A better express bus map

Express buses are easy in New York City. Just walk over to your express bus stop at the usual time and wait. Eventually the bus will arrive, you get on board, pay, find a seat and relax. When you're getting close to your stop, push the button, the bus stops, and you walk to work. Now they even have BusTime and MetroCard!

Express buses are easy if you're a regular passenger, that is. If you're not, how do you know which bus to take? You look at the complicated bus map for your borough, not posted in any subway station or bus shelter. Except if your borough is Manhattan. All the express buses are designed for trips to and from Manhattan, but the MTA doesn't show any express buses on the Manhattan bus map.

So you look at the bus map for the borough that's not Manhattan in your trip and figure out which bus is passing closest to the stop in that borough. Find the schedule for that bus. It may be posted on the stop, it may not, but the schedule is critical.

The schedule has tables telling you whether there is a bus scheduled to leave when you want to leave, and when it is scheduled to arrive in Manhattan. Everything besides the original departure time is approximate, and the buses almost always get stuck in traffic, so be prepared to board up to half an hour late depending on how close you are to the origin, and to get to your destination up to an hour late. Be sure to check BusTime so you know whether the bus is even coming.

The schedule does tell you where the buses stop in Manhattan. There used to be buses with suffixes after the route number (or not) indicating whether they stopped on Third Avenue or Downtown instead of Sixth Avenue, or maybe other routings, but the MTA has been gradually reorganizing them into separate numbers.

One key bit of information that's in the schedules but not the borough bus maps is where the buses stop and where they go express. It may seem obvious because most of the buses go on expressways, but some of them stop on the service roads of those expressways, and some don't. A few stop on Queens Boulevard or Woodhaven Boulevard, but most don't.

As you're probably saying to yourself right now, it doesn't have to be this way. Do the express buses really need to be on the same map as the local buses? Probably not. Is there a way to indicate on the map where the buses go in Manhattan? Probably. Is there a way to indicate on the map where the buses go express? Yeah.

The biggest thing that would make these maps easier to read is not showing extra information. Outside of Staten Island, where a bus network redesign is being implemented this summer, there are fifty express bus routes in the city. Almost half of them run only on rush hours, in the peak direction. Only sixteen of them run seven days a week. So if you're looking for an express bus on a Sunday you don't need to see the QM44, the X63 and the BM5. The resulting map is much cleaner.

That said, as I've written before, it's crazy not to offer Sunday service everywhere. When the Department of Transportation first started subsidizing private companies like Green Lines, they should have made funding contingent on seven day service. When the MTA took over their operations it should have immediately instituted Sunday service wherever there was Saturday service. Running buses on Saturdays and not Sundays is religious discrimination, and it has no place in New York City.

I'll have more to say about this map in the future.

Do New York's "manufacturing zones" promote driving?

I read on YIMBY that some people who live or work in the Jerome Avenue corridor in the Bronx are concerned that rezoning the area to allow residential development could price out many of the auto body shops and other car-related businesses that operate in the area. I sympathize with the concerns, but I think things have to change. And the more I think about it, the more important it seems to me.

A walkthrough of the Jerome Avenue area conducted by the Department of City Planning, January 2013. Photo: Gerard Flynn.

It seems pretty clear that allowing residential uses will price out auto-related businesses. There is a tremendous demand for housing, and housing is displacing auto services wherever they are allowed to compete, from the gas stations of the East Village to the garages of the Upper West Side to the used car lots of Woodside. I am not including Willets Point in this: there is no competition there, only government fiat.

As a business owner, I am not exactly happy about small businesses being unable to survive. My brother-in-law is an auto body mechanic, so I also appreciate the value of good technical jobs that do not require a college degree. And yet, there is such a thing as a job that costs too much. I have argued that the costs of each Tappan Zee Bridge construction job, in terms of sprawl, pollution and yes, death and destruction, are too high. I would say the same thing is true for auto related jobs along Jerome Avenue, and elsewhere in the city.

We have driven away many of the port jobs and the manufacturing jobs, and auto related jobs are a good chunk of what is left. As my friend Stephen Smith, who used to write for YIMBY, has observed on Twitter, the vast majority of businesses in M zones around the city are not involved in manufacturing anything.

Every time I have heard about a gas station closing or a parking garage converted to apartments, I have smiled inside. I smiled because I remembered the difficulty of crossing in front of these gas stations and garages. "Difficulty" is too nice a word: I remembered the dread I felt trying to walk in front of the gas stations as drivers cruised in and out across the sidewalk at high speeds. I remembered the humiliation I felt when garage customers parked across the sidewalk, forcing me out into traffic. I smiled at the thought that nobody else would feel that dread and humiliation again.

I and many other pedestrians have been similarly threatened and humiliated in front of car dealerships and repair shops in "industrial zones" across the city. Some have been killed. You will forgive me if I am not horrified at the prospect of losing an industry with such little regard for safety.

But we still have millions of cars stored in our city, and millions more that come in for the day. Where will their owners buy and sell them, and bring them to be serviced, if not on Jerome Avenue, Northern Boulevard, Jamaica Avenue or Atlantic Avenue?

Well, if they had to they would go to Hempstead Turnpike, or Kennedy Boulevard, or Boston Post Road. But that makes me think: if these businesses can't survive on Jerome Avenue or 21st Street without being protected from competition from housing, that means that we are essentially subsidizing the cheap rent, and thus the cheap repair jobs, with our expensive apartments. My mom is paying more every month so that the guy who cuts her off in the crosswalk can pay less to have his oil changed.

And that makes me wonder: what if we didn't have these bogus "Manufacturing" zones? What if we allowed people to build apartments wherever they thought they could rent them? Would the rents continue to rise? Would there be the same pressure to waste public money on railyard decks? Would we still have as many cars clogging Queens Boulevard every day? Would we still have Levels of Service that make our traffic engineers loath to build real crosswalks? Would we still have community boards packed with parking-obsessed NIMBYs?

Please, let's find some jobs for these people so that we can shut down the M zones.

That doesn't mean other options can't work

Sustainable transportation advocates in New York City have been campaigning for years to tear down the Sheridan Expressway, a lightly used 1.25 mile stretch of four-lane highway in the Bronx connecting the Bruckner Expressway with the Cross-Bronx expressway. It was built in 1956-1958 and named in honor of Arthur V. Sheridan, Bronx Borough Commissioner of Public Works, who oversaw construction of the Cross-Bronx under Bob Moses and was killed a car crash in 1952 while driving to pick up his eleven-year-old son. It was planned to continue north as an elevated expressway above Boston Road, all the way to Co-Op City, but those plans were abandoned in 1971 after years of protests.

Teardown advocates hang out on the Sheridan Expressway during rush hour, 5:30 PM, July 15, 2009. Photo: Tri-State Transportation Campaign.

The Sheridan Expressway should never have been built. It cuts the residential neighborhoods to the west off from the Bronx River. At the time it was built you didn't want to go to the Bronx River, but now it would make a nice riverwalk. For cars it is redundant with the Bronx River Parkway, and for trucks it is redundant with the Bruckner and Major Deegan Expressways. I have a double standard for redundancy: for transit and freight trains it's good, but for cars it's bad, and the very simple reason is that we want to encourage people to take transit and ship by train instead of cars and trucks.

The New York State Department of Transportation was always hostile to the idea of tearing down the Sheridan, and recently we heard that the City Departments of Transportation and City Planning have abandoned the possibility of tearing it down. Advocates were disheartened, but today Transportation Nation provided a ray of hope, courtesy of City Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan:

"I think you know the Bloomberg administration has been very innovative when it comes to traffic engineering," she said. "But in this instance this particular option didn’t work — but that doesn’t mean other options can’t work here and we’re going to continue to explore them."

I have another option that I hope Sadik-Khan and her colleagues will explore: let's tear down the Bronx River Parkway instead, from the Bruckner to the Cross-Bronx.

Steve Anderson tells us, "The proposed expressway was to serve vehicles that could not travel on the Bronx River Parkway, whose extension into the Bronx was in the design stages at the time." As I mentioned above, there is a mile-long section of the Bronx River Parkway that also connects the Bruckner and Cross-Bronx Expressways. The Sheridan serves cars, trucks and buses, but the Parkway serves only cars.

As we saw last month, this section of the Bronx River Parkway is no picturesque historic drive. It's a dangerous six-lane highway built in 1950 on eight blocks that used to be low-rise apartment buildings. If it were torn down, new apartments could be built to replace them, perhaps with a greenway in part of the old right-of-way. It might not be as big a triumph as tearing down the Sheridan, but it would be a lot better than nothing.

In fact, section of the the Parkway just north of the Cross-Bronx is the part that's elevated over the subway yards and the zoo, the site of the crash that killed seven people. Governor Cuomo is planning to spend 232 million dollars to replace that elevated section. As I suggested in May, that project is a huge waste of money. We could make it a lot safer by rebuilding it as a four-lane road with shoulders and a parallel greenway, at least from Pelham Parkway south.

Is tearing down this redundant section of the Bronx River Parkway one of the "other options" that Commissioner Sadik-Khan had in mind? If not, let's hope she adds it to her list.

When speeding is common, people die

By now you've heard the tragic headlines. A middle-aged woman accidentally drove her van off the side of the Bronx River Parkway yesterday, killing herself and everyone aboard - her parents, her sister, her daughter and two nieces. You may have also read statements by Robert Sinclair, president of the Automobile Club of New York, that the Parkway "lacks modern transportation engineering features" because it was conceived in 1907 and opened in 1925 as "the first limited access multilane highway in the U.S." He went on to complain about the guardrail: "It is very strange that there is a curb there," Sinclair said. "You don't put curbs on high-speed roadways because they can serve as launching pads, which appears to be what happened here. A big Honda Pilot flew over a 4-foot guardrail." The Wall Street Journal found that the State's "Five Percent Report" on the most dangerous roads claimed that the "section needs a 'deceleration lane' and other measures to improve the East 177th Street exit."

The fact that Sinclair finds it "very strange that there is a curb there" gives you a clue that he's talking out his ass, and that's probably where he found the "facts" that he solemnly delivered to the Associated Press. In contrast, Steve Anderson knows his shit, and on his site nycroads.com you can read that the entire Parkway south of the Sprain Brook Parkway was built between 1950 and 1952. While the section between Bronxville and Valhalla may well have "narrow lanes, steep hills, tight turns," the southern part has six lanes and is relatively straight and flat.

Photo: Louis Lanzano / Associated Press

Being somewhat familiar with New York City's parkways, I saw that "curb" on Bing Maps and knew exactly what it was: a divider protecting a long-closed side path. In the early 1950s, Bob Moses was still building sidewalks and side paths along his parkways. It's very similar to the one on the Goethals Bridge, even though that was built much earlier under the Port Authority.

If you're wondering why anyone would walk on a narrow sidewalk separated from six lanes of speeding car traffic by a two-foot-high strip of concrete, you're not alone. That's why it was closed, and it probably wasn't very popular when it was open, even though it's the straightest route to get from Bronx Park to Soundview.

Sinclair doesn't think it's strange that the driver, Maria Gonzalez, was doing 68 in a 50mph zone. Neither does NYPD spokesman Paul Browne. The AP says, "Gonzalez was driving well above the posted 50 mph limit, but speeding is common at that point and she may have been simply keeping up with traffic, said New York Police Department spokesman Paul Browne."

Of course, that's the problem. Gonzalez probably wasn't doing anything particularly unusual or reckless - beyond driving in the first place. If speeding is common, it's because the road design encourages it. It's a six-lane limited-access highway, but it has a 50mph speed limit, probably because it has no shoulders. But the drivers see six lanes, so they go fast.

So what do we do when the road gives drivers visual cues to go faster than it's really safe to go? Sinclair and the State DOT - and Borough President Ruben Diaz Junior - have only one answer: spend more money. Spend $232 million dollars to replace the bridge (as a link provided by the Journal News shows), raise the curbs, add shoulders and even a "FULLY ADA COMPLIANT SHARED-USE PATH." But for the section of the Parkway north of Bronxville, even Steve Anderson, who is usually not shy about spending other people's money on roads, actually recommends that the number of lanes be reduced to discourage speeding.

That's what we should do south of Bronxville too. This section of the road is redundant with the Thruway/Major Deegan and the Hutchinson River Parkway, and it doesn't even carry trucks. It does not need to be six lanes wide. If we believe Governor Cuomo that the State needs to rein in spending, we should definitely not waste money replacing and widening this bridge. But we do not have to compromise on safety. We can convert the outer lanes of this road to shoulders. This will add protection and reduce speeding, preventing at least some future deaths.

It might even make the road safe and pleasant enough that we could reopen the pedestrian and cyclist infrastructure and restore a needed link in the Bronx's non-motorized transportation network. We can also open the Parkway to buses, at least south of Pelham Parkway, to give people another alternative to driving.

Price drops aren't always forever

A few months ago I came across the notion of "filtering" on Charlie Gardner's Old Urbanist blog. It's an idea that's fairly well established in real estate economics, based on the observation that a lot of cheaper buildings are old and run-down. The theory is that the older a building is, the harder it is to maintain. The owners don't maintain it all that well, so it deteriorates, and no longer fetches as high a price or rent. The notion is usually the basis of an argument that adequate affordable housing doesn't require subsidies or mandates; we just have to wait for the housing to age and the market will take care of it.

As Charlie pointed out, this doesn't make any sense. Filtering is a very nice theory, but it really doesn't seem to match the data very well at all, and I expect that it will match it less and less well as time goes on. Charlie suggests that "the process of filtering, at least for initially high-income older neighborhoods, was a temporary result of rapid suburban dispersal in the 1940-1970 time period, and since that time has been steadily reversed."

Take the Grand Concourse in the Bronx for example. It was "the Park Avenue of the Bronx" when it was built, lined with large luxury Art Deco apartment buildings. Real prices and rents declined after World War II, and in 2000 you could get a two-bedroom apartment with hardwood parquet floors and a sunken living room for under $800 a month. Now those apartments go for $1500-2000.

It's true that most of those buildings were not well-maintained, but the causation is more likely the other way around: the landlords didn't put a lot of money into them because they didn't bring in much rent. So why were the rents so cheap? I'm guessing that there were several related factors: racism, city services, crime, noise, fads and the suburban ponzi scheme.

First, there are a lot of racists out there who don't want to live near black and Puerto Rican people, and if anything there were more fifty years ago. That reduces prices and rents anywhere near where black and Puerto Rican people live, which can be a good deal if you're not a racist. The problem is that the city was run by racists and by people who spent money where the rich and powerful people lived, and when the rich and powerful people moved away from the South Bronx, the city cut back on street sweeping, garbage pickup and other services. Most notably, it cut back on policing. At the same time the drug booms fueled by crack and other substances brought money and power to criminal gangs that lived in those neighborhoods. Some people (usually poor) seem to mind less when there's a lot of noise around from amplified music and other activities, but when the people who do mind move away, that lowers home prices and rents even more.

Finally, at that time it was "the thing to do" to move to the suburbs and buy as big a house on as big a piece of land with as big a car as you could afford. The suburban ponzi scheme described so well by the StrongTowns crew made housing cheaper in the suburbs than it needed to be to cover the amount of services that the municipalities were providing. All those factors made housing cheap in the Bronx, in Harlem, in Williamsburg and in Fort Greene.

Now those factors are reversing one by one. The suburban ponzi scheme has mostly burnt itself out. "The thing to do" is now to move back to the city and live in an apartment. The drug boom has subsided, and crime is much more under control. People may be less racist. So middle-class white people move back to the city, the noise levels go down, the city starts spending more money in the neighborhoods and the black and Latino people can't afford to live their any longer. Prices go up.

A lot of the anger over gentrification comes from the fact that the poor black and Latino people who lived in these neighborhoods for fifty or sixty years thought that the change was permanent. They thought that this was now their territory. Sure, they had to put up with crime, noise and dirty streets, but they got big apartments with parquet floors in Art Deco buildings on the Grand Concourse, and brownstones in Fort Greene and Harlem. They never thought anyone but them would want to live there again.

Is it fair that poor black and Latino people can't afford to live in these neighborhoods any more? Probably not. It wasn't fair when the neighborhoods were built and their grandparents couldn't afford to live in them. But the solution is not to keep the neighborhoods dirty, noisy and dangerous. As Matt Yglesias says, the best way to bring down the price of housing is to build more of it. And as I said last month, the best way to make sure that we have affordable housing that isn't dangerous or inaccessible is to build lower-quality housing alongside the high-quality housing.

The "two New Yorks" frame is now officially a menace

Earlier today I pointed out how in the "satisfactory" snow removal after the latest storm, there are many crosswalks that were not completely shoveled. I've observed it today, four days after the snow stopped: the snowbanks blocking the crosswalk nearest to me are now frozen solid. Others have reported similar situations around the city. The response from Kvetch Greenfield? One tweet.

Now Streetsblog did find a News story that Jimmy Vacca and Dom Recchia are looking into the possibility that Cemusa may have shirked on their obligations to keep the bus stops clean. Anything to avoid openly questioning the results of their colleagues' actions and statements, I guess!

There have been a few other stories about the effect of the storm on pedestrians and transit riders: one from Manny Fernandez in the Times and one from Greg Mocker on Channel 11. Frustratingly, both of them fall back on the tired "two New Yorks" frame. (Tonight Mocker filed another report about snow on sidewalks and crosswalks that didn't use the "two New Yorks" frame - but he didn't connect it to the demands from drivers for clear side streets either.)

I'm convinced that in order to believe that there are only two New Yorks, divided along borough boundaries, you have to be either creepily dishonest, spectacularly uninformed or blissfully unobservant - any of which should disqualify you as a reporter. Applying the idea to this snow situation is even a stretch beyond that.

In order to write these moronic stories, Fernandez and Mocker had to forget the stories that they had filed in December (Fernandez, Mocker) featuring local politicians demanding that secondary streets be plowed. Mocker had to forget how he reported that Dan Halloran was satisfied with the cleanup of the January 6 snowfall.

A lot of the stories in Fernandez's piece are kind of bizarre WTF stories, anyway. Let's see: Joseph McDermott couldn't pick up a used car he had bought. Okay... Linda DelGaudio "spent the day" digging out her brother's car. Ummm... Frank Inzirillo had to take the day off because he couldn't dig out all three of his cars? My heart bleeds! Two men on Flatbush Avenue were forced to listen to Celine Dion while digging out a van? I mean seriously, this is some of the shittiest John Dos Passos-wannabe prose I've read. Hey, you effete Upper East Sider, listen to me, the guy with the Hispanic last name, while I give you the local color and show you how the other half dig their three cars out of the snow!

There are a couple of car-related vignettes in Fernandez's report that might have earned my sympathy if they too hadn't been so WTF? Leo Martinez's baby needs to go to the doctor, but god forbid they have a doctor in walking distance or take a taxi, no, Leo suffers because he's spending forty minutes and paying two other guys a total of $20. Peter Hristodoulias dug out his wife's car because the bus wasn't running ... but she had already walked to catch the express bus?

The fact that Hristodoulias's wife had to walk forty minutes to the bus is a problem, and so is the fact that Margie Perez walked to wait for an express bus that never showed up. But Fernandez doesn't connect that to the fact that many more side streets were plowed in that snowstorm. If the city had focused on the bus routes, it might have been able to plow them better. But no, thanks to David Greenfield, Tony Avella and the Times editorial board, the city made every side street drivable by cars before putting any further effort into bus routes.

Fernandez contrasted his Everyman commutes with Bloomberg's statement that he had to wait "a minute and a half" for the subway. Mocker also had a field day with that one. But Bloomberg also said that "everybody on the train seemed in a good mood." Who rides the number 6 train with Bloomberg, Manny Ferndandez, you man of the people? That's right, poor Black and Mexican people from the Bronx. But because they happened to be in Manhattan at the time, they were counted as "New Yorkers in Manhattan," not "New Yorkers elsewhere."

So no, Manny and Greg, there are not two New Yorks. In this story there were at least four: the elite Manhattanites in taxis, the middle-class apartment-dwelling transit riders of all races, the poor Black and Hispanic bus and subway riders, and the entitled outer borough drivers. In order to shoehorn it into your crappy frame, you lumped us outer-borough apartment-dwellers in with the elite Manhattanites, and the entitled drivers in with the poor bus and subway riders. In the process, you obscured several issues, and the most important one is that the entitled drivers overpowered the elite Manhattanites in order to screw over both us middle-class transit riders and the poor Blacks and Hispanics. Way to stand up for the little guy!

Why 181st Street matters

I've long argued that the concept of "BRT" attempting to mimic subway lines is an inefficient and counterproductive strategy. When you've got a lot of people who think they're too good to ride the bus, it's flashy and can get people to try it, but when you've got lots of bus riders already, what you need is just an improvement in value. 181st Street in Upper Manhattan is an example of this.

On Friday, Streetsblog reported on a presentation by the Department of Transportation about alternatives for the 181st Street corridor in Washington Heights. "Alternative 2 would create a two-way, protected transit mall along this stretch, with raised medians serving as bus stops," writes Noah Kazis. Why does that matter? Check out the Bronx bus map (PDF):

There are five bus routes that start at the Port Authority's uptown bus terminal, cross Manhattan along 181st Street, go across the Washington Bridge to the Bronx, and fan out to cover most of the western Bronx. The Bx3 goes north past Bronx Community College, Lehman College and the VA Hospital to Kingsbridge. The Bx36 goes clear across the borough, past West Farms and Parkchester to Castle Hill. The Bx11 and Bx35 cover Morrisania and the Bx13 goes south to Yankee Stadium and the courts. They have high ridership, which keeps costs down; none of them require heavy subsidies:

Route	Average weekday ridership	Operating farebox recovery ratio
Bx3	17,840	105 %
Bx11	14,860	93 %
Bx13	10,700	94 %
Bx35	15,860	109 %
Bx36	32,710	95 %
Total	91,970

The Bx36 is a long route, but I would guess that more than half the ridership crosses the bridge to Manhattan, and even more for the other routes. Many of the people who live in this part of the Bronx are Dominican, and they use these buses to connect with friends, relatives and jobs in the Dominican neighborhoods of Washington Heights and Inwood. Others use these buses to connect with the A and 1 trains in Manhattan, which provide a more direct route to many destinations than the 4 and D trains.

Significantly, these buses also allow Bronx residents to reach the George Washington Bridge bus terminal, where they can take buses run by New Jersey Transit and Red and Tan Lines to various locations in New Jersey and Rockland County. There are also private van services that run from the GWB terminal across the bridge and west to Paterson and south along Bergenline Avenue to Hudson County. These buses form a vital east-west link between communities in an area where all the train lines run north-south.

If you actually go to check out these routes sometime, well, it can try the patience of Job. Double-parking is rampant along 181st Street, and all it takes is one double-parked car to hold up three buses. It's common for a bus to take as long to get from Broadway to Amsterdam as from Amsterdam to the Grand Concourse. These delays cause bunching, which has repercussions down all five lines.

Alternative 2 could actually work as a kind of "bus network acupuncture," relieving a pressure point and thereby improving flow on a large section of the network. Putting in bus lanes on three blocks of one street could improve the commutes of 50,000 people, and through speedier and more reliable trips, attract more people to the bus who might otherwise have taken car services. Compare that to the hundred-plus blocks of the First and Second Avenue Select Bus Service (M15 average weekday ridership: 53,510), and you get a huge bang for the buck.

And this is why it was so disheartening to me to read these words from Manhattan Transportation Commissioner Forgione: "We will not proceed with anything without community support."

I know what "community support" refers to, and it has precious little to do with actual community support. We're talking about a community board that's dominated by drivers in a neighborhood where 80% of households don't own a single car. These are people who are much more likely to double-park than ride the bus, even though the real community is much more likely to be riding the bus. We're talking about a lot of self-important "community leaders" who are convinced that their small circle of friends constitutes the community. These are the people who Commissioner Sadik-Khan stood up to, and got blasted for it. These are the people that John Liu, Bill Thompson and Jimmy Vacca repeatedly insist should have veto power over any transportation project. And it looks like in this case Forgione may defer to them.

Forgione is also talking about deferring to the "community" in Washington Heights, but what about the communities across the river in Tremont, Morrisania, Morris Heights, University Heights and High Bridge? Will their support matter?

I definitely believe that people should have some say over what transportation facilities are built in their districts. It would have been nice if Vacca and Liu had been around when people's homes were being bulldozed for the Cross-Bronx Expressway. Members of every affected community should be given the opportunity to raise their concerns, and those concerns should be taken seriously. But I don't think they should have veto power.

Alternative 2 would not tear down any buildings, and it will not blight the neighborhood. It would not flood parallel streets with displaced traffic. It would make these three blocks of 181st Street more like the Fulton Mall in Brooklyn, which would be an improvement.

Fortunately, Councilmember Rodgriguez seems to get this. His comments as reported by Noah were heartening. I hope he will talk to Councilmembers Cabrera, Foster and Arroyo and get their support on this. Transit advocates in that area should reach out to community leaders in the western Bronx and get them to the meetings where this project will be discussed. But the bottom line is that DOT cannot just listen to Washington Heights on this issue. They should conduct outreach along the five bus lines, and find out how much support there is there.

Keeping perspective on fare collection

As discussed previously, Mike Jaccarino, the Bronx reporter for the Daily News, recently ran a story about the MTA's lax fare inspection practices on the Bx12 Select Bus pilot program. Jaccarino's simplistic "they're getting away with it" narrative completely missed the bigger story: that the MTA is losing money because the fare inspectors refuse to ride the bus, instead forcing it to sit for five minutes or more at each inspection.

Some readers were shocked, with good reason: I don't think any other transit agency does it this way. Sadly, this is not an isolated problem; the NYPD does not usually patrol buses for any other reason, leaving the driver in charge of law enforcement in addition to all their other responsibilities.

Jaccarino's simplistic report allowed Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz to duck responsibility for ensuring adequate bus service to his constituents:

I’m not fighting it, I’m open to it, but I am just concerned that the system is set up in a way that it is easy for those that want to use the bus not to pay a thing and we lose even more money for the MTA.

If you believe Markowitz, the MTA lost money by converting the Bx12 Limited to Select Bus Service, and will lose even more with the B44 and any future Select lines. If his concern for MTA financing were genuine, Markowitz might be surprised to know that the Bx12 is New York City Transit's second most profitable route, with fares covering 123% of operating costs and 64% of total costs. We don't have pre-Select data to compare it to, but it's likely that the Select service has contributed to this success.

So how can the line be so financially successful if there's so much farebeating? First of all, the MTA insists that there isn't. But even if there is, the Select Bus Service offers enough value that it attracts additional paying customers who more than make up for the money lost to farebeaters. That's another important point that Jaccarino missed.

There are a number of reasons why it's still a good idea to get the MTA/NYPD to do proper fare inspections:

1. The current procedure is fucking nuts.
2. Now that Jaccarino spilled the beans, farebeating will probably go way up.
3. More fare inspections will bring that income even higher, possibly even paying for the capital expenses.

Most importantly, even with the fare evasion, it's still a very good idea to put Select Bus Service on the B44. That line is currently the 40th most profitable route in New York City Transit, recovering 88% of operating costs and 46% of total costs. If Select service brings that up over 100% of operating costs, that would save almost $29,000 per day, or $11 million per year. Not a ton of money, but nothing to sneeze at.

How not to do fare collection

Recently, the Daily News has been looking at fare-beating, starting with two pieces by Pete Donohue on March 17 and March 18. Earlier this month, Donohue's colleague Mike Jaccarino filed a report of fare-beating on the Bx12 Select Bus.

This offered Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz a ready-made excuse for his tepid support of the proposed B44 Select Bus service on Nostrand Avenue:

I’m not fighting it, I’m open to it, but I am just concerned that the system is set up in a way that it is easy for those that want to use the bus not to pay a thing and we lose even more money for the MTA.

If you've spent any time in Paris, you know what it means to take fare control seriously. In Paris, transit passengers are required to have a ticket or pass on them at all times. There are dedicated teams of "contrôleurs" who travel around the city on foot and by transit, setting up checkpoints at bends in subway corridors. On buses and commuter trains, they board simultaneously at the front and rear to cut off the possibility of escape. They work as the bus moves and get off when they've checked everyone.

By contrast, the Select Bus enforcement teams do not actually ride the bus. In some bizarre scenario out of CHiPs, the control teams drive up to the bus in an SUV, board it and check everyone's receipts, then get back in their vehicle and drive away. While this is happening, the bus just sits there, so everyone's trip is delayed by at least five minutes.

Of course this undercuts any attempt to market the Select buses as an alternative to a private car. But worse, if there are too many of these sweeps, it would wipe out the time advantage over traditional bus service. Jaccarino quotes a number of people who are legitimately angry that other people are riding for free while they pay, and have to futz with the validation receipts. But they assign vague blame to "the MTA" - a classic "bad MTA" story - instead of looking at what exactly the MTA is doing wrong: accommodating enforcement personnel who think they're too good to ride the bus.

The News could actually do a great service by printing a series on the myriad ways that New York City residents and taxpayers lose time and money by accommodating law enforcement personnel who think they're too good to ride transit. It would be on a par with their Boulevard of Death series, and a tremendous improvement over the simplistic "Queens Parking Crunch" series. But I'm not holding my breath; who reads the News, after all?

If the News is able to drum up enough outrage to bring about effective fare collection, great! More revenue is a good thing. But it is not worth adding more delays to everyone's trip and undermining the goals of Select Bus Service.

The next City Council transportation chair

The News reports (thanks, Streetsblog!) that the New York City Council will be voting on its leadership positions by the end of January. For the past eight years, the Transportation Committee has been chaired by John Liu of Flushing, who has now been elected as City Comptroller. This is a critical moment for advocates of transit and sustainable transportation, and it's important for us to make our priorities known.

Liu has had a mixed record on these issues. He has supported congestion pricing and the bikes in buildings bill, but in a pretty lukewarm way. More importantly, he has an annoying way of treating transit riders like we didn't exist. Many times when the subject of bridge tolls came up, he acted as though everyone drove everywhere.



I got the feeling that some of this was political calculation. Liu represented a red district, where only 38% of households were car-free in 2000 (PDF). Sometimes when the subject of bridge tolls came up, his reaction seemed mostly to be frustration that the Mayor and the Governor were pushing something that he felt was politically impossible for him to get behind. In fact, I would say that he adopted pro-transit, pro-livable streets positions about 38% of the time.

The News says that the top contender to chair the Transportation Committee is James Vacca of the Bronx. Vacca comes from the reddest district in the Bronx (PDF), with only 39% of households car-free. He represents the most sprawling, suburban part of the borough: Throgs Neck, City Island, Morris Park, Pelham Bay and Pelham Parkway. He sees transportation mostly through a car windshield. He voted for congestion pricing, but he was also a major sponsor of the idiotic, pandering five-minute grace period bill. He has protested the proposed elimination of the Bx14 bus, but his counter-proposal would do nothing to solve the problem long-term, and did not place the blame where it belonged: on the state legislature.

According to Streetsblog, there is an alternative to Vacca: Dan Garodnick of the Upper East Side has expressed interest in the chairmanship. He represents a yellow district: 70% of households are car-free (PDF). Garodnick is not perfect: he signed David Yassky's moronic letter that claimed it was "blatantly unfair" for people from Brooklyn or the Bronx to pay as much as people from New Jersey to get into Manhattan.

Garodnick has a lot to recommend him, though. He was one of only two Councilmembers who refused to vote for the parking grace period. He recently helped corral a number of his fellow Councilmembers into coming out in support of physically separated bus and bike lanes on First and Second Avenue, which is a big deal. He gets good marks from Glenn McAnanama of the organization Upper Green Side, which is a very good testimonial. Unlike Vacca, he has actually served on the Transportation Committee. He is probably the most progressive member of the Council on transportation issues, and would be the ideal candidate.

Streetsblog commenter "Niccolo Machiavelli" speculated that Quinn may want to give the committee chairmanship to someone from the Bronx, to secure their loyalty. If so, Vacca is really one of the worst possibilities. The Bronx councilmember who's most progressive on transportation is probably Joel Rivera, but he'll probably be re-elected Majority Leader, which is more senior than Transportation. Oliver Koppell voted for congestion pricing and sponsored the bikes in garages bill, and has been a member of the Committee, so he would probably be better than Vacca. Please let me know if you're aware of any indications to the contrary.

Larry Seabrook voted for congestion pricing, is a member of the Committee and has come out in favor of legislation to crack down on unlicensed drivers.

Maria del Carmen Arroyo and Annabel Palma voted for congestion pricing, but otherwise they seem to have no interest in transportation at all. Helen Foster famously skipped the congestion pricing vote. The useless Maria Baez has been replaced by unknown quantity Fernando Cabrera, who until 2008 was a registered Republican living in the suburb of Pelham (a fifteen-minute walk from the train station), and like most Bronx Latino politicians campaigned using a truck with loudspeakers.

The next Transportation Chair should be Dan Garodnick. If it has to be someone from the Bronx, and can't be Rivera, then it should be Koppell or Seabrook. The next choices would be Arroyo and Palma, in roughly descending order by car ownership in their districts. Vacca would actually be my fifth choice.

This decision will affect how transportation policy is framed in the city for the next four to eight years, possibly longer. It's too important to be left to power politics and back-room deals. I encourage you to contact your councilmember and Speaker Quinn. Tell them that the next Transportation Committee Chair should be Garodnick, Koppell or Seabrook.

Update: Frank Lombardi of the News is now reporting that "the powers that be are pushing" for Vacca to be Transportation Chair. Time to do some pushing back, if you want to see a committee chair who supports transit and livable streets.

Ready for the Reconstructions

Here in New York we've had our share of highway revolts. We've stopped a slew of ill-conceived expressways that would have made the fate of our city much more like present-day Detroit. But we still got stuck with some horrible highways like the Cross-Bronx, Bruckner, Sheridan and Major Deegan in the Bronx, the Gowanus and Belt in Brooklyn, and the BQE and LIE in Queens.

Recently, around the country, people have been talking about tearing down some of those blighted infrastructure. From the Sheridan in the Bronx to I-81 in Syracuse, there are campaigns in the area to convert these highways to boulevards and greenways.

It's important to note that these things don't just fill the surrounding areas with noise and pollution. They don't just cost a lot when they're first built. They're incredibly inefficient transportation systems that require huge reinforced concrete structures that are constantly pounded by multi-ton vehicles. They have to be rebuilt again and again, and each time we have to pay more as transportation budgets shrink.

The best time to suggest tearing down a highway is when it's scheduled for reconstruction. Then we can offer other taxpayers a choice: pay mega-millions to reconstruct the road as is, pay millions more for the inevitable widening proposal, or pay significantly less for an at-grade structure with "reduced capacity" for vehicles - but ideally with additional transit improvements so that it moves the same number of people.

That requires transit and environmental advocates to get ahead of the game. Every time you hear the phrase "scheduled for reconstruction," your ears should perk up. An alternative plan and organized community opposition should be ready to go at the first meeting - or better yet, the alternative should be proposed before. Don't wait for the DOT to set up their alternatives analysis for you.

And that brings us back to the South Bronx, and a question that's puzzling me. Sustainable South Bronx has a lovely page on their greenway plan - and Streetfilms has created a stirring short about it. But the greenway plan critically relies on a substantial segment along Bruckner Boulevard under the expressway. And in the Sustainable South Bronx's Summary 2 PDF, there's this quote:

In the future, the Bruckner Expressway is scheduled to be reconstructed. As part of this undertaking NYS DOT is planning a permanent at-grade bikeway along Bruckner Boulevard. However, this project is many years off, so the Master Plan recommends an interim, low-cost bikeway along Bruckner Boulevard between Hunts Point Avenue and 138th Street.

According to Steve Anderson's NYCRoads page on the Bruckner, it was already reconstructed, ending in 2002. How many years is "many years off"? How often do these things have to be rebuilt? When is the NYS DOT planning to reconstruct the Bruckner? How far in advance do they do planning without public outreach?

Teachers Take Over Maria Baez's District

The Bronx district of Councilmember Maria Baez is pretty poor, with 72% of households earning less than $40,000 a year. Most of it is well-served by transit: the number 4 and letter D trains run through it, and it also has the University Heights Metro-North station and the BxM3 and 4 express buses. Not surprising, then, that it's in the green quintile, with 75.8% of all households being car-free and less than 30% of workers commuting in carrs.

What is surprising is that Councilmember Baez is sponsoring a bill to provide parking permits to all teachers employed by the Department of Education. A recent Gotham Gazette article notes that this comes at a time when advocates for fairness and sustainable transportation are succeeding in reducing the number of parking permits issued to government employees. If her bill passes, it's likely that the police, firemen and every other category of government employee will want their entitlements entrenched in law.

I'm sure there are plenty of teachers living in Baez's district, but most of them probably take the excellent public transit to work. On the other hand, I'm guessing that most of the teachers who work in Baez's district are convinced that the streets and subway platforms are crawling with thugs ready to pounce on any unsuspecting middle-class person who dares show their face outside of a school or a car. And it seems that Baez herself is ready to identify with these teachers - she told the Daily News that she drove to the Congestion Pricing hearing in July, even though it's a one-seat, 40-minute ride to City Hall on the 4 train.

Sadly, parking permits for teachers would be a very bad thing for the residents of Baez's district. The streets are already crowded with too many cars, because even though it has one of the lowest car-ownership rates in the country, available parking is also low. It has one of the highest asthma rates, due mostly to its proximity to two of the busiest highways in the country, but the teachers' cars don't help anything. City resources are wasted serving the driving minority while the walking majority puts up with crumbling sidewalks and rat-infested empty lots.

The worst part about Baez's bill is that it would enshrine in law the idea that being middle-class means that you drive everywhere, that it's not safe for teachers to walk the streets of the Bronx, and that some people are too good to take the subway. It would reinforce the separation between teachers and taught instead of breaking it down by having them share the sidewalks and subways.

Maria Baez should be ashamed of herself for sponsoring a bill that would benefit hardly any of her constituents, and penalize the vast majority of them. So should Alan Gerson for being a co-sponsor.