Five rail-trails we'd like to see reactivated

Last month, the (Greater) Detroit Free Press told us of a section of trail the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (near Marquette) that had once been an active railroad, and will now be converted back to freight rail. "This is how it’s supposed to work," Humboldt Township Supervisor Joe Derocha told the Free Press, but it doesn't work that way as often as it should. In honor of that railroad, let's take a look at five rail-trails in the New York area that I'd like to see converted back to passenger use.

1. The Harlem Valley Rail-Trail
   
   
   Photo: Emily Moser. See her blog for more great photos and history.

   The Berkshires and Taconics are beautiful in the fall. A hundred years ago you could have taken the train up to Copake, Chatham and even beyond to Pittsfield, North Adams and Boston. But if you're up for some leaf-peeping, your only option is the slow bus that winds its way up Route 7. And you can't even get to Millerton without a car - unless you take the train to Wassaic and ride your bike for over an hour on this trail.

2. The Joseph P. Clarke Trail
   
   

   Villages like Piermont, Sparkill, Orangeburg and Nanuet grew up around junctions where the old Erie Main Line intersected with north-south lines. These towns have decayed since the railroad stopped running. They have recovered a little with Rockland County's population boom and the popularity of Route 9W among racing cyclists, but they can't compete with the Thruway-fueled strip malls. If you want to live in a cute village like Piermont you can get halfway decent buses to the city, but local bus service is woefully inadequate. Regular train service, ideally connecting to the city through the "new" Main Line or the Northern Branch, would breathe new life into these towns.

3. The South County Trailway, North County Trailway and Putnam Trailway
   
   
   Elmsford station. Photo: Unknown (1963)
   
   

   If you go to a place like Ardsley or Elmsford, you'll find a cluster of buildings very similar to what you'd see around a railroad station, and there's a good reason for that. When the buildings were built, there was a station there. Now these places are stuck in the middle of Westchester, and the people who live there have to take the bus or drive to stations on the Harlem and Hudson lines. Businesses that depended on a steady flow of commuters shut down long ago. In northern Westchester and Putnam County, bus service is so spotty that villages like Yorktown Heights and Mahopac are car-dependent.
   
   

   These trails are popular with families on weekends, but during commuting hours they're essentially abandoned. Instead, they could run passenger service direct to Grand Central, or possibly even be connected with the subway system.

4. The walkway Over the Hudson and Dutchess County Trailway
   
   
   Photo: Daniel Tobias / Flickr

   The Northeast Corridor, our country's highest volume train line, has a tremendous vulnerability: there is one single train line, with two to four tracks. If anything happens to that line, as it has several times over the past few years, all traffic in that section stops. There were once many parallel lines, but some have incompatible power systems and many don't have tracks anymore. The Poughkeepsie Bridge Route offers a valuable alternate route that in the past has allowed trains to bypass New York City and its tunnels completely, while still allowing New York-bound passengers to transfer to any of five radial lines.

5. The Nyack-Piermont Trail
   
   
   
   
   

   I've written before about the problems with New Jersey Transit's current plans to reactivate passenger service on the old Erie Northern Branch. The main challenge, from the point of view of funding, is a lack of what Jarrett Walker calls an "anchor" on the northern end. Villages like Norwood, Northvale, Demarest and Closter are too small to pencil out in the transit planners' metrics, and the planners can't imagine anyone being willing to upzone, so the planners build large park-and-rides to try to capture people who will drive from the sprawl further north.

   
   

   We'd really want to see the planners ditch their crappy proprietary models and look at induced demand. But we can also look at strong anchors, which means Nyack. Nyack doesn't have the population of Englewood or even Tenafly, but it has enough to provide a nice anchor for the Northern Branch - which was why it ended there in the first place.
   To get to Nyack means running trains through the part of the Northern Branch that's now the Nyack-Piermont Rail Trail. Which is unfortunate, because it's a nice trail with great views. But trails don't get people out of their cars. Trains do.

Bikeshare budgets, how do they work?

I can now tell you that I'm a proud Citibike annual member, and I've been enjoying it. The biggest advantage is being able to use all that great Manhattan bike infrastructure without having to go through the inadequate bike infrastructure to get to it. The Ninth Avenue bike lane was installed in 2007, and I still haven't used it, because I haven't wanted to ride across from the Queensboro Bridge on 55th Street. With Citibike, I can take the subway to the West Side, or to Greenwich Village where the streets are calmer. I still haven't ridden the Ninth Avenue lane, but I have ridden the Eighth Avenue one.

Photo: riveredger / Flickr

It would be nice to have Citibike here in Queens, and in nearby parts of Brooklyn, and I'm glad that my City Councilmember Jimmy Van Bramer and State Senator Michael Gianaris are lobbying for it. But there's one thing I don't understand: where the money comes from. I've read a lot about potential Citibike expansion, and everyone just repeats the claim that the expansion will have to be paid for by the government. There is no explanation; it's just treated as though it's obvious, and then people move on to the question of where the government will get the money.

It's not obvious to me, though. Imagine a private bike rental business with five locations. The business can expand without money from the government. All it has to do is earn a surplus that the owner reinvests in new locations. The owner can even make a bet on future success by taking out a loan to pay for expansion. If Citibike can earn a surplus, it can do it too.

Is Citibike earning a surplus? I haven't seen anything one way or another. There are three main possibilities. It could be running a deficit and burning through the initial Citibank outlay of $41 million plus the Mastercard $6.5 million. It could be earning a surplus, but not enough to expand at any significant rate. Maybe it's not at a surplus yet. Or maybe the surplus is going to something other than expansion.

It turns out that we can actually estimate quite a bit. We know, from the Citibike website, that as of Sunday there were 69,830 annual memberships. The rate at which new people are joining is constantly dropping, as is standard, but the system may get up to a hundred thousand members a year, bringing in $9.5 million. There are about 1500 24-hour passes and 150 seven-day passes sold per day on average, earning $18,750 per day, which will come out to about another six million dollars a year, allowing for weather conditions. So the total membership income for the year will probably be around $15 million, which dwarfs the $10 million per year that the city gets from its sponsors.

So what are the expenses? According to this article, Bixi costs $400,000 Canadian a year to run 1800 bikes in Toronto, for an average of $222 per bike. Everything's more expensive here, so let's say $1.5 million a year for our 6,000 bikes. That means that we could pay for the the system out of 24-hour passes, or that it broke even with annual memberships before it even launched. Or about $23 million in profit, which is split between the city and Alta, leaving $11.5 million a year for expansion.

(Interestingly, this means that we don't actually need sponsorship; even without it, the city would still be on track to earn $6 million a year from the deal.)

The next question is how much expansion we can get for $11.5 million. Alta got $47.5 million from the sponsors, a $42 million loan from the vampire squid, and $5 million from its insurance company, for a total of $92.5 million. But a lot of the equipment was damaged by Hurricane Sandy, and it's not clear how much the bikes currently in use cost.

That said, before Sandy hit Alta told its insurance company that it had $20 million in equipment on the ground, so let's assume that that was for 7,000 bikes. That means that for $11.5 million we could expand the system by more than half its planned launch size - 3,500 bikes - every year.

To me that suggests that by this time next year I could be riding Citibikes from the Upper West Side to Long Island City to Bed-Stuy to Red Hook. In 2015 I could ride from my house to Tremont to Inwood, and south to Ridgewood and Brownsville. In 2018, who knows?

Feel free to go over my "back of the envelope" and point out anything that doesn't look right. But if I'm right, we don't need government money to expand Citibike. We only need it if we want to speed up the process. And you know, if we're spending $800 million to widen a bridge that carries hardly any transit, I have to wonder if we couldn't find a hundred million for Citibike expansion. Imagine what that would get us.

Detroit is not a city

Last month, the municipality of the City of Detroit filed for bankruptcy. Every so often Detroit is in the news for some symptom of urban decline: its famous ruins, particularly the Central Station; its vacant houses bulldozed to vacant lots, which have fed the fantasies of so many urban farmers; its cutbacks to emergency services, which result in hour-plus wait times; its transit history of trolleys torn up and replaced by promises; its half-assed projects like the People Mover and the light rail that may one day appear; the demands that the municipality sell the collection of its Institute of Art to pay its debts. The median household income is $31,011.

I've long avoided talking about Detroit, because I've never really been there. I passed through once, changing buses, and again on my way back from the same trip, but it was at night and I never left the bus station. But all this pointless chatter about bankruptcies and vacant lots misses an essential point, one that's true of most urban areas.

The problem with all these stories is that Detroit is not a city. Sure, it's a municipal corporation chartered by the State of Michigan. But it's not a coherent urban system, just as New York City and the City of Los Angeles and the City of Chicago are not really cities. Greater New York, including everything from Montauk to New Brunswick and from Asbury Park to Poughkeepsie, and more, is a city. Metro Detroit, including at least Oakland and Macomb counties in Michigan and Essex County in Ontario, is a city.

The city of Metro Detroit contains vibrant, well-maintained shopping areas full of white people, like this one in the administrative municipality of Birmingham.

If we look at Metro Detroit as a city, the picture looks a lot better. The median household income for the Detroit Metropolitan Statistical Area is $48,198 Eight of Michigan's top ten richest municipalities are in Metro Detroit, all with per capita incomes above $59,000. Windsor, Ontario, just across the river, had a median family income of $72,204 CAD in 2006.

Windsor also had no homicides for over two years. Metro Detroit contains places like Bloomfield Hills, with a world-class golf course and an art school featuring impressively manicured grounds and stunning architecture.

For many years Metro Detroit has been segregated, with black people living in the municipality of Detroit and white people living in the surrounding suburbs, although that has been changing lately with black people moving to some of the inner suburbs. The boundary between the municipality and the northern suburbs of Oakland County, 8 Mile Road, has long been an object of fascination of alienated white suburbanites, as highlighted by the musician Eminem and others.

These white suburbs are not all doing so well, but for years they prospered as the municipality declined. Some have argued that the city of Metro Detroit is now declining because it didn't take care of its center. I don't have the space or the expertise to comment on what caused the city to decline or what could save it, but I will point out, as a caller to the KunstlerCast observed years ago, that the city still has the same things going for it that led Henry Ford and other automakers to build their factories there: a key position on shipping routes. Essentially, you could argue that the suburbs have cut the city off by reconfiguring those shipping routes. I don't know what to do to reverse that, or at least to provide some justice and keep valuable riverside space from being wasted, but I hope somebody figures it out.

I've been happy to see that some people commenting on the bankruptcy have acknowledged that Detroit doesn't stop at the municipal boundary. Among them are Andrew Heath, Ariella Cohen, and the Planet Money team.

To someone who's observed regional issues unfolding in my own city of Greater New York and many others, this stuff is all pretty obvious. But for a lot of other people who talk about Detroit, the parts of the city across 8 Mile Road and across the river don't exist; they might as well be in Minnesota or Pennsylvania. I have a rule for reading news about the economic fortune of "Detroit": does it mention what's going on in Bloomfield Hills, or Grosse Pointe, or Windsor? If not, I close the tab immediately or skip to the next podcast. Because if they miss that part of the story, you have to wonder what else they're missing.

Where does this bus go?

"Where does this bus go?"
"Where do you want to go?"

If I know my readership, most of you have had that conversation. You're in a strange town, or a strange part of your own town. There's something about that bus that looks intriguing. Maybe it doesn't have a sign on it, but there's a long line of interesting-looking people getting on. Maybe it's got different markings, or it's pointing in an interesting direction. Maybe it's just the first bus that's come along in a while.

You're imagining taking that bus - where? Through a bustling neighborhood filled with an immigrant population you had no idea existed - the Finnish slum in Tegucigalpa, maybe. Past a dramatic waterfall or through the shadow of a nuclear power plant. Down a lush boulevard lined with Victorian mansions. To a trailhead in the foothills, or the best working-class takeout, or a great concert. Or maybe it connects to the end of the new subway, or the old trolley line. But you have no idea, really. You just see the bus, full of possibility.

You can probably picture the look on the driver's face. Where does this bus go? What kind of question is that? It goes home. It goes to work. It goes to the mall. It goes to the park-and-ride. You obviously don't have a car in the park-and-ride. Are you going home, or to work? Do you really want to shop in that mall? Why? Don't they have malls where you come from?

Why don't you take a taxi? You can afford it, and a taxi driver will take you right where you're going, wherever that is. Or a tour bus? All the other tourists take the tour bus. It'll take you past the Ancient Wonder and the Modern Marvel and even make a stop at the Mega-Event. There's even a tour bus that goes to the new mall where the rich people shop. It's much better than the one this bus goes to. It has a Cinnabon and a Lush and an Armani Exchange.

But mostly, it's going to bring people home. And that includes the ten other people waiting to get on the bus, grab their seats and snooze all the way home. You're holding the driver up; a couple more minutes and the bus will be officially Late, and the driver will have to floor it on the straightaway to make up time.

So make up your mind. Are you on or off?

Cities with and without transit

I was not at the Congress for the New Urbanism last month, so I was unable to take part in the debate, "Can a city be successful without transit?" I understand it was all in fun, and I honestly can't say that I could have done much better than the debaters, with the amount of time available for preparation, but there was a problem with the historical perspective. Several of the debaters stipulated that for millennia there have been cities that have been successful, but that in the words of Andrew Burleson, "there was no transit before the 1890s". This last part is actually wrong, but there's a larger issue with transportation myopia.

"The carabas was a public car in the shape of a long cage, with capacity for twenty people. The carabas took four and a half hours to get to Versailles, for a fare of twenty-five pence." - Official Journal of April 29, 1875. Model: Maurice Leloir. Photo: Michel Urtado.

First, there was indeed transit before the 1890s. Burleson and Edward Erfurt are probably thinking of the first trolleys, autobuses and underground railways, which were implemented around that time. But before then there were other ways of getting around. On the StrongTowns podcast page, Steve commented that waterways - rivers and canals - provided a transit function.

Beyond the waterways, there were horsecars. These were large, horse-drawn vehicles that ran on rails, and could carry twenty or more people at a time. These began to appear in the early nineteenth century. The London Underground ran on steam from 1863.

Mike Lydon was the only one who didn't suffer from persistent transportation myopia. Burleson said, "Imagine a European-scale city that had no transit, but also had no cars." Transit and cars - along with taxis, hansom cabs and personal horse-drawn carriages - are different ways of enabling long-distance commutes. Transit is a long-distance commuting option that is accessible to lower classes.

Cities did exist for millennia, but it's worth noting that until the nineteenth century, they were small enough that you could walk from any part of them to almost any other part within an hour. So as Erfurt observed, transit allowed cities to expand beyond that size, but so did personal vehicles. Ian Rasmussen pointed out that transit opened the city to all.

An interesting example that proves the rule is Versailles. By moving the court a long distance from Paris, Louis XIV essentially split the capital over a distance of twelve miles. To compensate for that distance, a public transit system - the "carabas" - was implemented. It covered that distance in six and a half hours at first, but by the beginning of the nineteenth century it took only two hours, and there were twenty-six round trips per day. It was not the first transit system in the Paris region - Bibliophile Jacob tells us that in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there was a whole network of public coach routes linking the various suburban palaces, with the frequency adjusted to the whereabouts of the King - but it was the best developed.

On one level, Erfurt and Burleson are right and you don't need transit to have a successful walking city. But you do need vehicle commuting to have a successful large city, and you need transit to do that equitably. I commend the debaters for what they were able to do within the constraints they had, and I thank them and the debate organizers for raising a number of interesting questions, and for recording the debate for posterity.

Buses and trains in Woodhaven

In this blog, Capt. Subway has written that we should run the R subway on the unused Rockaway Beach Branch of the Long Island Railroad, and I've written that we should run Select Bus Service on the parallel Woodhaven Boulevard.



On one of my followup posts, BBnet3000 argued that the Rockaway Branch is not well enough located:

Also, most of the commercial development in this area is along Woodhaven Boulevard, which this subway kind of misses. Theres a reason subways are usually built under streets. When I ride the bus on Woodhaven Boulevard (to go to the auto-oriented Trader Joes incidentally, though Forest Park is also worth visiting) I usually think id like a better bus, rather than a train a block to the east (for what its worth, this bus seems to have pretty good ridership, and a lot of people DO ride it to the Rockaways in the summer). For the densest parts of Woodhaven its several blocks to the east and inaccessible through the private properties of the Rego crescent.

There is in fact walkable commercial development along that section of Woodhaven Boulevard from 62nd Drive to where the cemetery starts at Furmanville Road, but that's the only walkable commercial development the entire length of the boulevard. North of 62nd Drive you've got an apartment complex, a Catholic school parking lot, a deli and a park before you get to Queens Boulevard and the subway station. South of Furmanville Road you have the cemetery on one side and sprawly stores on the other, then the big-box stores, then the Montauk Branch.

South of the Montauk Branch there are a few businesses, but they are almost all located on street corners. The vast majority of commercial use in this corridor is on the avenues that cross it: Metropolitan, Myrtle, Jamaica, Atlantic, 101st and Liberty Avenues. On Woodhaven itself you see mostly houses - and a lot of one-car garages.



If you walk down one of those avenues, the Rockaway Branch is never far away.



One thing to remember is that this is not just about better access to existing businesses, but enticing more and better businesses to locate there. The commercial buildings along the avenues are generally two stories, allowing for greater walkability - more shops, restaurants and offices in a small area. The ones on Woodhaven Boulevard are mostly one story, which limits their potential.

So yes, Select Bus Service would be good for the commercial stretch of Woodhaven north of Saint John's Cemetery, but a subway would be better for businesses further south in that corridor. That's why we should have both.

A safe, comfortable bus network

Recently I drew your attention to Kimberly Matus's story about being groped on a downtown 2 train, and the fact that the only way she could be reasonably sure of avoiding a repeat of that situation was to take a taxi to work, or buy a car. The Death Valley of Commute Options means that Matus - and people like me who just want to sit down - have no reasonable transit alternative. We can take a cheap, fast train or a cheap, slow bus, and both of them force us to deal with crowding and noise. Even the taxis are hard to find, and the legal options for sharing are rare. The system is set up to force us into cars.

Photo: Ben Woosley / Flickr.

The frustrating thing is that it doesn't have to be this way. Whenever there's crowding or queuing, chances are someone is willing to pay to escape it. If the government sets up an alternative it will get customers, and if barriers to entry are low, private businesses will set up alternatives.

Sadly, barriers to entry are not low. The City DOT refuses to allow any private bus lines to operate within city limits, the City Council won't authorize commuter vans to pick up passengers legally, the NYPD won't let them use the bus lanes, and the State Legislature is driving intercity bus operators out of business, based on bad data from the Federal DOT.

I'm proposing that instead the City allow well-regulated private buses to bid on selected routes, charging whatever fare the market will bear. And no, not on the routes with the lowest demand, which basically ensures failure without an anchor, but on high-demand routes, paralleling subway lines. It would help if the city also provided dedicated bus lanes and bus bulbs along these routes, but I don't think they're absolutely necessary. From what I can see, the demand is there even if the buses are much slower than the subway.

I can envision a million objections, but there are two serious ones I can think of. The first is that it will undermine the strength of the transit unions and the quality of life of transit workers. Because of this, I propose (1) that all bidders be required to operate a closed shop on these routes, employing only members of the transit unions that are currently active in the city.

The second, raised by Zoltán, is that it's not fair to make women pay more to avoid sexual assault. I completely agree, and I think we should be working towards a system where such offenses are rare and swiftly punished. But I don't think we should have to wait for that, and it's not the only reason to provide comfortable alternatives to the subway.

The third is that it will poach customers from the existing subway and bus routes. In the comments to my previous post, Alon Levy tried to argue that this would mean a "mass exodus from the subway," and that it was somehow okay for New York subways to be operating at 100% of recommended capacity because Tokyo subways have much higher loads.

Chart: New York Times (2007), based on MTA data.

I'm not convinced. I think we should be aiming for passenger loads below 100%, something like the Shoupian ideal of 85%. Why shouldn't people be comfortable during rush hour? But I agree that the government should not be subsidizing competition to its own transit system, the way it currently does by building and widening highways. But to address these objections, I suggest the following additional conditions:

(2) That there be no direct subsidy to the private operators. If there are enough people who think they can make a profit, they should pay the city an amount to be determined by competitive bidding.

(3) That the routes be rebid every year, based on a survey of passenger loads. The routes should connect subway stations that currently require travel on a line that sees loads greater than 85% capacity at rush hour (or even outside of rush hour, with reasonable deviations. If a route drops below 85% on a survey, it is no longer eligible for parallel bus service.

In addition, I think these two conditions would help ensure consistency and satisfaction:

(4) That the routes be served at least every fifteen minutes from 6AM to midnight, seven days a week. If an operator fails to provide that level of service, the DOT should rescind the authorization to operate on that route. If the operator cannot make a profit, there should be a formal process for abandoning a route.

(5) That the MTA allow the private operators to accept Metrocards and any other standard MTA fare payment system, if the operator desires it.

What would such a network of bus routes look like? Ultimately, that would be up to the operators bidding for the routes. But I have some ideas about what I would bid on if I had a bus company. First, if we assume that the chart above is still correct, it would mean paralleling the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, E and L trains. Those lines roughly parallel Eric Fischer's travel map of geocoded tweets:

Map: Eric Fischer / Flickr.

Knowing that most people are commuting to jobs in East Midtown, I set up a bunch of routes that focus on that area.

I would definitely pay five dollars for a guaranteed seat on one of these buses during rush hour, even if I had to sit on it for an hour, as long as it meant avoiding a crowded subway. I'd pay even more if it had BusTime, legroom, outlets, broadband internet and an espresso machine. I bet some people who currently drive or take taxis or black cars into the city would take one of these buses instead. Surely it's worth a try?