Did the Atlantic Ticket accomplish anything?

In June the Long Island Railroad instituted an "Atlantic Ticket" for people traveling on weekdays between southeast Queens and stops along Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. This fits with the RER, S-Bahn and Overground strategies that have been used in European cities like London, Paris and Berlin going back to the late nineteenth century. Instead of treating suburban trains like a completely separate system from the subways (and buses) they are run through the city center, at comparable frequencies to the subway, with the same fares and free transfers. So how does the Atlantic Ticket do in getting us to this goal of using our trains more efficiently?

Of the four differences between subways and commuter trains, the Atlantic Ticket addresses the fare difference and the lack of free transfers. They are the easiest to see: a rush hour commuter who takes the LIRR and the subway pays $13 one way or $346 monthly for a 55-minute trip from Rosedale to Grand Central, compared to $2.75 or $121 for 30 days for a much more crowded ride on a local bus to a subway. Many people take dollar vans to the subway, which brings the cost up to $4.75 one-way or $241 for 30 days. Riding the x63 express bus takes an hour and a half, but you get a seat and it's less than the railroad: $5.50 one way or $238 for 28 days.

The Atlantic Ticket offers a fare close to the express bus: $7.75 for a single one-way from Rosedale to Grand Central and $240 for 28 days. However, it is only good for travel to (or through) Flatbush Avenue, which takes about an hour and ten minutes from Rosedale to Grand Central. This is still quicker than the express bus, but about twenty minutes longer than LIRR trips through Penn Station. Surprisingly to me, it's also longer than taking a bus to the subway.

Why would someone pay extra for a longer ride? Comfort is one reason: LIRR trains are rarely packed, so even if they don't get a seat on the train they would expect some elbow room. But there's still a packed subway ride from Flatbush Avenue to Manhattan. Is riding a less crowded train for half an hour worth paying $3-5 more, but not worth $10.25 more? Maybe.

Another potential advantage is reliability. The subways and LIRR trains run on dedicated, grade-separated tracks controlled by the MTA. The buses and vans all run on busy avenues filled with other commuters. One insensitive driver can hold up bus riders for several minutes.

There's no word yet on how many people have been buying these Atlantic Tickets, but given the mixed benefits I suspect the number is relatively small. The LIRR Board Book this month credited the US Open golf tournament and the Belmont Stakes for increases in ridership (roughly 2% over last year), but did not mention the Atlantic Ticket at all. In a future post I'll talk about the two other factors, a direct ride (or at least a ride that is comfortable end to end), and frequency.

Infilling the subways

Commenter threestationsquare pointed out that I made an error in the chart I posted about overcrowded subways. He also noted that it's Table 20 of the NYMTC Hub-bound Travel Study that gives floor space per passenger during morning rush in 2012. Here's a bar graph based on it:

At the uncrowded end of this chart are the Metro-North and Long Island Rail Road commuter trains, and this makes a lot of sense. First of all, they have more seats. They run long distances, and people should be able to sit all the way from Speonk or Purdy's. But they're also premium service. There's a very good argument to be made that they're oversubsidized, but if we want to cut the subsidies the place to do it first is in station parking.

The other big group of uncrowded trains are the #7 and the trains that run through downtown Brooklyn and Brooklyn Heights (the 2, 3, 4, 5, and R), and a major factor in this is that there are alternatives that get people where they're going faster. A lot of people transfer from the #7 to the N or Q at Queensboro Plaza, and from the R to the N at Pacific Street or the B at Dekalb Avenue. Many people who can walk to these trains will walk a block or two further to get a quicker ride to Midtown on the B, D, E, M, N or Q.

This is not necessarily a bad thing, because it makes room for infill development, bringing new riders who fill up the train afterwards. It has already been happening for years on the #7 train, for example, where people get off in Jackson Heights to transfer to the Queens Boulevard trains. The space they leave is filled up by people who live in Woodside and Sunnyside. When those people get off at Queensboro Plaza, their space is taken up by people coming from the new developments in Long Island City. Something similar happens with the R in Downtown Brooklyn, but to a lesser degree.

The new buildings in Long Island City use that space on the #7 train to help get people out of their cars, by increasing the amount of carfree housing available in the area so that moving to the suburbs and buying a car seems less attractive. Unfortunately, it doesn't do that completely. Even though LIC's zoning does not require developers to build parking, it encourages parking construction by allowing them to build taller if they build parking. The result is the blight of garages lining Fifth Street.

In Downtown Brooklyn, particularly near the R station at Metrotech, the 2/3/4/5 stations at Hoyt and Nevins, and the big transfer station at Borough Hall the city has pursued a single-use vision of office construction and bent over backward to discourage residential development. Senator Schumer, who lives up the hill in Park Slope, recently reiterated that party line. In addition to use and height limitations, this is also accomplished with minimum parking requirements. The residents of Brooklyn Heights have fought reforms in these areas as well. The result is that residential development has been pushed to Dumbo, Fort Greene and Boerum Hill, which are a long walk from most of the stations on the 2/3/4/5 and R.

In a future post I'll talk about potential extensions for other lines. But these areas have transit capacity to meet the demand for walkable, transit-accessible living space a short distance from Manhattan. They just need to be zoned to allow it, without requiring parking that will compete with the trains and add more cars to an area that already has way too many.

Getting into Manhattan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The expense of East Side Access

The news is that the Long Island Rail Road East Side Access project, initially forecast to cost $4.3 billion and be completed in 2009 is not due to open until 2023, and it will cost $10.8 billion. Some have faulted the tunneling process and the engineers' estimates of the cost. Some have faulted the decision to run the trains into a deep cavern under Grand Central rather than on the loop tracks. I agree completely. But it recently occurred to me that a big part of the expense and delay - what makes it "the biggest " is a tunnel. Not the tunnel under the East River, that was dug 44 years ago. A tunnel through unstable soil in a filled swamp under the Sunnyside rail yards.

And why dig a tunnel? If you're building a new track that crosses an old track, the cheapest option is an at-grade crossing, but with two busy new tracks crossing lots of existing tracks - including storage tracks with trains parked on them and eight of the busiest tracks in the country - it's easy to see why the design team ruled out that option. It's harder to see why they ruled out a bridge. The yards are in a valley. Just a few blocks west, Queens Boulevard and the three tracks of very busy #7 train line have been crossing them on a double-decker bridge for over a century. There are five or six other bridges, depending on how you count.

There's no concern about blocking the sunlight because the only people in that yard are railroad employees. Sometimes a tunnel is chosen over a bridge to mitigate noise, but the trains will emerge from the tunnel close to the densest residential population, in Sunnyside Gardens. Grade elevation isn't a major concern because the yards are wide and the northernmost tracks are elevated, allowing for a relatively gentle slope, but if the grade is too steep, it would be possible to put in a bend.

Map: New York Observer.

And yet in the Final Environmental Impact Statement there is only one option considered for the Queens route: "crossing beneath the railroad yards." There's only one real reason I can think of to tunnel instead of building a bridge: a tunnel would get in the way of the convention center.

For years, developers, city planners and politicians have been quietly preparing to build a deck over the Yards and develop the area. Because NIMBYs were so successful at "protecting the residential quality" of most of the city's neighborhoods, the amount of new housing that can be built as of right in the city is not enough to accommodate everyone who wants to live here and bring rents down. Planners and developers see one of the largest uninhabited areas in the city, right next to the huge Queens Plaza station and the underused 36th Street stop, and they want to put something there. It figured prominently in the city's discussions about Olympic development, and a report from Alex Garvin and Associates to the Economic Development Corporation in 2006 called it "the city's single greatest opportunity to increase the housing supply and simultaneously improve the quality of the public realm."

Building over a rail yard is a strategy that made millions for the New York Central Railroad a hundred years ago. Railroad managers, now mostly government employees in the city, long to replicate that success. That was the idea behind the Atlantic Yards development in Brooklyn and now the Hudson Yards development in Manhattan, and they've got other yards in the Bronx to follow Sunnyside. Never mind that Atlantic Yards was a crappy deal for the MTA and the Hudson Yards isn't looking quite as successful as forecast. The city's elites are still hung up on the idea: in 2012 Dan Doctoroff found some interest for it at the Municipal Art Society.

If you look at the map above, the East Side Access tunnel is there, under sections B and C. If it had been built as a bridge, at least part of it would be right where the deck would go, and get in the way of some of the buildings and streets.

I don't know for sure how much the East Side Access designers were thinking about this. But if it played a role at all in their decision to dig a phenomenally expensive tunnel instead of building a bridge, then a significant portion of this multi-billion-dollar federally-funded "transit" project is actually subsidizing a possible future residential and commercial mega-project. Yay?

Off-peak service frequencies on the Long Island Rail Road

I made this map of off-peak service frequencies on the Long Island Rail Road.

Click through to see it full size.

Staten Island and our goals

This summer I went to Staten Island for the first time in several years. There are some things I like about it, but I don't go there very often because it's hard to get there and I don't feel welcome when I do. I feel similarly about North Carolina, but it's harder to ignore Staten Island. With mayoral candidate Joe Lhota floating the idea of moving the Transportation Department headquarters there, the need to say something about the place is even more urgent. Ben Kabak said his piece this morning, and it got me thinking.

…and the trolleys. Map: New York Tribune, July 1912, via Bowery Boys.

I know there are lots of nice people who live on Staten Island, including some regular readers of this blog. There are many who want it to be a place where you can walk, bike and take transit, and some who are even working to make that happen. I'm glad you're out there and I salute you for your work. But your borough is a problem.

Even more than other suburbs, Staten Island affects those of us who live in the rest of the city. Its residents spend a lot of time driving through Brooklyn, Manhattan and even Queens. They constantly feel slighted by Manhattan politicians and demand that the city and state spend money there. They also demand lots of subsidized services, like low tolls on the Verrazano Bridge.

Most dangerously, as a large bloc of middle-class white voters, the South and West Shores of the island wield disproportionate influence, and use that to get some of their demands. They are an indispensable part of any center or right-wing political campaign, proving particularly valuable to Rudy Giuliani and Christine Quinn. Politicians frequently pander to the agenda of the island's car owners, and the island's representatives on the City Council and state legislature frequently work with representatives from the eastern Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens to oppose progressive transportation efforts.

For some perspective, let's imagine that in the twenties, instead of building the Bayonne and Goethals bridges and the Outerbridge Crossing, the Port Authority had put in double-track high-level railroad connections, upgrading the Arthur Kill lift bridge and building a northbound connection to Bayonne and connecting to the Lehigh Valley line at Perth Amboy. Imagine if in the sixties, instead of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority building the Verrazano Bridge, the Board of Transportation had dug tunnels? Not a parochial local tunnel to Bay Ridge, but a connection between the Long Island Railroad and the national network, plus a high-speed tunnel under the harbor directly to Lower Manhattan? Imagine if they had extended the trolley network (see the map above) to cover the whole island?

You'd have a place that was easy to get to by train, but difficult by car. Instead we got the opposite: the most car-dominated of the five boroughs.

That time is past. The question is, what would help us fulfill our goals (see the top of the page)? What should we do about Staten Island?

Five rail-trails we'd like to see reactivated

Last month, the (Greater) Detroit Free Press told us of a section of trail the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (near Marquette) that had once been an active railroad, and will now be converted back to freight rail. "This is how it’s supposed to work," Humboldt Township Supervisor Joe Derocha told the Free Press, but it doesn't work that way as often as it should. In honor of that railroad, let's take a look at five rail-trails in the New York area that I'd like to see converted back to passenger use.

1. The Harlem Valley Rail-Trail
   
   
   Photo: Emily Moser. See her blog for more great photos and history.

   The Berkshires and Taconics are beautiful in the fall. A hundred years ago you could have taken the train up to Copake, Chatham and even beyond to Pittsfield, North Adams and Boston. But if you're up for some leaf-peeping, your only option is the slow bus that winds its way up Route 7. And you can't even get to Millerton without a car - unless you take the train to Wassaic and ride your bike for over an hour on this trail.

2. The Joseph P. Clarke Trail
   
   

   Villages like Piermont, Sparkill, Orangeburg and Nanuet grew up around junctions where the old Erie Main Line intersected with north-south lines. These towns have decayed since the railroad stopped running. They have recovered a little with Rockland County's population boom and the popularity of Route 9W among racing cyclists, but they can't compete with the Thruway-fueled strip malls. If you want to live in a cute village like Piermont you can get halfway decent buses to the city, but local bus service is woefully inadequate. Regular train service, ideally connecting to the city through the "new" Main Line or the Northern Branch, would breathe new life into these towns.

3. The South County Trailway, North County Trailway and Putnam Trailway
   
   
   Elmsford station. Photo: Unknown (1963)
   
   

   If you go to a place like Ardsley or Elmsford, you'll find a cluster of buildings very similar to what you'd see around a railroad station, and there's a good reason for that. When the buildings were built, there was a station there. Now these places are stuck in the middle of Westchester, and the people who live there have to take the bus or drive to stations on the Harlem and Hudson lines. Businesses that depended on a steady flow of commuters shut down long ago. In northern Westchester and Putnam County, bus service is so spotty that villages like Yorktown Heights and Mahopac are car-dependent.
   
   

   These trails are popular with families on weekends, but during commuting hours they're essentially abandoned. Instead, they could run passenger service direct to Grand Central, or possibly even be connected with the subway system.

4. The walkway Over the Hudson and Dutchess County Trailway
   
   
   Photo: Daniel Tobias / Flickr

   The Northeast Corridor, our country's highest volume train line, has a tremendous vulnerability: there is one single train line, with two to four tracks. If anything happens to that line, as it has several times over the past few years, all traffic in that section stops. There were once many parallel lines, but some have incompatible power systems and many don't have tracks anymore. The Poughkeepsie Bridge Route offers a valuable alternate route that in the past has allowed trains to bypass New York City and its tunnels completely, while still allowing New York-bound passengers to transfer to any of five radial lines.

5. The Nyack-Piermont Trail
   
   
   
   
   

   I've written before about the problems with New Jersey Transit's current plans to reactivate passenger service on the old Erie Northern Branch. The main challenge, from the point of view of funding, is a lack of what Jarrett Walker calls an "anchor" on the northern end. Villages like Norwood, Northvale, Demarest and Closter are too small to pencil out in the transit planners' metrics, and the planners can't imagine anyone being willing to upzone, so the planners build large park-and-rides to try to capture people who will drive from the sprawl further north.

   
   

   We'd really want to see the planners ditch their crappy proprietary models and look at induced demand. But we can also look at strong anchors, which means Nyack. Nyack doesn't have the population of Englewood or even Tenafly, but it has enough to provide a nice anchor for the Northern Branch - which was why it ended there in the first place.
   To get to Nyack means running trains through the part of the Northern Branch that's now the Nyack-Piermont Rail Trail. Which is unfortunate, because it's a nice trail with great views. But trails don't get people out of their cars. Trains do.

We can't depend on the Northeast Corridor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The railroads of Connecticut in 1893.

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

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

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

Exploring the Death Valley of Commute Options

Recently I argued that there was a "Death Valley of Commute Options" between transit and driving, If you're sick of the crowding on transit it costs a lot to upgrade to driving, and if you can then no longer afford to drive it's a big drop back to transit.

I was a little sloppy with the math behind the car options, and commenters like Christopher Parker and Joel Davis sorted me out. So here's the new version of my chart:




As you can see on the spreadsheet, I've included gas, parking, a car loan and insurance for a total cost of $24.48 each way. Parker claims that "the public uses its perception of the cost which is gasoline only," so I've provided a figure for that too, "Perceived car," which is $15.82.

Alon got ahead of me and pointed out that many civil (and uncivil, PDF) servants get free parking. In addition, most car owners park for free on the street, which would bring the cost down to $12.81.

If we do that, Death Valley almost disappears! But what if you don't live and work in the relatively small areas of the city where an express bus or commuter rail commute makes sense?



There's Death Valley again, especially if you don't have free parking. And what if you can't drive because of disability, prior conviction, or just wanting to be extra careful not to kill innocent people?



Humungous Death Valley, and the taxi option just seems like a silly luxury. That's why so many people drive in the city. The easiest way to get those people out of their cars is to offer a premium commute option, or at least let someone else try.

The Death Valley of Commute Options

On Friday I observed how for a trip from New York to Washington, DC, there are a variety of transit options, from Chinatown bus up to chartered limo or helicopter. This variety allows you to pick an option to match your budget. A small increase or decrease in your spending power translates into a small change in your comfort and/or convenience. Tune in to this week's Thinking Allowed for a fascinating history of this phenomenon on the London Underground.



Now let's contrast this with commuting from the Bronx to East Midtown. You can have a nearly free commute by bike, or a cheap commute by subway or local bus. But let's say you're a little better off, and you can afford the express bus or Metro-North train, where you almost always get a seat.

Now you get a small windfall, and you can afford a little nicer commute. There's nothing that's a "little nicer." You can take taxis, but you'll probably blow all that windfall in a couple of months. Your windfall isn't enough to get across the "Death Valley of Commute Options."



Suppose on the other hand that you get a promotion, and you know you're going to have a bigger salary for years. You can afford a down payment on a car, and get to work that way. Congratulations, you've made it across Death Valley!

But then the economy tanks, you get laid off, and you have to take a lower salary. You can't afford to pay for gas or park the car in Manhattan any more. You could take taxis, but you're probably better off saving that money for something else. You have to trek back across Death Valley and ride the express bus again.

Now imagine that you live in a part of Brooklyn, Queens or Staten Island, or even Manhattan, where there are no express buses or commuter rail stations. Your choices are subway or car, with nothing in between. The valley is even bigger.

Rockland County is not being short-changed by the MTA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rebuilding better than before

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

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

Photo: MTA New York City Transit / Leonard Wiggins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What improvements would you like to see?

What is New York's Forest Hill?

As you may remember, Feargus O'Sullivan recently moved within London, from the "urban" neighborhood Shoreditch (I think) to the "suburban" neighborhood of Forest Hill. Many people were struck by his use of the word "suburban" to describe Forest Hill. Some ascribed this difference to British English, which he accepted, but I think that's (as we say) a crock, because even within the US or the UK, we can't keep our own definitions of "suburban" neighborhoods straight. I was also struck by his contention that every "urban" neighborhood in London is gentrifying, unless it was always wealthy. But I'm trying to find neighborhoods here in the New York area that would correspond, even roughly, to the ones he discusses.

The Railway Telegraph pub, Forest Hill, Lewisham. Photo: Ewan-M / Flickr

In the comments, Benjamin Himric pins Feargus down to the following "independent variables" (my terminology) for distinguishing urban and suburban:

URBAN
- relatively high density
- mixed use district (i.e., not overwhelmingly residential)
- close to the city core (presumably this refers particularly to areas that are not themselves mixed use)

SUBURBAN (in the British as opposed to American sense)
- relatively low density
- overwhelmingly residential
- relatively far from urban core

So can we put numbers on these criteria? Let's take a look at the London Borough Profiles, using the boroughs of Hackney and Lewisham as proxies for their neighborhoods of Shoreditch and Forest Hill:

Shoreditch/Hackney:
1.7 miles to London Bridge Station
13 minutes by transit (London Overground)
163 people per non-greenspace hectare (66 per acre)
Jobs density, 2010: 0.66
Median house price, 2010: £292,500 ( $461,857.50; PPP $351,011.70)
Gross annual pay, 2011: £32,000 ( $50,528.00; PPP $38,401.28)

Forest Hill/Lewisham:
5.7 miles to London Bridge Station
30 minutes by transit (Southern Railways)
101 people per non-greenspace hectare (41 per acre)
Jobs density, 2010: 0.39
Median house price, 2010: £235,000 ( $371,065.00; PPP $282,009.40)
Gross annual pay, 2011: £29,000 ( $45,791.00; PPP $34,801.16)

I added in some dependent variables, using the OECD's purchasing power parity multiplier of 0.76 to convert the British prices and wages into something meaningful here. We can get a map of New York neighborhoods and their densities from the Department of City Planning. Quiggyt4 on Flickr has a map of jobs density. The New York Times has a map of income, and Trulia has housing price maps.

Looking at our dependent variables of density, mixed use and distance from the city core, there are only three New York neighborhoods that have 50-74 people per acre and are less than fifteen minutes from one of the two job centers: Fort Greene, Williamsburg and Woodside. Of the three, Fort Greene is the only one that's really mixed use, meaning that they have jobs that aren't just there to serve nearby residents, and that's only if you add in part of Downtown Brooklyn. It also has the right income mix and the projects to be the Shoreditch of New York City.

So what's Forest Hill for New York City? Sadly, it's not Forest Hills, which is much too dense (63 people per acre). More likely, within the half hour limit if you take the railroad, are Greenpoint, South Jamaica, East Flushing and Hollis. They're significantly more residential than Fort Greene or Williamsburg. Greenpoint is probably the best candidate for an analogue to Forest Hill.

Interestingly, of course, Greenpoint is the one New York neighborhood that Feargus mentions, and it's in his list of "currently hip city neighborhoods anywhere." I guess that just shows that "suburbs" - of any kind, really - aren't immune to gentrification. People got priced out of Williamsburg and they went to Greenpoint.

Another thing I noticed is that I couldn't find any neighborhood that had incomes and prices comparable to those in London, at similar densities. As you can see on the New York Times map, income levels in New York form a donut; once you get past the Van Wyck Expressway, or Van Cortlandt Park, or the Watchung Mountains, income levels rise the further you get from the city. There may be some cheap, low-density neighborhoods in New Jersey; I'll check that later.

I have read similar "Why I moved to the suburbs" stories that take place in the New York area, but the commutes tend to be significantly longer and the housing quite a lot more expensive. It's interesting that in London, the suburbs are still a bargain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Building on our transit-oriented past

I've been criticizing the Tappan Zee Bridge for weeks now, so it's time to offer an alternative vision. Deactivating the bridge will not make Orange, Bergen and Rockland counties go away. People will still live there. The role of the area in the regional economy would change somewhat, probably for the better. A wise investment in transportation infrastructure could foster prosperity in the area, but rebuilding the bridge ain't it.

Rockland, Orange and Bergen counties did not go straight from farmland to sprawl. There were many years of transit-oriented development, for industry, tourism and commuting.

The old industries are probably not coming back, even if we have an energy shortage. A lot more will be shipped by rail, but it will probably still be done in containers loaded in Newark. You never really know, but I don't see a huge demand for ice again. Quarrying will only pick up if the cost of moving rocks and concrete from further away goes through the roof.

Tourism and farming are the two economic sectors most likely to return. "Eating local" in the future is more likely to mean vegetables from Orange County than from a backyard in Brooklyn. If travel gets more expensive, a weekend in Nyack could become a better value than a weekend in Stockbridge. Bedroom communities may continue to be the main driver of the economies of these three counties, but not in the current sprawling configuration.

The current sprawl will not function with gas costing more than six dollars, but transit-oriented development can. Fortunately Orange, Bergen and Rockland counties have a network of transit-oriented towns that is still almost complete.

The Erie, and Pascack Valley railroads are still carrying passengers through the area, and the West Shore, Northern Branch and Suzy-Q are still carrying freight. The old Erie main line to Piermont is still intact from Suffern to Nanuet, and the right-of-way has been preserved as a rail-trail from Pearl River to Tappan. The only break is a mile or so from the Nanuet station to the Orangetown town line. The spurs to Haverstraw and New City have been abandoned, but the right of way seems mostly intact.

Just as importantly, the walkable town centers that grew up around train stations in all three counties before the highway network are still there. Middletown and Newburgh, Suffern and Nyack, Paterson and Hackensack, are still there with many of their beautiful old buildings still standing. All they need are transit riders and zoning reform to become vibrant towns again.

This is my vision for a Rockland county (and Bergen, and Orange) freed from car dependence. With convenient rail connections to jobs in Manhattan and Jersey City, no one will need to drive to Westchester. With sufficient residential density in the downtowns, businesses can thrive on pedestrian traffic without huge parking lots. When a train station and shopping are within walking distance, cars become unnecessary.

Wealthy transit riders by county

Since the distribution of incomes seems to flatten out across a region - or at least, to reach a maximum of about 1 - it seems that the diversity happens at the county level. Accordingly, I tabulated a list of the counties with the highest ratios of transit incomes to driver incomes:

County	Drove alone median earnings	Public transportation median earnings	Public Transportation earnings margin of error	Transit/ Drove Earnings Ratio	Transit - drove / error
St. Lawrence County, New York	31,706	72,130	35,964	2.27	1.12
Cherokee County, Georgia	38,140	85,403	45,118	2.23	1.05
Kane County, Illinois	35,202	75,133	28,679	2.13	1.39
Litchfield County, Connecticut	41,540	82,431	28,064	1.99	1.46
Stafford County, Virginia	44,686	86,938	30,686	1.95	1.38
DuPage County, Illinois	40,473	75,500	11,404	1.86	3.07
McHenry County, Illinois	40,706	75,009	9667	1.84	3.55
Bristol County, Massachusetts	36,895	67,922	13,450	1.84	2.31
Spotsylvania County, Virginia	40,723	73,572	12,071	1.81	2.72
Ulster County, New York	35,289	60,748	10,658	1.72	2.39

There are some surprises here. What's going on in Saint Lawrence County, way up by the Canadian border? Is it something like we saw in Idaho Falls? I'm guessing that it's faculty commuting to SUNY Potsdam or Clarkson University. In any case, there are only 92 transit riders in the county, so maybe one of them can email me.

County	Workforce	Public Transportation	Public Transportation Mode Share	Mean Drive Time	Mean Transit Time	Transit / Drive time ratio
St. Lawrence County, New York	44,683	82	0.18%	20.2	35.7	1.771
Cherokee County, Georgia	101,795	457	0.45%	#N/A	#N/A	#N/A
Kane County, Illinois	235,114	7160	3.05%	27.9	80	2.873
Litchfield County, Connecticut	95,152	1137	1.19%	27.3	61.5	2.257
Stafford County, Virginia	65,294	2420	3.71%	#N/A	#N/A	#N/A
DuPage County, Illinois	454,598	30,222	6.65%	27.1	60.6	2.235
McHenry County, Illinois	149,929	4115	2.74%	32.8	82.3	2.513
Bristol County, Massachusetts	248,437	5282	2.13%	25.5	66.3	2.603
Spotsylvania County, Virginia	58,414	1803	3.09%	#N/A	#N/A	#N/A
Ulster County, New York	81,878	1404	1.71%	#N/A	#N/A	#N/A

Photo: Todd Hull / Cherokee Tribune

The case of Cherokee County, Georgia, is more straightforward. Just about all 457 of them pay $125 a month to ride an express bus into Atlanta several times a week. A massive HOV/BRT plan was shelved in 2009.

Litchfield County, Connecticut is the same as the Torrington Micropolitan Statistical Area discussed in my earlier post, and Ulster County, NY is the same as the Kingston μSA. The Illinois counties of Kane, DuPage and McHenry are all suburbs of Chicago reachable by Metra. Stafford and Spotsylvania counties in Virginia are southern suburbs of Washington, DC served by Virginia Railway Express, and Bristol County, Massachusetts is a suburb of Boston served by the MBTA commuter rail.

The 39 counties with an earnings ratio greater than 1 include suburbs of just about every metro area in the country: Fort Bend, TX (Houston, 1.71), Howard, MD (Baltimore, 1.69), Kitsap, WA (Seattle, 1.50), Chester, PA (Philadelphia, 1.39), Dakota, MN (Minneapolis-St. Paul, 1.28).

One other thing: of course you don't want your county to have too low an earnings ratio, because that means that all the poor people are being pushed onto transit. On the other hand, you don't want it too high either, because too many poor people driving means your local transit system sucks. A ratio of 1 is ideal; that's what you'd get if everyone took transit. Broadly speaking, it seems like there's an acceptable range from 0.698 (Multnomah County) to 1.25 (Bergen County), including those closest to 1, Norfolk County and Middlesex County, Massachusetts.

The future of the Suzy-Q

It's funny, just last night I was re-reading this post from 2009 on the planned restoration of passenger service on the New York, Susquehanna and Western line from Hackensack to Hawthorne in New Jersey. I was wondering what happened to it, since there have been zero news articles about it since. Since Chris Christie's money tree only bears fruit for highway widenings and mega-malls, I figured that it's not going anywhere unless the pressure gets turned up.

This morning, though, I read that the Morris County Freeholders passed a resolution calling for restoration of service on the Suzy-Q, but west of the area I discussed in 2009. Morris County, in conjunction with Passaic and Sussex Counties, wants to run passenger trains from Hawthorne west to Stockholm, just before the track terminates at the Sparta Junction.

I understand why the Freeholders have framed their study in this way, but it seems pretty obvious to me that the train would continue at least into Paterson, where passengers could transfer to an Erie line train to Hoboken, and probably all the way to Hackensack. If I were the Railroad God, I would extend it north to Port Jervis, south to Andover, and east to Edgewater or Hoboken.

It's sad that Star-Ledger reporter Dan Goldberg seemed completely unaware of plans to reactivate passenger service in Bergen and Passaic counties, which could have been running by now. He could have asked New Jersey Transit officials, or the project's champion, Democratic Congressman Bill Pascrell.

The section of the railroad west of Hawthorne runs along the boundary between New Jersey's Fifth and Eleventh congressional districts, represented by Republicans Scott Garrett and Rodney Frelinghuysen. Sadly, even though Garrett is a regular rail commuter and Frelinghuysen was once a champion of the Lackawanna Cut-Off, they have both succumbed to Tea Party mania. Frelinghuysen sponsored an amendment to reallocate high-speed rail funds for Midwest flood relief. Garrett has proposed eliminating Federal funding for Amtrak.

At this rate, though, there won't be funds to build more roads in that area, so the NYS&W's revenue will gradually increase. Maybe some day it'll have enough money to restart passenger service on its own.

Transportation myopia for commuter rail

Jeff "Pantograph Trolleypole" Wood has a post questioning the value of building new commuter rail lines, as contrasted with light rail or streetcars. He points to several new lines where ridership is well below expectations, and argues that such tiny numbers do little to further our goals.

It has always been acknowledged that these new commuter rail lines are oriented towards relatively affluent park-and-ride commuters, so they won't increase access for underserved communities. The claim was that they would get people out of their cars for at least a portion of the trip, leading to greater efficiency and less pollution and carnage. In addition, some people claimed (or at least hoped) that they would attract relatively well-connected passengers, who in turn would have an interest in lobbying for the maintenance and expansion of the transit system. Jeff argues that such small numbers do very little to help us reach any of those goals.

Everyone seems to agree that these commuter lines are a miserable failure, but there is disagreement over why exactly they failed, and how to avoid failures like this in the future. Jeff takes a technical approach, saying that the problem is that the lines tend to be located in old freight rights-of-way far from residential, job and shopping centers and served by large park-and-ride lots. Significantly, these lines all tend to be relatively low frequency, sometimes only a few trains a day. He recommends that agencies pursue light rail through urban areas instead, and contrasts the ridership numbers on these commuter rail lines with numbers from new light rail lines.

Yonah Freemark expands on Jeff's post, but argues instead that the problem is a political failure, due to a futile attempt to distribute funding across metropolitan regions, hamstrung by bad zoning.

I think they're both confusing correlation with causation. Both of their explanations are probably true to some degree, but in fact only one could, or none; we don't know. There's another factor at work that I think plays a role. I don't have any proof, only a similar causation, but that is enough to require more support for Jeff and Yonah's claims. Both bloggers are suffering from transportation myopia, because for every one of the commuter rail lines that Jeff lists, there was a major road project that improved car travel and took riders away from the commuter rail lines.

Northstar commuter rail	I-94 third lane
Capital Metro	US 183 toll road
RailRunner	Big I reconstruction
Music City Star	I-40 widening
Utah FrontRunner	I-15 Ogden-Weber Expansion
Portland WES	Oregon 217 Modernization
Oceanside Sprinter	CA Route 78 HOV Improvements (planned)

Now I know some of the readers are going to jump in and say, "but that highway project outside of Portland is only one lane in one direction for a few blocks!" Yes, but there are numerous other highway expansion projects going on in the area. You can quibble with the details, but I think you'll agree that the overall picture is sound.

If you regularly commute from Maple Grove to downtown Minneapolis and keep getting stuck in traffic jams on I-94, you might consider switching to the Northstar trains. But then if MnDOT adds a lane to I-94 and traffic moves smoother, you might stay in your car. This is partly a failure of commuter rail, partly a failure of regionalism, but mostly a failure of transit advocates to realize how much of a threat competing road projects can be to the train lines they so desperately want to see.

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.

Satellite Photo: Bing Birds-eye view

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.

Westchester-Rockland Pick-a-Mix

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

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

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

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

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

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

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