If the MTA doesn't want to take you to work...

I've got so much to say in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy that I'm posting twice in one night. In my last post I didn't include Flushing on the list of places that should have express bus service to Manhattan, because it already has express bus service to Chinatown.

Even if the MTA and the DOT boneheadedly refuse to go along with any of Transportation Alternatives' recommendations, or the two I added, the City still tolerates a small network of van services to cross the river to Chinatown. If you live in Flushing, Elmhurst, Maspeth or Sunset Park and work in Lower Manhattan, you may want to try these vans. I've been thinking about posting a map, similar to the one I made for New Jersey, but I've hesitated because I don't have complete information. In this situation I'll make an exception and put it up there:

These buses all run at least every twenty minutes, and the Flushing-Chinatown and Sunset Park-Chinatown buses run more frequently. Now, the Chinatown buses are express, so you can only catch them at certain points along the line. Here are some locations where I know you can find an express bus to Chinatown:

• 41st Avenue between Main Street and College Point Boulevard, Flushing
• Broadway and Justice Avenue, Elmhurst
• Eighth Avenue and Sixtieth Street, Sunset Park

If you're not Chinese and the drivers don't know what to make of you, just ask, "Chinatown?" That usually clears things up. The Flushing and Sunset Park locations are the best places to get the line that goes from Flushing to Sunset Park as well. The Sunset Park-Chinatown bus goes local up Eighth Avenue until it heads for the Gowanus Expressway, and the Elmhurst-Chinatown bus goes local along roughly the route I've marked on the map until it gets to the BQE, but I don't know exactly where the Elmhurst bus goes east of Broadway (if you know, please tell me). In Chinatown, here are the places to get the buses:

• Flushing: Division Street, just east of the Bowery
• Sunset Park: Forsyth Street and East Broadway
• Elmhurst: Elizabeth Street, just north of Hester Street

Here are some handy Simplified Chinese translations to help you:

English	汉语	Commuter Vans
Chinatown	曼哈頓華埠	To Elmhurst, Flushing and Sunset Park
Elmhurst	艾姆赫斯特	To Chinatown
Flushing	法拉盛	To Chinatown and Sunset Park
Sunset Park	布鲁克林華埠	To Chinatown and Flushing

I've also added the Flatbush Avenue dollar van route to the map, even though it's a local route and doesn't go over the bridge. Some of you may find it useful. If anyone knows the Utica Avenue route, please let me know and I'll add it.

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.

There are worse things than congestion

Chuck Marohn has been on a tear lately against the goal of "fighting congestion." He got going on this particular tear in September with a post about the empty stroads of Kansas City, arguing that by eliminating congestion, the government drove the life out of town. I have no idea why he didn't pick up on my snot metaphor from February, but I'm glad he's posting this stuff.

I want to add a data point here: with pricing you can reduce congestion and still have a vibrant urban center. But the pedestrian environment suffers. I'm talking about the case of London.

From the beginning I was a supporter of congestion pricing here in New York. Some of my first blog posts were about congestion pricing. I fought hard for it. I still think it's done some good things in New Jersey, and would be an improvement over what we have now. But until recently I had never seen it in action. I have now been to London for the first time since congestion pricing was implemented there, and I have some serious concerns.

While in London I almost never saw a traffic jam. Wherever I went, cars seemed to be flowing freely. In theory that's good: people and goods get where they need to go, without being stuck in one place polluting too long. But in order to get the cars to move that freely, London's traffic engineers made the pedestrian environment much worse.

It's my understanding, based on the work of Ben Hamilton-Baillie, that Greater London started making things difficult for pedestrians long before congestion pricing was enacted. The photo above illustrates a suite of anti-pedestrian tactics employed to speed cars. The Earl's Court tube station, on the right, is a very high-traffic pedestrian "destination" (in that the pedestrians temporarily become transit riders); you can't see that many of them, but there are a large number of people waiting to cross Earl's Court Road, the two-lane street in the picture.

Earl's Court Road is only two lanes wide, but it's one-way in order to allow faster cars to go around slower ones. There is no parking allowed on this section of the road, to provide more space for driving. The side streets around the Tube station are one-way in opposing directions, so that no driver has to cross the road. Because of this, the only reason for the traffic lights in this picture is to give pedestrians a chance to cross the street.

The lights themselves were timed to allow lots of cars to move through the intersection, while forcing pedestrians to wait and then rush across as soon as the light changed. There may have been a "beg button" as well; I certainly saw a lot of them in London. The lights were also spaced fairly far apart; there were several times when I saw an interesting shop or restaurant on the other side of the street, but couldn't get to it without going two or more blocks out of my way. Even though Earl's Court Road is narrower than most Manhattan cross streets, there was very little jaywalking because the cars came so fast.

Throughout London I saw plenty of other devices designed to speed cars at the expense of pedestrians. There were fences, Z-crossings and dedicated turn lanes. Despite having wide sidewalks and lots of street life in many places, it was not a very pleasant place to walk. The side streets tend to be calmer, with neckdowns and raised crosswalks, but it's very hard to go anywhere in the city without spending some time on larger streets like Earl's Court Road or worse.

What I'm describing are feelings of anxiety and frustration that I had as a pedestrian, but are they justified? I don't have hard data for London, but in July staffers at the Utah Department of Transportation found that people tend to die and get injured in car crashes more in places with low congestion.

So what can we take away from this? First of all, I think congestion pricing can still help. But we have to keep congestion in perspective. That means that as cars start to flow, we would improve the pedestrian environment, thus slowing them down. Restoring two-way traffic, restoring curbside parking, adding lights at more intersections, removing fences, giving more time to pedestrians - these are all relatively cheap strategies that can be implemented for almost no cost. I hope that London will continue along that path, and that if New York does implement congestion pricing, that we use some of the same strategies to keep the streets calm and safe.

What's so great about low farebox recovery?

I just want to take a minute to talk about the ... strange statement that came out of the Straphangers Campaign last week, in response to the MTA's fare hike proposal. I'm trying to be polite here, but it's, um, puzzling and frustrating. Here's part of the quote that Ben Kabak ran:

New York City Transit already has the highest fare box operating ratio in the nation at 53%. That is the share of operating costs covered by fares. MTA Chairman Joseph Lhota said in September that “when you compare the public support given to mass transit agencies nationwide on a per customer basis, New York ranks at the very bottom.

In comparison to New York City Transit’s 53% ratio, the average for large systems nation-wide that operate both buses and subways was 38% in 2011. That’s according to the Federal Transit Administration in 2011, its most recent figures. Looking at big cities that run both subways and buses, the farebox operating ratio in Boston was 38%, Chicago 44%, Los Angeles 27%, Philadelphia 37%, and Washington, D.C. 42%.

Forget big cities; let's look at cities with really low farebox recovery. These are the top agencies in the country, right?

Agency	Farebox Recovery Ratio
The Greater New Haven Transit District (does not include CT Transit buses)	0.5 %
SunLine Transit Agency (Riverside, CA)	1.5 %
Southeast Tennessee Human Resource Agency (SETHRA)	2.7 %
Crescent City Connection Division (New Orleans Ferries)	2.7 %
City of Glendale Transit (AZ)	3.1 %
Twin Cities Area Transportation Authority (Benton Harbor and Saint Joseph, MI)	3.2 %
Broward County Community Bus Service (FL)	3.4 %
Muncie Indiana Transit System (MITS)	3.6 %
Clarkstown Mini-Trans (NY)	3.8 %
Cleveland Area Rapid Transit (OK)	3.9 %

This is a really weird way to think about farebox recovery. There are a lot of transit systems in other parts of the world, and even in this country. that have a much higher farebox recovery ratio. If you don't want to go to Hong Kong, just head up to the Port Authority for a bus to the exotic land of Hudson County, New Jersey, where all the most frequent routes are privately owned and operated. Sure, the Port Authority runs the PATH trains and the state of New Jersey runs a slew of coverage and anchor routes. But if you added up all the routes, I'm guessing the farebox recovery would be way above 53%.

Does Hudson County have an inferior transit system? Well, yes. They only have two subway lines and one light rail line, and everything else is buses that can get stuck in traffic or ferries that don't go very close to people's homes. Some of the buses are crowded or noisy, or have saggy seats. But that's not because they have a high farebox recovery ratio. It's because the zoning is crazy, and encourages people to drive instead of taking transit. With all the parking that's been built, it's a wonder that anyone takes the bus.

People do take the bus in Hudson County, because it's frequent and convenient. That's a lot more than you can say for the buses run by the Southeast Tennessee Human Resource Agency, even if they are a bit newer and cleaner.

If anything, we should be shooting for a higher farebox recovery ratio. That would insulate transit users from the predatory demands of people like Lee Zeldin and Scott Vanderhoef. If we pay for all our transit, what would they be able to take?

The fact is that farebox recovery doesn't have anything to do with pubic support for transit, and it doesn't have anything to do with the quality of transit. It's a reflection of the efficiency of the transit system (supply) and the lack of competition from cars (demand). That's the bottom line. Hearing Gene Russianoff kvetching about high farebox recovery is discouraging, and hearing Joe Lhota repeating that is depressing.

In praise of pedestrian sidepaths

Back in August, Chuck Marohn wrote that the roads in our National Parks could be models for the "country roads" he envisions as alternatives to the "stroads" that state transportation departments are currently building all over the country. In response I wrote that my own National Park experience was a frustrating and disappointing, and that we need to do more to make our parks walkable, including providing transit. But I have a further response: I don't think that these would make good country roads.

Car-free carriage road, Mohonk Preserve. Photo: knorris908 / Flickr.

Old carriage roads are great to walk on. You can find them in many parks like Rockefeller State Park (accessible by foot from the Tarrytown and Scarborough train stations) and Mohonk Preserve. What makes them so nice is that they don't have any cars. They hardly have any carriages either, but as long as there's enough room to pass that wouldn't be so bad.

Today's country roads are not good for walking. To see why, all you need to do is take a long walk or bike ride on one. You'll be buzzed by cars going much faster than you. Some drivers will be going 55 or even 65 on a straight section. Even if you're doing twenty miles an hour on your bike, it's too big a difference. I don't care how wide the shoulders are, nobody wants to walk next to speeding traffic.

I've been on narrow country roads in England and France, and they're not much better. Maybe the cars appear a little less often and go a little slower, but it's still stressful to think about them. A gravel road might slow the cars down more, but I would it be enough?

The sidepath on West Street in Amherst hosted this Greening the Roadways parade in 2007. Photo: Step it Up 2007 / Flickr.

For asphalt roads, as long as we have cars we'll need physical separation for cyclists and pedestrians to feel truly comfortable. We even have a model for this: the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts. All the streets of Amherst, Northampton and nearby towns have sidewalks, and most of the heavily traveled country roads in the area have sidepaths. These are not the shitty stroad sidepaths that you may have encountered in some areas - they don't actually have those on their stroad, Route 9 - but a whole different experience on a two-lane country road.

Walking on a sidepath like the one on South Pleasant Street may not be as nice as a walk on a carriage road or a rail-trail. It's not even as nice as walking on the sidewalk along Pleasant Street in the village of Amherst, but it's a lot nicer than walking on the shoulder of a road.

Amherst's sidepaths date back a long time. Photo: Amherst College Archives / Flickr.

I hate to say it, but if we want people to walk or ride bikes on country roads, we'll need more sidepaths. It would be expensive to build sidepaths on every country road, but if you look at all the plans to "four-lane" country roads into stroads, it would be a lot cheaper, and the connectivity it would provide would be a lot more sustainable.

Back in late March and early April, I wrote that roads, streets, railroads and country roads have their own optimal vehicles for carrying freight and people - although railroads are better than car roads. I'm now going to add Really Narrow Streets to the mix, because I think they're different enough from the typical American streets that Nathan Lewis calls "hypertrophic." We can also see that they accommodate pedestrians differently:

Type of way	People vehicle	Freight vehicle	Pedestrian accommodation
Stroads*	SUVs	SUVs	Alternate route
Highways (roads)*	Buses	Trucks	Alternate route
Railroads	Passenger trains	Freight trains	Rail with trail
Really Narrow Streets	Feet	Wheelbarrows	Pedestrian priority
Streets	Streetcars	Pushcarts	Sidewalk
Country roads	Hitchhike	Pickup trucks	Sidepath

* Deprecated

With TIFIA, a loss for "New York" would be a gain for transit

Newsday reported that the competition for TIFIA loans is "stiff." It was presented as a challenge for New York: will another state beat us out to get the money? But if we look beyond the simplistic rhetoric and shoulder through some boring financial details, we can see that a "gain for New York" would actually be a loss for transit. In fact, it would be a loss for New York, and a loss even for Rockland and Westchester counties.

Okay, first of all, what is a TIFIA loan? TIFIA is a law, the Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act of 1998, that set up a program where the federal government offers loans to states and transportation agencies, which are then used to build new roads, rail lines, stations and other big capital projects. Getting a loan from the Treasury instead of selling bonds or borrowing from a private bank can save agencies millions of dollars, because they can get a better interest rate or extend the loan for a longer period.

Earlier this year, Congress put a billion dollars into the TIFIA fund for the next two years, and the Federal Highway Administration will decide who gets the loans. So far they've received nineteen applications, totaling $27 billion, so not everyone can get a loan. The New York State Thruway Authority has put in an application for almost six billion dollars, to build a replacement for the Tappan Zee Bridge. Newsday is clearly expecting everyone in the greater New York area to cheer on the Tappan Zee loan.

Building the Silver Line near Tysons Corner. Photo: Sean Marshall / Flickr.

Here's where it gets interesting: the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority has also applied for a TIFIA loan, for almost the same amount ($5.999 billion instead of $5.900 billion). But their loan wouldn't fund a highway bridge, it would fund a new subway line from downtown Washington through the northern Virginia suburbs to Dulles Airport.

On the surface, the choice is clear for transit advocates. The Tappan Zee Bridge project would take a huge, sprawl-generating highway and double it, possibly with a dedicated bus lane, probably without. The new bridge will make it easier to drive for a few more years, draining the life out of the small but growing movements to rebuild Rockland and Westchester's sustainable infrastructure of compact towns connected by train lines. This inefficiency will in turn waste more local tax money and fuel, increasing demand for hydrofracking and other destructive energy extraction methods.

At the state budget level, the Tappan Zee Bridge replacement project will suck up all of the toll money that the state can manage to get out of drivers (while the elected officials from the areas with the most bridge commuters fight to keep the tolls as low as possible). At best, that means that taxpayers statewide will be forced to pay for Thruway improvements that are currently funded out of bridge tolls. More likely, general state funds will be used to pay for various bridge-related expenses, diverting money away from other state expenses, particularly transit.

In contrast, the Silver Line metro project would bring rapid transit to a part of Virginia that has long been dominated by cars. Fairfax and Loudoun counties have made it the centerpiece of their smart growth plans, in particular a project to transform the town of Tysons Corner from a land of detached houses, strip malls and office parks into an urban area with dense, walkable centers. It would ultimately be paid for by motorists on the competing Dulles Toll Road, simultaneously providing a disincentive for driving and an incentive for taking the train.

Now, WAMU is spinning the TIFIA loan as a way to keep tolls on the Dulles Road low, but it's better to have low tolls and a completed train than a toll revolt and no Phase 2.

This is a case where what is good for "New York" is not only bad for Northern Virginia, but bad for transit everywhere, and in fact for the people of New York. New Yorkers should contact the FHWA and tell them to give the cheap loan to the Silver Line train.

The wrong lessons to take from the livery van failure

In his frustrating blog post from June about the "failure" of Chinatown buses, Will Doig also alleged that local private van service had failed:

And most important, it’s been tried before — not just in New York, but in many cities — with miserable results. "There was this expectation that these vans would be a perfect substitute for conventional transit," says Columbia University assistant professor of urban planning David King. But, "There are a lot of real problems when you try to formalize informal transit."

I know it's been a few months, but I've had this sitting half-finished in my pipeline, and it leads to an important point. But first, I haven't heard any evidence of an expectation that private vans would be a perfect substitute for conventional transit. Worse, Doig gives no details about what "miserable results" or "real problems" he and King might be referring to. Routes are expanding and the operators are buying bigger and better buses. To me that suggests either success or massive over-leveraging, and the second possibility is highly unlikely in this economic climate.



My guess is that King was referring to the failure of the Taxi and Limousine Commission's 2010 Group Ride program, which I covered extensively at the time. There were indeed several problems, and I came up with eight recommendations:

1. Jitney service is qualitatively different from scheduled government bus service.
2. Admitting ignorance is the first step on the path to wisdom.
3. Consider the customer's perspective.
4. Transit is in competition.
5. Thin markets need an anchor.
6. Sometimes marketing can help.
7. Gaps in service can kill your business.
8. Take constructive comments seriously.

The problem with King's statement, and Doig's, is that most of these things are not specific to "these vans," but they're true when you're launching a new transit service of any kind. They're also not about "trying to formalize informal transit," but about the perils of expecting to make a profit on unprofitable routes.

It's just lazy to give something a half-assed try and then say, "oh, well I guess it doesn't work," especially when it's working pretty well right across the river. Of course, King's statement was fairly nuanced and qualified; it's Doig who turned it into a blanket condemnation of privately owned transit.

If anything has failed, of course, it's Taxi Commissioner David Yassky, who's also promised a hybrid taxi fleet and a borough taxi program. It's then-Deputy Mayor Stephen Goldsmith, who has been awfully quiet since he left under accusations of domestic abuse, but who showed with this project that he's not a budget-cutting privatization guru. And of course it's Mayor Bloomberg, who hired these guys and gave them their orders.

Legal private transit still has a chance of working in New York City. Hopefully we'll give it a try one day.