Our third world airport

I remember when Joe Biden remarked that LaGuardia Airport felt like the Third World to him. I remember thinking, "What the fuck is this guy talking about?" I thought about writing something, but my thoughts were kind of messy and it felt kind of hopeless, so I moved on to something else. Now I'm kicking myself.

I generally like Biden. He has a long record of not only supporting Amtrak but riding it himself, although with all his support it seems bizarre that the company would only have one line going through his state, with two stops. And I like how he seems to genuinely speak his mind.

But I've been to the Third World. Dominicans may not like me calling their country third world, but their airport is a bit lacking in the air conditioning department. I think we can all agree that Abidjan is third world, and when I was there they didn't have jet bridges. You get off the plane, go down the stairs and walk across the tarmac to the gate. Not a bad airport, all in all, but not in the same league as any airport I've been to in the United States. LaGuardia has good air conditioning, and it has fully functioning jet bridges.

I've also flown into a lot of airports with good reputations: Heathrow, Charles de Gaulle, Keflavík, JFK's Terminal 5. I honestly don't see what the big deal is. I like Terminal 5 because they have Cibo. If I could get some fresh vegetables with dip, and a decent ice coffee, to take on the plane at LaGuardia I would be happy.

If I've ever had a problem flying into or out of LaGuardia it's been the crappy bus connections. I hate waiting a long time for a bus to come, and then when it does it's packed with people who got on at the other terminal. I hate how the buses have to fight with all the cars and taxis to get to the curb. I hate how in the winter the curb is blocked by taxis. The Q70 is a big improvement, but there's still a long way to go.

Somehow, whenever people talk about how awful LaGuardia is, they never mention how the buses are blocked by taxis. It's always the low ceilings, and maybe somebody once saw a rat. I've never seen a rat there. I've never noticed the low ceilings, in fact some of them are pretty high. I kind of like the architecture. When I was a kid the Central Terminal would occasionally pop up in my dreams. The new terminals aren't bad for what they are. The Marine Air Terminal is a fucking Art Deco monument.

What would make the biggest difference to me would be a direct train there from Woodside, or even from Astoria (and no, just because it was politically unfeasible in 1995 doesn't mean it's politically unfeasible twenty years later). Andrew Cuomo likes to style himself as the Bold Leader who Gets Things Done. If he really were, he would extend the goddamn N train and tell Gianaris to grow a spine and get on board. But instead we get a proposal for a shitty AirTrain that would dump all the LaGuardia passengers at Willets Point, twenty minutes further out in Queens. That's not boldness, that's cowardice. That's Cuomo running away from a challenge.

What would really make a difference to me would be if we took that four or ten or twenty billion dollars and used it to build a new train along 21st Street and Astoria Boulevard, or the Tribororx, or a Queens Super-Express, or the Subway to Secaucus, or basically any transit improvement that would be used on a daily basis by people who don't work at the airport.

I'll tell you what it is that makes LaGuardia a Third World airport. It's the authoritarian, top-down approach taken by our Governor, and yes our Vice President, who have never come through here or sent staff members to ask what we might want or need. It's the plutocratic approach that puts the optics of the business traveler ahead of the convenience of families going to visit relatives. It's the cowardice of building a flashy AirTrain to nowhere instead of taking on the entrenched elites who want to block a really useful train. It makes me feel like I live in a goddamn banana republic.

(Dragon appears courtesy of the Durian-Project of the Blender Foundation.)

The transportation hypocrisy of civil libertarians

It was in the news yesterday that the Drug Enforcement Administration paid an Amtrak employee over $800,000 over twenty years for confidential passenger information that it could have gotten for free. The Albuquerque Journal reported in April 2001 that they were getting it through "a computer with access to Amtrak's ticketing information." People like Senator Grassley are spinning it as government waste, but to me there's a bigger story: why should Amtrak have given this information to the DEA in the first place?

That was the response of the American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico back in 2001, and they were then "pondering whether to take legal action." A few months later they clearly had bigger fish to fry, so it's understandable why this issue went on the back burner.

Photo: Joseph Barillari / Wikipedia

What's not understandable is why transit freedom has gone on the back burner, and pretty much stayed there, since 2001. Some of you may actually be too young to know that before then, you could board an intercity bus or train without giving your name or showing identification. You just walked up to the ticket counter and handed over your cash.

I've been taking Trailways buses since I was a kid, and I remember when it all changed, sometime shortly after September 11, 2001. I walked up to the ticket window at the Port Authority and asked for a ticket, and the person asked for my name. "Why?" "Security." "I don't want my name on some list!" "Nobody's going to put your name on a list." I sounded like a goddamn schizophrenic. After some back-and-forth he said, "Just give me a name!" Okay, I gave him a name that could plausibly have been a nickname for me, but wasn't, and he put it in the computer - and on some list, of course. Soon after that, they began requiring photo ID or a credit card to buy the tickets. I think they even tried to get the drivers to check the photo ID before they let people on the bus, but that one at least didn't fly.

What has amazed me to this day is that there was absolutely no mention of any of this by anyone but me. People complain (with good reason) about taking off their shoes at airports and about no-fly lists, and even about draconian treatment on buses near the Mexican border, but I don't remember seeing a single mention of buses or trains requiring a name for intercity tickets. Hell, I still don't know what counts as intercity. I don't have to give my name for a ticket to Nyack or Poughkeepsie, but I do for a ticket to New Paltz.

But what really burns me up is when civil libertarians complain about license plate scans or toll surveillance. Driving is not a right, it's a privilege, especially in a place like New York where transit is plentiful. And these civil libertarians don't even acknowledge that the MTA has a record of the movements of everyone who buys a Metrocard with a credit card.

And yes, it's true that potential criminals or even terrorists can use buses and trains to move around. But we live in a free country, where it's not a crime to be a potential criminal or terrorist, or just someone who doesn't want to drive. Or at least we used to.

Along the Chemical Coast to Staten Island

People seem to be captivated by the unused stretch of the Staten Island Railroad along the North Shore of the island. It makes sense to do something with it, because it's the part of Staten Island with the poorest population and the lowest car ownership. But the whole discussion is pathetic, ranging from the sorta reasonable (restore the Staten Island Railroad passenger service to Arlington) to the mildly faddish (light rail!) to the moronic (bus rapid transit!). For some reason, people love the idea of extending the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail over the Bayonne Bridge and connecting it to either the North Shore line or the West Shore line.

Hardly anyone looks west across the Arthur Kill to Elizabeth. That makes some sense, because I'm guessing that most of the people who are commuting outside the borough are going to jobs in Manhattan. But it's short-sighted, because it ignores the fact that there's a railroad bridge that was restored to full functionality in 2007.

Back in 2008 I talked about running the trains to connect to the Northeast Corridor in Elizabeth or Newark, but then you're still only in Elizabeth or Newark and you have to change trains. Fortunately, there's another train to connect to, and a right-of-way with plenty of room to connect them.

Right now there are PATH trains from 33rd Street to Hoboken, from the World Trade Center to Hoboken, and from the World Trade Center to Newark. But the train from 33rd Street west stops at Journal Square, presumably because there isn't enough ridership to run the trains all the way to Newark.

This train can be extended to Staten Island - or else it can be extended to Newark, and the trains from the World Trade Center can be extended to Staten Island. How would they get there? On the Chemical Coast.

The Chemical Coast Line is a freight railroad with a wonderfully evocative name, originally part of the Central Railroad of New Jersey. Like the Arthur Kill Lift Bridge, it is lightly used. We wouldn't want the PATH trains to share tracks with chemical tank cars, but there is plenty of room in the right-of-way and on adjacent properties for two tracks of dedicated passenger service.

The single-track Arthur Kill Lift Bridge sees three freight trains a day. The main concern is how often the bridge would need to be raised to allow ships to pass under it. The current PATH train to Newark runs every four minutes during rush hours and every fifteen minutes off-peak.

The key is that the trains would go express for the nine miles from Journal Square to the Jersey Gardens Mall in Elizabethport, just like they currently do for the five miles from Journal Square to Harrison. Given that it takes 25 minutes to get from the World Trade Center to Newark, it would probably take at most 35 to get to Elizabethport, and under an hour to Saint George. Compare that to the time it takes to ride a bus to the ferry and walk to the office, or to sit in an express bus on the Gowanus Expressway.

In terms of capital costs, we're talking about rebuilding the North Shore rail line and making it flood-resistant - part of it washed away during Hurricane Sandy. Then we would probably have to build a new connection with the Chemical Coast line and run new track up to Port Newark. From Newark we would probably have to build some new track, a new bridge over the Passaic River and a new junction with the existing PATH line. I don't know how much all that would cost, but could it be more than the billion and a half that the Port Authority wants to spend on the useless extension to Newark Airport?

Getting into Manhattan

I've got a whole bunch of ideas for subway and bus expansions in the boroughs, commuter rail and bus expansions in the suburbs, and even intercity rail and bus connections. They all wash up against one big problem: the capacity of crossings into and out of Manhattan is almost maxed out at peak commuting times, the few big expansions in the works are proceeding slowly, and there doesn't seem to be political will to do much more.

Passenger capacity estimates on the East River Bridges. US DOT, updated by threestationsquare.

Of the subways that cross the East River and the PATH trains that cross the Hudson, almost all the bridges and tunnels are packed with trains at rush hour, and those trains packed with passengers. The one exception is the Williamsburg Bridge, which is constrained by technical challenges, by the depopulation of South Side Williamsburg, Bushwick and East New York, by zoning restrictions on building, and by the fact that the J and Z trains only go to lower Manhattan. Since the MTA rerouted the M train to Midtown, ridership has gone up, and so have rents in Ridgewood, but that is the only line that is not at full capacity.

The only new subway crossing that has been given serious consideration recently, the Subway to Secaucus, has been stuck on a shelf somewhere.

MTA Capital Construction has installed an improved signalling system (CBTC) on the L line, which has allowed them to run more trains through the Fourteenth Street Tunnel. This capacity has been rapidly filled by an increase in ridership. They are rolling out CBTC to other lines, as the Port Authority is doing with the PATH trains, but funding limitations have stretched the rollout over years. As with the L train, the increased capacity is not expected to be enough to handle an additional branch on any line, only to allow neighborhoods near the existing branches to add population and to give some breathing room to passengers.

With commuter rail, the constraints are the platforms at Penn Station and the Park Avenue Tunnel. Alon Levy pointed out years ago that the constraints at Penn Station are not technical, but due to the three government-run commuter rail agencies' insistence on terminating all trains there, and our politicians' inability to force them to implement through-running arrangements.

For years the MTA has been pouring billions of dollars into East Side Access, but that will not be finished until 2023 at the earliest. The ARC Tunnel from New Jersey and its successor, the Gateway Tunnel, are being blocked by Governor Christie, who has used ARC funding to pay for road expansions.

Bus capacity into Manhattan is similarly constrained. Buses crossing from New Jersey through the Lincoln Tunnel can terminate at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, but that is also full. Proposals to build garages with public funds have faltered, and no private company seems interested in building a garage or terminal. The Port Authority is renovating the George Washington Bridge terminal, but that is too far north, and connects to a downtown A train that is also very crowded.

Any buses that can't fit into the Port Authority use city streets to pick up and drop off, as do buses from the other crossings. A backlash from NIMBYs, mostly drivers and business owners but aided by misguided pedestrian advocates, has put a lid on any expansion of curbside bus access.

As with commuter trains, there is a potential for through-running with buses along 34th or 42nd streets or Church Street that could relieve some of these constraints, but the bus operators have shown little interest, and political leaders have been too busy pandering to the backlash.

One reason bus operators may be uninterested in through-running or building terminals or garages is that there are also capacity constraints for buses on the bridges and tunnels. Anyone who's tried to take the Q32 into Manhattan in the morning knows what happens to bus travel times when a bridge is free for any vehicle. Passengers on the inbound QM5 express bus know that things run a little smoother when there is a toll and a bus lane, and people who have ridden the Red and Tan number 20 know that congestion pricing makes it even better. But even those passengers say that the bus lanes are too short, and those crossings with lanes and tolls are at capacity as well.

So that's the dismal state of getting commuters to Manhattan. What should we do about it? I'll talk about that in future posts.

Rebuilding better than before

Since they began to realize how much the subway system had been damaged by the storm surge from Hurricane Sandy, leaders have been making statements like this one from Governor Cuomo: "We will rebuild the subway system and it will be better than before." Tonight Stephen Smith scoffed at that claim, but I think it's important to take it seriously, and to think about what it could mean.

It is often said that the Chinese word for "crisis" is spelled with the characters for "danger" and "opportunity." It's also been pointed out that this is a crock, so let me give you a better metaphor, one that a friend once learned from a plumber: if you have a small leak in a pipe in a wall, it's better to wait for it to bust than to fix it right away.

Photo: MTA New York City Transit / Leonard Wiggins

The reason is that either way you need to tear out the wall. You might as well wait until it ruins the wall by itself. Obviously this is not always the best course of action; the busted pipe could ruin some valuable papers or equipment, but it seems relevant to our current situation.

We don't know the full extent of the damage to New York's transit system. We know that the Cranberry Street (A/C) tunnel is still flooded, and that the Rutgers Street (F) and Steinway (7) tunnels are not in great shape. We know that almost all of the PATH system was heavily flooded. We also know that there have been washouts along the Northeast Corridor between Newark and Secaucus, and in other parts of the commuter rail system.

Let's look at this as an opportunity, like a really long Fastrack: if you could rip out a section of the subway or commuter rail system and replace it, with 90% federal funding, what would you improve? Obviously, some parts, like Hoboken Terminal, were recently renovated and it's just be nice to have them back the way they were. Others, like the South Ferry station, are brand new and have never worked very well, and we'd just like them working. But some parts were kind of old and decrepit to begin with.

We've already missed our opportunity to connect the PATH system with the #6 Lexington Avenue line after the attack on the World Trade Center. Last year we missed the opportunity to use emergency powers to electrify the Port Jervis line or rebuild the Erie Main Line. Here are some other ideas:

The PATH train tunnels are very narrow and twisty. This constrains the Port Authority to use short, narrow train cars. Could the tunnels be widened and the curves smoothed out, to the point where they could handle bigger cars?

Many signals will probably need to be replaced. Why not replace them with signals compatible with the new Communications-based Train Control system that the MTA is planning on installing at some point anyway? This is particularly relevant in the Steinway Tunnel, which is supposed to host the next line to receive CBTC. The Port Authority had already planned to install CBTC and Automatic Train Control in the PATH system by 2015; could that happen sooner?

Some of the stations were in really bad shape, like the G train station at 21st Street/Van Alst. It'd be nice to see them rebuilt.

What improvements would you like to see?

The Port Authority rooftop should be for buses

As I've written before, there are a lot of buses and trains bringing commuters to Manhattan every morning and taking them home at night. Specifically, there are a lot more peak-direction commuters than reverse commuters. When you have that kind of imbalance, you have four options: run vehicles mostly empty back to the origin, as is done with some of the MTA express buses; run the vehicles through the center to the outskirts on the other side mostly empty, as is done with the subway; "deadhead" the vehicles with no passengers to a yard or garage on the outskirts; or store the vehicles in the center.

A lot of the buses that bring commuters through the Lincoln Tunnel into the Port Authority Bus Terminal turn right around and head back through the tunnel, empty. You can see them in the late morning heading out, and in the early afternoon heading back in to pick up passengers. If you've ever gotten stuck in tunnel traffic alongside them, you know what a tremendous waste of tunnel capacity that is.

Many of the Port Authority buses are actually stored in Manhattan, though. The terminal itself has limited storage space, so some bus operators will park on the street. This is something of a problem in that the bus drivers often circle around Midtown until they find a space, adding to congestion on the street.

Some people are more upset about the lost parking: drivers who want to park in those spots, drivers who want other people to park in those spots instead of in "their" spots, and merchants who believe that all their customers come by car. It also bothers people who think of drivers as "us" and transit users as "them," because they see the space as wasted if it's serving transit riders.

The Port Authority planned to spend $800 million on a new bus garage in Midtown, but one of Chris Christie's first acts as Governor of New Jersey was to take the money and use it to stave off a gas tax increase. With any luck, next year he'll be replaced by someone who actually gives a shit about transit riders, but can anything be done in the meantime?

Hm. Imagine if we could add a floor to the Port Authority Bus terminal and use that for bus parking. We could probably fit a hundred buses up there. Gee, what's up there now?

Does anyone at the Times know about this?

Yes, that's right, more than a city block full of parking. The Port Authority owns a ton of space up there, and is currently leasing it for parking up to 1500 private cars at a time. If you feel like driving through the Lincoln Tunnel, you can pay a company called LAZ to park your car there. The ramp to get there is right next to the bus ramp, at the corner of 40th Street and Dyer Avenue. If you're on foot, check out the elevators at the east end of the South Wing, right near Annie's Pretzels. I assume the rates are competitive with the Midtown parking market, but I haven't been able to find a rate sheet, so if anyone knows roughly how much they charge per day, please let me know.

In any case, if you've just unloaded a bus, sorry, you can't park there. And I kinda sorta understand that for the fifth and sixth levels, because the clearance is pretty low:

You'd have a hard time fitting full-size coaches in there, even if you took out all those pipes. You could probably fit a bunch of vans in there, but the van drivers seem to have made pretty good deals for surface parking all by themselves. Still, why not use the top level for parking buses?

Incidentally, those 1500 cars constitute eight percent of the 18,500 cars that cram through the Lincoln tunnel every morning. That's a relatively small fraction, but big enough to have an effect on congestion. And note that the Port Authority has a conflict of interest here: each car that parks there pays a daily parking fee and a tunnel toll.

Conflict of interest or not, though, this is bullshit. Maybe there's nothing else that can go on the fifth and sixth levels, but the open seventh level should be bus storage.

What does mode shift look like?

Last week I mentioned estimates that 86% of travel in the Northeast Corridor is by heavily polluting modes (5% by plane, 81% by private car), and only 14% by transit (6% by train, 8% by bus). What if we wanted to flip that and make it 14% by plane and car, and 86% by bus and train? How could we get there?

In the comments on last week's post about Amtrak and the Chinatown buses, Ryan Miller points out that I neglected to mention that Amtrak is sold out for the peak hours at least. This point is also made by his cousin Stephen Miller, the new Streetsblog reporter, in a post on September 5.

The North River Tunnels that carry the Northeast Corridor from New Jersey into Penn Station are at capacity. There are only three ways that Amtrak can add more trains, two being a new tunnel under the Hudson or rebuilding the Maybrook line, and both of those are far off. Increasing the speed of the trains may allow a few more runs to fit in, but that won't allow Amtrak to double its ridership. That means that in the next ten years, trains will continue to carry the same number of people, and any increase in Northeast Corridor transit ridership is going to come from buses.

The expansion of bus service will most likely take place at the lower-cost end of the market. Jarrett Walker likes to talk about how buses are theoretically no less comfortable than trains, but it's much harder for a bus to achieve a train-comparable level of comfort on a long-distance run. Even on the smoothest highway (i.e. not the New Jersey Turnpike), the curves are sharper and lane changes are relatively frequent. There is no cafe car.

The best strategy, therefore, is for Amtrak to consistently aim to capture the high end of the market, increasing the speed, wifi and amenities on the Acela Express to a level that will satisfy the air shuttle riders, and those on the on the Regional to just below that level. That means that Bolt and Megabus need to get to one step below that, and Peter Pan and Greyhound need to build reputations of safety, comfort and reliability that are solidly middle class, to compete with driving.

Most importantly, capacity at all levels of bus service needs to increase. And here we run into another problem noted by Stephen: the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Midtown is also at capacity. There is no room for most of the commuter buses to park during the day, so they have to go back through the tunnel to a garage in New Jersey and come back in the afternoon.

Here's another chart from that Amtrak report (PDF, page 4), showing that in 2010 people took 161 million trips on the Northeast Corridor. If you figure that most of them traveled between 8AM and midnight, that works out to 27,568 trips per hour. If Randal O'Toole is right and 8% of that is on buses, and we guess that the buses carry an average of 30 passengers, that's 74 buses an hour, which sounds about right.

If we assume that the total number of trips will remain constant, that means that we need to plan for a tenfold increase in the number of buses cruising into New York, i.e. 662 more buses per hour. Linear projections are stupid, but let's just imagine that the "Baseline Growth" scenario of 260 million trips per year projected by Amtrak in the chart above comes to pass. If that's all absorbed by buses, it means 1227 more buses per hour; if it's the "High Growth" scenario then we're looking at 1569 buses per hour.

Are we ready for that? I didn't think so.

Could we be ready? Sure! That's the kind of thinking we transit advocates have to do. What does mode shift really look like?

Could the MTA ever run the Koreana van?

Last night I wrote about a new van service running from Flushing, Queens to Fort Lee and Palisades Park, New Jersey. The service is privately owned and operated, and charges ten dollars each way (with a free trip every ten rides). Now let me ask: Can you imagine the Metropolitan Transit Authority starting such a service?



The wonkiest among you may reply, "No, because crossing the Hudson is the Port Authority's job." Fair enough; can you imagine the Port Authority starting such a service? As far as I know, the Port Authority has never initiated a new transit service at all. The only one they run is the PATH trains, which they took over when they bought the bankrupt Hudson and Manhattan Railroad in 1962. They rely on New Jersey Transit and private companies to provide transit across the Hudson.

Starting a service like this - a service that crosses a state line and two rivers, and charges ten dollars! - is not something that the Port Authority, or the MTA, or any of our transit bureaucracies, would ever do under the current circumstances. Only a few people at either agency has enough power, and for them the risks are too great, and the rewards too small.

Back in January, MTA Chief of Operations Planning Peter Cafiero announced that the authority would be shutting down the number 7 line for eleven weekends from late January through mid-April, and again for five weekends in the fall. Regular reader Angus Grieve-Smith picked up on an idea that I floated a couple of years ago to run shuttle buses through the Midtown Tunnel, and convinced City Council member Jimmy Van Bramer to back it with city money.

The MTA refused, according to the Post: "MTA chiefs balked at his idea, Van Bramer said, because they worried that if they offered it to 7 riders, they’d have to do the same for other communities that deal with serial service outages, like those along the L line." One of their complaints is that even if the tunnel bus worked, it would be a lot more expensive than a shuttle to Queensboro Plaza. I'm not convinced of this in the first place; note that they studied shuttle routes to Grand Central, even though I argued for using the 34th Street busway instead.

In addition to the "then we'd have to give ice cream to everyone" argument, transit agencies are often also reluctant to increase service if they have any fear that they might have to cut it back again later. In part this is because service cuts require so many hearings and announcements, and offer opportunities for politicians to rail against "the MTA." Why would any self-respecting bureaucrat set themselves up for more public criticism than the minimum they can get away with? It's similar to the argument that severance pay and other measures that make it difficult to fire people also make employers reluctant to hire.

Can anyone remember the last time the MTA started a new bus route? It has acquired routes that were started by old streetcar and jitney companies. It has regularized and streamlined the system, combining some routes, splitting others and renaming some. But has it ever said, "You know, there are people here who want to go there. They're willing to pay for that. Let's make that happen!

The only possibility I can think of are the express bus routes that were started in the 1970s. The Select Bus routes are upgrades of existing routes, and they're being pushed by the Department of Transportation. There were a few other routes proposed as part of the congestion pricing debate (including a local route from down Northern Boulevard and 61st Street from Flushing to Woodside), but they never saw the light of day.

The MTA did not realize that there were lots of people in Sunset Park, Flushing and Elmhurst who wanted a quick, one-seat ride to Chinatown. If they ever did figure that out, they did not try to provide that service. If private operators had not stepped in to provide it, would we know that the market exists? What other potential routes are we missing out on?

The real danger from the Tappan Zee Bridge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Port Authority's toll hike is blatantly unfair

The big news the past few days has been the Port Authority's fare and toll hike plan. Many people are upset about it, but for me the PATH fare increase seems doable. It's higher than the NYC Transit fare, but don't worry, we'll catch up soon. The toll increase - well, I'm in favor of anything that brings the cost of driving up closer to the actual amount of resources used.

Lots of people were upset about the proposal. New York State Senator Charles Fuschillo of Merrick is against the Port Authority increases, the MTA fare hikes and the MTA payroll tax, apparently believing that nobody should ever have to pay anything for a government service. In a hilarious development, Governors Cuomo and Christie expect us to believe that they had no idea the Port Authority would propose such a steep hike. They only signed off on its capital plan, they didn't expect anyone would have to pay for it! A bit closer to reality, there were various complaints against the plan, but the Bergen Record actually found a guy who reasoned that it would discourage single-occupant driving.

Tri-State and Streetsblog pointed out that for several years people have been noticing that the Port Authority had lots of cash on hand, and saying, "Well, let's get the Port Authority to chip in on this." In this way, the few billion dollars in question has probably been spent at least five times over. And this is the answer to my question from 2009 about why governments borrow to finance capital projects: if they try to save the money ahead of time, someone will take it.

One of the reasons the Port Authority is raising fares and tolls is that Governor Cuomo expects it to contribute $380 million a year to the MTA capital plan. This makes sense in a way, because people from New Jersey commute to Manhattan by train, bus and car, and benefit from having people ride the NYC Transit subways and buses. Some people have noted that the $380 million probably wouldn't be necessary if we were bringing in $500 million a year through congestion pricing on the East River bridges and tunnels. In essence, New Jersey drivers will be paying what the drivers from Westchester, Long Island, Connecticut and the outer boroughs refused to pay.

But even Streetsblog though didn't pick up on one of the grand ironies involved in having New Jersey drivers subsidizing sprawl in Bayside and Mamaroneck. Back in March 2008, in one of the craziest episodes of the whole crazy congestion pricing debate, twenty New York City Council members signed a letter complaining that the proposed congestion charge would be deducted from any bridge and tunnel tolls paid the same day. This, they wrote, was "blatantly unfair." They even demanded exactly what Cuomo is asking from the Port Authority this year: that it contribute to the MTA capital plan. Of course it was a total lie: the proposed congestion charge would have remedied numerous unfair situations, not created one.

And now, over three years later, it looks like this will happen without congestion pricing. Now, if there's a remedy for a situation that is blatantly unfair, and you apply that remedy in a situation that isn't blatantly unfair, that would be blatantly unfair, right? And yet - I have not heard a peep from David Yassky, Jimmy Vacca, John Liu or anyone else who signed that letter. They only care about fairness when they think their constituents are the ones being treated unfairly.

But that's not all. The supreme irony in the whole situation is the source of the Port Authority's money: congestion pricing. The Port Authority can charge such high tolls because it operates a secure cordon. You can't drive from New Jersey to New York City without paying a Port Authority toll unless you drive up to the Tappan Zee Bridge or beyond.

If we charged tolls on the East River bridges we'd have plenty of money for transit projects - and reduced congestion, and well-funded buses. But none of our state legislators want to stick their necks out for it, and neither does Andrew Cuomo. They'd rather just let New Jersey pay, and take the money. Excelsior!

Bus capacity background, again

In my last post, I discussed the brewing storm over bus capacity in Manhattan. It wasn't the first time: in 2008 I wrote that the Lincoln Tunnel vans were a shining beacon of profitable transit that Dick Gottfried was threatening to firebomb. In 2009 I wrote that Alan Gerson (anybody miss him?) was holding up the East River Esplanade because he didn't want buses stored on West Street in Tribeca. A better way, I argued in both cases, would be through-running of commuter buses from New Jersey to Brooklyn and Queens.

As Joel pointed out in the comments to yesterday's post, and as the Wall Street Journal detailed recently, the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan serves a truly staggering number of buses. It has already been expanded once, in 1979, and has been at capacity for years - anyone know how many years it's been full without anyone in power trying to add capacity? This is why buses are picking up and dropping off passengers on the street - if you want to add a route, there is literally nowhere else to go.

There has been significant discussion of bus storage: I've been very critical of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign recently, but they have been involved - in their high-level way, without much organizing at the local level. Christine Berthet, of the Hell's Kitchen community group Chekpeds, has been a strong and sane voice on this issue, as she is on most transportation issues. City Planning has undertaken a study of bus parking in Chinatown, and something called the Mayor's Midtown Citizens Committee did a study in their part of Manhattan. The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation is looking to adapt the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel garage for buses.

I'll have more about potential solutions and about the media and governance issues, but in the meantime I want to highlight the fact that I've been talking about this for two and a half years now, and not much has changed. I'm loath to compare bus frequency to the shooting of unarmed civilians, but I have to ask: how long do we have to keep repeating that the bus riders matter? How long must we sing this song?

Manhattan bus capacity, again

You might not realize it, but we're in the midst of a large expansion of transit capacity. That expansion is in jeopardy, though, primarily because a lot of people don't realize it. If we don't do something, it could come to a screeching halt, and years of work could be undone.

No, I'm not talking about the ARC tunnel or the Second Avenue Subway. I'm talking about the boom in buses. You may have heard about them - every once in a while there's a breathless "trend" article about how all the cool kids are taking Megabus or the Chinatown buses, because they can do social network marketing on their iPads in transit instead of wasting time behind the wheel listening to Rush Limbaugh and books on tape.

You may have also noticed the growth in other bus services: gambling buses to Atlantic City, Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods; Chinatown vans traveling to Flushing, Elmhurst and Sunset Park; Jamaican and Haitian dollar vans; I believe that the MTA also expanded express bus service after they took some routes over from the "private" operators. They've cut it back since, but I think overall there's still a net increase. Tour bus usage has also increased; many tour companies offer "hop-on, hop-off" tour bus networks that function as a parallel transit network without some of the "riff-raff" that tourists might fear in the subways. Hospitals like Sloan-Kettering and universities like NYU also run shuttle buses between campuses.

Well, that's wonderful, right? A large increase in transit capacity, largely undertaken by private operators, at no cost. No expensive holes in the ground, no stations, just reuse existing infrastructure. The miracle of buses! It almost seems too good to be true.

As usual, what seems too good to be true usually is. In this case, there is a cost. On a crowded island like Manhattan, the existing infrastructure is always being used by somebody, as we saw with the 34th Street Transitway. It turns out that they built the Port Authority bus terminals for a reason. Curbside long distance buses were tried years ago, and they require taking street and sidewalk space that other people want for parking and walking.

The buses themselves need places to lay over between peak periods, and these places are hard to come by, in part due to the gentrification of Manhattan. In 1950 and 1979 the corner of 40th and Ninth was a low-rent district; now there are very few left in Manhattan. Many bus drivers simply park their buses at the curbside for hours until the next shift.

I'm not sure how many people realized that this was actually a stealth land grab for transit, but the people who used to use the land have figured it out, and they're not happy. One article after another appears in the papers, each one a bit more insistent, each one enlisting another clueless pandering politician.

Right now the support for buses is diffuse, which means that there could be a big backlash that could set back transit in this city by years. I'll talk more about what we can do about this in a future post.

The Helix and the XBL

My post last Wednesday on Chris Christie's plans to use the Port Authority's $3 billion ARC tunnel contribution on a bus garage, reconstructing the Lincoln Tunnel helix, and replacing the cables on the George Washington Bridge got some interesting comments, both here and when Angie Schmitt featured it on the Streetsblog Network. Some of the comments pointed out that since buses use roads, this doesn't have to be all for cars. Sean, Kate and Alon on Streetsblog, and Busplanner here, all argued that the helix reconstruction could help speed buses.

For those of you just tuning in, the Lincoln Tunnel exclusive bus lane is a counterflow lane. One of the lanes that is normally reserved for outbound traffic is allocated for inbound buses during the weekday morning rush, but then it's over, and there is no outbound XBL. It carries thousands of people every morning, in an impressive feat of bus service, and is quite likely possible for the continued viability of most of the country's private bus lines. Several transit advocates have argued for making the XBL two-way round-the-clock, and for doubling it in the morning rush. The Port Authority has studied this, but there hasn't been much movement on it. One of the items in the Strategic Plan was $800 million to expand the XBL, but the helix reconstruction and the GWB cables seem to have jumped ahead of this.

I agree that since the Lincoln Tunnel exclusive bus lane goes on the helix, it would be negatively impacted if the helix were to fall down. But rebuilding the helix by itself would not actually increase capacity. The current helix is three lanes inbound and four outbound, and we could conceivably press to increase that to four inbound and five outbound, with one in each direction reserved for buses.

The problem is that the helix still connects to a six-lane road cut through the bedrock of the Palisades, and we can't add any lanes to that without some serious blasting. Increasing the capacity of the helix would just move the backups a mile further out of the city, to the point where the lanes merge down to three in each direction again. This is the reason why most of the serious plans to increase the XBL capacity involve taking another car lane.

However, we've got some pretty clear indications that Christie understands that this is about subsidies for drivers versus subsidies for transit, and we know where he comes down on that issue. I wouldn't expect him to say, "Okay guys, sure, let's take a general traffic lane and give it to bus riders!" Unless it's some vicious sarcasm like his mom dished out with her bit about the money tree.

That's not to say that savvy politicians couldn't get an expansion of the XBL folded into the helix reconstruction. Maybe if everyone plays their cards right, Cuomo could threaten to block the helix reconstruction as a car project unless XBL expansion is included in it. But that's not going to happen if everyone says, "Well, the helix benefits buses too!"

Sucked down the helix

Photo: Camron & Richard

The sad fate of the money that was to be dedicated to the ARC tunnel is a clear illustration of how easy it is for governments to spend money on car travel, and how hard it is for them to spend it on transit. The money was going to come from the Federal government, the New Jersey Turnpike Authority and the Port Authority. The Federal money will probably go to some transit project, assuming the President doesn't cave into some Republican "cancel the stimulus" nastiness. The Turnpike Authority will widen the two toll roads it controls, and Christie wants it to turn some of the money over to the State Transportation Trust Fund.

The latest news is what will probably happen to the three billion dollars the Port Authority was going to contribute to the project, $595 million of which was going to be spent next year. Andrew Grossman at the Wall Street Journal lists three projects that are at the top of the Authority's wish list: reconstruction of the Helix ramps leading to the Lincoln Tunnel, replacement of the cables holding up the George Washington Bridge, and a new bus garage at the Port Authority Bus Terminal. In case you suffer from transportation myopia, Ben at Second Avenue Sagas points out that only one of these projects is exclusively transit-related. As you may remember, most of the goals we have for transit (cleaner air, reducing carnage, less waste of energy) depend on getting people to shift from cars to transit. For that, in general, shifting money from transit to cars is bad.

I can't find an estimate anywhere for the cost of the Lincoln Tunnel helix or the George Washington Bridge cables, but on Page 16 of the Authority's 2008-2015 Strategic Plan, it says that the total cost for the new bus garage would be $500 million, of which $400 million was expected to come from the Port Authority. If that price hasn't gone up, that leaves $2.6 billion for the other two projects, and I can imagine that they'd be pretty expensive.

But what if the Port Authority were committed to using this money for transit? It turns out that in this Strategic Plan there are a number of other things on the wish list. Some are expansions of the transit system, some are equipment maintenance, and some are subsidies for transit-oriented development.

Project	Estimated cost in millions of dollars
Expansion of the Lincoln Tunnel exclusive bus lane	800
Lengthen the Grove Street and Harrison stations on the PATH to ten cars	230
Signal replacement on the PATH	253
Transit-oriented development: Newark Airport station on Northeast Corridor line	155
Transit-oriented development: George Washington Bridge bus station	150
Transit-oriented development: Jamaica AirTrain Station	425
Transit-oriented development: Lower Manhattan-Kennedy Airport link right of way	350
Total	$2,863 million

How about that? It comes out to a little over $2.6 billion.  And according to DNAinfo's Julie Shapiro, the PATH signal replacement is funded from other revenue streams, which brings us under $3 billion total.

So here we have $3 billion in transit funds that is currently unallocated, and $3 billion in transit-related needs listed in the Strategic Plan. And yet, Executive Director Chris Ward completely disregards the Strategic Plan and picks two road-related projects that aren't even listed in it. What could that be about? Ward hints at it in the DNAinfo article: "Gov.-elect Andrew Cuomo will work with Christie to decide what those projects will be, but Christie 'will take the lead,' Ward said." And there you have it: Christie overriding the Strategic Plan and diverting more than half the ARC Tunnel money to roads. I never thought I'd miss the days of Jon Corzine.

A time for not borrowing

Now I want to get back to the discussion of borrowing that I started a month ago. Borrowing is often a good idea if you can be reasonably confident that you'll be in a better position at payoff time than you are at borrowing time. If you borrow $5,000 when your annual income is $10,000, and pay it off when your annual income is $50,000, you've done pretty well. Last time I forgot to mention one way that you might be in a better position at payoff time: inflation. It can boost your income without any action on your part!

There are some times when borrowing doesn't make sense. One of those times is simply when you don't need the money. Borrowing always increases your risk (except in times of high inflation). If you don't owe anything and lose your job (always a risk), you just have to figure out how to make enough to survive. If you owe money and lose your job, then you have to figure out how to survive and make your loan payments.

Beyond that, though, if borrowing is a good idea when you can reasonably expect to have a greater income at payoff time than you do at borrowing time, then it's a lousy idea if you have reason to think your income might be lower, or even if your expected increase in income is not enough to pay the interest.

Sadly, many transit agencies borrow without any expectation that their revenue will be higher when it's time to pay the money back. The MTA here in New York has borrowed a ton of money, without any reason to expect higher revenues in the future. The improvements that were paid for with that money did not bring in new customers who could pay a lot more. They did not bring in a new constituency that would demand support for transit in the State Government. They just kept people taking the trains and buses, i.e. maintaining the MTA's farebox revenue, but a large share of the MTA's budget came from state contributions and other taxes like the mortgage recording tax, which were subject to many factors unrelated to the MTA capital program.

One bad reason for borrowing is to "spread out payments." It's total bullshit, and you can see that if you just ask, "Why not pay on the installment plan?" The answer is, "because then we'd have to wait." And that makes it clear that the spreading out payments is just an excuse to get the money before you've earned it. No. You need to ask yourself if your financial situation will be any better at payoff time, and if it isn't, just sit tight and wait.

There is a problem in government with sitting tight and waiting. Lots of government agencies get their funding by crying poverty, and the system is set up to reward that. A few years ago the Port Authority was flush with cash - at least as transit agencies go - and everyone wanted a piece of the pie. In addition to a new order of PATH cars and related improvements, and chipping in a few billion for the World Trade Center redevelopment and the new train tunnel, Schumer and Paterson wanted the Authority to help pay for Moynihan Station, everyone's favorite vanity transportation non-improvement.

I don't think the Port Authority fell for that one, but pretty much all of its savings have been vacuumed up by various other agencies and projects around the region, to the point where it's almost as cash-strapped as everyone else. But it's hard to save up for a project if everyone's got their eyes on your money. Administrators who want to avoid that kind of headache will avoid saving up money, and simply borrow to pay for what you want and then scream for more when the money runs out.

Public and private on the Goethals Bridge

Image: Port Authority
As I wrote before, our government plans to spend over $2.4 billion in road projects over the next several years: $500 million to rebuild the Brooklyn Bridge, $700 million to rebuild the Kosciuszko Bridge, $1 billion to rebuild the Goethals Bridge and $250 million to rebuild the BQE just south of the Brooklyn Bridge in Carroll Gardens. Of this, only the Goethals replacement will be paid for by tolls.

Or will it? Today, the Tri-State Transportation Campaign tweeted a link to an article in the Staten Island Advance that tells us that the Port Authority has issued a request for proposals (PDF) for a public-private partnership to reconstruct the bridge.

This $1 billion project is also going to add a "managed use" lane to the bridge in each direction, either a high-occupancy vehicle or bus-only lane. This would bring the total number of lanes from four to six, adding capacity for 1600 more vehicles per hour to cross onto Staten Island in each direction. Believe it or not, this is actually a huge victory by Tri-State and Staten Island groups over the previous proposals that called for eight or more unrestricted lanes. There are also plans to reserve space for a "future transit corridor" that could carry light rail or buses (probably not subways or commuter rail, with that kind of grade). Finally, the current hair-raising three-foot-wide bicycle/pedestrian path that is never open would be replaced with a ten-foot path separated from speeding traffic by a generous shoulder.

Apparently the Port Authority, no longer a cash cow, has spent too much money on the World Trade Center and the ARC Tunnel and doesn't have any to lay out for the bridge. They want a private investor to design and build the bridge, and then maintain it for the next thirty to forty years. The company would lend a bunch of money to the Port Authority, which the authority would presumably invest somewhere, and then pay back to the company in periodic installments to cover the cost of design and construction. It would also pay installments for maintenance over the 30-40 year term of the agreement.

The request is confusing, because it refers to a "Construction Lump Sum" and a "Maintenance Lump Sum," and I thought that a lump sum was the opposite of installments, but maybe it refers to the fact that the amounts are agreed on beforehand. In any case, let's run this through Melissa Thomasson's ideas about the benefits of the public and private sectors:

Markets are usually really good at controlling costs. When they work best, products come into existence, like cell phones or stockings. They start expensive, and then they get cheaper and better. But markets don't guarantee that everyone can afford the things they need. Government can be good at that, ensuring universal access. But when you're paying for everybody, it's hard to control costs.

In this case, there will be no market beyond the initial bidding process, so don't expect too much cost containment. There will also not be the advantage of flexibility that come with entrepreneurship, because the entire process will be subject to an agreement negotiated between the winning bidder and the Port Authority.

The main thing that the Port Authority would get from the deal is that it wouldn't have to issue bonds to pay the upfront costs. It would also shift the risk of cost overruns and unexpected maintenance expenses onto the company. In exchange, the company would get interest on the loan, which the authority would presumably pay for out of tolls.

Eliot Brown at the Observer has an analysis pointing to some potential problems. The private partner may want a lot of money to cover the risk and the costs of borrowing, and while they would have an incentive to build something that would last thirty to forty years, they would have very little incentive to build anything that would last longer.

What Brown doesn't mention is that shifting the risk is not always successful. If the investors feel that they're not making enough money on the deal, they can default, leaving the Port Authority responsible for cleaning up whatever mess they make.

Essentially, this is like a teenage boy who wants to buy a car but can't get a loan on his own credit. He asks his parents to cosign the loan. Instead of an obligation to visit them when he might not otherwise feel like it, the Port Authority is just paying extra interest.

Now about this extra interest. The Advance says, "Borough President James Molinaro said an investor could stand to make a decent profit on the arrangement, which he said he would support." Well, that's nice, but it means that more than a billion dollars of toll revenue will be spent on this, money that might otherwise be available to subsidize PATH trains or the bus terminals.

What would happen if the Port Authority couldn't find a bidder? According to the Advance, "If no one comes forward to fund the project, the Port Authority will maintain the existing bridge, and Islanders will be stuck with its deteriorating roadway, dangerously narrow lanes and heavy traffic for the foreseeable future, until the economy rebounds or an alternate funding source is found."

The existing Goethals bridge is a pretty scary and dysfunctional thing, and the proposed new one would be safer for all and friendlier to pedestrians and cyclists, and have the promise of a new transit corridor some day. However, it would add up to 1600 more vehicles per hour to the roads of Staten Island and Brooklyn. And it would take a billion dollars out of the Port Authority budget, and it still runs the risk of a bankrupt partner dumping a financial mess in the authority's lap.

This bridge replacement should probably be done at some point. It's not quite as horrible as the Tappan Zee bait-and-switch, or the Kosciuszko that has no transit component. But this is not the time. The Port Authority should wait until it can raise the funds through public means, either by its own bonds or with federal money. It has already spread itself too thin, and we can ill afford to see it collapse and take our PATH trains and bus terminals with it.

Killing the cash cow

Last week WNYC's Brian Lehrer had a segment on tolls and transportation that made me squirm a little. There were several bizarre moments, including when Senator Savino embarrassed herself by giving a bike route from Boro Park to Flushing along the BQE service road and McGuinness and Northern Boulevards, and Stacey from Basking Ridge repeating the lie that "mass transit is not an option" for the disabled.



The most sensible people on the segment were callers Andres from Jersey City and TJ from Boro Park, and Lehrer himself. Despite her obvious windshield perspective and her partisan shilling for the car-oriented Bill Thompson, Savino was clearly pro-transit - although I'm disappointed that Lehrer didn't ask her to explain how she let bridge tolls fail in the Senate.

The biggest disappointment was Kate Slevin of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign and her resolutely sunny we're-all-winners-with-transit schtick - which might explain Tri-State's bizarre stance on the Tappan Zee Bridge widening. I was particularly frustrated at how Slevin completely missed TJ's question, responding with a stock speech about how people are turning back to transit, which wound up reinforcing his point. I think TJ's question is a great one, so let me quote it for you:

How much is policy set indirectly by retaining the car - and the driver in the car - as a cash cow, as opposed to developing public transportation more, which perhaps is a lower revenue earner?

TJ's question echoes one asked in June by commenter P on a Streetsblog post announcing the pro-XBL Streetfilm:

My guess is that the Port Authority doesn't want to forego the tolls from the cars currently using those lanes. Pressure needs to be put on the PA from elected officials and advocacy groups that see a larger vision than just the PA's bottom line.

I've been thinking about P's question ever since, and I've done a little number-crunching. According to the Port Authority's 2008 financial statement (PDF), 20,937,000 vehicles traveled eastbound through the tunnel in that year, and the total operating revenues were $153,536,000. The XBL study found that 1700 buses use the lane every day. I will assume that half the average daily traffic, or 28,681 vehicles, passes through during the XBL hours, or 8,994 per non-XBL lane. I will further assume that trucks are 7% of these vehicles, as they are on an annual basis, and that these trucks have four axles on average. The Port Authority website tells us that these trucks would pay about $32 each, while cars pay $8 and buses $4.

This leads me to conclude that each non-XBL lane brings in $87,058 per day, and replacing it with a second XBL would cut all but $6,800 of that out, leading to a annual drop of $30 million - 19% of the revenue from the Tunnel. We may all agree on this blog that it's worth it, but it's still a big hit to ask the Port Authority to take.

If the Port Authority currently loses thousands a day on the buses, it makes most of it back in gate fees at the bus terminal. Buses pay $40 per departure (PDF), including any bus that goes into the terminal and doesn't immediately deadhead back to Jersey. If we estimate that that's 1500 of the 1700 buses, it comes out to $60,000 a day. The problem is that the terminal is pretty much at capacity, so any additional buses going through the lane would probably drop off on the street somewhere - my recommendation is to send them through the planned 34th Street busway, but in any case they won't be paying any gate fees.

Also, none of this affects westbound traffic. Since the tolls are one-way eastbound, the Port Authority could keep that XBL round the clock and just reverse direction without losing any toll money. Sure, they'd cause the mother of all Manhattan traffic jams at first, but then people would get used to it, and more of them would take the bus.

All told, it makes sense that the Port Authority would drag its feet on setting up a second XBL. It also explains that they want it to be high-occupancy or toll, not a bus-only lane, even though that would significantly limit its effectiveness. P recommends pressuring the Port Authority to take a larger vision beyond their bottom line - which would be nice if it works. The only other solutions I can think of are to raise tolls on both cars and buses, or to build a new terminal somewhere else and charge for it.

Getting back to TJ's question, here's a pretty clear case where relying on car use to subsidize transit is unsustainable if we really want people to shift away from cars to transit. The good news is that if you build your transit right, as ridership goes up, so does profitability, so eventually either the passengers would pay for all the operating costs, but even if you don't, if enough people use the system, a consensus in favor of collecting taxes to fund "our transit" will probably form.

The man behind the Simpson Curtain

Last week I posted about arguments for free public transit, some of which refer to the "Simpson-Curtain rule." "Politically and practically, for most systems, the easiest way is to raise fares. But soon after, ridership goes down," writes Dave Olsen.

As I wrote last week, things are actually quite different, and a bit more complicated. The rule is actually the Simpson-Curtin, rule, after the Philadelphia planning firm of Simpson and Curtin that came up with it. A 1968 paper by principal John F. Curtin is often cited as providing the basis for the Simpson-Curtin rule, but it is actually concerned with extensions to the rule for various additional factors.

From the 1940s through the 1960s, Simpson and Curtin collected data on transit fares and ridership. After crunching the numbers, they found that when fares were increased, ridership went down. The ratio of the change in ridership to the change in fare is called shrinkage ratio or fare elasticity, and is explained in more detail in this PDF from the VTPI. But briefly, Simpson and Curtin claimed that for every 3% increase in fares, ridership dropped 1%, for a shrinkage ratio of -0.33. The lower the absolute value of the ratio, the less an agency would have to worry about driving riders away with high prices.

So what's wrong with the Simpson-Curtin rule? Well, it represents correlation, but correlation does not imply causation. As I wrote in the previous post, to get causation, we have to come up with an explanation that fits the facts better than any other one. The explanation that Curtin, Olsen and others have made, that raising fares by itself causes reduced ridership, is not the best explanation.

Just a few years after Curtin's paper, in 1973, Michael Kemp published a paper arguing that "transit demand is inelastic with respect to money price." He indicates a number of other factors that affect demand, including level of service ("particularly door-to-door journey time"), trip purpose, distance, transit mode, urban form, and length of measurement period. In particular, since transit riding is a choice, it is dependent on the relative attractiveness of the alternatives. He notes:

One might hypothesize that, given the initial decision to travel, transit riding will be higher when the relative prices of substitute modes are at their highest; and that under such conditions transit fare elasticities will be relatively low. It follows that one would expect ... fare elasticities to be relatively low in very large cities with highly congested central areas, particularly for those modes catering to long-haul commuter traffic.

In other words, people are least likely to abandon the bus when it's hardest to drive ("relative price," here, includes travel time and convenience). The correlation observed by Simpson and Curtin is simply due to a lurking variable that drove down ridership and consequently pushed agencies to raise prices: the massive road-building that went on in the postwar period. Of course people aren't going to stick with their old bus system when the government is building new roads and parking lots for their cars! But if the government doesn't build as many new roads and parking lots, then transit still has a chance.

That brings us back to New Jersey, and what has allowed the bus companies to remain profitable for all these years. Not only do the private Lincoln Tunnel buses have the XBL, but they also have the Port Authority Bus Terminal and a law protecting them from destructive competition from the government.

There are two factors that are even more important. The buses (a) go to Manhattan (b) under the Hudson River. Manhattan is a notoriously unpleasant place to drive a car; despite the best efforts of the New York City DOT up until a year and a half ago, it is and was still incredibly congested. It can take half an hour to go a block, "free" parking is almost always full, and private parking is very expensive.

Still, as you pointed out on Friday, the private bus companies in Brooklyn, Queens failed many years ago, even though they continued on as zombies until recently. What's the difference? I think it's very simple: cordon pricing. You can drive across the East River without paying a toll, but you can't drive across the Hudson for free.

Recently I ran into my boss on the subway here in Queens. He told me that he lives in New Jersey and owns a car, but he takes the bus to the Port Authority and then the subway and another bus to work. He's tried driving in the past, but the tolls were too expensive. Sure that's anecdotal, but it fits with the pattern that Kemp found. If it's too expensive to drive, people will take transit.

During the congestion pricing debate, Aaron Naparstek wrote a post called, It’s the Bus Riders, Stupid. Aaron is actually referring to something different from what I'm talking about (and honestly, I always hated the Clinton quote he's referencing). However, it was - and is - the bus riders: cordon pricing would have eliminated the toll-free option for crossing the East River, and thereby increased ridership on the MTA buses, bringing up revenue. With cordon pricing in place, that revenue would be more stable than the other MTA funding sources, and maybe enough to start paying down the debt.

So there's your magic formula for transit profitability:

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!

More on the profitable Lincoln Tunnel buses

Astute readers will have noticed that I'm interested in free transit, but I'm also interested in profitable transit. Mainly I'm interested in successful transit, and both extremes are promising in different ways. A high farebox recovery ratio indicates a strong demand for the service, and it suggests that whether the operator is public or private, the service will be relatively stable. A well-run free transit system could indicate strong political support for the system, which also suggests that the system will be stable.

With that in mind, let's take another look at those profitable buses that go through the Lincoln Tunnel. You'll find them on the right half of the graph below:

Although most of these services have very high ridership, some are actually low, like Olympia Trails, but make up for it with high fares like the lucrative service to Newark Airport.

Of course this is correlation (0.67, in fact) not causation. To get causation, we have to come up with an explanation that fits the facts better than any other one. So far, this seems to be the best explanation: something about the Lincoln Tunnel created high demand for the buses, which allowed bus operators to run fuller buses and/or charge more per trip, and that leads to profit.

One of the biggest factors is probably the the Exclusive Bus Lane. It gives buses their own queue through the tunnel so that they don't have to wait behind private cars, and that time advantage makes up for the multiple stops they have to make before they get to the XBL. This is, of course, a tremendous indirect subsidy to the bus companies. The State of New Jersey also buys buses for many of the companies, relieving them of this capital cost.

"Fine, Cap'n," you say, "but the Gowanus Expressway and the LIE both have HOV lanes. They're used by express buses that bear a passing resemblance to these New Jersey buses. And those buses in Brooklyn and Queens also got free buses from the government, but they lost money for years until they were finally taken over by the MTA, which continues to operate them at a loss. Why didn't those make a profit?"

Good question! I think there are a few factors. One, as described in this article about the deCamp bus company that serves Montclair, the law creating New Jersey Transit in 1980 contained a clause prohibiting the agency from operating "in destructive competition" with the private bus companies. Several of them have successfully sued NJ Transit on the basis of that law. There can be no public option.

Interestingly, the article also mentions that last year State Senator Beck sponsored a bill that would modify this restriction to add that "Under circumstances where the private entity fails to provide safe, adequate, and reliable public transportation services, it is the responsibility of the State, and instrumentalities thereof, to supplement, compete against, or replace such services."

The second is the Port Authority Bus Terminal. As Alon Levy wrote in the comments last January, "the XBL works only because it feeds directly into a gigantic terminal." Yeah, it's kind of a nasty place, but it's nowhere near as nasty as it was thirty years ago, and it's very good at what it does. It has ramps directly from the Lincoln Tunnel to the terminal, so that many of the buses are in bus-only space from Secaucus all the way to the end. It has an underground entrance to the Eighth Avenue Subway, with a one-block tunnel (that's just as nasty as it was thirty years ago) to the Times Square hub where people can access up to nine subway lines (depending on how you count them), with Grand Central and Penn Station just one stop away. It is very efficient at getting buses out of the tunnel and turned around again, or shuttled off to nearby storage. It's also very good at getting people out of the buses and onto the subways, or vice versa.

I'll get to the most important factor next time.

More craziness, this time in Pittsburgh

I've only been to Pittsburgh, but I had a really good time. It definitely fulfills the Tourism Department's slogan, "Pittsburgh: It's Not as Bad as it Used to Be!" Seriously, though, I experienced no noticeable pollution, it was mostly compact and walkable, the trolleys were cool, and it was visually just a fascinating place to explore. They don't need helped much there!

So I don't think the latest weirdness is Pittsburgh-specific. Here it is, anyway: next month Pittsburgh is hosting the G20 summit, which is expected to bring in lots of money from all the delegations and protesters. And plans are still being worked out, but it seems like the city intends to, well, shut itself down for three days.

At first I thought it was some crappy anti-transit security theater stuff, since a number of these restrictions will affect transit: Amtrak trains will pass through the city without stopping, trolleys may not be allowed into the Downtown subway tunnel, and buses may be turned back or not run at all. A modern-day Apocryphal Marie Antoinette might have said, "Can't get to work? Let them drive the Lexus." But this will apparently also affect schools, universities, nonprofits and businesses.

I have to wonder whether the hit to the economy from closing the downtown for three days might be more expensive than the gain from hosting the summit, and apparently I'm not the only one. I think there's a good case to be made for reasonable security to protect diplomats and heads of state, but if you have to go this far, you've clearly got big problems on your hands.

But if the Port Authority of Allegheny County really is channeling Apocryphal Marie Antoinette, they might want to keep in mind what happened to the real one - despite her security arrangements.