We can't depend on the Northeast Corridor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The railroads of Connecticut in 1893.

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

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

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

Rockland County is not being short-changed by the MTA

Rockland County Executive Scott Vanderhoef has been complaining for years that his county pays more to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority than they get back in the budget. Last year the county paid some consultants at Cambridge Systematics to analyze the 2010 MTA budget (PDF). They came back with a grave accusation: county residents and businesses sent $110 million in taxes, fees and fares to the MTA, but only got $68 million in services and capital improvements, for a "value gap" of $41.9 million.

Dana Rubenstein reports that on November 30, Vanderhoef wrote to the MTA, asking for an "exemption" for the county from the fare and toll hikes planned for March. "Common sense financial fairness would dictate, therefore, that Rockland County be exempt from the proposed fare increases," he wrote. "During my 20-year tenure as Rockland County Executive and a NYMTC Principal, it is with a deep conviction rooted in justice that I have fought for Rockland County’s fair share from the M.T.A. Rockland County is burdened by its orphan status as a New York community on the West side of the Hudson River—deep in NJ Transit territory."

MTA spokesman Aaron Donovan shot that one down. "Rockland residents enjoy higher property values, Rockland’s Metro-North commuters bring home higher salaries, and Rockland’s overall economy benefits from the regional economy and its robust transportation system. Rockland’s contribution to the M.T.A. supports its entire system, benefiting even the Rockland residents who commute to NYC by car and who wouldn’t be employed as police officers or firemen or construction workers or teachers in New York City if there were no MTA to make the City run."

Aaron is completely right, but he didn't even need to go there. When this study came out back in March, Ben Kabak posted the story, and Larry Littlefield nailed it in a comment on Ben's post: "Everyone has a value gap because much of the money is going to the past. They just don’t want to pay a share of the debt."

Sure enough, Rockland's share of the MTA's $1.91 billion debt service comes out to $41.9 million. The so-called "value gap" is just Rockland's share of the bond payments. The Cambridge Systematics report didn't pick up on that because they decided from the beginning to ignored debt service. Oh, and all this debt was racked up under Vanderhoef's comrade in arms Governor George Pataki, who Rockland voted for in 1994, 1996 and 2002.

As Rubenstein pointed out, Vanderhoef has been complaining that the MTA short-changes Rockland since 1997. It probably wasn't true then, and it's definitely not true now. I'm glad she's found people to call him on this, but none of them seem to pick up on the point that the entire "value gap" is nothing but payments on the debt that Vanderhoef himself supported.

Should Rockland get better transit service? Absolutely. But not to make things equal, just to fix the county's broken transportation system.

How the high Acela fares save taxpayers money

We know that Amtrak's Acela and Northeast Regional services are among the few Amtrak services that take in enough in tickets to cover their operating costs. We also know that the fares on those trains are considered high: they're higher than any parallel commuter rail line or bus. Malcolm Kenton of the National Association of Railroad Passengers (of which I am a card-carrying member) argues that without sufficient taxpayer support, these high fares are necessary. Here's how necessary they are:

First-class breakfast on the Acela. Photo: Christopher S. Penn / Flickr.

If you wanted to go from midtown Manhattan to New Haven on a weekday morning, you could pay $70 for a business class ticket on the Acela Express, or $123 for a first class ticket. There are 260 business class seats and 44 first class seats on every train, for an average fare of $77.67. Or you could pay $14.75 and take the Metro-North commuter train. That $14.75 is just 19% of the average Acela fare.

All those $70 and $123 fares add up: total Acela revenue from last October through July was $427,414,994. That's a 76% surplus over the operating costs of $242,800,000. That money could be used to buy more train cars or upgrade signals, but currently it seems to be used to cross-subsidize some of the less-profitable lines.

People complain about the high Acela fares, but they haven't gotten Amtrak to lower them. Imagine if they had! What if all Acela seats to New Haven cost $14.75? Then the total revenue from October to July would be $81,167,577, only a third of the cost. That leaves $162 million that would have to be paid by the taxpayer.

The story is similar for the Northeast Regional trains: $38 for coach, $57 for business class, for an average of $39.65. The total revenue for October through July was $446,466,387, a 21% surplus over the cost of $369,000,000. If all seats were $14.75, the trains would only bring in $166,078,642, 45% of the cost, requiring a taxpayer subsidy of $202,921,358.

Just to remind you: these are market rates, and the $374 first class round trip fare between New York and Boston is still a bargain compared to the $470 coach fare on the Delta air shuttle, let alone the $568 first class fare. The trains are mostly full. If Amtrak charged lower fares the trains would always be full, and a lot of people still wouldn't get a chance to ride. Lower fares wouldn't allow more people to ride, they would just give poorer people a better chance to ride.

The reason that there hasn't been much pressure on Amtrak to reduce its fares is because there is a cheaper alternative for people who can't afford to pay $38 to ride to New Haven. They can pay $14.75 for a Metro-North ticket, which takes half an hour longer, doesn't guarantee a seat and has no cafe car. Or they can pay $22 for a Greyhound or Peter Pan bus. They may even get a Megabus seat for $5. For those going to Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Wilmington or Washington, there are also Chinatown buses and Bolt Bus. That frees Amtrak from the requirement to offer charity service in the Northeast Corridor and allows them to charge market rate fares.

Why we shouldn't extend Metro-North on the Hudson Line

Mid Hudson News reports that Metro-North is still no longer considering extending service to northern Dutchess County. I'm not sure who was asking, but there you have it.

Many years ago, there was a proposal to extend service past Poughkeepsie, with stops in Hyde Park, Staatsburg, Rhinecliff and Tivoli. There was significant NIMBY opposition, and I was all ready to cuss out those transit haters, but the more I looked at it, the more their objections made sense.

It was the same problem I had with the Northern Branch plan, but even more so, because the planners expected almost every rider to drive and park. None of those stations have anything resembling the walkable suburban downtowns of Englewood and Tenafly.

To generate enough walk-up demand for the service, you'd essentially need to rezone the area to create a whole new Tarrytown, Irvington, Dobbs Ferry and Hastings. Which might be nice, but do we really need that development eighty miles from Manhattan?

We need to look at what our goals are, and how a Metro-North extension might serve them. If people are driving too much in Dutchess County, replacing a small number of large lots with new walkable suburbs will not make the existing residents drive less.

There are small things we could do. Extend some trains to Marist and Hyde Park, and maybe the CIA, to capture some of the student and tourist travel. But that's a relatively small segment of the market; would it be worth running ten-car trains?

The largest existing town without train service in Dutchess County is Fishkill. Emily from IRidetheHarlemLine.com thought it was funny that someone would want to ask Metro-North President Howard Permut about restoring passenger service on the Beacon/Maybrook Line that the railroad owns, but it's not such a strange question. Of all the potential Dutchess County service expansions it's the one that would have the greatest ridership. It runs through the most densely populated parts of Beacon and Fishkill.

At this point it might not be worthwhile running trains all the way to Derby, Danbury or even Brewster, but a local group has proposed a shuttle from the Beacon Station to Matteawan and Fishkill. You could also run a shuttle from Croton, timed to connect with the incoming local from Grand Central.

The State is planning to upgrade the Hudson Line to improve Amtrak service. Dutchess County could use more intercity service, and restoring service to Pittsfield through Amenia, Millerton and Chatham, perhaps run by Amtrak, would capture a significant portion of the weekend crowd that currently drives up the Taconic Parkway.

Emily actually asked Permut about service north of the current terminus in Wassaic, and he mentioned that he was involved in planning the current service. "If I remember correctly, the rail trail was already in existence to Millerton, so we would have had a huge obstacle," Permut said. "How do you de-map a rail trail? There would have been significant opposition." More proof that rail-trails are not good for transit.

Of course, my question for Permut, which Emily did not ask, was "If you could tear down one highway in the region, which one do you think would increase Metro-North ridership the most?" Dutchess County actually doesn't have many highways. There's one interstate (84), plus the Taconic Parkway. There are some relatively short limited-access sections of Routes 9, 44 and 55.

I would probably first get rid of the "Arterials" in Poughkeepsie, a horrible plan where two neighborhood avenues were turned into three-lane segments of a one-way pair, simultaneously killing both the pedestrian environment and commerce on Main Street. I'm baffled that the arrangement has lasted as long as it has, and I can only surmise that that's because no New Urbanist has ever visited Poughkeepsie. Restoring the Arterials to neighborhood streets, and restoring Main Street to east-west traffic, would make a lot more people want to live within walking distance of the train station. Green tracks trolleys on the former "Arterial" streets would bring more people to the train without driving.

All that said, if we really want to reduce driving in the metropolitan area, it's probably better to focus on other areas than Dutchess County. According to reports compiled by the EPA, Dutchess only accounts for two percent of the region's vehicle-miles traveled. Meanwhile, Nassau accounts for 8% of VMT, and Suffolk 13%. If only they had train service...

The transportation-land use cycle, illustrated

The transportation-land use cycle, illustrated by the Village of Piermont, NY and its environs:

The road builders say, "Everyone wants to drive, and a road will create jobs. That's why we have to build a big road!"


The employers say, "There's a big road, and everyone wants to drive, and I want to work near my house in the suburbs. That's why we'll build an office park!"

The town planners say, "There's a big road to the office park, and everyone wants to drive, and we're afraid they'll take our parking. That's why we need to require parking for everyone!"

The retail developers say, "The town requires parking, and everyone wants to drive, and it will boost our rents. That's why we need to build parking!"

The residential developers say, "The town requires parking, and everyone wants to drive, and it will boost our sales prices. That's why we need to build parking!"

The residents say, "There's all this parking, and everyone wants to drive, and it will be more convenient. That's why we need to buy a car!"

The transit planners say, "Everyone who lives around here owns a car, and everyone wants to drive, and it will bring more passengers. That's why we need to build a park-and-ride!"

The road-builders say, "Everyone is driving to the park-and-ride, and a road will create jobs. That's why we have to build a bigger road!"

Photo: Kate Hinds / Transportation Nation

When does it end?

Image: Transit Nerds (Jeff Wood) / Flickr

(FYI, the older parts of Piermont are a bit more progressive on parking.)

About that value gap...

Ben Kabak picked up on an interesting story: Cambridge Systematics has just completed an analysis of the 2010 MTA budget on commission for Rockland County, and found a "value gap" of $41,930,000. According to Cambridge, in 2010 Rockland residents and businesses paid $110 million in taxes, fees and fares, but only got $68.0 million in services and capital improvements. The report says that the county can either withdraw from the MTA (which would have to be approved by the State Legislature) or work out some kind of "Value Gap Reduction," such as:

• the MTA paying to subsidize bus service in Rockland
• suspension of fees at MTA park-and-ride lots
• increase in payments to the "DORF Fund," set up in 1988 by Tim Conway to address precisely these kinds of payment imbalances in the three counties of Dutchess, Orange and Rockland
• decreasing Rockland's payments to the MTA
• increase in MTA service in Rockland, for example suspending fees at MTA park-and-ride lots

Yes, the Cambridge consultants recommended reducing parking fees twice in the same bullet list. And yes, increasing service is at the bottom of the list. You can tell where these people have their priorities. But there's much worse in the report. Larry Littlefield won't shut up about pension and debt service, and he's absolutely right. In a comment on Second Avenue Sagas, Larry wrote,

Right, did they include the cost of debts, the cost of past pensions, and the cost of retiree health care in their analysis? Everyone has a value gap because much of the money is going to the past. They just don’t want to pay a share of the debt.

I think Ben scared people off the report (PDF) by calling it "a rather technical explanation," but it answers Larry's question. It's pretty clear that they include costs for pensions and retiree health care in the operating budgets, but right there on page 8 they say, "No debt service payments are included."
So what would debt service be? Further down on Page 8, Cambridge says that they calculated Rockland's benefits from the MTA Capital Construction budget by multiplying it by 2.19%, since Rockland has "2.19% of region’s population and jobs (US Census and Bureau of Labor Statistics)."

So if we multiply the MTA's total debt service of $1.91 billion by 2.19%, Rockland's share of the debt comes to $41.92 million, which is almost exactly the same as the "Value Gap." In other words, Larry is spot on. Rockland County has the same Value Gap that we all have: the MTA's debt. Larry continues:

And speaking of debt, did Rockland go for Pataki all those years? In that case, they voted in favor of it.

Why yes they did! according to Dave Leip, Rockland voted for Pataki 54.3% in 1994, 62.9% in 1998 and 62.7% in 2002. And of course in 2010, over 99% of Rockland County voted for one of the six anti-transit candidates.

At this point, though, it's worth asking what we mean by "fair." Should every county get back exactly what they pay into the MTA? Or should Rockland, with a median household income of $67,971, perhaps pay more per capita than the Bronx, with a median household income of $27,611? On the other hand, maybe we should separate transit from charity. Maybe, in fact, Rockland should get a greater share of the transit capital budget to compensate for the destruction wrought by the Tappan Zee Bridge, the Palisades Parkway and I-287.

So what if we did want them to get another $42 million a year in transit funding? Reducing payments and suspending park-and-ride fees are not going to improve Rockland's transportation situation. Increasing payments to the "DORF Fund" would help if it led to an increase in transit coverage, but not if it just allows Rockland to cut their own transit subsidies. Paying for Sunday service on the Tappan Zee Express bus? That's a no-brainer.

One of the many drains on Rockland County's budget is underutilized transit infrastructure.

Here's an interesting one: "MTA could provide funds to establish a dedicated BRT/bus service on portions of the Piermont Line and Route 59 in Rockland County." I've said that if there's "BRT" anywhere in Rockland, it should be on Route 59 and not the Thruway, but this is one issue where Cambridge Systematics is more radical than the Tri-State Transportation Campaign.

The best use of that money would be to reactivate the Northern Branch all the way through Sparkill, Piermont and Nyack, to take advantage of the dense, walkable development that already exists near the old train stations. And of course, if we tear down the Tappan Zee Bridge and don't replace it, the transit will need a lot less in the way of subsidies and Rockland's budget will be in a lot better shape.

Background on the high-income transit riders

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.

Westchester-Rockland Pick-a-Mix

In browsing the Tappan Zee study documents, I occasionally come across a really useful nugget, and the latest one is on Page 7-3 of Chapter 7 of the Transit Mode Selection Report (PDF). It's a cute little pair of tables supporting a pair of charts. Don't look at the charts, they're just there to argue that commuter rail on the full corridor is too expensive.

The value of these charts is that they provide a breakdown of the cost estimates of individual components of the bridge, and taken with the figures on Page 3 of the Preliminary Financial Assessment (PDF), we get a fairly complete picture. This information is hard to come by, either as a deliberate plan to favor road construction, or out of general obtuseness, depending on how much you want to use Hanlon's razor.

Code	Component	Cost in millions
BHB1	Bridge with HO/T lanes	$ 5,180
BR1	Commuter rail capacity on bridge	1,220
RWH1	Highway "improvements" (widening)	1,800
RB1	Rockland HO/T lanes	263
RB1	Rockland busway	800
WB1	Westchester bus lanes	560
WB2	Westchester busway	2,210
RR1	Rockland commuter rail	4,410
WR1	Rail connection to Hudson Line	1,500
WR2	Westchester light rail	2,295
WR3	Westchester commuter rail	7,080
WR3	Westchester commuter rail	7,080

The $16 billion figure (estimated to be $23 billion after inflation and debt service) you often hear bandied about comes from the current Alternative 4D: in Tier 1, BHB1 + RWH1 = $6,980,000; in Tier 2, RB1 + RR1 + WB1 + WR1 = $8,383,000. However, as I've written before, the organization into tiers was completely arbitrary and decided behind closed doors, subject to none of the rigorous and intensive public participation requirements of the rest of the project.

You can kinda sorta see why they would want to build the bridge before putting in the "BRT" lanes (they're actually High Occupancy/Toll lanes and don't qualify for federal transit funding), but there's absolutely no reason why the $1.9 billion in "Highway Improvements" (reconstructing the Thruway interchange with the Westchester Expressway at Exit 8 and widening the Thruway from the bridge west to Exit 12) need to be done before anything else. So I'm going to do my own Pick-A-Mix, and I suggest you try yours.

Phase 1: WB2 + RB1 = only $823 million, but I would make the Rockland "BRT" a real exclusive bus lane connecting to a reversible bus lane in the middle of the existing bridge. The total cost would be well below $4 billion dollars, and it might just take enough cars off the bridge so that there would no longer be any justification for replacing the bridge.

If the demand is there, Phase 2 would be BBH1 + BR1 + RR1 + WR1, for a total of $12,310,000. The total is slightly more than the current DOT proposal, but you could probably shave a few million off that by only building six general-traffic lanes on the bridge instead of eight. What's your mix?

A simple solution to the commuter parking crunch

Today, Ben at Second Avenue Sagas linked to a Wall Street Journal article about the MTA's plans to raise parking fees at its commuter railroad stations. He ends on a note of concern that commuters who are priced out of their parking spots will drive all the way to the city instead.

I can reassure Ben here that this will not increase the number of commuters driving to the city. The article's author, Andrew Grossman, also could have reassured Ben if he had provided some important additional information.

The key here is that parking is in high demand along Metro-North and Long Island Railroad stations. Most stations have wait lists for their parking permits, at some stations customers can wait eight years. Fees vary from $200 a year to almost $1000. Some stations have implemented valet parking to try and squeeze more cars into lots.

I don't blame Ben for not knowing this, but I do blame Grossman for not putting it in his article. Don't tell me there's no one at the Wall Street Journal who's on the wait list for a parking spot at a Metro-North station. Grossman didn't bother to ask, possibly because it suited him and his boss, Rupert Murdoch, to have a story about the MTA vs. the unions, possibly because he was under a tight deadline and went with the simplest frame.

There's something else that Grossman left out. He is a transportation reporter, but he works at, you know, the Wall Street Journal, so you'd think that when he's writing an article about money he would ask someone who knows about money. Like WSJ economics reporter Conor Dougherty, who did a nice article three years ago about Donald Shoup and parking pricing. He might have been able to inform Ben that it's possible to set parking prices to keep the lots about 85% full, so that there is always a space for people who want to park.

Sure, some people will be unable to afford the more expensive fees, and maybe they will drive to the city, or maybe they will walk or take a bus to the train station, or even take a bus all the way to the city. Maybe they weren't even using the spots: the Times quotes Rye City Clerk Dawn Nodarse as a witness to all kinds of market distortions:

The problem fuels itself, she said: As the waiting list gets longer and longer, people who have changed jobs or even retired become increasingly reluctant to relinquish their permits, in case they need them again.

“Maybe they go into the city twice a month, but they know that it takes so long to get the permit, so they hang onto it,” Ms. Nodarse said. “We can’t force people to give up their permits.”

Whatever they do, their spots will be taken by those on the waiting list, who may be driving to the city today. At worst, there will be no change in the number of people driving to the city. At best, it may decrease the numbers. And in all cases, it will bring the subsidy level for the commuter railroads down a bit, closer to the level of NYC transit.

Of course, in the end park-and-rides are not the answer, and should have some kind of sunset provision. Maybe the MTA should just keep raising the parking fees past the Shoupian ideal, using the extra money to subsidize local jitneys and building transit-oriented development on the space that gets freed up.

Other Tappan Zee Bridge possibilities

In my post on the Tri-State Transportation Campaign's strategy for redirecting the Tappan Zee replacement and expansion towards transit and transit-oriented development, I wrote that, yes, I can see the strategy, and if it works it could transform Rockland from New York's answer to Raleigh, NC into a place where someone might actually want to walk around, with downtowns that function. If it works.

What if it doesn't work? Well, last year the State DOT split the environmental impact studies into a "highway phase" and a "transit phase." Of course, the highway phase comes first, and the transit phase may never happen. Tri-State's own intern, Paul Murphy, warned about the possibility. It's a trick that's been pulled many times.

If the transit phase never comes to pass, we'll have a bridge that's five lanes in each direction including one for "high occupancy/toll" vehicles, and there will probably still only be 1500 bus passengers per day. This would raise the private-auto mode share from 98.3% to 99.7%. It will probably also cost $23 billion dollars, a truly staggering amount, of which only $3.3 billion has been found.

Tri-State's Steven Higashide writes about finding federal money as though there's a limitless supply. There isn't. Even though the feds can theoretically print money, they are constrained by the influence of budget hawks, and the share that any given state gets is limited by inter-regional power plays. That means that this $20 billion has to come from somewhere. It will probably come from transit funds, including money that would otherwise have been available for the Second Avenue Subway, Metro-North to Penn Station, citywide BRT, Northeast Corridor upgrades, and every other deserving project you can think of. Like Boston's Big Dig, this could wind up sucking the cash out of every transit project for years, leaving us unable to build anything but a series of unconnected, slow, inefficient bus tunnels.

Even if, as Higashide writes, funding could come from user fees like Thruway tolls, parking fees or gas taxes, those fees could also potentially be used to fund transit, but would not be available if they're taken by the Tappan Zee Bridge project. Some of the other options are much worse: tax increment financing districts and income taxes would take money from people who may not even drive.

What bothers me a little bit is that it seems like Tri-State is actually trying to help the State DOT to find funding for this project. It's true that the transit costs are slightly more than half: $8.9 billion out of the total $16 billion estimated in preliminary financials (PDF). So you might expect people to feel that transit advocates ought to find some of the cash.

But let's look at another possibility: what if nobody can find enough funding and the bridge never gets built? If no one pays for anything, it would eventually just be condemmed, and shut down for years like the Poughkeepsie Bridge. But if we can find $3.3 billion, that's enough to cover the cost of the rehab. And if transit advocates can find another $2.5 billion, it would pay for a fully grade-separated busway from Suffern to Port Chester.


Commenter "Anon" on the Tri-State blog doesn't think that BRT on the existing bridge would fly. "You are not going to get the Suburban populations of Rockland and Westchester to give up a general use lane to bus only especially considering the current backups." At this point, probably not.

But what would happen, land-use-wise, if we did nothing? Would these counties continue to sprawl? I doubt it. Sprawl needs roads to survive. If you don't build any more road capacity, it will stagnate and fester. If you take away road capacity, it will wither. Westchester and Rockland have pretty much run out of room, and will have to densify if they get any more population growth. Since the general consensus is that the price of gasoline is going to go up, we'll probably see more people switching to transit and moving from sprawl to walkable neighborhoods, either in Rockland or elsewhere. Finally, whatever form the ARC tunnel takes, it will make commuting by train from Rockland much easier, fostering transit-oriented development there. Without the bridge widening, a constituency for transit will grow steadily until there is broad-based support for funding and building a real solution. That possibility is the most promising to me.

It all hinges on whether funding for the $7.1 billion in highway components will be found. If the State DOT finds it, the best position for Tri-State to be in is the pleasant helper; they can then envelop and redirect. If the State DOT doesn't find the money, all Tri-State has to do is to wait and be ready to influence Plan B.

But what if it is Tri-State's help that gets the funding? Between the overall cost and the uncertainty of the transit component, I worry that this project will do more harm than good. While it's certainly impressive to get the State DOT to support transit-oriented development workshops, I don't think that those are worth the downsides. It's a very dangerous game that Tri-State is playing, and I sure hope they have an ace or two up their sleeves that I don't know about.

Transit versus highways in Connecticut

Last week I argued that a two-way dedicated busway on the Long Island Expressway would help make bus service between New York and points north and east faster and more reliable. That would boost ridership on these services, making the for-profit companies more reliable and the government agencies less dependent on subsidies.

Joel Azumah has been weighing the potential profits to be gained from running buses to New Haven, so I asked him what he thought. He observed, "I think CT's bus issues stem more from I-95 being erratic when it comes to congestion."

I've been thinking a bit about this corridor lately, since both Metro-North and Connecticut Transit are facing budget cuts. It got me wondering what the government might be doing to subsidize driving there. It turns out to be quite a lot.

1937: Hutchinson River Parkway
1938: Merritt Parkway
1949: Wilbur Cross Parkway
1958: New England Thruway and Connecticut Turnpike
1967: I-84
1974: I-684
1988: I-691
2001: Widen Turnpike in Stamford
2004: Widen Turnpike in Bridgeport

You could argue that the tolls on the Turnpike were "user fees," so that all the highways built or maintained with this money were not directly subsidized. That argument went out the window when the state removed the toll booths on the Turnpike in 1985. At the time politicians tried to claim that it would be paid with an increase in the gas tax. Regardless, it's clear that the State of Connecticut has been spending billions to help people drive quickly in the corridors that parallel the New Haven line.

This affects the amount of subsidy required for Metro-North and Amtrak, and thus the number of trains that can be run and the fares charged. As Azumah observed, it also affects the profitability of Greyhound, Peter Pan and any other bus lines that might want to operate in that area. It even affects the service and fares on the buses paid by CT Transit, because many people use these highways for local trips, reducing bus ridership and starving them of revenues.

What could transit advocates do to restore competitiveness to transportation in this area? First of all, oppose any new widening projects. There are currently none that I know of on the horizon, but there are lots for the Turnpike east of New Haven. Second, press for tolls to be reintroduced, not just on the Turnpike but on the Merritt and Wilbur Cross, and on I-84, I-684 and I-691. Tolls on the Turnpike should be set at rates that would return traffic to levels where it will not interfere with intercity bus operations. Other options would be to use some of the lanes added in Stamford and Bridgeport as dedicated bus lanes.

New Haven bike-n-wifi bus update

Following the comments on SeeClickFix is a little difficult because of all the repetitive "Another person wants this fixed!" auto-comments. But in among those on the New Haven BoltBus issue (discussed here previously) are a few interesting news items. User Mark points to a Yale Daily News squib that reports that TransportAzumah CEO Joel Azumah has taken interest in the market. "Azumah said he is currently drafting a tentative schedule for the service to show the New Haven community, adding that if feedback is good, the line should run in time for Thanksgiving break."

Some readers will remember TransportAzumah as one of the more entrepreneurial bus operators in the New York area. It was Azumah who stepped in when Coachusa dropped the 144 route from Staten Island to Jersey City in 2007. He was rewarded for this by seeing the MTA run competing service; watch this video for Azumah's take on the events, plus a jaw-dropping quote from now-Congressman McMahon.

If the New Haven riders are looking for Boltbus comforts on the cheap, they probably won't get leather seats from Azumah. On the Staten Island run, customers complained that the buses were old and not very well-maintained - particularly regarding the bathroom plumbing. Azumah also has a relatively small fleet and contracts out with other operators for any additional buses he needs; consequently he has less control over the amenities on the ride. But it's clear that if he had had more than six months before he had to compete against subsidized service, he would probably have been able to take care of some of those issues.

Azumah is young, techno-savvy, and a regular contributor to various online transit forums around the New York area (like BusChat). I'm sure he understands the value - and potential draw - of onboard wifi. I'm guessing by his name that he has probably also been to Ghana and seen how for-profit transit operators act in a true free market. He has released a detailed proposal for express bus service from Long Island, and I think he may also be the author of this one for restoring competition to NYC buses. He might be able to set up the Boltbus-style dynamic ticketing scheme that the New Haven residents like so much. His entry into the New Haven discussion - and his potential entry into the market - could really bring a lot.

The magic of Metro-North

In my last post I gave 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!

In response, Alon Levy writes:

You don't need steps 2 and 3. Transit already has a high modal share on the market it serves well, namely suburb-to-CBD commutes. Even Metro-North, which competes with numerous free bridges and parkways, achieves an 80% market share for commutes into Manhattan.

Alon is more or less right, in that Metro-North has a tremendous advantage over cars in terms of rush-hour trips to Manhattan. However, I would argue that Steps 2 and 3 are partially being followed. It's not like it's smooth sailing and completely free to drive from Scarsdale to Midtown. Either you pay the toll on the Henry Hudson or the Triboro, or you sit in traffic at the "free" Fifth Avenue Bridge. Either you pay a tremendous amount of money for parking every month, or you've got a "free" parking placard. Any of these scenarios, you probably spend at least half an hour stuck in traffic somewhere. It's not ideal, the way it would be if we had true cordon pricing or market-rate parking with no placards. But it is a deterrent to driving, and probably accounts for that high mode share.

So Metro-North has an 80% mode share, but it only has 59% farebox recovery. This is actually the best ratio of any commuter railroad in the country; the next highest are the MBTA with 54.1, New Jersey Transit tied with the South Shore Line in Chicago with 51.5 each, SEPTA with 50.9, LA's Metrolink with 50.3, and the LIRR with 46.3. Why are they all so low? Well, Metro-North's ridership (passenger miles per revenue mile) is only 37.4. This may seem high compared to the buses, but remember that Metro-North's M7 train cars have 101 or 110 seats, depending on whether they have the bathroom or not.

I know what you're thinking: it's that fucking middle seat! Nobody wants to sit in it. But you'd be wrong. If the trains had 64 people per car, they would make a profit and no one would ever have to sit in the middle seat.

One of the shortcomings of the Magic Formula is that it only applies to a particular origin/destination pair, and it succeeds for trips to Manhattan. In the rush hour, the trains are pretty much full. If there are some middle seats free, there are probably more people standing. In other words, those trips are making a profit. It's the system as a whole that's not making a profit, and that must mean that the off-peak trips aren't making a profit. Certainly if you ride Metro-North at night or on weekends, you'll see plenty of cars that are less than 64% full. Although there are plenty of carfree households in Westchester, there are plenty of people who use the train for their commute and a car for shopping and socializing.

On one level, of course, it's a good thing that the trains run all day, seven days a week. Metro-North could probably make a profit by only running trains during rush hour, like VRE. But then Westchester would look even more like Northern Virginia than it already does. As Jarrett wrote, "A profit-oriented operator will tend to skimp on late-evening service, for example, but you need really good late-evening service, even if unprofitable, to make lower car ownership viable on a large scale."

So if we wanted Metro-North to be profitable, we'd have to make evening and late-night service profitable. One way of doing that is to save money on fare collection. The conductors are quaint and helpful, and I don't want to see anyone get laid off, but we seriously don't need four or five people on every train. A proof-of-payment system would probably save a ton of money and make it possible to break even with forty or fifty people per train. Maybe Jay Walder will do that.

We could also apply the Magic Formula to the most popular night and weekend routes. What if we restored the parkways (Bronx River, Saw Mill, Hutch, Taconic and Cross County) to parkway design standards - four lanes with green space on the sides and a multi-use trail? What if we ran trolleys down the middle of Routes 1, 9, 22 and 100, in dedicated rights-of-way appropriated from cars where possible? What if we tolled the major crossings of the Croton Reservoir and River system?

Of course, if we made the whole Metro-North system profitable, those profits would probably be used to cross-subsidize the other MTA services. So any profitability boosting strategies should be applied across the board.

Greyhound is not a government agency

New Haven residents, apparently, have spent so much time with government-run transit agencies that they've forgotten how to deal with a for-profit company. That's the message I'm getting from this Design New Haven post featured on Streetsblog.net this morning. The SeeClickFix website (founded in New Haven) is a forum for people to post local non-emergency issues that they would like their government to act on. "About 1 month ago," SeeClickFix co-founder Ben Berkowitz posted an issue, "Bolt Bus Should Run From New Haven to New York," which has become one of the most popular "fixes." It has attracted the attention of Alderman Greg Morehead, who sponsored a resolution that was passed unanimously by the Board of Aldermen on Tuesday, and has used the issue in his re-election campaign.

In theory, this is nice to see: people want transit! But note that the New Haven-New York route is not exactly transit-starved. Metro-North runs hourly commuter rail service ($14), supplemented by more frequent trains during peak times. Amtrak runs almost-hourly Regional service ($26) and an additional almost-hourly Acela Express service ($61). Peter Pan and Greyhound also run a total of ten daily buses between the two cities ($25). If you're in Union Station (the initial suggestion for this desired Bolt Bus service) you've got four options at three different price points.

So why do so many people want BoltBus? It can't be for the company: BoltBus is just a special premium service offered by Greyhound (which in turn is owned by the Scottish company FirstGroup). It could be the price: Bolt uses computerized airline-style variable pricing, with at least one seat on every bus selling for a few dollars. But the Yale Daily News writes, "Greyhound Lines spokesman Timothy Stokes said the company has no plans to expand the BoltBus to New Haven, or any other city." They've clearly decided that at this point they're not going to make money by running the Bolt service to New Haven, so the New Haven residents couldn't be pressuring them to run it at a loss, could they?

But it could be the service: Bolt has free wifi and electrical outlets, more legroom and leather seats. They also have a friendlier policy towards bicycles, allowing them to be stowed in the luggage compartments without being boxed up. The other services can't match all these features: Amtrak has the legroom and electrical outlets, but they don't allow unboxed bikes on the Northeast Corridor or offer wifi. Metro-North allows bikes on off-peak trains, but doesn't have any of the other amenities.

So let's assume that it's the service. Why does it have to be Bolt? On the New York to Boston run there are at least two competitors. Megabus (owned by another Scottish company, Stagecoach) also offers wifi and electrical outlets, with a similar pricing scheme. Limoliner offers wifi and outlets, plus wider seats, more legroom and an attendant, and just started running to Hartford for a flat price of $49 (which is probably beyond the budgets of most students, even Yalies). No word on the bicycle policy. Did anyone from New Haven approach Megabus or Limoliner?

Since Stagecoach recently sold most of their New England bus operations to Peter Pan, and Peter Pan operates under an agreement with Greyhound, Megabus may be unwilling to enter the New Haven to New York market. But there are a number of other bus operators in the region, many of which serve the nearby Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun casinos. If there are profits to be made, one of them could probably be convinced to outfit their buses with the necessary amenities and make the run. Or even a brand new start-up.

If there are profits to be made. That's the big question, isn't it? Apparently Greyhound doesn't think so - or at least, not enough to justify putting resources into right now. On the other hand, they are currently rolling out wifi, outlets and legroom under their own brand on their most popular routes, and maybe New Haven will come soon. But if the New Haven residents really think Greyhound is wrong, why not prove it? Yale has an economics department, and a world-renowned MBA program. Surely they could find a grad student willing to spend a day crunching the numbers. If they're good enough, it would convince any bus operator.

And if there aren't profits to be made? I don't think any amount of aldermanic resolutions are going to convince a private company to subsidize intercity bus travel. There's not even any point in asking the government to subsidize the service, since there's already subsidized transit between the two cities. It doesn't have wifi, but beggars can't be choosers. If it's wifi you want, then you'd have better luck petitioning Metro-North to install wifi.

The bottom line is that this isn't really an issue for government. But I would like to see better bus service, so I hope that the people of New Haven can get the numbers crunched and find out that it really could be profitable for someone.

Video: Grand Central

PBS's The American Experience on the construction of Grand Central first aired in February. Special appearance by Jill Jonnes.

Interestingly, it discusses how the construction of the terminal was financed by leasing the air rights - one of the first times this was done, and something real estate developers and train agencies have been trying to replicate around the city ever since.

I definitely appreciate lots of things about Grand Central, but I do wish it still had a nice big train shed.

My head exploded

Jim Cameron of the Connecticut Rail Commuter Council tells Newsday, "I don't know why we're talking about encouraging people to use mass transit when the DOT isn't doing anything to increase parking at the stations."