Our third world airport

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where is the roads and bridges settlement?

It was a big con game, and many of the biggest con artists believed their own hype. "It can never go down!" they cried. They delivered something valuable to people who couldn't afford it, told them it was even more valuable, took a hefty cut for themselves, and left their victims on the hook for billions. But the government has been slow to make them pay.

In part that's because many of those responsible are in government, and many others in government are their friends. In part it's because most of the government regulators were asleep on the job. But mostly it's because so many in the public were asleep too. A lot of them still don't think anybody did anything wrong.

Your tax dollars paid to widen the LIE and pump up housing prices on Long Island.
Photo: Doug Kerr / Flickr

I'm talking about the housing bubble, yes, but not the mortgage fraud. You see, it's hard to tell how much of the bubble came from hype about loans that pay their own interest, and how much came from empty promises of roads and bridges that pay their own maintenance.

Tales of endlessly rising demand for housing and fantasies of endlessly rising demand for driving fed off each other: the new housing pumped up traffic measurements, prompting governments to build and widen roads and bridges, and the new roads and bridges pumped up housing prices, prompting developers to build more housing. In 2008 it all crashed, and if the stimulus hadn't been so focused on "roads and bridges" a lot of it would have stayed crashed.

There's a little good news on the mortgage front: this year the state has brought in over five billion dollars in settlements with several large banks. But when will we see a similar settlement for the road-and-bridge fraud? When will the government sue the people who got us to pay hundreds of millions for these projects that left us on the hook for decades of maintenance?

The defeat of the power broker

Robert Caro’s The Power Broker is one of the all-time classics of urbanism, assigned in many courses and read even by casual students of history. Caro intended his biography of Robert Moses to be an examination of the nature of political power, and how powerful people rise and fall, as evidenced by the title and by his follow-up multi-volume study of Lyndon Johnson.

What is surprising to me is how often people pair Moses with Jane Jacobs and talk about their conflicts over Washington Square Park and the Lower Manhattan Expressway. You could even get the impression, from the way that some people tell it, that it was Jacobs who brought Moses down. It’s true that Moses and Jacobs showed a striking clash of ideologies and worldviews, but Caro spends very little time on Jacobs, focusing instead on the conflicts that Moses had with the mayors (LaGuardia, Wagner) and governors (Smith, Roosevelt) that he nominally served.

Chase Manhattan Plaza. Photo: Ken Lund / Flickr

I am also surprised by how few people got through The Power Broker with any understanding of how Moses was eventually overthrown. I found that to be one of the most captivating parts of the book, like the way the Ring of Power met its fate in Mount Doom. I was in awe once when I got to visit the Chase Bondholder Services Office (not in the same location, but still). And yet I have not heard anyone else mention that part of the story.

I think the main reason nobody talks about how Moses fell from power is that nobody wants to think about it, and that’s because it’s not fair. Moses was not brought down by Jane Jacobs – although she may have helped to finish him off. He was not destroyed by a hobbit, or even a Gollum.

The people who were finally able to take away Moses’s source of power – his Ring, the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority – were two of the most powerful people in the country. Heirs to a multi-million dollar oil fortune, David and Nelson Rockefeller controlled, respectively, one of the largest banks in the country and one of the wealthiest states. Nelson would go on to be Vice President a few years later. And yet, neither brother could have defeated Moses by himself: it was only by combining their powers and working together that they were able to create the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and swallow Moses’s TBTA.

On the face of it, this is not a very inspiring story. Want to defeat a despotic, unelected, arrogant man who is destroying your cities? Sorry, you can’t do it yourself. You have to trust in two plutocrats, one elected, one not, each responsible for his own Corbusian excesses (Chase Manhattan Plaza and Empire State Plaza, respectively). You have to trust them to be strong enough to make it really work (instead of, say, leaving a bunch of free alternatives to the bridges and tunnels funding the subway system), and not to fuck it up (by, say, leaving its funding at the mercy of the notoriously corrupt and undemocratic New York State Legislature). It’s less like Frodo and Gollum, and more like Eärendil calling in the Valar, if the Valar were a bunch of Republican bankers.

But as I think about it, it's not like there was even an Eärendil. From what I can tell, the Rockefellers never talked to a single subway rider, or anyone whose home or business was displaced by their projects or those of Moses. As Bob Fitch explains it in The Assassination of New York (which everyone should read; you can get a taste from this Doug Henwood tribute), the Rockefellers were mainly motivated by their failing real estate investments in the West Side (particularly Rockefeller Center). Getting the Chrystie Street Connection and the Sixth Avenue express tunnels built was a priority, at least for David, so he needed to see the subway capital plan funded for a few years minimum.

I think that’s the true lesson of The Power Broker: sometimes the thing that gets rid of one tyrant is just another tyrant. Sometimes the interests of the new tyrant align with your own enough that you can get something decent going. Sometimes the new power is not a single tyrant but a junta, and its power is diluted by that fact, making it slightly less dangerous. This leaves an opening for smaller powers to come in and get a piece of the action, further diluting the power. It ain't democracy and it ain't fair, but it's better than having Bob Moses screwing everything up.

Any way you slice it, it's not very inspiring for those of us who aren't Rockefellers. And that's why people prefer to talk about Jane Jacobs's minor victory over Moses.

Carmageddon vs. Bridgegate

The New Jersey Department of Transportation will shut down two lanes of the Pulaski Skyway on Saturday, and recently Sarah Gonzalez was on WNYC with dire predictions of carmageddon.

My prediction is that these predictions, like most predictions of carmageddon, will not come true. There will hardly be any additional congestion. There is a simple reason: drivers are being warned in advance. In the recent Carmageddon episodes in Los Angeles and Seattle, not only were there dire warnings well in advance of the impending doom, but they were broadcast far and wide. When the time came, drivers took alternate routes or stayed at home, and the congestion failed to materialize.

Photo: Amy Newman / NorthJersey

The contrast with "Bridgegate" just a few miles up the river is particularly revealing. In Bridgegate, as with the Pulaski, there were two approach lanes taken out of service, but with Bridgegate there was absolutely no notice given. Drivers didn't know that the George Washington Bridge toll booths were closed until they got there, and many of them didn't even know then, until they got close enough to see. The element of surprise makes a huge difference.

There are other factors, in particular the availability of alternate routes, but that factor favors the Pulaski. As Larry Higgs tells us, there are many ways to get across the Meadowlands or the bay, and several of them don't even require driving.

The best outcome, in fact, would be for habitual drivers to take a transit option, realize that transit isn't so bad, and shift to transit permanently, as they seem to have done in Seattle. The bridge is a major contributor to crashes and pollution in Lower Manhattan. The best way to encourage transit use would be to turn the two remaining lanes of the Skyway into exclusive busways, but charging a well-advertised market-clearing price on the Holland Tunnel would work too. Unfortunately, nobody took up my suggestions, and drivers will have a nicely renovated bridge when it's all finished, making permanent shifts that much less likely. Thanks, Chris Christie!

If you care about the Northeast Corridor...

Last week I mentioned that the Northeast Corridor between Washington, DC and New York City has a wealth of transit options, all of them generating operational profits for the transit provider. Credit for this success is in part due to the citizens of New York and New Jersey, who have resisted pressure from road builders to destroy town and country for planned highways like the Somerset Expressway and the Lower Manhattan Expressway, and in part due to the managers at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, who implemented high tolls with congestion pricing.

The Northeast Corridor (left) and the New Jersey Turnpike (right) compete with each other across the state. Photo: David Pfeiffer / Flickr.

When our governments did not simply continue to build roads and keep the tolls low, people needed alternatives. As car traffic has increased on the New Jersey Turnpike and parallel highways and the price of gas has risen, people have steadily switched to trains and buses. The result is that Northeast Corridor passengers now subsidize the rest of the Amtrak network, and a whole range of bus operators from Eastern up to Vamoose Gold make enough money to not just pay for gas, wages and maintenance, but for new buses, and even generate a profit.

Those options are under threat now from unchecked government spending to interfere in the market, and the person directing this interference is none other than that darling of the right and famed budget-cutter, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. You may remember, specifically, that Christie cancelled the ARC Tunnel project because he thought it would place too great a burden on future generations of New Jersey taxpayers.

It turns out that Christie didn't just lie about New Jersey's share of the cost and redirect three billion dollars to road projects. Tri-State has the news (from the Star-Ledger) that even three billion dollars isn't enough to finish those projects, and the Turnpike Authority will borrow an additional $1.4 billion to complete them - putting that burden on future generations of New Jersey drivers and taxpayers.

One of those projects in particular is a really bad idea and could seriously undermine transit in the Northeast Corridor. There is a bottleneck on the New Jersey Turnpike between Mansfield and New Brunswick where the highway is "only" six lanes wide. A lot of that $4.4 billion is being spent to widen the Turnpike to twelve lanes in that section.

Eventually, as with most road expansions, those twelve lanes will probably be just as congested as the six lanes are today,. Or maybe not. If other driving costs like gas and insurance continue to rise, driving may drop there just as it is all over the country. But for a while it will be smooth sailing, and that could spell trouble for Northeast Corridor transit.

It's no coincidence that the Pennsylvania and Lehigh Valley railroads started to lose money after the Turnpike was opened, or that the Erie and New York Central lost money after the New York State Thruway was built, or the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western went downhill after Routes 78 and 80 opened. The Northeast Corridor, which is the successor to the Pennsylvania Railroad, is just beginning to recover.

Just as those highways drew passengers from the parallel railroads, the time savings on this newly widened Turnpike will draw passengers from the trains and buses of the Northeast Corridor. This is massive government-sponsored, debt-financed sabotage of a profitable market, done by a Republican with a reputation as a budget-cutter. Combined with the way the Democrats gummed up curbside bus pickup here in New York City, we may well see a drop in Northeast Corridor bus and train ridership over the next several years. I hope I'm wrong.

After the Port Authority raised tolls in 2010 there was a huge stink. After Christie cancelled the ARC Tunnel there was outrage from transit advocates. So far this massive highway widening hasn't gotten much more than a few angry Tri-State blog posts, and nothing from budget hawks. Will anything change?

The Pulaski Skyway, a different "freeway without a future"?

Earlier this year the Congress for the New Urbanism released a new version of its "Freeways without futures" list. I wholeheartedly agree that all twelve of the highways in question are disgusting blights and should be removed. I've seen the Claiborne Expressway, the Sheridan and the Alaskan Way up close, and I have a special loathing for I-81 in Syracuse and Route 34 in New Haven. But there are a few roads that I think deserve to be on the list but aren't.

Typical evening congestion, seven blocks north of the Holland Tunnel. Photo: Brooklyn Spoke / Instagram.

It's a bad thing when a highway cuts neighborhoods in half, like the Cross-Bronx Expressway, or cuts a neighborhood off from access to jobs and services, like the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in Red Hook, or cuts the waterfront off from meaningful recreational or commercial use, like the FDR Drive. Converting these highways to boulevards is a good thing, especially when the boulevards are designed to be walkable and livable. There are other criteria missing, though.

Think of a walkable urban area that's already well-served by transit. The streets are congested with cars for too many hours of the day. You don't need that many cars to bring customers to the businesses, and they're ruining the pedestrian experience. So why do you have a highway terminating there? That highway is basically pumping cars into an area that doesn't need them.

These highways may not be visibly blocking a cherished view or oppressing a street, but by aiming a firehose of cars into a compact urban area they are a major factor in the deterioration of walkable urban environments. When possible, they should either be torn down or turned over to transit.

The most obvious case is Congress Parkway in Chicago. It's six lanes of nasty urban traffic fed by an eight-lane highway. It doesn't need to be there, and it makes the South Loop feel oppressive. It should be narrowed and given sidewalks befitting a grand urban boulevard, from the Circle to the Lake. The District of Columbia is full of these; 12th Street NW is probably the worst. University Street in Montreal is not much fun, as I recall.

Here in the New York area, we have four highway tunnels and five highway bridges that empty directly into the streets of Manhattan. You could get rid of any of the highways (495, I-78, the BQE, the Long Island Expressway, the Grand Central Parkway, the Bruckner Expressway and the Major Deegan Expressway) and it would make a huge improvement.

It's hard to choose among these firehoses of cars, but one of the worst is the Holland Tunnel. This is because it combines two four-lane expressways, the Pulaski Skyway and the Newark Bay Extension of the New Jersey Turnpike, into a single stream. It's even more powerful in the other direction due to the Verrazano Toll Pump, sucking cars and trucks from all over Manhattan and Brooklyn through Chinatown, Soho and Greenwich Village.

The Pulaski Skyway. Photo: Jack E. Boucher, National Park Service, 1978.

Fortunately, we are coming upon a historic opportunity to turn down this firehose. One of the four-lane expressways that feed into the Holland Tunnel, the Pulaski Skyway, is nearing the end of its life. This expensive steel structure has contributed to the destruction of the sensitive Hackensack Meadowlands since 1932. Naturally, there is a plan to rebuild the structure, and lots of rehabilitation in the meantime. Remember the ARC Tunnel that Chris Christie killed? $1.8 billion of the money is paying for that rehabilitation.

Some people like the way the Skyway looks - from a distance, or from the inside of a moving car, at least. I admit that it has a certain beauty to it. But its function is destructive. If there were some way to turn it into a dedicated busway, that might be nice, but I don't get the impression it would work. If we like the look, let's keep a small piece of it up somewhere for posterity's sake, but don't hold people's lives hostage to aesthetics.

In sum, we're diverting more than a billion dollars from critical transit improvements to maintain a road that blasts 30,000 cars a day (yes, only cars) into one of the densest, most walkable business districts in the country. If this thing were towering over a neighborhood instead of a swamp, it would definitely be on the CNU's list. Is it any less deserving of a teardown because it only saturates the area with cars?

Governor Cuomo, climate change and transit

Nathan H. was following my train of thought when I wondered whether a politician - specifically, Governor Andrew Cuomo - could be a "car guy" and still be an effective advocate for transit. That train of thought started with Cuomo's statements on climate change in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy:

It's a longer conversation, but I think part of learning from this is the recognition that climate change is a reality, extreme weather is a reality, it is a reality that we are vulnerable. Climate change is a controversial subject, right? People will debate whether there is climate change … that's a whole political debate that I don't want to get into. I want to talk about the frequency of extreme weather situations, which is not political … There's only so long you can say, "this is once in a lifetime and it's not going to happen again."

The next stop on that train was the Governor's numerous statements announcing storm precautions and service restorations on the transit system, which Noah Budnick of Transportation Alternatives took as an admission that the Governor controls the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. It's obvious that the MTA is a state agency, but from the beginning governors have distanced themselves from it, in part to avoid responsibility for raising fares. Cuomo could not resist taking credit for the positive things the MTA has done in this storm, prompting speculation that he may continue to acknowledge ownership of it for the rest of his time in office.

Governor Andrew Cuomo and MTA Chair Joe Lhota brief New York residents on transit service restorations after Hurricane Sandy. Photo: governorandrewcuomo / Flickr.

Let's connect the two. Despite the shell game played by Tom Rubin and perpetuated by his followers like Eric Morris, the more people we can get to shift from cars to transit, the slower our climate will change. The bigger the rail network we can leave for our children and grandchildren, the easier it will be for them to get around without putting more carbon dioxide into the air.

You may ask why we should bother curbing New York City's carbon emissions. Dense, transit-oriented cities already have low per capita pollution; New York's is half as much as Denver's. We emit a small portion of the country's total greenhouse gas emissions (less than one percent), and an even smaller portion of the world's. True, but Cuomo is the governor of the entire state, and a large percentage of the state's population lives and works in dense, older areas easily served by transit. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that if the Governor could shift half the state's population from cars to transit, he could cut the state's greenhouse gas emissions in half.

Beyond that, New York City and New York State may have a reputation as weirdo outliers whose ideas won't fly in Peoria, but there are a lot of people around the country and around the world who are paying attention to us. If Cuomo leads on transit, many of those people will follow. If he ever succeeds in his goal of becoming President of the United States, getting the country to shift to transit would have a huge effect on the world's carbon dioxide emissions. New York State could provide a proof of concept for him.

Until last week, I was sure that Cuomo - who admitted to not having ridden the subway in years - was both clueless and uninterested on these issues. His raising of the climate change issue, awkward and fumbling as it was, changed that for me. It seems now that, like the President, the Governor had chosen to be silent on the issue, afraid that it would make him a magnet for reactionary mockery and ruin his carefully crafted reputation as a Democrat that Republicans could do business with. On October 30, it was clear that he had made up his mind that it was foolish to remain silent.

Similarly with transit, it is clear that Cuomo realizes that the city is dependent on its subways, buses and commuter trains to function properly. He knows what Joe Lhota repeated many times: that millions of people depend on the system every day. He knows that keeping it running smoothly means happy voters.

Has Cuomo gone beyond that and made the connection between a smooth, ubiquitous transit system and slowing the rise of the oceans? Unfortunately, that is not clear. Let's hope he has, and that his days of treating the subways as a trivial service are over.

Being a car guy in the age of transit

It's well known that Governor Andrew Cuomo is a "car guy." In a 2010 Esquire profile, he and his brother Chris discussed their love of "seventies muscle cars" like Corvettes, Firebirds and El Caminos. He travels mostly by car, and otherwise he prefers helicopters and planes, occasionally riding a bike or paddling a canoe, but hardly ever setting foot on a subway or bus. Can he legitimately govern a state where over thirty percent of the population commutes by transit?

Photo supplied by Andrew Cuomo to Esquire magazine.

I have to admit at this point that when I was a teenager I was something of a "car guy." Or at least, I wanted to be. I could identify the make and model of most cars on sight. I had one of those seventies cars in my yard, and my mom's mechanic friend always promised he'd come by and help me get it running.

I like machines. I'd probably still be into cars if it wasn't so hard to operate them without killing people, and if they didn't destroy our environment so badly. Instead, I play with other kinds of technology. But as a mechanically inclined person I totally respect and endorse other people's mechanical hobbies. I know people who like other dangerous technologies as well, like explosives and blades, and I don't judge.

I also like recreational walking and bike riding, so I respect and endorse other people's hobbies that have to do with transportation. Governor Cuomo is certainly not the only governor to have such a hobby. Aside from Mark Sanford's well-known love of hiking, there is also former Nevada Governor Jim Gibbons, who likes horseback riding. Triathlete, Presidential candidate and former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson likes skiing in addition to his other hobbies.

The key is that I never saw Governor Sanford throwing billions of dollars into hiking trails, or Gibbons reestablishing a network of intercity horseback stages, or Johnson building massive bridges that can only be used by cross-country skiers. These governors may have been informed by their hobbies to some degree, but they did not make them the basis for policy. Instead, they built policy around what they believed was right for their states - or not, depending on their level of corruption.

Thus it should be for car guys like Cuomo. We still have horse guys and women even though no governor rides a horse to the capitol, and we will always have car guys, even if some day it will be unthinkable for a governor to get to Albany any way other than the train. Andrew Cuomo is a car guy, and at home he probably always will be. But when it comes to transportation policy, even Andrew Cuomo should not be a car guy. It's bad for our state, and bad for the world.

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?

Greenwashing with recreation

I got pretty annoyed this weekend listening to Lieutenant Governor Duffy blathering on to Alan Chartock about how Governor Cuomo loves the environment so much, he would never approve hydrofracking if he thought it would harm the environment at all! How do we know Cuomo loves the environment so much? Because he just loves spending time outdoors in the woods!

I was composing a thousand word blog post in my mind about greenwashing through recreation, when Stephen Miller announced a caption contest with a photo of Cuomo canoeing on some pristine Adirondack body of water. So here is a picture that tells the whole story:

I would credit the photographer, but the Governor's Flickr stream doesn't say who it is. Very nice shot, though.

Please feel free to retweet my contest entry tweet. Also, please share this picture on Facebook! As a pseudonymous fictional entity, your Cap'n is not allowed on Facebook, so please be my minions!

You can find out why the Tappan Zee Bridge is a cancer in our midst at www.thetappanzeebridgeisacancerinourmidst.com, or by browsing my Tappan Zee-related posts.

What's going to be cut to pay for the Tappan Zee Bridge replacement?

I've been asking this question for a while. Remember that this is a bridge that shouldn't exist, and should be torn down and not rebuilt. But Andrew Cuomo wants to rebuild it, twice as big, and at a huge cost. Who is going to pay for it?

Remember: it has long been established that it is economically impossible to cover the budgeted cost of $5 billion through tolls. If everyone who crosses now paid $15-20 round trip we could do it, but when the tolls get that high, people start doing what they should be doing anyway: working close to home, living close to work, or taking transit. In the topsy-turvy world of road tolls this is a bad thing, because then total revenue declines and the Thruway can't pay the bonds.

Charlie Komanoff has argued that the solution is just to build a smaller replacement bridge, but Cuomo seems to have decided that any plan that doesn't double the width of the bridge is not big enough for his legacy. There's a chance he's expecting that the second span will be cancelled, but not until he's safely elected President.

What's more likely is that there will be some component that is directly paid for out of taxes, like the gas tax, the income tax or the sales tax. It will be paid by the Federal or New York State governments, but either way it will come primarily from people who don't drive across the bridge - and from significant numbers of people who don't drive at all. If we estimate that amount to be $1.4 billion, it will bring the tolls down to $10-12 round trip, as you can see in this modified version of Komanoff's spreadsheet.

As long as the bridge is getting built, there will be some component paid by other taxes; the question is simply how much it will be. The smaller the toll increase, the bigger the share that will have to be borne by taxpayers. Right now, through his unofficial press secretary Fred Dicker, the Governor has signaled that any toll increase will be minimal.

The tabloids have stoked a fierce backlash against toll increases following the most recent Port Authority bridge toll hike. The Governor has been saying, "the bridge will be paid for with tolls," but like his earlier insistence that he won't raise taxes and that he'll veto any redistricting bill that doesn't include an independent commission, it's pretty clear that this is just for show.

What is most disturbing is that, according to Dicker, Assembly Speaker Silver and Senate Minority Leader Skelos have come out against any Thruway toll hike. Silver thinks that more cars and trucks on the Thruway is good. Skelos wants government to be more efficient, but not so efficient that it doesn't replace the bridge. These quotes are about a toll hike that's independent of the bridge financing, aimed at keeping the highway solvent, and they're against that. It's possible that they could change their tune once it comes to paying for the bridge replacement, but it's also possible that they'll repeat these same platitudes.

If Silver and Skelos support rebuilding the bridge but oppose raising tolls to pay for it, and also oppose raising taxes (as Skelos at least is signaling), then there will have to be cuts in other things. I would actually love to see the Kosciuszko Bridge replacement cut, but I'm guessing it will probably be the transit budget that gets cut again. At which time expect to see Silver and Skelos's minions like Hakeem Jeffries, Jeff Klein and Marty Golden come out with the usual protests against transit cuts and fare hikes, all the while decrying the waste at the MTA.

Gonna get fooled again, again?

Three of the reasons that are most commonly cited for rebuilding the Tappan Zee Bridge are the current bridge's narrow lanes, no shoulders and high maintenance costs. But what if, instead of paying five billion dollars to replace it, we could get rid of those problems for a few million? Better yet, what if we could avoid them altogether? Fortunately, that's exactly where we are with the Verrazano Bridge.

The Tappan Zee Bridge used to have wider lanes until 1990, when the six existing lanes were squeezed to make room for a seventh. I don't have crash rates going back that far, but if the bridge builders say that the crash rates are due to narrow lanes, then presumably they were lower before. I also haven't been able to find a breakdown of the maintenance costs, but I'm sure the increased wear and tear from 30,000 more car and truck crossings every day has contributed to the increase. I'm also very curious to know how much it costs to run a machine across the bridge every day moving the barrier from one side of the bridge to the other.

As I've argued before, if we want to stop the carnage and save money, why not get rid of the reversible lane and its expensive machinery and widen the lanes again? Furthermore, can we acknowledge that the reversible seventh lane was a bad idea, and shouldn't be done again? Apparently not. Governor Cuomo has decided to build a new bridge, and he and his Thruway and DOT appointees will ignore any proposal to solve these problems that does not involve a new bridge.

That brings us to the Verrazano Bridge, where Cuomo's MTA is proposing to do exactly the same thing, as reported by Ted Mann in today's Wall Street Journal. In twenty years, will we be hearing that this bridge also has high maintenance costs? Will there be a push to replace it with a bigger bridge because it has "an accident rate double the rest of the system"? How much will the Governor want from our tax dollars when that time comes?

When I first heard about this plan for the Verrazano, I was pleased at the prospect of an HOV lane to speed buses from Staten Island to Manhattan. My first thought was, "yeah, they should extend it all the way through the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel and up Church Street." But there's a big difference between taking an existing car lane for transit, building a new greenfield, elevated or tunnel transit right-of-way, and shoehorning a new lane into an existing road. With the shoehorn approach comes increased carnage and operating expenses. Given the Cuomo Administration's record of "peeing on our backs and telling us it's raining," and the State DOT's history of this tactic on many roads under multiple governors, we can expect that this will mean new showers in the future.

We have to ask ourselves whether the increased capacity offered by an HOV lane (not a dedicated busway) is worth this tremendous cost, in money and in lives. Staten Island leaders should recognize that it will be much safer and cheaper if the MTA takes a lane for the busway, and that a lot more of their constituents will get to work in comfort with a busway than without one.

The state budget's bogus parity

Every once in a while the debate over the New York State budget turns briefly to transportation, and we see where our leaders have their priorities. Back in January, Streetsblog reported that the Governor had allocated $150 million to the MTA Capital Plan for next year, 5.7% of the budget for that plan, while requiring the MTA to borrow six times as much. Even this paltry amount was blocked by the State Senate, until a budget deal was hashed out by the infamous "three men in a room": Governor Cuomo, Assembly Speaker Silver and Senate Majority Leader Skelos.

DeFrancisco, Libous and Skelos: making sure drivers get as much as possible.

State Senate Budget Committee chair John DeFrancisco made his priorities clear to Glenn Bain of the Daily News: "DeFrancisco also expressed concern that funding for upstate road and bridge projects were being treated fairly," wrote Bain. "We don’t have too many MTA trains going to Syracuse," DeFrancisco told him. When the deal was finally announced, Dana Rubenstein of Capital New York surmised that "what the Senate Republicans might have been holding out for, in this case, was more money for non-city road and bridge projects."

Republican Senators, in particular Tom Libous of Binghamton, the Deputy Majority Leader, were also concerned that there would be "parity" in road funding between upstate and downstate, and last week State leaders produced a "memorandum of understanding" that would send "$751 million to the upstate regions north and west of the Hudson Valley. ... the Hudson Valley, including Westchester, Rockland, Putnam, Ulster and Dutchess counties, would get up to $158 million, Long Island would get up to $291 million, and New York City would get up to $415 million."

It's not clear what the actual basis is for the "parity" demanded by Libous and DeFrancisco. Are there the same number of drivers in the Hudson Valley as transit riders in New York City? As many drivers Upstate as in the City and the Island combined? Or is it based on land area, or taxes paid, or political contributions, or spiedie consumption? I don't have figures for those criteria, but let's take a look at the commuting population and how they get to work, from the 2005-2009 American Community Survey:

Region	Total commuting population	Drove alone, carpooled, taxi, bicycle or motorcycle to work	Public transportation to work
Upstate	3,029,501	2,841,155	11,399
Hudson Valley	1,003,833	797,964	122,356
Long Island	1,067,230	796,873	191,913
New York City	3,618,690	1,119,412	1,998,795
Total	8,719,254	5,555,404	2,324,463

Let's combine the public transit commuters from the Hudson Valley, the City and Long Island as the total constituency of the MTA. Some of them may only use their local county bus systems or even private buses like Red and Tan, but I'm guessing that most of the commuters from outside the city ride Metro-North or the Long Island Rail Road. We have to exclude Upstate transit commuters, because those transit agencies apparently got zero capital support from the State budget. You could say that people who walked to work benefited from State DOT money, but the state DOT spends so little of its money on pedestrian infrastructure it might as well be zero. True, everyone indirectly benefits from roads because they get things delivered by truck, but the enormous inefficiencies of truck freight would probably cancel out any indirect benefit.

Constituency	Commuters	Percentage of commuters	Capital funding	Percentage of capital funding
Upstate car/bike commuters	2,841,155	36.1 %	$751,000,000	32.2 %
Hudson Valley car/bike commuters	797,964	10.1 %	$158,000,000	6.78 %
Long Island car/bike commuters	796,873	10.1 %	$291,000,000	12.5 %
New York City car/bike commuters	1,119,4125	14.2 %	$415,000,000	17.8 %
MTA riders	2,313,064	29.4 %	$150,000,000	6.44 %
Total	7,868,468		$1,765,000,000

You can see that something's off there. Needless to say, bicyclists are a tiny share of commuters, but none of the percentages match. Now what if we allocated it differently, based on population?

Constituency	Percentage of commuters	Capital funding approved	Capital funding by population	Favored by budget
Upstate car/bike commuters	36.1 %	$751,000,000	$637,308,123	$113,691,876.61
Hudson Valley car/bike commuters	10.1 %	$158,000,000	$178,993,733	($20,993,732.96)
Long Island car/bike commuters	10.1 %	$291,000,000	$178,749,007	$112,250,992.57
New York City car/bike commuters	14.2 %	$415,000,000	$251,098,712	$163,901,288.03
MTA riders	29.4 %	$150,000,000	$518,850,424	($368,850,424.25)
Total		$1,765,000,000

So there you have it. The Upstate drivers, led by Tom Libous and John DeFrancisco, and the Long Island drivers, led by Majority Leader Dean Skelos and Transportation Chair Charles Fuschillo, each got over $112 million more than they would if it were based on simple commuting numbers. City drivers, led by Republicans Marty Golden and Andrew Lanza and Independent Democrats Jeff Klein and Diane Savino, got $163 million more. A tiny bit of this ($20 million) came from Hudson Valley drivers, but the vast majority, $369 million, came from city transit riders.

There is no "parity" here, even for drivers. The formula is simple: the more powerful "legislators" get more money for their constituents, and every driver is worth as much as 4.5 transit riders.

Keep this in mind next time you hear Skelos, Fuschillo, Golden, Lanza, Klein and Savino complaining about MTA cuts. They may act like they care, but when the money's on the line they're not fighting for transit riders.

Who will stop the Tappan Zee boondoggle?

Last week the Federal Highway Administration released two sets of documents relating to the Tappan Zee Bridge reconstruction project. There wasn't much discussion of the Scope Summary Report, where hundreds of people complained about the way the Federal Government has been handling this project and were completely blown off. That's backward-looking and old news. A lot more attention has been paid to the Draft Environmental Impact Statement because it finds, in the words of an Associated Press writer, "no ecology obstacles" to the plan.

Streetsblog's Noah Kazis has recycled several of my posts with added points, including a critique of the bridge planning under New York State's own Smart Growth law, a more thorough corroboration of my toll calculations by Charlie Komanoff, a report embarrassing the State with its own clumsy denial of Streetsblog's Freedom of Information requests, and a striking illustration of the FHWA's lack of interest in public input: the old outreach offices have been closed.

One of the craziest things about this is that the thing is supposed to cost five billion dollars, and nobody has said where that money will come from. The Governor has floated several different "trial balloons," but in the end declared that it will have to be "publicly financed." In theory this is all in the Governor's budget proposal, but in practice the budget is the usual spaghetti of confusing similarly-named funds and accounts folding endlessly back in on itself; the Tappan Zee Bridge is mentioned once or twice, but not in a way that seems connected with anything.

Despite the fact that lots and lots of people said there should be "transit on the bridge," the FHWA said they wouldn't do more than "not preclude" transit. Transportation Nation's Kate Hinds called New York State Transportation Commissioner Joan McDonald and asked her about this. McDonald's response was interesting:

That is what we have said all along…Our position has always been you cannot build transit until you replace the bridge. We don’t think it is financially feasible at this time for transit to be included, but we are building a bridge that will last for 100+ years, so at some point in the future, if the ridership numbers, and the fare box recovery ratio warrant the investment, we will make sure that it happens. So we are building the bridge to not preclude it in the future. And what that means is the footings will be spread appropriately and there will be enough weight-bearing capability on the bridge to hold transit in the future.

I've highlighted a key phrase that jumped out at me the second time I read it: if the ridership numbers and the fare box recovery ratio warrant the investment. You could read the part about "ridership numbers" as McDonald simply saying she's not going to put the State in a position where it's vulnerable to the Empty Lanes Attack. If they're going to reserve a lane for buses, they want to be able to say that that lane moves enough people to justify keeping private cars out.

The bit about farebox recovery is more troubling. Currently, fares paid by Tappan Zee Express and Orange-Westchester Link riders cover about ten percent of the cost of running those buses. What McDonald is saying here is that it's not "financially feasible" to spend that much money subsidizing bus rides as well as reserving the lanes for buses. Cannily, she doesn't say what kind of farebox recovery ratio would warrant the investment, allowing herself and her successors to dismiss any request for transit.

The troubling part is that McDonald seems to have no clue that roads and transit compete with one another - or possibly to be deliberately ignoring this fact. If we add a lane to the Tappan Zee Bridge (and everyone knows it's going to be at least three lanes), that makes it easier to drive, and lowers the demand for transit. In other words, as long as the government keeps widening the roads and bridges the farebox recovery ratio will never warrant the investment in transit.

McDonald has just flushed any credibility she had left on smart growth issues down the toilet, but what about her boss? Most of the posts about the bridge point the finger at Governor Andrew Cuomo, and clearly he's the one pushing for the bridge to be started this year. It's not hard to figure out why: he wants to have at least one inspiring infrastructure project finished by the time he runs for President in 2016. He doesn't see transit (much less "BRT") as necessary to this bullet point on his resume.

Transit advocates do not have the power to take away this bullet point that Cuomo so desperately seeks, and I can't think of anything we could offer him that would have equal political value. Is there a transit project that would move 150,000 people a day for $5 billion dollars and be finished by 2016 without requiring Cuomo to share the glory with anyone else?

If we want to stop this project, appealing to Cuomo or McDonald will not help. There are a few other avenues, though. Since October, the lead agency on the bridge replacement project has not been the State Department of Transportation, but the FHWA. The FHWA is part of the United States Department of Transportation, headed by everyone's favorite Republican ex-congressman from Peoria, Ray LaHood. LaHood has been actively courting the smart growth and alternative transportation crowd, and seems most passionate when he talks about bike facilities and high speed rail. Why not lobby him and his boss, President Obama? At the very least, every time LaHood shows up to speak at a pro-transit or pro-bike gathering, someone could say to him, "You know, Ray, this Tappan Zee Bridge project is a disaster, and your agency is leading it!" Not out loud, to embarrass him, but quietly, privately, so that he gets the message that people are paying attention and connecting it with him. (You can also mention the eerily similar Columbia River Crossing).

Another possible route of opposition is New York State's traditional system of checks and balances, known informally as "three men in a room." Streetsblog has mentioned that Senate Finance Committee Chair John DeFrancisco expressed frustration with the vagueness of the transportation budget. Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver has killed boondoggles in the past; would he or Dean Skelos be willing to expend enough political capital to kill this bridge project?

Since both the pro-bridge coalition and the pro-BRT coalition have reserved domain names for their positions, I have set up a website at www.thetappanzeebridgeisacancerinourmidst.com showcasing all the reasons to tear down the bridge and not replace it. Please link and tweet it widely!

The Tappan Zee Bridge and Transit: A look back

This December 15 will be the hundredth anniversary of the completion of the first Tappan Zee Bridge in 1955. In honor of that occasion, we've collected some highlights of the history of the original bridge and its current replacement.

The Andrew Cuomo Tappan Zee Bridge today. Photo: Wikipedia.

1953: The first concrete caisson is floated into place.

1955: Governor Averell Harriman opens the bridge to traffic.

1970: The Thruway Authority repays the last of its $80 million debt to New York State.

1993: A movable barrier system allows four lanes of traffic to flow in the peak direction.

1999: The I-287 Task Force is formed to explore options to rehabilitate or replace the bridge.

2011: President Barack Obama announces that the replacement of the bridge will be expedited.

2012: Governor Andrew Cuomo announces a deal to include "full corridor Bus Rapid Transit" on the bridge instead of an "emergency access lane."

2017: Governor Richard Brodsky opens the new north span of the bridge to traffic.

2023: Tappan Zee, Inc., raises car tolls from $10 to $15 round trip to make payments on the bridge construction bonds. Gasoline-powered cars are charged $20, but most people drive electric cars using cheap electricity from shale gas.

2027: Governor Eric Ulrich opens the new south span of the bridge to traffic.

2028: Bowing to political pressure, Governor Ulrich opens the "BRT lane" to all cars.

2032: The Historic Tarrytown Village is moved to a parking pedestal in Elmsford to make room for the Tarrytown Water Filtration Plant and the Residences at Sleepye Hollowe.

2038: Bowing to political pressure, Governor Cara Cuomo-Espada opens the bridge shoulders to all cars.

2040: Tappan Zee Shale Gas, Inc. assumes control of New York State for nonpayment of obligations. Car tolls are raised to $25 round trip.

2048: Bowing to political pressure, TZSG President Theodore Gillibrand converts the "little used bicycle/pedestrian path" to a reversible lane. The bridge has to have seven lanes in the peak direction, he argues, because the Thruway is that wide.

2049: The Andrew Cuomo Tappan Zee Task Force is formed to explore options to rehabilitate or replace the bridge.

2054: The Historic Village of Nyack is moved to a parking pedestal in Nanuet to make room for the Nyack Biomass Plant and the Residences at Nyacke.

Note: the previous post envisioned a Tappan Zee without transit, as currently planned.

Getting Cuomo to do the right thing

Transit and livable streets advocates are rightly frustrated with the way Andrew Cuomo has dealt with our issues as governor. He has not been an anti-transit ideologue like Scott Walker of Wisconsin, and he has not championed drivers above everyone else like Bill Thompson or Carl Paladino. He is simply uninterested in transit. He has no personal use for it, and he does not see transit victories as particularly helpful or necessary in his career.

As a result, Cuomo has abandoned transit issues like the budget lockbox and the Tappan Zee BRT when it seemed they would get in the way of another goal like passing a popular revenue plan or reconstructing an aging bridge. He has prevaricated on issues like congestion pricing and the borough taxi bill when he feared they would anger an important constituency. He has failed to take the initiative on issues like Chris Christie's reallocation of Port Authority funds from transit to roads. And he has neglected transit champions like Chris Ward and Jay Walder, driving them out and replacing them with managers chosen for their loyalty to him rather than their commitment to making transit work.

This is incredibly frustrating, especially because we do not have very much of the kind of power that can command Cuomo's respect. The Occupy movement aroused so much sympathy among the mainstream media that Cuomo felt comfortable defying the New York Post editorial board and abandoning their absurd construal of "no new taxes." The Occupiers created space for Cuomo to advance his career by doing the right thing. They did this by camping out for months, playing drums and having lots of really long meetings, but the effect of all that was to get out the message about income inequality and taxation.

Let's look at another example of inequality. There's an argument to be made that it's unfair to maintain the "free" bridges with sales and income tax dollars while transit riders have to pay more and more for crappier service. Tolling the bridges would remedy some of that inequality (and bring in riders for the transit services). It's the right thing to do.

If Cuomo wanted to take a stand on bridge tolls, he would have to face the angry right-wing Democrats from the outer outer boroughs and the suburbs, and maybe even a few myopic liberals who are swayed by bogus arguments about regressive taxes and totalitarianism. He won't do the right thing without the kind of political cover that the Occupiers provided.

Are transit advocates capable of harnessing that kind of power? And if we're not, maybe we should be using a different strategy?