Five rail-trails we'd like to see reactivated

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

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

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

2. The Joseph P. Clarke Trail
   
   

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. The Nyack-Piermont Trail
   
   
   
   
   

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

   
   

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

We can't depend on the Northeast Corridor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The railroads of Connecticut in 1893.

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

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

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

Black swans over Long Island

Last week Planet Money had a great "Deep Read" with economist Nassim Taleb. Taleb's major point is that when you're vulnerable to "black swans" - rare and unpredictable, but high impact events - you need to invest in reserves and redundancy to be able to survive them.

It's an argument that all transportation providers should pay attention to, but railroads in particular are dependent on linear infrastructure. The current mess with the Long Island Railroad's switches in Jamaica show that at least one railroad isn't getting it.

The vast majority of train trips on the LIRR go through Jamaica. That's great for transfers, but it sucks for redundancy. You would think they'd have a backup plan, but apparently the MTA prefers to let the riders - and the taxpayers - bear the full brunt of any black swans that affect Jamaica.

Yup, that's the kind of perverse thinking the public authority structure encourages. If we had a sane system, Helena Williams' head would already be on a pike for giving public property to Bruce Ratner for nothing. Well, if we had a sane system, Williams would probably never have been allowed anywhere near the top post, and maybe we'd have someone competent actually running the railroad.

But now it's time to pull out a game I like to play whenever there's a major, but avoidable outage that affects millions of people: what if the people in power actually gave a shit? In this case, what if they wanted to build redundancy into the Long Island Railroad? What if the government had a giant Keynsian stimulus program, and money were no object?

Ideally, the Central Railroad of Long Island, which ran from Flushing to Floral Park along the route of what's now the Brooklyn-Queens Greenway, would never have been torn up. It could potentially be reconstructed, or a southern bypass created under Rockaway and Linden Boulevards. Even a through connection in Jamaica bypassing the main station there would prevent some events from completely disrupting service.

If we give up on a rail-based solution, then a bus-based one is the next best thing. If I were the LIRR president, on Monday I would have sat down with the heads of Long Island Bus, the MTA Bus Company and New York City Transit to get every available bus running parallel routes.

I would also have gotten on the phone with Long Island Transit, Hampton Jitney, Joel Azumah and any other licensed operators interested in providing temporary service. I would have told them to take anyone who showed them an unused LIRR ticket, and paid them by the mile. If I were the Governor, I would have ordered the State DOT to set up bus-only lanes on the LIE so that those buses wouldn't all be sitting in traffic.

A real powerful response like that would have earned back some of the LIRR's customer loyalty that's been eroded over the years, and made it more likely that Long Island's representatives will support the MTA in the future. Instead - from a Governor who grew up on Long Island - we got lame excuses, finger-pointing and stranded customers.

Anchoring the cascade

Image from Klein et al. (1997)

We know that jitney service can be profitable, as illustrated by the graph above, but that it requires a certain level of ridership (a "thick market" in terms of the authors of this graph). Below that there is a vicious cycle: jitneys run less frequently in order to allow more riders to collect at stops, but many riders will give up if they have to wait longer. In response, the jitneys run even less frequently, and eventually give up.

In theory, then, the route is completely unprofitable, and thus a candidate for subsidized "coverage" service. But with only coverage service, buses are infrequent, schedules are inflexible, and routes may be bent to serve low-ridership but politically expedient destinations. This can make the service less valuable to potential riders, which in turn can lead to "empty bus" accusations and make budget cuts more likely than they already are for coverage service.

If there is even minimal scheduled service, however, this changes. Economist Dan Klein, his student Binyam Reja, and the generally anti-transit Reason Foundation vice-president Adrian Moore have written an entire book about this, based on a fairly wide-ranging study of private bus transportation. They summarize their argument in an article for something called The Independent Review (PDF). I think that it should be read by every transit advocate, at the very least to get a sense of what is possible outside the box of regional authorities and "bus rapid transit."

Klein, Reja and Moore call this scheduled service an "anchor": if riders know that even if the jitney doesn't show up there will be a bus every fifteen minutes or so, they are more likely to wait. This means more passengers for the jitneys, so the jitneys will run more frequently. The presence of minimal scheduled service can make jitney service profitable - even profitable enough that the jitneys could cross-subsidize it.

Image from Klein et al. (1997)

This scheduled service could be run by a public agency. Klein and friends, being libertarians, come up with the novel solution of auctioning "curb rights": in exchange for providing scheduled anchor service, a company gets a separate bus stop where by law only it has the right to pick up passengers.

It seems to me that a similar minimum service could be achieved by simply paying a driver to make one unprofitable run every fifteen minutes, or even with a kind of insurance plan where drivers contribute a certain amount per week/month/year and are guaranteed a minimum amount per hour. This does nor have to be done by the government; it can be arranged by the jitney syndicate.

Let me reiterate that I am not a fan of libertarian ideology. I regard a small-government solution to an economic problem the way I would a ship in a bottle: an example of working within constraints that shows off the cleverness of the problem-solver. Practically speaking, though, we're being forced to build our ship in a bottle forged by the likes of Richard Brodsky and Pedro Espada. We need small-government solutions, because the amount of service we actually get from our current government is small.

We need higher-frequency, more flexible bus service, and Dan Klein and his friends have shown us how we can have it without depending too much on our corrupt, unrepresentative government. Let's use what they've given us, and if we ever manage to claw back some decent transit funding, we can decide what to do with it then.

The party of no transit

Here's the latest proposal to address the transit funding crisis: make transit worse. That's right, Roe Daraio of a group called Communities of Maspeth and Elmhurst Together (Comet, get it?) wants to "help the MTA" by reducing transit frequency. You see, Maspeth has some private jitneys that do not always follow the laws and regulations. Daraio argues that the "commuter vans" are stealing passengers from the MTA buses and draining their farebox revenue.

There are numerous flaws in this argument, but the most obvious is that this proposal would reduce overall service. If you're in Maspeth and want to go into Manhattan, you probably don't care whether the bus that takes you there is run by the MTA or a private operator. You might care about price, safety and comfort, but then again you might not. If you currently rely on the jitneys to supplement the MTA schedule, then that would no longer be available to you.

If this enforcement effort were to succeed, it's highly unlikely that the MTA would increase service to make up for the reduction in frequency. COMET is certainly not asking them to. There's no evidence that they see the jitneys as providing any value whatsoever.

In fact, Comet has been waging a campaign against the jitneys for over a year, and conspicuously absent from that campaign have been the jitney customers. In their quotes you get the impression that the vans are there for the sole purpose of getting in the way of Roe Daraio's car. The group seems completely oblivious to the fact that the vans are there because their own neighbors are paying them, and they are paying because they provide value.

Keep this in mind when you hear politicians talking about giving power back to "the community." They're not talking about people like you and me, who might be sick of waiting for infrequent MTA buses. They're talking about people like Roe Daraio, whose solution to reckless jitneys is to harass them out of business, and whose solution to the MTA funding crisis is to reduce transit service. For these "community activists," transit users don't exist or matter, and the more power they have, the less services we'll get.

Rob Hopkins's Urban Challenge

Last month I discussed my suspicions that the transition movement may be just the same old back-to-the-land movement with renewed energy from the peak oil and climate crises. I'm not prepared to dismiss it completely out of hand, but I do think that it needs to let go of its contempt of cities and tone down its agriculture fetish to be truly effective.

I think it's worth quoting in depth the paragraph on page 37 of the Transition Handbook where Rob Hopkins dismisses New York:

If we see climate change as a separate and distinct issue from peak oil, we risk creating a world of lower emissions but one which is, in terms of oil vulnerability, just as fragile as today’s – if not more so – as energy prices rise.

A good example of this is New York, which recently emerged in a study as having one of the lowest per capita CO2 emissions of any large Western city, less than a third of the per capita US average. This is due to the density of living, the walkability, good public transport and the low heating requirements of apartment living. So, from a climate change perspective we can argue that New York is a good model of low carbon living we would all do well to emulate. Now let’s weave peak oil into that mix. What happens to New York in the event of a power shortage, or when the price of importing food starts to rise sharply? New York experienced such a power cut in August 2003, and although it only lasted for a day, its impact was keenly felt. While New York may have a small carbon footprint, it has little or no resilience to declining oil supplies (a concept explored in depth in Chapter 3).

You can read more of that section on the publisher's website.

When I read this, I immediately disagreed with Hopkins's conclusion (which seems to be that cities are doomed and we should all be living in small towns where we can use horsecarts to get our produce to market) but I had trouble defending New York against his specific accusation. The 2003 blackout did point to a particular vulnerability that the city has.

At 4:15 on August 14, I was working in Lower Manhattan in an enterprise that was essentially dependent on the Internet to function, so the boss told us to go home. The subways were non-functional, there was gridlock on the streets, and we didn't even think of taking a bus or a cab. I found a co-worker who lived near me and we walked six miles back to Queens. It took us a couple of hours. At least two car lanes on the Williamsburg Bridge were allocated to pedestrians. My wife had brought our infant son with her to work in the Bronx, and was not prepared to carry him ten miles home. One of her co-workers drove them to her apartment in Harlem, where they spent the night. The next morning they took three buses to get home. Power was restored the following evening.

Our resilience was tested in a less dramatic way three years later, when mismanagement by Con Edison resulted in sections of Queens losing power. At first there were two days of low power (our air conditioner and desktop computers wouldn't work, but the fans and laptops would), followed by a day of no power. At that point, Con Ed brought in several diesel generators in trailers and parked them next to large apartment buildings. Switching the apartment buildings to the generators freed up some electricity for smaller customers, but it took over a month before our generator was disconnected and driven away. In the meantime it was spewing diesel fumes around the clock under our bedroom window, which didn't help our son's asthma any. It was kind of a surreal experience, because in this case the subways were running normally and other neighborhoods had power. We could go work or shop in Manhattan or Forest Hills and it would be just another day with lights and air conditioning, but then we would get off the train and see stores with the lights off and the doors open.

There are two main questions that Hopkins's challenge raises. In both cases we made it through with minimal loss of life and property, but both cases were relatively temporary. What Hopkins is saying is that when peak oil finally catches up with us we will have to make do indefinitely with a much lower energy level. Is it possible to power a metropolitan area of nineteen million at roughly a thousand people per square kilometer without fossil fuels? What is a truly sustainable size and density?

In both cases we had a certain amount of redundancy between electrical, liquid and muscle energy that allowed the city to function at a reduced level while the problem was fixed. When the subways weren't running, there were gasoline and diesel powered buses, taxis and cars to transport those who couldn't walk or bike. When the cables couldn't bring enough power to work our lights, computers and air conditioners, we had diesel powered generators to supplement them.

In some visions of the future of cities, most transportation is powered by electricity, using energy ultimately supplied by sustainable sources. We already have electric subways and elevators, and in the past we've had electric streetcars and trolleybuses. Ultimately, I would like to see most car and truck trips replaced by electric rail and bus, and of course walking and bicycling.

But isn't that putting all our eggs in one transmission basket? What happens if we get another blackout like in 2003, and we don't have any cars or diesel buses to travel in? What if we get a brown-out like in 2006, and we don't have any diesel fuel to generate more electricity with?

Some of the answer is generating power locally, and in fact there are buildings in the neighborhood that have installed solar generators on the roofs and natural gas co-generation systems in the basements, but these only provide a fraction of the electricity needed, and the co-generation requires a supply of natural gas. I suppose we could have a completely redundant system of generators and buses powered by natural gas, but that presumes that we will have enough natural gas available then.

If any of you out there have information or insights, I'd love to hear them. Maybe you think Hopkins is right, and we should all move back to the land? In any case, please assume that we will reach peak oil, and that climate change will make other fossil fuels like "clean coal" and natural gas unsustainable. Feel free to disagree with those assumptions, but they are the premise of this discussion.

Niantic Bridge gets stuck...

The Day has the story. Fortunately, it was in the position where it disrupted boat traffic (mostly recreational) not train traffic. Anyone up for a little proactive redundancy, in case it gets stuck in the wrong position before they can replace it?

NYC-area bus networks - east vs. west

The greater New York area has one of the best train networks in the country. However, there are some major gaps in this network. West of the Hudson, these gaps are filled by an extensive bus network. It's not as convenient as the train, but most towns from Point Pleasant Beach to Albany have daily bus service, with routes stretching deep into the Poconos and Catskills. These are relatively new, clean, comfortable buses, and most of northern New Jersey has hourly service or better. Much of it is provided by private operators at a profit.

Now let's look east of the Hudson. There are three major private companies, which stick to established routes: Bonanza up the Hudson and Housatonic valleys; Bonanza, Peter Pan and Greyhound along the shore and up the Connecticut River valley.

The State of Connecticut and the New York counties of Westchester, Putnam and Dutchess run subsidized bus systems, much of which is the infrequent, indirect "charity bus" service familiar to transit advocates from other parts of the country. Of these public systems, only one, the Westchester Bee-Line, brings passengers to the city, and only one Bee-Line route, the BxM4C, goes to Manhattan. (Judging by the name, I'm guessing that this route is a relic of the express bus routes formerly operated by Liberty Lines, which runs the Bee-Line system under contract to the county. The BxM4A and B, which did not go into Westchester, are now operated by the MTA Bus Company.)

On Long Island, there's one major private bus company, Hampton Jitney, which offers near-hourly service from Manhattan to and from the South Fork, and less-frequent service to the North Fork and Westhampton. Intercity carriers New York Trailways and Coachusa each offer three runs a day from their core areas in the Catskills and Adirondacks through Nanuet, White Plains and Queens Village to Hempstead and other major towns on Long Island. I'm pretty sure that Greyhound offers at least one run a day, but I don't have more details.

Local bus service in Nassau County is provided by Long Island Bus, which is under the MTA umbrella. There is very frequent service on some lines (for example, Hempstead Turnpike sees buses every few minutes at some times), and others not so much. The Town of Huntington is served by Huntington Area Rapid Transit, and the rest of Suffolk County by Suffolk Transit, and both of those are charity bus services.

Coming up, I'll talk about how this dichotomy affects commuting patterns, and what it means for future transit development.

Redundancy, the Northeast Corridor and high-speed rail

An interesting discussion sprouted in the comments to one of Yonah's posts about high-speed rail, concerning how to reproduce the success of the initial Paris-Lyon TGV line. Chris G observed, "The thing with comparing anywhere to Paris Lyon is that that line was build as TGV only after it was already at capacity. Its not that we must have TGV speeds immediately."

The only line in the US that is anywhere near close to capacity is the Northeast Corridor, and Alon Levy wrote, "Everyone, don’t sell the NEC short. The line was operationally profitable until this year, when the recession killed ridership. If it were rebuilt at HSR speeds, it would make Amtrak as a whole profitable, creating a ready source of funding for further HSR construction."

Avi raised two concerns:

Alon, the NEC obviously has the greatest potential for ridership and profit. The problem is the cost to build a true HSR line would be astronomical. You’re talking about buying land and building a new right of way in the densest most expensive region in the country.

The other issue between NY and DC(especially NY and PHL) is there is too much traffic on the tracks. There is Amtrak Acela, Amtrak Regionals, Amtrak Keystones, random other Amtrak trains, NJ Transit express, NJ Transit Local, and Septa.

Avi clearly didn't read my earlier posts about redundancy, or he would know that there are parallel rights-of-way to the Northeast Corridor the entire way from New York to Boston. Some of them have commuter service, some run a few freight trains, but most of them are railbanked.

Eminent domain would only be necessary in cases where curves need to be straightened. The main expenses would be grade crossing elimination, electrification and rebuilding bridges. This is another way that redundancy can be useful: to run high-speed trains, you need dedicated express track. The Northeast Corridor has too many slower trains on it, but fortunately we have the right-of-way for another line.

So where could the Northeast High-Speed 2.0 Train run? From Boston south to New Haven, the best bet would probably be the Air Line, so named because it was almost as straight as an airplane route. The line is intact except for a bridge or two, and currently used as a rail-trail. From New Haven or Middletown the line could continue west on the former New York and New England line to Brewster and south on the Old Putnam line. It's not clear the best way to get it into Penn Station, but this is one of the many reasons why it's frustrating that the new Hudson River tunnel will not connect to Grand Central.

Between Newark and Philadelphia, the train can use the ex-Reading West Trenton Line. From Philadelphia to Baltimore I was a little worried at first, but looking more closely the CSX Philadelphia Division (ex-B&O) is single-track most of the way, and the NEC is only three tracks. There's plenty of room to add capacity. In any case, all of the alternatives are indirect, going through Lancaster, Harrisburg, York or Reading, PA, but some of the freight traffic could be shifted to those routes if necessary.

Going through Baltimore would probably be a headache, but that could potentially be done on the NEC. Between Baltimore and Washington we have three options, as I wrote before: the former Pennsylvania mainline currently used by the Northeast Corridor, the CSX Capitol subdivision used by MARC commuter trains, and the CSX Old Main and Metropolitan subdivisions, partly used by MARC.

The nice thing about these is that since we're serving the same cities, the alternatives could be phased in. I get the impression that the Shore Line is the most saturated section of the Northeast Corridor, but it's also the fastest, and the alternative Air Line is one of the most expensive to reconstruct. The most promising demonstration project would probably be the West Trenton Line. The right-of-way is already there, there is at least one set of tracks, there is some freight traffic but there are parallel routes for it to be diverted to. It also goes between New York and Philadelphia, where there are plenty of people ready to try it out.

Being proactive about the Niantic River Bridge

Following up on last year's replacement of the Thames River Bridge in Connecticut, Amtrak has received $105 million in stimulus funds to replace the Niantic River Bridge a few miles to the west. This is good, and will not only allow Acela trains to go faster, but will avoid slow orders that would be required if the bridge deteriorates further. The new drawbridge will also be taller and longer than the current one, meaning that it will not have to open for boats as often, allowing Amtrak to run more trains.

Unfortunately, as with the Thames bridge, this replacement will probably require Amtrak to shut down the Shore Line again. Last time, after objections from passengers, Amtrak agreed to run an alternate train along the Inland Route - but only one.

Let's see if we can do better this time. Stimulus money is already being used to fix broken cars, so Amtrak will hopefully have more equipment available. It would be nice if some of the money could also be used to upgrade the Inland Route. That would allow them to run more trains, not just for this outage but over the long term, serving more communities and providing needed redundancy.

As I've written before, to bring the Inland Route up to the standards of the Shore Line we need more tracks, electrification and high-level station platforms. As far as I know, the old Hartford line and Boston and Albany line never had electrification or high-level platforms, but they did have two tracks for almost this entire route. As I understand it, the second track on the Hartford line was scrapped some time during the 1980s. Some awesome guy has posted track maps for the B & A showing it as two tracks from Rensselaer all the way to Framingham, and four tracks from there to Boston.

How much would it cost to restore the second track? Fortunately, the Connecticut Department of Transportation has done a study of just that, for the always-just-around-the-corner New Haven to Springfield "commuter train." Bizarrely, although the study documents were online just a couple weeks ago, they now seem to have disappeared. Let's see how much of it I can recall from memory.

Basically, they say that you would get enough of a performance boost from double-tracking part of the line, and they recommended not double-tracking the entire line all the way to Springfield right off the bat. On average, it could be done for about $800,000 per mile. I don't think that includes the switches and signals necessary to make full use of the double tracks, and I'll be damned if I can remember what the total was for that whole section of the line. The shortest single-track section east of Springfield is the one between Springfield and Palmer, only about eight miles. It could be completely upgraded for a lot less than ten million dollars.

For a few million, we could get one additional double-tracked section, which would probably be enough to run two trains a day during the outage and any subsequent outages, and permanently increase capacity on the line. Amtrak is planning to spend $100 million of the stimulus funds on replacing the bridge. They should try and get a few more million for double-tracking the Inland Route. They could either upgrade the Hartford line and save Connecticut a few bucks whenever they get around to upgrading service, or they could upgrade the ex-B & A line between Springfield and Worcester, and although those tracks are owned by CSX as part of their Boston Subdivision, an upgrade would improve the running of Amtrak's Vermonter and the Lake Shore Limited trains.

Either way, we should be spending more to mitigate the impact of this outage, and these would be permanent improvements that would benefit the system in the long run.

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?

Redundancy and the Northeast Corridor

In my last post, I talked about the value of redundancy in transit networks. Connecting this back to our goals, I think this speaks more to the relative value of transit over cars. If you've got a robust transit network (thanks to commenter Most but not all on the last post for that term), you can compete with car networks that strand people if they lose access to their cars. If you have a sickly transit network, like the commuter rail lines that only run during rush hours, you'll lose people to cars whenever it's practical to drive.

One network in need of robustness is the Northeast Corridor train line from Washington, D.C. to Boston. If you want to go from Boston to Washington by train, you have to go through New Haven, New York, Newark, Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore. As we saw with last year's Thames River bridge outage, there is a little bit of redundancy between New Haven and Boston provided by the "Inland Route" through Springfield, but even that is not electrified between Springfield and Framingham (I think), and is single-track for most of that stretch with heavy competition from freight.

I'm less familiar with the Delaware/Maryland area, although Wikipedia says there are three routes from Washington to Baltimore, all in good condition and currently used for passenger rail: the former Pennsylvania mainline currently used by the Northeast Corridor, the CSX Capitol subdivision used by MARC commuter trains, and the CSX Old Main and Metropolitan subdivisions, partly used by MARC. But if anyone has other ideas about pinch points there (and information about the electrification status of any of these lines), feel free to leave them in the comments.

Between Baltimore and New Haven there is simply no alternative to the mainline. Compare this to the Peter Pan buses, which routinely switch between Interstate 95/91 and Interstate 684/84 to get from New York to Hartford, depending on where the traffic flows better. This is not an argument for buses or cars, it's an argument against sickly, non-redundant rail infrastructure. There are tons of pinch points along the Corridor that would completely disable large sections of it. We've seen the Thames River, and I'll mention a few others and how we could get around them.

The first pinch point I want to mention is the Morrisville-Trenton Railroad Bridge over the Delaware River. However, there is a bridge just four miles upstream that is used for electrified SEPTA commuter rail from West Trenton to Philadelphia. The currently-unfunded project to reactivate passenger service from West Trenton to Newark would provide an alternative route for less than $200 million (plus electrification).

The next pinch points are the bridge over the Passaic River in Newark and the Portal Bridge over the Hackensack River in Secaucus. The century-old Portal Bridge is a known weakness and is due to be replaced in the next five years - but because it's so essential, the replacement project will be huge and complicated. There's also the Hell Gate Bridge over the East River.

But let's skip those for the moment and consider the weakest point in the whole corridor: the Hudson River crossing into Penn Station. Even if the ARC tunnel eventually connects to Penn Station (or even Grand Central), you've still got a huge amount of train traffic being routed through Midtown Manhattan. We could even consider the whole stretch from Newark to New Haven as a single, ninety-mile-long weak point. Currently, the nearest place where FRA-compliant trains cross the Hudson (other than the float bridge for freight trains) is Selkirk, NY, a little south of Albany. Passenger trains cross a few miles further up between Rensselaer and Albany.

As I've covered before, there are tentative plans to run commuter rail over the replacement for the Tappan Zee Bridge, but the focus is entirely myopically centered on "commuter rail" connecting the former Erie mainline at Suffern with the Hudson Line at Tarrytown. The (flawed) Tappan Zee process did consider running the line east to connect with the New Haven line in Port Chester, but rejected it because of low commuter ridership projections. The prospect of a more robust Northeast Corridor would bolster the argument for this new line.

I'll end it here for now. There's another idea I'll get to in a later post.

In Praise of Redundancy

My apartment in Queens is close to a subway line, but I also have another subway line and a Long Island Railroad station a short walk away. There are buses as well, that can take me to Manhattan, Brooklyn or other parts of Queens. I can also get to many destinations by bike, or even on foot if I walk long enough. We also have taxis and gypsy cabs and car rental agencies.

This redundancy is important for many reasons. It can allow the system the capacity to deal with heavy demand. If one part of the network breaks down, I can use another. If the MTA needs to upgrade the signals on one line, I can use another. When one union went on strike, I was able to use the buses driven by workers from another union. When massive power failures shut down the subway and the resulting chaos clogged the roads and swamped the buses, I was able to walk home.

Streets in a grid system have redundancy built in to them, which is good for buses, taxis, bikes and pedestrians, but it's only good for car drivers and passengers as long as they have a system to fall back on if their vehicles break down.

When planning for new transportation systems or expanding existing systems, it's important to build in redundancy. In the short run it may seem better to add capacity to existing lines or streets, and in so cases it is. But when the existing lines don't have redundancy, it can be better in the long run to add another line or system.

There are several issues I've come across that relate to redundancy, so I'll be referencing this post in the future. I wanted to lay the groundwork here: redundancy is usually good in the transit world.

Thames River (CT): Thinking long term

In today's New York Times there is an editorial about the railroad bridge over the Thames river which I've discussed previously. The article concerns commuters from New London who would like to ride the train to work but can't, because there are no commuter trains. The State of Connecticut used to run ten Shore Line East trains a day to New London, and they all had to cross the bridge to turn around.

This caused a problem: the Thames River Bridge is a lift bridge which is normally left open to let boat traffic through, so only about forty trains a day can go across. With the growing popularity of the Acela Express, Amtrak customers wanted more trains to Boston, and Amtrak wanted the revenue. In 2003 the State of Connecticut promised Amtrak that it would stop running commuter trains from New London for fifteen years, allowing Amtrak to increase the number of Acela Express runs. In exchange for this, Amtrak agreed to allow Shore Line East customers with monthly tickets to travel on non-Acela trains (see video) to and from New London.

This is a problem that doesn't happen so much in transit-poor parts of the country. Most places are so happy to have any train service that they don't care if it's Amtrak or something else. Of course, not that many of them use it for their daily commutes. Unfortunately, the rates that Amtrak charges for its Northeast Corridor trips is too high for all but the wealthiest to pay for their daily commutes. Rather than pay to maintain or widen the inefficient I-95 bridges, Connecticut wisely chose to support Shore Line East service. While a ticket from New London to New Haven is $14 on an Amtrak Regional train, it's only $8.25 on Shore Line East. Monthly tickets are $360 on Amtrak and $175 on Shore Line East.

However, the agreement only applies to customers with monthly passes. Amtrak will not honor single tickets from New London, meaning that people who don't travel every day, or want to try the new service, have to pay the higher fare. Another big deal is that Amtrak is reservation-only. New London commuters without monthly passes need to go on line or pick up the phone to reserve each day, an added step that would deter regular commuters. If the train is completely booked one day, they can't get on. No train for them.

As the New London Day reports, many potential commuters are discouraged by this practice. This means that there are lots of potential Shore Line East customers who aren't using the service, and instead are most likely commuting by car, contributing to the traffic jams on I-95.

It's great to see the Times and the Day arguing so forcefully for transit. But why such limited vision? All they're asking for is to have Amtrak sell cheap tickets to commuters between New London and points west without reservations.

Meanwhile, there's tremendous demand for shore line service. It was booked solid the day before Thanksgiving this year. That means demand can only grow, and as James RePass of the National Corridors Initiative told the Day, "Shore Line East doesn't need to go to New London. It needs to go to Providence. ... There are tons of people who would like to go from New London to Boston and back." But there's no room to meet this demand. As the articles point out, the need to open the bridge to let boats through means that at most forty trains a day can cross it. That's how many are running now, and if they're all full, and they've all got as many cars as can fit, there's nothing more to add. The line is maxed out.

In transit advocacy, demand is often very ambiguous, so when the Cap'n sees demand, he wants to see it satisfied. Why doesn't anyone at the Times or the Day ask about upgrading the line? It's two tracks between New Haven and Providence; why not make it three or four? Many of the news articles mention that Amtrak is planning to upgrade the other two major bridges, over the Niantic and Pattagansett Rivers, in the next few years. This is the perfect opportunity to add capacity; if it's proposed after the reconstructions are done it would be hard to justify wasting the money that is now being spent. In fact, it's probably too late; they've already upgraded the bridge over the Quinnipiac River.

However, the point of my previous Thames River Bridge post was that there's more than one way to get to Boston. While many of the Amtrak customers on this route are going to Rhode Island or Route 128, a large number are going all the way to Boston, or to points north and west of Boston. If you can provide an alternate route, you can free up space for local passengers along the shore. I'm not the only one to suggest it; posters on the Amtraktrains.com, On Track On Line and Train Orders message boards have proposed running trains on the old Inland Route through Hartford and Springfield, either temporarily or permanently. A poster on the Amtraktrains.com board even suggested using the old Air Line through Willimantic and Putnam.

Of course, there are several challenges to both ideas. The Inland Route is not in very good shape for passengers. One poster from the Train Orders board said that it took him four hours to get from Boston to New Haven in 2003; the current shore line schedule has two hours 25 minutes for Regional trains and two hours five minutes for Acela Express trains. There are many reasons for this, as enumerated by Amtraktrains.com poster Dutchrailnut: "No high level platforms at 90% of stations, no Electrification, single track, to many freights, not properly signalled." Still, it would be a worthy use of federal and Massachusetts money to rebuild the second track, add a third track where feasible to minimize freight conflicts, electrify the line and upgrade the signals and the platforms. Dutchrailnut didn't mention grade crossing eliminations, so I'm hoping that there aren't too many grade crossings to worry about.

The other suggestion was to reactivate the Air Line; several posters mentioned that it was considered for the service that eventually became Acela Express. It's shorter and more direct than the shore line. The challenge there is that it's now a rail-trail, and it would be politically difficult to take that trail away. All of the bridges that were washed out would have to be rebuilt, and possibly some of the viaducts. All of the track between Portland, CT and Franklin, MA would have to be rebuilt, with electrification and signalling. Any stations along the line would have to be rebuilt with high-level platforms. Grade crossings would have to be eliminated. We're talking a lot of money.

Still, I'm sure either of these ideas would be cheaper and less environmentally destructive than ConnDOT's eternal pipe dream of an interstate highway between Manchester and Providence. It doesn't have to be done all at once, either. Here's my suggested progression:

Inland Route:

1. Double-track lines; add diesel local service
2. Add signals and high-level platforms; add more service
3. Electrify line and straighten curves; add through express service
4. Add third track where possible; add more trains

Air Line:

1. Rebuild bridges and viaducts; widen to two-track width and straighten curves where feasible; build trail alongside right-of-way where possible
2. Replace single track with sidings, signals and temporary stations; add minimum diesel passenger and freight service
3. Double-track line and rebuild stations with platforms; add more service
4. Electrify line and eliminate grade crossings; add through service
5. Add third track where possible; add more trains