Daily News from New York, New York • 12

1M i 1 --r -f THE ONCE and, It is hoped, future, Roosevelt Island tram. An island adrift in E. ftiver By OWEN M0RIT2 least for families. "The families love it because it's made for kids," says Pam Blessinger, who heads the Roosevelt Island Residents Association. "It's not a place for single people." On the other hand, the tram wasn't planned.

It came as a last-minute transit solution when someone got the brilliant idea of employing aerial cable cars, seen at ski resorts, as a temporary people-mover temporary until the 63d St. subway tunnel is finished. Except no one expects the 63d St. line to be operating any time soon. So this temporary transit, with its red-and-blue cabins that soar over First and Second Aves.

and the East River as if pulled by unseen reindeer, remains the only hope of direct access for Roosevelt Islanders. There are about 5,600 people now living on Roosevelt Island for rrinA inta TKfl Miio i 4 that face the sequined Manhattan skyline command Manhattan prices. The less expensive apartments face Con Edison's Big Allis plant and a giant housing project, both in Queens. Utsan Aftaifs Editof When Roosevelt Island first opened as a visionary community for the middle class, it was advertised as "three minutes from Bloomingdale's on the Manhattan mainland," as if Manhattan wasn't an island itself. This was 10 years ago, when the future of this two-mile-long, cigar-shaped island in the East River seemed limitless.

Today, its residents justly worry whether Roosevelt Island will become a remote island. Since Feb. 15, commuters and schoolkids, traveling the long way via Queens, have spent from 45 to 75 minutes to reach their Manhattan destinations. Most sub urban commuters make better time. The reason is that the tram, the island's direct link to Manhattan, has been grounded because of the rising costs of liability insurance.

A compromise in Albany may let it resume until June, when its insurance problem would be considered as part of the state's larger insurance crisis. But no one is predicting what will happen after June. A ghost town? "This place is going to be a ghost town if they don't get the tram running again," resident Sal Morabito says. "No one figured on taking 45 minutes to get to Manhattan when they moved here." "I absolutely refuse to believe that the tram will be completely stopped," Mary Lee Grisanti, a novelist and island resident, is quoted as saying. "But if it did, Roosevelt Island would empty." And that is the issue.

The island was designed as a place to keep the middle class from, moving to the suburbs. It has a small-town atmosphere replete with Cub Scout meetings, Halloween parades and a main drag named Main St There also are visionary touches: schools built into apartment houses, the integration of working-class and better-off families and an auto-free environment And by most accounts, this planned social idea has worked. At About 2,000 of the residents use the tram each day. The fare is by law, it must match the subway and bus fares. And, according to the state Division of Housing and Community Renewal, which oversees the island, the tram pretty much pays its own way.

That is, the $1 fare covers the tram's basic operating costs, in contrast to the subway and bus fares, where the $1 fare covers about 50 of the actual cost of each ride. The island itself still runs an annual deficit Right now, the future of this socially planned island is wound tip with the fate of its temporary cable transportation. There are critics who can't understand the fuss over the tram. i The answer is that what's ing on this one island is a metaphor for New York. Clean, safe, efficient, affordable, accessible transportation is the key to the survival of Roosevelt Island, as it is to the city itself.

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