Five reasons why the Tappan Zee sprawl should be stopped

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:

1. Sprawl puts teens, seniors, the poor and the disabled at a disadvantage.
2. Sprawl increases the pressure for hydrofracking.
3. Sprawl keeps Nyack, Suffern and the other towns from being Strong Towns with sustainable budgets.
4. Sprawl adds to pollution
   
5. 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

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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

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

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.

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?

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"?

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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...

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.