Tourists don't know where to go when they get off the Staten Island Ferry, so let's make some posters for them! Here's one I made:
And here's one Joby Jacob made:
You can make your own!
Find a picture of the sight on Flickr or Google Images, or create your own. It must be freely distributable - either your own picture or one marked as shareable with Creative Commons.
Find the shortest off-peak travel time to the sight, by bus or Staten Island Railway, from the Ferry terminal, using Google Maps or the bus/SIR schedule.
If the route is by bus, find the ramp where the bus leaves from the ferry terminal in the bottom right inset of the bus map (PDF).
Put the name of the sight, the travel time, the bus route or SIR, the ramp letter and the photo credit over the photo.
If you like, you can credit yourself and add the #SightsOfSI hashtag.
Add your photos to this Google+ album or tweet them with the #SightsOfSI hashtag, and I'll feature the best ones on this blog!
Staten Island is home to beautiful parks, lovely architecture, tasty restaurants and fascinating museums. As Joby Jacob and I recently documented, on a warm sunny day thousands of tourists take the ferry to the island, getting a free harbor cruise. While there, they could grab a quick bite, explore the prewar architecture of the North Shore, or take a short bus ride to the museums of Snug Harbor. Instead, the vast majority catch the next boat back to Manhattan without ever setting foot outside the ferry terminal.
Some tourists play it safe, follow the herd, go where they're told or plan in advance. Those kinds of tourists will require more explicit marketing, which deserves its own post. Other tourists like to explore, and many of them do this already.
Part of the problem is that the design of the ferry terminal and the streets around it discourage exploration. The neighborhood by the ferry terminal, Saint George, is charming and walkable, and has been acknowledged by the New York City Economic Development Corporation as the most promising site for "the kind of vital downtown that has long eluded Staten Island." The terminal and the streets obscure the attractions of the area and make pedestrians feel unwelcome. Since tourists getting off the ferry are pedestrians, the design winds up making tourists feel unwelcome.
The problem begins with the elevation of the main passage of the ferry terminal. While the roof deck has a clear view of some interesting-looking buildings in Saint George, tourists are not guided up there. Instead they are confronted with a series of ramps leading up to bus platforms, a stairway down to the Staten Island Railway, and a stairway marked "Richmond Terrace." None of these provide a view of anything outside the terminal; the line of sight is blocked by stairs and canopies.
Some tourists find their way up the stairs to the walkway. It affords a decent view of Saint George, but it is mostly bare, exposed concrete with a minimal canopy protecting people from the elements. It is very wide right outside the terminal, but narrows to a twenty-foot sidewalk when crossing the SIR tracks before the intersection with Richmond Terrace. Half the width of this sidewalk is currently blocked by construction for the Staten Island Wheel and outlet mall project.
The intersection between the ferry terminal approach and Richmond Terrace is the third part of the problem. The walkway is now just a sidewalk for the Ferry Terminal Viaduct, four two-lane ramps carrying buses, cars, taxis and bikes over the Railway. The intersection is designed for the cars and buses, with slip lanes, recessed crosswalks and lots of extra asphalt. It is confusing and intimidating to pedestrians.
The fourth and final obstacle is the buildings that greet visitors leaving the ferry terminal: Staten Island Borough Hall, the Richmond County Courthouse and the Saint George branch of the New York Public Library. According to my AIA Guide they were all designed by Carrère and Hastings in the early twentieth century. I should rather say that they fail to greet visitors, because they all have turned their backs to the ferry.
On one visit in 2014 I passed a troupe of thespians performing scenes from Shakespeare on the steps of Borough Hall, but this past Saturday Joby and I found the steps deserted, and the courthouse entrance permanently closed (without even any markings to indicate what it was). The handful of shops on the next block of Richmond Terrace were either closed or of no interest to tourists, or both.
A short walk around the corner showed us a different scene. Stuyvesant Place offered a variety of modest but inviting restaurants and shops. The courthouse has a fully functioning door on that side. So does Borough Hall - with parking for the Borough President and various high-level functionaries. The Library still presents a closed door to Stuyvesant Place, but you can walk around the block again and find a welcoming entrance, as well as the new Supreme Court building.
These buildings, shops and restaurants may not be things that every tourist would find interesting, but Joby and I saw a number of tourists who were tempted to stay on Staten Island for more than ten minutes. Many of them made it past the first two obstacles of lack of visibility and the exposed walkway (it was a warm Spring day), only to disappear at the intersection with Richmond Terrace.
I can easily imagine more tourists spending an hour or two in Saint George, New Brighton and Tompkinsville. We saw a number of storefronts that were either empty or closed on Saturday. It wouldn't take many more tourists to support a few more cafes and shops, which would in turn bring more tourists.
It would cost a lot to reconfigure the terminal so that arriving passengers can see the way to Saint George. It might not be worth spending that much right now, but we should talk about that when it comes time to redo the terminal for other reasons.
The walkway from the terminal to Richmond Terrace needs to be wider for its entire length, so that tourists never feel like second-class citizens, even if they are on foot on Staten Island. It needs to be better protected from sun, rain and wind, but also to be more interesting for tourists. A few signs advertising nearby attractions and businesses would help, but the city could also grant permits for vendors and buskers in the wider parts.
The intersection where the terminal viaduct meets Richmond Terrace needs to be reconfigured to be more welcoming to pedestrians. This is the kind of thing the DOT has done all over the other boroughs. They know how.
Finally, the institutions of Richmond Terrace - Borough Hall, the Courthouse, the Library and even the Post Office - need to turn around and welcome tourists. The Shakespeare performance I saw was a nice start, but the borough could do a lot more with that plaza. What about a Bryant Park-like cafe? Or the Supreme Court could rent the space inside its east facade to the Staten Island Museum, which is a block north on Stuyvesant Place.
Saint George is a pretty, walkable neighborhood just steps from the ferry. There is no good reason for eighty to ninety percent of people who arrive in the ferry to turn right around without leaving the terminal.
Staten Island offers lovely architecture, beautiful parks and fascinating museums. Thousands of tourists set foot on the island on warm sunny days. But as Joby Jacob and I discovered yesterday, there's a problem...
People seem to be captivated by the unused stretch of the Staten Island Railroad along the North Shore of the island. It makes sense to do something with it, because it's the part of Staten Island with the poorest population and the lowest car ownership. But the whole discussion is pathetic, ranging from the sorta reasonable (restore the Staten Island Railroad passenger service to Arlington) to the mildly faddish (light rail!) to the moronic (bus rapid transit!). For some reason, people love the idea of extending the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail over the Bayonne Bridge and connecting it to either the North Shore line or the West Shore line.
Hardly anyone looks west across the Arthur Kill to Elizabeth. That makes some sense, because I'm guessing that most of the people who are commuting outside the borough are going to jobs in Manhattan. But it's short-sighted, because it ignores the fact that there's a railroad bridge that was restored to full functionality in 2007.
Back in 2008 I talked about running the trains to connect to the Northeast Corridor in Elizabeth or Newark, but then you're still only in Elizabeth or Newark and you have to change trains. Fortunately, there's another train to connect to, and a right-of-way with plenty of room to connect them.
Right now there are PATH trains from 33rd Street to Hoboken, from the World Trade Center to Hoboken, and from the World Trade Center to Newark. But the train from 33rd Street west stops at Journal Square, presumably because there isn't enough ridership to run the trains all the way to Newark.
This train can be extended to Staten Island - or else it can be extended to Newark, and the trains from the World Trade Center can be extended to Staten Island. How would they get there? On the Chemical Coast.
The Chemical Coast Line is a freight railroad with a wonderfully evocative name, originally part of the Central Railroad of New Jersey. Like the Arthur Kill Lift Bridge, it is lightly used. We wouldn't want the PATH trains to share tracks with chemical tank cars, but there is plenty of room in the right-of-way and on adjacent properties for two tracks of dedicated passenger service.
The single-track Arthur Kill Lift Bridge sees three freight trains a day. The main concern is how often the bridge would need to be raised to allow ships to pass under it. The current PATH train to Newark runs every four minutes during rush hours and every fifteen minutes off-peak.
The key is that the trains would go express for the nine miles from Journal Square to the Jersey Gardens Mall in Elizabethport, just like they currently do for the five miles from Journal Square to Harrison. Given that it takes 25 minutes to get from the World Trade Center to Newark, it would probably take at most 35 to get to Elizabethport, and under an hour to Saint George. Compare that to the time it takes to ride a bus to the ferry and walk to the office, or to sit in an express bus on the Gowanus Expressway.
In terms of capital costs, we're talking about rebuilding the North Shore rail line and making it flood-resistant - part of it washed away during Hurricane Sandy. Then we would probably have to build a new connection with the Chemical Coast line and run new track up to Port Newark. From Newark we would probably have to build some new track, a new bridge over the Passaic River and a new junction with the existing PATH line. I don't know how much all that would cost, but could it be more than the billion and a half that the Port Authority wants to spend on the useless extension to Newark Airport?
On my post about Staten Island, chrismealy commented that we could trade it for Bergen Neck, the peninsula in New Jersey just north of it. This is actually something I've been thinking about for years.
I've called Hudson County "the fifth borough" because Staten Island is so unlike the other boroughs. There's no real good reason why the Arthur Kill is the boundary between New York and New Jersey, rather than the Narrows. It's just a historical accident.
Jersey City, Hoboken and Weehawken share more history with Manhattan than Staten Island, and better transportation links. Development patterns in Hoboken resemble those in Greenwich Village, and those in North Bergen resemble Astoria. From the map above, it looks like car ownership is higher in Hudson County, but that may be misleading. I can't get census data below the municipality level, and there's probably a big difference between car ownership in Journal Square versus Greenville.
Or we could even just let Staten Island secede without any new territory. You could argue that we should preserve the differences in transportation regulations between New Jersey and New York that have shown us that private transit can work in the US if you regulate it right. That's the kind of argument that Chuck Marohn has been making on StrongTowns, and it makes sense to me. We shouldn't say no to annexing Hudson County, but I don't think we need it.
New York without Staten Island means two or three less car-obsessed City Council members. It means one less car-loving state senator, and four less assemblymembers, and that may be the biggest reason that the legislature voted against it when Staten Island voted to secede in 1993.
Letting Staten Island secede would probably mean transferring the Verrazano Bridge to the Port Authority. That would mean less toll revenue for the subways, but also a lot less of our city and state transportation money going to Staten Island's roads and bridges.
Really, though, it's not worth the effort to kick Staten Island out of the city. If they want to go, we should let them. But if they want to be part of the city, I'm okay with that. I just wish they'd start acting - and voting - like it.
This summer I went to Staten Island for the first time in several years. There are some things I like about it, but I don't go there very often because it's hard to get there and I don't feel welcome when I do. I feel similarly about North Carolina, but it's harder to ignore Staten Island. With mayoral candidate Joe Lhota floating the idea of moving the Transportation Department headquarters there, the need to say something about the place is even more urgent. Ben Kabak said his piece this morning, and it got me thinking.
I know there are lots of nice people who live on Staten Island, including some regular readers of this blog. There are many who want it to be a place where you can walk, bike and take transit, and some who are even working to make that happen. I'm glad you're out there and I salute you for your work. But your borough is a problem.
Even more than other suburbs, Staten Island affects those of us who live in the rest of the city. Its residents spend a lot of time driving through Brooklyn, Manhattan and even Queens. They constantly feel slighted by Manhattan politicians and demand that the city and state spend money there. They also demand lots of subsidized services, like low tolls on the Verrazano Bridge.
Most dangerously, as a large bloc of middle-class white voters, the South and West Shores of the island wield disproportionate influence, and use that to get some of their demands. They are an indispensable part of any center or right-wing political campaign, proving particularly valuable to Rudy Giuliani and Christine Quinn. Politicians frequently pander to the agenda of the island's car owners, and the island's representatives on the City Council and state legislature frequently work with representatives from the eastern Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens to oppose progressive transportation efforts.
For some perspective, let's imagine that in the twenties, instead of building the Bayonne and Goethals bridges and the Outerbridge Crossing, the Port Authority had put in double-track high-level railroad connections, upgrading the Arthur Kill lift bridge and building a northbound connection to Bayonne and connecting to the Lehigh Valley line at Perth Amboy. Imagine if in the sixties, instead of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority building the Verrazano Bridge, the Board of Transportation had dug tunnels? Not a parochial local tunnel to Bay Ridge, but a connection between the Long Island Railroad and the national network, plus a high-speed tunnel under the harbor directly to Lower Manhattan? Imagine if they had extended the trolley network (see the map above) to cover the whole island?
You'd have a place that was easy to get to by train, but difficult by car. Instead we got the opposite: the most car-dominated of the five boroughs.
That time is past. The question is, what would help us fulfill our goals (see the top of the page)? What should we do about Staten Island?
Three of the reasons that are most commonly cited for rebuilding the Tappan Zee Bridge are the current bridge's narrow lanes, no shoulders and high maintenance costs. But what if, instead of paying five billion dollars to replace it, we could get rid of those problems for a few million? Better yet, what if we could avoid them altogether? Fortunately, that's exactly where we are with the Verrazano Bridge.
The Tappan Zee Bridge used to have wider lanes until 1990, when the six existing lanes were squeezed to make room for a seventh. I don't have crash rates going back that far, but if the bridge builders say that the crash rates are due to narrow lanes, then presumably they were lower before. I also haven't been able to find a breakdown of the maintenance costs, but I'm sure the increased wear and tear from 30,000 more car and truck crossings every day has contributed to the increase. I'm also very curious to know how much it costs to run a machine across the bridge every day moving the barrier from one side of the bridge to the other.
As I've argued before, if we want to stop the carnage and save money, why not get rid of the reversible lane and its expensive machinery and widen the lanes again? Furthermore, can we acknowledge that the reversible seventh lane was a bad idea, and shouldn't be done again? Apparently not. Governor Cuomo has decided to build a new bridge, and he and his Thruway and DOT appointees will ignore any proposal to solve these problems that does not involve a new bridge.
That brings us to the Verrazano Bridge, where Cuomo's MTA is proposing to do exactly the same thing, as reported by Ted Mann in today's Wall Street Journal. In twenty years, will we be hearing that this bridge also has high maintenance costs? Will there be a push to replace it with a bigger bridge because it has "an accident rate double the rest of the system"? How much will the Governor want from our tax dollars when that time comes?
When I first heard about this plan for the Verrazano, I was pleased at the prospect of an HOV lane to speed buses from Staten Island to Manhattan. My first thought was, "yeah, they should extend it all the way through the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel and up Church Street." But there's a big difference between taking an existing car lane for transit, building a new greenfield, elevated or tunnel transit right-of-way, and shoehorning a new lane into an existing road. With the shoehorn approach comes increased carnage and operating expenses. Given the Cuomo Administration's record of "peeing on our backs and telling us it's raining," and the State DOT's history of this tactic on many roads under multiple governors, we can expect that this will mean new showers in the future.
We have to ask ourselves whether the increased capacity offered by an HOV lane (not a dedicated busway) is worth this tremendous cost, in money and in lives. Staten Island leaders should recognize that it will be much safer and cheaper if the MTA takes a lane for the busway, and that a lot more of their constituents will get to work in comfort with a busway than without one.
Streetsblog is reporting that the New York City Economic Development Corporation is trying to build a "vibrant downtown" next to the ferry terminal at Saint George on Staten Island, but undermining that goal by swamping it with parking.
Yet EDC wants the island’s transit center and would-be downtown to make room for a sea of parking, which will draw more traffic to the neighborhood streets, eat up space that could be used for housing or offices, and degrade the pedestrian environment. At this stage in the development process, it’s not clear exactly how many spaces the new development might contain. But all the spaces in the enormous surface parking lots would have to replaced one for one, ensuring at least a full floor of parking almost by definition. On top of that, EDC expects that additional parking be provided for all "the expected demand produced by the proposed development." With 14 acres up for development, that could be quite a lot of spaces indeed.
First I want to point out that this much parking will also drive up the cost to build the development. It will reduce the profitability of the development, and thus drive up the cost to the city.
This is not surprising for the EDC, which has a record of overbuilding parking, as documented by Streetsblog. One anonymous commenter attributed the parking appeasement to EDC President Seth Pinsky and City Planning Director Amanda Burden, and called on Bloomberg to override them. But to give them some credit, the EDC has facilitated the parking-neutral Fordham Plaza redesign and the parking-negative Queens Plaza project. Noah Kazis points out that it may be the Mayor himself who is trying to appease the parking dragon: "The potential to develop these sites while maintaining the availability of parking," he said, "combined with projects at the Homeport, Howland Hook, and at the Ferry Terminal – will be a catalyst for the further revitalization of the North Shore, as well as the entire island."
Whether this comes from the EDC or Bloomberg, if livable streets advocates could get the EDC to reduce the number of planned parking spaces, it is not clear that Staten Island politicians would be happy about that. Think about the Flushing Commons plan, where the developer wanted to build a relatively sensible number of parking spaces, but was met with fierce resistance from the area's business and political elite. The EDC and the City Council then put in money to build more parking.
Any effort to reduce the amount of parking at Saint George needs to either go through the local business and political establishments (Kenneth Mitchell in the Council, Matthew Titone in the Assembly and Diane Savino in the Senate), or else to be done with such force as to crush the opposition. Good luck on either of those.
Oh, and the less parking you have at Saint George, the higher ridership will be on the buses that go there, and the lower the subsidy they require.
Commenter and occasional contributor George K has pointed out something that the Department of Transportation's bus planners seem to have missed: it's not just Manhattan and Queens. Thousands of commuters from Staten Island also ride buses that use the 34th Street bus lanes.
Route
Daily Trips
Operator
Crossing
Major corridor
Neighborhood
Council district(s)
X17J
1893
MTA
Lincoln Tunnel
Huguenot Avenue
Huguenot
50, 51
X22
1830
MTA
Lincoln Tunnel
Forest Avenue
West New Brighton
49
X23/X24/AE7
1899
Atlantic Express
Lincoln Tunnel
Woodrow Road
Woodrow
51
X31
740
MTA
Brooklyn Battery Tunnel
Forest Hill Road
New Springville
50
Total
6362
The total ridership for all branches of the X17 was 5680; I estimated that one third of that is the X17J. Atlantic Express did not publish any ridership figures like the MTA, but their 2006 filing in the National Transit Database (PDF) lists 693,076 unlinked trips for the year. George suggests that the X30, which brings 840 people to 42nd Street, could also use 34th Street, bringing the total number of trips to 7,202.
That means that Councilmember Ignizio from the South Shore has 2,846 34th Street bus trips from his district, almost as many as Dan Halloran does. Mitchell from the North Shore has 1,830, slightly less than Ulrich, and Oddo from the center has 1,682, a few more than Crowley. The grand total is over 42,200 bus trips using the bus lanes every day.
I've heard that some people in Queens are starting to contact their City Council members. If we can get the Staten Island delegation on board, it will be that much more of the city in favor of this project.
Back in March, Streetsblog reported that of the $143 million that the State Legislature cut from the MTA budget last year, $118 million was actually from taxes that are "dedicated" to the MTA. The legislature engaged in some "creative accounting" and managed to un-dedicate them. You would think that this would be gravy for anyone who wanted to challenge an incumbent this fall, but many of the challengers are staying away from it. In large part this is because Democrats running in primary elections are often seeking endorsements from other incumbent state legislators who voted for this deal.
Republicans are under no such constraints, and one of them has finally taken advantage of this. Staten Island express bus rider Nicole Malliotakis is challenging incumbent Janele Hyer-Spencer to represent the 60th Assembly district (PDF) that covers a chunk of Bay Ridge and the South Shore of Staten Island. Staten Island is in an interesting position with respect to congestion pricing: they already pay a bridge toll, so the 5.9% of District 60 residents who drive to Manhattan on weekdays would not have had to pay any more under Bloomberg's plan. Despite that, as Ben Kabak writes, she campaigned against congestion pricing, the Ravitch plan and bus lane enforcement cameras, and still had the gall to organize a "rally" against the MTA.
A month ago, while announcing her candidacy at a B37 bus stop, Malliotakis and Senator Marty Golden slammed Hyer-Spencer for her actions. Two weeks ago, Malliotakis reiterated the argument in an interview with the Staten Island Advance.
Malliotakis got Hyer-Spencer to embarrass herself with the absurd claim that "You have to be able to understand the technical nuances of these agencies," which the Advance mocked in an editorial the following day. She followed this up with a letter to the editor that appeared on Saturday. Yesterday the Advance's Tom Wrobleski pointed out the central failing of democracy in the Albany system: nobody knew what they were voting for; they just trusted Shelly Silver that it would work out for them.
In the Advance article, Hyer-Spencer pointed out a flaw in Malliotakis's logic: her mentor, Marty Golden, voted for the same budget. I'll go Hyer-Spencer one further and observe that during the negotiations on the Ravitch plan, Golden could have worked with progressive Democrats to establish a grand coalition in favor of rational pricing to balance out the massive driving subsidies that put bus riders at a disadvantage. That would have neutralized the power held by the Fare Hike Four as the most conservative and power-hungry members of the Democrats' slim majority. Instead, Golden decided to sit on his hands and let the Senate defund the MTA, betting that the Democrats' foolishness would bring his party back to power next year.
We can go even further than that. Malliotakis's big qualification is that she worked as the constituent liaison to the area for Governor Pataki, but of course Pataki was responsible for some of the worst cuts to the MTA budget - with the help of the Assembly Democrats and Senate Republicans, of course. It's kind of hard to portray yourself as a Pataki protege and a transit supporter at the same time.
Of course, that's the problem with big-party politics in New York State: it really helps to have endorsements, but some of the most powerful politicians on both sides are so anti-transit that it's hard not to kiss up to at least one troglodyte. If Malliotakis had decided to run as a Democrat and challenge Hyer-Spencer in the primary, who could she have gone to for an endorsement? Vincent Gentile? Lew Fidler? Carl Kruger?
So Malliotakis takes who's available and goes with it. She didn't have to choose this issue to attack Hyer-Spencer on, but she did. Hyer-Spencer voted for same-sex marriage and GENDA, and replacing her with a typical Republican would be a setback for those issues, but Malliotakis probably wouldn't be a typical Republican in the Assembly. In 2002 she interviewed Chazz Bono, the child of Sonny and Cher, who was then out as a lesbian and has since transitioned to life as a man, and was very sympathetic about Bono's relationships with women. She seems like much more of a libertarian. I wouldn't be surprised if her outrage about the Assembly's thievery is genuine.
For the Republicans, though, it looks like their strategy of letting the Democrats embarrass themselves and then moving in to take over is backfiring. The Capitol is reporting that their campaigns are having a much worse time than expected.
I am not a Republican, but let me suggest an alternative strategy for Golden and other Republicans who want to regain power in the state. How about actually leading? How about thinking of the interests of the entire state, not just your own party and its members?
If Marty Golden, or Brian Kolb, want to help New Yorkers get to work, they can reach across the aisle to Tom Duane and Dick Gottfried and find a way to toll the bridges. They could even appease their Republican base by bringing in some private companies to run transit, as long as they do it right. People remember that Pedro Espada came up with a crappy plan that fell apart a few months later. If Golden came up with a good plan that stuck, I think people would remember that too.
Maybe Golden will pass up the chance to be a grownup on this issue, preferring to play power politics. Maybe Malliotakis will wind up being the adult.
Image: Port Authority As I wrote before, our government plans to spend over $2.4 billion in road projects over the next several years: $500 million to rebuild the Brooklyn Bridge, $700 million to rebuild the Kosciuszko Bridge, $1 billion to rebuild the Goethals Bridge and $250 million to rebuild the BQE just south of the Brooklyn Bridge in Carroll Gardens. Of this, only the Goethals replacement will be paid for by tolls.
Or will it? Today, the Tri-State Transportation Campaign tweeted a link to an article in the Staten Island Advance that tells us that the Port Authority has issued a request for proposals (PDF) for a public-private partnership to reconstruct the bridge.
This $1 billion project is also going to add a "managed use" lane to the bridge in each direction, either a high-occupancy vehicle or bus-only lane. This would bring the total number of lanes from four to six, adding capacity for 1600 more vehicles per hour to cross onto Staten Island in each direction. Believe it or not, this is actually a huge victory by Tri-State and Staten Island groups over the previous proposals that called for eight or more unrestricted lanes. There are also plans to reserve space for a "future transit corridor" that could carry light rail or buses (probably not subways or commuter rail, with that kind of grade). Finally, the current hair-raising three-foot-wide bicycle/pedestrian path that is never open would be replaced with a ten-foot path separated from speeding traffic by a generous shoulder.
Apparently the Port Authority, no longer a cash cow, has spent too much money on the World Trade Center and the ARC Tunnel and doesn't have any to lay out for the bridge. They want a private investor to design and build the bridge, and then maintain it for the next thirty to forty years. The company would lend a bunch of money to the Port Authority, which the authority would presumably invest somewhere, and then pay back to the company in periodic installments to cover the cost of design and construction. It would also pay installments for maintenance over the 30-40 year term of the agreement.
The request is confusing, because it refers to a "Construction Lump Sum" and a "Maintenance Lump Sum," and I thought that a lump sum was the opposite of installments, but maybe it refers to the fact that the amounts are agreed on beforehand. In any case, let's run this through Melissa Thomasson's ideas about the benefits of the public and private sectors:
Markets are usually really good at controlling costs. When they work best, products come into existence, like cell phones or stockings. They start expensive, and then they get cheaper and better. But markets don't guarantee that everyone can afford the things they need. Government can be good at that, ensuring universal access. But when you're paying for everybody, it's hard to control costs.
In this case, there will be no market beyond the initial bidding process, so don't expect too much cost containment. There will also not be the advantage of flexibility that come with entrepreneurship, because the entire process will be subject to an agreement negotiated between the winning bidder and the Port Authority.
The main thing that the Port Authority would get from the deal is that it wouldn't have to issue bonds to pay the upfront costs. It would also shift the risk of cost overruns and unexpected maintenance expenses onto the company. In exchange, the company would get interest on the loan, which the authority would presumably pay for out of tolls.
Eliot Brown at the Observer has an analysis pointing to some potential problems. The private partner may want a lot of money to cover the risk and the costs of borrowing, and while they would have an incentive to build something that would last thirty to forty years, they would have very little incentive to build anything that would last longer.
What Brown doesn't mention is that shifting the risk is not always successful. If the investors feel that they're not making enough money on the deal, they can default, leaving the Port Authority responsible for cleaning up whatever mess they make.
Essentially, this is like a teenage boy who wants to buy a car but can't get a loan on his own credit. He asks his parents to cosign the loan. Instead of an obligation to visit them when he might not otherwise feel like it, the Port Authority is just paying extra interest.
Now about this extra interest. The Advance says, "Borough President James Molinaro said an investor could stand to make a decent profit on the arrangement, which he said he would support." Well, that's nice, but it means that more than a billion dollars of toll revenue will be spent on this, money that might otherwise be available to subsidize PATH trains or the bus terminals.
What would happen if the Port Authority couldn't find a bidder? According to the Advance, "If no one comes forward to fund the project, the Port Authority will maintain the existing bridge, and Islanders will be stuck with its deteriorating roadway, dangerously narrow lanes and heavy traffic for the foreseeable future, until the economy rebounds or an alternate funding source is found."
The existing Goethals bridge is a pretty scary and dysfunctional thing, and the proposed new one would be safer for all and friendlier to pedestrians and cyclists, and have the promise of a new transit corridor some day. However, it would add up to 1600 more vehicles per hour to the roads of Staten Island and Brooklyn. And it would take a billion dollars out of the Port Authority budget, and it still runs the risk of a bankrupt partner dumping a financial mess in the authority's lap.
This bridge replacement should probably be done at some point. It's not quite as horrible as the Tappan Zee bait-and-switch, or the Kosciuszko that has no transit component. But this is not the time. The Port Authority should wait until it can raise the funds through public means, either by its own bonds or with federal money. It has already spread itself too thin, and we can ill afford to see it collapse and take our PATH trains and bus terminals with it.
Some anti-van activists, like Roe Daraio and the Queens Crapper argue that private jitneys "have long poached fares" from the MTA and thus cutting into their revenue.
In his 1985 article about private commuter vans and public express buses, Jay Walder wrote:
the express buses are not only losing money as a whole, but also on a route-by-route basis. Hence, rather than harming the express service, or "skimming the cream" off its routes, the private vans are actually helping to reduce the city's transit deficit.
I wish I could just leave it at that. No poaching, no skimming. Jay Walder said so! Sadly, his argument doesn't apply here. In his study, the vans could save the MTA money because the MTA would eliminate unprofitable routes and leave the field to the jitneys.
In practice, the MTA has continued to run all the unprofitable lines that Walder identified twenty years ago. The amount they have spent to run these buses every year has increased (from $13 million to $20 million), and they have added more routes (for a total cost of $38 million).
I found it interesting that Walder was so surprised to find the Staten Island express buses losing money. Today it is almost an article of faith among transit advocates that no route earns enough at the farebox to cover its operating expenses, let alone capital costs. This is actually not true across the board: there are routes within the MTA, and entire independent companies, that make an operating profit. Some even make an overall profit. But the vast majority of bus agencies are heavily subsidized, a fact that many advocates use to counter accusations that a particular route or agency is "losing money."
In 1985, though, Walder wrote, "Contrary to general perception, NYCTA express buses are operating at a loss, with a deficit estimated at $4.7 million per year, or 85 cents per passenger." Clearly, not only were the NYC Transit express buses expected to earn enough profit to cross-subsidize the local service, but everyone else thought that that was actually happening.
The fact that these losses weren't openly acknowledged or widely discussed when found, well, I don't know what to think. But leaving the field to the private jitneys was only feasible if Walder's other recommendations were followed. That probably has something to do with it.
Your Cap'n can be an arrogant sumbitch, but I'm not so arrogant that I believe I'm the first one to think of everything. And with jitneys, I'm not. It turns out that in 1983 New York's commuter vans were the subject of a study at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government by a 24-year-old master's student named Jay Walder.
Walder focused specifically on express van service on Staten Island. He summarized his findings in an article that was published two years later, when he was already working for the MTA Capital Program. He came to five conclusions, as follows:
1. "The vans are not siphoning off revenue from the NYCTA express bus system."
2. "Commuter vans do not have to sacrifice public safety."
3. "The vans were found to have a negative impact on traffic patterns... This problem may be alleviated to some extent by increased use of contra-flow express lanes on connecting highways."
4. "The city could best respond to the commuter vans in a cooperative atmosphere."
5. "The city should reexamine its role in providing express bus service."
Some of these points are no longer valid after twenty-five years, and others were based on inaccurate assumptions and never were quite valid. But the general thrust, expressed most clearly in conclusion 4 - privately owned mass transit is not a threat to be defended against at all cost - is still valid, and it's nice to see that Walder is the kind of person who's open to such ideas. When he worked at Transport for London, he dealt with the privatized system there, so he probably knows as much about private mass transit as anyone who might wind up running the MTA. It'll be interesting to see what he manages to accomplish. I sure hope he doesn't wind up getting thrown to the wolves like Lee Sander.
Staten Island has a rail line, but it used to have three. In addition, the Bayonne Bridge was built to handle light rail, a capacity that has never been used. There's fairly broad support for reactivating passenger service on the North Shore and West Shore Lines. So far, so good.
What bugs me is that they keep talking about "light rail." It's in the PlaNYC 2030 documentation, and in a Staten Island Advance article discussing a grant won by Senators Schumer and Clinton (one of the few things that those two have gone out of their way to do for transit).
The original rail lines, described in loving detail in this article in The Third Rail, were heavy rail, though. Saint George was the New York terminus for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Long-distance and commuter passenger trains, and freight trains, came from New Jersey over the Arthur Kill Bridge and the North Shore Line to the ferry at Saint George. You would expect the proposal to be for either commuter rail like the Metro-North Penn Station Access project, or metrorail like the TriboroRX proposal. But no, it's all light rail, light rail, light rail. There doesn't seem to be any justification for preferring light rail over any of the other potential modes.
There are two explanations I can think of. The practical one is that New Jersey Transit's Hudson-Bergen Light Rail could go across the Bayonne Bridge, but what would it connect to? Probably the West Shore line, so that should be light rail. But why the North Shore Line as well? Hm, maybe energy efficiency? Staten Island is considered to be too sprawly to support commuter or metro rail (and everyone conveniently forget about the SIRT), so we shouldn't put heavy locomotives on those lines?
Mainly, though, I think it's a fad. Light rail is a buzzword that's been going around. All the cool cities are doing it. New Jersey's got one. The only thing cooler would be if we had one of those BRT things that the kids are always talking about.
Fads are not a good reason to choose a transit mode. The residents of Staten Island are going to be using this thing for years to come. This would be like the subway cars that still have the fake wood laminate - don't you love being saddled with what someone thought was cutting edge in the 70s? - except that it would actually matter in terms of speed and connections.
Staten Island is the borough closest to the west side of the Hudson, and has the potential to be closely connected with the continental rail infrastructure. Right now to get a train to Philadelphia you have to take a bus or train to the ferry, then a subway uptown to Penn Station. With a connection to the Hudson-Bergen light rail, you could get to Hoboken or Journal Square and then get a train to Newark and another to Philadelphia.
Meanwhile, with the North Shore line revived as heavy rail, you could get a commuter train directly to Elizabeth, Newark - or even West Trenton and Philadelphia. From a commuter point of view, you could connect to the Northeast Corridor at Elizabeth and transfer at Newark to a train to Penn Station. You could get to some of the many jobs in New Jersey.
We're still doing the studies. I think we'll find that light rail makes sense for the West Shore line, but heavy rail for the North Shore Line. But why don't we do them without making up our minds ahead of time about the mode?
