There are many plans for new casinos in the New York area. Already, there are "racinos" at Pocono Downs, Monticello and Yonkers, and a casino boat operating out of Freeport. There are plans for a new racino at Aqueduct, and speculation about Indian casinos licensed by the Shinnecocks on Long Island and by the Munsee in the Catskills.
Pocono Downs is right on a train line and could eventually get direct service from Penn Station via the Lackawanna Cut-Off. Monticello used to be served by a branch line, but those tracks have been gone for a while. The Shinnecock lands are served by the Montauk Branch, and Freeport by the Babylon Line. Yonkers Raceway is near the Harlem Line, but it's a long walk or a shuttle bus ride.
Bizarrely, the Aqueduct racino has been touted as a way to avoid a repeat of last month's overnight gambling bus crash. "If you're coming from Chinatown, all you have to do is get on the A train," Audrey Pheffer told the Daily News.
We already knew that Pheffer is not a friend of transit; if I'm in a charitable mood I'd say she's clueless. There's a similar level of cluelessness and/or chutzpah involved in this statement of hers.
The overnight gambling buses exist because their passengers work crazy hours, and the only times they have available to gamble are in the middle of the night. It's nice that the Aqueduct racino will only be a half hour away instead of four hours, and reachable by the A train (although I'd think twice about taking a lot of money on the A train in the middle of the night). But will the Aqueduct be open late enough? The Yonkers Raceway is open until 2AM most nights and until 4AM Friday and Saturday nights, and the gamblers still chose to go to Mohegan Sun. What hours will the Aqueduct be open, and will it be enough to draw the overnight gamblers away from Connecticut?
Showing posts with label casinos. Show all posts
Showing posts with label casinos. Show all posts
Saturday, April 23, 2011
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
When safety makes us less safe
Jim O'Grady of WNYC reports on a rant about bus safety from James Hall, who was chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board from 1984 to 2001 (under three presidents!). Hall is now a lobbyist on Capital Hill, who was paid $80,000 last year to represent Porsche on emissions regulations. O'Grady did not mention Hall's current job, or whether he was speaking for himself or a client.
Hall argues that recent bus crashes, including the gambling bus crash, show that buses aren't safe enough, and that the government needs to legislate stricter standards. He criticizes the American Bus Association for lobbying against (Word doc) a recent "safety" bill. The bus industry and the government, he charges, "have treated the people who ride these buses as second-class citizens and given them second class safety.:
There are lots of problems with Hall's entire line of reasoning, and I may get a few blog posts out of this, but let me focus first on the idea of safety. It's easy for "safety" people like Hall to get so fixated on their jobs that they miss the bigger picture. In this case the bigger picture is that improving the safety of individual rides may make bus rides more expensive, less available or less comfortable. This may convince potential passengers to choose to drive or fly instead, and that in turn may make us all less safe, due to two important principles.
The first is that professional automobile operators are safer than amateurs, and the second is that each additional operator increases the danger. Operating a motor vehicle safely is a difficult job, and training and experience help a driver to overcome that difficulty. A professional driver has a career and a reputation to maintain, while an amateur cares much less about being thought of as a dangerous driver; for some it is even a marker of coolness.
There are also job standards and workplace rules that require minimum levels of competence, sobriety and rest. They are not always followed, but they are stricter and better enforced than the laws regulating amateurs.
The other principle is that driving is a human activity requiring attention and good judgment, and even the best operators occasionally fail. The more operators you have on the road, the greater the chance that any one of them will make a potentially fatal mistake.
If you have five hundred people going from New York City to eastern Connecticut, they could travel in four hundred cars or in twenty buses. It's completely infeasible for all four hundred cars to be driven by professionals, but that would only bring a fraction of the potential safety improvements. The safest would be twenty buses driven by responsible professionals, but if even half of those buses were driven by poorly-trained, irresponsible, stressed and/or fatigued drivers it would still be a lot safer than if the passengers all drove themselves.
Air travel is safer than individual drivers, but still much less safe than buses. Convincing people to choose bus travel over driving not only improves their safety, but the safety of everyone on the road with them.
Many of the proposed bus safety improvements are sound, but the seat belt proposals are not. Long bus rides are already uncomfortable; requiring seat belts could drive away some of the riders who have been attracted by wifi and power plugs. The cost of implementing these and other safety requirements should be taken into consideration. A high enough cost upfront could jack up the bus fare high enough to drive many passengers away, or it could reduce the bus company's profit enough that it would cut back on service.
Hall argues that recent bus crashes, including the gambling bus crash, show that buses aren't safe enough, and that the government needs to legislate stricter standards. He criticizes the American Bus Association for lobbying against (Word doc) a recent "safety" bill. The bus industry and the government, he charges, "have treated the people who ride these buses as second-class citizens and given them second class safety.:
There are lots of problems with Hall's entire line of reasoning, and I may get a few blog posts out of this, but let me focus first on the idea of safety. It's easy for "safety" people like Hall to get so fixated on their jobs that they miss the bigger picture. In this case the bigger picture is that improving the safety of individual rides may make bus rides more expensive, less available or less comfortable. This may convince potential passengers to choose to drive or fly instead, and that in turn may make us all less safe, due to two important principles.
The first is that professional automobile operators are safer than amateurs, and the second is that each additional operator increases the danger. Operating a motor vehicle safely is a difficult job, and training and experience help a driver to overcome that difficulty. A professional driver has a career and a reputation to maintain, while an amateur cares much less about being thought of as a dangerous driver; for some it is even a marker of coolness.
There are also job standards and workplace rules that require minimum levels of competence, sobriety and rest. They are not always followed, but they are stricter and better enforced than the laws regulating amateurs.
The other principle is that driving is a human activity requiring attention and good judgment, and even the best operators occasionally fail. The more operators you have on the road, the greater the chance that any one of them will make a potentially fatal mistake.
If you have five hundred people going from New York City to eastern Connecticut, they could travel in four hundred cars or in twenty buses. It's completely infeasible for all four hundred cars to be driven by professionals, but that would only bring a fraction of the potential safety improvements. The safest would be twenty buses driven by responsible professionals, but if even half of those buses were driven by poorly-trained, irresponsible, stressed and/or fatigued drivers it would still be a lot safer than if the passengers all drove themselves.
Air travel is safer than individual drivers, but still much less safe than buses. Convincing people to choose bus travel over driving not only improves their safety, but the safety of everyone on the road with them.
Many of the proposed bus safety improvements are sound, but the seat belt proposals are not. Long bus rides are already uncomfortable; requiring seat belts could drive away some of the riders who have been attracted by wifi and power plugs. The cost of implementing these and other safety requirements should be taken into consideration. A high enough cost upfront could jack up the bus fare high enough to drive many passengers away, or it could reduce the bus company's profit enough that it would cut back on service.
Thursday, March 24, 2011
A missed opportunity for rail-oriented development
Another of the many things that make the overnight casino bus crash so frustrating is that even if there was no possibility of changing the law to allow gambling closer to the city, the location they used would still have been ideal for rail.
As Arcady pointed out in the comments to my first post on this topic, the casino that the bus was returning from, Mohegan Sun, is located right next to the New London and Northern, an active freight line that is currently part of the New England Central Railway. It would have been a tiny part of the resort's construction budget to build a station there.
Mohegan Sun is one of the largest casinos in the country. Curiously, its biggest competitor, Foxwoods, is just a few miles away across the Thames River. Foxwoods is located at 350 Trolley Line Boulevard, so named because a branch of the Shore Line Electric Railway ran down it. I don't have any maps or pictures of the old line, so I don't know how easy it would be to rebuild it or to link it to the nearby Providence and Worcester line, but the location was once served by rail.
The Foxwoods website says that it's served by over a hundred buses a day. According to the Mohegan Sun website, over twenty buses a day arrive there, but I think the real number is higher. There is definitely the ridership to justify reactivating passenger service on that line. Arcady writes, "they'd need a new station and permission to run more trains across that drawbridge east of Old Saybrook."
It's true that there are only five Shore Line East trains a day that cross the bridge. It's also true that most of the Amtrak trains that go through New London are pretty full. But the Shore Line East trains could be extended to Mohegan Sun and beyond, to Norwich, Willimantic and even Mansfield Depot, just a few miles from the University of Connecticut. If the line is electrified, trains could run directly from Penn Station or possibly Grand Central.
The Niantic River Bridge is being replaced, and the new bridge will allow for more trains, and the upgrades to the Hartford-Springfield line could relieve some of the congestion on the Shore Line, but it's still a drawbridge that has to be raised for boats to go under, and the number of trains will be limited.
Some of the trains could be operated as shuttles from New London, or perhaps even Providence with an awkward change in direction. Would gamblers from, say, Chinatown, put up with a three seat ride (subway, mainline train, shuttle) instead of a one-seat bus? Probably not during rush hours, but during off-hours they could get a two-seat ride, and it might just boost ridership enough to make regular local service on these lines viable.
If you're thinking it's too expensive, just take a look at satellite photos of the area, and marvel at the amount of money that was spent on bringing cars to these resorts. New stations at Mohegan Sun and Norwich would cost a fraction of one of those parking lots, and rehabbing the rail line would be within the same range. The main point is that these casinos could have been major drivers of rail expansion in the area, but instead they were boosters of the road infrastructure.
As Arcady pointed out in the comments to my first post on this topic, the casino that the bus was returning from, Mohegan Sun, is located right next to the New London and Northern, an active freight line that is currently part of the New England Central Railway. It would have been a tiny part of the resort's construction budget to build a station there.
Mohegan Sun is one of the largest casinos in the country. Curiously, its biggest competitor, Foxwoods, is just a few miles away across the Thames River. Foxwoods is located at 350 Trolley Line Boulevard, so named because a branch of the Shore Line Electric Railway ran down it. I don't have any maps or pictures of the old line, so I don't know how easy it would be to rebuild it or to link it to the nearby Providence and Worcester line, but the location was once served by rail.
The Foxwoods website says that it's served by over a hundred buses a day. According to the Mohegan Sun website, over twenty buses a day arrive there, but I think the real number is higher. There is definitely the ridership to justify reactivating passenger service on that line. Arcady writes, "they'd need a new station and permission to run more trains across that drawbridge east of Old Saybrook."
It's true that there are only five Shore Line East trains a day that cross the bridge. It's also true that most of the Amtrak trains that go through New London are pretty full. But the Shore Line East trains could be extended to Mohegan Sun and beyond, to Norwich, Willimantic and even Mansfield Depot, just a few miles from the University of Connecticut. If the line is electrified, trains could run directly from Penn Station or possibly Grand Central.
The Niantic River Bridge is being replaced, and the new bridge will allow for more trains, and the upgrades to the Hartford-Springfield line could relieve some of the congestion on the Shore Line, but it's still a drawbridge that has to be raised for boats to go under, and the number of trains will be limited.
Some of the trains could be operated as shuttles from New London, or perhaps even Providence with an awkward change in direction. Would gamblers from, say, Chinatown, put up with a three seat ride (subway, mainline train, shuttle) instead of a one-seat bus? Probably not during rush hours, but during off-hours they could get a two-seat ride, and it might just boost ridership enough to make regular local service on these lines viable.
If you're thinking it's too expensive, just take a look at satellite photos of the area, and marvel at the amount of money that was spent on bringing cars to these resorts. New stations at Mohegan Sun and Norwich would cost a fraction of one of those parking lots, and rehabbing the rail line would be within the same range. The main point is that these casinos could have been major drivers of rail expansion in the area, but instead they were boosters of the road infrastructure.
Monday, March 21, 2011
Vice in your backyard
In the comments to my previous post on the overnight gambling bus crash, Jonathan wrote, "I am kind of disappointed in this post; I thought you were going to argue for more conveniently located casinos in order to spare the hopelessly addicted the long dangerous bus ride." Well, Jonathan, you can always GYOFB, but we aim to please here, so...
The second thought I had about the gambling bus crash is that it indicates multiple major failures of transportation and land use policy. There is clearly a high demand for late night gambling, and the system is set up to satisfy it in a grossly inefficient way, with eight-hour bus trips to casinos in the woods of rural Connecticut.
A lot of this comes from the longstanding practice of "solving" problems of vice (which also include undesirable sexual and drug-related activities) by pushing them outside the city, instead of figuring out how to regulate them effectively. With subsidized roads it became possible to push casinos outside the metro area completely, as with Las Vegas and Atlantic City.
There are many crazy things about this whole story, but one of the craziest is the fiction that it is somehow "Indian gaming." The Pequot nation has a glorious history, but at one point the population was too small to fill one of these buses. The numbers have increased since then, but only by counting anyone who can show the remotest connection with the group. They don't live on the reservation, or near each other at all.
The people who developed the casino, the people who run it, and the people who gamble there come from the whole spectrum of American ethnicities. As I understand it, people with Chinese and Jewish backgrounds are especially well-represented among all three groups, largely because other ethnic groups have a history of considering gambling to be sinful.
The fact that the law required these casinos to be located on a reservation in Eastern Connecticut (but convenient to Interstate 95) means that people who want to gamble in the middle of the night will have to spend a lot of time on the road.
I know it would be almost impossible politically, but imagine if we could set up a place in lower Manhattan where people could gamble. It would be walking distance from Chinatown, from the N train to Sunset Park, from the R train to Elmhurst, and from the Chinatown buses. It would also be accessible to non-Chinese people from all over, of course.
Hm, now that I think about it, there are places in Lower Manhattan where people can go to gamble - perfectly legally. Unfortunately, you're not allowed in unless you're a member of an elite club. You can pay one of the club members to gamble on your behalf, but you lose the excitement of being there. Even then, many of these "brokers" require a minimum bet in the thousands, out of reach of many Chinese waiters. Oh, and they're only open from 9 AM to 4 PM.
The second thought I had about the gambling bus crash is that it indicates multiple major failures of transportation and land use policy. There is clearly a high demand for late night gambling, and the system is set up to satisfy it in a grossly inefficient way, with eight-hour bus trips to casinos in the woods of rural Connecticut.
A lot of this comes from the longstanding practice of "solving" problems of vice (which also include undesirable sexual and drug-related activities) by pushing them outside the city, instead of figuring out how to regulate them effectively. With subsidized roads it became possible to push casinos outside the metro area completely, as with Las Vegas and Atlantic City.
There are many crazy things about this whole story, but one of the craziest is the fiction that it is somehow "Indian gaming." The Pequot nation has a glorious history, but at one point the population was too small to fill one of these buses. The numbers have increased since then, but only by counting anyone who can show the remotest connection with the group. They don't live on the reservation, or near each other at all.
The people who developed the casino, the people who run it, and the people who gamble there come from the whole spectrum of American ethnicities. As I understand it, people with Chinese and Jewish backgrounds are especially well-represented among all three groups, largely because other ethnic groups have a history of considering gambling to be sinful.
The fact that the law required these casinos to be located on a reservation in Eastern Connecticut (but convenient to Interstate 95) means that people who want to gamble in the middle of the night will have to spend a lot of time on the road.
I know it would be almost impossible politically, but imagine if we could set up a place in lower Manhattan where people could gamble. It would be walking distance from Chinatown, from the N train to Sunset Park, from the R train to Elmhurst, and from the Chinatown buses. It would also be accessible to non-Chinese people from all over, of course.
Hm, now that I think about it, there are places in Lower Manhattan where people can go to gamble - perfectly legally. Unfortunately, you're not allowed in unless you're a member of an elite club. You can pay one of the club members to gamble on your behalf, but you lose the excitement of being there. Even then, many of these "brokers" require a minimum bet in the thousands, out of reach of many Chinese waiters. Oh, and they're only open from 9 AM to 4 PM.
Saturday, March 19, 2011
The logic of the overnight gambling bus
There's been a lot of discussion in the press lately about the spectacular crash of an overnight gambling bus on the Bruckner Expressway in the Bronx. What I've been trying to wrap my head around for the past few days is the concept of an overnight gambling bus, and what it says about the failure of planning in the country and the region.
First of all, it clearly shows that anyone who says "Americans won't take transit" is full of shit. Sure, these are Chinese-Americans, mostly first generation immigrants, who don't want to spend a lot of money on anything but gambling. They live in the densest, most transit-rich part of the country. They're gambling addicts, driven by their addiction.
That said, they live in America, and I'd imagine that many of them own cars. But here they are sitting on a bus for eight hours in the middle of the night. They pay the full operating cost of the bus, which makes a profit with no more subsidies than any other commercial vehicle.
Mode choices - a single trip or a habit - are not inherent in American culture, or in the topography. They're a response to economic incentives. These people have a burning desire to gamble, and the only time they can do it is at night. They're exhausted, and they don't have the energy to drive hundreds of miles. In these circumstances gambling itself doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but the bus does.
First of all, it clearly shows that anyone who says "Americans won't take transit" is full of shit. Sure, these are Chinese-Americans, mostly first generation immigrants, who don't want to spend a lot of money on anything but gambling. They live in the densest, most transit-rich part of the country. They're gambling addicts, driven by their addiction.
That said, they live in America, and I'd imagine that many of them own cars. But here they are sitting on a bus for eight hours in the middle of the night. They pay the full operating cost of the bus, which makes a profit with no more subsidies than any other commercial vehicle.
Mode choices - a single trip or a habit - are not inherent in American culture, or in the topography. They're a response to economic incentives. These people have a burning desire to gamble, and the only time they can do it is at night. They're exhausted, and they don't have the energy to drive hundreds of miles. In these circumstances gambling itself doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but the bus does.
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