Cap'n Transit Rides Again

People in cars tend to stay in cars

2012-02-09T23:26:00.000-05:00

I've been thinking a lot about park-and rides and mode shift lately in the context of the Northern Branch restoration project, and I've come up with a new generalization. I even thought of a catchy summary for it, like Isaac Newton: people in cars tend to stay in cars.

Of course I'm standing on the shoulders of giants here. Donald Shoup found (PDF) that on average, when parking is free, drivers will prefer to spend three minutes circling for a close parking space than three minutes walking from a further space. Retailers fear any reduction in parking capacity or increase in parking cost out of fear that their driving customers will choose a competitor with easier or cheaper parking.

This extends to mode choices as well. In an illuminating report, "Guaranteed Parking, Guaranteed Driving" (PDF), Rachel Weinberger and her colleagues found that car-owning Jackson Heights residents who owned off-street parking spaces near their houses tended to drive more than car-owning Park Slope residents who had to circle for on-street spaces. I find this to be true when I walk, shop and eat in my own neighborhood: my car-free neighbors tend to be more visible and available than those with guaranteed parking, and those who have cars but no guaranteed spaces are in the middle.

In my view, park-and-rides have a similar effect. When I take the train or the bus, I walk past all the neighborhood shops and restaurants, and I know that if I need groceries, hardware, medicine, a haircut or a cup of coffee, I can stop on the way. If I need something I can't get near my apartment - a suitcase, a television, a kabob or a bagel - I can get off the train at a nearby station and walk a little further. If I need something that's not available at all in my neighborhood - a hair dryer, a package of frozen dosai, quality clothes, books - I can take the train or bus to Manhattan or to another part of Queens.

My neighbors who drive to work or for social trips know that they will probably not be able to find parking near any of the neighborhood stores or restaurants, so they stop at places with abundant parking on the way home. If they have guaranteed parking and they need something from outside the neighborhood, they are more likely to drive to a "cheaper" car-oriented store like Costco or Target than take the train to Manhattan.

None of my neighbors commute via park-and-rides, but the pattern seems pretty clear. If you need something, you can buy it right near your job downtown, or there might be somewhere to buy it near the train station or bus stop. Chances are, though, that you'll get off the train and immediately drive to a store with easy parking. What's least likely is that you'll drive home, park and then go to the store. So park-and-rides are bad for business at the transit stop, and near the homes of the parkers.

There is one more way that this works: in self-identification. You might think that transit riders would identify as transit riders and drivers as drivers, but it's not that simple. There are people who drive to the park-and-ride, people who drive when they're off work, and people who only occasionally drive up to the mountains for a weekend. Whenever they're not riding, they tend to be on foot or on transit. We might therefore expect them to identify at least partly as transit riders, but in my experience they all identify as drivers first, even if they hardly drive.

This leads me to my Law of Transportation Mode Inertia: on a given trip people in cars tend to stay in cars. But note the word "tend." Obviously there are plenty of people who transfer from car to foot or bus or train in their commutes, but there are particular conditions for these transfers, and most drivers will resist doing it more than once.

It is because of this principle that I get so frustrated with mainstream American transit planners' love of park-and-ride facilities, as seen most recently in the Northern Branch project. More on that soon.

The problem with the Northern Branch project

2012-02-08T00:59:00.000-05:00

For a months now I've been telling people that the "transit" proposed for the bridge is just sprawl transit, and it's true. There wouldn't even be a stop in Nyack; if commuter rail is chosen the nearest station would be near the Palisades Mall in West Nyack, more than two miles away, and if "Bus Rapid Transit" is chosen the nearest station would be at the western end of Nyack, at the top of the hill where Main Street crosses the Thruway, a mile from downtown. The Thruway people would build huge park-and-rides at these stations, and park-and-rides are not the answer. People who drive to park-and-rides think of themselves as drivers, not transit riders, and they will vote accordingly.

Instead, I've suggested that Rockland County can improve its connections to jobs in New York City and New Jersey by rebuilding its rail network. There are four railroads that connect Rockland to Hoboken, but only two (the Erie Main and Pascack Valley lines) still have passenger service, but the trains run on the slower and more sprawly Graham Line instead of the Main Line between Harriman and Otisville, and the Pascack Valley trains terminate in Spring Valley instead of Haverstraw or New City. The Erie Northern Branch used to run to Nyack but now only sees freight as far as the New York State line in Northvale. The New York Central West Shore Line is currently owned and operated by the Chesapeake System as a high-volume freight line between North Bergen and Selkirk, but most of the second track has been removed, and if it were restored there would be room for commuter rail service.

For much less than the five billion dollars that Cuomo and friends want to spend doubling the width of the Tappan Zee Bridge, we could restore passenger service to Nyack, West Nyack, New City, Stony Point and Haverstraw. This would require restoring track in some places, re-acquiring the right-of-way in others, double-tracking and eliminating grade crossings here and there, and electrification. We might even have enough money to rebuild the old Erie Main through the Orange County villages of Goshen and Middletown. If we can ever build a new tunnel (which would cost a lot more than five billion but would move more people than the proposed bridge), the trains could go straight into Manhattan.

Believe it or not, there is movement in this direction. New Jersey Transit has just released a Draft Environmental Impact Statement for their plan to reactivate passenger service on the Northern Branch between North Bergen and Tenafly. At this point I would love to be able to point to this as an example of success that could be extended right up to Sparkill and Nyack. But there are problems. And by problems I mean parking. Way too much of it. This is from the executive summary of the DEIS:

Yes, that's right, 2130 or 2310 parking spaces! I tweeted about this a couple of weeks ago, and @majormajor42 replied, "what do you think of the Ramsey Rt17 station parking garage?" I think that's an excellent question, and I will try to give it the thoughtful answer it deserves in another post soon.

In general, park-and-rides are not the answer, because they make people transit commuters but drivers for everything else, so they should have sunsets and market-clearing prices. The Route 17 station is not the answer, but it's not too bad as far as park-and-rides go.

Tappan Zee traffic volume: Don't pee on my back again!

2012-01-30T23:41:00.000-05:00

Yes, it's time for another episode in our "Don't pee on my back and tell me it's raining!" series about the Tappan Zee Bridge replacement project. Last month I addressed one of the New York State Department of Transportation's favorite claims, that the crash rate on the bridge is more than twice that on the rest of the Thruway, and that the only way to fix that is to build a new bridge. Today I'm going to address another claim that they love to make: that bridge traffic will increase over the next several years, and therefore a new bridge is necessary to accommodate that. I've already covered this back in October, but today I've got support from a famous economist, a team of financial experts and the State Transportation Commissioner herself.

Figure 1. NYMTC projected increases in residents and employment.

Here's what the Federal Highway Administration says in the Draft Environmental Impact Statement, copied directly from the Scoping Packet:

The New York Metropolitan Transportation Council (NYMTC) projects that both population and employment growth will continue in Rockland and Westchester Counties (see Figure 1-4). Between 2010 and 2047, the populations of Rockland and Westchester Counties are expected to increase by 50,000 and 134,000 residents, respectively. Employment is projected to increase by 47,000 jobs in Rockland County and by 160,000 jobs in Westchester County during this timeframe. This growth in population and employment will increase daily volumes across the Tappan Zee Bridge for the next thirty years.

This increase in traffic volumes is presented as a fact of nature, one that nobody can control, least of all the little ol' Federal Highway Administration and New York State Department of Transportation. But the State has the authority to set tolls, and in today's New York Times, economist Nancy Folbre, recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "Genius Grant," summarizes the well-supported case that toll prices can affect traffic volumes. And on Friday, libertarian columnist Nicole Gelinas struck gold in the 2009 Merrill Lynch / Loop Capital preliminary financial plan for the Tappan Zee Bridge replacement project:

Even a significant toll increase is unlikely to full fund the Project capital costs, and could pose potentially adverse traffic demand response. Toll increases require significant efforts to gain stakeholder support.

An "adverse traffic demand response" just means lower traffic volumes. Well, ahem, one man's "potentially adverse traffic demand response" is another man's problem solved! It's only a problem if you've already built a bigger bridge and you need the tolls to pay for it. If you reduce traffic volumes instead of building a bigger bridge, well, you just saved us five billion dollars.

But wait, there's more! Now let's connect these statements to the principle that roads compete with transit for people, and thus to New York State Transportation Commissioner Joan McDonald's statement last week:

Our position has always been you cannot build transit until you replace the bridge. We don’t think it is financially feasible at this time for transit to be included, but we are building a bridge that will last for 100+ years, so at some point in the future, if the ridership numbers, and the fare box recovery ratio warrant the investment, we will make sure that it happens.

This pretty much wraps up the case. The current plan is to widen the bridge, and probably to sneak a couple of extra car lanes in, making it easier for people to drive. The Thruway will always keep tolls low on the bridge, making it cheap for people to drive. In other words, the government of New York State will do everything it can to make sure that there is never enough demand to warrant setting aside bus-only lanes on the Tappan Zee Bridge.

The current Tappan Zee Bridge is a sprawl-generating machine. A replacement bridge with transit would not stop the sprawl. The replacement bridge will not have transit anyway, if Governor Cuomo has any say in the matter. Let's tear down the bridge and not build another one. But we'll be okay, and we can have jobs.

It's time to end this charade. To find out more, visit my new website, www.thetappanzeebridgeisacancerinourmidst.com.

Who will stop the Tappan Zee boondoggle?

2012-01-30T01:19:00.000-05:00

Last week the Federal Highway Administration released two sets of documents relating to the Tappan Zee Bridge reconstruction project. There wasn't much discussion of the Scope Summary Report, where hundreds of people complained about the way the Federal Government has been handling this project and were completely blown off. That's backward-looking and old news. A lot more attention has been paid to the Draft Environmental Impact Statement because it finds, in the words of an Associated Press writer, "no ecology obstacles" to the plan.

Streetsblog's Noah Kazis has recycled several of my posts with added points, including a critique of the bridge planning under New York State's own Smart Growth law, a more thorough corroboration of my toll calculations by Charlie Komanoff, a report embarrassing the State with its own clumsy denial of Streetsblog's Freedom of Information requests, and a striking illustration of the FHWA's lack of interest in public input: the old outreach offices have been closed.

One of the craziest things about this is that the thing is supposed to cost five billion dollars, and nobody has said where that money will come from. The Governor has floated several different "trial balloons," but in the end declared that it will have to be "publicly financed." In theory this is all in the Governor's budget proposal, but in practice the budget is the usual spaghetti of confusing similarly-named funds and accounts folding endlessly back in on itself; the Tappan Zee Bridge is mentioned once or twice, but not in a way that seems connected with anything.

Despite the fact that lots and lots of people said there should be "transit on the bridge," the FHWA said they wouldn't do more than "not preclude" transit. Transportation Nation's Kate Hinds called New York State Transportation Commissioner Joan McDonald and asked her about this. McDonald's response was interesting:

That is what we have said all along…Our position has always been you cannot build transit until you replace the bridge. We don’t think it is financially feasible at this time for transit to be included, but we are building a bridge that will last for 100+ years, so at some point in the future, if the ridership numbers, and the fare box recovery ratio warrant the investment, we will make sure that it happens. So we are building the bridge to not preclude it in the future. And what that means is the footings will be spread appropriately and there will be enough weight-bearing capability on the bridge to hold transit in the future.

I've highlighted a key phrase that jumped out at me the second time I read it: if the ridership numbers and the fare box recovery ratio warrant the investment. You could read the part about "ridership numbers" as McDonald simply saying she's not going to put the State in a position where it's vulnerable to the Empty Lanes Attack. If they're going to reserve a lane for buses, they want to be able to say that that lane moves enough people to justify keeping private cars out.

The bit about farebox recovery is more troubling. Currently, fares paid by Tappan Zee Express and Orange-Westchester Link riders cover about ten percent of the cost of running those buses. What McDonald is saying here is that it's not "financially feasible" to spend that much money subsidizing bus rides as well as reserving the lanes for buses. Cannily, she doesn't say what kind of farebox recovery ratio would warrant the investment, allowing herself and her successors to dismiss any request for transit.

The troubling part is that McDonald seems to have no clue that roads and transit compete with one another - or possibly to be deliberately ignoring this fact. If we add a lane to the Tappan Zee Bridge (and everyone knows it's going to be at least three lanes), that makes it easier to drive, and lowers the demand for transit. In other words, as long as the government keeps widening the roads and bridges the farebox recovery ratio will never warrant the investment in transit.

McDonald has just flushed any credibility she had left on smart growth issues down the toilet, but what about her boss? Most of the posts about the bridge point the finger at Governor Andrew Cuomo, and clearly he's the one pushing for the bridge to be started this year. It's not hard to figure out why: he wants to have at least one inspiring infrastructure project finished by the time he runs for President in 2016. He doesn't see transit (much less "BRT") as necessary to this bullet point on his resume.

Transit advocates do not have the power to take away this bullet point that Cuomo so desperately seeks, and I can't think of anything we could offer him that would have equal political value. Is there a transit project that would move 150,000 people a day for $5 billion dollars and be finished by 2016 without requiring Cuomo to share the glory with anyone else?

If we want to stop this project, appealing to Cuomo or McDonald will not help. There are a few other avenues, though. Since October, the lead agency on the bridge replacement project has not been the State Department of Transportation, but the FHWA. The FHWA is part of the United States Department of Transportation, headed by everyone's favorite Republican ex-congressman from Peoria, Ray LaHood. LaHood has been actively courting the smart growth and alternative transportation crowd, and seems most passionate when he talks about bike facilities and high speed rail. Why not lobby him and his boss, President Obama? At the very least, every time LaHood shows up to speak at a pro-transit or pro-bike gathering, someone could say to him, "You know, Ray, this Tappan Zee Bridge project is a disaster, and your agency is leading it!" Not out loud, to embarrass him, but quietly, privately, so that he gets the message that people are paying attention and connecting it with him. (You can also mention the eerily similar Columbia River Crossing).

Another possible route of opposition is New York State's traditional system of checks and balances, known informally as "three men in a room." Streetsblog has mentioned that Senate Finance Committee Chair John DeFrancisco expressed frustration with the vagueness of the transportation budget. Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver has killed boondoggles in the past; would he or Dean Skelos be willing to expend enough political capital to kill this bridge project?

Since both the pro-bridge coalition and the pro-BRT coalition have reserved domain names for their positions, I have set up a website at www.thetappanzeebridgeisacancerinourmidst.com showcasing all the reasons to tear down the bridge and not replace it. Please link and tweet it widely!

On Bleecker Stroad

2012-01-28T00:29:00.001-05:00

There's been a lot of brouhaha lately about New York University's plans to expand its main campus, and the (sometimes successful) efforts of the Greenwich Village Society for Historical Preservation to thwart and scale back those efforts. As a former Village resident, I feel the GVSHP is wrong, but so is NYU.

I've lived in the Village and been a regular visitor all my life. There's something about the Village that's never felt right to me, but I've only recently acquired the vocabulary to describe it. It's Bleecker Street. It's also Houston Street and West Third, but I feel it most on Bleecker, in part because I avoid that part of Houston.

Bleecker Street is dead to me. I don't mean that the Red Lion has seen better days, although that may be true. I mean that when I walk from Sixth Avenue to Broadway on Eighth or West Fourth Streets, there's always something going on. There are stores, or NYU buildings bustling with students, or there's Washington Square. When I walk on Ninth or Tenth Street it's almost all residential, but with beautiful brownstones and carriage houses, and lots of stoops with interesting-looking people coming and going.

This is important because the Village has one concentration of shops around the subway stations at Sixth and Seventh Avenues, and another around those at Broadway and Lafayette Street. I regularly find myself on a trip to the Village with one thing to do near Sixth Avenue and one near Broadway, and I'm not the only one. There's steady traffic from one side of the neighborhood to the other, for work, shopping, entertainment and study. There's no direct subway connection, and the one bus is slow and unreliable, though, so most people walk.

When I walk down Bleecker Street, it's a jumping, happening place from Sixth Avenue (or even Seventh) to La Guardia Place. From Mercer to Broadway it's quiet and residential, but it works. From La Guardia to Mercer, Bleecker Street is dead. There's one ugly driveway on the north side and a couple of pedestrian paths on the other, in a stretch that's two blocks long (Wooster Street doesn't go north of Houston). The rest is just blank walls on one side and windows with curtains drawn on the other. Yeah, there are a few trees. So what? They don't help.

Houston and Third Streets are similar, at least on one side, and so are Mercer Street and La Guardia Place. Third Street is actually worse, because it's much wider in that area, and much less pedestrian-friendly as a result. Why are they this way? There are two black holes that are sucking the life out of those streets, and they have names: Washington Square Village and Silver Towers.

Photo: Jacob Riis, View of a back-lot house on Bleecker Street between Mercer and Greene Streets, almost toppling into an excavation site.

There is some interesting history behind these superblocks, fairly well summarized in the Wikipedia articles I linked in the above paragraph. The area was considered a slum in the days of Jacob Riis, and beginning in 1954 it was condemned, cleared and divided into three superblocks. The north superblock was given to NYU, and it now holds several NYU buildings. The central superblock was given to a private partnership including Paul Tishman, who built Washington Square Village, with 1200 apartments over a 650-unit parking garage. The south superblock was originally given to the developers, but after they couldn't get financing it was turned over to NYU, who built the Silver Towers and a Mitchell-Lama building over an underground parking garage. In 1964 the developers sold Washington Square Village to NYU, giving it control of all three blocks.

I'll write more about the current fight - and the problems with what both sides are saying - later.

The Tao of economic incentives

2012-01-27T01:09:00.000-05:00

I haven't yet read Gernot Wagner's new book But Will The Planet Notice: How Smart Economics Can Save the World, but I heard him interviewed by Leonard Lopate, and the approach he's promoting seems very sensible. If there is a major economic incentive encouraging people to do negative things (drive, accept plastic bags, buy food sweetened with high fructose corn syrup), is it easier to fight that behavior directly, or to change the incentive?

We can think of this as an application of the Tao, or of Ueshiba's notion of enveloping your adversaries. If you prefer, you can think of it as leverage: if someone is using a lever to magnify their force on an object, is it better to push back on the object, or on the other person's foot? You can also think of it as getting past the superficial story to the real story underneath. The best kind of compromise is when it doesn't matter whether anyone gets what they said they want, but everyone is getting what they really want.

One example of incentives working in transit is Hasselt, Belgium, which is usually held up as a paragon of free public transit, but where it seems that the key was actually converting the government-sponsored inner ring road from an incentive to drive to a "Groene Boulevard" where buses and bikes have priority. However, in order to pass both free transit and the Groene Boulevard, their promoters had to convince the citizens of Hasselt that it was "their" town, their mobility plan, and their bus system. Getting to the levers is not easy, and neither is controlling them once you do.

Three factors in density

2012-01-26T01:08:00.001-05:00

I concede defeat on one aspect of the density thought experiment: the commenters convinced me that there are places that don't have "the density to support transit" even if everyone who wants to go anywhere takes the transit. Phelan, California and Fort McMurray, Alberta may be examples of this. However, there are three aspects of the story that I'm sticking to:

1. If these places can't support transit, most of them probably can't support roads either. That's "support" either in the sense of inducing enough tax revenue to pay for their construction and maintenance, or providing a public service that would be considered worth the investment.

2. Most of the places that are generally claimed to "not have the density to support transit" are of the kind that would have the density to support transit if it had a 100% mode share.

Image: Transit Nerds (Jeff Wood) / Flickr

3. As Jonathan said, if you make driving expensive or unpleasant enough (or if you just don't bother to make it cheap and comfortable), people will move to places where they can access things easily through walking and transit. That's the transportation-land use cycle that I identified in 2008 (here seen in a cleaned-up version by Pantagraph Trolleypole).

So the next time you're tempted to say something about "the density to support transit," ask yourself these three questions:

1. Would transit work if it had a better mode share?
2. Does the area have the density to support roads either?
3. Would people live or work more densely if the car infrastructure was less subsidized?

Density thought experiments

2012-01-24T02:29:00.000-05:00

In recent posts, I've discussed how density isn't all that important in transit demand, how the idea of "supporting transit" is problematic, and how different people have different goals for transit, and density affects these goals differently. Because my own goals (see the top of this page) are wrapped up in a feedback loop based on mode share, my most intermediate goal is getting people out of their cars.

Transit mode share, in fact, is where density is least relevant. This may seem surprising, but only if you believe that density is the only way to control the relative value that people get from various modes. The transit boosters who worry about density actually believe that it's possible in the short term to increase the value of transit by throwing more money at it, but that that's unsustainable in the long run. Their big blind spot is that we actually have quite a bit of control over the value of driving, if we can find the political will.

This brings us back to the Magic Formula for Transit Ridership:

1. Give transit its own right-of-way and good terminals
2. Make it hard to use cars
3. Make it expensive to use cars
4. Profit!

Many transit advocates have enough exposure to the concept of (3) in the form of congestion pricing and gasoline prices, but they seem very resistant to considering step (2), probably because they don't want to be accused of wanting to take anyone's car away. The Very Serious People are all afraid to talk about decreasing the size of the road network.

But what if, while Spain was building all those high-speed rail lines, they didn't also pump billions into a truly gigantic highway network? If drivers faced constant congestion on old highways, wouldn't we expect higher ridership on the trains? Wouldn't we also expect that if the highway network was old and small enough, but the train network was the size it is today, eventually there would be enough demand for the trains that they would be completely profitable - operations and capital?

You can do the same thought experiment with any place. No matter how sparsely populated it is, just subtract some roads while keeping the rail and/or bus network constant, and eventually the place "supports transit." Take Wyoming. Now imagine it without interstate highways. Would that be enough to support restored passenger service on the train lines? How about if we turn all the roads to gravel?

Back in 2010, I had a similar discussion on Human Transit about the supposed convenience of cars. A lot of people had problems with the idea that convenience was dependent on the quality of the infrastructure, but I think I showed that if you throw enough money at any transportation system you can make it feel convenient to its users.

Similarly, if you make the car infrastructure shitty enough and expensive enough, you can make transit feel like a bargain. Density may make it politically easier to support transit expansion or harder to support road expansion, but that's not a matter of "the density to support transit," it's "the density to make it likely enough that transit will receive more political support than roads," which is not the same thing at all.

If you're really not convinced, I challenge you to come up with a place, or a route, where you can't increase transit ridership by taking away roads or increasing prices. If you want data, I have density and mode share figures for all of the municipalities and census-designated places in the New York Combined Statistical Area. Go for it.

Density and our goals

2012-01-23T00:28:00.000-05:00

On my last post I got some great comments! Jeff "Pantagraph Trolleypole" Wood pointed us to Pushkarev and Zupan suggesting that commercial density is more important than residential density back in 1977; Jeff summarized that argument in 2010. So that's where a lot of this comes from.

Richard Layman points out that some parts of the transit network can reinforce others, and that it may therefore be valuable for apparently unjustified transit routes and runs to be cross-subsidized by "popular" routes, or even by the government. Jeff also pointed to the value of high-speed rail in inducing dense development near stations, and I think if we put these together we get something that Germà Bel's analysis misses: that an "unprofitable" high-speed rail line can be worth subsidizing if it gets people to downtown stations where they will walk and ride transit instead of driving.

Bel himself left a comment pointing out that any transportation investment yields private benefits (which should probably be paid for by the user) and public benefits (which could be paid for by the government), and pointing us to an interesting study of the new Italian high-speed rail network (PDF). I think that's very important, but I would add that the public and private benefits are not a matter of universal agreement, and especially with the public benefits there will be people who disagree about the relative value of transit cross-subsidy or economic development or emissions reductions. The debate is not just a matter of how much a project affects these outcomes, but how much the outcomes matter.

With that in mind, let me try to clear up a few more things about return on investment. If our goals are to induce economic development then we'll be looking at measures like levels of employment and tax revenue generated by that development. If we don't care about any of that and we just want to make sure that this project doesn't bankrupt the state, we'll be focused on capital and operating outlays. Either way, density of development plays a role. Just as importantly, though, we need to look at the transportation system as a whole consisting of redundant bus, rail and private auto networks, and figure out the most cost-effective way to make use of it. It's idiotic to declaim the waste on high-speed rail while ignoring the ROI of the multitude of inefficient highway expansion and rehabilitation projects. As Chuck shows, development density improves the ROI of both road and transit infrastructure.

As you can see at the top of the page, my goals are to increase access and improve society while reducing pollution and carnage and avoiding resource depletion. Because of that I may look at individual measures like access to jobs and services, pollution, fatality and injury levels, and rate of depletion of the various natural resources used by transportation and development. Many of these metrics are sensitive to the density of residential, commercial and industrial development.

However, other than access, all those goals require getting people out of their cars. This means that I can look at VMT reduction as a long-term goal, and increasing the mode share of transit and walking in the short term. More importantly, there's a cycle of government and private investment in transit. The more transit ridership there is, the less subsidy will be required, and the more money that will be available for expanding the transit network. In addition, the more transit ridership there is, the more political support there will be for government investment in expanding the transit network. Conversely, the less driving there is, the less political support there will be for driving subsidies. Transit mode share is really key here, more important than any of the individual measures.

Transit mode share, in fact, is where density is least relevant. This may seem surprising, but only if you believe that density is the only way to control the relative value that people get from various modes. I'll talk more about that soon.

What does it mean to "support transit"?

2012-01-22T02:54:00.003-05:00

Last week I singled out Richard Layman for repeating the chestnut "Spain doesn't have the population density to support economically many of the lines, based on ridership." Again, let me make clear that Richard is far from alone in assuming that density is required to support transit, and that his blog is informative, insightful and well worth reading for urban issues. He was also a good sport in leaving a comment on my post; unfortunately all the comments made it clear to me how deep the idea is ingrained in our understandings of transit.

A number of people have addressed this issue before. Richard mentions Steve Belmont and linked us to a scan from his book (see also David Alpert's take). Alon mentions Gary Barnes and his concept of "perceived density" (PDF); the Austin Contrarian has his own idea of perceived density.

I had a great idea for a phrase, "density is not destiny," but like most ideas it turns out that someone's thought of it before you; in this case it was Paul Mees, and Jarrett has an interesting discussion. But all these discussions are frustratingly myopic, assuming that the competing road network is a constant force of nature beyond political influence.

Instead of looking at the concept of "density," let's look at "support." What does it mean to support a transit line? Is it complete financial self-sufficiency, as Germà Bel demands for the Spanish high-speed network? If that's the case, then very few transportation projects anywhere would qualify. Is it the simple existence of the transit line? Then Newburgh's three-line transit system would qualify, since it exists, but that's not a very enlightening criterion. Is it a certain threshold of mode share, as the discussion at Greater Greater Washington would suggest? That's more promising, but it's not all.

Let's bring in some Strong Towns thinking. Chuck Marohn looks at any transportation project and asks, what is the return on investment? And it turns out the answer is connected to density. The ROI for a street, bus line, train line or ferry dock, it turns out, is dependent on the benefits derived from that investment. If it's a government investment, it has a "public ROI" indicating the benefits accrued to the public, whether in the form of tax revenue or any other goal.

ROI is the benefits divided by the costs. In transportation, sewers, utilities and other public projects, the costs are spread out geographically, so the ROI depends on the density of the benefits. That is where density comes in.

Navy Road and the projects

2012-01-21T01:11:00.000-05:00

Ben Fried at Streetsblog said it all in just fifteen words:

How About an At-Grade Crosswalk Instead of a Ped Bridge With Fencing Over Navy Street?

But because he said it in the middle of a "Today's Headlines" post, I think it didn't get picked up the way it should have. I would have tweeted it, but it's hard to pick out.

I'm going to blather on about this for much longer than Ben just so that you might get the idea that there's something here, and pay attention to it, and maybe tweet a link to this post. But really, Ben said just about everything that needed to be said. If you like, you can stop reading and make your views known to the DOT and NYCHA and Councilmember James.

One of the reasons I write this blog is because there are things that get under my skin, and I just need to answer them and get it out there. One of them is people who think they've got a wonderful pro-pedestrian solution that nobody's thought of: pedestrian overpasses.

Sometimes pedestrian overpasses are the best solution. For example, when every other crossing of the Long Island Expressway involves fighting with half a dozen turning cars driven by entitled jerks, it's really nice to have your own little ramp with no cars around. In Strong Towns terms, pedestrian overpasses are good for crossing roads, which are in turn built to get cars from one place to another as fast as possible.

Most of the time, though, pedestrian overpasses suck. They're at their worst when they cross streets that have wide sidewalks and retail, like I've seen in Santo Domingo. In these cases, a driver who wants to cross the street has a huge advantage over the pedestrians who have to climb up, over and down. Underpasses, as used on Queens Boulevard and in Paris and London, are just as bad. In Strong Towns terms, pedestrian overpasses are bad for crossing streets. In fact, they're one of the ways that streets get turned into stroads.

So now let's turn to the topic of Ben's tagline: Navy "Street." The Brooklyn Paper story he linked to gave the basics: Navy Street is a popular route between Fort Greene and Park Slope to the south and the Manhattan Bridge and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway to the north, and for two blocks in between (joined together into one superblock) it passes between two subsidized public housing projects, the Farragut Houses (population 3,440) and the Walt Whitman Houses (population 4,276). There are buffered bike paths on either side of the street, and fences blocking pedestrians from accessing or crossing the street from the projects. In the middle of the superblock there is a pedestrian bridge across the street from one project to another.

Every once in a while, some young sociopaths get the idea that it would be fun to go up on the bridge and throw things at the cyclists passing below. Last August, they hit computer programmer Stephen Arthur in the face with a brick, seriously injuring him. The city responded with typical bureaucratic non-solutions: they first stepped up police patrols of the area, and now they're going to cover the overpass with a mesh fence.

Ben's one-liner gets to the heart of the problem: why is Navy Street like this in the first place?

Photo: cisc1970 / Flickr

In Strong Towns terms, this section of Navy Street is not a street, or even a stroad. This is a road. It has fencing on both sides for the entire length. It's been about twelve years since I spent much time in that area, but I seem to remember that there was no bike path, just four lanes of car traffic. This road was designed to speed cars through the projects to the Manhattan Bridge and the BQE, without stopping or interacting.

If I lived in those projects, I would probably detest Navy Street for cutting my home off from other parts of the city and bringing noise to my building, just so that outsiders could get through the area faster. If I were an alienated teenager who'd spent his whole life as the target of abuse and discrimination from white people who were mostly well protected behind glass and steel, I'd want to throw something at those cars. And if I saw a less-protected, slower-moving, well-fed-looking white guy going by, I might just throw something at him. It's not right, but I understand where the impulse comes from. In some sense, you could say, they're angry at Bob Moses for designing the projects and the road this way, and at all the people who supported him, and at all the people who maintain this degrading Corbusian environment. They can't throw bricks at them, so they throw them at Stephen Arthur.

By putting in the bike lane, the DOT acknowledged that drivers going to the BQE are just not important enough to justify four lanes of traffic. The bike lane was a good start, but as Ben says, they need to finish the job. Arthur already asked the city to take out the fences, so that if the kids throw things at him again, he can at least try to chase them, but that would be counterproductive. The DOT needs to take down the road and put in a street that serves the project residents and not just the people passing through. As you can see from the pictures, there's room to put sidewalks all along the street. In the unused "open space" NYCHA can put out benches and tables so that other residents can sit by the street, and those eyes on the street may deter potential thugs. Maybe even, as Holly Whyte suggests, have movable furniture, good public bathrooms and food vendors.

With the extra lanes and the fence gone, the cars will be going so slow that there will be no need for a pedestrian bridge; it can be replaced with a raised crosswalk. Hopefully then the residents can meet the cyclists passing through eye to eye, as equals, with respect, and no one will want to throw anything.

If you've read through to the end, at this point you may want to make your views known to the DOT and NYCHA and Councilmember James. Or maybe you want to donate to Streetsblog, so they can keep paying Ben Fried for those great insights.

How the Tappan Zee Bridge hurts existing transit

2012-01-19T02:37:00.001-05:00

It's become the standard position for environmentalists, transit advocates and anyone else who opposes the Governor's heavy-handed revision of the Tappan Zee Bridge replacement plans: "the new bridge must include transit" (PDF). Most of the people who disagree argue that the bridge should be built right away. Besides myself, at this point only a few, like the Hudson Riverkeeper and Alfred Strasser, say that a replacement bridge may not be the best choice. I think I've convinced Alon Levy too now.

The interesting thing about transit in Bergen, Orange and Rockland counties is that the services that go through the Lincoln Tunnel Exclusive Bus Lane to the Port Authority in Manhattan actually earn back almost all their operating costs in fares. In contrast, all the local services - many of them operated by the same companies under contract - require heavy operating support from the Federal, state and local governments.

This can be easily explained using the Magic Formula for Transit Ridership:

1. Give transit its own right-of-way and good terminals
2. Make it hard to use cars
3. Make it expensive to use cars
4. Profit!

Getting through the Lincoln Tunnel or across the George Washington Bridge by private car is slow and expensive. The XBL and the Port Authority Bus Terminal allow the buses to cut through this, giving them an advantage to compensate for their multiple stops, fixed routes and sometimes inconvenient schedules. Local roads offer no such advantage, so people use their cars whenever they can.

Given this, it is no surprise that buses across the Tappan Zee Bridge (also contracted out to Stagecoach subsidiaries) earn back only ten percent of their operating costs, with the remaining amount paid by the State DOT. I just found a fascinating report (PDF) done by the State DOT in 2005 on transit in Rockland that sheds some light on just how the Magic Formula leads to profitability. The table on page III-54 in particular deserves to be excerpted here:

Service	Tappanzee Express	Commuter Bus	Fixed Route TOR
Where	Tappan Zee Bridge	Lincoln Tunnel and George Washington Bridge	Local Rockland service
Operating Expense / Rev. Vehicle Mile	$ 5.73	$ 5.04	$ 5.09
Rev. Passengers / Rev. Vehicle Mile	0.57	0.48	1.28
Operating Expense / Revenue Passenger	$10.04	$10.39	$ 3.96
Total Op. Revenue / Revenue Passenger	$ 0.98	$ 8.18	$ 0.78

The Tappan Zee Express and the "Commuter Bus" have a lot in common. Both bring commuters from Rockland County to work run using intercity coaches operated by subsidiaries of the Stagecoach Group, at a cost of about five dollars per mile or ten dollars per passenger, and they both carry about half a commuter per mile. The difference is that when Stagecoach operates under contract as the Tappan Zee Express, they only earn an average of 98 cents per passenger. When they operate through the Lincoln Tunnel as Short Line or Red and Tan, they can charge an average of $8.18 per passenger.

Stagecoach can charge that much because people who want to get to Manhattan will pay it. The Tappan Zee Express fare may be set by contract, but if they thought they could make more they'd have cancelled the contract and run service across the bridge without it. It's simple supply and demand: there are enough people willing to pay $7.40 to go from Nanuet to the Port Authority to make it worthwhile, but there aren't enough willing to pay that much to go from Nanuet to White Plains.

People don't want to pay that much for the bus across the Tappan Zee Bridge because it doesn't give them much of an advantage over driving. Or in State DOT-speak, "Operating revenue for this service is impacted by challenging suburban auto-oriented market as well as the low fare structure in contrast to other commuting express services using Over-the-Road Coaches."

But we've got all these commuters who ride buses to Manhattan. Why don't the local buses make any money? They're also operated by Stagecoach and cost about the same per vehicle mile. They get more passengers per vehicle mile, so their expenses per passenger are lower, but they can only charge 78 cents a ride on average. There aren't enough passengers to bring the expenses per passengers down below that amount, and there's not enough demand for them to raise the prices to cover the expenses.

Demand for these local buses is low because the State DOT, Rockland County and the municipal governments have spent the past sixty years building stroads and parking and prohibiting dense mixed-use development - in other words making it easy for these bus commuters to make all their local trips by car and depriving the local buses of their advantages for anyone who owns a car.

Now the Tri-State Transportation Campaign is pushing hard for "BRT on the bridge" (PDF). How would the "BRT" envisioned by Tri-State work under the Magic Formula? It would have its own right-of-way (or close enough if the State tweaks the HO/T parameters properly, which is a big "if" in itself), and if the State doubles the bridge tolls as planned, but the State would make it easier to use cars by widening the bridge. There are other factors like the price of gas, but chances are that any ridership boost will not be enough to make the service self-supporting like the Lincoln Tunnel services, meaning that if the State cries poverty and cuts the subsidy, the bus service would simply vanish, either immediately or after a brief transit death spiral.

Similarly, local bus service is hampered by stroads, parking and sprawl, which are all mandated by local ordinances. The "BRT" envisioned by Tri-State would not help any of this, because it would be sprawl transit, taking commuters from highway park-and-ride to office park and not focusing on walkable downtowns.

The Tappan Zee Bridge is bad for transit, and "BRT on the bridge" would not be any better. If you really care about transit, about walkable downtowns, about preserving open space, about conserving resources and about curbing pollution and carnage, there's only one solution that makes any sense: tear it down and don't replace it.

If you'd like to gently suggest that the Tri-State Transportation Campaign stop promoting "BRT on the Bridge," you can email them at tstc@tstc.org. You can also blog, tweet, or leave comments on their blog or Facebook page.

The population density to support my ass

2012-01-17T02:52:00.000-05:00

I swear if I read one more time that such-and-such a place "doesn't have the population density to support" transit, or sidewalks, or high speed rail, or multifamily housing, or mixed-use development, or sushi restaurants, or anything other than Joel Kotkin's suburban American fantasy, I'm gonna spit. At this point all you urbanists, livable streets advocates and transit supporters really ought to know better. Yes, you, Richard Layman, but you're not alone so don't feel bad; you're just the most recent person to say it, who happened to set me off.

Layman is summarizing the myopic "lessons learned" in an article about Spain's high-speed rail system (don't miss the "next page" buttons!) by mainstream reporter Tim Sheehan of the Fresno Bee, based in part on an interview with political economist Germà Bel. Sheehan writes:

"There is no question whether (Spain's system) can cover its costs. It cannot," Bel said. "It actually has not recovered one single euro from the infrastructure investment. The government claims they are recovering the operating costs, but the numbers are not clear."

The busiest high-speed lines in the world are capable of making money, Bel said, including between Paris and Lyon, where about 25 million people ride the French TGV trains each year, and the Japanese Shinkansen trains between Tokyo and Osaka, which draw about 130 million riders a year.

"But this is not the case with any single line in Spain," Bel said. "The most crowded operation is Madrid-Barcelona, and it has not even had 6 million people in a year."

Robert Cruickshank took issue with Bel's argument and Sheehan's portrayal of it. He also faults Sheehan for holding highways to a double standard. What about Spain's highways? Are they half empty too? Do they pay for themselves, since many of them are tolled?

Note that Bel doesn't say anything about population density; I think that's something that Layman is reading into it. What he and the other analysts tell Sheehan is that the system doesn't have high enough ridership, which is not the same thing. In fact, Bel's own research fails to show that population density is a significant factor in urban transit ridership.

In 2010, Bel and his colleague Daniel Albalate did an amazing factor analysis (PDF of the 45 cities in the Mobility in Cities Database (yours for only $1,608 plus shipping!) and found that the factors that loaded most heavily on service demand were as follows:

Factor	Loading
GDP	0.797
PRIVATE_TIME (average time spent by private vehicle trip)	0.747
FLEET (fleet of vehicles available for public transport purposes)	0.553
MOTOR (number of private vehicles per capita)	-0.524
PRICE (average price charged to urban transport users)	-0.466
PARKING (number of parking spaces per thousand jobs in the CBD)	-0.221
DENS (urban population density)	-0.190
PUBSPEED (average speed of public transport vehicles in operation)	0.0722

Here's a quick note on how to read a factor analysis. A positive value means a positive correlation, so the higher the GDP, the higher the demand for transit. A negative value means a negative correlation, so the more private vehicles per thousand residents, the lower the demand for transit.

The key here is the absolute value of the loadings. The greater that value, the stronger the relationship between the factor and the dependent variable. In this case, the effect of GDP is more than ten times as much as the effect of transit speed. Note in particular that population density and transit vehicle speed have the loadings with the lowest absolute value.

Finally, remember that this shows correlation, not causation. It may well be that high transit demand causes large numbers of transit vehicles to be available (funny how that works!) and high population density, not the other way around.

Again, this article by Albalate and Bel refers to urban transit, not intercity rail, but the dynamics involved in intercity mode choice are similar to urban mode choice. The time difference (3.5 hours for AVE vs. 6 hours by private car), number of vehicles per capita, tolls and gas would all make a difference. Those are some lessons that California can learn from Spain, but as Cruickshank argues, Sheehan was predisposed to find problems with high-speed rail. Maybe Bel tried to tell him, but he wasn't listening for it?

New York City's Really Narrow Streets

2012-01-06T04:00:00.000-05:00

My last post on Really Narrow Streets got picked up by Streetsblog NYC and the Streetsblog Network, and I got a bunch of really nice comments. In addition to the cities I mentioned, commenters also pointed to Really Narrow Streets in Provincetown, the Toronto Islands, Baltimore and Philadelphia, as well as Bristol in England.

A number of commenters mentioned New York City, which does have several Really Narrow Streets south of Fourteenth Street. With the help of this Forgotten NY post, I've identified the narrowest streets in Manhattan and got a rough measure of their widths using Google Earth. There are ten of them under twenty feet wide:

View New York's Really Narrow Streets in a larger map
Interestingly, many of them are what I'd call alleys rather than Really Narrow Streets. What's the difference between an alley and a Really Narrow Street? I'd say it's one of function. Really Narrow Streets are the main pedestrian access to shops and residences. Alleys are used to allow cars and trucks to access rear entrances to loading docks and parking lots.

On Tuesday I happened to be walking through Lower Manhattan and I snapped my own cell phone pictures of some of these Really Narrow Streets/alleys.

Liberty Place

Note that Liberty Place is covered with ugly scaffolding. So is Catherine Lane:

Catherine Lane

It seems to be almost entirely used as a driveway for that parking garage.

Cortlandt Alley looking South from Walker Street

Cortlandt Alley looking North from Walker Street

Cortlandt Alley is definitely used as an alley for motor vehicle access. Nate Berg has a great interview with Nick Carr of the Scouting Report about Cortlandt Alley's film career:

The big thing I always get asked to find are dank dilapidated alleys, and New York City has, like, 5 alleys that look like that. Maybe four. You can’t film in three of them. So what it comes down to is there’s one alley left in New York, Cortlandt Alley, that everybody films in because it’s the last place. I try to stress to these directors in a polite way that New York is not a city of alleys.

It seems like it would be possible, maybe with some zoning changes, for some foresighted developer to take one of these streets, open a bunch of vibrant storefronts and market the hell out of it so that every tourist stops there for shopping and street food after they visit Ground Zero. It might take a year or two, but I could see one of them becoming New York's answer to Bearskin Neck or the Rue Sous le Cap. In Strong Towns terms, think how much tax revenue the city would get from such a tiny amount of infrastructure.

In praise of Really Narrow Streets

2012-01-03T23:00:00.000-05:00

Lately I've been following posts by the Old Urbanist and one of his main inspirations, Nathan Lewis. Lewis puts aside political issues of compromise with car boosters and examines the question of how we would want our environment to look if we weren't planning for cars. He looks at pedestrian-oriented cities around the world and highlights examples of good design. One concept he refers to again and again is the Really Narrow Street.

These streets were usually created before cars were invented, and they have no place for cars. Some are too narrow for any car. Most are wide enough for one car to pass, but not much wider. There are examples from every continent, including Europe, Africa, Asia and South America.

In North America we have a few of these streets in some of our older towns. Here is one of the oldest, Acoma (established ca. 1300):

Here is Santo Domingo (1496):

Quebec (1608):

Boston (1630):

Albuquerque (1706):

One of my favorites, in part because it's a small town, is Rockport, Massachussetts (1743):

I spent an enjoyable few days in Rockport last summer. The street in this picture, Bearskin Neck, leads to the main docks and was a key route during the town's heyday as a fishing port. It now leads to the departure docks for some tourist boats, but is more of a destination in itself, and is lined with shops and restaurants. It functions essentially as a woonerf.

Notice that none of the streets above were laid out after 1800. Lewis attributes this to an American fad he calls "nineteenth-century hypertrophism," where wide streets became a symbol of progress and wealth. He observes that in his hometown of New Berlin, New York, the main street was designed so that you could turn a horse and carriage around in it, even though that wasn't necessary for any social purpose.

Lewis argues that Really Narrow Streets privilege the pedestrian and create an opportunity for intense commerce that cannot be matched by any street wide enough to handle cars and pedestrians together. This is an experience that shopping malls, cruise ships and theme parks are designed to replicate.

At this point you may be saying to yourself, "We tried pedestrian streets in the seventies, and many cities are allowing cars back in, because it killed the street." One answer to that is that the streets were still "hypertrophic," too wide to feel comfortable with just pedestrians. My main answer is that it was the subsidies to sprawl commerce that killed downtown streets. Many of them would probably have done just fine as pedestrian streets if the government hadn't been simultaneously building big competing highways and parking lots on the edge of town. Some of them have done fine.

The NYSAC is not your friend

2012-01-02T18:04:00.000-05:00

You may remember the New York State Association of Counties. Last February their transportation committee passed a resolution opposing complete streets legislation, and I observed that they, like the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) and the Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA), constitute a lobbying organization protecting the interests of bureaucrats while pretending to be a governmental entity.

This week, Alan Chartock interviewed the Executive Director of NYSAC, Stephen Acquario. Chartock is pretty honest with his guests, but even he couldn't come right out and ask, "Where the fuck do you get off pretending that you represent the people?" if he wanted the guy to ever come back. Chartock is right to interview Acquario, because to my unending frustration, some people actually take this gang seriously.

The United States Senate and other one-state-one-vote organizations like AASHTO and the GHSA are pretty obviously unrepresentative, but the NYSAC goes so far beyond that level that I feel it's worth spending a post on. In case you weren't aware, here are some figures about New York State's counties.

The most populous county in New York, Kings (i.e. Brooklyn), contains almost 13 percent of the total population of the state, according to the 2010 Census. The five boroughs of New York City together contain 42% of the state's population, and the other five most populous counties (Suffolk, Nassau, Westchester, Erie (Buffalo) and Monroe (Rochester)) contain 28%. Under a system of one person one vote, these ten counties would control 70% of the votes, and the other 52 counties would be irrelevant.

Instead, the NYSAC operates by a system of one county, one vote, which means that the representatives of the 70% of the population who live in the ten most populous counties only have 16% of the votes. The ten least populous counties (Hamilton, Schuyler, Yates, Lewis, Schoharie, Seneca, Essex, Wyoming, Orleans and Delaware), with their combined share of 1.63% of the population, control an equal 16% of the votes.

The NYSAC's Transportation and Public Works Committee, which passed the resolution, is similarly lopsided. It is chaired by Jean Raymond, the Supervisor of the Town of Edinburg, NY (population 1,384), which has no buses, no trains and no sidewalks. The co-chair is Randy Gibbon, the Director of Public Works for Chenango County (population 50,477), which actually contains New Berlin, the home of Nathan Lewis (and here's what Lewis has to say about streets). Also on the committee is Andrea Horsch, chief lobbyist for the New York City Department of Transportation, but it's not clear whether she gets five votes or one.

Somehow Monroe County (3.8% of the population), Broome (1.0%), Livingston (0.34%) and Wyoming County (0.22%) each have two seats on the Committee. Maybe they have one representative for transportation and one for public works, or one for the legislature and one for the county executive, but I can't tell if they get two votes. Regardless, I'm pretty sure that the NYC, Erie and Monroe County representatives (with more than half of the state's population) don't outweigh the other 19 committee members.

I hope I've established by now how lopsided this organization is. Now back to Stephen Acquario and his interview with Alan Chartock. This year, Chartock has been asking all his guests the same question about party control of the New York State Senate. Here are the statewide political party enrollments as of November 1 (PDF):

Democratic	5,660,246	49%
Republican	2,824,680	25%
Conservative	147,993	1.3%
Working Families	42,776	0.37%
Independence	434,752	3.8%
Green	21,095	0.18%
Other	3,351	0.029%
Blank	2,326,786	20%
Total	11,461,679

With the Democrats just shy of a majority of registered voters and the Republicans only claiming a quarter of them, it's pretty obvious that the State Senate will not stay in Republican hands without a bunch of dirty tricks. Acquario said that it was in "the counties"' interest for the Senate to stay in Republican control, because a Senate controlled by Democrats would be dominated by senators from New York City who won't pay any attention to the needs of "counties."

It seems pretty clear to me that the needs of "counties" shouldn't matter. Counties aren't people. They contain people, and we do need basic safeguards to prevent urban majorities from running roughshod over country dwellers, but giving residents of sparsely populated areas an overrepresentation in government is a really bad way to do that.

If you have any doubt about the representativeness of the NYSAC, consider this final point. The official name of the dominant party is the "New York State Democratic Committee." Longstanding usage is that things associated with the party will be referred to with the adjective "Democratic" with a capital D, as in "the Democratic Party" and "Democratic control." Several times in the interview, Acquario referred to these things as "the Democrat Party," "Democrat control" and so forth. This is a well-documented insult to the Democrats that has been used by Republicans for generations, and it is never used unintentionally. It's been called "fighting words."

I do not take that insult personally, because I'm not a Democrat either and I have no love for the party that killed bridge tolls. However, it's a clear signal that Acquario is a Republican partisan who sees the Democratic party as an enemy. It shows, unequivocally, that he has no interest in representing the needs of Democrats or city dwellers. By using it, Acquario has exposed the New York State Association of Counties as a tool for rural Republicans to attack urban interests.

It is clear that Andrea Horsch and the other representatives of populous counties in New York State are wasting their time participating in this sham organization. There are better ways of ensuring the protection of the people who live in rural parts of the state. I suggest that we put their time to better use and withdraw from the NYSAC any basis for their pretense of legitimacy.

Five reasons why the Tappan Zee sprawl should be stopped

2011-12-29T22:01:00.001-05:00

As I've discussed before, the Tappan Zee Bridge is a sprawl-generating machine. The sprawl created by this bridge in Orange, Rockland, Bergen and Westchester counties is bad for everyone in the area. Here are five reasons why:

Sprawl puts teens, seniors, the poor and the disabled at a disadvantage.
Sprawl increases the pressure for hydrofracking.
Sprawl keeps Nyack, Suffern and the other towns from being Strong Towns with sustainable budgets.
Sprawl adds to pollution
Sprawl kills.

And if you think it's bad now, it will be hell when oil (and shale gas, and electricity) becomes really expensive. Please don't use this post to support an argument for "a new bridge with transit." The bridge we have keeps generating sprawl. Any replacement would generate at least as much sprawl, with or without "transit."

Five things we can do without rebuilding the Tappan Zee Bridge

2011-12-29T21:32:00.000-05:00

A lot of the arguments given for replacing the Tappan Zee Bridge present something that we want, or maybe even need, and then offer the bridge as a way of getting that. The dishonesty is that the bridge isn't the only way of getting these things. Here are five examples.

We don't need a new bridge to create jobs. Almost any increase in government spending will put more people to work. Transit projects put more people to work than road projects, so let's spend all the money on transit.
We don't need a new bridge to improve mobility in the region. A wider bridge may help people to move at first, but it will soon be full of cars, and then when the tolls and the price of gas rise, no one will be able to afford to drive across it.
We don't need a new bridge to reduce crashes. The Governor could reduce the crashes tomorrow by getting rid of the seventh lane on the existing bridge. He hasn't, because the politicians have all decided that squeezing a few thousand more cars in is worth the deaths and injuries, and the people don't seem to care.
We don't need a new bridge to accommodate an increase in population. The population is not going to increase according to the moronic linear projections put out by the State DOT. Any added population can be served by more train and bus service.
We don't need a new bridge to build a new linear park. We could build a linear park tomorrow by getting rid of a few lanes on the existing bridge, but the politicians have all decided that squeezing a few thousand more cars in is more important than a park, and the people don't seem to care.

The Tappan Zee Bridge and Transit: A look back

2011-12-27T21:31:00.000-05:00

This December 15 will be the hundredth anniversary of the completion of the first Tappan Zee Bridge in 1955. In honor of that occasion, we've collected some highlights of the history of the original bridge and its current replacement.

The Andrew Cuomo Tappan Zee Bridge today. Photo: Wikipedia.

1953: The first concrete caisson is floated into place.

1955: Governor Averell Harriman opens the bridge to traffic.

1970: The Thruway Authority repays the last of its $80 million debt to New York State.

1993: A movable barrier system allows four lanes of traffic to flow in the peak direction.

1999: The I-287 Task Force is formed to explore options to rehabilitate or replace the bridge.

2011: President Barack Obama announces that the replacement of the bridge will be expedited.

2012: Governor Andrew Cuomo announces a deal to include "full corridor Bus Rapid Transit" on the bridge instead of an "emergency access lane."

2017: Governor Richard Brodsky opens the new north span of the bridge to traffic.

2023: Tappan Zee, Inc., raises car tolls from $10 to $15 round trip to make payments on the bridge construction bonds. Gasoline-powered cars are charged $20, but most people drive electric cars using cheap electricity from shale gas.

2027: Governor Eric Ulrich opens the new south span of the bridge to traffic.

2028: Bowing to political pressure, Governor Ulrich opens the "BRT lane" to all cars.

2032: The Historic Tarrytown Village is moved to a parking pedestal in Elmsford to make room for the Tarrytown Water Filtration Plant and the Residences at Sleepye Hollowe.

2038: Bowing to political pressure, Governor Cara Cuomo-Espada opens the bridge shoulders to all cars.

2040: Tappan Zee Shale Gas, Inc. assumes control of New York State for nonpayment of obligations. Car tolls are raised to $25 round trip.

2048: Bowing to political pressure, TZSG President Theodore Gillibrand converts the "little used bicycle/pedestrian path" to a reversible lane. The bridge has to have seven lanes in the peak direction, he argues, because the Thruway is that wide.

2049: The Andrew Cuomo Tappan Zee Task Force is formed to explore options to rehabilitate or replace the bridge.

2054: The Historic Village of Nyack is moved to a parking pedestal in Nanuet to make room for the Nyack Biomass Plant and the Residences at Nyacke.

Note: the previous post envisioned a Tappan Zee without transit, as currently planned.

100 Years of the Tappan Zee Bridge: A Look Back

2011-12-23T01:20:00.000-05:00

The Andrew Cuomo Tappan Zee Bridge today. Photo: Wikipedia.

1953: The first concrete caisson is floated into place.

1955: Governor Averell Harriman opens the bridge to traffic.

1970: The Thruway Authority repays the last of its $80 million debt to New York State.

1993: A movable barrier system allows four lanes of traffic to flow in the peak direction.

1999: The I-287 Task Force is formed to explore options to rehabilitate or replace the bridge.

2011: President Barack Obama announces that the replacement of the bridge will be expedited.

2017: Governor Richard Brodsky opens the new north span of the bridge to traffic.

2023: Tappan Zee, Inc., raises car tolls from $10 to $15 round trip to make payments on the bridge construction bonds. Gasoline-powered cars are charged $20, but most people drive electric cars using cheap electricity from shale gas.

2027: Governor Eric Ulrich opens the new south span of the bridge to traffic.

2028: Bowing to political pressure, Governor Ulrich opens the "emergency access lane" to all cars.

2032: The Historic Tarrytown Village is moved to a parking pedestal in Elmsford to make room for the Tarrytown Water Filtration Plant and the Residences at Sleepye Hollowe.

2038: Bowing to political pressure, Governor Cara Cuomo-Espada opens the bridge shoulders to all cars.

2040: Tappan Zee Shale Gas, Inc. assumes control of New York State for nonpayment of obligations. Car tolls are raised to $25 round trip.

2048: Bowing to political pressure, TZSG President Theodore Gillibrand converts the "little used bicycle/pedestrian path" to a reversible lane. The bridge has to have seven lanes in the peak direction, he argues, because the Thruway is that wide.

2049: The Andrew Cuomo Tappan Zee Task Force is formed to explore options to rehabilitate or replace the bridge.

2054: The Historic Village of Nyack is moved to a parking pedestal in Nanuet to make room for the Nyack Biomass Plant and the Residences at Nyacke.

Will the Applied Sciences campus be car-free?

2011-12-21T02:36:00.000-05:00

One of the biggest stories in the news this week is the announcement that the City of New York will give a hundred million dollars and a chunk of Roosevelt Island to a consortium of Cornell University and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology to build an Applied Sciences campus. The establishment of a new technical institute in the heart of the city can be thought of as another victory in the resurgence of urbanism over job sprawl. But how urban will it be?

University study has traditionally been an urban practice, whether at Bologna, Paris, Harvard or Chicago. There has been another educational tradition of rural cloistering leading in the U.S. to the college town, a small town dominated by one college or several. Ithaca, the home of Cornell's main campus as well as Ithaca College, is one such college town. In the second half of the twentieth century, many small-town and suburban campuses sprawled, inviting students, faculty and staff to drive in and turning most of the space between buildings into parking lots. Even in those campuses, most of the students and significant numbers of faculty arrive on foot, by bike or by transit, leading to very high transit mode shares, but often a small minority of administrators, faculty and staff insist on driving and on having their parking dominate the campus.

This college sprawl has been one part of the general sprawling of America, along with job sprawl, housing sprawl and shopping sprawl. This trend is not sustainable, and there are signs it is losing steam. Sarah Goodyear has chronicled attempts by corporations like Facebook and Apple to make their campuses more urban, but they remain isolated along their suburban collector roads, and Sarah concludes, "Maybe they will be happy in their custom-made, self-contained bubbles. Or maybe down the road, they'll be like one-time innovative giants such as Sears -- looking longingly toward downtown."

The Applied Sciences campus is part of Mayor Bloomberg and Deputy Mayor Steel's strategy to make New York the downtown competitor, the target of those longing gazes, and it just may work. Roosevelt Island seems isolated, and Eric Jaffe thinks that it will need transportation upgrades, but I can't really see what needs upgrading.

With no improvements the entire campus will already be within a ten minute walk of the aerial tram and F subway line to Manhattan. Like the R train, which the Daily News dubbed the "Silicon Subway," the F runs through Midtown, Soho and Downtown Brooklyn, connecting a number of start-up companies. An Applied Sciences student or faculty member could be at the Housing Works Bookstore for coffee with a corporate researcher in half an hour, door to door, and a staff member from MakerBot Industries in Brooklyn could take the D to the F and be at a seminar on Roosevelt Island in 45 minutes. With the city's planned bike share, Court Square in Long Island City is only twenty minutes away.

The proposed bike/pedestrian bridge to Manhattan could be cool. The old way to get to the island was by trolley to an elevator on the middle of the Queensboro Bridge, and rebuilding that would be nice as well. But neither of those are urgent.

Stephen Smith points out that the city could probably get people to build a tech campus for free just by raising height limits and removing minimum parking requirements in transit-connected areas. On Twitter, he also opined that "Cornell's Roosevelt Island plan is basically a few bldgs hidden beneath solar panels in a quasi-Corbusian urban form." It's a very appropriate criticism. The oldest residential buildings on Roosevelt Island are at least clustered around Main Street, which feels very urban, but the newer buildings built in the past twenty years break the grid and force pedestrians to make odd detours. Why did the designers of the Cornell-Technion plan feel the need to propose something even less urban?

My main concern is for Roosevelt Island to remain as car-free as it has been, and maybe even become more so. The original plan for the island's current developments was to have all the cars parked at the Motorgate garage, and the rest of the island be nearly car-free - they don't even have garbage trucks. Sadly, over the years, everyone with a little bit of power has decided that they're too good, or maybe too disabled, to park at the Motorgate and take the bus. The space around Goldwater Hospital, which now occupies the land that will be given to the Applied Sciences campus, is filled with cars. When an old insane asylum on the north end of the island was redeveloped into condos, the developers were able to get permission to build a 148-space underground garage.

Let's hope that the Cornell and Technion designers have more vision than they showed in that lame fly-through, and that they build something urban and scholarly, with really narrow streets, like in Paris's Latin Quarter. Let's hope that they don't think they're too good to take the train to work, or at least to park at the Motorgate and take the bus. But if they do, let's hope that Bloomberg, Steel and the RIOC will make them do the right thing.

Why not a longer "Tappan Zee High Line"?

2011-12-16T01:46:00.000-05:00

Everyone knows I've got serious misgivings about the rails-to-trails movement, especially when people pull the rails out of perfectly functional, useful railroad infrastructure. I feel a lot better about roads-to-trails, and there are several good ones. The best is the section of the Long Island Motor Parkway that's been preserved here in Queens. There are other trails that use land taken for roads that were never built. I've walked on the Nassau-Suffolk Greenbelt, which follows an unbuilt section of the Bethpage Parkway. The Briarcliff-Peekskill Trailway in Westchester also uses an old parkway right-of-way.

Back in October when the Governor began his push for the Bridge Reconstruction merit badge, Paul Feiner, Supervisor of the Town of Greenburgh (which includes Tarrytown and Elmsford) suggested leaving the existing bridge standing for use by cyclists and pedestrians. This had been considered in earlier bridge replacement plans, but ultimately rejected in favor of a bike/pedestrian path on one of the two replacement spans. But if, as I've argued, the Tappan Zee Bridge should not be replaced, then Feiner's plan has a shot.

Instead of tearing the existing bridge down, we could keep two lanes for buses and use the rest of the width for a mixed-use path.

My question is, why stop there? The bridge itself is three miles long, but if we're not replacing it then we don't need the loud, polluting highway approaches. They'd just dump cars onto Routes 9 and 9W anyway.

Where the Thruway (Interstate 87) and the Cross-Westchester Expressway (I-287) split in Elmsford is right over the missing link between the two rail-trails that run in the right-of-way of the Old Putnam Line. If we reconfigured the highways so that northbound Thruway traffic turns east on the Cross-Westchester, then we can have the Tappan Zee High Line connect to the South County Trailway (PDF) there. It will also pass right under the Old Croton Aqueduct Trail.

On the Rockland County side, if we terminate the Thruway at the Palisades Parkway, we can extend the Tappan Zee High Line west for a total length of nine miles. It can connect to the Esposito Memorial Trail and the Long Path in Nyack. If we stop the Thruway at the Garden State Parkway, that makes twelve miles. Think of the recreational possibilities!

Of course, those connections assume that we don't reactivate the old Erie Main Line and the Putnam Line, but it might be worth it even so.

To be perfectly honest, with the length and the grades on the current bridge, I'm not sure it would be a pleasant trip - unless maybe we could have a concession for a bus stop, cafe and refreshment stand at the highest point. But it makes a lot more sense than some of the other recent proposals "high lines."

Getting Cuomo to do the right thing

2011-12-13T23:58:00.001-05:00

Transit and livable streets advocates are rightly frustrated with the way Andrew Cuomo has dealt with our issues as governor. He has not been an anti-transit ideologue like Scott Walker of Wisconsin, and he has not championed drivers above everyone else like Bill Thompson or Carl Paladino. He is simply uninterested in transit. He has no personal use for it, and he does not see transit victories as particularly helpful or necessary in his career.

As a result, Cuomo has abandoned transit issues like the budget lockbox and the Tappan Zee BRT when it seemed they would get in the way of another goal like passing a popular revenue plan or reconstructing an aging bridge. He has prevaricated on issues like congestion pricing and the borough taxi bill when he feared they would anger an important constituency. He has failed to take the initiative on issues like Chris Christie's reallocation of Port Authority funds from transit to roads. And he has neglected transit champions like Chris Ward and Jay Walder, driving them out and replacing them with managers chosen for their loyalty to him rather than their commitment to making transit work.

This is incredibly frustrating, especially because we do not have very much of the kind of power that can command Cuomo's respect. The Occupy movement aroused so much sympathy among the mainstream media that Cuomo felt comfortable defying the New York Post editorial board and abandoning their absurd construal of "no new taxes." The Occupiers created space for Cuomo to advance his career by doing the right thing. They did this by camping out for months, playing drums and having lots of really long meetings, but the effect of all that was to get out the message about income inequality and taxation.

Let's look at another example of inequality. There's an argument to be made that it's unfair to maintain the "free" bridges with sales and income tax dollars while transit riders have to pay more and more for crappier service. Tolling the bridges would remedy some of that inequality (and bring in riders for the transit services). It's the right thing to do.

If Cuomo wanted to take a stand on bridge tolls, he would have to face the angry right-wing Democrats from the outer outer boroughs and the suburbs, and maybe even a few myopic liberals who are swayed by bogus arguments about regressive taxes and totalitarianism. He won't do the right thing without the kind of political cover that the Occupiers provided.

Are transit advocates capable of harnessing that kind of power? And if we're not, maybe we should be using a different strategy?

Rockland County needs Strong Towns, and the bridge won't help

2011-12-11T23:42:00.001-05:00

Last week, Comptroller DiNapoli released an audit of Rockland County's finances. Much of the discussion of the audit has focused on the $52 million deficit in something called the "unappropriated fund balance": whose fault it is, and why County officials relied so heavily on the sale of a nursing home that fell through. But the real question is why the deficit appeared in the first place, and whether anything can be done to avoid them in the future. The audit report says,

We found that County officials over-budgeted revenues from sales and mortgage taxes. In years when the national economy showed negative growth, County officials estimated that sales and mortgage taxes (which represent 39 percent of the County’s revenue) would increase by 4 to 6 percent. While the County’s overall expenditures increased by 7 percent in 2007, revenue from sales and mortgage taxes increased by only 3 percent. The County’s sales and mortgage taxes continued to fall short of estimates by 13 percent in 2009, and results of operations for 2010 showed that this revenue source fell short by approximately 6 percent.

Number 3 on their list of five recommendations is:

3. The Legislature and County officials should realistically budget for sales and mortgage tax revenues and/or reduce general fund expenditures to levels that can be financed by recurring revenue sources.

When talk turns to local government financing, I think of the Strong Towns approach. Chuck Marohn and his friends Ben Oleson and Jon Commers have found that sprawl development is really bad for the budgets of local governments. They list the five key features of a Strong Town:

1. Must be near-term financially solvent.
2. Must have the tax base and resources to cover long-term financial commitments.
3. Must have sufficient age diversity so that population will be added at a rate greater than population is being lost.
4. Must have sufficient economic diversity and vibrancy so that businesses are being added at a rate greater than or equal to the rate they are being lost.
5. Must have the courage and leadership to plan for long-term viability.

I haven't delved into the finances of every town in Rockland County, but it sounds like the county at least has made financial commitments that they don't have the tax base and resources to cover. Chuck, Ben and Jon also list ten Placemaking Principles - there's some overlap with the key features listed above, but there are some new strategies for achieving them. Here are three that are particularly relevant for Rockland County:

Strong Towns reduce costs associated with land use, transportation and development, and are able to reinvest these savings to strengthen their long-term position in the region and the world.
To build an affordable transportation system, a Strong Town utilizes roads to move traffic safely at high speeds outside of neighborhoods and urban areas. Within neighborhoods and urban areas, a Strong Town uses complex streets to equally accommodate the full range of transportation options available to residents.
To make transportation systems more efficient and affordable, to create economic opportunity and to enhance the community, neighborhoods in a Strong Town must be mixed use, with properly-scaled residential and commercial development.

If you've ever been on Route 202 in Suffern, Route 9W in Piermont, or pretty much anywhere along Route 59, you've been on what Chuck calls a "stroad":

Photo: dougtone / Flickr

If you want to start to see the world with Strong Towns eyes and truly understand why our development approach is bankrupting us, just watch your speedometer. Anytime you are traveling between 30 and 50 miles per hour, you are basically in an area that is too slow to be efficient yet too fast to provide a framework for capturing a productive rate of return.

Once you've done that, ask yourself: Which would reduce costs associated with land use, transportation and development: spending five billion dollars on an eight-lane highway bridge that will be expanded to ten, or spending that money rebuilding the rail connections to Newark, Jersey City and New York City?

Finally, when you're done with that, ask yourself: with a brand new bridge encouraging lots of driving, how much would a sprawl-oriented bus project really do to move Rockland away from its unsustainable sprawl and towards a Strong Towns way of life?

To solve the budget problems in Rockland County as, in the rest of the state and the country, as Chuck likes to say: we need to build places of value. We need to start building Strong Towns.

Why we can't afford to replace the Tappan Zee Bridge

2011-12-10T00:03:00.001-05:00

Last week, Governor Cuomo went on Fred Dicker's radio show complaining about "the lack of initiative and ability to execute by state government." because people were telling him we can't afford to replace the Tappan Zee Bridge. He said, "We used to build bridges! ... I believe we can! I believe it doesn't have to be this way! I'm not giving up on us!"

Well I'm not giving up on us either! *sob* I'm okay, just let me compose myself... Right.

The Governor talks about "alternative financing," but what matters much more than where you're going to borrow the money from is how you're going to pay it back. The fact of the matter is that if we confine ourselves to using toll revenues, and keeping the tolls to no more than double the current tolls plus inflation, we will never be able to pay back $5.2 billion dollars. It's a mathematical impossibility. The money has to come from somewhere else. The Federal government? State taxpayers? Justin Bieber's personal fortune? Mugging old ladies on the street? It's anybody's guess, but it won't come from tolls unless we raise the tolls above twenty dollars round-trip.

Why can't we finance it with tolls? Now, Alan Chartock is fond of saying that Andrew Cuomo is a very smart guy, and it's true that the issue is not that obvious. But I have an answer for Cuomo. I know the reason we can't afford to build this bridge. It's not related to the economy or austerity or anything. It's a combination of three factors: the river is too wide, the bridge is too wide, and the cars are too empty.

Many people have observed that the Tappan Zee is the worst part of the river to build a bridge. There are some places, like the George Washington Bridge, where the river is relatively narrow and the bedrock relatively close to the surface. You drive some piles into the rock and hang a bridge off them. Expensive but doable. Even then, it's going to cost a billion dollars just to replace the suspender ropes.

The Tappan Zee Bridge is built on mud at the widest point in the river. That's just going to cost a lot more. The original bridge was built on the cheap during the Korean War, which is why maintenance costs so much today.

Secondly, remember that the new bridge is planned to be twice as wide as the old one, but with only a slightly higher number of cars crossing it. That's going to add to the expense as well.

Finally, most of the vehicles crossing the bridge are single-occupant. If they had two or three people in them on average, those people could get together and pool their money for the toll, and it wouldn't be too much for anyone. But if it's just one person, then that person is going to get very angry if tolls go above a certain level. The bridge can only fit so many cars, which means only so many people.

Cuomo isn't just a smart guy, he's a smart guy who signs the paychecks of lots of knowledgeable people with direct involvement with this project. The only way he doesn't know this is if those people are all too scared to say something the Governor doesn't like. On some level I'm guessing he does know this, which means that he's looking to pay for the project with something other than toll revenue. The fact that he's never mentioned that, despite spending hours talking about financing, suggests that whatever he's looking at, people aren't going to like it.

The Tappan Zee Bridge replacement is not about jobs

2011-12-08T00:57:00.001-05:00

We all have needs, and many of the needs can be satisfied in different ways. For example, everyone needs a certain amount of protein in their diet, and you can get it from beef, chicken, beans or nuts. You could get your protein from barbecued elephant stakes, but most people would agree that it's a wasteful and environmentally destructive way of satisfying that basic need. It's the same with jobs.

Many of the most fervent arguments for the Tappan Zee Bridge replacement project, like this op-ed by Assemblywoman Ellen Jaffee and another one by Rockland Business Association President Al Samuels, have focused on "jobs." Jaffee writes,

In addition to a new bridge, our community cannot afford to wait for new jobs. At a time when the state unemployment rate is 8 percent, we cannot waste any opportunity to spur economic growth. Building a new Tappan Zee Bridge is estimated to create up to 150,000 new jobs, a huge boost for our region and state. And by speeding up the process and finally getting a quick date for construction, our community will have these jobs now, when we need them most.

Well, yes, Assemblywoman, if an "opportunity to spur economic growth" is a shitty one, we certainly can waste it, and we should. Not all employment programs are created equal. There are many ways to create jobs, including monetary policy, unemployment insurance and infrastructure spending. You could create jobs by rebuilding the Tappan Zee Bridge, but it's a wasteful and environmentally destructive way of satisfying that basic economic need.

On a basic level, you could pay people to dig holes and fill them up for years, and stimulate the economy that way, but some forms of stimulus are better and others are worse. For years, Smart Growth America has been highlighting data showing that government spending on mass transit projects creates more and better jobs per dollar than road projects.

If you want to create jobs in the Lower Hudson Valley, why not spend it rebuilding the old rail infrastructure? I bet that five billion dollars would be enough to rebuild the tracks on every train line that ever existed in Orange, Bergen and Rockland Counties, double-track them, lower the floor on the West Shore Line, and restore passenger service on all of them. Any leftover money could be spent rebuilding the Putnam Line and NYW&B in Westchester, or digging the Cross-Harbor Rail Freight Tunnel. Tons of good jobs there. No need to rebuild a bridge that has filled the area with sprawl and will only generate more sprawl.

The 2010 farebox numbers

2011-12-07T01:05:00.000-05:00

It's December, and that means it's time for the release of this year's National Transit Database! See past analyses for 2007, 2008 and 2009.

The Chattanooga inclines lead the pack again, with 194.3. Pittsburgh's inclines are way down, at only 80.1%. Port Imperial (140.1) and BillyBey (105.1) also did very well. The University of Georgia is listed, but they don't charge fares, so the revenue must come from the college and doesn't really count as "farebox" revenue.

New York City Transit is at 71.7% this year, and BART is just under at 71.6%. Now for the buses:

Name	Fare Revenues per Total Operating Expense (Recovery Ratio)	Lincoln Tunnel XBL
Trans-Bridge Lines, Inc.	132.3	Yes
Orange-Newark-Elizabeth, Inc. (Coach USA)	114.9
Trans-Hudson Express	111	Yes
Olympia Trails Bus Company, Inc. (Coach USA)	105.4	Yes
New Jersey Transit Corporation-45(NJTC-45)	105.3	Yes
Community Transit, Inc. (Community Transit)	101.1	Yes
Martz Group, National Coach Works of Virginia (NCW)	91.5	Yes
Suburban Transit Corporation (Coach USA)	89.1	Yes
Academy Lines, Inc.	85.9	Yes
Monroe Bus Corporation	83.3	Yes
Rockland Coaches, Inc.	79.9	Yes
Hudson Transit Lines, Inc. (Short Line)	79.3	Yes
Lakeland Bus Lines, Inc.	78.5	Yes
DeCamp Bus Lines	77.5	Yes
Monsey New Square Trails Corporation	77	Yes
Adirondack Transit Lines, Inc. (Adirondack Trailways)	76.7	Yes

Bonanza is gone from the list, probably because it's been folded into Peter Pan, which does not report its figures to the NTD. Nothing really new this year, just the same sixteen companies, half of them owned by Stagecoach, most of them using the Lincoln Tunnel XBL.

Tappan Zee carnage: don't pee on my back and tell me it's raining!

2011-12-05T23:30:00.000-05:00

I want to highlight one particular piece of Tappan Zee bullshit tonight: the traffic safety issue. Our Governor says, "with seven narrow lanes and no safety shoulders, the Tappan Zee has an accident rate double the rest of the New York Thruway system." And to be specific, the State Department of Transportation says, "In 2007, the accident rate on the New York State Thruway was 1.1161 per million vehicle miles, lower than the New York State accident rate of approximately 2.36. The accident rate on the Tappan Zee was more than twice the Thruway rate, at 2.4250 per million vehicle miles." But how many crashes are we actually talking about? "In a 3-year period from July 2004 to June 2007 there were 1,645 accidents that occurred between Interchange 9 in Tarrytown and Interchange 10 in Nyack, which includes the Tappan Zee Bridge, the approaches to the bridge, and the toll plaza." So just under 550 crashes a year.

I've touched on it before, but I think it's important to get us absolutely crystal clear on this. The traffic safety issue is bogus. The Governor could bring the crash rate down tomorrow with one phone call. It would cost a few thousand dollars at most. He doesn't need to spend five billion dollars on a new bridge to do it.

Seven narrow lanes and no safety shoulders? Gee, what can you do about that? Well, here's an idea, Governor:

Thruway engineer Steve Velicky is proud of his paint. Photo: Skip Dickson / Albany Times Union

You could paint the lanes wider!

I mean, this is basic geometry, right? If wider lanes and shoulders lower the "volume-to-capacity ratio" and make a highway bridge safer, than just paint wider lanes and shoulders.

The most recent plans call for two 82-foot-wide spans, each with four lanes on them, so four lanes must be the safety standard for an 82-foot-wide span. The current span is ... 82 feet wide, so if we repainted it with four lanes, it would be just as safe as the replacement bridge. Problem solved, five billion dollars saved! What more is there to say?

Well, of course there's a lot more to say. You could make the bridge significantly safer by simply repainting the lanes, but that would mean that not as many drivers could get across, which would bring down toll revenues. You could raise the tolls to the market-clearing price, but then you'd have a bunch of angry people who could no longer afford to drive to work in Westchester.

In fact, the bridge used to have six wider lanes, but in 1990 they were repainted to make room for a reversible center lane, and an expensive barrier-transfer system was installed, allowing 30,000 more cars to cross it every day. That's right, the State actually decided in one fell swoop to increase the annual costs of the bridge and make it less safer. Pee on my back and tell me it's raining!

The leadership of the state has decided that they don't care as much about safety (or cost) as about moving cars and trucks across the bridge. They have never been motivated by safety to do anything significant on the Tappan Zee Bridge. Safety is not their motivation now, and it will not motivate them once the bridge is replaced. As in 1990, the safety features that are one of the major selling points for the new bridge will be compromised one by one to make room for more cars.

The north structure - during construction

2011-12-05T00:12:00.001-05:00

I checked in on the "new" Tappan Zee Bridge website, and I found something interesting. The "boards" from the two scoping sessions held in October are now online as a PDF. Board 16 has cross-sections that answer my question as to how the lanes would be divided under these plans. Here's the north span:

There would be four twelve-foot lanes, a ten-foot shoulder, an eight-foot shoulder, a twelve-foot "shared path" for cyclists, pedestrians and skaters, and a twelve-foot "emergency access" lane.

The south structure would have all that, minus the shared path. But what's this? It says, "To facilitate construction, the north structure will be built first, followed by the south structure." And here's what the north structure would look like "during construction" of the south structure:

Funny, it looks just like our existing 82-foot bridge, with an extra lane added!

This seems like a straightforward way to replace a bridge, and maybe that's all it is, but something smells. Does it smell to you? I'm not really sure what Cuomo and the cranky old highway engineers at the State DOT are up to, but allow me to indulge in some wild speculation:

1. Are they actually planning to build the second span any time soon? It could be the ultimate cheapskate tactic: build one span that will add a lane and eliminate the expensive barrier transfer, and never deliver on the second span that will yield the promised shoulders, shared path and "emergency access." By that time, Cuomo will be President and the new Governor can announce that, sorry, there's no money for the south structure!

2. If they build both structures, how long does anyone think the extra lane will be reserved for "emergency access"? My guess is that as soon as the new bridge is open, at the first traffic jam some enterprising politician will start the clamor to have the "emergency access" lane opened to general traffic. That assumes that people will still be able to afford to commute by car across the bridge in the same numbers they've been doing it. That in turn assumes that a wave of outrage will have already persuaded Cuomo to call off the planned doubling of tolls and pay for the south span with income tax money (twist his arm!), and that gas prices won't have risen too high.

3. How much longer after that do you think the shoulders will still be there?

Questions about financing

2011-12-02T00:52:00.001-05:00

If you go to CVS you can buy a bag of Canada Mints for a dollar, and pay with your credit card. You're borrowing money but you don't really think about how you're going to pay it back, because your income stream is so much bigger than that single dollar. But if you go to Best Buy and put a thousand dollar computer on the credit card, you should be thinking about how you're going to pay it off. Will your income be able to cover the credit card payments? If you take out a student loan to go to medical school, the loan itself helps you pay for the skills that can earn you enough money to pay it off. But will your income be enough to cover the loan payments?

If you're borrowing a large amount relative to your income, you'll also want to think about alternate arrangements in case you can't pay that off. If you can't make your student loan payments, there's usually a hardship clause that entitles you to request forbearance. If you can't pay the credit card bill, you might be able to ask your mom to help.

Thinking about regular and alternate repayment methods is the smart thing to do, because you know that if you don't repay your debts on time, you could be hit with penalties. If you use a car as collateral it could be reposessed, and a house could be foreclosed on. You could lower your credit rating, so that if you're able to borrow at all in the future, you may only be offered high interest rates. If you ask Mom to pay your credit card bills, you may wind up having tea with her and Aunt Gladys every week. But the main thing is that you might wind up spending so much of your money on debt service that you can't afford to buy anything new, or even to go to the doctor.

Now we need to be very careful about comparing government debt, especially sovereign government debt, with private debt. Households can't print money to make it easier to pay off their debts. But in this case, government debt is similar: if we ask "How are we going to pay for it?" and the answer is, "We'll borrow the money," we need to ask the two follow-up questions: "Will our income cover the payments on the debt?" and "What do we do if our income doesn't cover the loan payments?"

These are the smart questions to ask, because if New York State doesn't repay its debts on time, we'll face a credit downgrade, and we'll have to pay higher interest rates on bonds in the future. If we get a bailout from the federal government, they'll probably insist on some kind of financial oversight committee. But the main thing is that we might wind up spending so much of our money on debt service that we won't be able to build anything new, or even maintain our existing infrastructure.

In the discussions of paying to rebuild the Tappan Zee Bridge, I've heard a lot about where we're going to borrow the money. There's been very little about how the money will be paid back, and what we will do if we can't make the payments. Those are the smart questions to ask. Why isn't anyone asking them?

From tragedy to farce in Bushwick

2011-11-29T23:43:00.001-05:00

Today Streetsblog had a post about a few blocks immediately to the east of the Knickerbocker Avenue el station in Bushwick, where development is hostile to pedestrians.

Sprawl development in Bushwick. Photo: Christopher Taylor Edwards.

I was curious, so I pulled up the zoning for the area on City Planning's handy new ZOLA map (also on this PDF). The block with the military recruiter is zoned R6 with a C2-3 overlay, and the equally sprawly Burger King across the street is in a C4-3 commercial district. The C4-3 zone allows a floor-area ratio (FAR) of 3.4. The C2-3 overlay only allows a commercial FAR of 2.0. Both allow a residential FAR of up to 2.43, depending on setbacks. The developers could have built taller on both blocks.

These two zoning categories have identical parking requirements, and if the Burger King qualifies as "Refreshment stands, drive-in," it would have to have one parking space for every 400 square feet of floor area, with no waiver (PDF). The Burger King is about 5000 square feet, meaning that it's required to have thirteen spaces. In the parking lot there are about sixteen. The phone store is a bit more of a mystery, because when the amount of parking required is less than 25 spaces per lot, it is waived, but the developer built the parking anyway.

Noah Kazis writes, "Zoning may not be the chief culprit here. Head a block west along Knickerbocker, or follow the elevated subway tracks along Myrtle, and you’ll find vibrant commercial corridors with stores facing the sidewalk, not a parking lot. Even so, this seems like a location crying out for an intervention from New York City’s planners and economic development officials."

So if the zoning created that sprawl to the east of the el, why is there multistory mixed-use urban development under the el and to the west? The key is that the zoning code only covers new development, and all the buildings to the west were built in the 1930s, before the current zoning code was adopted in 1961.

The All Hands Fire. Photo: FDNY.

The next question is, why were the block with the Burger King and the block with the phone store new construction? What happened to the buildings that were there before 1961? To find that out, I found the area on the Digital Tax Map, and plugged the Block Number into ACRIS. There were some records referring to a "Bushwick II Urban Renewal Plan." And that led me to the fire. In 1977 the All Hands Fire was started by three boys playing in an abandoned knitting factory. It destroyed several blocks of stores and apartments. For years, not much was built except the ugly sprawly police station.

I haven't found much about the history of the Burger King block specifically, but the block with the military recruiter and the phone store was sold by the City in 1983 to a guy named Ralph Goffner. The deed contains the interesting clause that "The development and use of the subject property is limited to off-street parking purposes only, and any successor in interest shall not use the premises for any other purpose." Clearly, Goffner is now using the premises for other purposes as well as parking. I'm assuming that the City relaxed that covenant at some point, but I haven't found documentation. If so, they may have required that Goffner continue to use some of it for parking.

The bottom line is that it's not 1961 in Bushwick, and it's not 1983. It's 2011, and we now know that large curbside parking lots are anti-urban and anti-pedestrian. Single-use single-story buildings are pretty out of place next to a train station as well. The City should rezone the area to allow for denser development without required parking - C4-5A or something like the R6N district that I proposed in July with a C2-5 overlay.

It's about jobs

2011-11-28T00:52:00.001-05:00

Today, jobs are the No. 1 concern of most New Yorkers and Americans. Unemployment in New York state is at 8 percent and nationally it's even higher. At the same time federal, state and local budgets have fewer resources to invest in capital projects that help spur economic growth. But here in Rockland and Westchester counties, Gov. Cuomo has achieved an economic victory that has eluded us for almost a decade. Thanks to the governor we now have an expedited plan for the slaughter of puppies, which could bring more than 100,000 jobs to our region at a time when we need it most. Yet despite this monumental progress, there are some people who are trying to derail plans for killing puppies before bludgeoning even starts. After years of study, the people of our region cannot afford to wait any longer. We need to kill these puppies, and we need to kill them now.

Job creators in action. Photo: puck90 / Flickr

For more than 10 years we have seen studies for bashing puppy heads in, but we have never seen a real plan for action. When Gov. Cuomo came into office he promised to restore the state's economy and he is delivering on that promise. The governor requested and won approval from the president to have the puppy slaughter put on a list of expedited projects, one of only six mayhem projects in the nation put on a fast timeline for implementation. At a time when many states are reducing or shutting down butchering projects, Gov. Cuomo has delivered a project that will create up to 150,000 jobs in the region. It would be a colossal mistake to continue the pattern of debating plans for killing puppies until we let this monumental economic opportunity pass us by.

The new plan for killing the puppies both creates jobs and gives our community a better, bloodier spectacle. The current state plans will smash the puppies with extra speed, safety straps, space for emergency handiwipes, and an array of spikes. Right now for the more than 100,000 puppy-killers who go over the Tappan Zee every day, the rate of accidents is twice as high as the state average. The plan for bludgeoning the puppies is a plan the workers in our community want to carry out for Rockland, Westchester and the entire state. The state's plan also preserves our ability to cuddle puppies in the years ahead.

At the public meetings I have attended about the puppy bashings, I have seen some politicians and advocates say that it is not enough for the state to preserve options to snuggle with soft puppies in the future. In their view we should cuddle the puppies while we slaughter them or no slaughter at all. At a time when all levels of government face historic fiscal constraints, it would be inexplicably foolish to reject an investment of $5.2 billion in our region. It makes even less sense when the plans were designed to allow the other desired improvements in the future. What we need now is action, not another decade of debate and studies that go nowhere.

We have spent years waiting and now thanks to Gov. Cuomo we have the opportunity to kill lots of puppies, creating tens of thousands of jobs at a time when we need them most. To reject this opportunity to give struggling New Yorkers job opportunities and strengthen the economic foundation of our region would be the mistake we simply cannot afford. For the sake of our state as well as Rockland and Westchester, it is imperative that we cannot let the critics stop progress. We need to finally grind these puppies into the dirt.

The writer is president/CEO of the Rockland Animal Cruelty Association.

The above post is a work of satire. The author is opposed to all animal cruelty, including violence against puppies.

Building on our transit-oriented past

2011-11-26T23:14:00.000-05:00

I've been criticizing the Tappan Zee Bridge for weeks now, so it's time to offer an alternative vision. Deactivating the bridge will not make Orange, Bergen and Rockland counties go away. People will still live there. The role of the area in the regional economy would change somewhat, probably for the better. A wise investment in transportation infrastructure could foster prosperity in the area, but rebuilding the bridge ain't it.

Rockland, Orange and Bergen counties did not go straight from farmland to sprawl. There were many years of transit-oriented development, for industry, tourism and commuting.

The old industries are probably not coming back, even if we have an energy shortage. A lot more will be shipped by rail, but it will probably still be done in containers loaded in Newark. You never really know, but I don't see a huge demand for ice again. Quarrying will only pick up if the cost of moving rocks and concrete from further away goes through the roof.

Tourism and farming are the two economic sectors most likely to return. "Eating local" in the future is more likely to mean vegetables from Orange County than from a backyard in Brooklyn. If travel gets more expensive, a weekend in Nyack could become a better value than a weekend in Stockbridge. Bedroom communities may continue to be the main driver of the economies of these three counties, but not in the current sprawling configuration.

The current sprawl will not function with gas costing more than six dollars, but transit-oriented development can. Fortunately Orange, Bergen and Rockland counties have a network of transit-oriented towns that is still almost complete.

The Erie, and Pascack Valley railroads are still carrying passengers through the area, and the West Shore, Northern Branch and Suzy-Q are still carrying freight. The old Erie main line to Piermont is still intact from Suffern to Nanuet, and the right-of-way has been preserved as a rail-trail from Pearl River to Tappan. The only break is a mile or so from the Nanuet station to the Orangetown town line. The spurs to Haverstraw and New City have been abandoned, but the right of way seems mostly intact.

Just as importantly, the walkable town centers that grew up around train stations in all three counties before the highway network are still there. Middletown and Newburgh, Suffern and Nyack, Paterson and Hackensack, are still there with many of their beautiful old buildings still standing. All they need are transit riders and zoning reform to become vibrant towns again.

This is my vision for a Rockland county (and Bergen, and Orange) freed from car dependence. With convenient rail connections to jobs in Manhattan and Jersey City, no one will need to drive to Westchester. With sufficient residential density in the downtowns, businesses can thrive on pedestrian traffic without huge parking lots. When a train station and shopping are within walking distance, cars become unnecessary.

Before the Tappan Zee Bridge

2011-11-22T23:43:00.001-05:00

I've talked before about the amount of sprawl that the Tappan Zee Bridge has generated west of the river in Orange, Bergen and Rockland counties. One thing that's often overlooked is that this area did not go straight from farmland to sprawl. Before 1950 it had an extensive railroad network, moving goods, travelers and commuters between the areas north and west of the Hudson Highlands and boats on the river.

The New York Central's West Shore Line ran from Albany along the river to Weehawken. The Erie ran from Binghamton and Port Jervis to Piermont, and later to Jersey City, splitting into the Main, Bergen County and Northern branches. The New York, Susquehanna and Western ran from Stroudsburg and Warwick to Edgewater. The various docks and junctions were significant employment centers, but the area also contained vacation destinations, bedroom communities and industrial uses such as rock quarrying and ice harvesting.

With the opening of the various bridges and tunnels and the highways connecting them, truck freight became more economical than rail. At the same time, new refrigeration technologies made ice harvesting unnecessary, and the creation of various mountain parks put an end to rock quarrying in these counties.

The bridges, tunnels and highways also put the area within easy commuting reach of Manhattan jobs. The housing crunch created in the city and inner suburbs by building height restrictions, racism and crime made even houses in Orange and Ulster counties desirable. The result is the sprawl we see today. That sprawl is real, and it represents an outrageous amount of wasted effort. But if we look, we can see the area's transit-oriented past. That can be the foundation for a sustainable future.

Independent Medallion Driver Option

2011-11-22T14:25:00.001-05:00

Here's an email I got from the Taxi and Limousine Commission, which is stuck in the Internet of 2002 with Corey Bearak:

To All Interested Parties:
Industry Notice #11-31 November 21, 2011
For Immediate Release

Owner Must Drive Rules &
the Independent Medallion Driver Option

The New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) recently modified its Owner Must Drive Rules to allow a Medallion owner to designate, under an Independent Medallion Driver Option, an Independent Medallion Driver for a one year period beginning on January 1 of each calendar year. The designation form MUST be submitted to the TLC by November 1 of the current year for the upcoming year (for example, a designation for Calendar Year 2013 must be submitted to the TLC no later than November 1, 2012).

The Independent Medallion Driver selected would be responsible for satisfying the owner’s service requirement. One change of the designated driver will be allowed during the calendar year period. If the designated driver does not cover the required shifts, the owner of the medallion MUST drive the vehicle themselves to make up the difference.

The form that will need to be completed by both the Medallion Owner and the selected Driver can be found at the following locations on our website:
http://www.nyc.gov/html/tlc/downloads/pdf/ind_med_driver_desig_removal_app.pdf ,
http://www.nyc.gov/html/tlc/html/licenses/medallion_main.shtml.

The form lists the documents and the payment amount that are required by the TLC for this option to be selected. Failure to complete the form in its entirety and to provide all required documents and payment will result in the request being denied.

The standard annual filing deadline of November 1, 2011 for the upcoming year has been extended to December 23, 2011 for those medallion owners seeking to designate a driver under the Owner Must Drive Option for Calendar Year 2012. This is a one-time extension of the deadline. Future selection documents, beginning with the 2012 submissions for Calendar Year 2013, must be filed by November 1 of the current year for the following calendar year. Late filed documents will NOT be accepted.

Roads and trucks for natural gas

2011-11-18T19:16:00.001-05:00

A big topic in state politics lately has been high- hydraulic fracturing, in which water and lubricants are transported by diesel-powered tanker trucks on narrow country roads to a drilling site, then pumped into an underground layer of shale, breaking apart the rock and releasing methane. The methane floats to the surface, where it is captured and pumped into "natural gas" pipelines. From these it is burned for heating or in electrical generators.

Image: Marcellus-shale.us

This "hydrofracking" is being heavily promoted by a group of businessmen and women who stand to profit and politicians who want to be able to take credit for delivering "jobs" to high-unemployment areas. They claim that it's "safe" and "clean," even though the lubricants and methane have contaminated water supplies in the past.

Beyond the health risks, though, this is an incredibly inefficient way to generate electricity. A leaked draft report by the New York State Department of Transportation" - not the most conservative bunch when it comes to roads - estimates that "the Marcellus region will see a peak year increase of up to 1.5 million heavy truck trips, and induced development may increase peak hour trips by 36,000 trips/hour." The report says that it will cost $210 to 378 million a year to resurface the roads - and often widening them, of course - to accommodate these trucks.

Alan Chartock is fond of saying that fracking will not be worth it "if one little girl gets sick from drinking water laced with benzene," but what if one little girl gets run over on a road that's been widened for the fracking trucks? With that many new trips I'm guessing it won't be just one, either.

Job sprawl and the multipolar city

2011-11-17T01:40:00.001-05:00

Back in 2009 I had an interesting discussion with Alon Levy, Jarrett Walker, Jeff Wood and Damien Newton about transit and multipolar cities. Jarrett, in particular, highlighted the efficiency benefits of multipolar layouts:

If you want a really balanced and efficient public transit system, nothing is better than multiple high-rise centers all around the edge, with lower-rise density in the middle, because that pattern yields an intense but entirely two-way pattern of demand. If balanced and efficient transit were the main goal in Los Angeles planning, you'd focus your high-rise growth energies on multiple centers such as Westwood, Warner Center, Burbank, Glendale and perhaps new centers in the east and south, while continuing to add density in the middle as opportunities arise.

It's expensive to have your jobs centralized in a small area and your housing scattered around it. It results in large crowds at rush hour and empty trains and buses in the reverse peak, or else large railyards and/or bus garages in the middle of the city. In a multipolar city there are jobs and residences everywhere, so that in the rush hour there is a greater use of the transit system but it is not highly unbalanced in one direction. In Paris, for example, you have people who live in Nanterre and Noisy-le-grand commuting in to work at the Bourse or one of the government offices, but at the same time you have people who live in the Marais and the Latin Quarter commuting out to La Défense and Montreuil.

In a multipolar city like that, you want circumferential routes, not just radial ones, because it's more efficient for someone who lives in Saint-Ouen and works in Nanterre to go directly west instead of going south into the city first. New York could stand to be more multipolar, and David Giles has pointed to job sprawl as evidence that of such multipolarity emerging. In our current transportation network, circumferential highways like I-287, I-278 and the Belt Parkway are much more functional than any similar transit routes. Given this, David argues that job sprawl favors drivers over transit users. He argues that we should build "bus rapid transit" to even out this disparity.

The thing is that there's a big difference between a multipolar city and sprawl. Multipolar cities have, you know, poles. Of higher density, near major transit hubs. Sprawl has highway interchanges, but the density is still fairly uniform. You can get off the train at La Défense and walk to your job, but you can´t do that for most of the jobs in the White Plains area: they're too far from the station. Because of this, job sprawl forces most people to drive and is much less efficient than a multipolar city.

David did consult me and other smart people for his report, and on the whole I like the way it turned out. But I disagree with his ultimate conclusions, especially the emphasis on "bus rapid transit." There are two problems with that. The first is that buses are always more expensive to operate, per passenger, than trains. The second is that it won't ultimately solve the problem of job sprawl. That second point deserves a whole post, so look for one soon!

Our expensive cheap roads

2011-11-15T23:32:00.001-05:00

On November 8, Gizmodo ran a great piece by Rachel Swaby about the deterioration of the American road system, much of it based on interviews with Tim Lomax of the Texas Transportation Institute. The roads were originally designed for private cars, with the expectation that most freight shipping would continue to be done by train. They were mostly constructed out of compacted dirt with a layer of asphalt on top, unlike the German Autobahn which was asphalt on concrete.

Truck freight offered a particular advantage over rail for shippers: on trains, small loads of a container car or two had to be decoupled from the train and possibly coupled to another train for the next leg of the journey. The more times a train had to be stopped in a yard, "broken" and reassembled, the longer the trip for the entire cargo.

A full truck, by contrast, could hold a lot less than a full train, but it could go directly from the loading point to the unloading point. Both freight railroads and road builders were surprised by the speed of the shift from rail to road. The roads were paid for by the government, and most of them were "free." Lomax tells Swaby that "companies are pushing the limits of what our roads can take, which increases their profits—but at the taxpayer's expense." It's clear to me that this has been going on for as long as there have been companies.

You probably know what happened next. The railroads began losing money, and cut their passenger service first. American housing and retail reorganized themselves around roads, and manufacturing and other industries followed. Faced with such intense demand for the roads, the federal, state and local governments embarked on a massive expansion plan. This just fed the appetite for more roads.

I've known for years about this vicious cycle of road subsidies, but I didn't make the connection with the use of dirt instead of concrete under the asphalt. It makes me wonder: if all these roads had been made with concrete, how much longer would it have taken to build out the 1950s era Interstate system? How many railroads would have avoided bankruptcy? How many downtowns would have been saved from being paved over for parking?

A real "no build" option for the Tappan Zee Bridge

2011-11-14T22:39:00.001-05:00

By law, the environmental review for every major capital project has to include a "no build" alternative, so that the consequences of building the thing are seriously compared to the consequences of not building it. Sometimes the no-build option wins out, as with Westway and the state's plans to widen the Major Deegan Expressway in 2009. Most of the time, unsurprisingly, the no-build option is a sham to satisfy the formal requirements. Some of those times, though, the projections for the no-build scenario are so divorced from reality that it borders on fraud.

The no build alternative advanced to satisfy the requirements for the Tappan Zee Bridge replacement is really not an alternative at all. "The No Build Alternative would involve the continued operation of the existing seven-lane bridge with ongoing maintenance to keep the bridge in a state of good repair," says the Scoping Packet. It envisions the state raising tolls and taxes to maintain an increasingly deteriorating bridge, while new residents pour into Rockland. These residents would be sitting in traffic for hours each day, with traffic backed up to Coxsackie and forlorn employers in Westchester staring at thousands of empty cubicles.

As I've written before, these projections are bullshit. It's already a pain in the ass to drive across the bridge, and people have responded by taking jobs in the city or by simply not moving to Rockland, Orange and Bergen. Employers have responded by hiring people who live east of the river, or by relocating to the city.

This is true for bridge maintenance as well. Just because maintenance costs rise doesn't mean we have to pay them. We could dramatically reduce maintenance - and crashes - by simply reducing the number of lanes on the bridge. If only half as many vehicles took the bridge, it would dramatically reduce the stress. They're doing it on a bridge in Montreal, and it's a boon for transit. It's even got some people talking about BRT on that bridge - without replacing it!

I may not have been clear enough in my earlier post, but just as failing to expand the bridge will not result in huge traffic jams, unemployed Rocklanders and empty cubicles in Westchester, neither will reducing the number of cars that can use the bridge. If only half as many people can get across the bridge, then people will compensate by making adjustments to their homes, their jobs and their transportation.

The grinding traffic jams on the bridge are there not because it's such a wonderful way to get to work, but because it's underpriced. As Eric Jaffe writes, the only way to get rid of them is to charge market rate tolls. Before you protest about gouging the poor Rockland residents, let me remind you that almost all of them moved there because they could get the suburban life for cheap. It's cheap because we're subsidizing their driving, but nobody ever promised them it would be cheap forever, did they? Oh, and the State plans to double or triple the tolls even if they replace the bridge, so you should be just as mad about that.

The great thing is that as tolls go up, maintenance costs go down and the money available to pay them go up. There is likely to be a point at which the tolls cover maintenance again and other Thruway users no longer have to chip in. On the other hand, it's possible that the particular structure of this bridge is hopeless, and there is no toll level that would attract enough drivers to cover the cost. In that case, we can simply have an orderly devolution of the bridge, where we raise tolls enough to keep the bridge going for five or ten years more, and to build up capacity on the four railroad lines that serve the area.

The past ten years' discussion of Tappan Zee Bridge replacement has been full of this kind of dishonesty. Wouldn't it be nice if the discussion could be honest from now on? An honest discussion would consider the possibility that the best option might actually be to tear the bridge down and build nothing in its place, or to turn it into a greenway without building a new bridge. Instead, the three goals listed on Page 1-7 of the Scoping Packet are,

Ensure the long-term vitality of this Hudson River crossing
Improve transportation operations and safety on the crossing
Maximize the public investment in a new Hudson River crossing

These are goals for "the crossing," not for the people. They admit no solution that doesn't involve spending lots of money on "the crossing."

Tomorrow, November 15, at 5:00 PM is the deadline for commenting on the scope of the environmental review. If you think that the scope of this project is too narrow, and that the "no build" option is bogus, you need to make your opinion known. You can email them, or you can call them at (877) 892-3685. Anything you send them, they have to respond to it and they have to include it in a report.

The future of the Hudson Valley, and the future fiscal health of the State of New York, depend on us stopping this boondoggle. Please act.

Some consequences of energy depletion

2011-11-08T23:52:00.002-05:00

Many people accept the likelihood of peak oil and climate change, but haven't quite thought through all its implications. Here are five things that I think are likely results:

- Mode shift: In the past four years, the price of gasoline has already gotten high enough relative to income that driving is unaffordable for a larger segment of the population. This trend will only continue. Biodiesel, electric cars and hydrofracking will only postpone it.

- Depopulation of sprawl: The housing market collapsed in 2007 because people could no longer afford to "drive 'til you qualify." The commercial real estate market collapsed right after because employers didn't want to be dependent on workers driving in from miles around. Most of suburban America is unsustainable at a gasoline price of five dollars a gallon, and an even bigger chunk is unsustainable at ten dollars a gallon. The recession has cut gas prices and commute times, and people have started creeping back into the subdivisions, but any recovery will send them back into more urban areas.

- Survival of cities: We have had concentrated population centers for thousands of years, and we will continue to do so. Even if the total population declines, there will still be trade and industry. Expensive energy will make the 3,000 mile Caesar salad an expensive rarity (if it survives at all), but just as the Romans traded with the Chinese, so will future Americans. These goods may not be transported by plane, diesel ship and truck, but by electric ship and rail (if we're lucky) or sailing ship, canal boat and horse (if we're not). Whatever the conveyance, there will continue to be a need for transfer, storage and distribution centers, and that means cities. They may not be as big as they are now, but we're not all going to be blacksmithing and raising goats.

- Rust belt resurgence: Shortages of energy and water will make it difficult if not impossible to live in areas that depend on air conditioning for survival, like those around Phoenix and Houston. People will move to cooler cities that are nodes in water and rail transportation networks. That means the same "Rust Belt" cities that their parents mocked: Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Buffalo and Springfield.

- Capital shortage: When energy, transportation and asphalt (which is made out of oil) are expensive, it will be hard to build any new infrastructure. We may be able to build some things, but that ability depends in part on how quickly we deplete the supply of fossil fuels and uranium that we have left, and how quickly we build alternatives to harness renewable energy.

- A vicious cycle of transportation inadequacy: The cost of any infrastructure project also depends on how well the transportation system is functioning when you need to transport supplies for the new infrastructure. Let's say you want to rebuild an abandoned rail line, like the old Air Line through Connecticut. If you can get the supplies 90% of the way by rail or boat, that's great. But if you need to spend exorbitant amounts the fuel to carry the supplies by truck across potholed roads, that's going to add to the cost.

Any that I missed?

Inefficient cities of the future

2011-11-07T00:22:00.001-05:00

In response to my post on inefficient cities, Alon wrote that in Kampala his cousin observed, "The heavier vehicles take the space they want, and pedestrians get the short shrift because they're lighter than cars and if they don't make way they get run over." This is what happens all too often when there is not enough to go around - in this case, enough space to maneuver in the streets - and when the rule of law is weak. Might makes right, and the mighty happen to be the rich who can afford to buy big, heavy vehicles.

It doesn't have to be this way. In the Third World, if you go to places where there is enough street space, such as smaller towns, everyone shares. If you go to places where the rich can't bring their cars, like the narrow streets of the old towns, you can find a more equitable distribution of space.

Interestingly, in these inefficient cities even the rich with their big cars usually have trouble getting around. They may be able to get around a little faster and easier than everyone else, but they still get slowed down and frustrated.

As I wrote in the last post, Los Angeles and Houston have notorious traffic along those lines, but up to now they've been able to build lots and lots of roads to keep cars moving. Kampala and Cairo and Lagos cannot. And here's the problem for LA and Houston (and Las Vegas and Phoenix and Atlanta and Charlotte ...): some day soon, they will lose the ability to build lots and lots of roads. Once that happens, they will become as paralyzed as Cairo and Lagos.

For some, it won't matter. Vegas and Phoenix are so closely tied to the sprawl economy that if sprawl becomes impossible they will lose their reason for existence. People will leave, the cities will shrink, and if there is still a need for anyone to live and work there, they'll probably get around just fine by bike. But they are also heavily dependent on air conditioning and imported water, and if either of those break down the cities will become uninhabitable.

For others it does matter. As Kunstler has argued, coastal cities like LA and DC, river towns like Memphis and Cincinnati, and lake ports like Detroit and Buffalo, will see a resurgence. But the extent to which they function well depends on how well-adapted their transportation systems are for people without cars.

This is where rapid transit comes in. And it has to be rapid so that the transit passengers aren't stuck in the same gridlock as everyone else. The guaguas of Santo Domingo and the bachés of Bamako have phenomenal ridership, but they´re slow, uncomfortable and unreliable during peak times. Streetcars in mixed traffic aren't much better. You need to have at least a physically separated transit right-of-way, and better a grade-separated one. Cities that either have enough of those already or can build them quickly will be in better shape than those that have built themselves around private cars.

Maybe you can see now how this is getting back to the Tappan Zee Bridge replacement. I'll follow up soon.

Inefficient cities

2011-11-05T00:28:00.000-04:00

There are lots of cities in the Third World that I'd call "inefficient cities." It's hard to get anywhere because the transportation infrastructure is so overburdened. This is illustrated by a story I read recently about Kizza Besigye, a political opposition leader in Uganda who was shot in the arm with a rubber bullet and arrested four times, for walking to work in the capital of Kampala. This is not like the stories of crazy suburban high school administrators who threaten to arrest parents for child endangerment for allowing their children to walk to school. This guy's goal was to disrupt the government by walking to work.

One funny aspect of Besigye's story was that when the police arrested him, they gave him a number of choices. One of them was to simply call for his car. Their assumption was that everyone in the Ugandan political elite has not just a car, but a paid chauffeur. Since Besigye didn't challenge that assumption, it was probably accurate.

Clearly, Besigye didn't disrupt the capital by telling his driver to stay home while he walked. That would have actually eased traffic congestion slightly. What disrupted things was that his followers also walked to work, instead of taking buses, cars or motorcycles. Why did this disrupt things? Because Kampala's pedestrian infrastructure sucks.

I haven't been to Kampala, but I've been to other cities in Africa and the Caribbean, and I know that in many of them the sidewalks are narrow or nonexistent. The cities are designed for drivers first, and pedestrians are an afterthought. With proper sidewalks, New York was able to handle crowds of pedestrians during the blackout of 2003. Only the bridge walkways were too narrow for the crowds, so the DOT opened a lane to pedestrians on every bridge. In Kampala, apparently, they can't handle a bunch of people walking to work.

There are similar stories of car traffic, of people trying to get across town in Cairo or Lagos, and giving up because they've been stuck in the same place for hours. These are places that were designed for cars, but where most of the people don't own cars. Still, there are more car owners than the roads were designed for, and the result is gridlock. Los Angeles and Houston have notorious traffic along those lines, but up to now they've been able to build lots and lots of roads to keep cars moving. Kampala and Cairo and Lagos cannot. This is why I call them inefficient cities.

Believe it or not, this still relates to the Tappan Zee Bridge. I'll get to that connection eventually.

Wenn brauchen wir Beton vor alles...

2011-11-04T01:09:00.000-04:00

My friend Alon Levy has done a great service for the transit blogging community by introducing us to a German planning proverb: Organisation vor Elektronik vor Beton. Literally it means "organization before electronic before concrete," and the idea is that changing the organization of an enterprise is relatively cheap, installing electronics is more expensive, and large infrastructure projects are the most expensive. So if your goal is to provide a service like transportation, you should look at organizational and compact solutions first, and pour concrete only as a last resort.

This is great advice when the goal is to get commuters to their jobs quicker, more comfortably and with greater flexibility. It works well if your goal is to improve access, especially for the poor, and when you're spending your own money that could go to other worthwhile problems.

The principle is less applicable when "jobs" are a goal. This could be from the perspective of Keynesian stimulus, or simply of old-fashioned patronage. When Barack Obama and Ray LaHood want to put people back to work, they're not necessarily interested in organizational streamlining.

The Keynesian practice of ignoring deficits in a liquidity trap gives them a huge pot of money to throw at "shovel-ready" projects. This would be great if it could be spent on much-needed transit maintenance and operations, but currently politicians get the greatest reward from funding big new projects, less from fixing things that are broken, even less for incremental improvements and hardly anything from keeping things running smoothly.

This combination of Keynesian budgets and "ribbon-cutting bias" means that the government is itching to spend money on stuff, and they care more about job creation than about efficiency. The transit projects that are most likely to get funded are the ones that create the most jobs for voters and donors in the districts of influential politicians. Those of us who care about efficiency may not like to see it take a back seat to considerations like stimulus and patronage, but there are different kinds of efficiency, including cost efficiency, fuel efficiency, space efficiency and time efficiency.

If it's a choice between a five billion dollar beton transit project or a 500 million dollar elektronik project, sure, we want the cheaper one. But if the government plans to spend five billion no matter what, then it's the choice between a five billion dollar transit project and a 500 million transit project plus a 4.5 billion dollar highway project. Under these circumstances the elektronik project will not ultimately save money, and the highway project will use more energy per passenger-mile and induce more sprawl.

The highway project will also compete with parallel transit lines, so it could wind up reducing energy and spatial efficiency further. It will encourage people to drive more and reduce the constituency for future transit projects, compounding the effect.

On top of all that efficiency we have other goals like reducing pollution and carnage, and increasing health and social interaction. These goals mean that we need to get people out of their cars, and for me at least they are more important than simple cost efficiency.

So yes, Organisation vor Elektronik vor Beton. But if you're getting béton anyway, then make it Schiene vor Beton.

There's another reason that I'll get into in a future post.

The end of sprawl has come to Westchester and Rockland

2011-11-01T02:31:00.001-04:00

The Tappan Zee Bridge replacement proposals are predicated on three assumptions: that people will keep moving to Bergen, Orange and Rockland Counties to live; that employers will keep moving jobs to Westchester and Fairfield Counties; and that people living west of the Hudson will keep wanting to drive to jobs east of the Hudson:

Figure 1. NYMTC historical (indicated in green from 2002-2010) and projected bridge traffic volumes, including recent totals.

The New York Metropolitan Transportation Council (NYMTC) projects that both population and employment growth will continue (see Figure 1-4). Between 2010 and 2047, the populations of Rockland and Westchester Counties are expected to increase by 50,000 and 134,000 residents, respectively. Employment is projected to increase by 47,000 jobs in Rockland County and by 160,000 jobs in Westchester County during this timeframe. This growth in population and employment will increase daily volumes across the Tappan Zee Bridge for the next several years. (PDF)

Figure 2. Historical bridge traffic volumes and capacity constraints. "Getting Up to Speed" (PDF, 2007)

None of those is true. I've already shown how the traffic projections are wrong. You might object that this leveling is due to the recession, and if the population and job projections are correct, traffic will go up. Well, that's wrong too. The number of cars trying to squeeze onto the bridge began to level off in 2000. This mirrors general trends in driving habits.

Figure 3. Historical bridge traffic volumes, gas crunches and highway openings. "Rockland County Tappan Zee Corridor Transit-Oriented Development Study (PDF, 2007)

This weekend I found two great charts from 2007 that also riffed off the NYMTC projections. This one, produced by the the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, shows that traffic on the bridge is self-limiting. When it becomes too inconvenient to drive across the bridge, people find another way to get to work, or another job, or another place to live. The other, produced by the Regional Plan Association, shows that the traffic is limited by the cost of driving and encouraged by new highway construction. We really shouldn't have to spell any of that out for anyone, but there it is.

Reis via the Wall Street Journal

What about our second assumption, then, that there will be job growth in Westchester and Fairfield? Reports suggest that that supply is leveling off. Employers are finding that if they locate in a downtown area, they attract more creative and dynamic employees. In general it's more fun to work in the city where you can eat a different cuisine for lunch every day than in some office park where you eat at the corporate cafeteria every day instead of spending your lunch hour stuck in traffic on the road to Applebee's. "It's a switch back to 'I don't want to be isolated in an office park, I want the vibrancy of a downtown, public transportation and the ability to shop and walk around'," Gerard Hallock, executive managing director of Colliers International, told the Wall Street Journal.

Finally for our first assumption, that people are going to keep moving to Bergen, Orange and Rockland counties. Let's look at the housing market there.
There's a glut of housing in these areas. No one wants to live in New City because you can't get anywhere without driving, and driving is dangerous and uncomfortable. But mostly, since we've run out of money and space to build new roads, and since the price of gas has risen, driving is slow and expensive. Housing prices are down in Bergen, Orange and Rockland. In contrast, if you look at housing in Westchester, where housing is denser and people can commute to the city by train, prices are recovering.

New York Zillow Home Value Index

New York Home Values - Interactive chart

So let's review: we're spending five billion dollars to build a bridge for people who live in Rockland to drive to jobs in Westchester, but people aren't moving to Rockland, jobs aren't moving to Westchester, and the people who live in Rockland aren't going to drive across the bridge if it's not convenient.

This is a project that kinda sorta made sense ten years ago if you didn't question the projections too much. In 2011, it's clearly a waste of money. It's a zombie project, one that was almost dead for good until our governor and president reanimated the corpse. Thanks, guys!

We can do this the sprawl way, or we can do this the TOD way

2011-10-31T01:38:00.001-04:00

Recently I've been examining the decision-making process for "bus rapid transit" in the Tappan Zee corridor, in response to Stephen's insightful question, "Can someone explain to me how the hell an I-287/Tappan Zee BRT could cost ("as little as"!!) $1 billion?" I originally listed four parts to the answer: First, all new busways are vulnerable to the dreaded "empty lanes" attack, which (bonus post) can be part of a broader strategy. Second, you're trying to serve a sprawling population with transit, which is always expensive. Third, the transit proposals all include some part of the "full corridor" from Suffern to Port Chester, while the current road proposal only covers the bridge. Fourth, transit advocates didn't have - and never have had, in this country - the political will to formally propose true dirt-cheap BRT.

I've dealt with the first and third factors, so now on to the second. I want to lead with this quote from our State Transportation Commissioner, Joan "Smart Growth" McDonald, speaking to Kate Hinds of Transportation Nation:

Some of the transit issues, whether it’s BRT (bus rapid transit) or commuter rail, are very detailed issues that need to be resolved with localities, particularly in Rockland County. Where do you site bus rapid transit stations, where do you put parking, if you want to add another lane for bus rapid transit, that would entail property takings, and that will take two to three years to get there, and the costs are between two billion and four billion to build that.

Uh, wait. Parking? Adding another lane? This is smart growth?

The inherent nature of sprawl is that transportation is inefficient. It's even more inefficient for personal cars than for transit; we just notice the inefficiencies less with personal cars because that system outsources the responsibilities of driving, fueling and maintenance onto the vehicle owner - typically a single occupant and an amateur, with predictable results. But transit is inherently inefficient in sprawl.

There are two ways to handle this. The first is simply to go with the form of sprawl and cater to people who want to go from far-flung cul-de-sac tract house to far-flung office park to far-flung strip mall, wasting gas, driver time, and bus wear and tear on snaky little routes guaranteed to make passengers simultaneously nauseous and bored stiff. The second, smart growth way, is to foster Transit Oriented Development. This works by starving the sprawly cul-de-sacs, office parks and strip malls and feeding the denser, pedestrian-oriented mixed-use apartments, townhouses and loft buildings. By doing this you encourage people to move their homes and businesses into the denser developments.

With busways in particular, there is a sprawl way and a TOD way. The sprawl way is to run the buses in a physically separated center lane on a highway out of walking distance of anything you might want to go to, with park-and-ride stations, and to keep the sprawl-inducing 1950s zoning. The transit-oriented development way is to run the buses in a corridor that accommodates commercial and residential development within comfortable walking distance of stations, and to throw out the zoning so that people can build more dense walkable buildings. The prototypical bus rapid transit systems - Curitiba, Bogotá, Guangzhou - all work the transit-oriented development way.

The transit-oriented development way is physically cheap - all you need is a bunch of jersey barriers and maybe a signal priority system for the traffic lights - but it is politically very expensive because it involves (a) taking road space from cars and (b) allowing density and mixed-use, two things that are guaranteed to get crowds of baby boomers all steamed up. By contrast, the sprawl way is politically cheap but expensive to build. This is one reason that the transit-oriented development way was pioneered in authoritarian societies like 1970s Brazil and 2000s China.

In the I-287 corridor between Suffern and Port Chester, there is a highway that is out of walking distance of anything you might want to get to, and there is a parallel series of older roads that run right through downtown Suffern, Spring Valley, Nanuet, Nyack, Tarrytown, Elmsford, White Plains and Port Chester. We've got a campaign that specifically invokes Curitiba (PDF) and a project team that holds Transit Oriented Development Workshops. And now we've got a Transportation Commissioner with a reputation for supporting smart growth. So which way did they choose?

Yes, that's right, they chose the sprawl way (PDF). God help us all.

The habits of successful busways

2011-10-30T02:48:00.003-04:00

In response to Stephen's question about why "bus rapid transit" across the Tappan Zee Bridge was projected to cost "as little as one billion," I described the Empty Lanes attack and how sometimes it may even be part of a more nefarious plot. Tonight I'll explain how this led to only full-corridor BRT proposals, even while the road widening had a proposal just for the bridge.

The successful busways of the world fall into two categories. There are thick market busways, built in areas where there already is a thriving bus market, following the Magic Formula for Transit Ridership, and often earning a profit for the operators. Examples of this include Bogotá's Transmilenio, Guangzhou's Zhongshan Avenue line, and our own Lincoln Tunnel Exclusive Bus Lane and Bx12 Select Bus. Then there are former rail lines that are too narrow to fit more than a couple lanes of road, such as Pittsburgh's East and West Busways and Los Angeles's Orange Line.

Busways connecting sprawl with sprawl, without established bus markets and with heavy competition from government-subsidized roads, tend to have a hard time attracting passengers and fostering transit-oriented development. This 2002 post from Light Rail Progress cites Virginia's Shirley Busway and LA's Harbor Transitway as having lost riders, as well as former train lines like the Pittsburgh South Busway. At the very least they take a long time to build ridership, and are thus vulnerable to the Empty Lanes attack.

That makes it all the more mystifying why the Tri-State Transportation Campaign would push so hard for BRT across the Tappan Zee Bridge, and why they would happily throw the "prohibitively expensive" commuter rail option under the bus, so to speak. But it does explain why Tri-State pushed so hard for "full-corridor" BRT, from Suffern to Port Chester.

Work destinations of Rockland residents, according to the 2000 Census. From Tappan Zee Transit Mode Selection Report, Figure 1-4.

Nyack on the west shore of the Zee and Tarrytown on the east shore are both pretty small towns with high car ownership rates, and neither of them has enough residents or jobs to fill a busway between them when there are four parallel lanes of mixed traffic. Tarrytown has the Metro-North station where bus riders could transfer to Manhattan-bound trains, but even that isn't enough of an attractor. The buses could run in mixed traffic on both sides of the bridge, but that would limit their competitiveness with driving. Thus, transit advocates pushed for "full corridor BRT" to try to pick up as many Rockland residents and Westchester jobs as possible. And this, of course, added to the projected cost.

Given all this, the full corridor is pretty essential to the success of BRT. Without the full corridor you might as well not bother. In contrast, the highway widening plans put forth by the DOT were pretty clearly fantasy projects thrown in to make their bridge widening seem cheap by comparison. But because the bridge widening was only for the bridge, it also looked cheap by comparison to the BRT, and that's what allowed Commissioner MacDonald to reject BRT as not "financially feasible.”

Still, a billion dollars seems a lot for thirty miles of bus rapid transit, which we're constantly being told is "much cheaper than rail." So why aren't the proposals cheap?

The HOV Bait-and-Switch

2011-10-29T00:06:00.000-04:00

In my discussion of the Empty Lanes attack on busways and HOV lanes, I neglected to mention that it can be part of a larger, more nefarious strategy, the HOV Bait-and-Switch. The sequence of events is the same; it is only the motivation that is different.

In both cases, a road agency builds HOV lanes, but they are not filled immediately. Solo drivers complain about wasted space, and eventually someone makes the decision to open the HOV lanes to all vehicles. This can happen with busways too.

The politicians and bureaucrats who build and maintain the roads usually express some support for the HOV lanes or busways, but that support can evaporate pretty quickly in the face of the Empty Lanes attack. And that's made me wonder if in some cases they hadn't planned it all along.

As far as I know there's never been a smoking gun to show that a highway bureaucrat suggested HOV lanes or a busway. But you'll notice that highway bureaucrats almost never suggest turning an existing lane into an HOV lane or a busway. They always want to build a new one, and somehow that new lane is always on a stretch of highway that they wanted to widen not long before, but ran into opposition on environmental or fiscal grounds. HOV lanes and busways appeal to environmentalists and fiscal conservatives, and the Empty Lanes attack is so predictable that you really have to wonder.

The transit planners are all too familiar with this pattern. It's no wonder that they never want to just open a busway without ensuring there's demand for it from day one.

The Tappan Zee Bridge and the Empty Lanes Attack

2011-10-28T11:41:00.000-04:00

A tweet may not be worth a thousand words, but a well-crafted tweet can be worth a few hundred at least. On Monday, Stephen Smith asked, "Can someone explain to me how the hell an I-287/Tappan Zee BRT could cost ("as little as"!!) $1 billion?" With those few words, Stephen put his finger on a major weak point in the "enveloping BRT" strategy practiced by transit advocates. There is no "cheap" option for transit among the alternatives that were considered for the Tappan Zee corridor in the last round of discussions. Every transit option adds at least a billion dollars to the cost. When nobody can even find five billion for "just the bridge" (with a little stealth widening thrown in, naturally), it's too tempting for our austerity-obsessed "car guy" governor to cut the transit completely.

So why are the transit proposals so expensive, especially compared with the car proposals? The answer is a combination of four interconnected factors. First, all new busways are vulnerable to the dreaded "empty lanes" attack. Second, you're trying to serve a sprawling population with transit, which is always expensive. Third, the transit proposals all include some part of the "full corridor" from Suffern to Port Chester, while the current road proposal only covers the bridge. Fourth, transit advocates didn't have - and never have had, in this country - the political will to formally propose true dirt-cheap BRT.

The "empty lanes" attack has probably been attempted on every busway and HOV lane in history. In part it stems from basic physics: vehicles traveling slower can fit closer together safely, but faster ones have to leave more stopping distance between themselves and the vehicle in front. If the bridge managers succeed in speeding up bus traffic, the bus drivers need to leave more space. Drivers stuck in nearby traffic see that space and clamor for the lanes to be opened to them.

If demand for the bus or HOV lanes is at maximum (for example, the Lincoln Tunnel XBL with its steady stream of buses flowing down into the tunnel), drivers can't really say anything. But if it's anything less - say for instance that the project is just getting started - the clamor will start immediately and just keep building until the bureaucrats give in and open the lane to all vehicles.

Note that the bridge itself was pretty empty when it first opened - but there was nothing anybody could do about that. Tearing down the bridge wouldn't bring the money back. So they made the best of it. That's the double standard that all busways and HOV lanes face.

The transit agency could always run a bunch of buses whether anyone's riding or not, but that just opens them up to the related "empty buses" attack, another perennial favorite.

A strong political leader or movement could protect the busways and say "fuck you, it takes time to build ridership, we're not letting you drive in the lane." So a new busway has to have strong political sponsorship, or else it has to have a certain amount of ridership from day one.

It would add almost nothing to the cost of the current proposal - a rounding error - to build a new bridge with three general-purpose lanes and a busway in each direction. But if the busway is not immediately full of buses, car advocates will hit fast and hard with the "empty lanes" attack. I don't see any political leaders ready to stand behind a half-empty busway. The staff at Tri-State knows this well, and I'm pretty sure that's why they didn't object to the "BRT" actually being high occupancy/toll lanes on the bride itself. They don't want an actual busway on the bridge until they know it'll be full enough to stave off the empty lanes attack. So how do you build that ridership? That's where the other three factors come in.

The Tappan Zee Bridge: Money Pit, or Giving Tree?

2011-10-26T01:18:00.000-04:00

I want to correct something that I wrote last week. I said, "even though the Thruway spends $30 million a year to maintain the bridge, and that number is rising every year, the tolls bring in $50 million." The tolls are still bringing in $50 million a year, but in 2009, according to Phil Ferguson, then the Finance Study Project Manager, "the bridge requires $130-150 million annually to operate and maintain, which is much more than it generates." Similar figures have been repeated in the media lately.

Given the number of times that we've heard about the high maintenance costs of the current bridge, a natural question is what the maintenance costs of the replacement bridge might be. Surprisingly - or perhaps not - this figure is a bit hard to come by. There's nothing in the scoping packet about it. The only figure I was able to find was on Page S3 of the Executive Summary of the Rehabilitation vs. Replacement analysis, where the "Present Value (150-year) Maintenance Cost" for a slightly larger bridge is estimated at $700 million. I'm not a finance expert and I haven't figured out how to get from that to estimated annual costs, but if we just divide the PV total by 150 years we get $4.67 million a year. Even if that doesn't include the cost of police, tolls, etc., it's still a lot lower than the $130 that's currently claimed, and the $20 million that the Authority paid for maintenance when the bridge was newer.

No wonder the Governor wants to replace it - and probably to spin it off as an independent authority, or even a separate for-profit corporation. The bridge is actually a huge drain on the Thruway budget, and part of the urgency comes from the desire to get out from under that burden. That said, it's really pretty rotten of Upstaters to take from the bridge when it was running a surplus and not want to chip in when it's running a deficit. It's like the Giving Tree or something.

Unreliable projections

2011-10-25T00:37:00.000-04:00

Figure 1. NYMTC projected increases in residents and employment.

The new Scoping Packet (PDF) put out by the Federal Highway Administration for the reconstruction of the Tappan Zee Bridge includes this cute little map, showing "projected" increases in thousands of residents (on top) and jobs (on the bottom). The implication is that these thousands of residents will need to get to the thousands of jobs, and they'll all want to drive, and they'll need the bridge to do it. These numbers all come from the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council, essentially an arm of the New York State Department of Transportation.

Figure 2. NYMTC historical and projected bridge traffic volumes.

A similar argument was made in Figure 2 (from the Alternatives Analysis document that has since been scrubbed from the website), showing the average daily number of vehicles that have driven across the bridge for each year since the bridge was built in the 50s. It's a nice straight line, huh? So extending it, as the dashed line does, seems natural. This projected demand is an important part of the State DOT's argument for replacing the bridge. It's also an enticement for people to buy bonds to finance the bridge replacement: the higher the tolls, the more certain it is that the bondholders will be paid back. But why didn't the FHWA use that chart in the most recent Scoping Packet? Instead they used a chart that only went up to 2010 (Figure 3).

Why did they do that? Well, you might notice that the data for the past decade doesn't quite match projections. In fact, if we compare the actual volumes to the projections, as I do in Figure 4, we find that the projections haven't been very reliable.

Figure 3. NYMTC historical bridge traffic volumes.

The bridge traffic volume has actually been pretty stable over the past decade, in contrast to the dramatic increases that were predicted. There are two likely reasons for this. One is that the high gas prices in 2006-2007 discouraged people from driving, and the unemployment from the resulting recession took away the reason to drive from many west-of-Hudson residents.

However, the rate of increase in traffic volume was low even in the beginning of the decade. The other potential explanation is that the congestion on the bridge, and the high rate of crashes caused by the State squeezing an extra lane in, is a turn-off. Rather than deal with this, people will choose to get jobs elsewhere, or not even move to Rockland.

Figure 4. NYMTC historical (indicated in green from 2002-2010) and projected bridge traffic volumes, including recent totals.

If the volume of traffic is self-limiting (and come on, really, why wouldn't it be?) then there is no urgent need to widen the bridge, or even to replace it. If the bridge capacity is reduced, people will either stop moving to Rockland, Orange and Bergen counties, or they'll move to someplace where they can catch the train to Hoboken.

Even if the new bridge is built, most scenarios call for the tolls to be doubled or even tripled, and many call for them to be indexed to inflation. That would serve to discourage use of the bridge. Furthermore, there is a chance that higher energy prices would limit driving. This could mean that the tolls never bring in enough revenue to pay off the bonds.

The future of Rockland, Bergen and Orange

2011-10-24T00:56:00.000-04:00

One of the unpleasant possibilities to contemplate if the Tappan Zee Bridge gets rebuilt at double the width is a massive growth in sprawl. Right now, driving to Westchester every morning is a pain in the ass and getting worse every day. When the new bridge opens with its wide lanes and shoulders, traffic should move quickly, even with four lanes in each direction. If traffic gets backed up, you know that Cuomo would use one or both of the shoulders for an extra lane, even though he pretended he wouldn't. Tolls may be double, but they'll pay for a nice easy commute - until drivers get to I-287 at least.

With this easy commute, people will start buying houses in Orange, Bergen and Rockland again, and businesses will start moving offices back to Westchester. The money spent by all the construction workers in the immediate area will boost the economy, putting more people to work. "Homebuilders" will go back to work knocking down trees on the sides of Orange County hills to build more subdivisions. Big box stores will build more locations along Route 59, with nice big parking lots. Maybe the State will get excited at all the toll money coming in and widen the Thruway like it proposed in the study.

You and I may recoil in horror at that scenario - carnage! pollution! wasted oil! wasted space! obesity! bowling alone! But that's the happy motoring vision put forth by the task force under Governor Pataki and Commissioner Boardman in 2006, and continued right through to the present day under Andrew "car guy" Cuomo and Joan "smart growth" McDonald. A lot of it is based on the projections from the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council, like this one for traffic volume on the bridge.

The problem is that these projections are moronic. Sooner or later this will stop. As Kate Slevin predicts, even at fourteen lanes, the bridge will get congested. But before that, a lot of people will not be able to afford to pay ten dollars a day to cross the bridge on top of everything else. Gas prices will rise to five, six or seven dollars a gallon, and that will knock out a lot of other commuters on the bridge. If people can't drive to work, they will take transit, and if the transit continues to suck they will get jobs in the city where they can take the train or the bus in. If they can't do that they will move to someplace with more convenient transit. Others will stop moving to that part of the region, because it won't be a good deal any more.

When that happens, in order to function at all Bergen, Orange and Rockland will need to transition to a lifestyle oriented around transit and walking, which means living in town. How easy will that be, with a brand new five billion dollar bridge that nobody needs anymore, and all the sprawl it created? How easy would it be instead if we spent the money on transit, such as restoring passenger service on the West Shore Line?

Do you want no tolls, or no tolls, or are you unsure?

2011-10-23T22:05:00.000-04:00

So I got this ~~campaign flyer~~ legislative report from my Assemblymember, Marge Markey, in the mail the other day. It had a "what do you think" survey at the end. In general, I think these things are great. For example, I'm glad that Marge wants to know whether I think there should be more state oversight of the MTA:

As a matter of fact, not only do I think there should be more state oversight, I think there should be more accountability so that the State legislature can't cut the MTA's budget and then hold rallies against the MTA. So that's a good question. But now how about this one:

We all know that bridge and tunnel tolls are used to pay for all kinds of things beyond the maintenance of those bridges and tunnels. So using them only to maintain the bridges and tunnels means either saving them up (not always a bad idea) or reducing the tolls. Basically, the question boils down to: "Should tolls be rolled back, or should tolls be rolled back?" Then there's question 6:

Basically, the first option says that transit improvements should be funded by increased transit fares, not tolls. The second says that there should be no tolls. So the question is, "Do you want no tolls, or no tolls, or are you unsure?"

This is why I've long argued that it was a stupid idea to frame bridge tolls as paying for transit improvements. The obvious response is, "No, those transit users should pay for their own fucking improvements!" The fact is that we've already promised to reconstruct every single bridge on the BQE, including hundreds of thousands to replace the Kosciuszko, with no toll funding whatsoever. We've already done major reconstructions on most of the East River Bridges. Why are our transit improvements being held hostage to a bullshit artist like Marge Markey, while we use our income and sales tax dollars to write blank checks to repave every street in the city?

Oh yeah, and Marge Markey is a bullshit artist. Come on, Marge.

Paying for the new Tappan Zee

2011-10-23T02:47:00.000-04:00

In an earlier post I mentioned Planet Money's story of how Governor Dewey built the Tappan Zee Bridge where it is so that he could use the toll money to pay for construction and maintenance of the Thruway all the way to Buffalo. I pointed out that the ongoing structural problems of the bridge have steadily increased the cost of maintenance, so that it eats up an ever-growing share of the revenue from the tolls, leaving less and less for the rest of the Thruway.

Given that, one weird thing about this project is that it would not only take the toll revenues away from the Thruway, but it would remove them from the funds available to maintain and administer the existing bridge. In 2008, the Preliminary Financial Studies assumed that the full $50 million annual toll revenue would be available to finance the reconstruction (page 7):

Directing additional tolls to this project will require careful legal and financial analysis of the resulting impact on the Thruway Authority, especially because current Tappan Zee tolls support the operation of the bridge and also subsidize the rest of the Thruway system.

In fact, one of the reasons that the project has been stalled for so long is that even if the tolls were doubled, they would only bring in $100 million a year, and if they were doubled and then indexed to inflation, they would still average $137 million a year over fifty years. If the State issues bonds against the tolls, because ~~they~~ we would have to pay interest, we could only get $1.3-2.4 billion up front to build the bridge. The Federal government was only expected to kick in a further $100 million a year, for a maximum of $2.6 billion.

So where does the rest come from? Well, we get a hint from this Journal-News article, which honestly leaves me scratching my head. Reporters Jorge Fitz-Gibbon and Ken Valenti quote several Experts, including Robert Poole of the Reason Foundation and Nancy Singer of the Federal Highway Administration. The remaining money, they say, would come from "investments from labor union pension funds and other nongovernment sources."

What's not clear to me is this: when the State borrows money by issuing bonds, they promise to pay it back with interest. They get the money up front, and the investors get the interest. In the case of the Tappan Zee, the interest is paid with toll revenues.

So why can't these pension funds and other investors just buy the toll bonds? Why do they want anything else? They're not going to give us money for nothing. What would they get out of it?

It's not spelled out in the Journal-News article, but Fitz-Gibbon and Valenti do mention the Goethals bridge replacement, where the plan is to pay the private investors extra interest. So I'm guessing the answer is that the State would promise to pay the investors back a certain amount above and beyond the toll revenues. That money, of course, would come from other revenue sources, like the sales tax or income tax we pay.

Oh, and how about the $20 million a year for the rest of the Thruway? Yeah, that'll either come from higher tolls in Woodbury or statewide, or else it'll come out of our tax dollars too. And that means one of two things. Either our taxes will go up, or in a few years some "brave" politician - maybe Cara Cuomo - will be forced to cut funding for education, Medicaid and transit, because "the state is in hard times."

The Tappan Zee Bridge is a sprawl-generating machine

2011-10-20T23:11:00.000-04:00

Whenever I see a wasteful road project, one of my first responses is to look for ways that the same trip could be made by rail. I tried to do that for the Tappan Zee Bridge. Going from Rockland or Orange to the city? We can dig the Gateway Tunnel. Going from New Jersey to New England? We can have the Cross-Harbor Rail Freight Tunnel, or we can reactivate the Poughkeepsie Bridge. Then I saw this chart, which has stumped me for months:

It illustrates the results of a survey done by the State Department of Transportation in April 2003, to determine the origins and destinations of eastbound auto and bus travelers crossing the Tappan Zee Bridge. In response to a question from Bbnet on a post from January, I dug up the survey summary, which says:

On an average weekday, 80,457 people cross the Tappan Zee Bridge in the eastbound direction. ... The majority of the person trips (65 percent) originate in Rockland and Orange counties, with 42 percent coming from southern Rockland County alone. The remaining person trips either begin in New Jersey (24 percent) or locations external to the study region (11 percent)...

In terms of where trips end, slightly more than half (51 percent) of all the eastbound person trips over the Tappan Zee Bridge terminate in Westchester County. Approximately 28 percent of the trips end in New York City (16 percent in the Bronx, 7 percent in Manhattan, and 5 percent in other areas of the City), which includes those person trips commuting on the Hudson Line from the Tarrytown Station. The remaining person trips terminate in Connecticut (10 percent), Long Island (3 percent), Putnam and Dutchess counties (1 percent), and in locations external to the New York metropolitan area1 (7 percent).

Hm, well it looks like the Gateway Tunnel, the Cross-Harbor Tunnel and the Poughkeepsie Bridge won't be much help to these people. 65% are coming from Rockland and Orange Counties, but if we add up Westchester, Putnam, Dutchess, the Bronx and Connecticut we get at least 78% of commuters who wouldn't be able to take advantage of those options. For those commutes, the only place you can really cross is at the Tappan Zee.

The liberating moment came when I realized that just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. We have a word for the style of residential development that's been built in Orange, Rockland and Bergen counties over the past fifty years. We have a word for the style of commercial development that's been built in Westchester and the north Bronx since 1960. That word is sprawl.

There are several reasons why sprawl is a dirty word among environmentalists, and they're listed at the top of this blog. Car-centered development pollutes the air, causing asthma and global warming. Incessant driving kills people, pets and wildlife. Sprawl wastes a tremendous amount of space, separating people from each other and causing obesity. Driving everywhere uses energy much faster than our planet gets it from the sun.

We see this in Orange, Rockland and Bergen counties, which have high crash fatality rates (33, 19 and 16 deaths per ten thousand inhabitants, respectively) and high rates of car travel per capita (12,682, 9,269 and 10,237).

The sprawl in Orange, Rockland and Bergen counties did not just appear. People built it because there were buyers, and those buyers came because they could drive to work. They could only drive to work because of the bridge. It's a sprawl-generating machine.

Reduce the capacity of the bridge, and you reduce the demand for sprawl. Tear down the bridge, and you eliminate a good chunk of the demand for sprawl.

Rebuild the bridge, on the other hand, and you continue that demand for sprawl. Widen it, or even just "bring it up to modern standards" so that people can drive fast, and you increase the demand.

Why are we doing this again?

How wide will the Tappan Zee Bridge be?

2011-10-19T01:11:00.000-04:00

There's something confusing going on with the design of the Tappan Zee Bridge replacement. I looked into this issue specifically, because I was disturbed in 2008 when the State DOT decided, without any public discussion, that the bridge would be ten lanes wide, with two of the lanes being "HO/T" or high occupancy/toll lanes, which could be used by carpools or by solo drivers paying a higher toll.

This represented a significant increase in the car capacity of the bridge from the current seven lanes. In addition to adding a peak-direction lane and two off-peak ones, it would have widened the lanes from eleven feet to twelve or fourteen, increasing capacity by allowing drivers to go faster without increasing their risk of crashing.

This increased capacity would promote residential and job sprawl at both ends of the bridge, but this was never discussed. It was simply announced on page 21 of the Scoping Update that the bridge would be ten lanes, and none of the Alternatives included anything different.

The build alternatives 3, 4A, 4B, and 4C include a number of common elements. The fundamental differences between the alternatives are the transit modes. The common elements include the following: ... A River Crossing with two HOV lanes, eight general purpose lanes, shoulders and a full-length pedestrian/bicycle path linking Rockland and Westchester.

I've been poking around through the old study documents I can dig up, but I haven't yet found any evidence that there was ever any discussion of how many lanes to put on the replacement bridge.

I've seen estimates of the width of the current bridge that vary from 82 feet to 90 feet, but let's assume it's 82 feet. It contains seven lanes of traffic with no shoulders. That comes out to an average width of 11.7 feet per lane. Considering that one of the goals in the Scoping Packet is "Providing for standard, 12-foot traffic lanes," it would seem that the current bridge is not that far off. The biggest problem is that it doesn't have shoulders for anyone to stop in if they break down.

The Journal News and many other newspapers are reporting that the current plans for the bridge call for it to be eight lanes wide. The scoping document tells a slightly different story, though:

Minimum Width

NYSTA would maintain traffic flow across the Hudson River to the maximum extent feasible, even if one of the two bridge spans must be closed. To provide adequate capacity for such short-term traffic operations, a minimum of seven highway lanes would be needed across the river. In order to accommodate this service redundancy, the road deck would need a minimum width of 82 feet to provide for seven, temporary highway lanes in the event that one structure would be inoperable. This minimum dimension would be provided on both of the new spans to achieve this desired feature of the new crossing.

At present, bicycles and pedestrians are prohibited on the Tappan Zee Hudson River crossing although there are existing multi-use trails near the bridge on both sides of the river. To maximize the public investment in a new crossing, the New York State Department of Transportation (NYSDOT) and NYSTA would provide a shared-use
(bicycle/pedestrian) path across one of the spans of the replacement bridge. To meet current design standards for the path and to provide adequate separation from traffic lanes, the Replacement Bridge Alternative must provide a minimum of 12 feet of additional width for the shared-use path (including the path, barrier, and a safety buffer); however, 14 feet is currently planned.

To meet these operational requirements, the EIS will consider a Replacement Bridge Alternative with two spans. The span that includes a shared-use path would be 96 feet wide, and the span that does not include the shared-use path would be 82 feet wide.

If you're paying attention, you'll note that the new bridge will have two spans, each of which can carry the same amount of cars as the current bridge. That means that the bridge could conceivably carry fourteen lanes. What's up with that?

It's true that the Governor has been complaining about the "seven narrow lanes and no safety shoulders" under the current configuration. So we would imagine that the new bridge would have at least twelve-foot shoulders and fourteen-foot lanes, and we still get ten lanes.

Ten lanes might not be so bad, because two of them could be used for buses right away. It's possible, however, to squeeze twelve lanes onto the bridge and still have twelve-foot lanes and an eleven-foot shoulder on each side.

The main thing that I want to know is, what's to prevent the bridge from being used for fourteen lanes? Right now the Thruway Authority could dramatically decrease the number of crashes by reducing the number of lanes on the current bridge from six to seven, with either two six-foot shoulders or one twelve-foot one. They don't do that because the politicians on either side are insisting that car throughput is more important than safety. The current level of congestion, they say, demands seven lanes.

If the "eight-lane" replacement bridge fills up, as Kate Slevin predicts, there will be new demands to put another lane or two on it. If the bureaucrats couldn't say no to increasing this bridge to seven lanes, why would they say no to fourteen?

Salvaging the Tappan Zee studies

2011-10-17T01:16:00.001-04:00

I've had a lot of criticism for the way the New York State Department of Transportation has led the Tappan Zee Bridge replacement project up to now, but one thing they deserve credit for is a decent website. There were tons of useful studies done, generating hundreds of pages of documentation. All that information was posted to the "TZB Site." Without it, I would have been dependent on secondhand reports from newspapers and blogs. I don't have time to go to all these meetings upstate.

Well, now Governor Cuomo has turned the project over to the Federal Highway Administration. They immediately took down all the documents and put up a completely new site with three whole documents.

All that information? You don't need it. Why would you? This is a new project. All the person-hours of research that went into those reports? All the money - your tax money - that paid for the research? Down the drain.

Of course, I feel that most of the information presented there was still relevant, and I intend to continue using it. Some of the files, particularly the HTML, is available through the Wayback Machine. Other stuff may be in the Google Cache still. Unfortunately, most of the information was in PDFs and images. I had a bunch saved to my hard drive, and I'll put them up as I need them. For example, today I uploaded the Preliminary Financial Studies Phase I Report. If I find other documents on my hard drive I'll put them up. If you have some of these documents, please post them and I'll link to them, or send them to me and I'll post them.

The Tappan Zee Bridge is not indispensable

2011-10-13T23:22:00.000-04:00

This Rand McNally "Mobil" Map from 1969 shows I-87 passing through Connecticut on its way to Port Chester. Scanned by kurumi.com.

A key component of the PR drumbeat in favor of replacing the Tappan Zee Bridge has been the myth that the bridge is indispensable. We are led to believe it is a cornerstone of our regional economy. After all, it's the centerpiece of the Thruway bringing cars and trucks from the City upstate, and of Interstate 287 connecting New Jersey with New England.

If anything happened to the bridge, the myth goes, freight traffic up and down the East Coast would be paralyzed, and the city would be cut off from Albany, Buffalo and Montreal.

If you stop and think for even a moment, you realize that this is a crock. There are four crossings south of the Tappan Zee, and six between it and Albany. When I go upstate, the buses take the Lincoln Tunnel; when I go to Connecticut they take the Tunnel and the George Washington Bridge.

I was intrigued to discover that the original route for Interstate 87 ran over the Newburgh-Beacon Bridge and the present route of I-684 through eastern Westchester, and was only later shifted to the Tappan Zee Bridge. Cars and trucks going between Upstate and the city could just take that route. Much of the traffic from New Jersey to New England winds up on I-84 anyway; it could just take the Thruway north to Newburgh instead of I-684.

But Cap'n, you say, wouldn't that put too much of a burden on these parallel roads? The Cross-Bronx and the BQE are saturated at peak hours as it is!

They are, but I was talking more about drivers using the Beacon-Newburgh Bridge and the I-90 bridge to the north. And if the crossings to the south are saturated, they will. There is room on those bridges.

If there is a concern about freight movement, we should come up with a sustainable freight movement plan. The arrangement promoted by the road-builders would only increase our dependence on trucks and continue to hold the economy hostage to the sprawl machine. If we want to improve freight movement across the Hudson, we should spend the billions on the Cross-Harbor rail tunnel, not on road lanes that are wide open to any solo driving commuters.

The real danger from the Tappan Zee Bridge

2011-10-13T01:15:00.000-04:00

Last month, Planet Money did a great report on the Tappan Zee Bridge. (For the short attention span crowd, here's the five-minute version.) David Kestenbaum noticed that the bridge was built in a really stupid place, at the widest point in the entire river, on soft ground far above the bedrock. I had kind of noticed that too, but I assumed that the people involved knew what they were doing. Ha!

When Kestenbaum started asking around he found out that no, by engineering criteria just about any other spot on the river was better for a bridge. The Tappan Zee Bridge was built where it was for political reasons.

Like most political fights, it was about power in the form of money. In this case it was the money from tolls. Essentially, the law that created the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey gave it a monopoly on the toll revenue from all bridges and tunnels that crossed between New York and New Jersey, within a 25-mile radius of the Statue of Liberty.

Governor Thomas Dewey (the one who didn't defeat Truman) wanted to build a big highway from the Bronx to Buffalo that would reunite the state. It would have to cross the Hudson at some point, and he figured that the excess toll revenue from that crossing could fund the construction of the rest of the highway - a highway now known as the Thomas E. Dewey Thruway.

If the State built the bridge too far north, it would not attract enough toll money to fund the highway. If they built it too far south, the Port Authority would get the money and spend it all on PATH trains and skyscrapers. The optimal place to put it according to the engineering criteria was right by Bear Mountain - but there was already a bridge there, not to mention a popular state park. So Dewey had it built just outside the Port Authority's territory.

Remember how I said "excess toll revenue"? That means the money left after the Thruway Authority sets aside funds for bridge maintenance. Well, the size of that "excess" is a matter of opinion, it turns out, if you look at the Thruway's "Budget Book." Toll revenues have always exceeded maintenance costs, but maintenance eats up a larger chunk every year.

Let's make something perfectly clear here: this is not going to be a repeat of the I-35W Bridge disaster in Minneapolis. Nobody thinks the bridge is going to fall down. It's not structurally deficient, it's "functionally obsolete." People whine about the crash rate, but just as with the BQE in Brooklyn, it would be a lot safer (and undergo less wear and tear) if the Thruway Authority wasn't trying to squeeze seven lanes of traffic onto a bridge where there's really only room for six.

The rising costs to maintain the bridge have meant that each year a smaller proportion of the tolls can be used to maintain and operate the rest of the sprawling system, and to pay the interest on the bonds that have been issued to fund projects up front. As with the Port Authority itself, the Thruway Authority has been used as a piggy bank for the State, taking on additional responsibilities like the untolled Cross-Westchester Expressway, the untolled Interstate 84 (returned to the State last year) and the Erie Canal, and allowing the State to close toll plazas, making sections of the Thruway in Albany and Buffalo free for local travel and making Syracuse jealous.

Now before doing a few calculations tonight, I've never heard the simple fact that even though the Thruway spends $30 million a year to maintain the bridge, and that number is rising every year, the tolls bring in $50 million. It's not the bridge budget that's in danger, it's the millions of toll dollars that get sent upstate and to Wall Street. Conceivably, the Thruway Authority could simply keep using the tolls to pay bridge maintenance, and the rest of the Thruway can go whistle. Maintaining a badly designed bridge in an ill-chosen location might not be the best use of the money, but building a new, wider bridge in the same place sure ain't.

Wealthy transit riders by county

2011-10-11T01:32:00.002-04:00

Since the distribution of incomes seems to flatten out across a region - or at least, to reach a maximum of about 1 - it seems that the diversity happens at the county level. Accordingly, I tabulated a list of the counties with the highest ratios of transit incomes to driver incomes:

County	Drove alone median earnings	Public transportation median earnings	Public Transportation earnings margin of error	Transit/ Drove Earnings Ratio	Transit - drove / error
St. Lawrence County, New York	31,706	72,130	35,964	2.27	1.12
Cherokee County, Georgia	38,140	85,403	45,118	2.23	1.05
Kane County, Illinois	35,202	75,133	28,679	2.13	1.39
Litchfield County, Connecticut	41,540	82,431	28,064	1.99	1.46
Stafford County, Virginia	44,686	86,938	30,686	1.95	1.38
DuPage County, Illinois	40,473	75,500	11,404	1.86	3.07
McHenry County, Illinois	40,706	75,009	9667	1.84	3.55
Bristol County, Massachusetts	36,895	67,922	13,450	1.84	2.31
Spotsylvania County, Virginia	40,723	73,572	12,071	1.81	2.72
Ulster County, New York	35,289	60,748	10,658	1.72	2.39

There are some surprises here. What's going on in Saint Lawrence County, way up by the Canadian border? Is it something like we saw in Idaho Falls? I'm guessing that it's faculty commuting to SUNY Potsdam or Clarkson University. In any case, there are only 92 transit riders in the county, so maybe one of them can email me.

County	Workforce	Public Transportation	Public Transportation Mode Share	Mean Drive Time	Mean Transit Time	Transit / Drive time ratio
St. Lawrence County, New York	44,683	82	0.18%	20.2	35.7	1.771
Cherokee County, Georgia	101,795	457	0.45%	#N/A	#N/A	#N/A
Kane County, Illinois	235,114	7160	3.05%	27.9	80	2.873
Litchfield County, Connecticut	95,152	1137	1.19%	27.3	61.5	2.257
Stafford County, Virginia	65,294	2420	3.71%	#N/A	#N/A	#N/A
DuPage County, Illinois	454,598	30,222	6.65%	27.1	60.6	2.235
McHenry County, Illinois	149,929	4115	2.74%	32.8	82.3	2.513
Bristol County, Massachusetts	248,437	5282	2.13%	25.5	66.3	2.603
Spotsylvania County, Virginia	58,414	1803	3.09%	#N/A	#N/A	#N/A
Ulster County, New York	81,878	1404	1.71%	#N/A	#N/A	#N/A

Photo: Todd Hull / Cherokee Tribune

The case of Cherokee County, Georgia, is more straightforward. Just about all 457 of them pay $125 a month to ride an express bus into Atlanta several times a week. A massive HOV/BRT plan was shelved in 2009.

Litchfield County, Connecticut is the same as the Torrington Micropolitan Statistical Area discussed in my earlier post, and Ulster County, NY is the same as the Kingston μSA. The Illinois counties of Kane, DuPage and McHenry are all suburbs of Chicago reachable by Metra. Stafford and Spotsylvania counties in Virginia are southern suburbs of Washington, DC served by Virginia Railway Express, and Bristol County, Massachusetts is a suburb of Boston served by the MBTA commuter rail.

The 39 counties with an earnings ratio greater than 1 include suburbs of just about every metro area in the country: Fort Bend, TX (Houston, 1.71), Howard, MD (Baltimore, 1.69), Kitsap, WA (Seattle, 1.50), Chester, PA (Philadelphia, 1.39), Dakota, MN (Minneapolis-St. Paul, 1.28).

One other thing: of course you don't want your county to have too low an earnings ratio, because that means that all the poor people are being pushed onto transit. On the other hand, you don't want it too high either, because too many poor people driving means your local transit system sucks. A ratio of 1 is ideal; that's what you'd get if everyone took transit. Broadly speaking, it seems like there's an acceptable range from 0.698 (Multnomah County) to 1.25 (Bergen County), including those closest to 1, Norfolk County and Middlesex County, Massachusetts.

"Choice riders" will put up with all kinds of shit

2011-10-10T01:10:00.001-04:00

There's a school of transit planning that divides passengers into "captive riders" and "choice riders." The captive riders are your stereotypical transit riders who are either incapable of driving or unable to afford cars. They're physically disabled, mentally disabled or poor. Often they're some combination of the three, and maybe even immigrants or visible minorities as well. Many people support government-funded transit as a form of charity, but like any form of charity there are people who feel it's a waste.

Image: calm a llama down / Flickr

The "choice riders" are people who can drive and can afford cars, but choose to take transit instead. Many transit planners treat them like kings who must be pleased at all costs. They get big, cozy seats on their buses and trains, and parking at the station. Lots of parking. The thinking is that if they are displeased they will just drive instead.

There are a number of problems with this line of thinking. First of all, it glosses over the fact that not all transportation choices are equal. I've identified at least four kinds, which I call the Single Trip, Habits, Investments and Subsidies.

Second, there are also "carfree by choice" households that chose not to make Investments in cars, and thus are "captive riders" from a practical point of view. We are able-bodied, of sound mind, with driver's licenses, and could theoretically afford to buy and maintain a car, but we choose instead to go on European vacations, or pay off our debts, or do any number of other things with the money. We are everywhere, but we tend to be concentrated in walkable cities with good transit. This was the core of my critique of the Eric Morris post I linked to at the top of this post. In fairness to Morris, he was referring to data from a 2001 John Pucher article (PDF). Also in fairness to Morris, it was stupid of him to take an article based on nationwide data and try to apply it to New York City without even considering the possibility that there might be differences in distribution of riders and choices.

The biggest shortcoming of that approach is a limited understanding of the choices people make. We are not just choosing transit or no transit. We have goals, the main one being to get to work. We are choosing between transit and driving. The key is whether transit helps us accomplish their goals better than driving.

It's true that bad service, high fares, low frequency and long travel times will factor into someone's decision to drive instead of taking the train. But only if it makes transit a bigger hassle than driving. The NHTS data that Pucher and Renne cite, and the ACS data that I discussed this past week, show that even middle-class white people will sit on a bus for a long time. Why do they do that? Because driving is worse.

There are many ways that driving to Manhattan, or Stamford or White Plains, in the morning rush hour is a pain in the ass. Traffic on the inbound highways is often backed up for long distances, even on I-684. You can't read or write, or play video games, without putting yourself and everyone around you in more danger than you already do by just being behind the wheel. You can't relax, sleep or drink alcohol, even on the way home. When you get to the city, unless your job provides free parking you have to circle for a space - or more likely, pay for one. Really wealthy suburbanites can afford to rent a parking space, but most commuters have something else they'd rather do with the money.

The conventional wisdom says that "choice riders" won't put up with all these transit hassles. Well guess what? In the greater New York area they put up with them, because the other choice is worse.

I want to make sure you don't just dismiss this as, "This is New York, and other places are different." It's not just New York, it's also Bainbridge Island and Idaho Falls and Vallejo. It's anywhere that driving is difficult and/or expensive.

All these places may have some pre-existing feature that makes driving a pain. In New York it's the rivers and the density. In San Francisco it's the bay, and in Seattle it's the Puget Sound. In Idaho it's the desert and the nukes.

But what about other places that have natural obstacles? DC has the Potomac. Miami has bays. Los Angeles has mountains. Phoenix has the desert and Los Alamos has nukes. Why don't they have transit commuters from their wealthy exurbs?

Idaho is a weird case. Mostly, I think, it has to do with "trip-chaining." In a place that makes it easier to get just about anywhere by car than by transit, commuting by car makes it easier for the commuter to chain trips, so they can drop the kid off at school on the way to work, or pick up the dry cleaning on the way home. I don't think they have a school or a dry cleaner's in the middle of the desert on the way to the labs, so it makes sense to take the bus to the lab and back, and take care of the other errands separately. In Los Alamos, by contrast, most people live in town with the labs, but if they drive from Santa Fe they can stop in Pojoaque or Tesuque on the way.

Parking availability could have something to do with it, as Morris suggests. I wonder if the government limited the amount of parking available at the Idaho National Labs. In the other cases, it would be interesting to see if there's any correlation between the availability of parking in the various central business districts associated with these areas and the transit mode share among upper-class commuters. Certainly New York and San Francisco have limited parking available.

The answer also has something to do with freeway revolts. New York stopped Lomex, Westway and the Mid-Manhattan Expressway, and tore down the West Side Highway. San Francisco tore down the Embarcadero Freeway and part of the Central Freeway. Vashon Islanders stopped a bridge across the Puget Sound. These have made it harder to get to jobs by car - or avoided making it easier. In DC, Miami, Phoenix and LA, the approach seems to have been to build as many highways and parking lots as possible. It's no wonder that people drive.

Returning to the original point: the "choice riders" made their choice based on the relative value of transit as opposed to driving. Transit providers only have to bend over backwards to please the "choice riders" if someone is simultaneously making it easier for them to drive. And even then, at best they will only postpone the inevitable.

Travel time by Combined Statistical Area

2011-10-09T01:47:00.000-04:00

One issue that came up in discussions of my previous post on "cities" (census-defined Metropolitan and Micropolitan Statistical Areas) where the income of the median transit rider is higher than that of the median driver is the fact that many of these MSAs area exurbs of larger cities. In fact, many of the MSAs in the top ten were part of the outer ring of New York City suburbs. I thought it would be interesting to look at Combined Statistical Areas instead: areas that the Census Bureau judges to be part of the same metropolis.

CSA Name	Drove Alone Median Earnings	Public Transportation Median Earnings	Public Transportation Earnings Margin of Error	Transit / Drove earnings ratio	Transit - drove / error
Idaho Falls-Blackfoot, ID	$25,081	$60,962	$8,043	2.431	4.461
Chicago-Naperville-Michigan City, IL-IN-WI	$37,166	$37,647	$1,824	1.013	0.264
Ponce-Yauco-Coamo, PR	$16,026	$15,437	$5,864	0.963	0.100
Boston-Worcester-Manchester, MA-RI-NH	$41,704	$40,073	$1,491	0.961	1.094
Seattle-Tacoma-Olympia, WA	$40,914	$38,754	$3,092	0.947	0.699
San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland, CA	$46,062	$41,737	$1,274	0.906	3.395
Washington-Baltimore-Northern Virginia, DC-MD-VA-WV	$48,826	$42,261	$1,627	0.866	4.035
Youngstown-Warren-East Liverpool, OH-PA	$27,387	$23,678	$10,153	0.865	0.365
Portland-Lewiston-South Portland, ME	$34,105	$28,426	$12,340	0.833	0.460
New York-Newark-Bridgeport, NY-NJ-CT-PA	$44,837	$37,305	$359	0.832	20.981

There's Idaho Falls at the top again, and the Chicago CSA (which combines the Chicago MSA with Kankakee and Michigan City) coming in second. I still haven't figured out what's going on with Ponce. Then come the other big cities: Boston, San Francisco and Washington. New York as a whole (combining Torrington, Kingston, Poughkeepsie, Trenton and Bridgeport with the New York City, Nassau-Suffolk, New Haven, Newark and New Brunswick MSAs) drops to number 10 on the list. Some big US metro areas are missing from the top ten: Philadelphia has dropped to #19 and Houston is at #26. Los Angeles, Dallas and Atlanta are replaced by Seattle, Portland and Youngstown. Yes, in Youngstown, that infamously shrinking city with its nice clockface transit service and a frequency-based map (PDF), transit riders only make a few thousand dollars less than drivers. To be honest, I don't know what's going on there.

CSA Name	Total workforce	Public Transportation commuters	Commute Mode Share	Mean Drive Time	Mean Transit Time	Transit / Drive time ratio
Idaho Falls-Blackfoot, ID	76,440	1,923	2.52%	18.28	67.97	3.72
Chicago-Naperville-Michigan City, IL-IN-WI	4,382,704	480,195	10.96%	28.53	48.61	1.70
Ponce-Yauco-Coamo, PR	116,208	1,165	1.00%	24.31	33.42	1.37
Boston-Worcester-Manchester, MA-RI-NH	3,677,685	295,190	8.03%	26.26	46.17	1.76
Seattle-Tacoma-Olympia, WA	1,994,521	148,296	7.44%	25.26	45.68	1.81
San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland, CA	3,458,438	336,701	9.74%	25.16	44.90	1.78
Washington-Baltimore-Northern Virginia, DC-MD-VA-WV	4,375,136	489,705	11.19%	30.68	48.33	1.58
Youngstown-Warren-East Liverpool, OH-PA	269,700	1,258	0.47%	#N/A	#N/A	#N/A
Portland-Lewiston-South Portland, ME	309,597	2,168	0.70%	#N/A	#N/A	#N/A
New York-Newark-Bridgeport, NY-NJ-CT-PA	10,076,478	2,721,372	27.01%	27.74	50.35	1.82

In all these cities, the travel time ratio is pretty similar: except for Idaho Falls and Ponce it's between 1.55 and 1.81. Seattle, San Francisco and New York have ferries. Boston and DC, in addition to the above three, have commuter rail. The mode share doesn't seem to affect either the earnings ratio or the time ratio.

The main thing I take away from this list is how close together these CSAs are, with the exception of Idaho Falls, and how low the earnings ratios are. That suggests that in an entire metropolis there are going to be pockets with a high percentage of poor transit riders lorded over by a small elite of drivers, and those will typically balance out the Torringtons and Bremertons of the area. But that doesn't mean that there's no inequality. Here's the bottom ten CSAs:

CSA Name	Drove Alone Median Earnings	Transit Median Earnings	Transit Earnings Margin of Error	Transit / Drove earnings ratio	Transit - drove / error
Detroit-Warren-Flint, MI	$36,068	$14,263	$2562	0.395	8.511
Greensboro--Winston-Salem--High Point, NC	$30,399	$11,535	$3442	0.379	5.481
Syracuse-Auburn, NY	$35,282	$13,371	$8419	0.379	2.603
Lexington-Fayette--Frankfort--Richmond, KY	$31,604	$11,688	$10159	0.370	1.96
Little Rock-North Little Rock-Pine Bluff, AR	$32,025	$11,263	$13157	0.352	1.578
Birmingham-Hoover-Cullman, AL	$32,383	$11,222	$4740	0.347	4.464
Peoria-Canton, IL	$35,221	$12,168	$3378	0.345	6.824
Lafayette-Frankfort, IN	$28,684	$9249	$3345	0.322	5.81
Grand Rapids-Muskegon-Holland, MI	$30,796	$9634	$2862	0.313	7.394
Lansing-East Lansing-Owosso, MI	$32,601	$7685	$3349	0.236	7.44

Here we've got five Midwestern rust belt cities, four mountain Southern cities, and Syracuse. Drivers make three to four times what transit riders make. This is the more typical pattern that everyone expects.

CSA Name	Workforce	Public Transit	Commute Mode Share	Mean Drive Time	Mean Transit Time	Transit / Drive time ratio
Detroit-Warren-Flint, MI	2,112,805	35,287	1.67%	25.6	44.8	1.75
Greensboro--Winston-Salem--High Point, NC	69,3108	5813	0.84%	#N/A	#N/A	#N/A
Syracuse-Auburn, NY	332,909	4720	1.42%	#N/A	#N/A	#N/A
Lexington-Fayette--Frankfort--Richmond, KY	319,221	2166	0.68%	#N/A	#N/A	#N/A
Little Rock-North Little Rock-Pine Bluff, AR	392,477	2159	0.55%	#N/A	#N/A	#N/A
Birmingham-Hoover-Cullman, AL	513,750	2681	0.52%	25.3	43.9	1.74
Peoria-Canton, IL	182,534	1146	0.63%	20.7	36.2	1.75
Lafayette-Frankfort, IN	108,591	3012	2.77%	#N/A	#N/A	#N/A
Grand Rapids-Muskegon-Holland, MI	574,558	6340	1.1%	21.4	35.2	1.65
Lansing-East Lansing-Owosso, MI	237,870	4866	2.05%	22	30.7	1.4

None of these cities have rapid transit. Detroit has the People Mover and Little Rock has a heritage streetcar, but those don't actually go from homes to jobs. Syracuse used to have Ontrack, but that was shut down in 2007; ridership had been declining because it didn't go from homes to jobs.

I still can't figure out why there's so much inequality in Detroit, Syracuse, Lafayette and Lansing, but not in Youngstown. Maybe people driving to New Castle to get the bus to Pittsburgh? But in the 2005-2009 ACS, the mean drive time is 22 minutes and the mean transit time is 32 minutes. If anyone has an explanation, please tell me.

Background on the high-income transit riders

2011-10-08T00:54:00.001-04:00

Eric Jaffe at the new Atlantic Cities blog picked up on my last post, and said some really nice things. Between him and a mention on the Streetsblog Network, I got a few useful questions.

1. Eric wonders about Torrington, Connecticut: "Cap'n Transit suggests it forms an outer ring of New York City; if that's the case, the commute should be longer than an hour, since it takes 45 minutes by bus to reach New Haven, which is still an hour and a half from New York on Metro North. Bus riders into Hartford may instead be the source the discrepancy."

There are a few things going on here. First of all, as Tim Evans commented on the Atlantic Cities post, Torrington is the city of 36,383 that lends its name to the Torrington Micropolitan Statistical Area, a census area that basically refers to Litchfield County. That means that we're talking about commuters from all over northwestern Connecticut, including people who live within a few miles of the Metro-North train stations at Danbury, Waterbury and Southeast. The ACS form (PDF) asks, "How did this person usually get to work LAST WEEK? If this person usually used more than one method of transportation during the trip, mark (X) the box of the one used for most of the distance." So if you drove 30 miles of a 61-mile commute, you would count it as a transit commute. Even if the 30 miles of driving took 45 minutes.

But if it takes two and a half hours to get from Waterbury to New York, and the Torrington μSA is a half hour from the Waterbury train station, including parking and padding, then how does the average commute time only come to 62 minutes? Well, there are probably quite a few people commuting to suburban job centers like Stamford, Hartford and White Plains. It may be people riding the bus that Eric mentions into Hartford, but I'd be surprised if that kind of demand-response service gets much use. If they're middle-class bus commuters to Hartford, they'd probably take the Bonanza, Peter Pan or Greyhound buses. They can also take Metro-North to some of the destinations.

2. In the comments to my own post, Rob Pitingolo asks, "Can you elaborate a bit on the methodology? Did you simply pull these numbers down from the American FactFinder? If so, can you please provide the table ID? Since the 2010 ACS microdata hasn't been released yet, I'm guessing that you used the tabular data, but would really like to confirm that this is the case."

Great question. Some of you have also asked to tweak the analysis in various ways, so let me tell you how I did it, and you can go right ahead and download your own data! First of all, here's my tabulation of the data, so you can pick it apart.

What I did was to download Table B08301 for the overall commute mode choices, B08121 for the earnings data, and B08136 for the aggregate travel time. I combined them into one Excel workbook and cross-referenced them using the Vlookup function. I calculated mean travel time by dividing aggregate travel time by the number of commuters, and I calculated the earnings and time ratios in a similarly straightforward way. I compared the absolute value of the difference in earnings to the margin of error in transit earnings as a check on the statistical significance of the sample.

So knock yourselves out! If you find something interesting, post a link in the comments here. I'm looking forward to seeing what you dig up.

About those long transit commutes...

2011-10-05T00:06:00.000-04:00

When people talk about long transit commutes, it's usually with an attitude of pity for the economically disadvantaged transit riders. But when I looked at the long commutes tallied in the 2010 American Community Survey, the second-longest commute, from Poughkeepsie, jumped out at me. You see, I've ridden that train many times. It's not bad. You can sleep on the train:

Photo: bitchcakesny / Flickr

These are not the typical "long transit commuters" that are normally invoked in pity-oriented articles; they're well-dressed white professionals. So that got me wondering about the incomes of transit riders, and sure enough the American Community Survey has them. Here are nine metro areas where transit riders have higher incomes than drivers, and Ponce, Puerto Rico makes ten:

Metro Area	Overall median income	Drove alone median income	Public transportation median income	Public transportation margin of error	Public transportation/ drove alone ratio	Transit- car/ error
Idaho Falls, ID	$26,120	$25,607	$61,214	$8,522	2.34	4.17
Torrington, CT	$41,136	$41,540	$82,431	$28,064	2.00	1.45
Kingston, NY	$32,344	$35,289	$60,748	$10,658	1.87	2.38
Bremerton-Silverdale, WA	$35,024	$35,371	$52,946	$10,765	1.512	1.63
Poughkeepsie-Newburgh-Middletown, NY	$38,048	$41,462	$56,351	$7,782	1.48	1.91
Vallejo-Fairfield, CA	$38,774	$39,717	$49,184	$16,607	1.26	0.570
Trenton-Ewing, NJ	$40,779	$45,387	$55,789	$15,243	1.36	0.682
Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk, CT	$43,133	$46,128	$55,199	$13,556	1.28	0.669
Chicago-Joliet-Naperville, IL-IN-WI	$35,973	$37,297	$37,657	$1,858	1.04	0.194
Ponce, PR	$15,598	$16,294	$15,963	$2,859	1.02	0.116

So here we see that the median transit commuter in Idaho Falls made $61,214 in 2009, while the median single-occupant driver made only $25,607. Torrington, CT was more dramatic because the incomes were higher: transit commuters made $82,431 while drivers only made $41,540.

To get this list, I eliminated those cities where the ACS had no data for transit rider income or population, and those where the margin of error was more than 25% of the median transit rider's income. I have marked in pale red the metro areas where the difference in median income levels is below the margin of error for the transit riders. In those cases, the survey is not reliable enough to tell us whether there really is a difference in median income between the two groups, so we can treat them as basically equal incomes. Here are the population and commute time figures:

Metro Area	Total workforce	Public transportation commuters	Public transportation mode share	Drive time	Transit time
Idaho Falls, ID	57,442	1,617	3%	19.9	69
Torrington, CT	95,152	1,137	1%	27.3	61.5
Kingston, NY	81,878	1,404	2%	#N/A	#N/A
Bremerton-Silverdale, WA	113,573	8,742	8%	26	66.8
Poughkeepsie-Newburgh-Middletown, NY	304,730	13,196	4%	30.5	81.4
Vallejo-Fairfield, CA	178,631	4,395	2%	28	69.1
Trenton-Ewing, NJ	169,889	13,158	8%	24.2	67.4
Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk, CT	424,122	35,301	8%	24.6	61.9
Chicago-Joliet-Naperville, IL-IN-WI	4,289,558	479,370	11%	28.9	48.6
Ponce, PR	68,007	968	1%	24	32.5

There are no commute time figures for Kingston, but the commutes are roughly the same as Poughkeepsie-Newburgh-Middletown. These two areas, plus Torrington, Trenton, and Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk, form the outer ring of suburbs around New York City. In all these places the rich people are the ones who can get jobs in the city, and the lower-income ones have to work nearby. Some of the rich commute to the city by car, but many take comfortable commuter trains or buses. Local transit is pretty crappy, though, so the people who work locally have to drive - and in many cases spend a large chunk of their money on driving expenses. In Trenton and Stamford, there is enough high-paying "job sprawl" to bring the incomes of the drivers up.

When I first looked at this list, I was sure that Idaho Falls was an error. People making $60K a year, spending 69 minutes a day on a bus in Idaho? But it turns out that a major employer in the area is Idaho National Laboratory, which runs a fleet of comfortable motor coaches to bring people to work. Apparently there's not much of anywhere to live around the labs, so all these nuclear physicists live in Idaho Falls. Roughly a third of the 4,000-person staff takes advantage of the opportunity to travel with their colleagues on free buses rather than falling asleep on the desert roads by themselves. This has been working well for sixty years, but recently the lab decided to replace the local stops with park-and-rides, essentially forcing every worker to drive partway. They seem to be spinning it as an overall win-win, but it's forcing the individual workers to spend more time and money on fuel and emissions (and perhaps even buy a car that will get driven a few miles and then sit in a lot all day) to save the lab a little time and money.

Bremerton-Silverdale, as mentioned previously, covers the area across the Puget Sound from Seattle, and the commute basically involves a comfortable hour on the ferry. Vallejo-Fairfield is an exurb of San Francisco, with bus/BART and ferry connections, as well as buses to Sacramento. I haven't been able to figure out what's going on in Ponce, but the average transit trip is only nine minutes longer than the average drive.

In sum, we shouldn't feel too bad about some people with long transit commutes. Many of them are pretty well-off, and they get a chance to take a nap or play solitaire. Of course there are plenty of poor people with long transit commutes, often involving multiple buses. Those are people we should work to help.

A new High Line for Chicago

2011-10-01T02:11:00.001-04:00

Paris has the Promenade Plantée. New York has the High Line. Lebanon, New Hampshire has the Northern Trail. Soon Chicago will have its own world-class elevated park.

After the planned Bloomingdale Trail right-of-way was taken for a Kennedy Expressway spur, park advocates despaired. But then they realized that there were many more other elevated rail lines with the potential to become attractive public spaces.

Thus the idea for the Red Line was born. "I realized that we had an old set of train tracks running right up the center of the North Side," said Josh Branson, co-chair of Friends of the Red Line. "It has the potential to connect people from Rogers Park, Wrigleyville, Lincoln Park almost to the Near North."

Like the High Line in New York, Branson sees the Red Line as a catalyst for development. "In these tough economic times, you need every boost you can get," he enthused. "The commercial effects would radiate out from every access point. Imagine art galleries on Lincoln Avenue, or quirky restaurants along Clark Street. Chicago needs that growth to realize its potential as an urban center for the Midwest."

The Board of Aldermen is expected to approve the lease of the Red Line later this year, and the last trains will run some time next summer. Activists are raising funds for the the first phase, which will run from Howard Street to Devon Avenue, opening in 2015. Eventually, Chicagoans and visitors will be able to walk as far as North Avenue, and maybe some day to the loop.

City planners are enthusiastic about the line, which will be incorporated into the Green Chicago Vision 2040. Other elements of that plan include the transformation of Lake Shore Drive into Interstate 96, a "green road," where the weight of passing cars will generate enough electricity to light the "Cloud Gate" sculpture in Millenium Park, the installation of a solar powered parking garage in the old Union Station facility, and the redevelopment of Meigs Field as a "biodiesel-only" airport.

Apples and oranges

2011-09-26T11:00:00.000-04:00

People can get things done on the ferry from Bainbridge Island to Seattle. Photo: tbone_sandwich / Flickr

The most frustrating thing about the latest Census report is that it lumps together car commutes and transit commutes. Many people (for example, the Consumerist, the the Asbury Park Press, and the Los Angeles Times) recognize that an hour on transit is easier to deal with than an hour behind the wheel, but nobody seems to have bothered to separate them out. Until me.

Here are the ten cities with the longest commutes, lumping together all modes like the L.A. Times and Marketwatch did, following the example of the Census Bureau themselves (PDF). I've put in the overall Mean travel time, but I've also included a column for "Drive time" that includes only car, truck and van trips, and a column for "Transit time" that includes only transit trips. The extra time that transit users spend is labeled as the "transit time cost":

Metro Area	Mean travel time	Drive time	Transit time	Transit time cost
New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island, NY-NJ-PA	33	29	50	21
Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV	32	32	47	15
Poughkeepsie-Newburgh-Middletown, NY	30	30	81	51
San Juan-Caguas-Guaynabo, PR	30	31	52	21
Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, CA	29	30	60	30
Chicago-Joliet-Naperville, IL-IN-WI	29	29	49	20
Baltimore-Towson, MD	29	29	55	26
Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Marietta, GA	29	30	52	22
Yuba City, CA	28	29	85	56
Bremerton-Silverdale, WA	28	26	67	41

You'll notice that with their large transit mode share, the average 50-minute transit time brings up the average New York City commute four minutes, and the 67-minute transit time from Bremerton-Silverdale brings their commute time up two minutes. But the small number of transit commuters in San Juan, Riverside and Atlanta actually bring the overall travel time down by a minute each. If we just look at drive time, we get a different picture:

Geography	Mean Travel Time	Drive time	Transit time	Transit penalty
Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV	32	32	47	15
San Juan-Caguas-Guaynabo, PR	30	31	52	21
Poughkeepsie-Newburgh-Middletown, NY	30	30	81	51
Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, CA	29	30	60	30
Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Marietta, GA	29	30	52	22
Yuba City, CA	28	29	85	56
Baltimore-Towson, MD	29	29	55	26
Chicago-Joliet-Naperville, IL-IN-WI	29	29	49	20
New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island, NY-NJ-PA	33	29	50	21
Vallejo-Fairfield, CA	28	28	69	41

This puts DC first, and New York City ninth, in drive time. Baltimore, Atlanta and Yuba City are all ahead of Chicago. Bremerton-Silverdale has slipped to 27th place, and tenth place is now taken by Vallejo-Fairfield, California, formerly eleventh.

In the past, this "longest commute" story has been used to drum up sympathy for drivers stuck in traffic and glorify small towns. Well, not in New York. Here in New York, we're in the top ten for drive time, but we're not number one. We're behind DC, San Juan, Atlanta and Chicago, as well as the crazy exurban drivers in Poughkeepsie, Riverside and Yuba City.

I'll talk about transit times later.

Census confusion

2011-09-25T13:30:00.002-04:00

There have been a number of news stories this week about commute times, based on information from the Census Bureau. Much of it is confusing and contradictory. For example, on Thursday the Times said that New York has the longest commute, but then on Friday a different Times blogger said that New York doesn't have the longest commute any more. What gives?

Well, the Census Bureau just released the commuting data from the 2010 American Community Survey. But on the same day they also released an analysis of commuting patterns and trends (PDF) based on data from the 2009 survey. New York has the longest mean time to work in the 2009 data (see page 16), but in 2010 it dropped to number 2. At least according to the analysis reported by Sam Roberts in the City Room, and by the Washington Post. Honestly, I don't get that ranking at all. By my analysis, New York is still #1, Maryland is tied for #6, and Grand Forks, ND, is simply not listed as a metro area that has any commute time data for 2010. I have no idea what Roberts is doing with the data.

Maybe they're using a different method of calculating mean time to work? I'm dividing aggregate time to work by total number of commuters. That matches up with the rankings given by MarketWatch and the Los Angeles Times. What method are Sam Roberts and Ashley Halsey using? What are the Census analysts using?

The rest of it seems like typical bureaucratic dysfunction at the Census. Why release an analysis of the 2009 data at the same time as you release the 2010 data? It'll just confuse everyone. Why have no rows for metro areas with no data, instead of empty rows? Why does the Census Bureau talk about Grand Forks in a press release, but not release the data?

There's a lot of other stuff I have to say about this data, so stay tuned for a few more posts about it.

Rebalancing?

2011-09-18T23:53:00.001-04:00

Today, the Urbanophile tweeted a link to a "caution" about bike share from Payton Chung. While I agree that caution is in order, I'm disturbed by the framing of Chung's piece, particularly the assumption that a significant amount of "rebalancing" is necessary in any bike share system. Rebalancing is where share bikes are transported, usually in a truck, from "full" stations to "underutilized" ones. Let me go through my ideas in response to that:

First, there's something profoundly depressing about a bike system supported by large gasoline-powered vehicles. I first got the same feeling when I read about the large long-distance bike rides - not tours - that are supported by "sag wagons." Essentially, you ride your bike, but you're paying for someone to drive ahead of you with your stuff. This happens in races, too. A single sag wagon can carry stuff for multiple cyclists, but it still undercuts the whole idea of bicycles as transportation.

Paris's Vélib´system, as the first large-scale bike sharing system, showed that there is an imbalance in the use of the bikes - or at least two, in fact. First, there's a daily pattern where people ride their bikes from home to work and back again. Most bike share stations are not equally balanced in terms of home and work destinations, so the ones that have more homes nearby tend to be emptier in the middle of the day and fuller at night, and vice versa for stations close to jobs. There were similar patterns in terms of travel to shopping, recreation and metro stations.

This one seems like a no-brainer. The system should simply be built with enough flexibility to absorb extra bikes depending on time of day. There should be enough bikes at the home stations in the morning, and at the work stations in the afternoon. This may seem like a waste, but it's preferable to driving the bikes back to the home site for another wave of commuters, and back in the afternoon.

Secondly, the Vélib' managers found that people were quite willing to ride their bikes downhill, and less so uphill. Brian McEntee tweeted that Paris and DC have experimented with building incentives into the pricing structure to encourage people to ride uphill. This seems like a promising response.

It seems to me that there are two primary goals for a bike share system. One is to encourage cycling at the expense of any other mode, thus turning everyone into part-time cyclists and building a constituency of cyclists who will then support other parts of the agenda. The other is to create a composite transportation system that is more flexible, convenient and efficient than private cars. If you really want to increase efficiency overall, you need to look at how much fuel consumption, pollution and carnage a "rebalancing" trip adds to each bike ride.

Does the rebalancing (and all the other fossil fuel use that goes into a bike share system) make it more efficient, cleaner or safer to drive a single-occupant vehicle? What about a bus? Bike share works best with trips that are too dispersed to warrant a transit route, but if you're paying someone to drive a diesel vehicle back and forth, you might as well skip the bike share and just run a bus.

The Path to Prosperity

2011-09-17T16:52:00.000-04:00

Are we ready for a recovery?

2011-09-15T00:51:00.000-04:00

Chuck Marohn has a very thoughtful reply to my post about short and long term problems. I don't buy the Weimar analogy, but I've been thinking a lot about the issues, and I'm coming to agree with Chuck's main point that a recession may just be the best place for us to be at this time.

First of all, I want to say that unemployment sucks. I've been unemployed a few times, and it can be depressing. If you're unemployed for too long, you can get frustrated and angry. And that assumes that the safety net is working; otherwise you could wind up homeless or worse. High unemployment also brings down real wages, because there's always someone who'll work for cheaper.

Underemployment also sucks. I have friends and relatives who are temping, or working part-time, or at jobs that don't pay a living wage. I know a lot of people who don't have good health coverage and have to put off important procedures, and don't have a 401(k) and may never retire. There are too many people struggling.

And yet... In a fascinating interview, Mark Blyth makes a strong case against reducing unemployment as a short-term priority, mainly because he doesn't think it's feasible. He argues that with all the debt in the private sector, any stimulus would immediately be spent paying off debt. Eliminating the debt, then, should be done first. Blyth is not opposed to the kinds of mass debt forgivenness that David Graeber describes, but he doesn't think that's feasible. He suggests that the best solution is to simply wait until all the bad debts have been cleared. This would likely lead to a Japan-style "lost decade," but Blyth argues that "That decade of ‘helpless stagnation’ is actually okay."

This private debt burden is another constraint on our economic prosperity, operating in a remarkably similar way to the constraints on the flow of oil that I described earlier. But suppose we could overcome them both?

There's another reason we may not be ready for a recovery. Remember back in the housing boom, when "homebuilders" and other developers were merrily sprinkling car-dependent subdivisions, big-box stores and office parks across greenfield forests and farmland because "that's what people want"? Remember when your friends and cousins were buying SUVs and moving to Charlotte and Scottsdale "because it's cheaper"? Remember when governments were building roads, schools and sewers in the suburbs and exurbs at a fantastic rate because "that's where the growth is?" Remember when they were financing it based on phantom "future growth" - the Ponzi scheme described by Chuck?

Well, many people still want the suburban lifestyle, and from a developer's point of view it's still relatively easy to build. Zoning codes around the country still prohibit multifamily, mixed-use development and require large lots and too much parking. For large swaths of the country, big roads, sprawly development, crappy sidewalks, slow buses, cheap car loans, subsidized automakers, and low gas taxes still make driving the most convenient choice when establishing transportation habits.

When the government does try stimulus, what does it build? Roads and bridges. When Americans feel that things are looking up, what do they buy? SUVs and McMansions. If we have a recovery, that's what we're going to get. Roads and bridges, SUVs and McMansions, tar sands and electric cars. Parking required at the apartment building, parking at the train station, parking at the office park.

So Krugman is right that liquidity traps exist and we're in one. But maybe Chuck is right, and so is Blyth and maybe even Kunstler. Maybe we need to just stay in the recession until we've gotten our incentives in order. When the zoning codes are fixed so that we can build sane, mixed use multifamily housing downtown without huge parking garages or lots, when the government only builds roads that it expects to be able to maintain for hundreds of years, when the government is ready to stop subsidizing driving in all its myriad ways, then we should write off the loans, stimulate the economy and start putting people back to work.

If we do, in the meantime we're going to need a hell of a big safety net.

Maintaining high-rise apartments.

2011-09-11T10:58:00.001-04:00

James Howard Kunstler has a bad feeling about tall buildings.

He's not against density: he's said that he thinks a bunch of low-rises packed together would be okay. But he's uncomfortable with tall buildings.

That would be fine, if he just came out and said that. Instead, he's shifted from one justification to another for opposing tall buildings. Ten years ago, he and Nikos Salingaros confidently predicted the end of tall buildings based on a range of half-baked arguments: they make people crazy! They're out of touch with nature! They overload the infrastructure! They're experimental!

When people pressed Kunstler for more coherent arguments, he claimed that they weren't sustainable in terms of the energy required to heat and cool them and power the elevators. This Spring he admitted he was wrong about that and said that it was the cost of renovation and producing the replacement materials that was the problem. Then in June he gave an economic argument against condos, in a podcast critiquing Ed Glaeser's keynote address to the Congress of the New Urbanism (the part about condos runs from about 26:00 to 32:00). He repeated these last two critiques to the Planetizen editors for their excellent piece on skyscrapers last week.

I'm also a little uncomfortable with tall buildings, but at this point I just have vague feelings about them. I don't think that either of Kunstler's arguments hold water, though, so I want to go through them.

First, the renovation argument. Kunstler says that it's impossible to renovate tall buildings. Personally I don't know about the concrete and steel, but I know that it's certainly possible to renovate the other parts. I live in a mid-rise built in 1950, and in the past ten years we've replaced the windows, the roof, one of the boilers, and much of the brick facade. A building nearby is replacing its balcony fixtures. These are things that can be done with just about any residential building, no matter how tall.

Some of the newer super-high rises may indeed have high-tech parts - Kunstler mentions "manufactured sheet-rock, silicon gaskets and sealers that hold glass curtain walls in place." Those parts may indeed become difficult to replace if energy gets really scarce. Sheet rock is just a wall surface, though. It's not integral to the building's structure. It can be replaced with any flat surface: wood, lath-and-plaster, or even corrugated steel. Silicon gaskets can be replaced with rubber or other materials, which may not be as efficient but will still keep the buildings habitable. Glass curtain walls are a different story, and it's quite possible that they are unsustainable. I never liked them anyway. But you can easily have a highrise without glass curtain walls; we've got hundreds of them in Manhattan.

An architect named Serge Appel tells Planetizen that high-rises are just as easy to heat and cool: "You take the same amount of energy to heat a space and cool a space [whether] it's 900 feet up in the air or ten feet up in the air." That's very true, and in fact it's more efficient to heat and cool spaces that are adjacent to each other. More significantly, it's not the same amount of energy to cool a space in Phoenix or Houston. If you're concerned about heating and cooling, you should be thinking about the cost of heating millions of houses in the desert or the swamp, and maybe about the costs of heating cold cities. And Kunstler is, but a lot of other anti-skyscraper people aren't.

Similarly, if you're concerned about running elevators you should be thinking about the cost of driving. And Kunstler is, but a lot of other anti-skyscraper people aren't. What concerns me is that they will cherry-pick his arguments and say "cities bad, country living good," which is not at all what he's saying.

I'll talk about the economics of condos in another post.

The hurricane death toll

2011-08-27T10:56:00.000-04:00

I've lived through one big hurricane in my life so far, and observed a few others through media reports. People make a big deal out of having enough supplies and batteries and water, but one thing that's struck me is how many of the deaths and injuries come directly from car use.

As the big hurricane was blowing in, my wife and I hunkered down for the night in our hallway near the bathroom. In the morning, the storm had passed. Trees were down, and many areas were without power, but very few people had been injured or killed. Then the water started rising. We had been a block and a half from the river; soon we would be only half a block away. We put as much of our stuff as we could in the attic, put the cats in their carriers and walked another block inland to a colleague's house.

There were deaths. Almost all of the ones I heard about involved one of three factors:

1. People driving in high waters, being swept off the road and drowned.

2. People driving in water where power lines had fallen, and being electrocuted.

3. People living in flood zones where nobody was foolish enough to live before cheap cars and "drive till you qualify." When the floods came they took too long to evacuate. If they didn't try to drive anyway (see number 1), they were drowned on top of their houses.

When Hurricane Katrina came through New Orleans, I saw another way people could be killed:

4. Evacuation plans that assume that everyone has a car. People without cars were left to evacuate on foot. Many of them were turned back when trying to get to higher ground, because their carlessness revealed their low-class status, and they had no cars to hide their dark skin.

People will die in this hurricane too. If you pay attention, you may notice the same pattern.

Manhattan is special

2011-08-26T00:02:00.001-04:00

One of the most frustrating things for me to hear over the last few years has been "Why does Manhattan get all the good stuff? Why don't they do this in Brooklyn or Queens?" People who say this don't usually expect that they would do them in the Bronx or Staten Island, but they like to leave those boroughs in so they can be really anti-Manhattan.

A good example is this guy who claims to speak for "the outer boroughs" while living in an Upper East Side highrise. Another is the "two New Yorks" meme that came up in last winter's snowpocalypse as well as the congestion pricing fight.

The implication is that the location of these projects is entirely driven by elitism. Our Billionaire Mayor who lives on the Upper East Side only thinks of his fellow rich Manhattanites. They get all the exciting projects, and the working-class stiffs get to slouch along with their worn-out old highways and boulevards.

The most frustrating thing is that most of these people are completely full of shit. They claim to want projects like these to be located in Brooklyn or Queens, or maybe even the Bronx or Staten Island, but if someone tries to build one they rise up, like you're trying to put a methadone clinic or a toxic waste dump in their neighborhood. "Why are you dumping on Queens?" or of course, "This may have been a success in Manhattan, but it'll never work in Brooklyn."

There are a few people who genuinely want to see the benefits of transit and livable streets spread out among the boroughs. There's a good argument to be made for the "polycentrism" of the Paris or Los Angeles metropolitan areas, which evens out the demands on the transportation system somewhat. But even they don't always get why things happen in Manhattan. So here are four reasons why Manhattan is special, and why it makes sense to put things - new things, fancy things, exciting things - in Manhattan.

1. More people live in Manhattan. If you want to serve a lot of people, you can build something in Manhattan and they're all right there.

2. As a corollary, because lots of people live there, Manhattan is dense, one of the densest places in the country. Some projects need a critical mass of people to get going, and in Manhattan it's relatively easy to find thousands of people who are interested in something.

3. More people go to Manhattan. It's the primary employment center, the primary center of trade, of shopping, of art and performance. It's centrally located within the metropolitan area and well-served by the transportation system, so that people can get there relatively easily from all over the city. It's also a mixing ground for people from different groups to meet, a neutral territory with a strong police presence and lots of eyes on the street.

4. Less people drive to Manhattan and in Manhattan. Less Manhattanites own cars. It may not seem this way if you stand in the middle of Park Avenue at rush hour, but per capita there's a lot less car ownership, and a lot less driving. Many people drive everywhere but Manhattan: they leave their cars at the North White Plains lot and turn into pedestrians and transit users for the day.

Bureaucrats, politicians and advocates ignore these facts at their own peril. I've seen the DOT try to site numerous projects in Queens. Some of them attract instant opposition, because they would compete with cars, and others fail to attract enough pedestrian or bike traffic, and wind up being abandoned. A pilot project needs to work.

Some Manhattanites are snobs. Some Manhattan residents and businesses have too much influence, especially over Our Billionaire Mayor and his Sycophantic Staff, and they get things that they're not really entitled to. But more often, things happen in Manhattan because the DOT or the MTA know that there will be a lot of pedestrians or transit users there, or they'll be able to get there relatively easily.

The next time you see something happening in Manhattan, and you're ready to spring forward with cries of "Elitism!", check these four aspects of Manhattan's specialness that have nothing to do with elitism. You just might find there's a rational reason for it.

Summer Streets: I want more!

2011-08-23T22:20:00.000-04:00

I went to Summer Streets again last week, and again I had a good time. But in addition to my expansion suggestions, there were a few things that have started to get to me after four years. These are all pretty small things, but they could make a difference in people's enjoyment of the event, and in how well the event accomplishes its goals.

1. Framing. Several times I heard and read reference to the street being "closed," and at 1:00 I heard repeated announcements that they were going to "open it up again."

To someone like me, who rarely takes taxis and drives even less, when cars are allowed it doesn't feel "open" to me. It's open to me for three mornings a year, and pretty unavailable the rest of the time. Repeating over and over again that Park Avenue will be "opened up again" emphasizes that we don't belong.

A few times I've stayed on one of the streets and been directly addressed by the staff, who don't seem to be aware that bicycles are allowed on the streets even when Summer Streets is over. Last week a bunch of us were traveling the right direction in the Centre Street bike lane and got yelled at.

A more neutral framing would be to simply say, "Cars will be allowed on the street again. Be careful of the cars; they can kill you. Pedestrians move to the sidewalk, and bicycles move to the right."

2. Practice what you preach. What's with the DOT employees racing those stupid golf carts around? They're still three times heavier than anything else on the road. The DOT staff drive them too fast, and expect everyone else to get out of their way. They were never being used to transport anything, only to drive some self-important-looking people around.

There's a great spot at the foot of Park Avenue South where you can sit on a bench and look right up the avenue to Grand Central and the Pan Am Building. Across the street are an Au Bon Pain and a Starbucks. On each of the three Saturdays I took a break and sat there with an ice coffee, watching everyone walking, skating and riding by. This past week my view was blocked by one of those NYPD dollar vans, parked right on the sidewalk.

The DOT and the NYPD should respect the non-motorized, small-vehicle nature of the event. Leave the golf carts in the garage, and park the vans on the side streets. If people need to get someplace in a hurry, they should take the subway or a taxi - on one of the other avenues. Let the VIPs go be Very Important someplace else.

3. Be flexible with space. Someone decided that exactly half of the street should be dedicated to walkers and runners, and half to cyclists. There were little signs at key intersections reminding people to bike on the left and walk on the right, and they are always placed exactly midway between the sidewalk and the median, no matter how many cyclists or runners there are.

The volunteers shouted out at regular intervals, "Bikes to the left, walk to the right!" If cyclists went too far to the right they singled us out for special scolding, but never seemed to say a word to the runners or strollers in the left-hand lane.

All I'm asking for is a little flexibility. Volunteers should be told that if there are consistently more cyclists than pedestrians passing through an intersection, they should move the sign over, or at least refrain from scolding cyclists who ride just to the right of the sign.

4. The Park Avenue Tunnel. Every time I pass that, I think about how cool it would be to ride through it. It would also alleviate some of the bottlenecks in the East Thirties. It only needs to be open in one direction. Any arguments for not allowing bikes into the tunnel can also be made for not allowing cars into the tunnel on the other 362 days of the year.

5. Brooklyn Bridge conflicts. The DOT is intentionally directing hundreds of bikes and pedestrians onto the Brooklyn Bridge walkway on sunny summer weekends. This year I rode over on the second week, and it was packed with both cyclists and pedestrians, who were not always respecting each other's space.

This is a golden opportunity for someone (I'm thinking Transportation Alternatives, but it could be somebody else) to organize in favor of converting one car lane to a cycle track. It could start with Summer Streets, then be extended to every summer weekend, then 24/7. All you would have to do is station a few people at each end of the bridge with petitions and flyers, and you'd get both cyclists and pedestrians signing on. Alternatively, you could ask local politicians to cross the bridge on foot, and even on bike if they're willing.

Money and Summer Streets

2011-08-22T23:37:00.000-04:00

Earlier this month, I made some suggestions of changes to Summer Streets for livable streets activists to fight for. I've got a few more, but first I wanted to address a comment by "Greg Temps" on that earlier post. Some of you might be wondering why I pay so much attention to what some random anonymous guy writes on the internet. (Beat.) I find his arguments particularly worth considering because they sound like something that someone at the DOT might say.

Almost everything you mention costs money. While the city shortens parade routes and threatens to cut teachers, maintaining the event as it is is hard enough.

This is a recipe for doing nothing, ever. I've lived in this city for a large chunk of the past forty years, and I can't remember a time when there wasn't something being cut from the budget. But I do believe that if you're making a case for the government to spend money, you should either suggest a revenue source or something else that could be cut. I think we can raise taxes a bit in this city, and I'm willing to pay more if it means a longer Summer Streets. I've also said that the budget for reconstructing city-owned highways and parkways should be cut back. Those would both provide more than enough money to cover the additional costs.

Food trucks and temporary sidewalk cafes cannot be allowed on Summer Streets as an integral part of the event is that NOTHING on the entire route is for sale.

That's not true. All of the existing businesses along the route are selling things like crazy. The corporate sponsors may not be selling anything immediately, but they are definitely making an advertising pitch. Does it really matter if I can't buy the applesauce right there?

There are existing food trucks, like the Mud Truck on Astor Place, that are evicted for Summer Streets. I think the Mud Truck contributes at least as much to the life of the plaza as the Starbucks does. Why does Starbucks get to keep selling coffee during Summer Streets, but the Mud Truck doesn't?

I don't particularly think that having "nothing for sale" is integral to the event. I mean, sure, we don't want it to turn into sixty blocks of tube socks and funnel cake, but I don't think that's a real danger here. There's a lot of middle ground between free applesauce and $5 mozzarepas.

The main point is that people need to take breaks, and when I take a break I don't want a mini zoomba class, I want to relax with a cup of iced coffee and people-watch. Right now it's hard to find a good spot for that, and I don't think it should be hard. I'd take a free cup of coffee, but I don't think that's in the budget.

Hitting the ceiling

2011-08-22T01:46:00.000-04:00

No, I'm not talking about the debt ceiling, I'm not talking about getting angry, and I'm not talking about a real ceiling. I'm talking about economic recovery.

As I wrote yesterday, our economy has the short-term capacity to put everyone back to work, thereby bringing income and sales taxes back to earlier levels. We have factories and workers sitting idle because demand is low, and executives aren't driving production because they can park their money in bonds without worrying about inflation eating their principal.

There's a reason why Paul Krugman wants the Federal Reserve Bank to commit to an inflation target of four percent. If executives knew that their cash reserves would be worth 82% of their present value in five years, they would do something else with them, like hiring people to make trains. Those people would buy more stuff and pay more taxes, and the economy would recover.

Some of it would, at least, and that's where we get into the problem. There are sectors of the economy that are not healthy, and those are the ones that brought us down in the first place: transportation and housing. If you remember, the housing bubble depended on "drive 'til you qualify," people buying houses with really long car commutes, and no transit alternative. It was popped by the peak in gas prices. When people couldn't afford to pay for those long commutes, they stopped buying houses in the sprawl and SUVs to drive to them, and the whole thing came down. The credit-default swaps were awful, but they were mostly a sideshow.

When economic activity declined, people used less oil to get to work, but also to ship things (because people were buying less stuff) and to run oil-fired power plants. The price of oil came down, and road congestion eased.

The stimulus was a little crazy: roads and bridges, cash for clunkers, government mortgage guarantees. When the economy started to recover, thanks to the stimulus, people immediately started buying sprawl houses and SUVs again. The price of gas started to go up. Then we had a mini-crash and the whole thing stopped.

This is absurd, and I'd be laughing my ass off if it weren't so serious. It's like a comedy where a guy on an airplane stands up too fast and bumps his head on the luggage compartment. He sits down dazed, and then as soon as he recovers he stands up again and hits his head. There may even have been a scene like this in Airplane!. Will he ever learn to stand up slowly, partway, and move sideways?

That's kind of the question for us. As long as we keep trying to run our housing sector on sprawl houses, and our transportation sector on roads, cars and oil, we'll keep crashing as soon as we start to recover. We could rezone our cities for dense, transit-oriented development, use the stimulus funds for rail and the housing guarantees for renters (say, that the government will pay your rent for six months every ten years if you can't make the payments), and reform the Federal Railroad Administration regulations for railroad cars. Any recovery that happens after that would be more stable.

Of course, any measures designed to encourage sustainable development will take time, and in the meantime we've still got all this sprawl infrastructure, with people living and working in it. To the extent that economic activity increases, some of it will take place with cars and trucks in these sprawl areas, and thus contribute to global warming and oil depletion. I've often wondered recently whether it wouldn't be better to let our economy stay depressed until the Baby Boomers die and we can forge a national consensus in favor of transit and urbanism.

The short term and the long term

2011-08-20T23:51:00.000-04:00

Once again Matt Yglesias puts his finger on an important issue: "The inability to even keep long-term and short-term issues straight in a conversation is mind-boggling." This is the problem I have with a lot of my fellow transit advocates who keep harping on the debt, like Chuck Marohn and Jim Kunstler. I don't want to insult them the way Yglesias is insulting the Republicans, because I think it's a bit more excusable for Marohn and Kunstler, but it's still frustrating.

Yes, it's true that we're facing the peak oil crisis and the climate change crisis, and Marohn is quite right that we have an additional crisis of overbuilt infrastructure that we don't have the financial ability to maintain. We may not even have the "real" ability to maintain it, in terms of resources like manpower, asphalt and energy, while still feeding ourselves and producing goods for export.

The fact is that those are all three long term problems. There are similar-looking short-term problems, but the solution to a short-term problem is not always the same as the first step of solving a similar long-term problem. For example, if it's cold in my apartment one day, I may want to turn on a space heater. If it's cold in my apartment all winter, I may want to replace my weatherstripping. The first step to replacing weatherstripping is to see if the hardware store is open, but that won't make my apartment any warmer in the short term. I may want to turn on the space heater and see if the hardware store is open. It may be a bit wasteful to run the space heater with leaky windows, but for a day it's not that big a deal.

This is what I think Marohn and Kunstler are missing when it comes to Paul Krugman, Matt Yglesias and their calls for Keynesian stimulus. Marohn and Kunstler criticize Krugman for not realizing the severity of the situation. Krugman may or may not realize the severity of the situation, but he knows that the economy has the short-term capacity to put most people back to work and bring tax revenues back up, if the government were willing to tolerate some inflation.

There are medium-term problems, and I'll discuss them in a future post. But they're not what many people think they are.

Our transit system could be profitable like Hong Kong's

2011-08-17T01:09:00.000-04:00

Last week I discussed Alex Marshall's take on the profitability of the Hong Kong Mass Transit Railway. As Alon Levy pointed out, the MTR does make an operating profit, so what I said was a little inaccurate. I said "Marshall responded that the Hong Kong MTR makes money on real estate and uses that money to subsidize its transit facilities." What Marshall actually said was that the Hong Kong MTR makes money on real estate and uses that money to supplement the income from its transit facilities. Here's the relevant paragraph from Marshall's blog post:

Hong Kong’s MTR is unusual in also actually making money from its fares as well. How it can do this relates in part the uniqueness of running trains on an intense few strips of land filled with development. But for our purposes it’s worth looking at its actions as a developer, and that as a model for transportation agencies and departments in this country.

Here Marshall acknowledges that the MTR makes an operating profit, but dismisses that as a consequence of "the uniqueness of running trains on an intense few strips of land filled with development," and thus not relevant "for our purposes."

Here I want to disagree with Marshall. I think the urban layout of Hong Kong is not unique for our purposes, and very relevant to the issue. In fact, people thinking only of the United States would say that "running trains on an intense few strips of land filled with development" is a great description of what the New York MTA and Port Authority do.

The development density, though, is only part of the story. It is one source of the MTR's operating profit, but only because it is Step 2 of the Magic Formula for Transit Ridership:

1. Give transit its own right-of-way and good terminals
2. Make it hard to use cars
3. Make it expensive to use cars
4. Profit!

The Mass Transit Railway has its own right-of-way. Hong Kong is one of the fifteen most expensive places to buy gas. And it is hard to drive there. But the density is only part of the reason it's hard to drive. The highways in Hong Kong are relatively few, and relatively narrow. If you're coming from the mainland there are at most fifteen lanes of traffic leading into the city.

New York may not make it quite as hard to use cars, but driving here is notoriously unpleasant and difficult. It is pretty expensive, except for the free bridges and highways, and the free or cheap parking.

What Marshall is neglecting, what too many transit advocates neglect, is the fact that transit is in competition with private cars driving on government-subsidized roads. If the roads are expanded or driving is made cheaper, transit ridership falls; I think we'll see a small drop in the Hong Kong MTR's profitability when the Central-Wan Chai Bypass is opened. If the roads are repurposed or driving is made more expensive, transit ridership rises and transit agencies become profitable.

This is why Marshall's interview and post are so frustrating. If we want the New York MTA to become profitable, we don't need it to buy a bunch of land and build high-rises on it. (In most of the city, the zoning would require them to build parking anyway.) Here are four steps that should do it:

1. Give buses at least one dedicated lane on every major bridge and tunnel.
2. Don't spend billions replacing the Goethals and Kosciuszko Bridges or the Pulaski Skyway. Tear down the Sheridan Expressway and any other highway that is "structurally deficient or functionally obsolete."
3. Institute market pricing to cross the East and Harlem River Bridges, and for parking.
4. Profit!

I know that Marshall is in favor of congestion pricing. He's probably in favor of market-rate parking pricing as well. He might even be in favor of some highway teardowns. Why didn't he say any of that to Andrea Bernstein?