JayMan, thanks for the kind reply! What you say is very true. But although a transit beltway is, indeed, "high" fantasy, I thought I should mention a few thoughts regarding this:
1) Parts of a Robert Moses highway beltway already exist in NYC. One way of doing a transit beltway would be to take lanes away from the Moses beltway -- which means no acquisition of right of way, little demolition and little in the way of tunneling, etc. (All important expenses in the construction of subways -- although less so, obviously, for elevateds).
And for transit advocates, I would think turning highways into a transit ways would be a little bit like turning swords into plowshares! (Another reason for people to take delight in this fantasy.)
2) Supposedly (and I don't know if this is really true), monorail systems are less expensive to build than conventional elevateds. (Supposedly they are used pretty commonly in Japan for new mass transit.)
3) While it's true that mass transit has traditionally been built to connect residential areas with downtowns, very often these residential areas have been only barely inhabited when construction was begun. So there was, even then, a bit of speculation involved.
This transit beltway would then be a 21st Century version of the same kind of "build it and they will come" transit mentality. It would be doing for NYC what highway builders all over the country are already doing for existing automobile suburbs -- linking one automobile suburb with another, reducing the need for people with cars to go through the center city.
So although I admit this fantasy is probably a lot less realistic than most other fantasies, there is a "method to the madness." Plus, in some ways "high" fantasies can be more "practical" than more modest fantasies: "Make no small plans: they have no magic to stir men's blood" -- Daniel Burnham.
But in the end, you are probably correct. This fantasy is kind of large and amorphous, so it is kind of hard to get a handle on it and boil it down into something that is tangible and concrete.
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P.S. -- I meant the Bayonne Bridge, rather than the Goethals. (Although using the Goethals would be a way of connecting JFK Airport to Newark Airport with mass transit.)
