Our third world airport

I remember when Joe Biden remarked that LaGuardia Airport felt like the Third World to him. I remember thinking, "What the fuck is this guy talking about?" I thought about writing something, but my thoughts were kind of messy and it felt kind of hopeless, so I moved on to something else. Now I'm kicking myself.

I generally like Biden. He has a long record of not only supporting Amtrak but riding it himself, although with all his support it seems bizarre that the company would only have one line going through his state, with two stops. And I like how he seems to genuinely speak his mind.

But I've been to the Third World. Dominicans may not like me calling their country third world, but their airport is a bit lacking in the air conditioning department. I think we can all agree that Abidjan is third world, and when I was there they didn't have jet bridges. You get off the plane, go down the stairs and walk across the tarmac to the gate. Not a bad airport, all in all, but not in the same league as any airport I've been to in the United States. LaGuardia has good air conditioning, and it has fully functioning jet bridges.

I've also flown into a lot of airports with good reputations: Heathrow, Charles de Gaulle, Keflavík, JFK's Terminal 5. I honestly don't see what the big deal is. I like Terminal 5 because they have Cibo. If I could get some fresh vegetables with dip, and a decent ice coffee, to take on the plane at LaGuardia I would be happy.

If I've ever had a problem flying into or out of LaGuardia it's been the crappy bus connections. I hate waiting a long time for a bus to come, and then when it does it's packed with people who got on at the other terminal. I hate how the buses have to fight with all the cars and taxis to get to the curb. I hate how in the winter the curb is blocked by taxis. The Q70 is a big improvement, but there's still a long way to go.

Somehow, whenever people talk about how awful LaGuardia is, they never mention how the buses are blocked by taxis. It's always the low ceilings, and maybe somebody once saw a rat. I've never seen a rat there. I've never noticed the low ceilings, in fact some of them are pretty high. I kind of like the architecture. When I was a kid the Central Terminal would occasionally pop up in my dreams. The new terminals aren't bad for what they are. The Marine Air Terminal is a fucking Art Deco monument.

What would make the biggest difference to me would be a direct train there from Woodside, or even from Astoria (and no, just because it was politically unfeasible in 1995 doesn't mean it's politically unfeasible twenty years later). Andrew Cuomo likes to style himself as the Bold Leader who Gets Things Done. If he really were, he would extend the goddamn N train and tell Gianaris to grow a spine and get on board. But instead we get a proposal for a shitty AirTrain that would dump all the LaGuardia passengers at Willets Point, twenty minutes further out in Queens. That's not boldness, that's cowardice. That's Cuomo running away from a challenge.

What would really make a difference to me would be if we took that four or ten or twenty billion dollars and used it to build a new train along 21st Street and Astoria Boulevard, or the Tribororx, or a Queens Super-Express, or the Subway to Secaucus, or basically any transit improvement that would be used on a daily basis by people who don't work at the airport.

I'll tell you what it is that makes LaGuardia a Third World airport. It's the authoritarian, top-down approach taken by our Governor, and yes our Vice President, who have never come through here or sent staff members to ask what we might want or need. It's the plutocratic approach that puts the optics of the business traveler ahead of the convenience of families going to visit relatives. It's the cowardice of building a flashy AirTrain to nowhere instead of taking on the entrenched elites who want to block a really useful train. It makes me feel like I live in a goddamn banana republic.

(Dragon appears courtesy of the Durian-Project of the Blender Foundation.)

Transportation myopia of the week: 7- make that 6 ways transit can be financially sustainable

Alex Block has a summary of a discussion between David Levinson and Lisa Schweitzer on making transit sustainable from last June and July. I was quite dismayed to see three otherwise intelligent people wasting their brainpower on problems that were pretty much irrelevant. They were all three suffering from transportation myopia: the condition of seeing transit as a self-contained system rather than as an option in competition with private cars and other modes, and of seeing transit as an end in itself, rather than a means to an end.

Levinson's initial piece did actually mention a couple of times that transit is competing with publicly subsidized roads and parking. In particular, he observes that, "An independent transit utility can raise fares, with the approval of a public utilities commission, so that average farebox recovery approaches and eventually exceeds 100 percent. This should be accompanied by full cost pricing for competing transportation modes — in other words, higher gas taxes or road fares."

Schweitzer devotes an entire blog post to every one of Levinson's seven "ways transit utilities could reverse the long decline the current governance model has provided" - except for Way #2, "raise fares," which I quoted above. I think this is actually an honest mistake on Schweitzer's part: she gave her commentary on Levinson's Way #1 a title beginning with "Part 2," so when she started "Part 3," she went on to Way #3. And yes, this can happen to self-described nerds, even ones with PhDs.

Unfortunately, in overlooking Way #2 Schweitzer skipped over one of the few really meaningful parts of Levinson's post. Here's the other main one:

From the mid-19th century through the mid-20th, transit was privately operated, usually running on public rights-of-way (which companies often were obligated to maintain), charging a government-regulated fare. This model was hugely profitable for decades, until it wasn't.

The causes for transit's decline are many, but rising incomes, suburbanization, and of course a much faster competitor in the automobile and highway system are among them. At that point, which ran from the 1930s to the 1960s depending on where you were in the United States, the private sector abandoned transit and the public sector took over.

Levinson himself acknowledges that transit was "hugely profitable" until competition from publicly funded roads and parking took away their ridership. And he acknowledges in his Way #2 that this could be reversed by charging the full cost for those roads and parking facilities. This is essentially the Magic Formula for Transit Ridership described by Michael Kemp back in 1973. And that's really all you need. No need for Way 1 or Ways 3 through 7.

What we need to talk about is how to get full cost pricing for roads, including potential challenges and ways to overcome them. But for some reason Levinson doesn't talk about any of that, he just goes on to talk about smart cards and land value capture and bond markets.

This is like reading an article about How to Keep Cool in Hot Situations that observes, "The causes for your house being on fire are many…" and goes on to list "seven ways burn victims could reverse the dramatic rise in heat-related discomfort." Way #2 is "put out the fire," and the rest are things like wearing an asbestos suit or putting a fan in front of a bowl of ice cubes. And then Dr. S writes a long post about the known dangers of asbestos suits, while forgetting to mention that you could just call the fire department except that the fire department is run by the arsonist's brother.

And this is the problem not just with Levinson and Schweitzer, but with other transportation experts like Jarrett Walker and Yonah Freemark when they talk about transit funding and profitability. Ultimately it's not a transportation problem at all, it's a political problem, and the transportation experts don't really have anything useful to say about it. But we insist that they say something so they come out with this kind of bullshit, which is not really wrong, it's just beside the point.

Transit setback roundup: I can't even

These past few weeks have been discouraging for me as a transit advocate. From almost every^* level of government I've heard elected (and appointed) officials promoting "roads and bridges," or crappy, uninspiring, unproductive transit, or opposing reasonable transit improvements.

• President Obama going on and on about "roads and bridges," and "infrastructure," and "choice."
• Senators Schumer and Blumenthal bloviating about the safety of Metro-North, without mentioning the safety of driving.
• NEW! Representative Maloney also ignoring the possibility of holding drivers accountable, exploits the tragedy to push $100 million for Positive Train Control upgrades … reallocated from where, exactly?
• Governor Cuomo proposing a budget full of transit raids, park-and-rides, and a mostly useless AirTrain from Willets Point to La Guardia. Oh, and taking $1.3 billion in mortgage fraud settlements for the Tappan Zee Bridge.
• State Senator Gianaris bashing plans to increase subway service to his district based on decades-old conversations.
• Assemblymember Simanowitz and Councilemember Lancman coming out swinging against Main Street Select Bus plan.
• Mayor de Blasio with a transportation plan based on ferries without feeder buses.
• Members of Manhattan Community Board 8 opposing bus bulbs.

* I say almost because I haven't heard anything stupid from a local congressional representative recently. Added: I just heard from Maloney! To the contrary, Jerry Nadler's efforts to promote the Cross-Harbor Rail Freight Tunnel project seem to be making progress.

So much crap, so much of it things that transit advocates have discussed for so long, I feel exhausted thinking about writing more than a sentence about each one. Thanks to Streetsblog for going into the details in many of these so that I don't have to; you can donate here. Also thanks to Ben Kabak, Yonah Freemark and Alon Levy for taking the time to call bullshit on Cuomo's AirTrain proposal, and Ben again for calling bullshit on de Blasio's ferry proposal.

Inequality: disease or symptom?

Do you want to see real inequality? Do you want to see well-fed people, satisfied smiles on their faces, walking past lines of hungry people waiting in the cold, or in the hot sun? It's not hard to find, here in one of the richest cities in the world: just go to any restaurant that has a line for brunch.

Photo: Jessie Daniels / Flickr.

Yes, I'm being flippant. But I'm making a real point: just because you observe inequality in a place does not mean that that place creates inequality. In fact, imagine if you had a magical machine that turned poor people into rich ones, or even if you just had someone who sat at a desk and handed out stacks of twenties. You'd see poor people next to rich people, because the poor people have to go to that place to become rich people. In fact, if you go to some of the places where smug people tell you you won't see rich people stepping over poor people, chances are very good that they're that way because of segregation, like Detroit.

I've been to places with relatively mild weather - Seattle, Vancouver and Albuquerque, in particular, but I'm sure there are more - and people there told me that their city attracts homeless people because the living is easy. You can see the challenge: suppose that your city has a million poor people, and you come up with a brilliant economic development plan that lifts them all out of poverty in a year. What would happen next? A million more people would move in, ready for their chance to escape poverty. Perfectly reasonable on their part.

What's not reasonable is to blame "the city" - its government, and usually its people - for the inequality, as I often see being done to New York. If you see inequality in a city, it could be that the city is making its residents poorer, or it could be keeping its poor residents down over generations. It could be that everyone's getting richer equally, but the rich had a head start. Or the city could be making its poor residents richer, and they then move out or have a low birth rate, and are replaced by poor immigrants.

There are even ways to tell. Look at adults (living anywhere) who were born to poor city residents. Are they richer or poorer than their parents? How does their change in wealth compare to the children of their parents' wealthier neighbors?

I honestly don't know. I haven't looked at that data. But I'm not the one demonizing New York for "inequality."

The disaster of New Jersey's emergency transit plan

New Jersey's transportation infrastructure is in crisis. New Jersey Transit told Businessweek that 257 rail cars and 65 engines (23% and 35% of the total, respectively) were damaged or destroyed by Hurricane Sandy. Some of the rail lines were washed out, or blocked with boats and shipping containers. Hoboken Terminal and the PATH train, which connect New Jersey Transit passengers with lower Manhattan, were flooded. The state is in the midst of a gasoline shortage. They needed a plan.

Unfortunately, the emergency plan that New Jersey Transit came up with was horrible. They borrowed 31 buses from SEPTA and are getting another 350 from around the country. They chose eight park-and-ride lots around the northern half of the state, and set up buses to take people from these lots to the ferries and the Holland Tunnel, twenty in the morning and twenty in the evening from each lot. What could possibly go wrong?

The line to board the bus at South Orange. Photo: @ccondry / Twitter.

Well, quite a lot, actually. Turns out that even people who had gas in their cars didn't want to waste it driving to some park-and-ride and back. They probably also didn't want to have their car stuck at some park-and-ride out by the highway with no bus to get them to it, if they had to go home in the middle of the day or late at night. They wanted to walk to the bus, so that's what they tried to do. In towns across the metro area, including Montclair, South Orange, Hoboken and Woodbridge, people waited up to 90 minutes to board packed buses bound for Manhattan. There was only one lane open for buses in the Holland Tunnel, and the usual one-lane XBL in the Lincoln Tunnel, limiting the total number of buses that could cross the Hudson. Many of those who did take the park-and-ride buses were dropped off at ferry terminals, where there was another wait for a boat.

In the ultimate craziness, after trains from Woodbridge attracted unmanageable crowds, New Jersey Transit simply cancelled the service and told everyone to drive to Metropark to catch a Northeast Corridor train. And, you know, let them eat cake on the way.

The commute home was similarly frustrated. The Port Authority Bus Terminal was packed with commuters - first waiting for buses, then waiting to buy bus tickets, finally waiting just to get into the terminal.

Commuters wait to get inside the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Photo: nikocoutroulis / Instagram.

As I write this at 9:30 PM, many people are still at the terminal waiting for buses. Some of them are afraid that at a certain point New Jersey Transit will stop running buses. I'll update this when that part of the saga is over.

The problems in the morning rush attracted some attention from the media. First, WNYC reporter Nancy Solomon discussed the long lines at South Orange. (I've been trying to find that report online, but haven't been able to.) Then it got mentioned by Wall Street Journal bloggers and Capital New York.

In the afternoon, New Jersey Transit released a revised plan for tomorrow. "Buses that were used in emergency service at Bridgewater, Woodbridge and Willowbrook Mall, as well as Newark Liberty International Airport have been redeployed to ease crowding on buses traveling through South Orange, Jersey City, Hoboken and Newark, to New York, the agency said." In other words, there were nowhere near as many cars in the park-and-rides as the planners expected, and a lot more people at the walkable bus stops.

We'll see tomorrow how much better the revised plan is. In the meantime, can we all agree that this shows the utter bankruptcy of the standard park-and-ride mentality that still preoccupies transit planners? No, New Jersey Transit Planners, most transit riders don't want to maximize the time they can spend behind the wheel, especially during a post-hurricane gasoline shortage.

Can we also agree that buses are not better than trains? The "Bus Rapid Transit" zealots at the Institute for Transportation Development Policy have mesmerized too many of New York's transportation thinkers, to the point where we get the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, the Pratt Institute and former Streetsblog editor Aaron Naparstek all arguing that buses should be a higher political priority than trains. In the current world buses have their place, and the "bus bridge" instituted by the MTA last week seemed to work fairly well. But to replace either one of the PATH tubes or the North River Tunnels with buses would take a huge number, and they'd need serious street priority.

I have to admit that I was disappointed in the performance of the private sector. I had expected private bus operators to be more flexible, adding service as needed to meet demand. Since New Jersey's laws allow private bus operators, I had hoped to find that they stepped up to fill the obvious holes in New Jersey Transit's plan. Instead, there is no evidence that any of the major private bus companies (DeCamp, Suburban Transit, Academy or Coachusa) added buses to their existing routes or sent buses to supplement routes that were overcrowded. Apparently the private vans were running their usual routes, but they haven't had enough capacity to get everybody home from the Port Authority.

Of course, it's hard to add extra buses, especially if the route is relatively complex and you have to bring on drivers who don't know it. That's why it's nice to have relatively simple routes like "you go all the way down Route 3 to the end, then turn around and come back."

It's possible that the "cross-honoring" system is contributing to the lack of interest from private operators. I don't know exactly how it works when someone with a monthly New Jersey Transit pass shows up on a DeCamp bus, but it may be that DeCamp doesn't get any money from it, or enough to make it worth running extra buses. It's also possible that DeCamp and friends have simply grown fat and lazy on its government-protected monopoly.

The bottom line is that New Jersey Transit's park-and-ride culture has to change. We know how much Governor Christie likes drivers, and it's possible that that attitude is shared by Executive Director Weinstein, and from him on down. But New Jersey can't go on functioning as a car-dominated society. The longer that Christie and the NJ Transit planners try to stave off the inevitable, the worse it will be.

Your Guide to New York State's Judicial Nomination Process

As I mentioned recently, there were two bizarre judicial rulings in the New York State Supreme Court setting back transportation reform. On August 18, State Supreme Court judge Arthur Engoron declared that the Five Borough Taxi Plan was unconstitutional, and on August 22, State Supreme Court judge Bruce Cozzens declared that a payroll tax that funds a significant chunk of the city's transit operations is unconstitutional. They both rested their opinions on a dubious principle of home rule.

The State Supreme Court - that sounds like a big deal, huh? Like New York's version of Justices Breyer and Roberts? Actually, as I learned in eighth grade, the Supreme Court is actually the state's lowest court, able to be overruled by the Appellate Division and the Court of Appeals, not to mention federal courts. But it's still significant. So where did these guys come from, anyway, and how did they get this kind of power?



Governing magazine has the answer, and it links to two editorials that are definitely worth a read. I sure didn't learn this stuff in eighth grade! It turns out that New York State has a hugely crappy, undemocratic system of electing judges. Sure, you can get nominated as an independent, but to get the nomination of the Democratic or Republican parties you don't run in the primary like you might for a legislative seat. You need to be chosen by a Judicial Nominating Convention.

Who votes in the nominating convention? Judicial Delegates. Who chooses the judicial delegates? In principle, you can vote for them in the primary, but in practice nobody bothers to collect the signatures to contest a judicial delegate election. The county party committee can nominate candidates for the primary without requiring signatures, and the party committee is controlled by the county chair. So in practice, the county chairs nominate the delegates and tell them who to nominate for judgeships, and the delegates do it.

Okay, so where do these County Chairs come from? They're elected by the county committee, which is made up of the party's State Committee members from that county. In theory, the State Committee members are elected in the primary elections, but just like the judicial delegates, it's very rare to collect petitions and run for the State Committee. Most people just get nominated by the County Chairs themselves. Once that happens, of course, they owe something to the chairs, so they keep re-electing them.

Now you might have noticed that in this system, the State Committee members and judicial convention delegates have effectively zero decision-making power. Their entire function is to obfuscate the system so that people can't tell what's going on, and give it a veneer of legitimacy. So why do they bother? What do they get out of it? Besides a chance for some kinky sex in an Albany motel, that is?

The most ambitious of these people are candidates for higher office. By attending the State Committee and the judicial nominating convention, they have a chance to prove their loyalty to their patrons. This marks their place in the hierarchy, and then when vacancies come up for elected positions, including judgeships, they may be chosen by the county or state chair to be the party's candidate and not have to collect petitions. The less ambitious people, or the ones marking time in between elected terms of office, are rewarded for their loyalty with powerful roles on the boards of government authorities, and sinecures at well-connected nonprofits and corporations.

The State Court of Appeals is actually nominated in a slightly cleaner way, by the state's Commission on Judicial Nomination, whose commissioners are nominated by the Governor, the Chief Judge and the majority and minority leaders of the two legislative chambers. Of course, how the legislative leaders get elected isn't exactly clean either, but it's a slight improvement.

So the next time you hear, "State Supreme Court Judge," remember that they're essentially appointed by the county party chairs. And the next time you hear about a scandal involving a county party chair, think about how many judges that chair has selected.

More cars on the streets of Tenafly

Peter Rustin, the mayor of Tenafly, New Jersey, is against the current plan to restore passenger service to the Northern Branch of the Erie Railroad through his town. "The preferred alternative for this project will put more cars into the streets of Tenafly than it will take off," he told the Northern Valley Suburbanite (which is apparently a newspaper).

I would be inclined to dismiss that as typical demented NIMBY rantings, except that it's actually confirmed by the planners (PDF, page 9-28): "During the AM peak hour, which represents the worst-case scenario for traffic congestion, it is projected that 16 vehicles would park at or near the station during the peak hour. An additional 96 vehicles are projected to drop off passengers at the station, resulting in additional travel to and from the station during the peak hour, for a total of 208 trips. The reverse is expected to occur in the PM peak."

I've criticized traffic projections in the past, and Chuck Marohn, who's a trained engineer, echoed that criticism this week. The software that makes those projections for the Northern Branch, like most other traffic projections, is a state secret. In March I emailed Thomas Marchwinski, Senior Director Forecasting & Research at New Jersey Transit, asking very nicely for more information about the NJTDFM and how it was used in this project, and I have not heard anything yet.

So these are not the rantings of a demented NIMBY, but a demented computer. It may well be that the projected 208 car trips will not materialize, but Mayor Rustin is still justified in his opposition. In an earlier post, Matthew the Walking Bostonian made this astute observation:

The other problem is that they plan to do traffic "mitigation" in the vicinity of the parking lots. For example, Fort Lee Road at Grand Ave in Leonia is going to get widened, along with the construction of the 500 car garage. It's already a crummy place to walk, this will make it worse.

Matthew nailed it. Here's the map of "improvements" planned for Leonia, from Figure 9-10 of this PDF:

The key here is to notice the space between the green lines (the "existing curb") and the red lines (the "proposed curb"). It's supposed to be filled in with orange ("proposed widening"), but sometimes it's hard to see the orange. Take a look at the south side of Fort Lee Road between Spring Street and Station Parkway. That sidewalk is pretty narrow, and they just took out the whole thing for most of that block. They also did this weird thing where they shaved a few feet off of the eastern side of Station Parkway.

These "improvement" means that walking to the train station site will go from kind of unpleasant to downright hellish. This is not just true for commuters and anyone else who might want to take this train, but for people going to the large park there, many of whom are teenagers and families with small children. Oh, and here's Tenafly, from Figure 9-25:

Unfortunately, Mayor Rustin is not at all out of line here. Downtown Tenafly would be a much less pleasant place to walk around after the "improvements" planned by Marchwinski and friends. Rustin shouldn't be opposing the project or forcing New Jersey Transit to cut it short at Route 4, but he should be doing everything in his power to restore sanity to the traffic projections and their "mitigations." Anyone who can help him, please offer your services.

Why do we care about Willets Point again?

For years I've been reading about various plans to redevelop the Willets Point area, each worse than the last. Each time I wonder why everyone's so convinced that Something Must Be Done. It's not a slum where people live in close quarters and can die of diphtheria or something. On its own terms, it's a successful business district. Why do people care about this forlorn corner of the borough? And why the urgency?

There are some people whose goals are obvious: those who have a direct financial interest. The Related Companies and the Wilpon family are the main investors in the current scheme, and they stand to make a profit in rent and property sales. In addition, the Mets could get more business from residents and customers, who figure they might as well take in a game while they're in the area.

There may be some other business owners who see themselves as "on the way" to Willets Point, and hope to make some money that way. And then there are all the "economic hunters" (like the Queens Chamber of Commerce and Deputy Mayor Robert Steel) who see this as a way to bring jobs and tax revenue to the city.

I have a lot of trouble relating. First of all, I have no direct financial interest. Second, I'm much more of a fan of economic gardening than hunting. What that means, as Chuck Marohn describes, is finding a way to help ten small businesses add ten jobs, rather than a single business adding a hundred jobs.

For existing small businesses in Queens to benefit from this new development, they would have to be perceived as "on the way," and I just don't see that with the current plans. Maybe some drivers would think about getting off the highway to shop or dine, and maybe some would think about getting off the number 7 train, but most of the proximity boost comes from walking. The current setup actively discourages walking, and none of the plans would do much to improve that.

Photo: oracle monkey / Flickr

So why is Willets Point so urgent? It's not like it's the only industrial area in the city with crappy streets. After thinking and thinking, I believe I've finally figured it out: you can see it from Citifield. It's even closer and more visible than it was from Shea Stadium. It's right across the street, staring you in the face: junkyards! unpaved streets! grimy brown people in work clothes!

I'm guessing that someone has a box seat in Citifield with a grand view of the junkyards behind the field, and the Wilpons look out at the thing every day. They got ahold of the politicians and the Queens Chamber of Commerce, and there you go.

Of course, it's not your problem or my problem. To paraphrase the office proverb, lack of tolerance for muddy streets on their part does not constitute an emergency on our part. But it looks like they've got enough clout to make it an emergency for us.

The empty promise of Gridlock Sam's dollar buses

As I wrote last week, the transit portions of "Gridlock Sam" Schwartz's transportation proposal just feel kind of bizarre and divorced from reality. Sometimes it seems that the entire city's transportation advocacy discourse is dominated by drivers and cyclists. If occasionally a transit rider like Jay Walder may get a little bit of influence, they still don't get the support they need when the chips are down.

When drivers and cyclists make big plans that include transit, as in the current proposal from Gridlock Sam, the transit component runs the whole range of uninspiring, from mediocre (we'll consider restoring the 2010 cuts, but only on local bus routes) to other people's fads (elevated busways!) to WTF. The WTF in this case includes reducing the fares on buses "in neighborhoods with no subways" by a dollar, i.e. from $2.25 to $1.25.

Part of the problem here may be due to Powerpoint. It's possible that this is better thought out than it sounds, and it was edited into inanity to fit in one bullet point. But honestly, if your bus proposals don't get their own slides, what does that say about your priorities?

Anyway, so what's wrong with reducing bus fares to a dollar twenty-five in neighborhoods with no subways? In principle, nothing. But there are costs, and unforeseen consequences, and it's not clear what it will accomplish, if anything. The main cost is the opportunity cost: what else could we do with that money? Increase frequency on the buses; build bus bulbs or physically separated bus lanes; implement traffic signal priority or offboard fare payment. Or we could even use it to extend the E train to Valley Stream. With all these possibilities, why did Schwartz choose to spend the money lowering the fare?

Then there are the unforeseen consequences of lowering the bus fare. Many years ago I bought an "Apollo" inkjet printer for a hundred dollars; the sales people told me that it was made by Hewlett-Packard, and had the same technology as HP-branded printers. Why did HP go to the trouble of creating a separate company and brand for this printer? Because they didn't want anyone to see a brand new HP printer selling for a hundred dollars. They didn't want anyone to associate "HP" with "cheap" in their mind.

Buses already have a reputation in Staten Island, eastern Queens, southeastern Brooklyn and the eastern Bronx as cheap, crappy transportation for people who can't afford cars. A $1.25 bus fare will just reinforce that image. That's something that Schwartz seems to have no problem with - but it means giving up on the possibility that these areas will ever increase their transit mode share. I have a problem with that, and I hope you do too.

So reducing bus fares would spend money that we could instead use to expand the system and make it better, and it would probably reinforce the reputation of buses in the outer boroughs as cheap, crappy transportation. But is it worth that?

Well, is what worth that? Schwartz doesn't say what he expects to accomplish by reducing bus fares. On one level it seems obvious: save people $40 or more a week! But why save those people money, and not lower the fare for subway riders, and for people riding the buses in neighborhoods where there are subways? The answer can only be to encourage more people to ride buses in the outer boroughs. Presumably this is instead of driving, but it could be that Schwartz wants to encourage people to make bus trips that they wouldn't otherwise have made, or that they would have made by walking, but it's not clear to me what the value of that is. Mobility for mobility's sake?

It's not clear, anyway, that lowering the fare will do either of these things. To begin with, take a look at this chart from the most recent MTA Transit Committee meeting:

That's right, almost half the fares are paid with unlimited-ride Metrocards. There's no way to take a dollar off if you're not paying per ride!

Now, it's quite likely that the percentage of people paying with unlimited Metrocards is lower in the outer boroughs than in Manhattan, but I'll bet it's still pretty high. But beyond that, a lot of the people riding buses in "the two-fare zone" are transferring to subways, or even to buses that go to "neighborhoods with subways." A rush hour visit to Kew Gardens, Pelham Bay Park or Flatbush Avenue will give you a sense of how many. Presumably, when they make the transfer, and when they come back, they would spend that dollar anyway. Thus, the discount would only apply to trips that begin and end in neighborhoods without subways. How many is that, really?

For that tiny number of trips, the $2.25 fare is already lowered by the 7% pay-per-ride bonus if the passengers pay with Metrocards and not cash. Many of the people riding those trips would be disabled and senior citizens eligible for the 50% discount on top of that. Whether the fare is $1.10, or $2.05, how often is that really a deterrent? Keep in mind that many of these people already pay a market price of $2 for "dollar vans."

Finally, if we're talking about getting people out of their cars, we know how much people pay to own and insure a car, and drive and park it on the streets of New York City. How many of them are sensitive to a few dollars in bus fare?

As you can see, I've tried mightily to make sense of this. I probably spent a lot more time on it than it deserves. And I'm pretty damn sure that I put more time and thought into it than Sam Schwartz or anyone who's working for him on this plan. A dollar reduction in fares in "neighborhoods without subways" is hard to implement, would accomplish very little, would probably be counterproductive, and would take money from more worthy uses.

The NYSAC is not your friend

You may remember the New York State Association of Counties. Last February their transportation committee passed a resolution opposing complete streets legislation, and I observed that they, like the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) and the Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA), constitute a lobbying organization protecting the interests of bureaucrats while pretending to be a governmental entity.

This week, Alan Chartock interviewed the Executive Director of NYSAC, Stephen Acquario. Chartock is pretty honest with his guests, but even he couldn't come right out and ask, "Where the fuck do you get off pretending that you represent the people?" if he wanted the guy to ever come back. Chartock is right to interview Acquario, because to my unending frustration, some people actually take this gang seriously.

The United States Senate and other one-state-one-vote organizations like AASHTO and the GHSA are pretty obviously unrepresentative, but the NYSAC goes so far beyond that level that I feel it's worth spending a post on. In case you weren't aware, here are some figures about New York State's counties.

The most populous county in New York, Kings (i.e. Brooklyn), contains almost 13 percent of the total population of the state, according to the 2010 Census. The five boroughs of New York City together contain 42% of the state's population, and the other five most populous counties (Suffolk, Nassau, Westchester, Erie (Buffalo) and Monroe (Rochester)) contain 28%. Under a system of one person one vote, these ten counties would control 70% of the votes, and the other 52 counties would be irrelevant.

Instead, the NYSAC operates by a system of one county, one vote, which means that the representatives of the 70% of the population who live in the ten most populous counties only have 16% of the votes. The ten least populous counties (Hamilton, Schuyler, Yates, Lewis, Schoharie, Seneca, Essex, Wyoming, Orleans and Delaware), with their combined share of 1.63% of the population, control an equal 16% of the votes.

The NYSAC's Transportation and Public Works Committee, which passed the resolution, is similarly lopsided. It is chaired by Jean Raymond, the Supervisor of the Town of Edinburg, NY (population 1,384), which has no buses, no trains and no sidewalks. The co-chair is Randy Gibbon, the Director of Public Works for Chenango County (population 50,477), which actually contains New Berlin, the home of Nathan Lewis (and here's what Lewis has to say about streets). Also on the committee is Andra Horsch, chief lobbyist for the New York City Department of Transportation, but it's not clear whether she gets five votes or one.

Somehow Monroe County (3.8% of the population), Broome (1.0%), Livingston (0.34%) and Wyoming County (0.22%) each have two seats on the Committee. Maybe they have one representative for transportation and one for public works, or one for the legislature and one for the county executive, but I can't tell if they get two votes. Regardless, I'm pretty sure that the NYC, Erie and Monroe County representatives (with more than half of the state's population) don't outweigh the other 19 committee members.

I hope I've established by now how lopsided this organization is. Now back to Stephen Acquario and his interview with Alan Chartock. This year, Chartock has been asking all his guests the same question about party control of the New York State Senate. Here are the statewide political party enrollments as of November 1 (PDF):

Democratic	5,660,246	49%
Republican	2,824,680	25%
Conservative	147,993	1.3%
Working Families	42,776	0.37%
Independence	434,752	3.8%
Green	21,095	0.18%
Other	3,351	0.029%
Blank	2,326,786	20%
Total	11,461,679

With the Democrats just shy of a majority of registered voters and the Republicans only claiming a quarter of them, it's pretty obvious that the State Senate will not stay in Republican hands without a bunch of dirty tricks. Acquario said that it was in "the counties"' interest for the Senate to stay in Republican control, because a Senate controlled by Democrats would be dominated by senators from New York City who won't pay any attention to the needs of "counties."

It seems pretty clear to me that the needs of "counties" shouldn't matter. Counties aren't people. They contain people, and we do need basic safeguards to prevent urban majorities from running roughshod over country dwellers, but giving residents of sparsely populated areas an overrepresentation in government is a really bad way to do that.

If you have any doubt about the representativeness of the NYSAC, consider this final point. The official name of the dominant party is the "New York State Democratic Committee." Longstanding usage is that things associated with the party will be referred to with the adjective "Democratic" with a capital D, as in "the Democratic Party" and "Democratic control." Several times in the interview, Acquario referred to these things as "the Democrat Party," "Democrat control" and so forth. This is a well-documented insult to the Democrats that has been used by Republicans for generations, and it is never used unintentionally. It's been called "fighting words."

I do not take that insult personally, because I'm not a Democrat either and I have no love for the party that killed bridge tolls. However, it's a clear signal that Acquario is a Republican partisan who sees the Democratic party as an enemy. It shows, unequivocally, that he has no interest in representing the needs of Democrats or city dwellers. By using it, Acquario has exposed the New York State Association of Counties as a tool for rural Republicans to attack urban interests.

It is clear that Andrea Horsch and the other representatives of populous counties in New York State are wasting their time participating in this sham organization. There are better ways of ensuring the protection of the people who live in rural parts of the state. I suggest that we put their time to better use and withdraw from the NYSAC any basis for their pretense of legitimacy.

Inefficient cities

There are lots of cities in the Third World that I'd call "inefficient cities." It's hard to get anywhere because the transportation infrastructure is so overburdened. This is illustrated by a story I read recently about Kizza Besigye, a political opposition leader in Uganda who was shot in the arm with a rubber bullet and arrested four times, for walking to work in the capital of Kampala. This is not like the stories of crazy suburban high school administrators who threaten to arrest parents for child endangerment for allowing their children to walk to school. This guy's goal was to disrupt the government by walking to work.

One funny aspect of Besigye's story was that when the police arrested him, they gave him a number of choices. One of them was to simply call for his car. Their assumption was that everyone in the Ugandan political elite has not just a car, but a paid chauffeur. Since Besigye didn't challenge that assumption, it was probably accurate.

Clearly, Besigye didn't disrupt the capital by telling his driver to stay home while he walked. That would have actually eased traffic congestion slightly. What disrupted things was that his followers also walked to work, instead of taking buses, cars or motorcycles. Why did this disrupt things? Because Kampala's pedestrian infrastructure sucks.

I haven't been to Kampala, but I've been to other cities in Africa and the Caribbean, and I know that in many of them the sidewalks are narrow or nonexistent. The cities are designed for drivers first, and pedestrians are an afterthought. With proper sidewalks, New York was able to handle crowds of pedestrians during the blackout of 2003. Only the bridge walkways were too narrow for the crowds, so the DOT opened a lane to pedestrians on every bridge. In Kampala, apparently, they can't handle a bunch of people walking to work.

There are similar stories of car traffic, of people trying to get across town in Cairo or Lagos, and giving up because they've been stuck in the same place for hours. These are places that were designed for cars, but where most of the people don't own cars. Still, there are more car owners than the roads were designed for, and the result is gridlock. Los Angeles and Houston have notorious traffic along those lines, but up to now they've been able to build lots and lots of roads to keep cars moving. Kampala and Cairo and Lagos cannot. This is why I call them inefficient cities.

Believe it or not, this still relates to the Tappan Zee Bridge. I'll get to that connection eventually.

Paying for the new Tappan Zee

In an earlier post I mentioned Planet Money's story of how Governor Dewey built the Tappan Zee Bridge where it is so that he could use the toll money to pay for construction and maintenance of the Thruway all the way to Buffalo. I pointed out that the ongoing structural problems of the bridge have steadily increased the cost of maintenance, so that it eats up an ever-growing share of the revenue from the tolls, leaving less and less for the rest of the Thruway.

Given that, one weird thing about this project is that it would not only take the toll revenues away from the Thruway, but it would remove them from the funds available to maintain and administer the existing bridge. In 2008, the Preliminary Financial Studies assumed that the full $50 million annual toll revenue would be available to finance the reconstruction (page 7):

Directing additional tolls to this project will require careful legal and financial analysis of the resulting impact on the Thruway Authority, especially because current Tappan Zee tolls support the operation of the bridge and also subsidize the rest of the Thruway system.

In fact, one of the reasons that the project has been stalled for so long is that even if the tolls were doubled, they would only bring in $100 million a year, and if they were doubled and then indexed to inflation, they would still average $137 million a year over fifty years. If the State issues bonds against the tolls, because they we would have to pay interest, we could only get $1.3-2.4 billion up front to build the bridge. The Federal government was only expected to kick in a further $100 million a year, for a maximum of $2.6 billion.

So where does the rest come from? Well, we get a hint from this Journal-News article, which honestly leaves me scratching my head. Reporters Jorge Fitz-Gibbon and Ken Valenti quote several Experts, including Robert Poole of the Reason Foundation and Nancy Singer of the Federal Highway Administration. The remaining money, they say, would come from "investments from labor union pension funds and other nongovernment sources."

What's not clear to me is this: when the State borrows money by issuing bonds, they promise to pay it back with interest. They get the money up front, and the investors get the interest. In the case of the Tappan Zee, the interest is paid with toll revenues.

So why can't these pension funds and other investors just buy the toll bonds? Why do they want anything else? They're not going to give us money for nothing. What would they get out of it?

It's not spelled out in the Journal-News article, but Fitz-Gibbon and Valenti do mention the Goethals bridge replacement, where the plan is to pay the private investors extra interest. So I'm guessing the answer is that the State would promise to pay the investors back a certain amount above and beyond the toll revenues. That money, of course, would come from other revenue sources, like the sales tax or income tax we pay.

Oh, and how about the $20 million a year for the rest of the Thruway? Yeah, that'll either come from higher tolls in Woodbury or statewide, or else it'll come out of our tax dollars too. And that means one of two things. Either our taxes will go up, or in a few years some "brave" politician - maybe Cara Cuomo - will be forced to cut funding for education, Medicaid and transit, because "the state is in hard times."

Salvaging the Tappan Zee studies

I've had a lot of criticism for the way the New York State Department of Transportation has led the Tappan Zee Bridge replacement project up to now, but one thing they deserve credit for is a decent website. There were tons of useful studies done, generating hundreds of pages of documentation. All that information was posted to the "TZB Site." Without it, I would have been dependent on secondhand reports from newspapers and blogs. I don't have time to go to all these meetings upstate.

Well, now Governor Cuomo has turned the project over to the Federal Highway Administration. They immediately took down all the documents and put up a completely new site with three whole documents.

All that information? You don't need it. Why would you? This is a new project. All the person-hours of research that went into those reports? All the money - your tax money - that paid for the research? Down the drain.

Of course, I feel that most of the information presented there was still relevant, and I intend to continue using it. Some of the files, particularly the HTML, is available through the Wayback Machine. Other stuff may be in the Google Cache still. Unfortunately, most of the information was in PDFs and images. I had a bunch saved to my hard drive, and I'll put them up as I need them. For example, today I uploaded the Preliminary Financial Studies Phase I Report. If I find other documents on my hard drive I'll put them up. If you have some of these documents, please post them and I'll link to them, or send them to me and I'll post them.

Schumer calls for horse "no ride" list in wake of terror plot

Sen. Charles Schumer called today for the creation of a "No Ride List" for American horses to prevent suspected terrorists from targeting the US equine system.

Photo: John Haeger, Oneida Daily Dispatch

The move follows reports from intelligence gathered at Osama bin Laden's compound that showed the Arabian Horse Association was considering attacks on US horses.

In a press conference at his New York City office, Schumer said he will begin pushing congressional appropriators to increase funding for rectal inspections of commuter and passenger horse systems, as well as heightened monitoring and support for security at local horse stables throughout the country.

The Democratic senator said he also asked the Department of Homeland Security to expand its Secure Flight program to stables, which would essentially create a "No Ride List" to prevent suspected terrorists from mounting horses.

Intelligence analysts who examined the documents seized from bin Laden's compound in Pakistan concluded that al Qaeda was considering attacks on high-profile dates, including the tenth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks, the conclusion of the State of the Union address and high traffic holidays such as Christmas and New Year's Day, Schumer said.

"We must remain vigilant in protecting ourselves from future terror attacks, and when intelligence emerges that provides insight into potential vulnerabilities, we must act with speed," Schumer said.

Under the current program for airlines, travelers' names and other identifying information are cross-checked with the terror watch list to select passengers for enhanced screening and prevent possible terrorists from boarding planes.

Schumer wants that program to be applied to stables when passengers purchase their passage before mounting the horse.

Schumer noted that the nation's horse system transported 90,000 passengers in 2010 and carries 90,000 passengers every day on 90,000 different horses.

Not all horseback riders were enamored of the plan. "Sounds like a big load of horseshit to me," said noted equestrian 'Cap'n' Ignatius R. Transit. "Like something you'd read in the Post."

Vested interests

On Friday, I quoted Ruben Diaz, Jr. ("the Reasonable") about the City's borough taxi proposal: "We want to find a way to decriminalize street hails and at the same time not devalue the yellow medallions that so many people have invested so much in." In a comment on my last post, longtime reader NY Taxi Photo echoed this, "paying for a medallion is paying for such permissions, and shouldn't be limited after such a contract is purchased."

These quotes really encapsulate everything that I've been fighting against for the entire existence of this blog, and everything that Streetsblog has been fighting against. Brooklyn Spoke found a great quote from "Senior for Safety," Jasmine Meltzer back in 1984: "All we wanted was what we had." Meltzer was talking about the right to double-park without being subject to the penalties specified by the law, but Doug observed that she could just as well be talking about the ability to double-park on Prospect Park West without being uncomfortably close to the speeding cars.

All Meltzer wants is what she had. That's all that the taxi medallion owners want too. That's all America's drivers and politicians want, too - the cheap gas and open roads that they had. All East 57th Street business owners want is the parking they had. All Tim Hughes wants is the right he had to drop off his bottled water and Goya beans at his curb on 34th Street. All Kvetch Greenfield wants is clear streets after a snowfall, which he had.

You can say that about almost every post I've ever written, every Streetsblog post, every post by Larry Littlefield. People fight for safety, they fight for fairness, they fight for clean air, they fight to keep our energy supply from being used up. They come up with an idea that will make a contribution towards one of these things. Sometimes it's a small idea, sometimes it's a big idea.

Sometimes it's not an idea at all, or not an idea about carnage or global warming or access. Sometimes it's just a change in something else, like the size of the snowfall, or the number of snowfalls, or the size of the new subway stationhouse. But whatever it is, it can't get in the way of what "we" had.

The law is irrelevant to "what we had." Sometimes it is explicitly respected by the law, like the "right" to free bridges paid for by income and sales taxes. Sometimes the law says nothing about it, like the "right" to own a house or a taxi medallion that never goes down in value. Sometimes it is actually forbidden by the law, like the "right" to double park without being ticketed. Legal or illegal, if "we" had it, it must continue.

Notice the "we" there. Because "we" doesn't mean the people who have had nice wide sidewalks on Broadway. It doesn't mean the people who've (sorta) had crosswalks clear of snow. It doesn't mean the livery cab drivers who've had the right to pick up street hails in the outer boroughs without too much enforcement. It means the powerful: the drivers on Broadway, the drivers on the snowy streets of Queens, the yellow cab medallion owners.

Sometimes it's important to realize that what "we" had hurts other people. What "we" had contributes to hundreds of deaths every year. What "we" had is causing crazy tornadoes in Massachusetts. What you had is causing oil wars. What "we" had is stifling the economy of the United States.

Sometimes we need to give up some of what we had so that others can have a little more. Now we need to give up some of what we had so that our grandchildren can have anything. There's a word for that: community.

Bureaucrats as a special interest

If you're a transportation geek you're very familiar with AASHTO, which was originally the American Association of State Highway Officials, and only recently included "transportation" in their name. If you've been watching the news recently you may have also noticed the Governors Highway Safety Association (not to be confused with the other GHSA) and the New York State Association of Counties (not to be confused with the other NYSAC).

These organizations have a contradictory and misleading status. They are composed of appointed or elected officials, which may lead some to believe that they represent the public or are fighting for the public interest. In fact, they are private nonprofit organizations, and their agendas often differ from that of the public at large.

The biggest problem is the "Senate" problem: AASHTO and the GHSA give the same representation to Wyoming with its tiny population and tinier transit riding community as it does to Illinois, just like the United States Senate does. The 5,379 people in Hamilton County get the same representation in NYSAC as the 2,465,326 people in Kings County.

These organizations suffer from another "Senate" problem: who gets chosen to represent each state or county. What is the likelihood that Missouri will be represented in AASHTO or the GHSA by a pedestrian advocate from Saint Louis or Kansas City? State and county bureaucracies are often dominated by middle-class suburbanites, often wildly out of proportion to their populations.

When AASHTO argues against cycle tracks, or the GHSA blames the victim for walking, or NYSAC comes out against complete streets, it's important to point out that these are not representative government entities that follow the principle of one person, one vote. They are Senate-type nonprofits that are heavily skewed towards rural and suburban - and thus car-oriented - jurisdictions, and they represent middle-class suburban bureaucrats, not the population at large. They are special interest groups lobbying for money to be spent on their own agencies, and any recommendations they make should be taken with a grain of salt, considering the source.