The challenge of curbside transit lanes

Back in May I argued that we should be talking about improving surface transit even for avenues with subways or els, for three reasons. First, it can help calm speeding personal cars and trucks. Second, it can provide local hop-on, hop-off service, which is especially valuable to people who have difficulty walking or climbing stairs. Third, especially with New York’s high construction costs and deference to NIMBYs, it can accommodate increases in demand in much less time than building a subway or el.

Photo: islandjoe / Wikimedia

A couple of weeks ago Sandy Johnston tweeted a great picture from Lisbon to illustrate that street-level transit does not need huge boulevards; the minimum width is not much more than the width of the vehicle. Of course, for it to be rapid transit the route has to be unimpeded by private vehicles, but we could never get a useful network if we only built transitways on our widest boulevards.

The city does have an extensive network of hundred foot avenues, and we can have a decent surface-level rapid transit network once we find reliable ways of making transit rapid within a hundred feet. So what arrangement of road space would do the most to discourage single-occupant driving while still allowing people to get to work and shopping, and to receive and ship things? I’ll talk in future posts about what has worked in the past and what might work in the future, but today I need to talk about a couple of things that don’t work.

The Department of Transportation originally proposed banning vehicles other than transit on Thirty-Fourth Street. That can work; I’ve seen it work on Fulton Street in Brooklyn and yes, on State Street in Chicago. But it only works if businesses can still receive deliveries. I’m not sure what they do in Brooklyn, but I know in Chicago they have alleys. I’ve read promising things about deliveries by trolley and bicycle, but until those are closer let’s plan for some private vehicles, especially on wider avenues.

The Department of Transportation has tried reserving the entire curbside lane for buses on avenues like Second Avenue and 34th Street, with unsatisfying results. To begin with there’s always a major outcry from residents and business owners, who are used to having the curbside lane for turning, unloading and customer parking - and more often than not, parking for residents and business owners.

Good thing that bus lane is there to ensure the speedy travel of new yorkers pic.twitter.com/w7nvTyLGbj

— eric goldwyn (@ericgoldwyn) August 21, 2017

The city has compromised on this issue in a very counterproductive way, by suspending the bus lanes to allow private loading and even parking during middays, nights and weekends, and allowing turning and passenger dropoffs at all times. But they still painted the lane red, teaching drivers that the lanes don’t really matter and making things harder for an already uninterested NYPD.

I’m not entirely sympathetic: it’s been shown that for businesses in walkable neighborhoods in New York, the majority of customers arrive on foot, by bus or by train. The guy who gets his Goya beans delivered to his apartment on 34th Street can have them wheeled around the corner on a handtruck. But as I wrote a few years ago, a lane for parking suits our goals better than a lane for moving cars. If we have a hundred feet to work with, minus sidewalk and transit lanes, I’d rather fill the rest of the space with a traffic lane and a parking/loading lane than two traffic lanes.

Curbside bus lanes can work fairly well in places like the west side of Fifth Avenue where there are no businesses and relatively few turns - although even that lane would benefit from better enforcement. On avenues with businesses and intersections, it’s not the best approach. I’ll talk about other possibilities in future posts.

The Montauk Branch should go to Queens Plaza

I was pleased to see that Councilmember Elizabeth Crowley has come out in favor of restoring passenger service on the west end of the Long Island Rail Road's Montauk Branch, which actually goes from Jamaica to Long Island City. I took a Long Island Rail Road train along this once, years ago, when they still ran passenger trains. It was pointless except for a railfan experience: there was one train a day in each direction, and it went nonstop to Jamaica.

I'm not sure how light rail would coexist with the freight trains that still use the Branch, but with the Federal Railroad Administration making it easier to run lighter trains, there should be some relatively cost-effective way to run frequent service along the line, not only to the Atlas Park Mall in Glendale, but to Fresh Pond Road in Ridgewood, Forest View Crescent, Forest Park, and Hillside Avenue in Richmond Hill.

There is one change that I would strongly recommend at the western end that would make a huge difference in the value of the line. The old passenger service terminated at the old Long Island City station in Hunter's Point, which was once really convenient when it was served by frequent, massive ferries to Manhattan. Now it is a relatively long walk to the East River Ferry, which runs every twenty minutes, or a similarly long walk to the #7 train at Vernon Boulevard and Jackson Avenue, which is crowded at rush hour. You could move the station closer to Vernon-Jackson, but then it would be further from the ferry, and vice versa.

Instead of using the old Long Island City terminus, the passenger trains should use an existing flyover that crosses the Sunnyside Yards. This part of the Yards is currently being used as a staging area for the East Side Access project. There is room to build a two-track line along the north side of the Yards, terminating at a new station under Queens Boulevard. This would bring passengers one short block from the Queens Plaza subway station where they could change for the E, M or R trains.

For a light rail train, it might be possible to build another stop at Pearson Street, a block from Court Square. Depending on what gets built along Northern Boulevard, it might also be possible to extend the train east to 48th Street, Woodside Avenue or even Broadway. But regardless, the line should go to Queens Plaza. It would give residents of Ridgewood and Glendale better access to jobs and better connections to Manhattan.

The return of the mixed-traffic streetcar

I wrote before that mixed-traffic streetcars no longer make sense in this country, because whenever a corridor has enough walkable destinations to support the service, it attracts too many private cars. Those cars slow down the streetcar so much that it no longer provides enough value to draw passengers. There is a way to make them work, however: drive the cars away.

Trolleys in Times Square, 1920s. AP via NPR.

Drivers are currently drawn to Manhattan under today's heavy subsidy levels, but if the subsidies are decreased it will attract less drivers. Cordon pricing is the most obvious way to do this, but it could also be accomplished with high enough prices on parking or fuel.

Imagine Manhattan one day in the Future. As it did a century ago, a streetcar again connects Greenwich Village with Soho, Chinatown, Tribeca and the Financial District along Wooster Street and University Place. It runs smoothly and quickly, even at the height of rush hour or the hottest club time on Saturday night. The reason is that, thanks a combination of bridge tolls, parking pricing and ten dollar a gallon gas, nobody wants to be driving. There are cars on the streets, but never enough to slow down the trolley.

That's the kind of environment where a mixed-traffic streetcar can work. Without something to keep private cars out of the way, streetcars are just buses with a smoother ride.

Imagining desire lines

You've seen them: lines where the grass is worn down, the evidence that enough people have walked a particular route as to kill the grass. They are called "desire lines" by landscape architects, and they are used to decide where to put new concrete or gravel paths.

This is a real desire line, showing the demand for an extension of the Motor Parkway to Glen Oaks. Click here to find out more.

The key point is that these bottom-up paths represent the desires of the people - the users of the space - in contrast with the top-down concrete paths that represent the desires of the planners and architects. The use of desire lines is an acknowledgment that sometimes the “wisdom of the crowds” – the aggregate of thousands of decisions made by hundreds of people, or more – can produce better outcomes than a handful of principled decisions made by educated professionals who may never actually use the space.

What are these better outcomes? Why do we care if people are walking on the concrete or the grass? Well, concrete is expensive and takes up space that could otherwise be planted with grass, so it pays to pour the concrete where it will be used. Dirt paths can be less comfortable, and some people don’t like the way they look. In general it’s more efficient for people to go where the infrastructure is, and for infrastructure to go where the people are.

It’s important to note that desire lines don’t tell you the whole story, because the decisions that create them operate within constraints imposed by others. For example, people may leave an asphalt path and cross a quadrangle diagonally to get to a door, because the asphalt path does not lead to a convenient door. Once they get through the door, they may travel down a corridor to a point just on the other side of a wall from the asphalt path. The best solution may not be to pave the diagonal path, but to open a new door in the wall.

Last week, Michael Kimmelman invoked the idea of desire lines to support his proposal for a streetcar running near the East River waterfront in Brooklyn and Queens. I read his post looking forward to hearing about how people are already trying to get from one part of the waterfront to another. Then I read it again, and again, but found no actual desire lines.

Kimmelman writes, "Cities also have desire lines, marked by economic development and evolving patterns of travel." Evolving patterns of travel, sure, but the only evidence he gives of these patterns is the Kent Avenue bikeway. Now I love the Kent Avenue bikeway, but it is no desire line. It’s a top-down effort, the result of years of collaboration between bike activists and city planners. Its popularity is largely due to the scarcity of safe alternatives.

I took Kent Avenue to work for a while when I worked downtown, but it was a significant detour for me. The quickest way for me to get downtown is the route of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, but I can’t ride my bike on it, there is no bike access on the Kosciuszko Bridge, and the parallel streets are hostile to cyclists. It is the planned concrete path. My desire line is the one traced by the young, tough, fast cyclists commuting down Metropolitan Avenue.

Similarly, the economic development invoked by Kimmelman represents not the desires of the residents, workers or shoppers, but the desires of developers and city planners, and the hate – the opposite of desire - of NIMBYs. The process of planning and zoning in this city favors people who have a lot of money, people who have fancy degrees, and people who have the time and energy to sit through community board meetings and the connections to get appointed to the community boards. That is why those buildings are rising along the waterfront.

Stephen Smith pointed out that Kimmelman is ignoring true desire lines, notably the ridership of existing bus lines. "What is the logic in investing a billion or more in upgrading a moderately-trafficked bus route in Astoria before far more heavily-traveled routes in neighborhoods like Flushing and Elmhurst?" he writes. "It’s hard to discern any motivation beyond the fact that existing high-ridership routes like the Q44 or Q58 simply don’t pass through gentrifying areas."

Other desire lines include the presence of non-government-sanctioned transit lines, like the Jamaican and Haitian dollar vans on Flatbush Avenue, or the Chinatown vans to Flushing and Sunset Park. Patterns of travel in taxis and private cars (or even bicycles, but with care) are other possible indicators. The replacement of any one of these by a faster, more efficient, less crowded train would be an improvement comparable to the replacement of a dirt path with a concrete walkway.

But the existence of housing developments and a bike path do not constitute desire lines, even if they are popular. Using these signs of the will of developers and planners to plan a train line is not like the bottom-up process of using the tracks of multiple individuals to plan concrete paths.

I'm honestly puzzled as to why Kimmelman misused the term "desire lines" in such a conspicuous way. I don't think he's deliberately being misleading, but I really expected him to know better. My most charitable explanation is that he was so excited at this idea (which he got from Alex Garvin) that he didn't really think through the idea of "desire lines" before hitting "send."

At least he's smart enough to avoid calling it "a desire named streetcar."

Light rail in New York City?

Last week I talked about the practical differences between light rail, streetcars, subways and commuter rail. We have light rail right across the river in Hudson County, and there have been several proposals for streetcars and light rail here in New York City. I want to mention a few possibilities and discuss their technical and political feasibility.

As I pointed out last week, the lower construction cost of streetcars and light rail comes primarily from shorter, lighter trains and lack of grade separation. These in turn limit your capacity and speed, meaning that if you build the wrong system you can wind up with overcrowded trains and frustrated passengers, and not get as many people out of their cars as you could with a heavier system. The consequences of this in turn are that if you can afford light rail, don't build a streetcar. If you can afford a subway or an el, don't build light rail.

With that in mind, consider Raanan Geberer's suggestion, "How about light rail on the old Rockaway line?" Geberer is clearly a supporter of transit and he's trying to be helpful, but the old Rockaway Beach Branch is completely grade-separated. It should be returned to Long Island Rail Road trains, or connected to the subway, along the lines of Capt. Subway's proposal, to take full advantage of its potential.

The Lower Montauk Branch in Glendale. Photo: Jim Henderson / Wikipedia.

Some of the supporters of rail on the Rockaway Beach Branch have mentioned the possibility of running light rail from Rockaway Park or Ozone Park onto the old "Lower Montauk" branch to Long Island City. The problem is that there are at least two freight trains a day that use those tracks. Because of the Federal Railroad Administration rules, the only way to run light rail would be to limit the freight trains to overnight hours. Unfortunately, I don't see enough potential ridership to justify that time separation. It might be more feasible to run a short diesel-multiple-unit shuttle, especially if it could be done without paying a lot of conductors.

So why do people like Geberer seem to think light rail would be so much better than subways or commuter rail? They are claimed to be quieter, but this is not really true. Yes, the heavier the train the more noise it makes, but that's a relatively minor factor. The noise is primarily a function of the supporting structure. The #7 train is elevated on reinforced concrete in Sunnyside and plain old steel everywhere else. You can have a conversation under the el in Sunnyside, but not in Woodside or Corona. This would not change significantly if you ran light rail trains on the same structures.

The main argument given by proponents of light rail on these lines is that it is somehow more modern than subways or commuter rail. This is nonsense: many of the tracks of the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail saw trains long before subways ran in New York City, and many of the cars in use on the New York subway and the Long Island Railroad are newer than the cars on the HBLR.

Sadly, this seems to be another case of what Ryan McGreal called "cargo cult urbanism": if it works in Jersey City and Phoenix and Seattle, it should be the hot new thing here in New York. (Cyclists who promote "BRT" as a panacea seem to have a similar shallowness of thinking.) In part, it's because many of the most ambitious new train lines are being built as light rail in places like Salt Lake City and Charlotte.

The thing is that those lines are being built as light rail for two reasons: (1) freight railroads have been abandoning their less-used lines all over the country, and (2) any new rail lines have faced such stiff competition from new highways that ridership projections haven't justified grade separation. Neither of those apply here in New York City. There is still a market for freight trains on the Bushwick, Bay Ridge and Montauk Branches and the Oak Point Link in the Bronx. None of these railroads are going to be abandoned any time soon. And there is such demand for transit that we could pack any new light rail trains that are run.

So I've pretty much ruled out mixed-traffic streetcars and legacy-freight light rail here in New York City. The one area where light rail or streetcars would make sense here is if we can dedicate lanes to them. If we can dedicate lanes to buses, we can dedicate them to streetcars or light rail. I looked at this issue almost six years ago, but it might be time for a re-look soon.

Light rail, streetcars and our goals

There's a lot to be said about light rail and streetcars; in this post I want to focus on how these two kinds of trolleys fit in with our goals (as articulated above), and particularly how they can get people out of their cars. If you're trying to decide which kind of train to push for, there are three major questions: (a) Can the train mix with cars and trucks? (b) Can the train mix with freight trains? (c) How long can the train be?

In contemporary usage, streetcars run for most of their length in mixed traffic. We don't have a good example here, but if you go to Girard Avenue in Philadelphia you can ride one. Light rail trains run for most of their length in their own right-of-way, but may cross many (or all) streets at grade. Good examples include the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail and Newark City Subway in New Jersey.

The Girard Avenue Trolley in mixed traffic. Photo: rperlin83 / Flickr.

There are important differences between light rail, streetcars and other forms of rail. Elevated rail is raised above the street like the #7 train for most of its length, and subways go below the streets like the R train. Commuter rail can run elevated or in a cut like the LIRR Port Washington Line in Queens, but sometimes crosses streets and roads at grade like the LIRR Hempstead Branch in Garden City.

Commuter trains in the New York area typically share tracks with freight trains, which means that the Federal Railroad Administration requires them to be unnecessarily big and heavy. PATH trains run in subway tunnels in Manhattan, Jersey City and Hoboken, but they have a waiver from the FRA to run on shared track between Journal Square and Newark. Light rail and streetcar trains are typically not allowed on shared tracks, but the River Line between Trenton and Camden splits the time with the Chesapeake freight railroad: they run passenger service during days and evenings, and CSX runs freight overnight.

Because they mix with cars so much, streetcar trains are typically only one or two cars. Light rail trains sometimes have up to five or six cars. Subways and commuter trains can have ten or twelve cars.

Some light rail lines, like Salt Lake City's TRAX, run pretty long trains. Photo: vxla / Wikipedia.

Streetcars are often considered to be cheaper than light rail, and light rail to be cheaper than subways or commuter rail, but this is not magic. The cost comes primarily from grade separation and longer, heavier trains. This has important implications for transit, particularly in the New York area.

The first is that building the wrong system can limit your capacity. If you've got enough passengers to fill a four-car light rail train but you've only got a two-car streetcar, you're going to get crowding. Same if you've got enough passengers to fill a ten-car subway but they're trying to squeeze into a six-car light rail train.

The second is that building the wrong system can limit your speed. All other things being equal, a streetcar in mixed traffic is going to be slower than a light-rail or commuter train in a dedicated right-of-way with grade crossings, and a train with at-grade crossings is slower than one without them.

Both of these speed and capacity limitations have the effect of limiting how many passengers the line can carry, which can in turn limit revenue. They also decrease the value to passengers, which can drive them away. You may be able to pack those cars, but you'll have to keep the fare low to do it.

In a future post I'll discuss these factors in terms of specific projects here in the New York area.

Winning by default, or losing by a landslide

There's a point I've been trying to make. Maybe I haven't been really clear about it. It has to do with transit being in competition with cars, so much so that the real reason most of us care about transit is because it will hopefully get people out of their cars.

The VTA and its competition. Photo: Sean Marshall / Flickr.

There's a thing about competition. When I was a kid I was on a kid baseball team. We sucked, partly because my catching wasn't very good and my batting was worse. But we won some games. Why did we win if we sucked so much? Because sometimes the other team sucked worse.

In competition, it doesn't matter how bad you are, if the other team is worse. It doesn't matter how good you are, if the other team is better. When I posted about the competition facing the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority, lots of people wanted to tell me how horrible the VTA is.

Cap'n: The VTA is in competition with roads and parking.
Commenters: But they suck!
Cap'n: Yes, but they're building these roads and parking lots...
Commenters: The shitty routes and they go really slow and curves and...
Cap'n: Yes, and highway widenings and interchange upgrades...
Commenters: and bad zoning and they don't go where you want to go! Sucky trolleys! They suck!
Cap'n: Sigh.

Yes, I believe you. I've never ridden the VTA, but if you say it sucks, I'm prepared to concede that point. But have you been to Santo Domingo, or any of those Third World cities that have humungous transit market share? In most of those places, the transit sucks and they don't even have rail. But people ride it, because the roads and parking lots suck worse. Conversely, I'm sure there's some place where they did all the transit "right" and still lost mode share because the government was building lots of highways at the same time. Certainly that's what happened all over the country in the sixties and seventies.

This is not a defense of sucky transit. I'm all in favor of transit that doesn't suck, and in general I believe that not sucking helps to get people out of their cars. But when there's competition you can't just talk about one side of it. Sometimes you can really suck, but win by default. Other times you can be really good but just get outgunned.

Valley Transportation Myopia

The San Jose Mercury News has an article about the 25th anniversary of the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority's light rail system, quoting a few supporters and one critic. The supporters are VTA transportation planning manager Kevin Connolly, "the train's godfather" Rod Diridon, and a few riders, all of whom have Spanish last names and say that they ride the trolley because they don't own cars. The single critic quoted is Tom Rubin, an accountant who gets paid as a "transportation consultant" who mostly gets paid to attack transit. Sometimes Rubin will make arguments that seem "pro bus" in order to attack rail, but when there's no rail involved he's happy to attack buses.

On Twitter, some transit advocates did criticize the VTA. They're probably right. I've never been to Silicon Valley, but it sounds like it was relatively badly planned. It also sounds like there's a zoning issue behind the fact that many of the farms bordering on the lines haven't been built up with dense, walkable neighborhoods. That said, there's a bigger factor at play, one that I've touched on many times in the past: transportation myopia.

In the twenty-five years since the first VTA trolley ran, the federal, state and county governments and the VTA have widened four competing highways and built numerous interchanges and other "improvements." Here are a few that I could find details on:

CA 237	Convert to "freeway standards"	1997
I 880	Widen from US 101 to Montague Expressway	2004	$76.3m
CA 17	Add auxiliary lanes	2007	$28.2m
CA 87	HOV lanes south and north	2007	$121.9m
I-280	Ramp Metering and Widening	2010	$5.5m

As you can see, just about every branch of the VTA light rail system has seen millions of dollars invested in competing roads. Add to that the cost of constructing the 101, 280, 680 and 880 to begin with, which only happened within the previous twenty-five years. Those wouldn't have affected the design of the system, and thus the "Cost to run a light rail vehicle for an hour," but they have definitely sapped ridership, which affects all the other indicators mentioned.

Rubin is actually half right when he says "I think the original concept was very seriously flawed." Whatever the flaws of the original trolley concept and zoning, they pale in comparison to the flaw in the concept of building a trolley system at the same time as you expand the competing road network.

Why we shouldn't extend Metro-North on the Hudson Line

Mid Hudson News reports that Metro-North is still no longer considering extending service to northern Dutchess County. I'm not sure who was asking, but there you have it.

Many years ago, there was a proposal to extend service past Poughkeepsie, with stops in Hyde Park, Staatsburg, Rhinecliff and Tivoli. There was significant NIMBY opposition, and I was all ready to cuss out those transit haters, but the more I looked at it, the more their objections made sense.

It was the same problem I had with the Northern Branch plan, but even more so, because the planners expected almost every rider to drive and park. None of those stations have anything resembling the walkable suburban downtowns of Englewood and Tenafly.

To generate enough walk-up demand for the service, you'd essentially need to rezone the area to create a whole new Tarrytown, Irvington, Dobbs Ferry and Hastings. Which might be nice, but do we really need that development eighty miles from Manhattan?

We need to look at what our goals are, and how a Metro-North extension might serve them. If people are driving too much in Dutchess County, replacing a small number of large lots with new walkable suburbs will not make the existing residents drive less.

There are small things we could do. Extend some trains to Marist and Hyde Park, and maybe the CIA, to capture some of the student and tourist travel. But that's a relatively small segment of the market; would it be worth running ten-car trains?

The largest existing town without train service in Dutchess County is Fishkill. Emily from IRidetheHarlemLine.com thought it was funny that someone would want to ask Metro-North President Howard Permut about restoring passenger service on the Beacon/Maybrook Line that the railroad owns, but it's not such a strange question. Of all the potential Dutchess County service expansions it's the one that would have the greatest ridership. It runs through the most densely populated parts of Beacon and Fishkill.

At this point it might not be worthwhile running trains all the way to Derby, Danbury or even Brewster, but a local group has proposed a shuttle from the Beacon Station to Matteawan and Fishkill. You could also run a shuttle from Croton, timed to connect with the incoming local from Grand Central.

The State is planning to upgrade the Hudson Line to improve Amtrak service. Dutchess County could use more intercity service, and restoring service to Pittsfield through Amenia, Millerton and Chatham, perhaps run by Amtrak, would capture a significant portion of the weekend crowd that currently drives up the Taconic Parkway.

Emily actually asked Permut about service north of the current terminus in Wassaic, and he mentioned that he was involved in planning the current service. "If I remember correctly, the rail trail was already in existence to Millerton, so we would have had a huge obstacle," Permut said. "How do you de-map a rail trail? There would have been significant opposition." More proof that rail-trails are not good for transit.

Of course, my question for Permut, which Emily did not ask, was "If you could tear down one highway in the region, which one do you think would increase Metro-North ridership the most?" Dutchess County actually doesn't have many highways. There's one interstate (84), plus the Taconic Parkway. There are some relatively short limited-access sections of Routes 9, 44 and 55.

I would probably first get rid of the "Arterials" in Poughkeepsie, a horrible plan where two neighborhood avenues were turned into three-lane segments of a one-way pair, simultaneously killing both the pedestrian environment and commerce on Main Street. I'm baffled that the arrangement has lasted as long as it has, and I can only surmise that that's because no New Urbanist has ever visited Poughkeepsie. Restoring the Arterials to neighborhood streets, and restoring Main Street to east-west traffic, would make a lot more people want to live within walking distance of the train station. Green tracks trolleys on the former "Arterial" streets would bring more people to the train without driving.

All that said, if we really want to reduce driving in the metropolitan area, it's probably better to focus on other areas than Dutchess County. According to reports compiled by the EPA, Dutchess only accounts for two percent of the region's vehicle-miles traveled. Meanwhile, Nassau accounts for 8% of VMT, and Suffolk 13%. If only they had train service...

Why streetcars don't work anymore

Many people, including Jarrett Walker, have written skeptically about the value of streetcars over buses in mixed traffic. They're right to be skeptical, but they don't explain why we can't just go back to the way things were. I've often wished we could go back to the time when there were trolleys on the streets of Long Island City and interurbans serving places like Hoosick Falls (minus the sexism, racism, and so forth). But as James Howard Kunstler is fond of saying, history is not symmetrical. There are good reasons why streetcars won't do what they did in 1912 unless we change other things.

Suppose that next year, instead of restoring passenger service on the Northern Branch, New Jersey Transit rebuilt the North Hudson County railway along Broad Street in Palisades Park and Leonia. Would people jump back on the trolleys and ride them to the ferries to the city?

Judging by the number of photos out there, these streetcar tie-ups are fairly common in Toronto. Photo: windsordi / Flickr.

Some, probably, but most would either keep driving to work or keep catching the Red and Tan buses that take the Turnpike and the XBL to the Port Authority. The simple reason is that any suburban streetcar or interurban built today would face a lot more congestion than its ancestors in the golden age of streetcars. In 1912 there were hardly any cars, and people didn't own horse-drawn carriages at anything like the numbers that they own cars today.

If we go back to our goals (see above), the reason I at least support streetcars is that they allow people to access goods and services without driving their own cars. But mixed-traffic streetcars have never competed well. They were preferable to walking or horsecars, but whenever people could take elevated or underground railroads they did. When cars and even buses came along, they abandoned the streetcars for those as well.

I am not saying that we should all love the bus. Buses lurch, they're expensive to operate, they keep losing their rights-of-way, and they are no easier to install than trains. But until private cars are few and far between, mixed-traffic streetcars will be a waste of effort. We need to be pushing for transit that can compete with cars, and that means transit with its own right-of-way. In cities, that means subways, elevateds or green tracks trolleys.

Of course, here I'm talking about transit that operates in mixed traffic for its entire length. A line that operates in mixed traffic for a segment of its route may turn out to be worth it. It all depends on how well it can compete with cars.

Calming big boulevards

You know that big ugly boulevard near you? Maybe when it was built it was the Champs-Elysées of your town. Maybe it wanted to be, but things didn't turn out quite right. Or maybe your town planners had a less ambitious model, like the Miracle Mile or Route 66.

Whatever the ambitions, today that boulevard is a stroad. It's one of the most dangerous places to drive or walk, but people keep going there anyway, because that's where the Target and the Old Navy and the Barnes and Noble are. Even though it's one of the most popular shopping streets, it brings in a relatively small fraction of the tax revenue.

There are a number of remedies that can be taken for a stroad boulevard (boulevaroad?). I want to focus on one particular remedy that combines traffic calming and transit expansion; we can call it green tracks.

The poster child for this method is Paris, in particular the Boulevards des Maréchaux. This is a ring of boulevards that runs just inside the city limits. They replaced the "rue Militaire" that ran along the inner extent of the fortifications built between 1841 and 1844 under Prime Minister Adolphe Thiers and torn down between 1919 and 1929 after they proved unable to stop heavy artillery in the Franco-Prussian War. The road is divided into 22 segments, each named (more or less) after one of the military leaders who bore the rank of marshal under Napoleon.

Paris's Boulevard Ney. Photo: Minato Ku

I've visited a few of the Maréchaux many years ago, and they were all pretty unpleasant places to walk. Definitely not what comes to mind when you think of a stroll through Paris. Even though they had trees, cafes and fairly wide sidewalks, they were noisy and felt dangerous. The 4-5 lanes of unbroken traffic and the long gaps between crosswalks made the boulevards feel like a barrier; I rarely crossed them, and usually took parallel streets when walking home from the metro. I never took the mixed-traffic "PC" bus, after trying once or twice and finding it slow and infrequent.

At its core, the design of the Maréchaux privileged cars at the expense of pedestrians and transit riders. The city of Paris found an excellent way to adjust that balance in favor of the more sustainable users. They built a trolley.

Here in the United States, we have basically two ways of building a trolley. We can build "light rail" which operates primarily in an old rail right-of-way or highway median with some mixed-traffic or dedicated segments, or we can build a "streetcar," which operates entirely in mixed traffic. Jarrett Walker in particular is fond of slamming streetcars for offering no mobility improvements over buses. Both, notably, minimize the amount of street space reallocated from cars.

Boulevard Victor with green tracks trolley. Photo: Minato Ku

The Tramway T3 takes a third approach. Its entire route, except for intersections, is physically separated from all other vehicles. This helps trolley passengers get to their destinations faster, because they are much less likely to get stuck in traffic. To underscore this point, and to simply look nice, the right-of-way between and around the tracks is covered with sod. This evokes the grassy medians where trolleys have traveled in other cities - for me particularly, the "neutral grounds" of New Orleans.

The Saint Charles Streetcar in New Orleans. Photo: Infrogmaton / Wikipedia.

The right-of-way of this new Paris trolley was not previously a train line, or private property. It was street. Two lanes of these boulevards were simply taken from cars and reallocated to transit. The sod has the additional function of marking the right-of-way as "not car space" and thus discouraging any use by cars.

The last time I was in Paris, the T3 was not yet running, but the street space had been reallocated. It made a huge difference. There weren't as many cars, and they were going much slower. The noise was much less oppressive. Crossing the boulevard was easier and felt much safer. There were two sets of pedestrian refuges at each intersection, not just one. But wherever I've seen street-running trolleys, they're always more predictable than cars, and therefore safer. They almost never leave their tracks.

Self-fulfilling prophecies at Willets Point

Adam Lisberg reports that lobbyist Richard Lipsky, disgraced by police allegations that he conspired with clients to bribe Senator Carl Kruger with at least $252,000, has quietly resumed at least some of his work. In particular, Lisberg reports that articles are being posted "in a style strongly reminiscent of Lipsky’s" to one of his biggest clients, Willets Point United.

Lisberg was able to recognize Lipsky's online style instantly, because Lipsky basically carries around a giant firehose of shit that he targets at any corporation or organization involved in city politics who hasn't hired him in the past six months or so, and at any government official who hasn't done him any favors recently. He has particular scorn for Our Billionaire Mayor, who can take it, and has recently targeted new State DOT Commissioner McDonald, who probably can too.

Lipsky seems to be incapable of recognizing a political ally who isn't currently paying him money, so he shoots off gratuitous broadsides at old enemies, like this one about bike lanes. Now it seems to me that if one of you're trying to stop a large highway project, you would naturally find common cause in advocates of non-motorized transportation, but Lipsky is so locked into his us-and-them mindset that it doesn't seem to occur to him that cyclists might support Bloomberg when he's doing something they like and oppose him when he's doing something they dislike. Lipsky's mercenary perspective also seems to prevent him from contemplating the possibility that someone might choose their alliances on principle.

Well, your Cap'n is a man of principle, and a strange bedfellow too. I think Bloomberg is a jerk, but I support him when he builds bike lanes and transit projects. I think Lipsky is a jerk, but I support him when he fights a highway project, which is what he did today.

So with that introduction, let me tell you about this Willets Point project. Here we have a functioning district of car repair and scrap metal shops that's located right between the stadium where the Mets play and downtown Flushing. It's right near LaGuardia airport, and lots of people pass it on the #7 train or on the highway. Somebody got the idea that the land is too well-situated to be left to a bunch of car mechanics, so they decided to declare it blighted, evict the owners through eminent domain, and build a mixed-use complex. Politicians left and right have signed on to the thing. The aerial rendering on the main page looks like your typical Corbusian yuck, but the street-level ones look more promising. There's a lot more detail in the DGEIS Executive Summary.

The problem is that all the people involved are convinced, as a former aide to the Mayor said to me, that "people in Queens, they love their cars," and everyone will drive to this new complex. Yes, it's right next to a large express subway station, but as Lipsky points out, even at its eastern terminus the #7 train is at capacity during rush hours, being fed by a network of buses. If people want to use transit, there's not really anywhere for them to go. So Lipsky and friends assume, just like the Economic Development Corporation, that they'll all drive. As a result, the city plans to construct between 6,000 and 8,250 new parking spaces, as well as new on-ramps to the Van Wyck Expressway. It's the on-ramps that Lipsky is challenging on behalf of his clients, hoping that the city will abandon the entire plan if they can't build them.

Honestly, it took me a while to see that there's a great big flaw in the logic that both Lipsky and the City are using to justify their conclusion that there will be 80,000 new car trips a day to and from this development. The highways, of course, are also at capacity. If anything, they're more clogged than the subways at rush hour. So it really seems to me that if you build transit at Willets Point you'll get people using transit, and if you build roads and parking garages you'll get people driving.

There are a number of things you could do to tie this development into the transit system better. You could build a spur off the #7 line, perhaps the beginning of the long-planned College Point Extension. You could build an AirTrain (elevated driverless metro system) from Jamaica to LaGuardia Airport. You could build at-grade physically separated light rail from the Mets train station east through Willets Point along Northern Boulevard. You could build a bus terminal connecting to the Mets train station, and redirect many of the lines that currently terminate in Flushing to the new terminal. You could increase the frequency and coverage on the Port Washington Branch of the Long Island Railroad so that it becomes more like a subway.

Yes, all those things are expensive, but think about it this way:

8,250 parking spaces at $28,000 a space = $231 million. Add the $55 million that the City wants to spend on the highway ramps, for a total of $286 million. That could build you 1.8 miles of AirTrain at $155 million a mile, or 4 miles of light rail at $75 million a mile.

My per-mile figures are probably off, so Alon Levy, o guru of per-mile construction costs, please enlighten if you have a chance.

Oh, and for those who are wondering why they should care: we're talking about 8,000 new households in the city, a tenth of one percent of the total. Do we want them identifying themselves and voting as drivers, or as transit riders?

Competition is about relative value

I find Yonah Freemark's blog The Transport Politic to be very informative, and his more thoughtful pieces at sites like Next American City to be frequently insightful. I feel similarly about Aaron Renn's Urbanophile blog. That's why it pains me to say that one of Yonah's recent columns, while intriguing, was seriously flawed, based on a limited view of transit in the world. In it, he linked to a recent post by Aaron Renn, which was flawed in its own way.

I should point out that the Urbanophile post was about whether density is necessary for a city to be competitive. Briefly, businesses depend on access, and they will go where access is cheap. I honestly don't give a shit about whether my city is competitive, because that just means that someone else's city is losing out. My priorities are up at the top of the page: pollution, efficiency, carnage, society, equity - and competitiveness works against equity. (I'm aware of the value of healthy competition, but it's got limits, that's all.) But in essence, he's arguing the following:


In physics, you can increase mass while holding volume constant by increasing density, or you can increase volume while holding mass constant by decreasing density. In urbanism you can increase access while holding mobility constant by increasing density, or you can increase mobility while holding access constant by decreasing density. So Columbus might be less dense than Indianapolis, but there's just as much access because the roads are less congested. Similarly for Houston and New York, to quote a commenter.

Well yay, equitable access! But uh - pollution, efficiency and carnage? Not so great. By relying more on driving, and on longer distance trips, less dense cities promote pollution, waste money and resources, and put more people at risk of being killed or injured by cars. If all you care about is your city's competitiveness, well, how competitive can you be if your air quality sucks, you're spending a huge chunk of your budget fixing roads, and your residents are being killed?

Yonah rightly observes that this equitable access may be great for businesspeople with private cars, but it leaves out "everyone else - the young, the old, the poor, the sick," so it's not very equitable after all. Those who can't use cars need walkable neighborhoods with transit. But if people with cars can do just fine without walkability and transit, they won't support them, and everybody else will suffer. Density acts as an equalizer here, forcing walkability and transit patronage, and ensuring that walkable stores and transit providers will have enough business to stay afloat.

That's where Yonah goes off course, following the illustrious trail of Simpson, Curtin and Olsen. Like them, he treats car use as a force of nature:

Unlike inner-city districts with their medium and high-rise buildings, streetcar suburbs are characterized by low densities, little neighborhood retail within walking distance, and very few accessible jobs, three significant factors that make them difficult to adapt to transit. In other words, while they may have been built with streetcars in mind, they transitioned to the automobile age naturally.

The fact of the matter is that the absolute access afforded by streetcar suburbs is irrelevant. As Michael Kemp wrote back in 1973, when we're talking about people switching from one mode to another, what matters is their relative access, and that means comparing the access afforded by transit to that afforded by cars.

Surprisingly, Yonah talks about "failure" without discussing what failure actually means for an enterprise: people get what they want from the competition. There is no mention of how the roads got to be such stiff competition for the streetcars. It's left to Stephen Smith of Market Urbanism in the first comment to point out "the widespread subsidization of the roads, which were at that time not mostly funded by user [f]ees, but rather out of general revenues (which, perhaps not coincidentally, were in large part paid by 'traction magnates')."

People in streetcar suburbs didn't abandon the streetcars because the density was too low. They switched to driving because they could get where they wanted quicker by road, and they could do that because the government built a bunch of big new roads for them to drive on. If there had been no cars, people in those suburbs would still be taking streetcars - or they would have moved back to the cities, if the streetcar suburbs were really as inefficient as Yonah claims.

It required a massive government intervention to build all those roads, and that intervention is proving unsustainable. The roads are crumbling, the bridges are falling down, and there's no money in the budget to repair them. Despite the hugely expensive oil wars, the price of oil rose a few years ago and popped the housing bubble. Everyone who knows what's going on expects the price of oil to rise again and stay high. Eventually it will become difficult for all but the richest to own cars, and that's the main reason we should live in walkable neighborhoods with transit.

But as it becomes more expensive to own a car, transit and walking become more attractive. Transit providers and local shops will flourish, and they will return to the streetcar suburbs. In other words, the viability of streetcar suburbs is inversely related to the expense of driving.

Above, I argued that even though you could function pretty well driving around Columbus, it was not so good for pollution, efficiency and carnage. You could make a similar counterargument to my own argument about streetcar suburbs. Walking to the streetcar and the local grocery may give you good access, and it doesn't generate a significant amount of pollution or carnage, but it's not that efficient. Much more efficient to have people living above the grocery store, etc. But won't that kind of efficiency sort itself out?

More examples of profitability

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why do we care about mobility?

Jarrett Walker has provided a lot of insightful commentary and thought-provoking questions since he established his Human Transit blog a few months ago. His most recent series questioning the value of streetcars is in this vein: we should question every mode, because modes are just tools for accomplishing our goals.

In his most recent post and the previous one, Jarrett observes that streetcars don't improve mobility relative to buses. For him, mobility means "How many places can you get to in a fixed amount of time?"

Interestingly, Jarrett uses Walk Score to count the places, meaning that his mobility takes density into account. That makes it more valuable than simply measuring how many route-miles you have available to you. There was some back-and-forth in the comments about whether streetcars could increase mobility by increasing density relative to a similar investment in buses, but I don't think there was a solid conclusion.

My main response to Jarrett's post, though, is simply "Why?". He writes, "I'm just suggesting that the mobility offered by a transit service is an independently assessable feature that some people might want to decide if they care about." But do they care, and if they don't, why would they start? And why do we care whether they care? Because they'll start a campaign against this service? Because they'll stop using it and starve it of fares?

What I'm missing from these posts is a sense of overall goals. I've got them right up at the top of the page: "Reducing pollution, Increasing efficiency. Reducing carnage, Improving society, Transportation for all." I suppose that mobility would come under the headings of increasing efficiency and improving society. The five principles that I extracted from Transportation for America's torturous PDF were "Safety, Sustainability, Fairness, Independence, Prosperity," and I'd put mobility under Prosperity. For me, these are lower on the priority totem pole.

Of course, mobility can be used to sell a service, potentially drawing people out of their cars, and thereby contribute to more goals. But as with the anti-streetcar campaign and the loss of fare revenue, these are hypotheticals for a hypothetical streetcar. Why not cross those bridges when we come to them?

I think in order for us, Jarrett's audience, to value the goal of mobility, he needs to explain it in terms of our own goals - and not hypothetical ones. Otherwise it's a tool without an application. A provocative discussion, but not quite as productive as it could be.

Feds relax restrictions for light rail

I wrote in January about how the Federal Railroad Administration's antiquated safety rules were blocking the use of diesel multiple units, passenger rail cars that have built-in diesel engines instead of needing to be pulled by dedicated engines. There are only a few DMUs that are compliant with the FRA regulations, notably the Portland Westside line. There are also a few non-compliant DMU services, like NJ Transit's River Line, that have received a waiver from the FRA because the passenger cars run at different times from the freight trains.

Last year Austin's Capital Metro bought a bunch of cars similar to the ones used on the River Line in the hopes of getting a similar waiver for time-separated service, and was being stalled by George Bush's FRA. Now, under Obama, the FRA has indicated that it will work with Capital Metro and grant the waiver if they install steel cages around the fuel tanks.

Time-separated service is not great in terms of accomplishing much of our goals. It gets people to work and back, but has no flexibility for schedules, and they still have to drive for shopping and recreation. It can build a constituency for transit, potentially save families the expense of owning two cars, and reduce congestion somewhat, but it won't shift too many people away from car ownership. However, this change suggests that the FRA may be more open to relaxing its rules for DMUs in general. If that happens, maybe we could see DMUs soon on the New England Central, on the Suzy-Q and even on the Oyster Bay Branch.

Strange Doings on the Atlanta Beltline

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

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

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

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

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

Subway Commuter and Light Rail Advocate Chosen for Senate

The Times is reporting that Governor Paterson has chosen Representative Kirsten Gillibrand to replace Secretary Clinton in the Senate. I've discussed Gillibrand's record before, but I think it's a good time to go over the most salient points.

Although Gillibrand's house has a Walk Score of 3, she's an hour's walk from downtown Hudson, which has a Walk Score of 86. More importantly, when she's in Washington she takes the Metro to work. She even brought her son to daycare on the train, and then got back on the Metro one stop to her office. That may have changed now that she has two sons - or it may not.

Gillibrand's commitment to transit and rail may not go very deep: the Ethan Allen Express, one of the two trains a day that run through the northern part of her district, is threatened by Vermont budget cuts. Last week over 200 people rallied in Rutland (which by Vermont standards counts as a mass demonstration), but no one from the New York section of the route was to be seen. There is no indication that Gillibrand has even noticed that part of her district could lose half its train service.

As I wrote before, Gillibrand has called for light rail in the Capital District, but deferred to the Governor for action. Did this come up in any of their conversations? It would be a really good thing for that area, but if Gillibrand's transit advocacy is limited to campaign promises with no follow-up, this could be a big disappointment for New York.

It'd be interesting to hear from advocates for transit and livable streets in Gillibrand's district. One well-known critic of "Happy Motoring," James Howard Kunstler, has so far been silent on Gillibrand and any of his elected officials. Incidentally, his house has a Walk Score of 0. WTF JHK?

I Want a Nice Big Imitation Steak

There are some pretty good meat substitutes out there. Some people like tempeh and veggie burgers; the only one that's really done it for me is seitan. Now I'm aware that seitan and tempeh are foods in their own right, and that if you play to their strengths you can get some pretty tasty, protein-rich meals. But by and large what you wind up with is something that doesn't resemble meat in any meaningful way.

Let's put those aside and focus on the use of vegetable proteins as imitation meats. Since you can find someone who likes to eat just about anything, you can probably find people who prefer them to meat. There are people on a budget who eat imitation meats if they're cheaper than real meats. But most people eat fake meat because they feel that real meat is bad for one reason or another. Maybe they don't feel comfortable being responsible for the death of an animal, or they don't want to contribute to global warming.

Setting aside people who are principled vegetarians, most people who can afford real meat just don't choose imitation meat. Imagine someone (not a vegetarian) who was invited to dinner by their rich uncle (also not a vegetarian) and said, "Let's go get a nice big seitan steak!"

Now you might get an idea of how I feel to read an article featuring Streetsblog editor Aaron Naparstek. The New York Times asked several New York thought leaders, including Aaron, what they would like soon-to-be President Obama to do for New York. Aaron responded, "The top priority has to be the creation of a citywide bus rapid-transit network, known in transportation circles as B.R.T."

Here we have an imaginary Obama asking Aaron what he wants - for all of us New Yorkers - and does Aaron say, "build new subways," like Jeffrey Zupan and Sam Schwartz? Does he ask for a nice new light rail line like Roxanne Warren? No, he says "BRT." BRT has been shown to be inferior to trolleys in just about every way. It's a seitan steak: the kind of thing you'd normally ask for only if you had some reason you couldn't eat a real steak.

We know that the government is running a huge deficit this year, so maybe this is more like the uncle trying to still pretend to be the big spender even though he got laid off last month. But then our dinner guest would still ask for steak, but they just might ask him to take them to the Argo Diner instead of Peter Luger's. And anyway, over the long run BRT tends to cost almost as much as light rail - if it's well-enough developed to earn its "rapid" name. There are some things you just don't buy at the 99¢ store.

Of course, our hypothetical birthday boy might instead say, "Hey Uncle, let's go to that vegetarian place you took me to last year. I love their stir-fry with tempeh!" This is taking the food on its own terms: expecting it to be nutritious and satisfying instead of thinking of it as a substitute for something else.

Buses are no substitute for light rail, but they do already transport thousands of New Yorkers in relative convenience and comfort. They can be made better: Aaron's Streetsblog has featured stories about the value of busways, and I've discussed potential applications of those ideas for New York. Aaron could have talked about the various possible ways to improve our city's bus system without implying that it would be some kind of substitute for rail.

One thing that Aaron should absolutely be ashamed of himself for is his use of the phrase "surface subway." Subways and elevated trains speed people along because they're grade-separated. You just can't go that fast on the surface, even if you have a dedicated right-of-way and signal priority. A surface subway is nonsense.

Aaron has done a tremendous amount for transportation in this city, and in 2009 I'm looking forward to many intelligent, informative Streetsblog posts on all areas of transportation. I have admired him and respected him for years, and will continue to do so. But in this case, he was given a big soapbox and he chose to use it to push a concept that is dishonest at its core. This post is not intended as an attack, or as punishment for violating some arbitrary principle. It's an honest expression of my disappointment, and my hope that Aaron will present things differently next time. Bus improvements, yes. BRT, no. "Surface subway," hell no!

Not a Horrible Senator for Transit

After recommending Jerry Nadler as the transit candidate to be New York's next Senator, I was encouraged by Niccolo Machiavelli (himself!) to examine some of the other candidates.

Many upstaters are disgruntled at the prospect of having two senators from the New York metropolitan area. (Maybe they're also upset at the idea of being represented by two Jews, but they don't come out and say that.) It's a funny thing, though: we really haven't had too many senators who weren't from downstate. There were John Foster Dulles and Charles Goodell, but they were both appointed to fill vacancies and then lost the next election (hmm). Kenneth Keating (1959-1965) is the most recent senator to be elected from upstate; he served one term and then lost to Bobby Kennedy.

Still and all, maybe upstaters deserve a senator every now and then. I was worried that we might get some awful highway-builder like David Gantt appointed, but it turns out that there's at least one promising name: Representative Kirsten Gillibrand (D-Hudson).

Your Cap'n disagrees with Gillibrand on a lot of issues, like tax cuts for the wealthy and the farm bill. But this is a blog about transit, so how is she on these issues?

Unfortunately, I don't have time right now to look into her record in detail. At a glance, I see that she voted for a bill to give grants for public transit, but she also voted for a Rangel-sponsored bill to pump money into the highway trust fund, and for the automaker bailout. Generally she seems to vote with the House majority, which is not surprising for a freshman in Congress.

In terms of statements she's made, she supports light rail for the Capital District. The Times Union reported in August:

“The investment I’m really interested in is a commuting light rail system between Albany and Saratoga,” said U.S. Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-Greenport.

Gillibrand’s ideal system would grow branches to the airport, Schenectady, Troy and other communities. She estimates such a project could cost around $1 billion and would require sustained investment over at least a decade.

Gillibrand even has a champion in mind: Gov. David Paterson.

“Because it’s a significant investment, it would have to be an investment from the state and it would have to be a vision of the governor,” she said.

Or she could even reach across the aisle to Assembly Minority Leader James Tedisco, whose district covers most of the proposed trunk route. It'd be nice if she developed that idea as much as she did her gas price pandering.

In terms of transit, Gillibrand practices what she preaches. The Main St. USA blog reposts a Times Union piece from last year that describes her riding the D.C. Metro every day from her Arlington apartment to the Capital, dropping her son Theo (then three years old) off on the way at the congressional daycare center.

Gillibrand's record is pretty scanty - again, what you'd expect for someone who's only served one term in Congress. It certainly doesn't compare to Nadler's strong record of support for transit and rail freight. But if Governor Paterson did wind up appointing Gillibrand, it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world for transit. Hey, maybe we'd wind up with a light rail system in the Capital District.

Photo: Theo and Kirsten Gillibrand by Andrew C. White/Flickr.