We can't depend on the Northeast Corridor

The big news this weekend is the major derailment and crash on the New Haven line between Fairfield and Bridgeport yesterday. The National Transportation Safety Board is shutting down that entire stretch of track for several days while they do a thorough investigation, and only after that can the repairs begin.

Map: New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad in 1929.

Metro-North and Amtrak trains are suspended indefinitely in both directions, and the lack of alternative service is just pathetic. "If all the trains use the same tracks, it doesn't really seem like there are many alternatives for getting into the city," New Haven resident Robert Li told the Stamford Advocate. "Especially if you don't have a car." There were bus bridges to get people home last night, but there are no buses, let alone trains, all weekend. This evening Eric Gershon of Yale News tweeted, "830 pm Peter Pan bus NYC to New Haven packed due to Fri MetroN #train #derailment. Long lines, short tempers at Port Authority."

Jim Cameron of the appointed Connecticut Parking Garage Rail Commuter Council has been tweeting up a storm. Unfortunately, he's been talking almost entirely about where you can drive to catch a train on Monday morning, I guess because he thinks people who don't drive - or don't want to be behind the wheel in a mess like that - aren't part of his constituency. Most of his tweets about buses are along the lines of, "No way you could handle that many people with buses," but he seems to think that the highway and parking infrastructure is more than up for the task. Yeah.

Anyway, there's a major rail outage, and that means it's time to play the "what if these people actually gave a shit about the riders?" game! Back in 2007, the bridge over the Thames River between Groton and New London was being replaced, and in 2009 it was the Niantic Bridge being replaced. In both cases Amtrak completely suspended service for an entire weekend, and in both cases I pointed out parallel train lines that could be used to bring people between New York and Boston, in particular the Inland Route (currently a slow, non-electrified line with low platforms) and the Air Line (currently railbanked as a trail).

Amtrak's Vision for this part of the Northeast Corridor.

Amtrak and the states of Massachusetts and Connecticut are now working to upgrade the Inland Route, in part due to a large influx of stimulus money, and Amtrak's Vision (PDF) for the Northeast Corridor includes a parallel route through the middle of Connecticut. Unfortunately, that part of the Vision is expected to cost $58 billion (with a "b") and not go live until 2040.

The railroads of Connecticut in 1893.

In the meantime we can work on the existing track. It would cost a lot less than $58 billion to rebuild the New Haven and Derby Railroad, abandoned in 1932, and to upgrade the track on the Berkshire Railroad and the New York and New England, electrify them and install high level platforms at stations. This would ensure that Northeast Corridor and Metro-North trains can go from New Haven to Stamford and get back on the main line, or to Brewster and get on the Harlem Line without having to pass through Bridgeport. (For that last you would also have to convert the Harlem Line to catenary power.)

For a lot less money, you could simply have diesel locomotives pull Amtrak cars through the Inland Route and along the unelectrified track from Meriden through Waterbury and Danbury to Stamford and maybe White Plains, with temporary platforms at a few stations. You could run extra shuttle service from Bridgeport and New Haven to meet the train in Meriden and Waterbury, and in Stamford and White Plains people could transfer to electric trains to Manhattan. It would be slower and less frequent than normal service, but it would be a lot better than nothing.

With the way that Amtrak and Metro-North are currently handling this, it looks like there are a lot of Connecticut commuters who will have a long, slow commute on Monday. I hope you'll all take the time to write to Governor Molloy and to Jim Cameron urging them to put an alternate route in place.

Stuck on the subway

Today the Times published a good article by Kimberly Matus telling the story of how she was groped on a crowded subway train. In that particular case there were undercover police officers who noticed her facial expression and arrested her attacker, but the experience was upsetting nonetheless.

Photo: Tasayu Tasnaphun / Flickr.

What I found striking is how limited Matus's choices were in the whole situation. As she wrote, "I tried to evade him but couldn’t move an inch in any direction." What a horrible feeling. Even when I was a young man I never had an experience like that, but what little hassle I've had is bad enough. I've been yelled at, pushed, and even sent flying into another passenger by some prejudiced jerk. And that's not counting the normal crush conditions, sermons and bad music.

After this incident, Matus recognized that her only choice was simply not to participate. She says she told her husband that "I wasn't planning on taking the subway anymore, at least during peak hours." I've done the same thing. I choose hours that give me a more comfortable commute. I also live a bit further out and take jobs even further in Queens. Of course I'm fortunate that we have these options. There are many New Yorkers, especially in this economy, who consider themselves lucky to have a job at all, and if that job means they squeeze onto a number 2 train at 8:15, that's what they do. And whatever happens, they put up with it.

Matus also has a couple of alternatives. She could ride a bike, which means dealing with a lot of the same jerks, but instead of squeezing on the train in sweat pants they're in control of deadly machines (barely in control). She could take the M57 bus to the Q60, but that would take a long time, and many of those buses get packed too. Since she works for her family's taxi business, maybe they just send a taxi to pick her up. (But I do appreciate the irony of even a taxi family seeing the value in traveling by subway.) That would cost her family money, just as it costs me money to take lower paying positions to avoid the Manhattan rush hour.

What I would like, and I bet Matus would like it too, is another option. An option where we get a seat, but we don't have to pay for a whole taxi for ourselves. I'm willing to pay more for a slower ride, if I knew I would be a little more comfortable.

What I'm talking about is the Death Valley of Commute Options. You're sick of squeezing into the subway, and you might be willing to pay more for a more comfortable ride. But you can't afford to buy and keep a car (assuming you even want to put people's lives at risk and heat up the planet). So you're stuck on the IRT with the sexual predators.

I'll talk about some solutions in a future post.

Goals for long distance trains

Man, you railfans are a chatty bunch! I think my two recent posts on the competitive environment for long distance trains and long distance trains around the world have gotten the first and fifth most comments out of all of my posts. But as C.P. Norris wrote on the earlier post, "I think this debate needs to start with exactly what problem you're trying to solve." And Norris is right: I really should have started with this. So now, let's try to see how long distance trains fit in with our goals, helpfully stated for you at the top of the page.

First, regarding access for all: are all people equally deserving of access, or are some a higher priority than others? To the extent that some are a higher priority than others, it is as a counterweight to existing disadvantages, which means that poor people, Black and Hispanic people, and women should be higher priorities. We should also be looking for the best bang for our subsidy buck, so trains that serve the largest number of people per dollar should count more.

I don't have the numbers, but my impression is that the Silver Meteor and Silver Star are the long distance trains with the highest proportion of African American riders; I have certainly seen and spoken with many on those trains who were traveling between work in Northern cities and family or retirement in the South. I'm not sure what the income of Black Silver Service riders is compared with that of the African American community at large. But if any long distance trains deserve support on access grounds per person, my guess would be that it's the Silver Service.

Transit reduces pollution and carnage, increases efficiency and improves society to the extent that it gets people out of cars. Long distance trains, in addition, can do this by getting people off of planes.

I have a strong desire to preserve the long distance train network. So much of it has disappeared and not come back, and I worry that losing any more routes will start a snowball effect, swallowing up any remaining trains that are not profitable or state-subsidized. But I have to admit that I'm hard pressed to see how that fits with any of my goals.

The problem is that it's not really clear how many people the long distance trains are keeping out of cars and planes, and it's not clear how many more we can get out of cars and planes by improving service.

The only way I can think of that maintaining a route like the Southwest Chief can get people out of their cars is a long term one: that there's more political support for maintaining or improving a route than for restarting one. Just look at the stimulus rail money. Two projects (Ohio and Florida) were for corridors that don't currently have service on them; the rest are all for existing corridors, including the California High-Speed Rail project, which is a fancy bypass for the San Joaquins.

It would seem, then, that operating subsidies tend to motivate capital subsidies beyond what the freight railroads are willing to spend. That means that they may be worth keeping on certain long distance routes, if they can someday draw enough people out of cars and planes, with the right combination of capital investment and road and air disinvestment. The question becomes figuring out which routes those are.

When you comment on this post, please be clear about your goals, so that others can decide whether they share them.

"Why would they take the glass encasing off of a bus stop?"

I've written before about the Republican mayoral candidates' responses to a debate question about bus frequency, and their notions of accountability for transit. The Democratic candidates got their own bus question, too, which you can see at 1:50 on the video:

I want to know why the MTA, who's always crying for money, is putting all these steel benches by the bus stops, and taking out the glass encasing from the bus stop. If they have no money and they're constantly doing fare hikes, why would they take the glass encasing off of a bus stop where people can get wet, and invest money in new benches? It seems just a misuse of the money, and I want to know what mayor is going to take care of that.

Both the Republican and Democratic candidates seemed really amused by questions about transit. I'm not sure what they thought was so funny. It's possible that they might have been equally amused by a question about parking, but I wonder if there isn't something patronizing there. Maybe it's because the questions are so narrowly focused on parochial issues - and that in turn is probably because our elites have given up on meaningful subway expansion.

The candidates each followed a basic pattern: praise (perhaps patronizingly) the questioner, maybe make a joke, and then pivot to a topic that they had prepared for: control of the transit system. Ben Kabak has addressed this issue in response to proposals by Joe Lhota and Chris Quinn, but you know what's really funny? This is one part of transit that is in fact controlled by the City government.

Bus companies in the city, including the MTA and intercity buses under the State's crazy new rules, get to post a destination sign and a schedule if they want, and that's about it. The bus stops themselves are controlled by the City Department of Transportation, directly under the Mayor.

The bus shelters are "street furniture," covered under a contract with Cemusa along with newsstands, bike shelters and those automatic toilets that are always a few years in the future. Cemusa pays for all the "furniture" and gets to keep the money from selling ads on it. (Incidentally, this Cemusa contract is why the City couldn't use ad revenue to fund bike share the way Paris did.)

The benches are part of the DOT's CityBench program, separate from the Cemusa contract, to install a thousand benches around the city. It was proposed in Planyc 2.0, as a service to pedestrians and to give people more chances to socialize.

Chris Quinn promised to "go and find out why the MTA has seemingly moved away from the concept of keeping people dry." I can't find her report anywhere, but maybe she's still researching it. My guess is that the bus shelter was taken out because it didn't fit the "siting requirements," but there was still room for a bench. The removal of the shelter and the installation of the bench may have been coordinated, or they may not; the DOT is still a pretty opaque bureaucracy, and it's hard to tell how organized it is.

I don't expect mayoral candidates to know everything about city government, but I think it's kind of sad that you have three long-term members of the City Council and one former member of the Board of Estimate, including two people who have been elected to citywide office, and none of them had any clue that the office they're running for does have control over bus stops. (How do I know? I read Streetsblog.)

And that in turn makes me wonder: if any of them did have control over the entire public bus system, would they know what to do with it?

Long distance trains don't work?

Everyone seems to have figured out exactly why long distance trains don't work, and can't work, in the US. I wrote before about the efficiency arguments that Jarrett Walker and Bruce Nourish make against them, and a whole raft of people weighed in in the comments with well-constructed cases against routes longer than 750 miles.

Photo: stevec77 / Flickr

The problem with these arguments is that they're too good. They ignore the fact that in many places outside the US, long distance trains are still popular, even with competition from subsidized planes and high-speed rail. The Trans-Siberian Railway is the most famous, but it is just one line in the large network built by the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Wikipedia lists the networks of India, China and Malaysia, as well as Germany, Italy, Morocco and the United Kingdom. There are even still a few long-distance trains in Argentina and South Africa.

This is not a question of population density: there are parts of Morocco, China, India and the former Soviet republics that are essentially uninhabited. So what do they have that we don't, and how can we get it? I'll leave this to all the commenters, since they know what's going on so much better than I do...

Apartment buildings near the Rockaway Branch

In 2011, Alon Levy wrote this about the possibility of restoring service on the Rockaway Beach Branch Railroad in Central Queens:

Observe the land use maps of Queens Community Boards 6 (PDF) and 9 (PDF), which host most of the Cutoff: along the Cutoff’s right of way, the primary uses are single-family residential, with only a little commercial. Moreover, the commercial development is often very auto-oriented, for example at Metropolitan Avenue. Indeed, the only proposed station with significant dense development is Rego Park, which is on the LIRR Main Line and could be restored without restoring an entire line. Rezoning near the other stations is possible, but why not rezone near existing subway stations first?

Sure, on the map there are lots of single-family residential areas, but if you go there you see things like the Forest Park Co-ops:

When I took this picture I had my back to the fence enclosing the right-of-way. These are dense developments, with hundreds of residents. There's another condo across Park Lane South that used to be a factory. A little further north you see Forest View Crescent:

This massive twenty-story co-op sits right next to the right-of-way; in fact, one of the initial obstacles when the MTA tried to restart service in the 1960s was the fact that the co-op is using the right-of-way for their parking lot. A few blocks north is the commercial development along Metropolitan Avenue that Alon mentions:

This is indeed auto-oriented, especially the Home Depot and the Metropolitan Avenue Educational Campus, but it is not irredeemable. The Trader Joe's draws people from all over Central Queens, and not just by car. Look at the number of people waiting for the bus across the street, at noon on a Monday:

There were similar numbers waiting on my side of the street for the eastbound bus, and on Woodhaven Boulevard for the buses going north and south. Just a block east of the Rockaway Branch is the beginning of a relatively dense, walkable two-story commercial district along Metropolitan. Finally, north of there is another area of apartments around Fleet Street:

Because of this, I think the Rockaway Branch would get more riders if it had stops at Fleet Street and Myrtle Avenue, in addition to the old stations at Parkside (Metropolitan Avenue) and Brooklyn Manor (Jamaica Avenue). Between residents going to work and shopping, and people coming in to the schools and shops, there are hundreds of people who currently drive or take the bus or slow train. Rezoning the area near the Parkside station to allow more dense development would bring even more riders.

MTA complaints: myth vs. reality

There's actually a lot to say about the few minutes that the mayoral candidates spent discussing transit at the 92nd Street Y forum last month. When the Republican mayoral candidates responded to Selig Alpern, there seemed to be a sense that you could actually complain to the MTA about something.

Joe Lhota and his phone. Photo: Dana Rubenstein / Capital NY

Lhota: "Had this 89-year-old gentleman called me when I was at the MTA, I would have done something. Because anybody can tell you that I returned every one of my phone calls, and I returned every one of the letters that was a concern of all of the riders of the system. And I consider riders to be customers, and in my world, a customer is always right. ...."

"Since I'm no longer employed I'm taking the bus a lot, often, and I too get peeved at the fact that I see all of these express buses going by, and I want to get on the locals. So I made it a point, and I called Tom Prendergast, literally, last week, and I said, 'What's going on? Why can't these buses stop more locally?' I did not realize how bad it is here on the Upper East Side.'"

Catsimatidis: "You know, It's management. If you do get complaints, as mayor, you have a 311 system. If you get complaints people have to address them. And if the limiteds are making too few stops, then you have to adjust the system. And it's pure and simple: adjust the system where the limiteds make more stops. And you just need qualified people to solve those kind of problems."

Some of you are already jumping up and down, shouting that the Mayor doesn't control the MTA, and of course that was the next thing that Lhota said. But it's worse than that. Let me tell you about my experience complaining to the MTA.

A few months ago I was waiting in the cold for 25 minutes with about 30 other people, for buses that were scheduled to run every 5-7 minutes. After a while I decided to spend my time making a formal complaint, so I pulled out my phone and dialed 311.

I knew that 311 was run by the city, but I figured they'd have some connection worked out by now. Not so much. After listening to minutes of bullshit about alternate side rules, I eventually talked to a 311 operator, who forwarded me to 511, which is the state transportation line. I think I was finally able to talk to someone, but I'm pretty sure I didn't get a tracking number, and I definitely haven't gotten a callback or an email.

Maybe Catsimatidis is right; all you need are qualified problem solvers to take the complaints and act on them. But it ain't happening. If Catsimatidis can make it happen, maybe he should run for Governor instead.

I sure as hell don't know Tom Prendergast's direct phone number, and I never knew Joe Lhota's. The Executive Director's contact information is not on the MTA's website. I don't know how easy it would be to leave Prendergast a voice mail by simply calling 511; if you try, let me know. If Alpern is like me, he doesn't have an easy way to call the head of the MTA.

It's not an accident that it's difficult to complain to the MTA. The third candidate, George McDonald, hit the nail on the head: "I believe that we have to have the Mayor accountable, because you all want to have somebody accountable. They create the MTA, and these kinds of agencies, for obfuscation. Who's responsible? Who do you complain to?" The system was designed by the master of public authorities, Bob Moses, to accumulate power while deflecting accountability.

This more than anything convinces me that Joe Lhota is unqualified to be mayor. This is real "let them eat cake" stuff. He ran the MTA for over a year, and apparently he's still clueless about how difficult it is to get a complaint heard, and to get answers. Somehow he thinks that we all have Tom Prendergast's direct line on our speed dials, and that we had his own before that. Lhota really seems to believe that everyone who had a complaint during his time on the job was able to get through to him without being discouraged on the way, so that anyone who didn't, well, it's their own damn fault.

Of course, the reason the MTA doesn't really want to hear from ordinary riders is that its management doesn't actually think of us as customers who are always right. Its customers are the people who pay its bills: the Governor, the legislators, Congress, the real estate power players. Even though we riders actually pay the majority of the MTA budget through the farebox, our power is diffuse enough to ignore.