Skyway

Transportation in New York can evoke exotic locales: the yellow-taxi experience, it’s said, is reminiscent of a rickshaw ride in New Delhi; the No. 6 train is a cattle car; Joe Biden once compared LaGuardia Airport to “a Third World country.” The French Alps don’t come up much. But in 2012 Dan Levy, a Williamsburg resident and the founder of the real-estate Web site CityRealty, was on a ski vacation in Chamonix when he had a revelation. A gondola had arrived to take him to the top of the mountain. Boarding the vehicle, with its metal poles to hang on to, he thought, I feel like I’m in a New York City subway car. Levy, like many of his neighbors, spends an hour each weekday jostling for a spot on the L train. As the gondola soared over snowcapped peaks, he thought, Why doesn’t somebody put one of these things between Brooklyn and Manhattan?