Do we need the Port Authority Bus Terminal?

In 2015 I talked about the proposal to build a new bus terminal in downtown Flushing, and came up with the following list of six features. The current Port Authority terminal on 41st Street provides some of these some of the time:

1. One-stop shopping for buses.
2. Easy transfer between buses, and from buses to trains.
3. Short-term bus layovers.
4. Long-term bus layovers.
5. Avoiding street congestion. There are ramps for the upper level, and an outbound tunnel under Ninth Avenue. This leaves many buses stuck in traffic, particularly those heading north and east.
6. Ticketing, shelter, bathrooms, food and shopping for people waiting for buses.

Any transit system is easier and more attractive with one-stop shopping, short-term bus layovers and easy transfers. But long-term bus layovers, avoiding congestion and passenger facilities are more important for long distance trips than short ones.

If I’m taking the bus to Binghamton, I might have to wait an hour or more, so it’s really important for me to have shelter, bathrooms, tickets and food. (It would be nice to have seating and a place to store my bag, but that’s a whole other post.)

Cheaper services with higher frequency, like the New Jersey Transit 166 bus, don’t need a terminal, any more than the M5 does. Of course we all need safe places to pee and grab a snack, but people waiting fifteen minutes for a half hour New Jersey Transit bus ride don’t have any more need than people waiting fifteen minutes for a half hour New York City Transit bus ride.

All movement is quicker if you don’t have a lot of people or vehicles in your way. But for someone who’s getting off right on the other end of the Lincoln Tunnel, going up three flights of stairs cuts out most of that time savings. Trips with more than a mile between stops benefit more from grade separation, because they have the time for a bus to get up to speed.

As I pointed out in my post on the proposed Flushing bus terminal, there are actually advantages to having buses pick up and drop off on the street. It allows for through-running, so that passengers whose destination is beyond the terminus can just stay on the bus, which then heads out to a layover point in a less congested area. Street pickups can also make transfers more efficient and robust by spreading them out across multiple stops.

Street-level transfers are better for the local economy. Bathrooms and shelter are public goods that need to be provided by the government, but food and shopping? That’s what downtown streets are for, in a very real sense. In Flushing the streets do an excellent job of providing snacks, drinks and banking for bus and train passengers. A government-owned building filled with corporate concessions is necessarily less dynamic and less friendly to small businesses.

The Port Authority Bus Terminal in Midtown provides all these services for long-distance bus lines like Greyhound, Peter Pan and Adirondack Trailways, but it claims to have no room for other long-distance carriers like Megabus, Fung Wah, Vamoose and Hampton Jitney. Some of these companies claim they save passengers money by not paying gate fees to the Port Authority, which is another way of saying that the City doesn’t charge enough for what is essentially a rental of valuable commercial real estate.

Other bus companies say that they offer more convenient pickups in Chinatown and the Upper East Side. But that just begs the question: if bus terminals are so great, why we don’t have them for every direction that buses go? Someone decided it was better to have apartment buildings at the mouth of the Midtown Tunnel, and office buildings near the Holland Tunnel. Were they wrong?

The other claim, that there is no room in the Port Authority terminal for Bolt and LimoLiner, is also questionable. Why do Red and Tan, Academy and Suburban load all their buses in the terminal, when most of them leave frequently for short runs? Why is New Jersey Transit, a government-owned provider of short-haul services, the biggest carrier in the terminal?

Imagine if New Jersey Transit shifted just half of their bus pickups to the street. First of all, I’ve been told that there are more jobs in East Midtown than near the Port Authority. Some of the buses could pick people up and drop them off closer to their jobs. Second, the buses could provide transfers to other trains beside the Seventh and Eighth Avenue, Broadway and 41st Street lines. That would all take a load off the E, 7 and Shuttle trains.

Moving some local NJ Transit buses to the street would free up space in the terminal. I’ve heard that the tight schedules are a source of delays, so just having more wiggle room would improve reliability on the remaining routes. This would still leave room to bring in some long distance services off the street. If it turns out we still need room for long distance services, we can move more NJ Transit buses to the street, as well as some of the shorter, more frequent runs by private carriers.

Some people might complain that the buses would just get stuck in Midtown traffic. This is why it is essential to give them, and the jitney vans, full access to the dedicated bus lanes on 34th, 42nd and 57th Streets, and to make those lanes real busways instead of the half-assed arrangement we’ve had since the DOT botched the process on 34th Street. It would also help to make them true through-running routes, going through the Midtown Tunnel or over the Queensboro Bridge.

You may have heard that the Port Authority board has declared its bus terminal to be at the end of its life, and said that it wants to use eminent domain to acquire a new property somewhere west of the current terminal, build a new terminal there at a cost of billions of dollars, and sell the current terminal to developers. The main thing wrong with this is that it would be horrible for subway transfers.

It’s bad enough to have a terminal where only the east end touches Eighth Avenue, meaning that some passengers have to walk more than two avenue blocks to get to their trains. The Port Authority Board wants to add at least another full avenue block. From what I’ve heard, most of these people have chauffeurs and all of them have free parking, and they’re baby boomers who equate driving with success, so none of them ever make this transfer.

Stephen Smith has argued that any amount in the billions should be spent building enough train tunnels under the Hudson to accommodate all the bus passengers, so that bus transfers can be made in New Jersey, and the terminal can be torn down and not replaced.

I agree with Stephen’s vision as the ultimate goal, but in the medium term there will be short trips that are best made by bus through the Lincoln Tunnel, and those trips should have access to our streets for pickup and dropoff. There will also be long distance bus trips that will be more convenient if they connect to the subway than to a commuter train, and we should have a terminal for them in Manhattan.

The good news is that a terminal serving a few long-distance routes can be much smaller than the current one. It could fit on the site of the South Wing of the current terminal, and probably doesn’t need as many levels - or the parking garage. If that wing really needs to be rebuilt, some of the buses could be relocated temporarily to the lower level of the North Wing - or the Farley Post Office.

The bottom line is that we don’t need a huge bus terminal if we have trains. If we want to spend billions improving our transit system, rail is a much more efficient, sustainable and wise place to spend it.

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.

What you need for a good bus bridge

It's my hope that New Yorkers will remember three events from the recovery from Hurricane Sandy. The first is the gridlock and chaos that Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens experienced on Wednesday, October 31, the day after the storm. The second is the difficult but functioning system in place on November 1 and 2. The third is the hours-long waits in commutes to and from New Jersey the following Monday and Tuesday, November 5 and 6.

The differences between the three events tell us the importance of three factors to good bus service: (1) having enough buses and drivers, (2) having enough street space and (3) managing how and where people will board the buses.

On Halloween in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, the first two factors were absent. The MTA was running most of its regular bus routes, but did not add any buses to accommodate increased demand from people who couldn't use the subways. Lots of people drove.

On the next day, the City instituted the HOV-3 rule, which drastically cut the number of cars on the streets. The DOT and the MTA instituted the "bus bridge" from Brooklyn to Midtown, putting hundreds of additional buses to use. They planned to keep a lane on Third and Lexington Avenues clear for the buses, but it turns out that the HOV-3 restriction took care of that. They had factors 1 and 2, but not 3. There were gigantic mobs waiting for buses at Jay Street and Atlantic Terminal, but in general people were understanding.

Photo: MartyJGardner / Twitter

On Monday, New Jersey Transit sent hundreds of buses to it eight park-and-rides to pick people up and bring them to the ferries. A lot of people couldn't or didn't want to drive to the park-and-rides, so they formed long lines at train stations and bus stops. The situation going home from the Port Authority Bus Terminal was worse: commuters tweeted picture after picture of Port Authority corridors filled with passengers waiting on line. A gasoline shortage kept some people off the road, and the Holland Tunnel was only open to buses, but there were no HOV restrictions on or near the Lincoln Tunnel, and the only dedicated street space is the morning rush XBL. That meant that NJ Transit didn't have factor 1 (buses) or 3 (terminal management), and very little of factor 2 (street space).

On Tuesday, NJ Transit shut down four of the eight park-and-rides and used the buses to supplement existing routes that were overloaded. Over the past few days, New Jersey has gotten loans of hundreds of buses, and deployed them on these routes. Tomorrow it will start additional service from train stations to the ferries. By using more ferries, it shifts passengers from the overloaded Port Authority terminal to the relatively uncrowded (I hope) ferry docks. So now it has factor 1 (buses) and 3 (terminal management) but not factor 2 (street space). Already people are tweeting that there's improvement; we'll see how it goes tomorrow.

There are a few lessons we can take away from these three incidents. First of all, private cars can't provide anything remotely approaching the capacity of a good subway or commuter rail system. I hope I don't hear the words "surface subway" out of anyone's mouth for a long time.

Second, at this point it seems clear that in order to run a bus system at anywhere near the capacity of a train, you need all three factors: (1) buses, (2) street space and (3) terminal management. You might be able to get away with two out of the three factors if passengers are patient, but not indefinitely.

The disaster of New Jersey's emergency transit plan

New Jersey's transportation infrastructure is in crisis. New Jersey Transit told Businessweek that 257 rail cars and 65 engines (23% and 35% of the total, respectively) were damaged or destroyed by Hurricane Sandy. Some of the rail lines were washed out, or blocked with boats and shipping containers. Hoboken Terminal and the PATH train, which connect New Jersey Transit passengers with lower Manhattan, were flooded. The state is in the midst of a gasoline shortage. They needed a plan.

Unfortunately, the emergency plan that New Jersey Transit came up with was horrible. They borrowed 31 buses from SEPTA and are getting another 350 from around the country. They chose eight park-and-ride lots around the northern half of the state, and set up buses to take people from these lots to the ferries and the Holland Tunnel, twenty in the morning and twenty in the evening from each lot. What could possibly go wrong?

The line to board the bus at South Orange. Photo: @ccondry / Twitter.

Well, quite a lot, actually. Turns out that even people who had gas in their cars didn't want to waste it driving to some park-and-ride and back. They probably also didn't want to have their car stuck at some park-and-ride out by the highway with no bus to get them to it, if they had to go home in the middle of the day or late at night. They wanted to walk to the bus, so that's what they tried to do. In towns across the metro area, including Montclair, South Orange, Hoboken and Woodbridge, people waited up to 90 minutes to board packed buses bound for Manhattan. There was only one lane open for buses in the Holland Tunnel, and the usual one-lane XBL in the Lincoln Tunnel, limiting the total number of buses that could cross the Hudson. Many of those who did take the park-and-ride buses were dropped off at ferry terminals, where there was another wait for a boat.

In the ultimate craziness, after trains from Woodbridge attracted unmanageable crowds, New Jersey Transit simply cancelled the service and told everyone to drive to Metropark to catch a Northeast Corridor train. And, you know, let them eat cake on the way.

The commute home was similarly frustrated. The Port Authority Bus Terminal was packed with commuters - first waiting for buses, then waiting to buy bus tickets, finally waiting just to get into the terminal.

Commuters wait to get inside the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Photo: nikocoutroulis / Instagram.

As I write this at 9:30 PM, many people are still at the terminal waiting for buses. Some of them are afraid that at a certain point New Jersey Transit will stop running buses. I'll update this when that part of the saga is over.

The problems in the morning rush attracted some attention from the media. First, WNYC reporter Nancy Solomon discussed the long lines at South Orange. (I've been trying to find that report online, but haven't been able to.) Then it got mentioned by Wall Street Journal bloggers and Capital New York.

In the afternoon, New Jersey Transit released a revised plan for tomorrow. "Buses that were used in emergency service at Bridgewater, Woodbridge and Willowbrook Mall, as well as Newark Liberty International Airport have been redeployed to ease crowding on buses traveling through South Orange, Jersey City, Hoboken and Newark, to New York, the agency said." In other words, there were nowhere near as many cars in the park-and-rides as the planners expected, and a lot more people at the walkable bus stops.

We'll see tomorrow how much better the revised plan is. In the meantime, can we all agree that this shows the utter bankruptcy of the standard park-and-ride mentality that still preoccupies transit planners? No, New Jersey Transit Planners, most transit riders don't want to maximize the time they can spend behind the wheel, especially during a post-hurricane gasoline shortage.

Can we also agree that buses are not better than trains? The "Bus Rapid Transit" zealots at the Institute for Transportation Development Policy have mesmerized too many of New York's transportation thinkers, to the point where we get the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, the Pratt Institute and former Streetsblog editor Aaron Naparstek all arguing that buses should be a higher political priority than trains. In the current world buses have their place, and the "bus bridge" instituted by the MTA last week seemed to work fairly well. But to replace either one of the PATH tubes or the North River Tunnels with buses would take a huge number, and they'd need serious street priority.

I have to admit that I was disappointed in the performance of the private sector. I had expected private bus operators to be more flexible, adding service as needed to meet demand. Since New Jersey's laws allow private bus operators, I had hoped to find that they stepped up to fill the obvious holes in New Jersey Transit's plan. Instead, there is no evidence that any of the major private bus companies (DeCamp, Suburban Transit, Academy or Coachusa) added buses to their existing routes or sent buses to supplement routes that were overcrowded. Apparently the private vans were running their usual routes, but they haven't had enough capacity to get everybody home from the Port Authority.

Of course, it's hard to add extra buses, especially if the route is relatively complex and you have to bring on drivers who don't know it. That's why it's nice to have relatively simple routes like "you go all the way down Route 3 to the end, then turn around and come back."

It's possible that the "cross-honoring" system is contributing to the lack of interest from private operators. I don't know exactly how it works when someone with a monthly New Jersey Transit pass shows up on a DeCamp bus, but it may be that DeCamp doesn't get any money from it, or enough to make it worth running extra buses. It's also possible that DeCamp and friends have simply grown fat and lazy on its government-protected monopoly.

The bottom line is that New Jersey Transit's park-and-ride culture has to change. We know how much Governor Christie likes drivers, and it's possible that that attitude is shared by Executive Director Weinstein, and from him on down. But New Jersey can't go on functioning as a car-dominated society. The longer that Christie and the NJ Transit planners try to stave off the inevitable, the worse it will be.

How many Jakriborgs is that?

Earlier this year, the Small Streets Blog introduced us to the planned community of Jakriborg, founded in 1990 on 12.5 acres of farmland between the cities of Malmö and Lund in southern Sweden, next to a frequent commuter rail line and a bus stop. It has "parking on the outside," as planned for the Piscataquis Village Project in Maine, but there are very few - I count less than a hundred spaces for a population of over 500 families.

(There's also a disturbing lack of people on the street in most of the photos you see of Jakriborg. Maybe the photos were taken in the height of winter, but I always thought the Swedes were out getting fresh air in the height of winter.)

Building on my post criticizing park-and-rides, the Small Streets crew imagined replacing part of a park-and-ride with a dense, walkable village like Jakriborg or the Czech town of Telč. They astutely observe that if you build at Jakriborg densities, you get more riders than if you used the land for a park-and-ride, and these riders all live within walking distance of the station.

Phil LaCombe from Small Streets takes the example of the park-and-ride in Greenbelt, Maryland, which holds 3,399 parking spaces. Those 37 acres can fit almost three Jakriborgs, which can house over 4,000 people in total, including children. That's a net gain of 701 people over the park-and-ride. If the 701 additional people are children they probably wouldn't pay taxes, but their parents would pay taxes and shop at the local stores.

Inspired by Phil, whenever I see a large parking lot near a train station, I think to myself, "How many Jakriborgs is that?" The Metro-North parking lot at Croton-Harmon is 1.3 Jakriborgs, I believe. The parking lot planned for the North Tenafly station on the Northern Branch is 0.68 Jakriborgs.

I thought of this today when I read that the New Jersey borough of Dunellen has been accepted into the state's Transit Village incentive program. Acceptance is based on a detailed application where the municipality specifies land within a quarter mile of a transit station that can be developed into walkable housing and shops.

It would be really nice if the state put all of its accepted applications up on its website so that we could see what's being planned. We could then monitor the progress of the various municipalities and see how much they live up the the hype. No such luck.

Mayor Robert Seader, however, specifically mentioned the 19-acre Art Color site, a printing plant right next to the train station that was abandoned in 1968. That's a Jakriborg and a half right there.

All across New Jersey I've seen shitty "condo" developments where you can't go anywhere without walking across endless parking lots, like this garbage across the tracks from the planned North Tenafly parking lot. That's not transit-oriented, and its walk appeal is zero. With no train service I can kind of understand them building these parking lots, but otherwise no. I hope that whatever goes in the old Art Color site is more like Jakriborg and less like Daibes Park Residences.

Another quick note: Dunellen was originally formed from the township of Piscataway. Piscataway, in turn, was founded by Quakers and Baptists who didn't want to live under the Puritans along the Piscataquis River in Maine. So if Dunellen builds a Jakriborg-type carfree village with small streets on the Art Color site, it could end up being a Piscataway Village Project. And as I said, Really Narrow Streets need good trains. Of course, then it would help if the Raritan Valley Line were as frequent a train as the line that serves Jakriborg.

Frequent transit in Hudson County, New Jersey

A common complaint about transit in New Jersey is that there is no official map with bus lines. New Jersey Transit provides maps of its commuter rail and light rail lines, New York Waterway has ferry maps, and the Port Authority provides maps of its PATH trains, but nothing for buses. Part of the problem is that New Jersey Transit runs a lot of buses, and a bus map of the entire state would be incredibly expensive to produce and hard to read. Still, it's kind of silly that they just throw up their hands. The MTA produces maps for each county that they serve, and the Paris RATP makes a great series of bus maps by department. So it can be done.

Since 2008, Doug Kelly has been developing, updating and maintaining an impressive set of Google maps of New Jersey Transit buses (and one of Nassau County to boot). But the other day I was thinking about our frequent network maps discussion from last year, where I made a map of the most frequent routes in Queens. I realized that I don't really want to know about New Jersey Transit Route 120, which doesn't even run all day. Like most people, I want to know the frequent routes.

The vast majority of bus routes are run by New Jersey Transit, but if you've been reading this blog you'll know that there's a large network of privately operated buses, especially in Hudson County and the Route 4 corridor. Many of these buses run on a jitney system, without a fixed schedule. They either wait at one end of the route to fill up before going, or they operate on the driver's best guess as to whether they'll be able to make a profit on the run. How do we know what that is for a given route? Sit out on a street corner with a stopwatch?

Fortunately, we don't have to. Unlike official transit planners in New York City who completely ignore jitneys, the North Jersey Transportation Planning Authority hired AECOM to study the jitneys of Hudson County in detail. Their report is a thing of beauty, and yes it contains frequency counts at different times of day. It also contains a list of all the bus lines that they know of in Hudson County, so I looked them all up on the websites of New Jersey Transit (though it's actually easier to google "NJ Transit" and the route number than to use their clunky interface), the A&C Bus Company, and others, and compiled a list of weekday midday frequencies, and a map to go with them (sorry about the colors).

Map updated August 12 to show NJ Transit Route 87 and the routes on Kennedy Boulevard in Bayonne

I was blown away. I knew that the NJTPA report listed the Bergenline vans as coming every two minutes, so I expected there to be van routes at the top of the frequency list, but I didn't think that the top six most frequent lines would be van lines. I also didn't expect that the Hudson-Bergen light rail would come so infrequently that if you're going to Hoboken you may have to wait up to twenty minutes. I didn't even expect the PATH trains to be every ten minutes during middays.

Most significantly, I didn't expect to find no New Jersey Transit bus route in Hudson County that comes more than once every twenty minutes during the middle of the day. But that actually makes sense if you remember that they're actually forbidden from engaging in "destructive competition" with a private operator, so in the terminology of Klein, Moore and Reja, when there's a thick market they step back and provide only an anchor. Still, it seems to me that in thin markets like everything west of the Hackensack River (Secaucus, Kearney, Arlington, East Newark and Harrison) they would provide more frequent service, but apparently not.

Another thing: these buses run frequently all day, and fill up regularly, without subsidies, and they only have one feature of "bus rapid transit": the Lincoln Tunnel Exclusive Bus Lane in the mornings. No iconic stations or distinctive branding. To be honest, many of them are slow, particularly on Bergenline Avenue. But people take them anyway.

A final note: I worked primarily by corridors, so I didn't include services like the Newark-WTC PATH train, the Broadway Bus and the buses that come every twenty minutes when they're the only service in that corridor. I did, however, include services like the Hudson-Bergen Light rail where interlining makes the vehicles more frequent than once every fifteen minutes.

More cars on the streets of Tenafly

Peter Rustin, the mayor of Tenafly, New Jersey, is against the current plan to restore passenger service to the Northern Branch of the Erie Railroad through his town. "The preferred alternative for this project will put more cars into the streets of Tenafly than it will take off," he told the Northern Valley Suburbanite (which is apparently a newspaper).

I would be inclined to dismiss that as typical demented NIMBY rantings, except that it's actually confirmed by the planners (PDF, page 9-28): "During the AM peak hour, which represents the worst-case scenario for traffic congestion, it is projected that 16 vehicles would park at or near the station during the peak hour. An additional 96 vehicles are projected to drop off passengers at the station, resulting in additional travel to and from the station during the peak hour, for a total of 208 trips. The reverse is expected to occur in the PM peak."

I've criticized traffic projections in the past, and Chuck Marohn, who's a trained engineer, echoed that criticism this week. The software that makes those projections for the Northern Branch, like most other traffic projections, is a state secret. In March I emailed Thomas Marchwinski, Senior Director Forecasting & Research at New Jersey Transit, asking very nicely for more information about the NJTDFM and how it was used in this project, and I have not heard anything yet.

So these are not the rantings of a demented NIMBY, but a demented computer. It may well be that the projected 208 car trips will not materialize, but Mayor Rustin is still justified in his opposition. In an earlier post, Matthew the Walking Bostonian made this astute observation:

The other problem is that they plan to do traffic "mitigation" in the vicinity of the parking lots. For example, Fort Lee Road at Grand Ave in Leonia is going to get widened, along with the construction of the 500 car garage. It's already a crummy place to walk, this will make it worse.

Matthew nailed it. Here's the map of "improvements" planned for Leonia, from Figure 9-10 of this PDF:

The key here is to notice the space between the green lines (the "existing curb") and the red lines (the "proposed curb"). It's supposed to be filled in with orange ("proposed widening"), but sometimes it's hard to see the orange. Take a look at the south side of Fort Lee Road between Spring Street and Station Parkway. That sidewalk is pretty narrow, and they just took out the whole thing for most of that block. They also did this weird thing where they shaved a few feet off of the eastern side of Station Parkway.

These "improvement" means that walking to the train station site will go from kind of unpleasant to downright hellish. This is not just true for commuters and anyone else who might want to take this train, but for people going to the large park there, many of whom are teenagers and families with small children. Oh, and here's Tenafly, from Figure 9-25:

Unfortunately, Mayor Rustin is not at all out of line here. Downtown Tenafly would be a much less pleasant place to walk around after the "improvements" planned by Marchwinski and friends. Rustin shouldn't be opposing the project or forcing New Jersey Transit to cut it short at Route 4, but he should be doing everything in his power to restore sanity to the traffic projections and their "mitigations." Anyone who can help him, please offer your services.

The missed opportunities of the Northern Branch

I had to admit that New Jersey Transit isn't planning to pave paradise for the parking lots on the Erie Railroad Northern Branch. They want to take over some existing parking lots, build on top of some others, and tear down some warehouses that are unremarkable and kind of shabby. It still makes me unhappy, though, because of what they're not planning to build there: walkable suburban downtowns.

There are a string of dense, walkable towns lining the western slopes of the Palisades: North Bergen, Fairview, Ridgefield, Palisades Park, Leonia, Englewood Tenafly, Demarest, Closter, Norwood and Northvale. They didn't happen by accident, nor did they spring fully formed from the head of some central planner. They grew up around the Northern Branch, and the New York Central's West Shore Line, and the trolley lines of the North Hudson County Railway. But after the opening of Route 46, and Route 4, and the New Jersey Turnpike, and Route 80, and the Palisades Parkway, it got harder and harder for the trains and trolleys to compete.

Now New Jersey Transit is planning to bring back some of the railroads. They're not talking about restoring passenger service on the West Shore, or rebuilding the North Hudson, but they are talking about restoring service on the Northern Branch, in the form of a Hudson Bergen Light Rail extension to Tenafly. As I've mentioned before, I'm concerned about the amount of parking. One reason is that I think it will encourage local driving and lead to more sprawl.

Another reason that the parking bothers me is the opportunity that is being missed. While Englewood, Tenafly, Cresskill, Demarest and Closter all grew up around the Northern Branch, the centers of North Bergen, Fairview, Ridgefield, Palisades Park and Leonia were all along Broad Avenue or even further east on Bergen Boulevard or Anderson/Bergenline Avenue. What developed along the Northern Branch in these towns was largely industrial. Since then much of the industry has been replaced with commercial development, but it has been sprawling, car-oriented development.

If we're not going to bring back the Broad Street trolley, but we are going to restore passenger service, people will be traveling from compact, walkable downtowns to rapid transit through a sprawling, car-oriented mixture of industrial and commercial buildings. You can see why many of those who have cars would prefer to drive.

If I were designing this, in the tradition of Jane Jacobs and Andres Duany, I would first rezone the areas around the stations for dense, pedestrian-oriented mixed-use development, no parking required. I would then look at likely commute paths from the downtowns to the new stations, including 91st Street in North Bergen, Edgewater Avenue in Fairview, Ruby Avenue in Palisades Park and Fort Lee Road in Leonia. I would widen the sidewalks on those roads, run shuttle bus service from the downtown to meet each train both ways, and rezone the properties on either side for the same kind of mixed-use development. For each of these towns, this would essentially allow a secondary downtown to grow around the new train station, extending it and the old downtown to meet each other.

Such a plan would allow these towns to return to their old transit-oriented pasts. Instead, New Jersey Transit has decided to lead these towns further down the car-oriented dead end, by building more parking and making it easier to drive and hard to walk. No wonder the leaders of these towns are upset. The planners didn't even try.

They paved some crap, and put up a parking lot

There's too much parking in New Jersey Transit's plans to restore passenger service on the Northern Branch of the Erie Railroad. There are many reasons why it's too much, but in this post I want to focus on one reason that doesn't apply: they aren't going to pave paradise to put up these parking lots.

I had been all ready to lead, months ago, with stories of beautiful old buildings and verdant glens bulldozed for parking lots. And if I had less scruples, like some NYU faculty and Greenwich Village NIMBYs, I might just have gone ahead with that. But I believe in supporting my opinions with facts, so I actually went to see the places where the new stations will be built.

Some parts of Bergen County are actually pretty paradisaical. I found some beautiful old buildings and verdant glens, but they're not anywhere near the planned parking lots. Many of the lots will just take over existing parking lots that are currently used for something else. There are a few buildings that the New Jersey planners want to tear down, but I can't get excited about any of them.

Tenafly North

New Jersey Transit plans a 570 space surface lot on 8.6 acres of land that currently holds an auto body shop, a couple of crappy strip malls and a bunch of small parking lots.

Tenafly Town Center

There would be a 40 space lot for kiss-and-ride and "handicap" parking on the site of a 15-space municipal lot. How they're going to shoehorn the 25 spaces in there I don't know, but this is already an ugly parking lot.

Englewood Hospital

No additional parking. I think they figure that anyone who wants to drive will drive to the Route 4 or Tenafly North station.

Englewood Town Center

The station will be next to an existing 500-space municipal garage. The planners basically say that downtown Englewood is overparked. "Within one-third of a mile from the station there are approximately 1,003 on-street parking spaces and 708 off-street parking. Two municipal lots that currently provide 138 permit spaces, 27 metered spaces, and 43 free public spaces are located near the station site. An approximate 500-space parking deck completed construction after the survey was conducted. The spaces were added to the capacity totals. Observations indicate that time-limit on-street parking restrictions are prevalent near the proposed station. Of the 1,711 spaces that exist in the area, 888 were occupied, leaving approximately 823 available spaces."

Englewood Route 4

This is where the most parking is planned, because the planners want drivers to just pull off Route 4 and park. If the Preferred Alternative to Tenafly is built it will be a garage with 430 spaces. If passenger service terminates at Route 4, they will build 870 spaces. The site is currently occupied by a warehouse. I couldn't see much of it through the trees, but it didn't look all that exciting.

Leonia

There is a very Nineties office-park style office building next to the station, with 172 parking spaces. New Jersey Transit plans to build a deck on top of that lot holding 550 more spaces.

Palisades Park

The plan is to knock down these warehouses and strip mally retail and build a 320-space parking lot. I was really ready to fight for these buildings until I actually saw them.

Ridgefield

This new strip mall is pretty uninspired. It would be torn down and replaced with a 350-space parking lot. I don't think anyone would miss it, as long as they could get their kimchi someplace else.

91st Street

The plan would put a 40-space handicap/kiss-and-ride lot on part of the back lot for this hideous strip mall. Parking for parking.

So New Jersey Transit isn't planning to pave paradise to put up these parking lots. But fear not, fellow park-and-ride haters! There are good reasons not to build so much parking. I'll get into them in another post. If I can't do Joni Mitchell I can at least do Donald Shoup.

Mystery models of the Northern Branch

I'm old enough to remember the days when computers were expensive enough that the only people who could afford one had either a lot of money or an IBM employee discount. Even when it got to the point that most households had a computer, there were still a lot of programs that were so complex they needed a large mainframe to run. Then there were proprietary programs that required expensive licenses, and the number of trained programmers was relatively small. Many governments, even if they wanted to keep their business open to the public, had no choice but to restrict access to their programs.

Those days are mostly over. Today, my cell phone can do a lot more than the average mainframe could in 1982. A lot of software is open source and can be downloaded and shared for free. A relatively inexperienced programmer can may not be able to delve into the depths of some programs, but can still take an existing program and create a freely accessible interface for it on the World Wide Web.

In short, in this day and age there is really no reason for a government to keep their computer programs secret. Any code that was created by government employees should be open source, and ideally should be able to be run by any citizen. Applications that analyze large databases can be opened up with a Web interface and an internet application-programmer interface so that independent programmers can connect to them.

The proposed site of the North Tenafly station. 8.6 acres (0.68 Jakriborgs) of space, including everything across the street, would be leveled to make room for a 570-space parking lot.

Unfortunately, transportation modeling has not moved into the twenty-first century. Case in point: the Northern Branch Corridor Project in New Jersey, whose managers would "prefer" to plop 2,310 parking spaces up and down the train line. I combed through the Draft Environmental Impact Statement - it's pretty readable as these things go - looking for New Jersey Transit's justification for building that many spaces, and the best I could find was this section from the Executive Summary (PDF):

ridership for each of the Build Alternatives was projected to the year 2030 using the North Jersey Transit Demand Forecasting Model (NJTDFM, the model). The model was used to estimate total LRT riders by zone to each station. NJ TRANSIT then used data from the model (such as percentage of people that would walk, drive, carpool, be dropped off, or take the bus based upon distance from each station, and the type and density of development) to estimate how riders would travel to each station. This produced an initial parking demand at each station. The station locations were then reviewed to determine the maximum amount of parking spaces that could reasonably be provided at each location, without overwhelming the communities. The model was then constrained with these maximum parking numbers, and a second iteration of the forecasting model was run. This resulted in adjustments to individual access modes to each station and a final, revised parking demand at each station

So, why build that much parking? Because our computer model says that there will be that much demand. Why does the computer model say that? Does it take into account the effect of parking lot capacity and price on the demand for parking? Does it account for the effect of zoning changes (for example, to allow dense development without accessory parking adjacent to the stations) on parking demand and drop-offs? Who knows.

I emailed one of the senior transportation demand forecasters at New Jersey Transit last week, and asked him these questions. I also asked about public access to the NJTDFM. If I hear back, I'll let you know.

The problem with the Northern Branch project

For a months now I've been telling people that the "transit" proposed for the bridge is just sprawl transit, and it's true. There wouldn't even be a stop in Nyack; if commuter rail is chosen the nearest station would be near the Palisades Mall in West Nyack, more than two miles away, and if "Bus Rapid Transit" is chosen the nearest station would be at the western end of Nyack, at the top of the hill where Main Street crosses the Thruway, a mile from downtown. The Thruway people would build huge park-and-rides at these stations, and park-and-rides are not the answer. People who drive to park-and-rides think of themselves as drivers, not transit riders, and they will vote accordingly.

Instead, I've suggested that Rockland County can improve its connections to jobs in New York City and New Jersey by rebuilding its rail network. There are four railroads that connect Rockland to Hoboken, but only two (the Erie Main and Pascack Valley lines) still have passenger service, but the trains run on the slower and more sprawly Graham Line instead of the Main Line between Harriman and Otisville, and the Pascack Valley trains terminate in Spring Valley instead of Haverstraw or New City. The Erie Northern Branch used to run to Nyack but now only sees freight as far as the New York State line in Northvale. The New York Central West Shore Line is currently owned and operated by the Chesapeake System as a high-volume freight line between North Bergen and Selkirk, but most of the second track has been removed, and if it were restored there would be room for commuter rail service.

For much less than the five billion dollars that Cuomo and friends want to spend doubling the width of the Tappan Zee Bridge, we could restore passenger service to Nyack, West Nyack, New City, Stony Point and Haverstraw. This would require restoring track in some places, re-acquiring the right-of-way in others, double-tracking and eliminating grade crossings here and there, and electrification. We might even have enough money to rebuild the old Erie Main through the Orange County villages of Goshen and Middletown. If we can ever build a new tunnel (which would cost a lot more than five billion but would move more people than the proposed bridge), the trains could go straight into Manhattan.

Believe it or not, there is movement in this direction. New Jersey Transit has just released a Draft Environmental Impact Statement for their plan to reactivate passenger service on the Northern Branch between North Bergen and Tenafly. At this point I would love to be able to point to this as an example of success that could be extended right up to Sparkill and Nyack. But there are problems. And by problems I mean parking. Way too much of it. This is from the executive summary of the DEIS:

Yes, that's right, 2130 or 2310 parking spaces! I tweeted about this a couple of weeks ago, and @majormajor42 replied, "what do you think of the Ramsey Rt17 station parking garage?" I think that's an excellent question, and I will try to give it the thoughtful answer it deserves in another post soon.

In general, park-and-rides are not the answer, because they make people transit commuters but drivers for everything else, so they should have sunsets and market-clearing prices. The Route 17 station is not the answer, but it's not too bad as far as park-and-rides go.

Budget goblins: the phantom menace

I've been meaning to write something about the shenanigans across the river with the "ARC Tunnel." I agree with a lot of the people who've said that the current plan with it's "deep cavern" under Macy's basement was a disaster, and I hope that eventually what will be done is to feed the new tunnels directly into the current Penn Station tracks, along with a sensible through-running plan to maintain decent frequencies. But I wanted to say something about the significance of the decision.

After Chris Christie gravely wounded the ARC Tunnel, there was no shortage of critical commentary. But most of it (Freemark, Renn, Herbert, Sollohub) focused on how Christie had "thrown money away" by giving up federal grants and the possibility of a significant infrastructure improvement for the short-term payoff of not having to raise gas taxes or tolls. And that's a legitimate point, but it's not the real story.

Paul Krugman is generally good at looking beyond the flimflam to find out what politicians are actually doing. In August, he ripped away the "deficit reduction" disguise from Paul Ryan's plan to cut taxes for the rich and benefits for the middle class. And Krugman, who lives in Princeton and regularly takes New Jersey Transit, will be directly affected by Christie's actions. It's disappointing, therefore, that Krugman's conclusion simply echoed those of the other commentators.

In order to get behind this particular flimflam, we need to go to Steven Higashide of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign. Just as Krugman used the Tax Policy Center's analysis to show that Ryan's plan was not about deficit reduction, Higashide noted that the New Jersey Turnpike Authority is borrowing two billion dollars to widen the Turnpike and the Garden State Parkway (at a total cost of $3.6 billion). Christie's decision is not about fiscal responsibility.

Higashide and his colleagues at Tri-State, simply, have been paying attention to what Christie is doing. They've written extensively on the double standard that Christie maintains for transit and driving - as seen in Christie's 11% cut in the NJ Transit budget, which resulted in a 25% fare hike for Transit riders, while the gas tax stays the same. In April, Tri-State's Zoe Baldwin pulled this gem out of an interview with the Star-Ledger:

Editorial board member: What’s the difference between a gas tax hike and a fare hike, besides who it lands on?

Christie: That’s the difference.

What's the difference between cutting the ARC Tunnel and cutting the Turnpike widening, besides who has a shorter commute?

I have to be honest here: if I were governor of New Jersey, I would do the same kinds of things Christie has done, but in the opposite direction. I don't care how many studies they've done, or how much digging or construction, I would stop a massive highway project dead. I would raise tolls and the gas tax, and try to hold train and bus fares down. I'm guessing that most of the folks at Tri-State would too.

There are two important differences, though. One is that I wouldn't lie about it like Christie has, cry about the attacking budget goblins, and slather it in fiscal-responsibility flim-flam sauce.

The other difference is that I would be promoting transit because it's used by New Jersey's poorest residents. I would be promoting transit and cutting roads in order to get people out of their cars, which would decrease pollution, increase efficiency, reduce carnage, combat obesity and strengthen the downtown cores of New Jersey's many beautiful towns and cities.

As far as I can tell, Christie doesn't care about pollution, energy dependency, carnage, obesity or downtown businesses. He's cutting transit and promoting driving because "we" (he and the people who voted for him) drive, and "they" take the train. He's perfectly happy to pay for infrastructure and state services, but only for "us."

The Christian Science Monitor recently contrasted the ARC Tunnel cancellation with the breakthrough in the construction of the Gotthard Base Tunnel under Switzerland. Like the commentators I listed in the second paragraph, they get it exactly wrong: "The difference between the Swiss and New Jersey examples is this: One shows vision and a commitment to invest in the future, while the other shows shortsightedness." No, the difference between the Swiss and New Jersey examples (as well as the other examples they give in California and Pennsylvania) is that in Switzerland, "we" ride the train, but for Christie, for Meg Whitman in California, and for the Pennsylvania legislature, trains are for "them." We're still building lots of nice things for drivers.

Just as with Paul Ryan's tax cuts for "us" and sacrifices for "them," these budget goblins are a phantom menace, aimed at distracting us from the real issue: the upper classes want more services and don't want to pay for them, and they don't think the lower classes deserve what they're getting. That's what this is about, and you can see it if you don't have transportation myopia.

More examples of profitability

I've spent a bunch of time recently talking about the profitable Lincoln Tunnel buses. Some of these companies, particularly the ones that operate the jitneys, are relatively new, but most are companies that have been running these buses since the Tunnel was built, and many of them used to run trolley lines. But I would be remiss if I didn't tell you the story of one of the companies that didn't make it. So pull up your chairs and gather round the fire, kids, and your Cap'n will tell you the story of Transport of New Jersey.

When I was a wee lad, I would go to the Port Authority and see buses with the big TNJ logo on them. TNJ was a mysterious, larger than life figure, like Frank Martz or Carl R. Bieber. I got it confused with the logo for the New Jersey Turnpike that we would pass in the bus.

While riding along the Turnpike, I would look out the window and see the large PSE&G power plant. Not long ago I actually tried to figure out what the letters stood for, and I was pretty sure that Pacific States Electric and Gas wasn't it. Little did I know that there was a connection.

Dave Mackey has a great history of the Public Service Coordinated Transport if you want the details. You may also want to read two very informative guest posts about streetcar history (one, two) by Scott Bernstein at the Overhead Wire. Briefly, though, it used to be very common for the same company to own both an electrical generating plant and a network of trolleys powered by that plant. Such was the case with the Public Service company of New Jersey. During the mid-twentieth century, they switched to buses along with most other streetcar operators, with the notable exception of the route that is now the main line of the Newark City Subway.

Mackey and Wikipedia user NE2 tell us that in 1971, Public Service no longer considered its bus operations to be profitable, and spun them off as Transport of New Jersey, which operated the routes under contract to the New Jersey Department of Transportation. In other words, the State of New Jersey paid for the buses and was responsible for any losses. In 1980 the state formed New Jersey Transit to take over those routes, and another set of routes in Mercer County. A few years later they took over the commuter rail operations of Conrail, which left the agency in the basic form that we know today.

So if the combination of the Lincoln Tunnel XBL and cordon pricing makes bus companies profitable, why didn't it do that with Transport of New Jersey? Well, first of all, it doesn't guarantee profits, it just enables them. An agency is free to mess up in any number of ways. There are plenty of businesses that fail despite having market advantages.

Secondly, there were a number of massive highways constructed in northern New Jersey between 1950 and 1971, any of which could have subsidized car travel to the point where TNJ was unable to compete. If they were not sufficient, the opening of Interstate 78 and Interstate 280 probably did. Newark was a major PSCT and TNJ hub. This does not quite fit with the fact that the Orange-Newark-Elizabeth buses are still profitable, but I don't know what the exact story is there. Maybe some of you out there have more details.

This raises a new question, however: the Passaic River is crossed by five major highway bridges downstream of the Great Falls. Would some kind of cordon pricing there have saved Transport of New Jersey?

The man behind the Simpson Curtain

Last week I posted about arguments for free public transit, some of which refer to the "Simpson-Curtain rule." "Politically and practically, for most systems, the easiest way is to raise fares. But soon after, ridership goes down," writes Dave Olsen.

As I wrote last week, things are actually quite different, and a bit more complicated. The rule is actually the Simpson-Curtin, rule, after the Philadelphia planning firm of Simpson and Curtin that came up with it. A 1968 paper by principal John F. Curtin is often cited as providing the basis for the Simpson-Curtin rule, but it is actually concerned with extensions to the rule for various additional factors.

From the 1940s through the 1960s, Simpson and Curtin collected data on transit fares and ridership. After crunching the numbers, they found that when fares were increased, ridership went down. The ratio of the change in ridership to the change in fare is called shrinkage ratio or fare elasticity, and is explained in more detail in this PDF from the VTPI. But briefly, Simpson and Curtin claimed that for every 3% increase in fares, ridership dropped 1%, for a shrinkage ratio of -0.33. The lower the absolute value of the ratio, the less an agency would have to worry about driving riders away with high prices.

So what's wrong with the Simpson-Curtin rule? Well, it represents correlation, but correlation does not imply causation. As I wrote in the previous post, to get causation, we have to come up with an explanation that fits the facts better than any other one. The explanation that Curtin, Olsen and others have made, that raising fares by itself causes reduced ridership, is not the best explanation.

Just a few years after Curtin's paper, in 1973, Michael Kemp published a paper arguing that "transit demand is inelastic with respect to money price." He indicates a number of other factors that affect demand, including level of service ("particularly door-to-door journey time"), trip purpose, distance, transit mode, urban form, and length of measurement period. In particular, since transit riding is a choice, it is dependent on the relative attractiveness of the alternatives. He notes:

One might hypothesize that, given the initial decision to travel, transit riding will be higher when the relative prices of substitute modes are at their highest; and that under such conditions transit fare elasticities will be relatively low. It follows that one would expect ... fare elasticities to be relatively low in very large cities with highly congested central areas, particularly for those modes catering to long-haul commuter traffic.

In other words, people are least likely to abandon the bus when it's hardest to drive ("relative price," here, includes travel time and convenience). The correlation observed by Simpson and Curtin is simply due to a lurking variable that drove down ridership and consequently pushed agencies to raise prices: the massive road-building that went on in the postwar period. Of course people aren't going to stick with their old bus system when the government is building new roads and parking lots for their cars! But if the government doesn't build as many new roads and parking lots, then transit still has a chance.

That brings us back to New Jersey, and what has allowed the bus companies to remain profitable for all these years. Not only do the private Lincoln Tunnel buses have the XBL, but they also have the Port Authority Bus Terminal and a law protecting them from destructive competition from the government.

There are two factors that are even more important. The buses (a) go to Manhattan (b) under the Hudson River. Manhattan is a notoriously unpleasant place to drive a car; despite the best efforts of the New York City DOT up until a year and a half ago, it is and was still incredibly congested. It can take half an hour to go a block, "free" parking is almost always full, and private parking is very expensive.

Still, as you pointed out on Friday, the private bus companies in Brooklyn, Queens failed many years ago, even though they continued on as zombies until recently. What's the difference? I think it's very simple: cordon pricing. You can drive across the East River without paying a toll, but you can't drive across the Hudson for free.

Recently I ran into my boss on the subway here in Queens. He told me that he lives in New Jersey and owns a car, but he takes the bus to the Port Authority and then the subway and another bus to work. He's tried driving in the past, but the tolls were too expensive. Sure that's anecdotal, but it fits with the pattern that Kemp found. If it's too expensive to drive, people will take transit.

During the congestion pricing debate, Aaron Naparstek wrote a post called, It’s the Bus Riders, Stupid. Aaron is actually referring to something different from what I'm talking about (and honestly, I always hated the Clinton quote he's referencing). However, it was - and is - the bus riders: cordon pricing would have eliminated the toll-free option for crossing the East River, and thereby increased ridership on the MTA buses, bringing up revenue. With cordon pricing in place, that revenue would be more stable than the other MTA funding sources, and maybe enough to start paying down the debt.

So there's your magic formula for transit profitability:

1. Give transit its own right-of-way and good terminals
2. Make it hard to use cars
3. Make it expensive to use cars
4. Profit!

More on the profitable Lincoln Tunnel buses

Astute readers will have noticed that I'm interested in free transit, but I'm also interested in profitable transit. Mainly I'm interested in successful transit, and both extremes are promising in different ways. A high farebox recovery ratio indicates a strong demand for the service, and it suggests that whether the operator is public or private, the service will be relatively stable. A well-run free transit system could indicate strong political support for the system, which also suggests that the system will be stable.

With that in mind, let's take another look at those profitable buses that go through the Lincoln Tunnel. You'll find them on the right half of the graph below:

Although most of these services have very high ridership, some are actually low, like Olympia Trails, but make up for it with high fares like the lucrative service to Newark Airport.

Of course this is correlation (0.67, in fact) not causation. To get causation, we have to come up with an explanation that fits the facts better than any other one. So far, this seems to be the best explanation: something about the Lincoln Tunnel created high demand for the buses, which allowed bus operators to run fuller buses and/or charge more per trip, and that leads to profit.

One of the biggest factors is probably the the Exclusive Bus Lane. It gives buses their own queue through the tunnel so that they don't have to wait behind private cars, and that time advantage makes up for the multiple stops they have to make before they get to the XBL. This is, of course, a tremendous indirect subsidy to the bus companies. The State of New Jersey also buys buses for many of the companies, relieving them of this capital cost.

"Fine, Cap'n," you say, "but the Gowanus Expressway and the LIE both have HOV lanes. They're used by express buses that bear a passing resemblance to these New Jersey buses. And those buses in Brooklyn and Queens also got free buses from the government, but they lost money for years until they were finally taken over by the MTA, which continues to operate them at a loss. Why didn't those make a profit?"

Good question! I think there are a few factors. One, as described in this article about the deCamp bus company that serves Montclair, the law creating New Jersey Transit in 1980 contained a clause prohibiting the agency from operating "in destructive competition" with the private bus companies. Several of them have successfully sued NJ Transit on the basis of that law. There can be no public option.

Interestingly, the article also mentions that last year State Senator Beck sponsored a bill that would modify this restriction to add that "Under circumstances where the private entity fails to provide safe, adequate, and reliable public transportation services, it is the responsibility of the State, and instrumentalities thereof, to supplement, compete against, or replace such services."

The second is the Port Authority Bus Terminal. As Alon Levy wrote in the comments last January, "the XBL works only because it feeds directly into a gigantic terminal." Yeah, it's kind of a nasty place, but it's nowhere near as nasty as it was thirty years ago, and it's very good at what it does. It has ramps directly from the Lincoln Tunnel to the terminal, so that many of the buses are in bus-only space from Secaucus all the way to the end. It has an underground entrance to the Eighth Avenue Subway, with a one-block tunnel (that's just as nasty as it was thirty years ago) to the Times Square hub where people can access up to nine subway lines (depending on how you count them), with Grand Central and Penn Station just one stop away. It is very efficient at getting buses out of the tunnel and turned around again, or shuttled off to nearby storage. It's also very good at getting people out of the buses and onto the subways, or vice versa.

I'll get to the most important factor next time.

More on the XBL and profitability

Last week I lamented that the National Transit Database did not provide figures for mode share. However, I did find something interesting: farebox recovery data. For example, Rockland Coaches, a.k.a. Red and Tan Lines, a division of Coachusa, made an $8.4 million profit in 2007 (PDF), just over two dollars per trip. Evidence that quickways help bus operators to make a profit.

I've now crunched the data (all from 2007, updated link) and come up with some overall numbers to substantiate my impression:

Area	Average farebox recovery ratio, weighted by unlinked trips
Nationwide transit	40.5 %
Nationwide bus	27.5 %
Buses in the tri-state area (NY-NJ-CT)	38.1 %
Agencies that use the XBL	95.9 %

Note that these agencies that use the XBL do not run all their routes through there.

Here are the twenty bus agencies with the highest farebox recovery ratios:

State	Name	Fare Revenues per Total Operating Expense (Recovery Ratio)
PA	Trans-Bridge Lines, Inc.	105.8
NJ	New Jersey Transit Corporation-45 (NJTC-45)	104.4
NJ	Trans-Hudson Express	102.8
NJ	Rockland Coaches, Inc.	102.2
NJ	Community Transit, Inc. (Community Transit)	101.3
NJ	Olympia Trails Bus Company, Inc. (Coach USA)	100.9
NJ	Orange-Newark-Elizabeth, Inc. (Coach USA)	100.8
RI	Bonanza (BZ)	96.8
NJ	Academy Lines, Inc.	93.9
NJ	Hudson Transit Lines, Inc. (Short Line)	88.1
NJ	Suburban Transit Corporation (Coach USA)	86.5
NY	Adirondack Transit Lines, Inc, (Adirondack Trailways)	82.6
NJ	DeCamp Bus Lines	79.3
NY	Monroe Bus Corporation	78.2
NJ	Lakeland Bus Lines, Inc.	74.6
NY	Monsey New Square Trails Corporation	71.8
VA	Blacksburg Transit (BT)	61.8
NC	Chapel Hill Transit (CHT)	61.7
FL	Gainesville Regional Transit System (RTS)	55.8
CA	University of California, Davis (Unitrans)	53.6

The last four obviously do not use the XBL. Of the others, I'm not familiar with Orange-Newark-Elizabeth; Wikipedia says they just run three local routes in those three cities, but given the rest of the pattern I'd be surprised if they didn't have some XBL revenue. There is a clear pattern: all the bus agencies in the NTD that make more than 70% farebox recovery use the XBL, and all the ones that make less than 63% do not.

I would like to point out what these agencies for-profit corporations (and one division of NJ transit) don't have: specialized vehicles, passenger information, offboard fare collection, subway-like station spacing, traffic signal priority and other Intelligent Transportation System applications. They have one single "iconic station" (I suppose you can call the Port Authority that), and one Exclusive Bus Lane. I'm not saying none of those other things matter, but let's have some perspective.

Other than that, all I can say is that with the amount that's been written about farebox recovery, I'm baffled as to why no one seems to have noticed this before.