Mr. Stringer's Choice - NYTimes.com By midnight Wednesday, Scott Stringer, the Manhattan borough president, will have to make a crucial decision about the future of New York City. That is the deadline by which Mr. Stringer, who is running for city comptroller, must state his opinion on a proposal to rezone a huge area around Grand Central Terminal. The mayor's office and the City Council do not have to accept the borough president's views, but they usually listen. During Mr. Stringer's six-and-a-half years in office, he has often charted a reasonable middle way for developments in his borough. This proposal, however, deserves a full thumbs-down. The rezoning process has been a rush job, too hurried for the public good, and aimed chiefly at ratifying Michael Bloomberg's grand design before he leaves office at the end of the year. More crucial, the plan would do a great disservice to commuters. In the name of creating towers better than the latest in London, bigger than those in Shanghai, the plan would add thousands of workers to an area where subways and sidewalks are already dangerously overcrowded. Squeezing even more people onto the underground platforms and forcing them to elbow their way up and down stairs and into subway trains is not progress. The new East Side Access line from Long Island, now under construction, is already expected to bring an additional 160,000 commuters to the area every day. The few changes to infrastructure proposed in the Bloomberg plan are insignificant, minor adjustments where far bigger plans are needed, like finally finishing the eternally unfinished Second Avenue subway. Worse, the plan requires developers to pay for modest improvements after their buildings are constructed, which is backward, to say the least. As Robert Stern, dean of the Yale School of Architecture, wrote in a highly critical Op-Ed article in The Times earlier this year, "First you put in the infrastructure, then you build the buildings." The real question is this: Why encourage developers to redo an attractive, livable and serviceable Midtown in the first place? Just across the island sits a huge transit hub - Pennsylvania Station - in need of a complete overhaul, along with its shabby surroundings, which desperately need to be razed and replaced. That would be a far more rational location for Mr. Bloomberg's Shanghai.