Don't Give Rail Infrastructure to Buses

Whatever you may think about Bus Rapid Transit (and I'm not the biggest fan), I would hope we can get transit supporters to agree on this: it should not take infrastructure from trains.

I've established in previous posts that buses running in mixed traffic do not qualify as "rapid," and that it makes a lot more sense to talk about BRT corridors than BRT lines, so only physically separated corridors really count as BRT. If you want to build true BRT, the next question is where do you get the corridors?

You could build brand-new corridors, and some plans do call for that, such as the Rockland-Westchester corridor Option 3B where the DOT would build a viaduct above or a tunnel below Interstate 287 for the entire corridor from Tarrytown to Port Chester. But corridor acquisition is one of the major costs of transit construction, bus or rail, and the current estimate (PDF, page 3) is that BRT with a brand new viaduct in Westchester would cost $2.55 billion versus $897 million without. Light rail would only be $1.6 billion more, and most of that is probably for two proposed tunnels that are not strictly necessary.

You could acquire your corridor by converting lanes currently dedicated for mixed traffic travel or parking, and that's probably the best option for someone who really cares about effective rapid transit. That's what was done for the famous BRT prototypes in Curitiba and Bogota. More locally, the Fordham Road Select Bus Service (PDF) simply converted travel lanes on Pelham Parkway and parking lanes on Fordham Road to bus lanes. Yes, they're not physically separated, and they're not 24 hours, but they're still widely acknowledged to speed travel time.

You could also take over an existing or abandoned rail corridor, as the State DOT is proposing to do with the Piermont Line between Suffern and Airmont (PDF). It's been done in numerous cases around the US, including Pittsburgh, Los Angeles and Boston, and it's proposed for New Britain, Connecticut. This might possibly be a good idea for a very short segment - say a block or two - but otherwise it's a really bad idea.

Why is it such a bad idea? Because even in dedicated rights-of-way, buses tend not to attract the same numbers as trains: the Pittsburgh busways have never attained anywhere near the ridership of the rail lines that were maintained. If busways do manage to attract ridership, they often don't have the capacity to handle it. In Curitiba, the current busways are maxed out at 18,000 passengers per hour per direction, and in 2007 the government approved construction of an elevated rail system.

If you convert a rail ROW to a busway, attract a lot of riders, and then want to upgrade the ROW to rail again to handle the ridership, you have to shut down the ROW for long enough to lay down all the rail, rebuild the stations and whatever else might be necessary. Congratulations, you've inconvenienced thousands!

I don't care how old and stale the rail right-of-way is, if it's good enough for buses it's good enough for trains. If it's more than two blocks long, don't waste time and money with busways. Just find a way to make the trains work. That was true in Pittsburgh, and it's true in New Britain and Suffern.

General Railcar?

Imagine you're a political leader of a region that has a few low-traffic, unelectrified freight lines, and you want to use these lines to bring transit to your area. Or maybe you've got existing, relatively low-passenger diesel service on a branch line where each train has a single locomotive pulling no more than three coaches, and you're looking to expand service or cut costs. Either way, you've got a tight budget (just like everyone in the transit business) and you can't afford to electrify the line. You'd love to run some kind of diesel multiple-unit trains, but they have to be FRA-compliant because freight trains share the line. Oh, and it'd be great if it could be made as locally as possible. Maybe you even get enough Federal dollars that you're bound by the Buy American Act.

Until recently, there was a company that seemed tailor-made for your needs. Colorado Railcar toured the country showing off its new diesel multiple-units, and transit agencies couldn't place orders fast enough. Unfortunately, many of those orders may go unfilled.

Last month I wrote about the fortunes of rail service in Vermont, which seem to have gone from the prospect of two or more runs a day to the elimination of all service. In the comments, my much more prolific (I think he's paid) transit blogger colleague Pantagraph Trolleypole pointed us to an article in the Oregonian that lays out all the details of the Colorado Railcar mess. As a Philip Morris executive wrote in an internal memo discovered by the paper, in Colorado Railcar there was a "fine line between stupidity and dishonesty and I think we’re right on it."

According to the Oregonian, the Portland, Oregon transit agency TriMet had contracted with Colorado Railcar for trains to run on its under-construction Westside light rail line. Faced with the prospect of getting no railcars after paying the company $17 million, TriMet paid $5.5 million to take control of the company and force it to complete, test and deliver the trains.

When I read this, I thought, "That's a brilliant step. They should go in with Vermont's Agency of Transportation, the Southeastern Wisconsin RTA, Florida Tri-Rail, the (Raleigh, NC) Triangle Transit Authority and anyone else who's interested. Bring on someone who knows how to build a company, and keep making DMUs for whoever needs them. Fund it until it gets a solid product built and is well-run, and then open it up to private investment." The last step is actually optional, but I don't know about the long-term legality or wisdom of a public transit agency running a train manufacturer.

The main thing, though, is that this is clearly a product that would be beneficial to transit agencies around the country, so anyone who cares about transit would probably consider it to be of national importance. How much would it take to keep it going for five years - $50 million?

But no, sadly, TriMet kept this zombie Colorado Railcar alive just long enough to deliver the trains, and then pulled the plug. On Tuesday, the company shut down, laid off all personnel, and is being liquidated. Meanwhile, GM has already gotten $4 billion. Couldn't we have used some of that to convert a GM plant to make DMUs? They're not much bigger than Escalades, after all.

On a related note, yesterday I posted about New Jersey Transit's $156 million plan to run passenger service on the currently freight-only New York, Susquehanna and Western main line. Here's a quote from NJ Transit's 2007 press release: "The project will introduce FRA-compliant Diesel Multiple Unit (DMU) technology into the NJ TRANSIT fleet of rail equipment and will provide new passenger service along more than eight miles of existing freight track." Uh-oh.

Oh Suzy-Q!

The Transport Politic (featured on Streetsblog.net) has some good coverage of New York-area issues today, including a Times report that the Federal Railroad Administration has approved the replacement of the Portal Bridge on the Northeast Corridor.



Tonight I'm going to focus on their other post, a list of construction starts that includes passenger service on the New York, Susquehanna and Western main line from Hackensack through Paterson to Hawthorne.

Oddly enough, this project is not listed on the New Jersey Transit System Expansion Projects web page. However, the Wikipedia article linked above points us to a PDF of a New Jersey Transit flyer on the Passaic County website (the source of the map above), a New Jersey Transit press release, and a NorthJersey.com article, so it looks like the project is happening and the System Expansion Projects web page is out of date.

The revived Suzy-Q passenger service is exciting because it would allow residents of this area to travel locally without driving or depending on the bus, and it would be a step in the restoration of passenger service on this important line. I also like how it has five stops in Paterson, serving as a local train much like the Montclair line. According to Wikipedia, it's a drastically scaled-back version of an original proposal to run trains from Hoboken along the former Erie mainline to Paterson and then west to Sparta, but that proposal, sadly, may be too ambitious at this time.

My main criticism of the project is the placement of the stations outside of Paterson. First, you'll notice that there are no stations planned for Maywood, Rochelle Park or Saddle Brook. It's true that in Maywood the line runs through low-density residential areas, and in Saddle Brook through industrial areas, but you'd think that at least one stop would be warranted. In fact, Rochelle Park is a former stop on the Suzy-Q, complete with vintage station, and a closeup on the area shows relatively dense development patterns characteristic of suburban train stations. The Rochelle Park station is also a convenient access point at the southern end of the Saddle River recreational path.

My other criticism regarding station placement is that this section of the Suzy-Q line crosses three north-south train lines, the ex-Erie Main Line, the Bergen County Line and the Pascack Valley Line, but the plan only includes a transfer station on the Main Line. The planned Boulevard stop that is closest to the Bergen Line is a half hour walk from either the Broadway or Plauderville stops on that line, and the planned State Street terminus is about a fifteen minute walk from the Essex Street and Anderson Street stations on the Pascack Valley Line.

It's true that even if the stops on the Suzy-Q were placed right above the north-south lines, it would still be a long walk to transfer. A convenient transfer would require the construction of new stations on both the Bergen and Pascack lines, and the possible closing of one of the existing stations. This may not be worth the trouble, but it's not clear whether the New Jersey Transit planners ever seriously considered the idea.

The New Jersey Association of Railroad Passengers has often criticized NJ Transit for focusing too heavily on commuters to Manhattan and ignoring people commuting to jobs within New Jersey, and non-commuting trips. It could be that since all three north-south lines pass through the Secaucus Transfer station and terminate in Hoboken, the planners thought that a transfer to one of the three lines was enough. This ignores the possibility that passengers may want to travel between, say, Paterson and Oradell or Hackensack and Radburn, or to the new Meadowlands station.

It may be that NJ Transit wants to build new stations on the Bergen and Pascack lines, but doesn't have the money and is deferring that to a later stage in the project. It wouldn't be the first time that a rail project is opened without a critical transfer, and then the transfer is added later. The danger here is that if this project fails to attract a certain number of riders, it may not gain the political support necessary to construct the transfers.

I would like to see NJ Transit build a Central Avenue Transfer Station on the Pascack Valley line, and reopen the Rochelle Park station. These should be part of the initial phase of the project. Later, the agency can look at creating a transfer station at the crossing with the Bergen County Line, as well as extending the line westward to Sparta and beyond. It could also extend the line east to link up with the planned Northern Branch light rail, or southeast to the end of the Hudson (Bergen) Light Rail. It could even be extended east through the abandoned tunnel to Edgewater (seen in the first two photos on this page, as well as this photo on Flickr) and then south past all the car-dependent new housing to the Weehawken ferry.

False Dichotomies: Carfree or Country?

Discussion of urbanism often runs into false dichotomies, many of which seem to be driven by the narrow viewpoints of their authors than anything else. We've got a whole generation of commentators and bloggers who've grown up with car-dependent suburbs, car-dependent houses in the country, and dirty, high-crime cities, and seem to have great difficulty imagining anything else.

If you think about it, though, the dramatic growth of car ownership over the last sixty years implies that lots of families didn't have cars sixty years ago. Most of them didn't have horses either. Quite a few of them lived in suburbs or even in the country, but they managed to survive quite well. How?

The infrastructure was different, that's how. Many places that are car-dependent now didn't use to be. As Matthew Yglesias put it yesterday:

traditionally a great deal of walkable urbanism took place in small towns rather than in cities, and also in small cities [...] and “streetcar suburbs” rather than big cities.

For example, Westchester County had two more train lines that were torn up a long time ago: the New York, Westchester and Boston and the Putnam Line. You can tell where they ran just by looking for places that "feel like" the old suburbs. Visit Ardsley, or Heathcote Road in Scarsdale, and you'll know what I mean. Binghamton used to have regular train service, and Saratoga had much more frequent service than it has now, to a station right downtown instead of the current one.

"Joe from Lowell" commented on Yglesias's blog, "I like to use the example of the towns in old westerns. People walking up and down the street, saloons and banks and churches, apartments up above, houses on side streets, usually a train station nearby - but as small town/rural as anyone could ask for."

This has changed somewhat. The NYW&B went out of business in 1937 and the Old Put in 1958. The 2001 bankruptcy of the Grand Union supermarket chain hit a lot of towns hard across the greater New York area. Grand Union's distributor C&S sold off a lot of stores to drugstore chains and other buyers who had no intention of keeping the supermarkets open, and many towns found themselves with no supermarkets.

Even so, there are still many "streetcar suburbs" and cities that even today are walkable and transit-friendly. As far as suburbs go: in Westchester there are several places where you can live within a fifteen-minute walk of both a train station and a full-service supermarket, as well as a range of shops and restaurants. Examples include Bronxville, Harrison and Tarrytown. There are similar towns in New Jersey (e.g. Montclair) and Long Island (Rockville Centre). Parts of New York City itself have a pretty suburban feel, but are still close to shopping.

Similar situations exist in medium-sized cities like Binghamton, large towns like Saratoga Springs, and small towns like Red Hook. Even in relatively car-dominated areas, there's often a significant percentage of the population that manages to live car-free. In many of those cases, unfortunately, even if you can find a house that's within walking distance of a supermarket there aren't many jobs that are within walking distance of such a house, and many desirable shops or restaurants are in unwalkable locations.

Overall, it's a lot easier to live without a car than some might suggest, and it's a lot easier to serve the populations of medium-sized and small towns than some might claim. All you need to see it is a little imagination.

Real Rail Access for Raleigh

Logan Nash over at Trains for America blogs about how increased train ridership means that some Amtrak stations are overburdened.

I'm all in favor of increasing station capacity to meet demand - in terms of station size, facilities and staffing, but much of the article is concerned about parking. The News and Observer writes, "A record Thanksgiving crush saw as many as 900 passengers a day streaming through a station that has only 57 parking spaces." As you may remember, I don't believe that park-and-rides are the answer, because they undermine transit-oriented development. Amtrak, the State of North Carolina and the various local governments should at least look into other ways of getting people to and from the station.

This map shows that in 1895 there were thirteen train stations in Wake County. The population then was around 50,000, and last year it was 833,000. The N&O says that Patrick B. Simmons, Rail Division chief for the North Carolina state Department of Transportation, "lives in North Raleigh, but he drives to Durham when he has to catch a train because it's easier to find parking there."

In what's now North Raleigh, there were stations in Forestville, Wyatt, Neuse and Millbrook. What if Mr. Simmons were able to convince the State to fund the extension of the Piedmont trains to Wake Forest or even Henderson? They could restart service in some of the in-between stations - with small parking lots, enough to take the burden off of the Raleigh station. Reopening of stops at Garner, Auburn and Clayton along the Carolinian would also help, as would some of the stops that both trains pass, such as Method and Nelson.

It's great that some people are changing part of their trips to train. What would it take for them to make the whole trip by train?

Who Does the City Council Represent?

It would be nice if drivers, pedestrians, transit riders and other road users could all get along. Unfortunately, it doesn't really work out that way. First and most importantly is the carnage: the demand to "move traffic" creates a danger to pedestrians and cyclists - and of course car drivers and passengers themselves. Second, there's only so much land to go around, particularly in a densely settled area like New York, and the more of that land is devoted to cars, the less is available for pedestrians, etc. Third, there's only so much money in the budgets of various transportation funders, and the more money that goes to cars and general-purpose lanes, the less is available for transit, etc.



When these conflicts get fought in the City Council, pedestrians, transit riders and cyclists would like to feel that their city council members are fighting for them. Sometimes they are, as in the case of Rosie Mendez, in whose Lower East Side district 81.8% of households do not own a car. Mendez not only voted against caps on pedicabs and for congestion pricing, but rode in a pedicab to participate in a Critical Mass ride in 2007.

Inversely, Jim Oddo represents a central Staten Island district where only 17.7% of households do not own a vehicle. It's not too surprising that he voted for the cap on pedicabs and against congestion pricing, even though it would only have affected 6.2% of his constituents.

The councilmembers are individuals, and their votes on these issues don't always follow the purchases of their constituents. There were some pleasant surprises, such as when Tony Avella (14.9% car-free households) voted against the pedicab cap, or when Michael McMahon (29.2% car-free) voted for congestion pricing.

What's more disturbing is when councilmembers from "green" districts hampered bills that would have helped their constituents. For example, 80.8% of households in Speaker Quinn's district do not own cars, but she sponsored the pedicab cap bill. All ten of the councilmembers from "green" districts voted for congestion pricing, but Alan Gerson waffled on the issue before the vote, potentially giving cover to the "concerns" of assemblymembers like Deborah Glick that ultimately led to the defeat of the plan. A few councilmembers from "yellow" districts, like Brooklyn councilmembers Diana Reyna and Matthieu Eugene, voted for the pedicab cap and against congestion pricing, despite the fact that 70% of the households in Reyna's district and 67.3% in Eugene's don't have a car.

A Council that Looks Like New York City

In recent posts, I've documented the low levels of car ownership in the city: in fully three-fifths of City Council districts, the majority of households do not own a car. If the council members were chosen at random, we would expect that at least thirty of them would not be car-owners. Here's that lovely map again:



At this point, I honestly don't know about the transportation arrangements of the incumbent councilmembers, and maybe there'll be some pleasant surprises, but I'd be really shocked if more than a handful were car-free, or even took the subway on a regular basis. I do know that Speaker Quinn is driven around in a ginormous city-owned SUV, despite living just a half hour's walk from City Hall. Lew Fidler drives a silver Infiniti. It's my understanding that every councilmember is given at least one reserved parking space somewhere in Lower Manhattan, and a placard, if not a custom license plate.

If any of you have information on the car ownership or commuting habits of other city councilmembers, please leave it in the comments or send an email.