the Bay Area boasting or seeking green certifications, including a police headquarters in Cotati, Orinda’s new City Hall, office buildings in San Mateo, San Rafael and San Jose, and mixed-use buildings in Berkeley and Sebastopol.

“Green building in general was one of the first environmental movements that started to cross party lines because it just makes business sense. There’s a really strong fiscal case,” said Mark Zahniser, director of the Green Building Council’s LEED program.

Such buildings result in lower energy and water bills. Studies have also shown that increasing the amount of natural light, using materials with fewer toxins and increasing air circulation translates to greater worker productivity, reduced absenteeism and better employee retention, said real estate consultant Lockwood.

Brian Gitt, executive director of Build-It-Green, a rating and certification agency in Berkeley that is similar to the Green Building Council, said he is fascinated at the surge of interest among builders, architects, engineers and Realtors. The group’s certification classes were sparsely attended three years ago, but now the council routinely sells out 100-seat seminars. It has a waiting list for future classes.

“Something happened about a year ago. No one can put their finger on it, but there was an incredible surge in attention to green building,” Gitt said.

Today, the group is consulting with 70 public agencies around the state.

San Francisco officials say they have been overwhelmed since September with inquiries from developers who want to get on the permitting fast track in exchange for building green projects. Such a perk means developers are assigned a city planner in weeks, not months, and their building plans are also reviewed in just a few weeks instead of an additional six months.

A half-dozen high-rise projects are already getting fast-track treatment. But so many developers sought the speedy approval that planners decided to make green building requirements mandatory. Boston adopted mandatory standards last month, although those requirements aren’t as strict as what is proposed in San Francisco.

Mark Solit, the Orinda developer who has proposed a San Francisco development that includes two 1,200-foot-tall skyscrapers at First and Mission streets, said it’s not just planners who want green projects.

“More and more consumers are aware of it and want it and are willing to pay for environmentally sensitive products, of all kinds, not just development,” he said. “Obviously the marketplace is dictating to us that we do some of these things voluntarily.”

Mandatory standards have opposition in the California Building Industry Association, which sponsors a voluntary certification program called California Green Builder.

Don Mull, who heads the Stockton-based program, said that programs ordered by local governments create regulatory inconsistencies statewide and drive up prices by preventing builders from mass producing houses.

The Green Builder program requires 15 percent better energy efficiency than the state’s residential standard, and a cut in water usage of 20,000 gallons — about 12 to 14 percent of normal usage. About 1,100 homes have been completed through the program, and 2,300 more are under construction, Mull said.

Building

– Thin building without closed offices on exterior allows

natural light to enter.

1 Solar heat reflection using light-colored roof coating.

– Skygarden atria with plants for people on upper floors to use.

2 Natural cross ventilation.

– Concrete using fly ash and slag (industrial byproducts) reduces carbon dioxide emissions.

– Recycled building components (steel, composite woods).

– Certified, sustainably managed, urea-formaldehyde-free wood products.

3 Cogenerator: generates electricity and uses waste heat for heating or cooling via an absorption chiller.

– Paints and adhesives containing low volatile organic compounds.

Facade

4 Sun control, high-performance insulation and glazing.

5 Photovolatic cells integrated in glazing or facade.

6 Automated blinds for daylight control.

– Individual lighting and climate controls from desktop computer.

Resources

7 Green power purchased for electricity.

– Encourage sustainable services.

– Fully integrated recycling system for zero waste.

– Low-flow fixtures and waterless urinals.

Transportation

8 Close to public transportation.

– Minimize parking.

9 Bicycle racks and staff showers.

Source: EHDD Architecture

E-mail Patrick Hoge phoge@sfchronicle.com.

Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

A rezoning of a 310-acre stretch of factories, parking lots and warehouses on the Far West Side has led the way for plans for residential towers.

The developer H. Henry Elghanayan likes to be at the head of the line.

He said that his company, Rockrose Development Corporation, was one of the first to build new residential towers in Lower Manhattan and the West Village and at Queens West in Long Island City and Battery City Park.

This month, Mr. Elghanayan will be the first developer to start building a residential complex on the Far West Side of Manhattan, which is the direct result of the Bloomberg administration’s rezoning of a 310-acre stretch of factories, parking lots and warehouses for large-scale development two years ago.

Rockrose is constructing 44-story and 24-story apartment buildings on opposite sides of 10th Avenue, between 37th and 38th Streets, in what has been officially renamed the Hudson Yards district. “Once people see that we are indeed going forward,” Mr. Elghanayan said, “you’re going to see an explosion of growth in that whole area.”

Builders are already flocking to the once-sleepy Hudson Yards, an area crisscrossed by bus ramps and Lincoln Tunnel entrances.

Indeed, a half-dozen developers plan to start residential projects there in the next six months, with a combined total of nearly 6,000 apartments, 20 percent of which will be for low- and moderate-income families.

There are also five slim-budget hotels either under construction or in development on the block bounded by 39th and 40th Streets, between Eighth and Ninth Avenues.

Most developers say that commercial towers will be slower to follow in a district that stretches from roughly 30th to 42nd Streets, west of Eighth Avenue. But Brookfield Financial Properties is talking to at least one investment bank interested in its office site on Ninth Avenue, between 31st and 33rd Streets.

City officials say they are making progress on plans for the $2.1 billion extension of the No. 7 subway line from Times Square to 11th Avenue and 34th Street, which, they add, will spur the development of office towers in the area. The Bloomberg administration sold $2 billion in bonds in December, much of it for the subway project. It hopes to issue the tunneling contract later this year and begin construction.

The city is also working with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to devise a plan for selling the development rights over the West Side railyards, which sit on both sides of 11th Avenue, between 30th and 33rd Streets. “There’s an extraordinary amount of activity going on, precipitated by high rents in Midtown,” said Daniel L. Doctoroff, deputy mayor for economic development. “You’re really beginning to see the outlines of what Hudson Yards is going to look like.”

But just north of the yards, the fate of the long-planned expansion of the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center is up in the air again, at least temporarily. Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s administration has said that the convention center is one of several projects “under review.” According to hotel industry executives and city officials, Mr. Spitzer has questioned the wisdom and cost of the $1.7 billion project, in part because of the vertical nature of the expansion, which runs counter to the horizontal layout of most convention centers.

Critics contend that adding floors to the convention center could make it more difficult and expensive to present successful trade shows and conventions. Some state officials prefer an expansion that would go south, over the West Side railyards.

That, however, would clash with the Bloomberg administration’s plan to develop residential and commercial towers on platforms over the railyards. It could also affect the three developers and hotel operators who submitted competing bids to build a 1,500-room hotel across 11th Avenue from the convention center.

But it remains to be seen what the Spitzer administration will do with the convention center after the review. Patrick J. Foye, chairman of the Empire State Development Corporation, declined to comment.

Mr. Doctoroff said he respected the governor’s right to evaluate the project and would participate in those discussions.

“There will be no ideal solution as long as Javits is still there and you want to continue to operate it during construction,” he said. “We continue to believe it is a very good solution and we ought to go ahead with Phase II at the same time.”

The second phase, however, could add $1 billion to the price and require closing the convention center for several years. The hotel industry has no enthusiasm for raising the $1.50 a night room tax dedicated to the expansion plan. City officials have suggested raising the tax to $2, noting that average room rates soared 12.6 percent last year.

Mr. Doctoroff and the transportation authority have met with real estate developers and community leaders to discuss the eventual sale of development rights over the railyards in August. The initial plan called for rights to be sold to one or two developers, who would build platforms over the yards for residential and commercial towers. But most developers now say that government should finance the platform construction, which could cost $1 billion.

There is also debate over whether the development rights should be sold to one developer, or divided and sold to a variety of builders, a strategy that could generate more money over time for the transportation authority.

Developers also want the city to demolish the elevated railroad line, known as the High Line, that hugs the western and southern perimeter of the railyards. That proposal is opposed by several community groups, which want to see the entire length of the High Line converted to a park.

In the meantime, the residential juggernaut continues. The developer Joseph Moinian is starting work on a $760 million, 60-story apartment tower on the north side of 42nd Street, west of 11th Avenue, next to his 46-story Atelier condominium tower.

Directly across 42nd Street, Larry Silverstein is close to starting construction of two 58-story glass towers, where 20 percent of the 1,276 apartments will be set aside for low-income families. An adjacent 16-story building will have 83 apartments for moderate-income tenants. The new buildings will be next to the River Place complex that Mr. Silverstein built in 1999.

All five buildings, designed by the architect Costas Condylis, sit within the Hudson Yards district. The area differs from most of the district in that developers have long been able to build high-rises along 42nd Street.

At the southeast corner of 10th and 42nd Street, Stephen J. Ross, chief executive of Related Companies, said he expected to start construction this spring on a roughly 60-story tower with 500 apartments, 250 hotel rooms and a set of theaters.

The Dermot Company said it would start building its $450 million Hudson Mews project, two 18-story buildings over platforms on opposite sides of 37th Street, west of Ninth Avenue, along with a public park. Stephen Benjamin, a principal at Dermot, said the company was completing its financing and negotiations with the Port Authority to buy development rights over ramps leading to the Lincoln Tunnel.

Farther east, on the north side of 37th Street, Glenwood Management plans to break ground later this year for a 24-story building with 550 apartments.

Jeff Levine of Douglas Development expects to start this spring on a 34-story building with 370 apartments just outside the Hudson Yards district, at the southeast corner of 30th Street and 11th Avenue.

Like most of the developers, Mr. Moinian is bullish on the future. He has bid in partnership with the Marriott hotel chain to build the convention hotel and banquet hall. He also owns two sites for commercial projects in the area, although he cannot begin construction for at least five years because the sites lay within the path of the subway extension.

“Our commitment to the area is very, very strong,” Mr. Moinian said. “There’s no question that this is the next part of town where the action takes place.”