The MTA is not interested

One cornerstone of the arguments for the Queensway rail-trail is that the MTA isn’t interested in restoring passenger rail service. Queensway advocate Peter Beadle tweeted, "point is MTA is not building a train, and new study only confirms prior MTA assessment that train not worth it." Former Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe, now in charge of studying the rail-trail proposal for the Trust For Public Land, wrote, "The MTA and the LIRR have studied rail reactivation several times and each time concluded it's not feasible." The New York Times Editorial Board wrote, "Then there is the question of when the M.T.A. would get to this capital project, which would be one of many on its overflowing, underfunded to-do list. The likeliest answer is never. The M.T.A.’s capital plan is only half-funded; the agency is strapped by debt and is hard-pressed to protect the infrastructure it has."

There are actually two claims here: the MTA as expert, and the MTA as leader. Both of these are pretty bizarre claims to anyone who has ever dealt with the MTA. They are clearly meant not as real arguments, but as quick ways to silence opposition.

First, the "MTA as expert" claim relies on a series of dubious assumptions: The MTA is an organization of highly skilled, knowledgeable professionals. They have conducted a thorough cost benefit analysis of all service restoration possibilities, and decided that none of the possibilities would produce benefits that justify the cost. Their ideas of costs and benefits are in perfect alignment with those of both the rail and bikeway proponents, and their judgment is valid for eternity.

In reality the MTA does indeed employ many talented, well-educated people, but they also employ some ignorant and unimaginative ones, and there’s no guarantee that the right ones were studying the question. There is also no guarantee that the MTA’s priorities at the time of the study have any relationship to my priorities now. This is why I want to see the reports of "prior MTA assessment." These reports are not on the MTA website. Presumably the rail-trail advocates have copies, but with one exception they have not provided any, although they have been asked directly.

On December 30, one rail-trail proponent, Doug McPherson, posted a link to a 2001 study hosted on the Capital New York website. If you read the study, you can see why the trail advocates don’t want to share them: it was specifically investigating the value of train service as a one-seat ride between Midtown and Kennedy Airport, and didn’t consider the potential value to people going anywhere else. It put the basic cost of restoring the tracks and third rail at $250 million (about $350 million in today’s dollars), which is substantially lower than all the scary numbers that the trail advocates like to throw around.

I suspect that the other "several" studies cited by Benepe are similarly either irrelevant or supportive of restoring train service. Maybe someday one of the advocates will post a link so we can decide for ourselves. Maybe not, though: one advocate, Anandi Premlall, was "delighted" by a 2001 Wave article saying a report had recommended against restoring train service.

The "MTA as leader" claim is similarly suspect: the MTA must take the lead on all subway expansion. Their priorities never change, so if they have ever expressed a lack of interest in anything it is final, and no amount of public demand will convince them to do it.

The reality is that the MTA takes its lead from others. The Governor has enough control over the MTA Board that its Chair essentially serves at his pleasure; if he made it a priority, the MTA would make it a priority. The current Governor also controls a lot of pork in the form of the “Regional Economic Development Councils” that have steered a million dollars towards planning the trail.

The Mayor of New York City can also set priorities, as we saw with the extension of the #7 train to Twelfth Avenue. This was nowhere on the MTA’s priority list until Bloomberg decided he wanted it done and arranged the funding for it. A Mayor who can get similar funding could get this moved to the top of the list; so could a Senator or a powerful congressmember.

Rail-trail advocates’ claims that “it’s never going to happen” are just bluster, and their claims to want rail “if it were possible” are transparent lies. If these advocates spent the amount of time and political capital on getting train service instead of a bike trail, the city would be clearing trees right now.

When bike paths are not transportation

I've written before about the capacity of bike paths to move large numbers of people. A dedicated bike path performs this function best when it connects dense residential neighborhoods with dense job centers. The bike paths on the Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg and Queensboro Bridges are great examples of this. They may not transport as many people in a day, but they don’t transport thousands of dangerous, wasteful motor vehicles either. This is why we should convert one lane of the Brooklyn Bridge to a two-way bike path.

That said, a frequent train line can beat a bike path, or even a car lane, any day. On the Manhattan Bridge one fall day in 2012, according to the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council’s Hub-Bound Travel Study, one car lane carried almost five times as many people as the bike lane, but one subway track carried 36 times as many.

With that in mind, let’s turn to the Rockaway Beach Branch, and to a proposal to convert it to a bike trail instead of reactivating train service. The Trust for Public Land argues that it “will” (not “could”) fulfill a similar transportation function:

Using the QueensWay to connect to subway stations, commuters could save 15 – 20 minutes each way to major work destinations such as Midtown Manhattan and Downtown Brooklyn. Residents will also be able to use the QueensWay to connect to stores and other destinations. … Using the QueensWay to connect to subway stations, commuters could save 15 – 20 minutes each way to major work destinations such as Midtown Manhattan and Downtown Brooklyn. Residents will also be able to use the QueensWay to connect to stores and other destinations.

Yes, that’s nice, but how many of them would actually use it? I could save ten to fifteen minutes off my commute by biking to the subway station, but I don’t do it because there’s just a plain rack to lock it to. There is no secure bike parking at any subway station near me, and there is none proposed in the trail plan.

Even assuming that secure parking was built, or that every potential bike commuter was comfortable locking their bike up at a plain old rack (and that the city built enough additional plain old racks to accommodate them, how many cyclists are we talking about? I’m guessing it would be far below the 2,601 cyclists that the NYMTC counted on the Manhattan Bridge on that fall day in 2012.

Now let’s assume that instead we brought trains back to the Rockaway Beach Branch. Let’s assume that the service is the crappiest possible: less than once an hour off-peak and a mandatory change to get to Manhattan, like the Long Island Rail Road Oyster Bay Branch. We would still get at least 3,350 riders a day (PDF).

If instead we dug a tunnel under a few blocks of Rego Park and ran the R train out to Howard Beach, we would see a lot more riders. Even if there were only four stations and all of them had the ridership of the 104th Street station on the A train (1,736), that would still be almost 7,000 riders a day. The least popular station on the R train, 36th Street in Long Island City, saw 4,540 riders last year, and I’ve proposed adding stations at Myrtle Avenue and Fleet Street to serve large buildings that were built since the line’s fortune declined. The half million riders heralded by some rail proponents may be too ambitious, but even if the line is a dismal failure it would serve far more people per day than a trail.

If you’re still thinking of the bike trail as a transportation project, look at this quote from the Trust for Public Land:

To ensure safety and security for neighbors and park users, the QueensWay will have gates at all entrances. The QueensWay will close at dusk except during winter months, when it will remain open slightly later to accommodate commuters.

(I’m pretty sure that last part about remaining open slightly later was added after I tweeted about this.) The bike paths on the Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg and Queensboro Bridges are open twenty-four hours. That’s because they’re transportation infrastructure, not parks.

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.

Guest Post: How sending the R train to Howard Beach can help the G go to Forest Hills

By Capt. Subway

The controversy over what to do with the 3.5-mile long abandoned northern section of the defunct LIRR Rockaway Line between Ozone Park and Rego Park has once again made it into a major newspaper, in this case in an article in the New York Times about a week ago. In that article we learned that the state will be awarding a $500,000 grant to the Trust for Public Land to study the QueensWay proposal to turn the abandoned railroad right-of-way into a linear park and biking/walking trail. It is rather curious that no equivalent grant is being made to the groups – and such people and groups do exist – advocating that the line should be resurrected as a – hold your hats - rail line. An extension of the "R" subway line, in fact.

The advocates for the Greenway insist that the revived line would accomplish little and that few people would ride. Oh really – a line that parallels the heavily trafficked Woodhaven Boulevard corridor – a line that would provide a one seat connection from densely settled Queens neighborhoods like Rego Park, Jackson Heights, Woodside, Astoria and Long Island City to East and West Midtown, that would provide possible transfer connections to the IND "A" and BMT "J" lines, and that would also serve neighborhoods of moderate density in central Queens that have no heavy rail access at this time – no one’s going to ride it?

Furthermore the Greenway crowd says that reviving the line would be too costly. Yes much work would be needed to get it back up and running. But as compared to constructing a wholly new rail line the cost of getting the defunct line back in working order would be a genuine bargain, probably around one tenth the cost of new construction.

The Woodhaven Junction station. Photo: John Chevier / Flickr.

Many people have argued that the line should be reactivated as a branch of the Long Island Rail Road. This would be better than a greenway, but not as good as a connection to the Queens Boulevard subway line. The capacity of the Queens Boulevard line is determined by a combination of signaling along each of its four tracks and by its terminal capacity, i.e. the ability of the terminal stations, 71-Continental Avenue-Forest Hills, 179th Street and Parsons/Archer to process or relay arriving and departing trains. The express tracks are, happily, operating at the current design capacity of 30 trains per hour.

Unfortunately the local tracks, while also theoretically capable of 30 trains per hour, are presently only running at about 20 trains per hour in the peak period. This is necessitated by the terminal at 71-Continental, which can only turn around about 20 trains per hour at the limit, and that not very well. For this reason the 63rd St connection to Queens Boulevard required a "robbing from Peter to pay Paul" switcheroo: the "G" line had to be cut back to Court Square and its slots on Queens Boulevard given over to another, Manhattan oriented service, first to the "V", and now to the "M". (For the first few years the “G” line ran to and from Forest Hills nights and weekends, when there was no "V" train service. But this passenger friendly part-time service died to make weekend service changes more doable).

Of course it needn’t be that way. Even in the original MTA plans from the late ‘60s "G" service would have remained intact. The express by-pass alone would have insured this. This is where the old LIRR Rock Line comes into play. By connecting this line to the Queens Boulevard line east (subway north) of 63rd Drive station – the tunnel bell mouths are there specifically for that scenario – the path to another local service terminal would be created, i.e. now the "G", along with the "M" and "R" could run along the Queens Boulevard local tracks, with one of these service branching off after 63rd Drive and heading off to a new terminal at either Howard Beach or, it would be hoped, JFK, and thus not threatening to overwhelm 71-Continental as a terminal. In this way peak trains per hour on the Queens Boulevard local tracks could be raised from the present day 20 trains per hour up to 27 ½ trains per hour, given the current timetables on those three lines. This would be a significant improvement in service, especially if the "G" were equipped with full length trains.

These are the transit advantages of reactivating the Rockaway Branch as a subway line. Neighborhoods like Woodhaven, Rego Park and Ozone Park get quicker service to Midtown. Greenpoint and Williamsburg can be reconnected to Astoria and Jackson Heights with revived G train service. Local stations on the Queens Boulevard line see seven more trains an hour.

These benefits are worth the money. This is something we can do. If you agree, sign our petition to Governor Cuomo and be counted.

Capt Subway is a Queens resident and transit advocate with 37 years of experience working for the New York City Transit Authority, including Senior Schedule Manager. He has had his alias for at least as long as I've had mine.

Gay men, zoning and the High Line's real source of power

You probably already know how annoyed I get by all the people who want "our very own High Line" for whatever little town they live in. As I wrote last year, "If you've got anyone like that in your town, you should print them out a copy of Witold Rybczinski's excellent discussion of the economics of the High Line, and why it probably won't turn your run-down industrial neighborhood into West Chelsea unless you've got (a) dense commercial and residential development nearby, (b) a subway two blocks away, (c) lots of well-connected gay men and artists living and working within a short walk, and (d) LOTS of money, more than your town can really afford to spend."

I'll add two data points to the ones from last year:

Photo: Professor Bop / Flickr

First, some documentation of the gay fundraising network that bankrolled Friends of the High Line. Here in New York we've got gay men with power and money! Is your town willing to give that much clout to its gay men? Think you can do it without them? Good luck!

Second, since 1982 there have been no minimum parking requirements in Manhattan south of 96th Street. In 2005 the city approved the Special West Chelsea District (PDF) zoning amendment. It did not add any minimum parking requirements. Would developers building around your "High Line" wannabe have to provide lots of parking?

The zoning amendment also capped any density limitations at a floor-area ratio (FAR) of 5.0. Does your town allow that much density around its "High Line"?

If anything, the High Line is a symbol. It's a symbol of a town that gives power to gay men walking among tall buildings, instead of wasting all its land and money on highways and parking lots. It's a symbol of a metropolis.

If your town doesn't do that, it's not a metropolis, and any "High Line" you build will be an empty symbol. And yes, that goes for you, Rego Park.

(I know, we still have too many highways and parking lots, even in Chelsea. The sooner we get rid of them, the better off we'll be.)

Walking down country lanes

This is an expanded version of a post from January 11, 2009.

In many parts of the world it's common for people to walk a lot. Sometimes they'll walk long distances - hours, days - to get where they need to go. It used to be pretty universal.

When I was younger I thought this just happened, that you could get up and start walking and just spend the night wherever you wound up. I was disappointed to discover, in Christopher Wren's Walking to Vermont for example, but also firsthand, that there are large sections of the country that are really very inhospitable to people on foot. To a large extent, it's because major roads have been built for cars with almost no thought to pedestrians. Outside of towns and cities, sidewalks are scarce, shoulders are narrow, and speeds are high. In some places, pedestrians are harassed, particularly outsiders.

My first reaction was to praise long-distance trail projects, like the Appalachian Trail or the Pacific Coast Trail. Certainly, people do take long walks on these trails, and they're great for spending time in nature, getting exercise and seeing pretty mountains. But if you've ever hiked on them, you'll know that they're not very practical for actually getting anywhere. They usually don't go through population centers: Harper's Ferry, West Virginia is one of the few towns that are actually on the Appalachian Trail.

The first reason for that is that land in towns is expensive, and walking trails didn't provide a good return on investment for either private companies or governments to spend the money to develop them. The second is that they piggyback on existing trails, many of which were made for visiting mountaintops. While it's great for hikers to climb Bear Mountain on their way through the Hudson Valley, it's not really the most convenient route to get from, say, Peekskill to Middletown.

I then got interested in rail-trails like the Old Erie Path pictured above, and other linear parks like the Old Croton Aqueduct.  I love walking on these trails, but the rail-trails make me sad because they use infrastructure that could be used for trains.  Because of this, I get a bit disturbed by the intensity with which people cheer rail projects like the Walkway over the Hudson, the "Queensway" and the "Low Line."  It's clear that there's a real hunger for comfortable places to take long walks with nice views, and I don't want that hunger to eat up all the railbeds we have left.

I developed an interest in stories about people walking long distances, and looked for older ones that went back before all those roads were built and filled with cars.  Three that I can particularly recommend are Russell Shorto's The Island at the Center of the World, Graham Robb's The Discovery of France, and Jerry Ellis's Walking to Canterbury. It turns out that in a lot of circumstances it wasn't much easier to get around on foot. There were weather problems, brigands, lack of food and difficulty finding or affording places to stay. There were also difficulties such as not having a good path to travel or losing the path.

One thing that's very striking about the more recent narratives is how many times the walkers get into cars, buses and trains. Especially cars. Five hundred years ago, if someone walked from Paris to Brussels they'd have had to walk from inn to inn, and once they left home they wouldn't see their families until they came back. Today, Appalachian trail hikers regularly hitch rides to grocery stores, or get visits from family members in cars. Just about every trail journal has an entry about getting a ride to a campsite further down the trail and then hitching another ride back to complete the skipped section.

What I learned from these stories is that walking too requires infrastructure. The paths and maps need to be created and maintained. There need to be bridges or boats to cross rivers and other obstacles. There need to be places to obtain food and places to stay, and they need to be affordable to walkers. This is a lot of work, and down through the ages it's something that people have spent years setting up. This infrastructure doesn't just happen.

It's actually quite a tragedy that country roads used to be places where people could walk, but with the number and speed of cars these days I wouldn't want to spend a month walking along them. When I was a kid I once visited coastal villages in Italy and Greece, and one thing that impressed me so much - impresses me to this day - is how they had well-maintained footpaths to other villages. I'm talking paths paved with stone, but too steep and narrow for cars. They were much more direct than the roads, because they didn't require all the hairpin turns. They weren't hiking trails or rail-trails or carriage roads. They were footpaths, built for people to get around.

In a recent Strong Towns podcast, Chuck Marohn talks a bit about country roads. He points out that most country roads used to be much narrower, and unpaved, which made it hard to travel at speeds above twenty miles per hour. And in fact, when I visited Africa several years ago, the road that a friend took me on would have been difficult for a four-wheel drive SUV, and much more so for an ordinary sedan. We never worried about a speeding car coming around the corner, because it was impossible for anyone to speed on that road.

Local governments across the country are facing budget problems, and Chuck argues that a big drain on the budget is the cost of maintaining all these wide, paved roads that serve a small number of travelers.  States across the country are already converting some low-traffic asphalt roads back to gravel to save money.   Beyond the cost savings, it'll be safer and more comfortable to walk on those gravel roads.  Hopefully that'll also satisfy our hunger for country walks, so that we can use the old rail lines for their original purpose.

Political realities

I'm not a mind reader, so I don't know for sure why the Tri-State Transportation Campaign's Kate Slevin said, "we're not against a new bridge; we can't have BRT without one." But I suspect it has something to do with what John Gromada said in response to a post of mine that was featured in Nyack News and Views: "The political reality is thus that your plan has no chance of ever happening."

Political reality is a handy thing. Everyone seems to have a healthy grasp of it, at least judging by the number of people who have lectured me recently on the political reality of the Tappan Zee Bridge replacement, the fate of the Rockaway Branch of the Long Island Rail Road, and the parking garages proposed for the Northern Branch of the Erie Railroad.

The political reality is obvious to people - until it isn't. For those of you who don't remember five years ago in New York City, we had resigned ourselves to a Department of Transportation that tried to impose arbitrary one-way plans on neighborhoods that didn't want them. Physically separated bike paths were something we could only dream of in our city. Then, on May 14, 2007, Janette Sadik-Khan was appointed Transportation Commissioner, and the political reality changed.

For the Tappan Zee Bridge itself, the political reality for years was that there was an uneasy truce between the highway pushers, the train advocates and the cycling activists bus rapid transit proponents around a (pretty shitty) plan that would include all three. Then one morning Andrew Cuomo calculated that it wouldn't get done in time for him to take credit for it, and presto! all three vanished overnight.

I'm all for taking a realistic view of the political landscape - in fact, last year I criticized Slevin and friends for their lack of appreciation of the politics of the 34th Street Transitway. But there's a big difference between my realpolitik and that practiced by Slevin or Gromada or Dave Zornow: I never rule anything out for good.

As Jarrett Walker is fond of pointing out, physical principles can be absolute and forever, and should constrain your sense of what's possible as you advocate for transit. For example, any vehicle that runs on a road with shock absorbers is going to be more jerky and less comfortable than a vehicle on tracks without them. Politics is different. Politics can change. A political analysis can give you an idea of which strategy is more likely to accomplish your goals, or which battle is worth fighting. It may suggest that at this point there is not enough political support to build a new rail line. What it can't do is tell you for certain that there will never be enough support.

The way to handle political uncertainty is very simple. Rather than saying "we can't have" something, you just say what it would take to get that thing. For example, in order to get "BRT on the Bridge," someone needs to either overcome Cuomo's ambition, or make your plan compatible with it. You can still say that a plan (say, prtonthebridge.com) is so far outside of what's currently being done that it's a waste of time to discuss it unless something big changes.

It may be less satisfying than saying "Never going to happen!" but it's a lot more honest.

Why not a longer "Tappan Zee High Line"?

Everyone knows I've got serious misgivings about the rails-to-trails movement, especially when people pull the rails out of perfectly functional, useful railroad infrastructure. I feel a lot better about roads-to-trails, and there are several good ones. The best is the section of the Long Island Motor Parkway that's been preserved here in Queens. There are other trails that use land taken for roads that were never built. I've walked on the Nassau-Suffolk Greenbelt, which follows an unbuilt section of the Bethpage Parkway. The Briarcliff-Peekskill Trailway in Westchester also uses an old parkway right-of-way.

Back in October when the Governor began his push for the Bridge Reconstruction merit badge, Paul Feiner, Supervisor of the Town of Greenburgh (which includes Tarrytown and Elmsford) suggested leaving the existing bridge standing for use by cyclists and pedestrians. This had been considered in earlier bridge replacement plans, but ultimately rejected in favor of a bike/pedestrian path on one of the two replacement spans. But if, as I've argued, the Tappan Zee Bridge should not be replaced, then Feiner's plan has a shot.

Instead of tearing the existing bridge down, we could keep two lanes for buses and use the rest of the width for a mixed-use path.

My question is, why stop there? The bridge itself is three miles long, but if we're not replacing it then we don't need the loud, polluting highway approaches. They'd just dump cars onto Routes 9 and 9W anyway.

Where the Thruway (Interstate 87) and the Cross-Westchester Expressway (I-287) split in Elmsford is right over the missing link between the two rail-trails that run in the right-of-way of the Old Putnam Line. If we reconfigured the highways so that northbound Thruway traffic turns east on the Cross-Westchester, then we can have the Tappan Zee High Line connect to the South County Trailway (PDF) there. It will also pass right under the Old Croton Aqueduct Trail.

On the Rockland County side, if we terminate the Thruway at the Palisades Parkway, we can extend the Tappan Zee High Line west for a total length of nine miles. It can connect to the Esposito Memorial Trail and the Long Path in Nyack. If we stop the Thruway at the Garden State Parkway, that makes twelve miles. Think of the recreational possibilities!

Of course, those connections assume that we don't reactivate the old Erie Main Line and the Putnam Line, but it might be worth it even so.

To be perfectly honest, with the length and the grades on the current bridge, I'm not sure it would be a pleasant trip - unless maybe we could have a concession for a bus stop, cafe and refreshment stand at the highest point. But it makes a lot more sense than some of the other recent proposals "high lines."

A new High Line for Chicago

Paris has the Promenade Plantée. New York has the High Line. Lebanon, New Hampshire has the Northern Trail. Soon Chicago will have its own world-class elevated park.

After the planned Bloomingdale Trail right-of-way was taken for a Kennedy Expressway spur, park advocates despaired. But then they realized that there were many more other elevated rail lines with the potential to become attractive public spaces.

Thus the idea for the Red Line was born. "I realized that we had an old set of train tracks running right up the center of the North Side," said Josh Branson, co-chair of Friends of the Red Line. "It has the potential to connect people from Rogers Park, Wrigleyville, Lincoln Park almost to the Near North."

Like the High Line in New York, Branson sees the Red Line as a catalyst for development. "In these tough economic times, you need every boost you can get," he enthused. "The commercial effects would radiate out from every access point. Imagine art galleries on Lincoln Avenue, or quirky restaurants along Clark Street. Chicago needs that growth to realize its potential as an urban center for the Midwest."

The Board of Aldermen is expected to approve the lease of the Red Line later this year, and the last trains will run some time next summer. Activists are raising funds for the the first phase, which will run from Howard Street to Devon Avenue, opening in 2015. Eventually, Chicagoans and visitors will be able to walk as far as North Avenue, and maybe some day to the loop.

City planners are enthusiastic about the line, which will be incorporated into the Green Chicago Vision 2040. Other elements of that plan include the transformation of Lake Shore Drive into Interstate 96, a "green road," where the weight of passing cars will generate enough electricity to light the "Cloud Gate" sculpture in Millenium Park, the installation of a solar powered parking garage in the old Union Station facility, and the redevelopment of Meigs Field as a "biodiesel-only" airport.

The glamour of the High Line

If you're from a city like Chicago, Philadelphia, Jersey City or Saint Louis - or possibly San Francisco or Wilmington, California, Toronto or Vancouver, Canada, or Sheffield or Manchester, England - or maybe even Harlem or my home borough of Queens, or a host of other cities - you've got an old railroad or car viaduct in your town, and at least one person is saying, "what if we turned it into a linear park, like New York's High Line, or Paris's Promenade Plantée?"

If you've got anyone like that in your town, you should print them out a copy of Witold Rybczinski's excellent discussion of the economics of the High Line, and why it probably won't turn your run-down industrial neighborhood into West Chelsea unless you've got (a) dense commercial and residential development nearby, (b) a subway two blocks away, (c) lots of well-connected gay men and artists living and working within a short walk, and (d) LOTS of money, more than your town can really afford to spend.

Oh, and if your town didn't fight a major freeway revolt just a couple blocks of your wannabe High Line, it's probably too car-oriented to get anything like the High Line.

Finally, show them the great slideshow embedded in this Greater Greater Washington post about "Freedom Park" in Arlington, Virginia's Rosslyn neighborhood. Rosslyn does have art and a metro station and is fairly walkable, but it also has three large highways nearby, and the density is nowhere near as high as in Chelsea. The result is a pleasant place to have lunch, and I'm sure it's a tremendous improvement over the elevated highway that used to be there, but it's no High Line.

If you want a true pedestrian revitalization you need to challenge the dominance of cars in the city. Everything else is just an empty escape fantasy. You can't become Kim Kardashian by buying her "signature scent," you can't become Mary-Kate Olsen by wearing her "celebrity clothing line," and you can't become New York or Paris by putting up an elevated walkway to nowhere.

The Bridge Route

In the comments to my last post about the lack of redundancy on the Northeast Corridor, Adam missed part of the point:

The main problem with the Tappan Zee alignment is that it skips NYC, the most important stop on the train. Ideally, we'd have six tracks under each river for either commuter or long distance trains.

Adam's proposal would not provide very much redundancy, as CityLights observed in suggesting that a Staten Island route would "serve as backup route in case something happens in Manhattan." Redundancy doesn't just mean having multiple routes, it means having routes that connect multiple locations without going through the same point. Something that can take out two tracks in Midtown Manhattan could also take out six.

What is really frustrating in all this is that there used to be a very good set of alternative routes to the Pennsylvania Railroad between Washington and New Haven, and the New Haven Railroad between Philadelphia and Boston, that combined would have allowed trains to completely bypass the pinch points I described in my previous posts. Various combinations of these were called the Poughkeepsie Bridge Route, the Federal Express route, and the Alphabet Route. Freight trains used the route regularly from 1890 to 1974, and passenger trains for part of that time.

The key is the Poughkeepsie Bridge, a railroad bridge across the Hudson at Poughkeepsie, which connected the Erie hubs at Maybrook and Campbell Hall to the Central New England hubs at Hopewell Junction and Boston Corners. The rail superstructure on the bridge was badly damaged in a fire in 1974 and never rebuilt, and the tracks between Maybrook and Hopewell Junction have been abandoned.

The bridge structure itself is still solid, and the right-of-way is still intact. If restored, the tracks could move passengers and freight from New England to Pennsylvania and points south and west without going through New York City, taking pressure off the Northeast Corridor and the bridge at Selkirk. Even though there's only room for a single track, the lines on either side could be double-tracked.

Well, readers, you'll be interested to know that a group of visionary citizens has gotten together to restore the bridge. After fighting for many years, they've gotten the support of political leaders, and their project has received a share of the federal stimulus funding. If all goes according to plan, in October the bridge will reopen ... as a rail-trail.

Now don't get me wrong, I love rail-trails. I've spent many happy hours strolling the Airline and cycling the Old Put. But you've got to keep your priorities straight. A rail-trail from Maybrook to Hopewell Junction is not worth our budget dollars, it's not worth our stimulus dollars, and it's certainly not worth using the only rail crossing infrastructure between Penn Station and Selkirk. All this activism, political capital and money could have gone into upgrading the multi-use walkways on either side of the Mid-Hudson Bridge and providing the staff to keep them open and safe after dark. That's really all you need to have a decent connection between rail-trails on either side of the Hudson.

"But Cap'n," you say, "there are no tracks. It would cost millions to restore the tracks from Maybrook to Hopewell, and many of the lines that used to connect at those points are gone too. You're talking about billions to get it back to the point where you can have normal speed electric passenger trains between D.C. and Boston using this route."

Maybe billions is what it would take. But I would argue that billions spent on a project like that would revitalize Orange and Dutchess counties and provide much needed redundancy on the Northeast Corridor. The restored capacity would also shift thousands of car and plane trips to transit, with their attendant benefits of increased efficiency, improved social structures and reduced pollution and carnage. Isn't that worth a few billion?

Finally, let me compare this proposal to the disastrous Tappan Zee Bridge replacement project, which the good folks at Tri-State seem to think would be worth $14 billion (and counting) and three new vehicle lanes just so that they can put "helped introduce BRT® to the NY area" on their resumes. If expanding a highway bridge is worth $14 billion, surely maximizing the passenger throughput of an existing rail facility is worth half that. Right?

Strange Doings on the Atlanta Beltline

Thanks to RailNews.net, I came across this blog entry at Creative Loafing. Apparently there's a plan to connect several old train rights-of-way around Atlanta - some idle, some in heavy use - and put in a light-rail line and a multi-use trail. After some real-estate shenanigans, the public-private partnership managing the project has gotten Norfolk Southern to file for abandonment of the Northeast section, but this is currently being blocked by Amtrak and the Georgia DOT.

The Fresh Loaf blog entry and an open letter it quotes from Mayor Franklin are full of outrage, but a few things bother me about this whole deal. First of all, any time I hear the words "file for abandonment" I get suspicious. Second, I always worry about all-or-nothing deals, public-private partnerships and unaccountable authorities. Third, while Amtrak's filing is fairly straightforward and dwells on the merits of the proposal, the response from the Beltline lawyers is smug and rests on legal technicalities. Fourth, tax-increment financing is a risky proposition.

I've never been to Atlanta, unless you count changing planes, so take this with a grain of salt. But after going through the Amtrak filing and perusing some maps, I've figured out what it is they're saying: the current route of the Crescent skirts the northern edge of Atlanta (to the extent it has an edge) and stops at a station four miles from downtown. The current proposal for high-speed rail along the Crescent corridor would instead use the northeast beltline segment to get onto an east-west corridor that goes right through the middle of downtown, stopping at a new "Multimodal Station." If the corridor is abandoned, trains from the northeast to the multimodal station would have to take the "trunk line" around and approach the station from the northwest, then presumably back out to continue on southwest to Alabama.

The beltline people are asking to condemn the northeast segment because they want to run light rail on it. Due to FRA rules, you can't run light and heavy rail on the same tracks at the same time. From Google's satellite pictures, it looks like the right-of-way is wide enough for two tracks and not much else. You might be able to squeeze a trail in there alongside the tracks, but you wouldn't get four tracks plus a trail. The beltline people want light rail and a trail, so no heavy rail.

I can kind of see the beltline reasoning, but overall I think that Amtrak and GDOT have the better position. The bottom line is that it's really hard to get good rail corridors, and high-speed rail is much more important than local light rail. This is an existing heavy rail corridor, which is very valuable. It should only be abandoned if the beltline advocates can come up with an alternative right-of-way for the high-speed rail. Say, converting two of I-85's fourteen lanes to rail?

The Failing Railbanks

At this point I think everyone understands the basics of the main mechanism underlying the current financial crisis: financial institutions lent money to people who really didn't have the ability to pay it back. The result was that when people tried to cash in on their investments with places like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, there wasn't enough money. Result: collapse.

A similar crisis is brewing in the railbanking sector. As I've discussed previously, with the intense government investment in competing road infrastructure over the past fifty years, one rail line after another has failed. In 1983 Congress passed a law that allowed the rights-of-way to be used as trails, with the explicit aim of preserving them for future rail use.

Well, the future is now. Across the country, people are thinking about rail travel again, and establishing - or re-establishing - light rail and commuter rail lines. Some, like New Jersey Transit's River Line, reestablish passenger service on active freight lines. Others, like the southern end of the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail, run on tracks within an active rail right-of-way, next to freight lines. The vast majority of new light rail systems, like the central portion of the Hudson-Bergen line, have at least some new construction along city streets.

Many systems obtain rail lines from existing freight operators: New Jersey Transit took over a section of the former West Shore Line from Conrail for the northern section of the Hudson-Bergen line. Some purchase the line years before any attempt to reestablish passenger service: Dallas and Fort Worth purchased the former Rock Island line between the two cities in 1983 and continued to allow freight trains to use it, but didn't start the Trinity Railway Express service until 1996.

To this day, the only attempt I know of to withdraw any right-of-way from a railbank has been successful - somewhat: according to a report by the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy (PDF), the Heritage Rail-Trail County Park in south central Pennsylvania allowed a company to reconstruct a single rail line and run a dinner train three times a week. According to a trail review on the Conservancy's website, though, the dinner train hasn't run since 2001. Almost every other rail-with-trail in the Conservancy's report seems to have come about by adding a trail to the rail right-of-way.

Now there are some attempts to reactivate rail lines. The most famous is the Georgetown Branch in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC, which was railbanked by Montgomery County in 1988 and developed into the Capital Crescent Trail. There are currently plans to use the right-of-way for the Purple Line, a planned circumferential light-rail line, converting it to a "trail with rail." Opponents of the light rail have argued that it would endanger trail users, cut down old trees and disrupt the trail experience, but since much of their funding comes from the adjacent Columbia Country Club, rail advocates have suggested that their true motives are to avoid the restoration of active rail service through their golf course. The project has taken some steps forward recently, but its success is not guaranteed.

In other places like Bellevue, Washington and Humboldt County, California, there are abandoned rail lines with active groups pushing to see passenger service restored. Meanwhile, there are trail advocates pushing for formal abandonment and railbanking for trail use. They have stated that they believe rail service will not happen for many years, or perhaps never, and that the corridor should be converted to a trail, with the possibility of restoring the railroad at a later date.

Some rail activists have said that they don't want to see the rail lines taken out because it would be politically difficult to remove a trail, or even to restore the rail line, converting the structure to a rail-with-trail. Certainly, the existence of the trail is being used to cause problems for the Purple Line. To the extent that this is true, these railbanks are failing. By law, they were set up to preserve the line for transit service, but they may have the effect of preventing transit service.

The Rail Bank and (mis)Trust

Banking operates on trust; many of them used to have the word in their names. When you deposit money in a bank, you expect it to be there if you need it. If a banker ever told you, "Gee, you know, I've actually come to like this money a lot, and I really need it to buy gym equipment," you'd take them to court.

Apparently trust doesn't go for much in the world of railbanking. This process was set up in the late twentieth century when railroads were going bankrupt. The freight business was dwindling, and railroad companies didn't want to pay to maintain lines that they didn't use. At first, they just abandoned them, but then the government recognized that many of them had acquired their rights-of-way with government subsidies.

Rather than give that land away for free, Congress passed laws allowing agencies and nonprofits to buy it and convert it temporarily to recreational trails. There was always the implied guarantee that rail uses for these corridors was still a priority, and that if a railroad wanted the land back it could get it easily. The term "railbanking" deliberately invoked a metaphor with financial banking: you deposit the right-of-way to keep it safe for future use.

Nowadays, with driving and motor freight getting more and more expensive, current rail corridors are getting overburdened. In places like the D.C. suburbs, people are looking at reactivating the rail corridors, and encountering resistance. Many of the opponents object to active rail lines in their backyards or parks, but others object to returning rail-trails to their previous uses.

Because of this, I think it's appropriate to look at rail-trail projects with a certain amount of skepticism. Mrs. Transit and I are members of the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, and we get their magazine, which is invariably upbeat and cheery. It's full of exciting stories about how this old railroad line has been transformed into a trail with educational exhibits telling kids about its history, and that one is used by commuters in some small city in the Midwest.

What it often glosses over, of course, is the loss of passenger and freight capacity that occurred when the line was abandoned. How the people who lived nearby were forced to drive or take buses whether they wanted to or not, and how the roads were widened to accommodate the increased car and truck traffic. It also glosses over any hint that the right-of-way could or should ever revert to rail use.

There are some times when I read about a trail and think, "well, that's nice, but imagine if they still had commuter rail along that line. Or if this town had Amtrak service three times a day."

Don't get me wrong, I love rail-trails. Plenty of times I want to go for a nice long walk in the woods, but I don't want to climb a narrow twisty hiking path or worry about cars on a suburban road. I've spent many an enjoyable hour on the South and North County Trailways, the Walkill Valley Rail-Trail and other wonderful paths in the region. I think that we need more long-distance corridors for walking and biking that can give people a break from dealing with cars. But I think that often, we have a greater need for trains, and we need to think about that when deciding what to do with particular corridors.

Towards a Million Fattie March

I first heard about Fat March in the magazine of the Rails to Trails Conservancy, to which I am a contributor. The RTC (no, not that RTC) helps to fund and lobby for the creation and maintenance of rail-trails throughought the country. They sponsor a useful database of rail-trails and other greenways throughout the country.

Rail-trails are good for a number of reasons. They give people a place to exercise and connect them to nature and parks. Overall, they provide a safe route for non-motorized travel, which can be hard to come by in many parts of the country. In many ways they're more useful than hiking trails, because they generally have low grades and wide curves, and many of them connect transit, residential areas and parks. There's something a little sad about them, though: once a right-of-way has been railbanked, it's very unlikely that train service will be restored.

Rail-trails are very well suited to long distance walking. The Fat March route used a number of trails in the Northeast, including the Hop River rail-trail in Connecticut and the Northern Central rail-trail in Maryland. The show's producers had help from the RTC in picking trails. Executive producer Julie Laughlin said this about rail-trails to Rails to Trails Magazine: "They're absolutely perfect for us. When you do a reality show, there is quite an entourage that goes with it. It's hard to be on city streets." By contrast, walking on roads is "nerve-wracking, it's noisy and it's hard to talk with one another." Fat March trainer Steve Pfiester told the magazine that the trails allowed the marchers to make the most progress. "When we get on [the rail-trails], we're just hauling butt."

Rail-trails and other greenways (and pedestrian infrastructure in general) could use some help. A large number of households are located in areas where it is not safe or comfortable for people to walk. By any measure, pedestrian projects receive only a tiny fraction of the public money spent on transportation. Many of the greenways are not connected to each other, or to transit, at more than one point, making them difficult, if not impossible, to access without a car. Many of the longer greenways do not have accessible hotels or campgrounds, making it difficult to arrange multi-day trips.

As a big fan of rail-trails and long-distance walking in general, I was thrilled to see them get exposure on a high-rated national prime-time television show. This will allow even more people to make the connection between rail-trails and health. I was disappointed that, although you see lots of trails on the show, the trails are never mentioned by name. Neither is the RTC or the East Coast Greenway Alliance, which has done a lot of work promoting trails in this area.

There isn't even a link to RTC or the ECGA on the Fat March website, and most surprisingly, there's no mention of it on the websites of those organizations. The RTC already had the product placement; I would have expected them to negotiate having the trails named on the show, or even buy an ad on the show or sponsor the website. A co-branded website could have brought in tons of donations and political support for rail-trails. I think they missed a big opportunity.

It's still not too late, though. Hopefully there will be another season of Fat March next year. In the meantime, I'll be that some of this year's Marchers are available for sponsorship. Imagine a commercial featuring Chantal or Matt saying "Donate to the Rails to Trails Conservancy. Because we all need a place to walk." Imagine a press release for a trail ribbon-cutting "featuring Sam from Fat March!" Imagine Anthony sending a letter to his fans asking them to write their representatives for more money for transportation enhancements.

In any case, this is your Cap'n speaking. I encourage you to donate to the RTC or the ECGA, and to write a letter to your representatives saying that you support greenways - for our health.