Honestly, I'd just love to see the 7 actually be a functional subway line. It's the only one near my girlfriend's house in Queens, and it's often completely non-functional; IIRC, it's completely shut down Queens-bound for the next 11 weekends or something like that. Constant problems.

The weekend is the MTA's Achilles heel. You are much better off at 3AM on a Tuesday than Noon Saturday. At least in the outer boros, they try and keep the lines in Manhatten south of 110 at least vaguely useable.

I don't know what the solution is though, they have to do maintenance and upgrades sometime or other.

In Prague, the metro system runs 4AM to 0AM - all maintenance and upgrades are done in the four-hour window without revenue moves. It's a system that's an order of magnitude smaller (in revenue track length) than New York subway, though - I'm not sure how this would scale.

I suspect it would benefit me more than the average New Yorker, but I'd love for the M60 to be replaced by a train line, something going from Columbia through LaGuardia out to Flushing.

I think the 7 extension would be cool, but there is plenty of rail traffic to and from New Jersey. It's something like one train every 18 seconds.

Whatever the number is, it's simply not enough and plans are underway to expand, even after the last plan was cancelled by the NJ governor because of budget issues.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Access_to_the_Regions_Core

Which makes a ton of sense, really. Manhattan is a crowded, congested, expensive place with high taxes and high costs of living. Regional transit accessibility is one of the few reasons people would locate a business there. Manhattan is clearly the primary beneficiary of the tunnel, and why New Jersey ever offered to pay for it in the first place (to the tune of ~$9 billion, before the inevitable overruns) is beyond me.

I think NJ is a pretty large beneficiary as well; a huge part of New Jersey's economy is dependent on para-NYC activities, ranging from businesses with satellite operations, to infrastruture (e.g. EWR), and property/income taxes from people who work in NYC and live in NJ. Without all that, cities like Newark would be even worse off economically than they already are, and there wouldn't be a lot going on in, say, Hoboken.

A short commute from New Jersey to Manhattan would convince people that would otherwise live in the city to move to New Jersey, moving their 10% state income tax with them. (And don't forget the city tax. I'm surprised we don't have borough and block taxes yet!) It seems logical that New York would want New Jersey to spend the money to enable this.