Chris Christie and the money tree

A few days ago, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie was campaigning for a congressional candidate in Pennsylvania, and he offered this anecdote about the ARC Tunnel:

In our house, when I used to go my mother and say "I’d like something new, I’d like to buy something," my mother would look at me and say "well, of course Christopher, you can have that just go in the back yard and take the money off the money tree. You know where that is, right?" …to me it is a moral imperative to say no to these things.

Christie is clearly fond of this story in justifying budget cuts: he used it in January to describe Corzine's budget, and in July when discussing the budget of the Delaware River Port Authority. It's a cute little story, but it's not really helpful.

Christie describes his upbringing as "middle class," and it's doubtful that he ever had to go without food, clothing or shelter. His parents both worked and brought in money, so there was money for things that were a priority. When he wanted "something new," that wasn't a priority, so he had to do without. The honest thing for his mother to say would have been, "Christopher, we only bring in so much money. For us to have enough to pay for the thing you want, I'd have to work overtime, or else you'd have to go without new clothes for school this fall."

There is always money in the budget. That's what budgets are for. When someone says "there's no money in the budget," what they're saying is, "all the spending that's in the budget is a higher priority than this thing you want." Nobody likes to hear that their project is a low priority, so politicians fudge the issue by saying, "there's no money." The money tree is a cop-out, a way to avoid talking about budget priorities. I'm glad my mom was a lot more honest with me.

Brian Williams tried to get Christie to talk about his priorities, but he chose the wrong words. He stayed in the "no money" frame, so Christie was able to look justifiably baffled by Williams's question about "finding money." Williams needed to get out of that frame and point out, as I did, that Christie has no trouble finding money for projects that he likes.

Interestingly, Christie did point out to Williams that New Jersey "can't print money like the federal government." It's true: states don't have the power to set interest rates and perform quantitative easing like the Federal Reserve. Some states can borrow money to provide stimulus, but in New Jersey, the Governor and the Legislature are constitutionally required to pass a "balanced budget" with no borrowing.

Of course, Christie could support a constitutional amendment to get rid of that balanced budget requirement, or push the federal government to print money for stimulus, but he clearly likes that balanced budget requirement. It's his own lack of money tree, and he can point to it any time he wants to cut a program. Not quite a reverse Houdini, but enough to allow him to avoid being held accountable for his priorities.

Is the rent 2 damn high?

We all got a good laugh out of Jimmy McMillan, gubernatorial candidate for the Rent is 2 Damn High Party, at the debate last week. He was clearly a clownish figure, with his black gloves and his muttonchops. And he was outrageously nonsensical, one minute saying that all we had to do was execute the plans that Obama has put in motion, the next promising to "bulldoze some of those mountains in Upstate New York, to make New York State an independent state ... for the children!" and then again promising to "help all Americans." He showed that he knows almost nothing about most of the issues, claiming for instance that there is a hunger crisis "even here at this college," meaning Hofstra University. Even as a karate expert, he was clearly the least qualified person out of the seven to be governor.

McMillan got me thinking, though: is the rent 2 damn high? What does that even mean? There are definitely some high rents: today on Craigslist there's a three bedroom apartment going for $8600, a two bedroom for $4330, a one bedroom for $4195, and a studio for $2200. With what I'm making, I can't afford to live in either of the Manhattan neighborhoods where I grew up. And I'm sure that there are millions of New Yorkers who are struggling to pay their rents, whatever they are. So in some sense, yes, the rent is 2 damn high.

On the other hand, I live in a wonderful neighborhood in Queens, with lots of nice shops and restaurants. I can get to almost anywhere in Manhattan in less than an hour. The streets around me are quieter than Columbus Avenue or Second Avenue. And as a family, we can easily afford our mortgage and maintenance bill every month. As far as I know, most of my neighbors are in the same situation, whether they rent or own. So in that sense, no, the rent is not 2 damn high.

If you say that something is too high, you're inviting the question, "2 damn high 4 what?" Too high for someone to afford on a janitor's salary? That's probably true throughout Manhattan south of 96th Street, unless you want to live in an illegal boarding house in Chinatown. But there are places around the city where the rent is lower. In the Bronx there are studios under $800, and three bedrooms under $1500, close to the subway. True, those are in relatively high-crime neighborhoods, but then you're saying that the rent is 2 damn high for a janitor to live in a low-crime neighborhood.

Once you get into that, what seemed like a simple problem reveals itself to be much more complicated. What if we invested more in policing those areas? If they got safer, would the rents rise? What if we could make it so that the lowest paid workers still got enough to afford to live somewhere safe? What other expenses do they have? Can we cut medical expenses so that people have more money to pay for housing?

McMillan is wrong. It really doesn't all boil down to one issue. He deserved to be laughed off that stage not for his beard or his gloves, or even for his lack of knowledge about basic facts. He deserved ridicule for taking such a simplistic approach to a complex problem, and for attempting to mislead people into thinking that we deserved a Strong Leader because of it.

The problem is that this criticism applies to most of the other people on stage with McMillan last week. There were only three candidates who showed any grasp of complexity and nuance: Kristen Davis, Charles Barron and Howie Hawkins. Warren Redlich might as well be running for the "Government Salaries R 2 Damn High" party, and Carl Paladino on the "Business Taxes R 2 Damn High" party line.

Most disappointing of all, because he's expected to win the election with more than sixty percent of the vote, is Andrew Cuomo. Forget about his nominations by the Democratic, Independence and Working Families parties, he might as well be running for the "Taxes R 2 Damn High" party. While Davis, Barron and Hawkins each proposed measures that will stimulate the state's economy and thereby increase revenue, Cuomo expects us to believe that he'll reap huge savings by eliminating the same wastefraudandabuse that politicians have promised to eliminate election after election, back to his father and beyond. His insistence on a property tax cap and avoiding any tax increases has led him to promise spending cuts that will plunge this state into a deep depression.

Poor people with cars

In the comments on my last post, Joel writes:

I know that the image of NJ drivers are BMW driving upper middle class yuppies. However, I have put in many miles in NJ and I can tell you that many parts of NJ have residents that are treading water in 1980s vintage automobiles. Warren County and large chunks of south Jersey have poverty problems and the land usage makes demand for NJT bus service sparse. These people are finished if fuel climbs.

I am not saying that raising tolls and the gas tax would be bad. I am simply saying that most of our transit advocates have transportation myopia that causes them to misunderstand their respective markets. Christie has done his best to protect the people that don't have much and he is doing it again.

I'm glad that you're not saying that raising tolls and the gas tax would be bad, Joel. (I'd be interested to know when and how you think they should be raised.) But you raise an important point, and I'm going to use it as a springboard to discuss a persistent problem in leftist transportation discussions: compassion.

I'm a compassionate kind of guy, and like many leftists, a lot of my politics are motivated by compassion. But a lot of leftists get paralyzed by their compassion - or maybe it offers them an excuse to avoid something they didn't particularly want to do anyway. They lose perspective, lose the ability to distinguish between different levels of pain, and between short-term disruptions and long-term inequities. For some reason it happens a lot when the topic of poor people who drive cars comes up.

Let me give an example, taking Joel's argument to its extreme: I live in Queens. I just heard about this great job in Chicago. Obviously, none of you are going to suggest that the government pay for my commute; I should either move to Chicago or get a job here.

But what if my Senators and the Senators from Illinois get a great idea for economic development: ten dollar flights to Midway! The federal government covers the difference between the ticket price and the airline's cost per passenger. I take the job in Chicago and start flying back and forth every weekday.

A year goes by and it's a hugely popular program. The city is talking about building a new airport in Brooklyn to accommodate the demand. The US has occupied Iran to ensure a steady supply of jet fuel. But it's straining the federal and state budgets, and the government is looking at either raising taxes or cutting other programs to pay for it.

Suppose that someone gets bold enough to suggest that the program could pay more of its own costs if the fare were raised to twenty dollars. But that would mean paying a hundred dollars a week for me. It would add up to almost five thousand dollars over a year! My job only pays thirty thousand, so it would be a devastating blow to me. How am I going to pay for the mortgage on my house, the payments on my car, and my kids' tuition at private school?

My point, to be clear, is that any subsidy will eventually have a significant number of people who are dependent on it. Ending a subsidy like this will disrupt people's lives, causing economic suffering. But just as we currently live fine without ten-dollar flights to Chicago, we would be able to live fine if they were given and taken away. And just as people were able to live fine in Warren County without cheap gas and free highways, some day they'll be able to do that again. Maybe all the people who moved to Warren County to take advantage of the cheap gas and free highways will have to move back to the cities, but they won't necessarily move back to the slum conditions that many of them left behind.

Making the transition is important. A lot of the pain associated with eliminating subsidies is transitional. This can be mitigated with proper support: a favorable job market, a good safety net. Interestingly, when there is enough support, transitions like this are often not even perceived as painful. It's another chapter in someone's life, even an adventure.

We also need to realize that subsidies can hurt as well as help, and compare the pain of getting rid of a subsidy against the pain of keeping it. Think about the budget mess and fuel shortages that ten dollar flights to Chicago would cause, let alone the suffering that it would cause if we occupied Iran. Similarly, it would probably cause a lot more suffering over the long term to continue subsidizing sprawl in Warren County than to stop.

Note the difference between my argument and a libertarian one. I am not saying that all subsidies are evil and must be eliminated. I am saying that they must be justified, and that those that can't be justified should be eliminated. I'm not saying that they should be justified with some kind of cold monetary cost-benefit analysis, but in terms of how they fit with our priorities, and how compassionate they are. I'm also not advocating pain and suffering, I'm advocating adequate transition support.

Again, I'm not trying to make Joel the bad guy here. I don't know what he thinks should be done in Warren County. But "These people are finished if fuel climbs," sounds like an argument for letting these subsidies persist indefinitely, which is not an answer.

The bottom line is that compassion doesn't mean never doing anything that could possibly make someone suffer somewhere. It means keeping perspective, and doing what's necessary to reduce the overall suffering. And that includes measures to mitigate transitional suffering.

Budget goblins: the phantom menace

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christie: That’s the difference.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jamaica Cutover: What if?

That's right, folks, it's time for another installment of What If?, where we look at some boneheaded move and ask, "What if the people in charge of this transit agency actually gave a fuck about their passengers?" The agency in question is the Long Island Rail Road, and really, can anyone think of a transit manager anywhere in the region who's done more to screw her passengers, transit advocates, and the people of New York than Helena Williams?

Back in August, you remember, there was a nasty fire in a 100-year-old switching board in Jamaica, that screwed up every LIRR rider's commutes for days, and I asked, what if the people in charge wanted to provide some redundancy to mitigate the effects of a disaster like this? Well, nobody's said boo about that, but a big irony that many people mentioned was that the switching board in question was almost ready to be replaced with a modern, computerized, centralized system.

Now it's time to do that replacement, and naturally, it's much easier to do that when the tracks are not actually in use. It makes sense that the Rail Road would run significantly reduced service. It just doesn't make sense how reduced their plans are. When I first saw the notice, I thought it must be some kind of joke. Especially this paragraph:

As a result of the extremely limited service, the LIRR advises that only customers traveling for essential business – such as first responders (police, fire) and service employees with no other alternatives – should use the LIRR during these two weekends. Customers traveling for recreational purposes during this period should consider travel on the Port Washington Branch or other travel alternatives.

Okay, seriously, what the fuck? If anyone thinks the LIRR is in it for the money, this should cure them of that illusion. If this were a for-profit business, its competitors would be salivating at the chance to snatch up disgruntled customers.

The notice is clearly written by someone who thinks that everyone on the island has cars, nobody but "first responders" actually needs to take the train, and weekend service is some kind of giant amusement park ride operated at great expense for people who are too lazy to drive themselves around. The idea that there are people who live or work within walking distance of a stop on the affected lines (all of which are more than a mile from the closest stop on the Port Washington Branch), and might not have an easy time driving themselves for one reason or another, seems utterly foreign.

During these two weekends, there will be no service at all on the Flatbush Avenue branch to Brooklyn, and no service between Jamaica and Mineola on the Main Line. There will be hourly service on the Long Beach and Babylon branches, with connecting service to Far Rockaway and infrequent diesels to the East End. There will be a weird hourly diesel-electric service that will express out to Babylon (but not stop), reverse over the old C.R.R.L.I. towards Bethpage (but not stop), and then go forward to Ronkonkoma (but not continue to Greenport).

There will be hourly buses from Jamaica to Mineola, where passengers can take electric shuttles to Huntington, connecting to a diesel shuttle to Port Jefferson, or a more infrequent diesel shuttle from Mineola to Oyster Bay. Every two hours, there will be a bus from Jamaica to Queens Village that will meet a shuttle to Hempstead. There will be no service on the West Hempstead Branch, but it turns out that there's been no weekend service on that branch for several months now.

There are several weird things about this. The most obvious is why they couldn't stop the Ronkonkoma diesel-electric express in Babylon, and time the Montauk trains to connect with it, shaving off some time for people going to the East End. Also, why not just reverse that train all the way to Hollis, and have a connecting train take people out to Ronkonkoma? Or have the diesel-electric express connect with a Ronkonkoma-Hollis train at Bethpage?

Another is that, given that it's weekend traffic and not beach season, why they couldn't have worked with a bus operator to run buses directly from Mineola into Penn Station and Downtown Brooklyn.

Instead, they just throw up their hands, say "Sorry!" and basically encourage anyone on Long Island with a car to drive into the city. I'm sure a ton of them will wind up on Queens Boulevard. Thanks, Helena Williams!

Transportation myopia

I've been writing this blog for over three years now, and there have been many issues that have come up repeatedly. There is one particular issue that I've found in just about every debate, every problem. It causes potential allies of transit to turn into enemies; it causes transit advocates to miscalculate their strategies. It has probably been the single biggest factor in the proliferation of unwalkable sprawl, and the bankruptcy of transit systems, over the past sixty years. I've decided to call it transportation myopia.

Essentially, transportation myopia involves people forgetting, even for a moment, why they care about transit, and treating transit as a goal in itself.



If their goals relate to the environment, they may forget that transit only helps the environment by getting people out of cars. We see this with the Tappan Zee Bridge project, where anti-sprawl advocates have been pushing for transit, but few have questioned the State Department of Transportation's primary goal of widening the bridge from seven lanes to ten.

If people are concerned about the financial and political support that transit receives, they may forget that transit is competing for customers and for political supporters against the road/parking/gas/car system. We see this with the "Save the G" campaign, where advocates failed to address a multi-year, billion-dollar investment in rehabilitating and upgrading the G's primary competition, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.

Why do I need a name for this? So that I don't have to keep restating the reasons why it's a bad idea to consider the Q74 without mentioning the Kew Gardens Interchange, and so on and so on. I can just say, "Q74 advocates show transportation myopia," and link to this page. Less work for me, and perhaps most importantly, less than 140 characters.

A lot of transit advocates that I know and respect have demonstrated transportation myopia. If I call you out on it, it's nothing personal. We're on the same side, and I'm doing it to help you accomplish a goal that we all share. I've probably written some myopic things in the past, and you should feel free to call me out if I do it again.

Why 181st Street matters

I've long argued that the concept of "BRT" attempting to mimic subway lines is an inefficient and counterproductive strategy. When you've got a lot of people who think they're too good to ride the bus, it's flashy and can get people to try it, but when you've got lots of bus riders already, what you need is just an improvement in value. 181st Street in Upper Manhattan is an example of this.

On Friday, Streetsblog reported on a presentation by the Department of Transportation about alternatives for the 181st Street corridor in Washington Heights. "Alternative 2 would create a two-way, protected transit mall along this stretch, with raised medians serving as bus stops," writes Noah Kazis. Why does that matter? Check out the Bronx bus map (PDF):

There are five bus routes that start at the Port Authority's uptown bus terminal, cross Manhattan along 181st Street, go across the Washington Bridge to the Bronx, and fan out to cover most of the western Bronx. The Bx3 goes north past Bronx Community College, Lehman College and the VA Hospital to Kingsbridge. The Bx36 goes clear across the borough, past West Farms and Parkchester to Castle Hill. The Bx11 and Bx35 cover Morrisania and the Bx13 goes south to Yankee Stadium and the courts. They have high ridership, which keeps costs down; none of them require heavy subsidies:

Route	Average weekday ridership	Operating farebox recovery ratio
Bx3	17,840	105 %
Bx11	14,860	93 %
Bx13	10,700	94 %
Bx35	15,860	109 %
Bx36	32,710	95 %
Total	91,970

The Bx36 is a long route, but I would guess that more than half the ridership crosses the bridge to Manhattan, and even more for the other routes. Many of the people who live in this part of the Bronx are Dominican, and they use these buses to connect with friends, relatives and jobs in the Dominican neighborhoods of Washington Heights and Inwood. Others use these buses to connect with the A and 1 trains in Manhattan, which provide a more direct route to many destinations than the 4 and D trains.

Significantly, these buses also allow Bronx residents to reach the George Washington Bridge bus terminal, where they can take buses run by New Jersey Transit and Red and Tan Lines to various locations in New Jersey and Rockland County. There are also private van services that run from the GWB terminal across the bridge and west to Paterson and south along Bergenline Avenue to Hudson County. These buses form a vital east-west link between communities in an area where all the train lines run north-south.

If you actually go to check out these routes sometime, well, it can try the patience of Job. Double-parking is rampant along 181st Street, and all it takes is one double-parked car to hold up three buses. It's common for a bus to take as long to get from Broadway to Amsterdam as from Amsterdam to the Grand Concourse. These delays cause bunching, which has repercussions down all five lines.

Alternative 2 could actually work as a kind of "bus network acupuncture," relieving a pressure point and thereby improving flow on a large section of the network. Putting in bus lanes on three blocks of one street could improve the commutes of 50,000 people, and through speedier and more reliable trips, attract more people to the bus who might otherwise have taken car services. Compare that to the hundred-plus blocks of the First and Second Avenue Select Bus Service (M15 average weekday ridership: 53,510), and you get a huge bang for the buck.

And this is why it was so disheartening to me to read these words from Manhattan Transportation Commissioner Forgione: "We will not proceed with anything without community support."

I know what "community support" refers to, and it has precious little to do with actual community support. We're talking about a community board that's dominated by drivers in a neighborhood where 80% of households don't own a single car. These are people who are much more likely to double-park than ride the bus, even though the real community is much more likely to be riding the bus. We're talking about a lot of self-important "community leaders" who are convinced that their small circle of friends constitutes the community. These are the people who Commissioner Sadik-Khan stood up to, and got blasted for it. These are the people that John Liu, Bill Thompson and Jimmy Vacca repeatedly insist should have veto power over any transportation project. And it looks like in this case Forgione may defer to them.

Forgione is also talking about deferring to the "community" in Washington Heights, but what about the communities across the river in Tremont, Morrisania, Morris Heights, University Heights and High Bridge? Will their support matter?

I definitely believe that people should have some say over what transportation facilities are built in their districts. It would have been nice if Vacca and Liu had been around when people's homes were being bulldozed for the Cross-Bronx Expressway. Members of every affected community should be given the opportunity to raise their concerns, and those concerns should be taken seriously. But I don't think they should have veto power.

Alternative 2 would not tear down any buildings, and it will not blight the neighborhood. It would not flood parallel streets with displaced traffic. It would make these three blocks of 181st Street more like the Fulton Mall in Brooklyn, which would be an improvement.

Fortunately, Councilmember Rodgriguez seems to get this. His comments as reported by Noah were heartening. I hope he will talk to Councilmembers Cabrera, Foster and Arroyo and get their support on this. Transit advocates in that area should reach out to community leaders in the western Bronx and get them to the meetings where this project will be discussed. But the bottom line is that DOT cannot just listen to Washington Heights on this issue. They should conduct outreach along the five bus lines, and find out how much support there is there.