Our overloaded subways

As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, there are times when building new transit is not warranted. In particular, it is a waste of resources to build new radial capacity on the outskirts if it connects to a trunk line that can't absorb that capacity. I looked at the train crossings into Manhattan to see which could add trains in the peak. That information can suggest where to add branch lines. But what about extending existing lines or encouraging infill development?

The NYMTC's Hub Bound Travel Study has some useful data, but first it's important to give some context. They have an estimate for space per passenger, but it's only broken down by sector, not by line. They do have counts of train cars and passengers by line, so we can get passengers per car. The problem with that is that the cars are different sizes, so there is a lot more free space in an R train car with 341 people than a car with 308 people on the #4 train.

I don't know exactly which equipment was used on which lines in 2012, so I used the most recent train models I knew of. I couldn't find floor area figures, so I used the listed capacities. Please feel free to consult the spreadsheet and suggest revisions. (Edit, April 27: this chart is in fact inaccurate. Please see the comments below for threestationsquare's helpful observations.)

Here is an updated chart based on Table 20:

There are some additional questions that come to mind looking at the chart. If the demand for a line is low, is that always because it doesn't serve enough homes on the outskirts? Maybe, like the J train, it doesn't serve enough jobs. Maybe, like the R train, it's much slower than the alternative. Would extending these lines really get people out of their cars?

There is another question: yeah, an A train car with 713 people on it is really uncomfortable, but isn't a B train car with 429 people pretty uncomfortable too? This is why we need to continue to think about how we can offer comfortable alternatives to wasteful, dangerous individual car trips.

If you're hub bound, there's room for you

Recently I posted that there seemed to be no room left in the subway tunnels and bridges leading into Manhattan. Threestationsquare, who had made the updated chart I used in that post, pointed me to the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council's Hub Bound Travel Study. And it turns out I was wrong. There is room - and the places where there is room have interesting potential.

The NYMTC is an arm of the New York State Department of Transportation that is responsible, among other things, for coming up with wildly inaccurate predictions of traffic volumes to justify bigger highways. But their underlying data is more sound, and a lot of it is online. The Hub Bound Travel Study is full of fascinating data for transportation nerds, and I wholeheartedly recommend it.

For our purposes, the relevant table is Appendix I, Table 6, "TOTAL RAIL TRAINS ENTERING AND LEAVING THE HUB ON A FALL BUSINESS DAY." Kind of poetic. (But it's trains going to the hub, not The Hub). If we look at the morning rush data for 2012, here's what we get:

There's a pretty wide spread between the #7 train, which manages to cram 23 trains per hour through the Steinway Tunnel, and the R train, which only sent eight trains an hour through the Montague Street Tunnel. In between we can see clusters in the low 20s, in the mid-teens, in the low teens, and then a few stragglers.

The busiest tunnels are the Lexington Avenue Express, the PATH, and the 60th and 53rd Street Tunnels to Queens. The uptown Broadway Express and the Cranberry Street Tunnel are also doing pretty well.

There is significant room on the Manhattan Bridge (as Threestationsquare mentioned) and the uptown #6 Local and Central Park West Express, and the Clark Street Tunnel to Brooklyn. Even the 14th Street Tunnel has capacity, despite promises that CBTC would improve things. We knew the Williamsburg Bridge had capacity, but it turns out, so do the locals on the Upper West Side.

The Montague Tunnel is currently closed to repair damage from Hurricane Sandy, but it's seen eight trains an hour since the M train was rerouted uptown in 2010. They ran 27 trains per hour in 2002, before the N was rerouted over the Manhattan Bridge. The R is just not a high-demand train in this area, because it crawls through Lower Manhattan. The two tunnels for the F (Rutgers Street and 63rd Street) see more trains, but they have plenty of room.

So there you have it! Looking forward to your fantasy maps...

The Pulaski Skyway, a different "freeway without a future"?

Earlier this year the Congress for the New Urbanism released a new version of its "Freeways without futures" list. I wholeheartedly agree that all twelve of the highways in question are disgusting blights and should be removed. I've seen the Claiborne Expressway, the Sheridan and the Alaskan Way up close, and I have a special loathing for I-81 in Syracuse and Route 34 in New Haven. But there are a few roads that I think deserve to be on the list but aren't.

Typical evening congestion, seven blocks north of the Holland Tunnel. Photo: Brooklyn Spoke / Instagram.

It's a bad thing when a highway cuts neighborhoods in half, like the Cross-Bronx Expressway, or cuts a neighborhood off from access to jobs and services, like the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in Red Hook, or cuts the waterfront off from meaningful recreational or commercial use, like the FDR Drive. Converting these highways to boulevards is a good thing, especially when the boulevards are designed to be walkable and livable. There are other criteria missing, though.

Think of a walkable urban area that's already well-served by transit. The streets are congested with cars for too many hours of the day. You don't need that many cars to bring customers to the businesses, and they're ruining the pedestrian experience. So why do you have a highway terminating there? That highway is basically pumping cars into an area that doesn't need them.

These highways may not be visibly blocking a cherished view or oppressing a street, but by aiming a firehose of cars into a compact urban area they are a major factor in the deterioration of walkable urban environments. When possible, they should either be torn down or turned over to transit.

The most obvious case is Congress Parkway in Chicago. It's six lanes of nasty urban traffic fed by an eight-lane highway. It doesn't need to be there, and it makes the South Loop feel oppressive. It should be narrowed and given sidewalks befitting a grand urban boulevard, from the Circle to the Lake. The District of Columbia is full of these; 12th Street NW is probably the worst. University Street in Montreal is not much fun, as I recall.

Here in the New York area, we have four highway tunnels and five highway bridges that empty directly into the streets of Manhattan. You could get rid of any of the highways (495, I-78, the BQE, the Long Island Expressway, the Grand Central Parkway, the Bruckner Expressway and the Major Deegan Expressway) and it would make a huge improvement.

It's hard to choose among these firehoses of cars, but one of the worst is the Holland Tunnel. This is because it combines two four-lane expressways, the Pulaski Skyway and the Newark Bay Extension of the New Jersey Turnpike, into a single stream. It's even more powerful in the other direction due to the Verrazano Toll Pump, sucking cars and trucks from all over Manhattan and Brooklyn through Chinatown, Soho and Greenwich Village.

The Pulaski Skyway. Photo: Jack E. Boucher, National Park Service, 1978.

Fortunately, we are coming upon a historic opportunity to turn down this firehose. One of the four-lane expressways that feed into the Holland Tunnel, the Pulaski Skyway, is nearing the end of its life. This expensive steel structure has contributed to the destruction of the sensitive Hackensack Meadowlands since 1932. Naturally, there is a plan to rebuild the structure, and lots of rehabilitation in the meantime. Remember the ARC Tunnel that Chris Christie killed? $1.8 billion of the money is paying for that rehabilitation.

Some people like the way the Skyway looks - from a distance, or from the inside of a moving car, at least. I admit that it has a certain beauty to it. But its function is destructive. If there were some way to turn it into a dedicated busway, that might be nice, but I don't get the impression it would work. If we like the look, let's keep a small piece of it up somewhere for posterity's sake, but don't hold people's lives hostage to aesthetics.

In sum, we're diverting more than a billion dollars from critical transit improvements to maintain a road that blasts 30,000 cars a day (yes, only cars) into one of the densest, most walkable business districts in the country. If this thing were towering over a neighborhood instead of a swamp, it would definitely be on the CNU's list. Is it any less deserving of a teardown because it only saturates the area with cars?

Can we get an Emergency Express Bus network?

We now know that most of the tunnels under the East River were flooded by Hurricane Sandy, including subway tunnels, and that there is flooding in other low-lying parts of the system. Because transit officials moved the trains and buses to high ground, all of the rolling stock is in working order. MTA officials have wisely refused to give a definite timeframe for restoring subway service, but have said that it will be days before there is significant service. In the meantime they have said that the whole bus system should be running tomorrow. That's good.

There are still two problems. First, the bus network is not designed to bring people into and out of Manhattan efficiently. Since the 2010 service cuts, no local buses have traveled between Brooklyn and Manhattan. The only MTA buses that do are the express buses that go to Staten Island, Canarsie and southern Brooklyn. With the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel (recently renamed in honor of former Governor Hugh Carey) filled with water, I'm guessing they'll go across the Manhattan Bridge instead. Similarly in Queens, the express buses bypass everything west of the BQE, and a good deal of what's east of it. The express buses from the Bronx go through all of Manhattan without stopping.

Now you want express buses to speed through certain areas. The problem here is that there are no express buses serving the inner neighborhoods that normally have good subway service. People from Woodside (for example) or the Upper West Side could get to Midtown or Lower Manhattan by taking local buses, but it takes a hell of a long time and it's annoying. And it leaves all the people who live in Park Slope or Bed-Stuy or Cobble Hill without a way of getting across the river.

The second problem is that the current bus system doesn't have anywhere near the capacity to handle the numbers that crowd into Manhattan on the subways and commuter trains on a normal weekday. Since most of the southern half of Manhattan is without power, that won't be an issue right away, but the demand for rapid transit into Manhattan will probably grow faster than the supply can be restored.

Now I'm hoping that someone at the MTA will figure this out and set up some kind of express bus system. The staff of Transportation Alternatives has set out some guidelines. They also have points about biking, walking and emergency vehicles, but these three speak specifically to transit:

• Emergency Bus Lanes to allow swift transit throughout the City until subway service is restored.
• High Occupancy Vehicle Requirements on crossings into the most congested areas of the city.
• Carpool Staging Areas offering parking and passenger pick-up locations in support of drivers sharing rides to meet the HOV requirements.

I agree with these, but I don't think they will provide enough capacity. I would add the following two recommendations:

• Temporary Express bus routes from major population centers and transit hubs to Midtown and Lower Manhattan.
• Allow anyone with the proper license, registration and insurance to operate buses.

Off the top of my head, here are five locations that should have express buses running from them: Atlantic Terminal, Jamaica Center, Queens Center Mall, 86th and Lex, and Verdi Square. What are your five?

If the MTA and the DOT don't do any of that, you may want to consider the Chinatown vans.

Why you should care about the Cross-Harbor rail freight tunnel

For years, people have been talking about a cross-harbor rail freight tunnel, but it hasn't caught on in the public's imagination. Look, already with you! You're thinking, "Geez, do I really want to read some post about a freight tunnel? I don't ship freight. What do I care?" But you should, so don't close this window! Here's why: less carnage, saving tax money, no more highway hostages. Read on for details.

Ever since the Poughkeepsie Bridge was closed, freight trains going from west of the Hudson (New Jersey, most of upstate, most of the rest of the continent) to east of the Hudson (New York City, Long Island, Westchester, New England) have had to go all the way up to Selkirk, a tiny hamlet south of Albany, to cross the river.

There are two alternatives to the "Selkirk hurdle": put the rail cars on a barge across the harbor, or transfer the goods to trucks. A lot of shippers have been using a third alternative: sending the stuff on trucks the whole way. And of course that means more trucks and bigger trucks.

How do trucks get across the Hudson? On the Verrazano, George Washington and Tappan Zee Bridges, and through the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels. How do they get from Brooklyn to Queens? On the BQE. How do they get from Queens to the Bronx? Over the Queensboro Bridge and on Manhattan streets.

The proposed Cross-Harbor Rail Freight Tunnel would allow trains from west of the Hudson to travel through Jersey City and Brooklyn to points east. They would connect to yards in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Long Island where goods could be loaded onto trucks. The estimate is that a million trucks would be removed from the region's roads. Because the trucks would be doing short distribution runs, they could be smaller. Here are some reasons why that's a good thing for us:

1. Carnage. Smaller trucks are safer in an urban environment. The safest truck, of course, is no truck at all.

2. Road maintenance. The amount of damage that a vehicle inflicts on a road is proportional to the fourth power of that vehicle's weight. Getting this heavy freight off our asphalt roads and onto steel rails would save a lot in maintenance.

3. No more hostages. If you're like me, you've come up with a great argument against a wasteful road project, when some smart-ass busts out, "Well, you may not drive, but your groceries got there by truck! You'll be paying more for cereal if the roads get congested!" They're holding your food hostage to get their road. With this project, you'll be able to smile sweetly and say, "Actually, my groceries come by train, so fuck off!"

So keep this in mind if you care about saving lives by getting big trucks off the road, or about saving money on road maintenance and construction: you like the Cross-Harbor Rail Freight Tunnel. Tell your representatives!

Summer Streets: I want more!

I went to Summer Streets again last week, and again I had a good time. But in addition to my expansion suggestions, there were a few things that have started to get to me after four years. These are all pretty small things, but they could make a difference in people's enjoyment of the event, and in how well the event accomplishes its goals.

1. Framing. Several times I heard and read reference to the street being "closed," and at 1:00 I heard repeated announcements that they were going to "open it up again."

To someone like me, who rarely takes taxis and drives even less, when cars are allowed it doesn't feel "open" to me. It's open to me for three mornings a year, and pretty unavailable the rest of the time. Repeating over and over again that Park Avenue will be "opened up again" emphasizes that we don't belong.

A few times I've stayed on one of the streets and been directly addressed by the staff, who don't seem to be aware that bicycles are allowed on the streets even when Summer Streets is over. Last week a bunch of us were traveling the right direction in the Centre Street bike lane and got yelled at.

A more neutral framing would be to simply say, "Cars will be allowed on the street again. Be careful of the cars; they can kill you. Pedestrians move to the sidewalk, and bicycles move to the right."

2. Practice what you preach. What's with the DOT employees racing those stupid golf carts around? They're still three times heavier than anything else on the road. The DOT staff drive them too fast, and expect everyone else to get out of their way. They were never being used to transport anything, only to drive some self-important-looking people around.

There's a great spot at the foot of Park Avenue South where you can sit on a bench and look right up the avenue to Grand Central and the Pan Am Building. Across the street are an Au Bon Pain and a Starbucks. On each of the three Saturdays I took a break and sat there with an ice coffee, watching everyone walking, skating and riding by. This past week my view was blocked by one of those NYPD dollar vans, parked right on the sidewalk.

The DOT and the NYPD should respect the non-motorized, small-vehicle nature of the event. Leave the golf carts in the garage, and park the vans on the side streets. If people need to get someplace in a hurry, they should take the subway or a taxi - on one of the other avenues. Let the VIPs go be Very Important someplace else.

3. Be flexible with space. Someone decided that exactly half of the street should be dedicated to walkers and runners, and half to cyclists. There were little signs at key intersections reminding people to bike on the left and walk on the right, and they are always placed exactly midway between the sidewalk and the median, no matter how many cyclists or runners there are.

The volunteers shouted out at regular intervals, "Bikes to the left, walk to the right!" If cyclists went too far to the right they singled us out for special scolding, but never seemed to say a word to the runners or strollers in the left-hand lane.

All I'm asking for is a little flexibility. Volunteers should be told that if there are consistently more cyclists than pedestrians passing through an intersection, they should move the sign over, or at least refrain from scolding cyclists who ride just to the right of the sign.

4. The Park Avenue Tunnel. Every time I pass that, I think about how cool it would be to ride through it. It would also alleviate some of the bottlenecks in the East Thirties. It only needs to be open in one direction. Any arguments for not allowing bikes into the tunnel can also be made for not allowing cars into the tunnel on the other 362 days of the year.

5. Brooklyn Bridge conflicts. The DOT is intentionally directing hundreds of bikes and pedestrians onto the Brooklyn Bridge walkway on sunny summer weekends. This year I rode over on the second week, and it was packed with both cyclists and pedestrians, who were not always respecting each other's space.

This is a golden opportunity for someone (I'm thinking Transportation Alternatives, but it could be somebody else) to organize in favor of converting one car lane to a cycle track. It could start with Summer Streets, then be extended to every summer weekend, then 24/7. All you would have to do is station a few people at each end of the bridge with petitions and flyers, and you'd get both cyclists and pedestrians signing on. Alternatively, you could ask local politicians to cross the bridge on foot, and even on bike if they're willing.

So much for the Red Hook Tunnel Bus

Ben Kabak is reporting that the Manhattan-bound Smith/9th Street platform will finally be closed, from January 10 through Spring 2012, and the Coney Island-bound platform will be closed from May through Fall 2012. There will be other assorted service outages at Fourth Avenue, Fifteenth Street and Fort Hamilton Parkway on the F and G lines. There's a lot of irrational anger at the MTA.

When Smith-9th is closed completely, there will be a shuttle bus to nearby F stations, and possibly to Jay Street, but the bus will not run through the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel to Lower Manhattan, as I suggested back in 2007. Although some politicians supported the idea as a permanent improvement, it got lost in the congestion pricing battle.

The people who are currently kvetching about the various closures should put that energy to work pushing for a tunnel bus. If they live in the South Slope/Gowanus/Red Hook area, they should push for one going down Ninth Street. If they live in the Windsor Terrace area, they should push for one going right down the Prospect Expressway. Google Maps say that either of these routes are ten minutes from the endpoint to the World Trade Center site, thirty minutes in traffic.

People who are upset about losing their F train service should get the state legislators representing this area - Assemblymembers Millman, Brennan and Ortiz, and Senators Montgomery and Squadron - to sign on to a request for a tunnel bus. It couldn't hurt to get support from the city council too. And if the MTA doesn't want to run it, get David Yassky to give permission for Suleiman Haqq to run his vans through there.

The Helix and the XBL

My post last Wednesday on Chris Christie's plans to use the Port Authority's $3 billion ARC tunnel contribution on a bus garage, reconstructing the Lincoln Tunnel helix, and replacing the cables on the George Washington Bridge got some interesting comments, both here and when Angie Schmitt featured it on the Streetsblog Network. Some of the comments pointed out that since buses use roads, this doesn't have to be all for cars. Sean, Kate and Alon on Streetsblog, and Busplanner here, all argued that the helix reconstruction could help speed buses.

For those of you just tuning in, the Lincoln Tunnel exclusive bus lane is a counterflow lane. One of the lanes that is normally reserved for outbound traffic is allocated for inbound buses during the weekday morning rush, but then it's over, and there is no outbound XBL. It carries thousands of people every morning, in an impressive feat of bus service, and is quite likely possible for the continued viability of most of the country's private bus lines. Several transit advocates have argued for making the XBL two-way round-the-clock, and for doubling it in the morning rush. The Port Authority has studied this, but there hasn't been much movement on it. One of the items in the Strategic Plan was $800 million to expand the XBL, but the helix reconstruction and the GWB cables seem to have jumped ahead of this.

I agree that since the Lincoln Tunnel exclusive bus lane goes on the helix, it would be negatively impacted if the helix were to fall down. But rebuilding the helix by itself would not actually increase capacity. The current helix is three lanes inbound and four outbound, and we could conceivably press to increase that to four inbound and five outbound, with one in each direction reserved for buses.

The problem is that the helix still connects to a six-lane road cut through the bedrock of the Palisades, and we can't add any lanes to that without some serious blasting. Increasing the capacity of the helix would just move the backups a mile further out of the city, to the point where the lanes merge down to three in each direction again. This is the reason why most of the serious plans to increase the XBL capacity involve taking another car lane.

However, we've got some pretty clear indications that Christie understands that this is about subsidies for drivers versus subsidies for transit, and we know where he comes down on that issue. I wouldn't expect him to say, "Okay guys, sure, let's take a general traffic lane and give it to bus riders!" Unless it's some vicious sarcasm like his mom dished out with her bit about the money tree.

That's not to say that savvy politicians couldn't get an expansion of the XBL folded into the helix reconstruction. Maybe if everyone plays their cards right, Cuomo could threaten to block the helix reconstruction as a car project unless XBL expansion is included in it. But that's not going to happen if everyone says, "Well, the helix benefits buses too!"

Sucked down the helix

Photo: Camron & Richard

The sad fate of the money that was to be dedicated to the ARC tunnel is a clear illustration of how easy it is for governments to spend money on car travel, and how hard it is for them to spend it on transit. The money was going to come from the Federal government, the New Jersey Turnpike Authority and the Port Authority. The Federal money will probably go to some transit project, assuming the President doesn't cave into some Republican "cancel the stimulus" nastiness. The Turnpike Authority will widen the two toll roads it controls, and Christie wants it to turn some of the money over to the State Transportation Trust Fund.

The latest news is what will probably happen to the three billion dollars the Port Authority was going to contribute to the project, $595 million of which was going to be spent next year. Andrew Grossman at the Wall Street Journal lists three projects that are at the top of the Authority's wish list: reconstruction of the Helix ramps leading to the Lincoln Tunnel, replacement of the cables holding up the George Washington Bridge, and a new bus garage at the Port Authority Bus Terminal. In case you suffer from transportation myopia, Ben at Second Avenue Sagas points out that only one of these projects is exclusively transit-related. As you may remember, most of the goals we have for transit (cleaner air, reducing carnage, less waste of energy) depend on getting people to shift from cars to transit. For that, in general, shifting money from transit to cars is bad.

I can't find an estimate anywhere for the cost of the Lincoln Tunnel helix or the George Washington Bridge cables, but on Page 16 of the Authority's 2008-2015 Strategic Plan, it says that the total cost for the new bus garage would be $500 million, of which $400 million was expected to come from the Port Authority. If that price hasn't gone up, that leaves $2.6 billion for the other two projects, and I can imagine that they'd be pretty expensive.

But what if the Port Authority were committed to using this money for transit? It turns out that in this Strategic Plan there are a number of other things on the wish list. Some are expansions of the transit system, some are equipment maintenance, and some are subsidies for transit-oriented development.

Project	Estimated cost in millions of dollars
Expansion of the Lincoln Tunnel exclusive bus lane	800
Lengthen the Grove Street and Harrison stations on the PATH to ten cars	230
Signal replacement on the PATH	253
Transit-oriented development: Newark Airport station on Northeast Corridor line	155
Transit-oriented development: George Washington Bridge bus station	150
Transit-oriented development: Jamaica AirTrain Station	425
Transit-oriented development: Lower Manhattan-Kennedy Airport link right of way	350
Total	$2,863 million

How about that? It comes out to a little over $2.6 billion.  And according to DNAinfo's Julie Shapiro, the PATH signal replacement is funded from other revenue streams, which brings us under $3 billion total.

So here we have $3 billion in transit funds that is currently unallocated, and $3 billion in transit-related needs listed in the Strategic Plan. And yet, Executive Director Chris Ward completely disregards the Strategic Plan and picks two road-related projects that aren't even listed in it. What could that be about? Ward hints at it in the DNAinfo article: "Gov.-elect Andrew Cuomo will work with Christie to decide what those projects will be, but Christie 'will take the lead,' Ward said." And there you have it: Christie overriding the Strategic Plan and diverting more than half the ARC Tunnel money to roads. I never thought I'd miss the days of Jon Corzine.

Deputy Mayor Robert Steel, keeping hope alive

Original photo: Associated Press.

Railfans and environmentalists across the city should be singing the praises of Robert Steel, Deputy Mayor for Economic Development. Our beloved fantasy maps had been trampled by Christie's pandering to the austerity fetishists, and then kicked when they were down by Andrew Cuomo's own attempt to appease the bond gods. In a flash, Steel picked them up, dusted them off, and raised them in triumph at the head of a cavalry charge.

From an AP report, it sounds like someone in Steel's office had seen the work of a few environmentalist transit advocates, Steve Lanset, Ralph Brasket and Joe Versaggi, showing that extending the #7 subway under the Hudson River to Secaucus could be done for half the cost of the "ARC Tunnel." Someone at the Hudson Yards Development Corporation was feeling a bit defensive about the city's own overpriced tunnel to nowhere - the current #7 extension to the Javits Center. Someone in City Planning was frustrated at Chris Christie's cancellation of the ARC project - and probably about the ARC project itself, bloated with unwanted features and beset with so many compromises and kludges that it had lost most of its supporters. Half the transit advocates in the region openly scorned the plan, and the other half had trouble keeping a straight face as they defended it.

They put their heads together and realized that they would need powerful allies to overcome Christie's strong pro-car bias. What better allies than the real estate interests that had gotten Bloomberg and Doctoroff to commit billions of taxpayer dollars to extend the #7 to an area that in 2005 was factories, warehouses and parking lots? The lower price tag dodged Christie's moronic but effective "money tree" attack, allowing him to accept the tunnel while still keeping his image of the Great Budget Cutter.

It's not clear how involved Steel himself was in any of this, but at the very least he saw the genius in the original idea and its appropriateness in the new context, and allowed it to be floated in the Times. By doing this, he has restored hope to transit advocates on both sides of the Hudson. Even with callous austerity panderers in both statehouses, we may still see some transit expansion.

This is why I voted for Bloomberg last year, even with the stupid term limits business: if Bill Thompson had won, you know we'd have some flunky like Joe Chan doing economic development, and if he showed any vision at all he'd be tearing down the Port Authority to put in a parking garage for Christie's new car tunnel. And that's why we need to find someone with vision who can run in 2013 and knock all the corrupt Democratic politicians out of the race. Get working on it now, people, or we'll all be in trouble.

Budget goblins: the phantom menace

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christie: That’s the difference.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why highway tunnels suck

Since some people didn't quite get my brilliant idea, I was marveling at the number of people who otherwise agree with me about most transit and livable streets issues, but don't see any problem with putting highways in tunnels. And this is not the first time: I've seen otherwise reasonable people support the Gowanus tunnel, and even lament that Westway never happened.

I started writing an explanation of why highway tunnels are problematic. Then Streetsblog highlighted the fact that I'm not alone in this. Over on the other side of the country, Dan Bertolet is having very similar discussions with fellow Seattleites who don't see any problem with putting the Alaskan Way in a tunnel.

So here is your answer: highway tunnels suck for many reasons. As discussed in the comments on Ben's blog post, they are expensive, draining money from other worthy uses. They require ventilation structures that spew carbon monoxide into the air, in much larger quantities than subway vents. As Dan Bertolet observes, if they free up road capacity it's only temporary. And here are three more from me:

The cars still come from somewhere. Ben recently had a post about the never-completed Nostrand and Utica Avenue subway lines. A number of commenters observed that the area is now very car-dependent and full of transit NIMBYism. I'll go further and point out that the people here regularly vote for anti-transit politicians like Lew Fidler, Alan Meisel and Carl Kruger. Their car-oriented lifestyle is not just encouraged by the lack of subways, but facilitated by highways like Linden Boulevard, the Belt Parkway and even the BQE.

The cars are going somewhere. If you look at the congestion on Sixth avenue in the middle of the day, or Bleecker Street on a Friday night, how do the cars get there? Many of them come on the BQE, on the FDR or on the West Side Highway.

The cars are probably not spending their entire time in the tunnel. If they could get from origin to destination without using any streets, that might not be so bad. But the tunnel (or parkway, or elevated highway) doesn't go everywhere, so the drivers are going to have to use local streets at both ends. When they do, it's a bad scene.

I still remember one time I rented a car and drove down the West Side Highway. Coming off onto 79th Street, I was bewildered and annoyed. What were all these pedestrians doing? And I was supposed to stop for them? I'd just been driving nonstop for a long time! A lot of our most dangerous intersections are highway exits, where drivers are still coming out of highway mode.

So that's why the BQE tunnel proposal sucks, why the Gowanus tunnel proposal sucks, why Westway sucked, why the Big Dig sucks, and why the Alaskan Way tunnel proposal sucks. Car tunnels suck, for at least six reasons. Don't support them, and don't accept that car capacity is sacred.

A brilliant idea for Broadway

Okay, I'm a civic-minded Queens resident with no engineering background, so maybe this won't work at all. But they tell me that Broadway in Manhattan is not up to federal highway standards, and they want to redo it.

My plan is simple: dig a "Cross-Midtown Tunnel" from Columbus Circle to Union Square. This will replace all the capacity that has been removed from Broadway over the past three years. I'm sure Allen Swerdlowe will love it because it will discourage traffic-enraged drivers from skipping off the highway to drive on local streets.

Given the Post's reactions to the changes that have been made on Broadway, I'm guessing they'll love my visionary plan. Sam Staley will adore it. It will have a place in Ben Kabak's ideal world. Sure, it'll have to be dug deep to bypass all the subway tunnels. But we'll throw in a few bucks to paint some buses and call it "BRT" so the transit people won't mind spending billions on this.

After all, if you agree with the State DOT that car capacity must be preserved at all costs on the BQE, then of course you agree with Michael Grynbaum that car capacity must be preserved at all costs on Broadway. Right?

Brilliantly STOOPID

I'm a little late responding to this, but so far I haven't seen this angle covered in anyone's blog posts, only in comments. It also covers points that I've made in several posts before, and I'm frustrated that I haven't been able to convince very many people of the validity of those points, and getting kind of tired of repeating them.

This particular incident started with a "design workshop" for the State DOT's BQE widening plan. Some guy from Cobble Hill named Roy Sloane suggested tunneling straight under Gowanus and Fort Greene to bypass Brooklyn Heights. An architect working on the project, Allan Swerdlowe, called the idea "brilliant," and from there it made its way into the Brooklyn Paper, Gothamist, the Post, and finally Second Avenue Sagas.

Well, yeah, I guess the idea is brilliant, in the same way that it would be brilliant if someone stood up at one of those meetings and said, "Why don't we just tow the cars and trucks over Downtown Brooklyn using trained flying hamsters?" Yeah, that's kind of brilliant, and it wouldn't add to the congestion on existing roadways, either.

Many commenters pointed out that the Gowanus tunnel proposal has been around longer and would provide more benefits in terms of burying unsightly structures and putting cars out of sight. They are both brilliant, and both incredibly stupid ideas. I just feel stupid myself for even giving the idea any attention, but since so many others are putting their thoughts into it, I feel like I have to address it as well:

1. As many commenters have mentioned, there is no way to build "Swerdlowe's vision" of a tunnel that whisks the cars under Downtown Brooklyn into Williamsburg, since many of them don't want to go to Williamsburg. They would either have to use local streets or continue to use the current structure in order to get to the Brooklyn or Manhattan Bridges.


2. The tunnel would also require large ventilation structures, which would replace existing buildings or parkland and spew carbon monoxide.


3. The BQE is not falling down. It is "functionally obsolete," which means that it is narrower than the highway builders think it should be. That is not a good reason to dig a tunnel.


4. There are plenty of cheaper, more effective ways to increase safety than by digging a multi-billion-dollar forgiving highway.


5. Of course it would add capacity. We're talking about the State DOT here. They're organizationally incapable of fixing a pothole without adding three lanes.


6. It would be nice to remove the cantilevered highway, fill in the ditch in Cobble Hill, and tear down the elevated Gowanus highway. None of these desires require the highway to be replaced. As Gandalf said, "That we should wish to cast him down and have no one in his place is not a thought that occurs to his mind."


7. The billions that it would cost to dig this tunnel are billions that would not be spent on transit.


8. Anything that makes it easier for people to drive encourages people to drive more, increasing the number of drivers and reducing the constituency for transit.


9. If you want to move freight, build freight rail.


10. As commenter Andrew pointed out on Second Avenue Sagas, most of the traffic on the BQE in downtown Brooklyn is induced by the "free" bridges. Toll the bridges, people will take the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel instead, and the BQE will see a lot less congestion and a lot less wear and tear.

The overall point, and I can't stress this enough, is that the BQE is in competition with all the parallel transit routes. Every dollar that makes it easier to drive private cars on the BQE takes away ridership from the Staten Island express buses, the Fourth Avenue subway, the G train and the proposed Tribororx line. So if you want to see healthy farebox recovery on these lines, don't build up any parallel car routes.

More difficulties predicting mode choice

As I mentioned in my last post, EngineerScotty and Jarrett Walker have been discussing various factors that motivate people's choice of one travel mode or another. Scotty and Jarrett are both interested in getting people to shift from cars to transit for similar reasons to the ones I list at the top of this blog. Scotty brought up Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and describes his reasoning as follows:

I think that actual research into what transit users want, as opposed to what planners, politicians, and amateur kibbitzers such as myself might think they want, is highly important.

Yes, definitely. But allow me to join the numerous commenters, as well as Scotty and Jarrett and Maslow themselves, in pointing out that there are tons of problems with using Maslow's hierarchy. Here are the ones that are the most salient for me:

1. Scotty frames the entire thing as what motivates people to use transit, without acknowledging that the issue is competition between transit and private auto use. Jarrett adopts that unquestioningly, as does Brad Aaron in his summary for Streetsblog.net.

2. Jarrett tries to use the concept to argue why transit geeks just can't motivate the general public to go along with their grand schemes. But as commenter Adrian points out, "The disagreements you're alluding to are more about the appropriate time-scale for change, than they are about a pyramid of needs. The person waiting in the rain for a bus wants a better bus service right about now, but the warm and dry urbanist wants to create an urban form over the next few decades in which waiting for a bus in the rain will be less common."

3. Maslow himself acknowledges seven exceptions to the hierarchy, including number 5:

Another cause of reversal of the hierarchy is that when a need has been satisfied for a long time, this need may be underevaluated. People who have never experienced chronic hunger are apt to underestimate its effects and to look upon food as a rather unimportant thing. If they are dominated by a higher need, this higher need will seem to be the most important of all. It then becomes possible, and indeed does actually happen, that they may, for the sake of this higher need, put themselves into the position of being deprived in a more basic need.

However, I should point out that Scotty does not actually try to apply Maslow's original categories. He creates his own groups in terms of Maslow's concept of "pre-potency":

Human needs arrange themselves in hierarchies of pre-potency. That is to say, the appearance of one need usually rests on the prior satisfaction of another, more pre-potent need. Man is a perpetually wanting animal. Also no need or drive can be treated as if it were isolated or discrete; every drive is related to the state of satisfaction or dissatisfaction of other drives.

Scotty arranges the needs in eight categories of pre-potency, going from the bottom of the pyramid to the top: Access, safety and security, reliability, time and convenience, comfort, cost, amenities and societal acceptance. I think it's a good start, but I would prune it drastically, and keep in mind that this is forming the basis for whether people choose various modes or not:

1. Availability. What we readers of Jarrett's blog typically call "access." Can you get from here to there when you need/want to? Once you're there, can you get back, or continue on to your next destination? On the most basic level, nobody's going to choose a mode that won't take them where they need to go.

2. Value. This includes not only the monetary cost, but other costs as well. Door to door, how long does it take you to get there? How reliable is it? Is the risk of bodily harm within your tolerance? Can you get work done on the way, or at least get a little exercise? Scotty's distinction between incremental, access and system costs is valuable, but they all fall under this umbrella.

3. Amenities. These include everything tangible that makes the trip more or less pleasant but doesn't involve basic cost calculations, including comfort and fun. This is where most of the individual variation comes in: one person's value is often another's amenity.

4. Glamour. Everything non-tangible that affects mode choice: status markers, fantasies, the presence of attractive people (or conversely, their absence).

Two modes can compete on all these levels, but from what I've seen, most of the competition between transit/cycling/walking and private cars takes place on the level of availability and value. The vast majority of transit systems in this country are uncompetitive because they just don't go to most of the places where people want to go, when they want to do it.

The systems that are competitive on availability often lose on one of the value criteria, usually trip time. The Lincoln Tunnel XBL/toll/parking nexus gets thousands of suburban commuters to take buses by making them competitive on only two variables: trip time and monetary cost. And I'll point out it accomplishes this by allowing cars to stay slow (no tunnel expansion) and making them more expensive - not by anything it really does to the buses.

For the systems that are competitive on availability and value, they can win passengers through amenities and eventually glamour. This is where we are in New York. Most of the people who drive or take taxis on a weekday do so not because they're faster (they're not) or they go someplace transit doesn't (they don't), but because they offer a bit more space and privacy, and because they're more glamorous. In New York, transit needs to offer similar service levels and similar status endorsement in order to win over those who are either too good for the subway, or too old for that shit.

Killing the cash cow

Last week WNYC's Brian Lehrer had a segment on tolls and transportation that made me squirm a little. There were several bizarre moments, including when Senator Savino embarrassed herself by giving a bike route from Boro Park to Flushing along the BQE service road and McGuinness and Northern Boulevards, and Stacey from Basking Ridge repeating the lie that "mass transit is not an option" for the disabled.



The most sensible people on the segment were callers Andres from Jersey City and TJ from Boro Park, and Lehrer himself. Despite her obvious windshield perspective and her partisan shilling for the car-oriented Bill Thompson, Savino was clearly pro-transit - although I'm disappointed that Lehrer didn't ask her to explain how she let bridge tolls fail in the Senate.

The biggest disappointment was Kate Slevin of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign and her resolutely sunny we're-all-winners-with-transit schtick - which might explain Tri-State's bizarre stance on the Tappan Zee Bridge widening. I was particularly frustrated at how Slevin completely missed TJ's question, responding with a stock speech about how people are turning back to transit, which wound up reinforcing his point. I think TJ's question is a great one, so let me quote it for you:

How much is policy set indirectly by retaining the car - and the driver in the car - as a cash cow, as opposed to developing public transportation more, which perhaps is a lower revenue earner?

TJ's question echoes one asked in June by commenter P on a Streetsblog post announcing the pro-XBL Streetfilm:

My guess is that the Port Authority doesn't want to forego the tolls from the cars currently using those lanes. Pressure needs to be put on the PA from elected officials and advocacy groups that see a larger vision than just the PA's bottom line.

I've been thinking about P's question ever since, and I've done a little number-crunching. According to the Port Authority's 2008 financial statement (PDF), 20,937,000 vehicles traveled eastbound through the tunnel in that year, and the total operating revenues were $153,536,000. The XBL study found that 1700 buses use the lane every day. I will assume that half the average daily traffic, or 28,681 vehicles, passes through during the XBL hours, or 8,994 per non-XBL lane. I will further assume that trucks are 7% of these vehicles, as they are on an annual basis, and that these trucks have four axles on average. The Port Authority website tells us that these trucks would pay about $32 each, while cars pay $8 and buses $4.

This leads me to conclude that each non-XBL lane brings in $87,058 per day, and replacing it with a second XBL would cut all but $6,800 of that out, leading to a annual drop of $30 million - 19% of the revenue from the Tunnel. We may all agree on this blog that it's worth it, but it's still a big hit to ask the Port Authority to take.

If the Port Authority currently loses thousands a day on the buses, it makes most of it back in gate fees at the bus terminal. Buses pay $40 per departure (PDF), including any bus that goes into the terminal and doesn't immediately deadhead back to Jersey. If we estimate that that's 1500 of the 1700 buses, it comes out to $60,000 a day. The problem is that the terminal is pretty much at capacity, so any additional buses going through the lane would probably drop off on the street somewhere - my recommendation is to send them through the planned 34th Street busway, but in any case they won't be paying any gate fees.

Also, none of this affects westbound traffic. Since the tolls are one-way eastbound, the Port Authority could keep that XBL round the clock and just reverse direction without losing any toll money. Sure, they'd cause the mother of all Manhattan traffic jams at first, but then people would get used to it, and more of them would take the bus.

All told, it makes sense that the Port Authority would drag its feet on setting up a second XBL. It also explains that they want it to be high-occupancy or toll, not a bus-only lane, even though that would significantly limit its effectiveness. P recommends pressuring the Port Authority to take a larger vision beyond their bottom line - which would be nice if it works. The only other solutions I can think of are to raise tolls on both cars and buses, or to build a new terminal somewhere else and charge for it.

Getting back to TJ's question, here's a pretty clear case where relying on car use to subsidize transit is unsustainable if we really want people to shift away from cars to transit. The good news is that if you build your transit right, as ridership goes up, so does profitability, so eventually either the passengers would pay for all the operating costs, but even if you don't, if enough people use the system, a consensus in favor of collecting taxes to fund "our transit" will probably form.

Faster, more reliable buses to Connecticut and beyond

In the comments to the original Design New Haven post about wanting better bus service, some folks mentioned that the New York-Hartford Megabus run was unreliable and took a long time. This was also mentioned by several commenters on the corresponding SeeClickFix issue, and there seems to be a consensus that buses from New York to Connecticut and points beyond (a) take longer than they should and (b) can sometimes take a lot longer. Everyone knows why: they get stuck in traffic on New York City streets.

As I've written before, the enduring profitability of the west-of-Hudson routes is due in large part to the Lincoln Tunnel Exclusive Bus Lane, which has been making bus commuting competitive with cars since 1970. Although the Port Authority has dragged their heels on the long-overdue expansion of the XBL, which has been at capacity since the late 1980s, they have continued to operate the lane.

Another factor is the huge number of general-purpose lanes feeding into the tunnel approach, which allow the buses to move relatively smoothly even where they don't have a dedicated facility.

If you go to the Port Authority and get on a bus to Montclair or Newburgh, your bus will go right out of the terminal and into the tunnel, with at most two blocks of street shared with private cars. By the time you're on the Turnpike or Route 3, traffic is usually flowing pretty smoothly for everyone. Relatively little of the route is on the general-purpose streets with frequent bus stops that put buses at such a disadvantage.

Now if you get on a bus to Hartford or Providence, your bus might go right out of the terminal and onto Tenth Avenue. There's no bus lane on Tenth Avenue, so you're mixed right in with the cars and trucks, and if traffic is bad, you're stuck in it too. If a light turns red, you sit there, and if someone blocks the box, you could be sitting there for a long time. So it goes up Tenth Avenue and Amsterdam Avenue. At some point the bus crosses to the East Side and gets on the Bruckner Expressway. There are no traffic lights on the Bruckner or the New England Thruway, but sometimes car traffic can get congested. The Bruckner has no bus lane, not even an HOV lane, which means that any bus is going to be slower than a corresponding car trip. Getting back is similar, except you're going down Ninth instead of up Tenth.

Because of this, some bus operators will actually use the XBL even for trips to Connecticut. That's right, they will go west, through New Jersey, up the New Jersey Turnpike and across the George Washington Bridge to the Major Deegan Expressway, and from there to the relatively less-congested Interstate 287 to 684 to 84. According to Google Maps, that adds about fifteen miles to the trip, but you know they've figured out that it's a more reliable - and often faster - route.

So why do we care if the buses are slow and unreliable? There's train service; shouldn't we put our government dollars into making that better? Well, maybe not; the old New Haven mainline is pretty much at capacity right now, and it's clearly not serving all the people who currently drive on these highways. Many people want a one-seat ride to a place that's not on the train, like Stockbridge or Northampton. Others want a level of comfort that they can't get on Metro-North, but maybe aren't willing to pay Acela rates. Some, as has been said before, want wifi, power outlets and a place to stow their bicycles.

We want to decrease the demand for building and rebuilding the highways of New England. We want to decrease the pollution and carnage along I-95 and US 1. We want these drivers to shift to the bus, and to do that the bus has to be at least as fast and reliable as the car.

That's why buses heading to the north and east need their own XBL, where they can be free from intersections and car traffic until they get to less congested highways. Ideally, this would be highway all the way. Why don't these buses take the LIE to the Whitestone Bridge? Well, thinking back to the few times I've attempted to drive the LIE at any time near rush hour, it was a lot slower than the Turnpike. The short morning rush HOV lane doesn't seem to be enough. If we had a bi-directional, 24/7 dedicated busway from the Midtown Tunnel to the Van Wyck Expressway, you know those buses would be flying out to Connecticut.

The LIE is a touchy subject with some people, so it wouldn't surprise me if it were difficult to get that bus lane approved. A less ambitious plan would put bus lanes on Ninth and Tenth Avenues (and Amsterdam and Columbus), similar to the ones on Fifth and Madison for the East Side. Don't West Siders - and Riverdale residents - deserve as much?

More examples of profitability

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The man behind the Simpson Curtain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So there's your magic formula for transit profitability:

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

More on the profitable Lincoln Tunnel buses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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