Ten things to remember about public and private transportation

With a bunch of articles in the news recently about private intercity bus service, it's important to keep in mind several points:

1. No transportation is completely private. Whether it's land, vehicles, fuel, air, research, wayfinding, public safety or search and rescue: you didn't build that.
2. No transportation is completely public. Even in the strictest Communist states there have always been markets where people sell transportation without state control. In the United States, every government transportation agency buys goods and services from private vendors, and many contract their operations to private companies. Somebody, somewhere, is making a buck, and there's nothing you can do to stop it.
3. Greedy, lazy people are everywhere. There's nothing about public ownership that guarantees good service.
4. Most public transit used to be profitable. Most of the "public" transit systems around the world between 1850 and 1950 were built and operated by private companies, with large government subsidies. Some are still profitable today.
5. Most roads and parking lots in the United States are socialist. And they're destroying the planet.
6. Automakers and airlines are regularly bailed out by the government. Pundits and politicians only complain about bailouts and subsidies if they think they're going to the "wrong" people. Which ones they complain about usually tells you a lot about the pundits and politicians.
7. It's all one big system. Whether publicly or privately owned or operated, public transit competes with publicly subsidized roads, airports, parking and personal cars.
8. Private operators can take payment through larger fare systems. It takes a bit of planning, but it can be done.
9. Transportation policy can't solve race, sex or class prejudice by itself. You may eradicate racism from buses, but as long as racism exists, racists will find a way to use transportation to oppress people.
10. Trip cost is just one factor. For some people it's the biggest factor. For most, it comes after other criteria like trip time, safety, comfort and reliability.

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.)

To Save Money on Marketing Buses, Try Running Enough Buses

I like bus improvements. I hate Governor Cuomo's terrible proposal to run an elevated "AirTrain" from Willets Point to LaGuardia Airport. So you'd expect that I would like Josh Barro's post last week arguing that we should improve the buses to LaGuardia instead of building the AirTrain. He writes, "Transit agencies are spending millions of dollars on new rail infrastructure that is no faster than existing bus service, simply because riders perceive a train as better than a bus." And then he goes on to make a nice argument that we should tell these poor deluded people that the train is actually not better.

This is wrong nationwide, but it's wrong on even more levels in the case of transit to LaGuardia. This is because people are already riding the bus to LaGuardia. On the first weekend of the M60 Select Bus Service I rode the bus, and it was packed. Since then I've ridden it twice more, and both times it was crush-loaded. The Q70, Q72 and Q48 aren't quite as heavily packed, but they have very healthy ridership. The Q70 probably gets even higher ridership than I give below, because it had only been in service for three months by the end of 2013.

Route	M60	Q48	Q72	Q70
2013 average weekday ridership	17,013	2790	5764	3716 (August 2014)*
2015 weekday buses	139	62	71	96
Average riders per bus	122	45	81	39
Loading capacity	112	70	70	70
Seated capacity	62	40	40	40

The M60 is packed, and the other buses are pretty full. If I were wealthy, or if my employer were paying, I would take taxis over the M60 almost all the time. I would probably take taxis over the Q72 or the Q48 as well; the Q70 experience is the only one that has been close to comfortable for me.

Why does the MTA not run enough M60 buses to bring the loads down to reasonably comfortable levels? I have no idea. but imagine that someone did what Barro suggests and spent a ton of money on "marketing" these buses. Imagine if that marketing succeeded in attracting the 70-90% of people who currently arrive by taxi or private car (PDF). The MTA would not be able to serve the people that they attract. They would have a horrible time and take a taxi from then on out.

Barro frames this with a quote from the National Bus Rapid Transit Institute, "Bus-based public transit in the United States suffers from an image problem." Yes, the BRT people keep repeating that buses are just as good as trains, and everyone just needs to be shown the light, but notice two things. First, the actual report (PDF) that Barro drew the quote from gives a much more nuanced picture and hardly makes a strong case that marketing is all you need. Second, this report and Barro's post, and this lame entry from EMBARQ a couple weeks ago, are just three more in a long line of bus scoldings where someone patronizingly tells you to love your bus without showing any interest in taking the bus themselves.

When Barro first tweeted the link to his post, I responded by telling him that the M60 is frequently packed. His response to me was simply, "even more reason not to spend $1 billion on a train." Well, I don't know about a billion dollars, but as Stephen Smith frequently reminds us, high bus ridership is actually one indicator that a potential train line is worth spending money on.

What bothers me most about Barro's piece is how since he posted it on February 10, several people have uncritically cited it as either an argument for more bus marketing, or an argument against subway expansion. It is neither, because it is based on inaccurate information. I hope that Barro will post something correcting those mistaken impressions as soon as he can.

* Thanks to @AHInQueens for the Q70 ridership figure.

First impressions of the M60 Select Bus

So I went up to Astoria today to check out the new M60 Select Bus line. I didn't look ahead of time to see where the stops were since I was out for a walk anyway, so when I got to 46th Street I had to walk east to 77th Street. This is not as far as it sounds, due to a bend in the street grid. As I was walking, two articulated M60 buses passed, and I could see people standing inside.

I got to the 77th Street stop, and there was an MTA van parked in it. Two guys in day-glo vests jumped out and inspected the ticket machines. A woman, also wearing a vest, was there to inform passengers. I squeezed past them and got a ticket, but by the time I got back around the machines, a bus was flying past the stop. It said "Next Bus Please," so it may have been full; I didn't get a chance to look. A few minutes later the guys emptied the change from the coin machine, got into their van, and left.

I saw a stack of brochures on top of the ticket machines and read one while I waited for the following bus. One thing that's not so good: if you transfer to the M15 Select Bus, you can't use the same ticket. You have to go to another ticket machine and stick your card or more money in. Presumably it's the same transferring from the Bx12 to the Bx41. That's pretty lame.

Also, the M60 is scheduled for every ten minutes on Sunday, but the local Q19, which replaces the local M60 service, is only every half hour on Sunday. That's not good.

I didn't time how long it took until the bus came, but it was a while, and when it came, it was so packed that only a few people could get on. There were five other people waiting, and since I wasn't in a hurry, I let the others board. The next bus was at least ten minutes after that. There was room to stand but no seats, even for the guy who was carrying a baby.

We flew down the Grand Central Parkway service road to Steinway and then 31st Street, and I got off. I didn't go to see how the buses were doing on 125th Street, but from what I saw on BusTime they weren't moving too fast.

My main impression is that the buses on this new route were doing very well in terms of ridership. I saw five buses, and they all had people standing. Two had no room for more passengers by 77th Street. If this isn't a fluke, the MTA will have to increase service on Sundays just to be able to fit everyone on.

It's time to extend the N train to LaGuardia

Twenty years ago, Astoria leaders blocked a plan to extend the elevated train line that serves their neighborhood. The proposal would have run the trains a few blocks north past their current terminus at Ditmars Boulevard, then east to LaGuardia Airport. In addition to the value of getting airport travelers out of cars and taxis, the line would have served new stops in areas of northern Astoria and Woodside that currently have no subway service. It would also have made better use of the Astoria Line, where trains were often fairly empty just a few stops outside of Midtown.

In a move that baffled me at the time, "the community," meaning the people with political power in the neighborhood, came out strongly against the plan. Ben Kabak has a good summary with links, but the gist seems to be that they didn't like the idea of an el, and they didn't like the disruption caused by constructing a subway.

This came up in Ben's blog and podcast again recently because the MTA is set to inaugurate the M60 Select Bus Service, and a business group called the Global Gateway Alliance released an open letter calling for "true Bus Rapid Transit" between the airport and the Ditmars Boulevard terminus of the Astoria Line. Ben was baffled by several assertions in the letter (a regular feature of this story is the bafflement of transit advocates at the bizarre reactions of city elites to what seems like a very straightforward case for a subway extension), most of all the blithe dismissal of rail by noting it was "shelved due to community opposition."

The train was indeed shelved due to community opposition, as everyone reminds us, but what they fail to note is that the "community leaders" are all gone. Read through the list of politicians who came out against the plan. Denis Butler and Walter McCaffrey are dead. Peter Vallone, Senior is retired, and so is George Onorato, and Vallone Junior has been term-limited out. John Sabini was hustled off to the Racing Authority after a DUI conviction in 2007.

Not only are these windshield-perspective politicians gone, but their replacements are much less wedded to the idea that cars are the future. Senator Michael Gianaris and his protégée Assemblymember Aravella Simotas are disappointing in some ways, but they've kept their car activism pretty low-key, as has Senator José Peralta. City Council members Jimmy Van Bramer and Costa Constantinides are both progressive on transit issues. Van Bramer, who represents me, has supported congestion pricing and the Midtown Tunnel Bus. Constantinides lost a bit of cred by coming out way too early in support of another term for Jimmy Vacca as head of the Transportation Committee, but has been a strong supporter of livable streets issues overall.

I believe that Van Bramer is a member of Transportation Alternatives, and I know Constantinides has been not just a member but an active supporter, marching with them at public events. They may keep their One Less Car T-shirts in the bottom of their drawers, but they definitely do not see cars as the only way to prosperity for their constituents. Community Board 1 may still be led by trolls who think parking is Astoria's number one issue, but they'll be gone soon as well. More importantly, the voters and donors in that area care more about trains than parking today.

Another baffling element of the 1990s opposition to the extension was that it seemed like the objections could all have been overcome with some thought, but the "community leaders" weren't interested. The line could have been run entirely over the Grand Central "Parkway," or put underground as far south as Astoria Boulevard. A solid proposal that addresses those objections, especially if it has the backing of business leaders like the Global Gateway Alliance, should be able to win over Gianaris, Simotas and Constantinides, and eventually the rest of Astoria. It's not 1999, people, and we shouldn't be acting like it is.

The density to support long distance trains

There's a new dust-up among transit bloggers, stirred by a recent report showing that while Amtrak's Northeast Corridor makes a profit and the state-sponsored corridor trains break even, the long distance trains are still losing money (although Don Phillips disputes those numbers). Eric Jaffe gives three arguments in favor of keeping the subsidies for the long distance trains, while Jarrett Walker and Bruce Nourish make an austerity case for dropping them. Paul Druce won't go that far, but argues that we should at least charge market clearing prices for berths in the sleeping cars.

"Overnight Train to Beijing." Jay Dedman / Flickr.

Here's the key quote from Jarrett's comment on Jaffe's post: "Rail is optimal for particular distances. Europe has lots of great rail services, but still, if you’re going 2000 miles within Europe, and you’re not a tourist or time-rich wanderer, you’re definitely going to fly. ... Australia is too big for rail networks to be national, and so are the US and Canada."

I've faulted Jarrett in the past for transportation myopia, and here it's causing him to repeat the old "density to support transit" canard. These are the three questions that get you out of this myopic viewpoint:

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

1. Would long distance trains work if they had a better mode share? Absolutely. Take the ridership on just about any Amtrak long distance route and there are more than a hundred times that many people driving or flying. Shift half of those drivers or flyers to the train, and you can charge enough to break even.

2. Does the area have the density to support roads or airplanes either? No. There are very few highways that pay for themselves, and I don't think any of those compete with trains. Air service is heavily subsidized: public airports, publicly funded air traffic control, Essential Air Service.

3. Would people live or work more densely if the car or air infrastructure were less subsidized? Yeah. You'd still have people living in Seattle and Phoenix and along train lines connecting them, but a lot less in small towns scattered around the country.

So we see that it's not that Australia, the US and Canada are too big for national rail networks. It's that they're too big for three national networks, road, rail and air. Cut the subsidies to one of the other two, and we can get enough passengers for rail.

Jarrett makes a further argument based on efficiency with his remark about the "time-rich wanderer," which is echoed by Nourish. That may have merit, but it's a separate issue, and it doesn't help anyone if you conflate them. I'll deal with it in another post.

When security makes us less secure

In my last post, I described how the current "airport security" system fails to provide any significant level of security beyond what existed before 2001. In particular, the system of requiring photo identification to get on a plane is pointless and easily circumvented from a passenger safety standpoint. Trains and buses are also very different from airplanes, with different security requirements, and applying airline security measures unmodified to trains and buses is idiotic.

Beyond this, the concept of "making trains as safe as planes" is even more counterproductive. "Safety" measures like seat belts can wind up making us less safe by encouraging people to drive or fly instead of take the bus. In the same way, these "security" measures can make us less secure by encouraging people to drive or fly instead of taking buses and trains.

The long lines, intrusive bag and body checks, idiotic limits on liquids and utensils, and depersonalizing identity checks have discouraged many from flying. I personally did not fly for almost five years after the September 11 attacks, partly for unrelated reasons, but also in part because I knew it would infuriate me to have to take my shoes off. I don't think I'm the only one. The beneficiaries of this bureaucratic incompetence have been Amtrak and the intercity bus companies. Although they instituted their own moronic identification requirements in 2002, at least you don't have to put your bag through an X-ray to get on a bus.

Senator Schumer seems determined to change that. The Senator from JetBlue loves to tell the story of how he put up with crappy plane service to upstate during his 2000 campaign, and promised that if elected, he would improve it. Did he improve it with an efficient, sustainable high-speed rail network? No, he poured massive subsidies into airports and airlines to serve them, and with the price of jet fuel rising and travel budgets falling, the system just demands more and more subsidies.

It could be that Schumer saw that all the security theater was making airlines uncompetitive and decided to saddle trains and buses with the same shit. But I'm going to apply Hanlon's Razor here and assume that Schumer really wants to do something nice for trains and buses, and he's enough of a moron to think that the security theater will save transit riders from a horrible September 11th-style fate.

Of course, the result will be that people will choose to drive instead of taking trains and buses. Whatever profits Amtrak is making on the Northeast Corridor will disappear, along with the minor profits that intercity bus operators are earning. This will lead to cuts in service, which will lead to drops in ridership and further service cuts.

The worst part of it all is that if people shift from a more efficient mode like trains and buses to a less efficient mode like private cars or airplanes, that increases their fuel consumption per mile and per trip. Increased fuel consumption means more oil imported from the Middle East, which means more oil wars to secure our supply, which means more motivation for terrorists to attack the United States. It's a fake security that only winds up making us less secure.

Trains are not planes

I want to post an explanation for my last post, and an elaboration of some of the points I raised in it. Recently our senior senator has been making a push to increase "security" on intercity trains and buses. I haven't written very much on this topic before because frankly it makes my blood boil, and I'm afraid I'll wind up TYPING IN ALL CAPS and all my frustration will burst out in one big incoherent rant. The satire has helped me to vent a bit.

What is it that has me in this state? Mainly it's the combination of idiocies: delays and frustrations from security theater joining with monitoring of private activities to discourage transit ridership. It's a perfect storm of evil.

The first reason is that, as Adron explains, most "airport security" is actually ineffective. The biggest improvement in airline security since September 11 has been reinforcing the cockpit doors. John Gilmore made an excellent case that requiring identification to fly on airplanes is both ineffective and unconstitutional. The shoe inspections, backscatter machines and body cavity searches are unnecessary, ineffective and intrusive. Their main point is to convince us that the Government is Doing Something.

The next point is that trains and buses are not planes. By their nature they require much less security, and the kind of security is different. Anyone who acts like they're the same is an idiot, and Chuck Schumer regularly embarrasses the state of New York when he opens his mouth about transit security and lets the whole world see what an idiot we elected.

There's one major thing to keep in mind when anyone makes a comparison between trains and planes: it's easy to crash a plane into a building; you just have to take control. It's much harder to crash a train into a building. Not completely impossible, but almost. It's relatively easy to crash a bus into a building, but they tend to be smaller than planes and not filled with tons of kerosene, so they don't do as much damage.

Of course, it is possible to carry out mass murder on trains, as was done by Al Qaeda affiliates in Madrid in 2004, and in London in 2005. But there have not been any similar attacks since, and my guess is that the terrorist leaders didn't feel they were worthwhile. 191 people were killed in Madrid, and 56 in London; compare that to the 2,996 deaths that immediately resulted from the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in 2001. In fact, if you glance over Wikipedia's list of terrorist incidents involving railway systems, the numbers of dead and wounded are all really tiny in comparison to the World Trade Center attacks, despite requiring as much planning and coordination.

Similarly with buses, Palestinian suicide bombers carried out a series of widely reported attacks on buses from 1989 through 2008, and only managed to kill 804 people. Their biggest year was when they killed 237 people in 2002 - but it was done in 46 separate attacks, most of which were in cafes and markets, not on buses. These attacks have had an effect, but they required a lot of coordination and numerous operatives over a nineteen-year period. Most importantly, the attackers felt that they were defending their home territory, and did not have to travel far to do it.

So that's why the current airline security measures are ineffective, and why they would be even less effective applied to trains and buses. In a future post, I'll discuss how the current security measures are discouraging people from using transit, and why the proposed ones would be even worse.

Poor people with cars

In the comments on my last post, Joel writes:

I know that the image of NJ drivers are BMW driving upper middle class yuppies. However, I have put in many miles in NJ and I can tell you that many parts of NJ have residents that are treading water in 1980s vintage automobiles. Warren County and large chunks of south Jersey have poverty problems and the land usage makes demand for NJT bus service sparse. These people are finished if fuel climbs.

I am not saying that raising tolls and the gas tax would be bad. I am simply saying that most of our transit advocates have transportation myopia that causes them to misunderstand their respective markets. Christie has done his best to protect the people that don't have much and he is doing it again.

I'm glad that you're not saying that raising tolls and the gas tax would be bad, Joel. (I'd be interested to know when and how you think they should be raised.) But you raise an important point, and I'm going to use it as a springboard to discuss a persistent problem in leftist transportation discussions: compassion.

I'm a compassionate kind of guy, and like many leftists, a lot of my politics are motivated by compassion. But a lot of leftists get paralyzed by their compassion - or maybe it offers them an excuse to avoid something they didn't particularly want to do anyway. They lose perspective, lose the ability to distinguish between different levels of pain, and between short-term disruptions and long-term inequities. For some reason it happens a lot when the topic of poor people who drive cars comes up.

Let me give an example, taking Joel's argument to its extreme: I live in Queens. I just heard about this great job in Chicago. Obviously, none of you are going to suggest that the government pay for my commute; I should either move to Chicago or get a job here.

But what if my Senators and the Senators from Illinois get a great idea for economic development: ten dollar flights to Midway! The federal government covers the difference between the ticket price and the airline's cost per passenger. I take the job in Chicago and start flying back and forth every weekday.

A year goes by and it's a hugely popular program. The city is talking about building a new airport in Brooklyn to accommodate the demand. The US has occupied Iran to ensure a steady supply of jet fuel. But it's straining the federal and state budgets, and the government is looking at either raising taxes or cutting other programs to pay for it.

Suppose that someone gets bold enough to suggest that the program could pay more of its own costs if the fare were raised to twenty dollars. But that would mean paying a hundred dollars a week for me. It would add up to almost five thousand dollars over a year! My job only pays thirty thousand, so it would be a devastating blow to me. How am I going to pay for the mortgage on my house, the payments on my car, and my kids' tuition at private school?

My point, to be clear, is that any subsidy will eventually have a significant number of people who are dependent on it. Ending a subsidy like this will disrupt people's lives, causing economic suffering. But just as we currently live fine without ten-dollar flights to Chicago, we would be able to live fine if they were given and taken away. And just as people were able to live fine in Warren County without cheap gas and free highways, some day they'll be able to do that again. Maybe all the people who moved to Warren County to take advantage of the cheap gas and free highways will have to move back to the cities, but they won't necessarily move back to the slum conditions that many of them left behind.

Making the transition is important. A lot of the pain associated with eliminating subsidies is transitional. This can be mitigated with proper support: a favorable job market, a good safety net. Interestingly, when there is enough support, transitions like this are often not even perceived as painful. It's another chapter in someone's life, even an adventure.

We also need to realize that subsidies can hurt as well as help, and compare the pain of getting rid of a subsidy against the pain of keeping it. Think about the budget mess and fuel shortages that ten dollar flights to Chicago would cause, let alone the suffering that it would cause if we occupied Iran. Similarly, it would probably cause a lot more suffering over the long term to continue subsidizing sprawl in Warren County than to stop.

Note the difference between my argument and a libertarian one. I am not saying that all subsidies are evil and must be eliminated. I am saying that they must be justified, and that those that can't be justified should be eliminated. I'm not saying that they should be justified with some kind of cold monetary cost-benefit analysis, but in terms of how they fit with our priorities, and how compassionate they are. I'm also not advocating pain and suffering, I'm advocating adequate transition support.

Again, I'm not trying to make Joel the bad guy here. I don't know what he thinks should be done in Warren County. But "These people are finished if fuel climbs," sounds like an argument for letting these subsidies persist indefinitely, which is not an answer.

The bottom line is that compassion doesn't mean never doing anything that could possibly make someone suffer somewhere. It means keeping perspective, and doing what's necessary to reduce the overall suffering. And that includes measures to mitigate transitional suffering.

Unclear on the concept

From an article in the Oxford (Ohio) Press - reprinted by Air Rail News without attribution:

The Hamilton Vision Commission is trying to fast-track a plan to include a train station at the Butler County Regional Airport in a statewide passenger rail system now being laid out on paper. ... “We think it is strategically located in the heart of the county,” said vision commission member Rob Wile ... He said it is immediately surrounded by vacant land...

Apparently this "vision" has never heard of infill development.

Phoenix Sky Train and the limits of intermodality

Some people at a place called Air Rail News have been sending me their newsletter for a while. It's basically just recycled press releases, and I'm not all that interested in airport rail connections, but every once in a while they have something interesting. This week they noted Phoenix's Sky Train project.

Sky Train will be an automated, rubber-tired "train" in a dedicated, elevated right-of-way, connecting the terminals and long-term parking to the airport light-rail/bus stop. It will replace the current shuttle bus, which sounds like a good thing, because the last time I went to Phoenix the shuttle bus took a while to show up.

It's great that they're improving connections between terminals and to the light rail and local buses. But they're forgetting about intercity travel. The new Sky Train will not connect to Union Station, which is understandable since Union Station hasn't seen regular train service since 1996. But the Greyhound bus station, now also served by several Mexican bus lines, is just a few blocks west of the airport.



In fact, it's one of Phoenix's ironies that the airport is four miles from downtown across from the bus station and along the new light rail line, while the train station is thirty miles south of the city in a little town with no bus service to speak of.

Another weirdness of this plan - and many airport rail services - is that it's completely incompatible with the light rail system. The Sky Train FAQ gives a lame excuse of not wanting to inconvenience light rail riders who weren't going to the airport. Of course, they wouldn't have to run all the light rail trains through the airport. Just those bound for Union Station.

The Sky Train will be built in two phases, so let's add a third: connect the airport with the Greyhound station to the west. I would also like to see the Sky Train built with the same rail and power systems as the Metro Light Rail so that they could be connected later.

Another possibility is that the Sky Train could act as a local loop from light rail to airport to Greyhound, but the elevated structure could be built wide enough to accommodate a second set of tracks for light rail. Phase 4 could be a light-rail branch through the airport to Greyhound and then continuing west to Union Station and reconnecting with the current light rail line somewhere downtown. It would only have to make one stop at the airport; passengers for other terminals could transfer to the Sky Train there.

Boondoggles: Stewart Airport Rail Link

Following Ben Kabak's lead, I have added the Stewart Airport Rail Link to my Spreadsheet o'Boondoggles. In this, I agree with Jeff Zupan, who was paraphrased by the Sun as saying that "the real benefit of Stewart International Airport would be if it relieved the city airports of upstate residents who would no longer have to commute into the city to fly." None of the rail proposals would serve very many upstate air passengers.

With AirTran cancelling its flights out of Stewart, Ben observes that there's even less reason to invest scarce transit funding in enabling this airport.

Following up on an earlier article about the tradeoff between funding air and rail travel, I feel that government money spent on air travel deprives passenger rail carriers of needed revenue and ensures that they will continue to need to beg for subsidies. My parents regularly fly to Florida through Stewart. They've tried driving the entire way, and they've tried taking the train the entire way. They've told me that flying out of Stewart is so much more convenient than either of the other options. But would the train be more attractive if they had to fly out of Albany or one of the other airports?

Incidentally, there used to be a privately-operated bus called the Hudson Valley Airporter, which traveled down the Thruway and Route 9 to Kennedy and La Guardia. It was active in the 1980s, gone in the 1990s. Stewart Airport opened in 1990. Coincidence?

Here's an idea: imagine if we extended the Empire Corridor train service from Rhinecliff, Poughkeepsie, Croton and Yonkers through Penn Station to Kennedy Airport. There are only two obstacles. The first is that the ex-New York Central Hudson Line and the LIRR Main Line have incompatible third-rail electrification systems. This could be dealt with by stringing catenary the whole length, but it would be expensive. Another option would be some kind of dual-mode locomotive that could switch shoes. The second obstacle is that use of the Rockaway Cut-Off has been blocked by local residents, and the MTA has allowed the tracks to decay.

Anyone care to give a back-of-the-envelope calculation about how much it would cost to restore the Rockaway Cut-Off? To deploy catenary along the route? To produce dual-mode locomotives like this? Any chance that this is under $600 million dollars?