A regional perspective on inefficient transportation

A lot of people appreciated my last post on the distribution of road fatalities across the region: it was featured on two Streetsblog posts, "Today's Headlines" and Streetsblog.net. Tonight I'm going to turn to another goal, increasing energy efficiency.

Our transportation system is incredibly inefficient, as you can see in this awesome infographic from Good. 75% of the 27 quadrillion BTU of energy spent on transportation is wasted. To a large extent it's because when we want to transport a 150 pound person (sometimes with a couple hundred pounds of other people or supplies, often not), we frequently use a large internal combustion engine to transport a 2-3 ton metal shell with them. When we want to transport ten thousand cubic feet of stuff, we frequently put it into containers of one or two thousand cubic feet, each with its own driver and a ton of internal combustion engine.

These cars and trucks have also allowed us to sprawl out our houses, jobs, schools, stores and entertainment, so that people who live, work or shop in newer developments often spend hours of each day shuttling between them in cars, and goods that were once transported a few blocks by backpack or handcart are now carried for miles in trucks.

The easiest way to measure energy expended on transportation is by vehicle miles traveled (VMT). Sure, some of those vehicle miles are absolutely necessary and efficient, but most of them are transporting one person and a briefcase from McMansion to office park, and others are carting a load of toilet paper from warehouse to big-box store. They also give us a sense of the counties' contributions to greenhouse gas emissions. Here is a map of VMT per capita by county for the tri-state region in 2005:

I got the data from an Excel spreadsheet that someone at the EPA helpfully posted online. The Center for Neighborhood Technology writes, "The EPA obtains VMT estimates that the U.S Federal Highway Administration collects from state bureaus of transportation. The states formulate the estimates by conducting traffic counts in each county and projecting those figures to arrive at an estimated miles traveled per year in each county." The 2008 data is available (and here are the state and county FIPS codes, so you know which files to download; they're also in the 2005 spreadsheet), but I can't find a nice spreadsheet for 2008.

I used a blank county map from the Tri-State Weather forum that turned up on Google Image Search, and colored the counties by VMT per capita: the darkest counties have over 12,500 VMT per inhabitant, and the lightest less than 5,000.

Putnam County in particular is off the charts, with 3.09 billion vehicle-miles traveled for a population of only 99,270, for 31,077 VMT per capita. Orange and Suffolk followed, with 13,171 and 12,682 VMT per person. There's a "Borscht Belt" (thanks to commenter CityLights) of milder sprawl beyond them, stretching from Warren through Sullivan to Dutchess, all in the 10,000-12,500 range, along with the raised-ranch and office-park counties of Bergen, Morris and Middlesex. The other Central Jersey counties plus Rockland, Westchester, Nassau and Connecticut are all in the 7,5000-10,000 VMT per capita range, and then Ocean, Sussex, Passaic and Hunterdon are in the 5,000-7,5000 range. The lowest per capita range includes the five boroughs of New York City plus Hudson County, NJ.

Now let's take a look at how the counties contribute to the overall energy efficiency and emissions of the region. As before, Putnam's large per-capita figure accounts for only two percent of all vehicle miles traveled. Suffolk again leads the pack with 13% of the total, despite only having 7% of the region's population. The top nine counties account for a majority of all VMT in the region: Suffolk, Nassau, Westchester, Bergen, Queens, Middlesex, Fairfield, Monmouth and New Haven.

The three counties that appeared both on the fatalities list and the VMT list are Suffolk, Nassau and Queens. I'm seriously thinking that the best thing we could do to save lives and reduce our region's energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions would be to tear up the Long Island Expressway and replace it with a new train line.

A regional perspective on road deaths

There's a whole bunch of different battles being fought across the greater New York area, and I was trying to figure out which ones were worth focusing on. To help with that, I created this map of traffic fatalities per capita in the various counties of the metropolitan area.

I got the data from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. You can get the data sliced and diced in various ways; I chose fatalities from 2005 by county. To get per capita fatalities I divided it by the population estimates of the 2005 American Community Survey, available from the Census Bureau. I used a blank county map from the Tri-State Weather forum that turned up on Google Image Search, and colored the highest fatalities per capita: the darkest are over 4 fatalities per ten thousand inhabitants and the lightest less than 1.5 fatalities.

There seems to be some kind of Upper Delaware Valley of Death going on, with 6.49 fatalities per ten thousand inhabitants in Sullivan County, NY, 4.11 in Pike County, PA and 4.04 in Warren County, NJ. It's not just because people drive more there: in 2005 there were about 10,000 vehicle-miles traveled per capita in Sullivan and Pike (roughly in line with Middlesex, Bergen and Dutchess Counties), and 12,000 per capita in Warren (slightly less than Ulster and slightly more than Orange). But there were 6.25 fatalities per hundred VMT in Sullivan County, 4.11 in Pike and 3.28 in Warren.

It may be that the fatalities are due to the large highways that cross these counties: Sullivan hosts NY Route 17, while Pike has Interstate 84 and US 206 and 209, and Warren has Interstates 78 and 80. It may be other factors: Sullivan was also highlighted by Slate Labs as the worst "food desert" in the entire Northeast, the county with the highest percentage of people (8.05%) living more than a mile from the nearest supermarket without a car. DWI is also a potential factor: if you can't get to a supermarket without a car, you probably can't get to a bar either.

Counties with between three and four fatalities per ten thousand inhabitants were Ulster, Orange, Mercer and Litchfield; those with two to three fatalities per ten thousand included Sussex, Suffolk, Monmouth, Putnam and New Haven. The five boroughs of New York City plus Westchester all had less than 2.2 fatalities per ten thousand inhabitants in 2005. The Bronx had the lowest per capita fatalities, with only 109 deaths for its 1.4 million people.

As tragic as the 49 deaths in Sullivan County were, it's important to keep in mind that they were only slightly more than one percent of the total 3,601 people killed in car crashes in 2005. The 44 Warren County deaths were also slightly more than 1%, and the 24 people killed in Pike County were 0.67% of the regional total. So I made this chart to show how the various counties contributed to the death toll:

The biggest contributor, with its 402 fatalities in a population of 1.5 million, is Suffolk County, with eleven percent of the total. Brooklyn, Queens and Nassau were the next biggest contributors, then New Haven, Manhattan and Monmouth County. All the others had less than four percent of the total. This means that the island of Long Island (including Brooklyn and Queens) accounted for a full third of the region's traffic deaths in 2005, and any island-wide improvements that can be made would bring down carnage significantly.

Obviously, I'm not distinguishing deaths of pedestrians, drivers, cyclists or car passengers here, let alone people killed by cars in buildings and parks. Pedestrian killings discourage people from walking, so they're more significant, but for the purpose of this exercise I wanted to look at the overall human impact of car culture.

Not all infrastructure is worth replacing

For weeks now, maybe months, I've been struggling to articulate something, and going through a bunch of false starts, and then moving on, only to have it come back to me in response to another article. I've been reading article after blog post after tweet after comment about the shitty state of America's infrastructure, how we can't build anything anymore, how shitty it was for Chris Christie to cancel the ARC tunnel because it meant that New Jersey wasn't building big things. I've been reading things that assume I'm a "transportation advocate," who really wants to see the transportation bill reauthorized so that we can get an "infrastructure bank" to help with mobility for the 21st century or something.

Well, maybe you're a transportation advocate who wants an infrastructure bank, but I'm not. Now, I'm a mechanically inclined geek who likes to look at buildings and bridges and train lines, but I don't think that the fate of the world depends on our ability to build or maintain large contraptions, and I refuse to mislead my fellow human beings just so I can get my jollies taking a ride on a high-speed train.

There are lots of situations where it's a good idea to build something or replace something, but there are others where it doesn't make any sense. Roads and sewers and power lines are tools. They have no inherent value, it all comes from their ability to help us reach a goal. If you sell a city an expensive light rail system that doesn't make a significant impact on poor people's access to jobs and shopping, or air quality, or global warming, you're just like the schmuck on television pitching an expensive table saw to someone who just needs a hand saw.

I'm going to pick on one of my commenters here, in this case Adirondacker 12800. As with most of the regular commenters, I appreciate Adirondacker's comments because they are often informative and help me to focus my own thoughts. I'm singling out Adirondacker not because the comments are stupid, but the opposite, in fact: because they articulate something that I've been trying to grapple with in my own mind.

So Adirondacker is very concerned that the Tappan Zee Bridge will collapse into the water, and I'm perfectly willing to believe that if we continue driving thousands of cars across it every day without doing some major maintenance that's just what will happen. I'm just not convinced that that's such a problem.

Yes, I don't want to see anyone injured or killed like on the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis, but the Tappan Zee Bridge could fail like the Champlain Bridge did in 2009, when the State DOT realized it was unsafe and closed it before anyone could get hurt. I don't see the big deal.

Yes, I know that it's a major link on the East Coast blah blah blah, but we have the George Washington Bridge and the Beacon-Newburgh Bridge and a bunch of other bridges and tunnels that cross it. The Poughkeepsie Bridge was a major link, but it was allowed to sit completely unused for 35 years, and now it's used only by pedestrians and cyclists, most of them recreational.

If you're really into infrastructure, you can go a few miles west of Poughkeepsie to High Falls, New York, and see the majestic ruins of the Delaware and Hudson Canal. (It's served only by the weekday N Route of UCAT, but you can take a taxi from Rosendale.) That used to be a major link too, bringing barges of coal through miles of farmland. Now it's a ditch in the woods filled with a foot or so of stagnant water, and some abandoned aqueduct pilings in the Rondout Creek. Gaze on those works and despair.

I haven't read about people's reactions when the D&H Canal was being abandoned, but I don't think there was that much despair because they were excited about the New York, Ontario and Western Railway coming to town. When the O&W was being abandoned, people were excited about the Thruway and Route 209. The Thruway's time will come soon; why prolong it? Why throw good money after bad?

So yes, I am an advocate of access for all, clean air and water, conserving our resources, keeping people alive and healthy, and strong societies. You may or may not have similar goals. Transportation infrastructure can be an excellent tool to accomplish these goals, and it can also help with things like fiscal stimulus. But it is not an end in itself. We should not replace infrastructure just because it's falling down. We should not build infrastructure for its own sake, or even just for the sake of moving people around.

Let's keep perspective, and keep our end goals in mind. You know my goals; if you want me to support replacing a bridge, you need to connect it to them.

So much for the Red Hook Tunnel Bus

Ben Kabak is reporting that the Manhattan-bound Smith/9th Street platform will finally be closed, from January 10 through Spring 2012, and the Coney Island-bound platform will be closed from May through Fall 2012. There will be other assorted service outages at Fourth Avenue, Fifteenth Street and Fort Hamilton Parkway on the F and G lines. There's a lot of irrational anger at the MTA.

When Smith-9th is closed completely, there will be a shuttle bus to nearby F stations, and possibly to Jay Street, but the bus will not run through the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel to Lower Manhattan, as I suggested back in 2007. Although some politicians supported the idea as a permanent improvement, it got lost in the congestion pricing battle.

The people who are currently kvetching about the various closures should put that energy to work pushing for a tunnel bus. If they live in the South Slope/Gowanus/Red Hook area, they should push for one going down Ninth Street. If they live in the Windsor Terrace area, they should push for one going right down the Prospect Expressway. Google Maps say that either of these routes are ten minutes from the endpoint to the World Trade Center site, thirty minutes in traffic.

People who are upset about losing their F train service should get the state legislators representing this area - Assemblymembers Millman, Brennan and Ortiz, and Senators Montgomery and Squadron - to sign on to a request for a tunnel bus. It couldn't hurt to get support from the city council too. And if the MTA doesn't want to run it, get David Yassky to give permission for Suleiman Haqq to run his vans through there.

Beyond thick and thin markets for transit

In their extremely useful paper on private bus transit (PDF), Daniel Klein, Adrian Moore and Binyam Reja give us the concepts of "thick" and "thin" markets for transit: "Another distinction of fundamental importance is whether ridership on the transit route is potentially heavy enough to sustain the cascade of jitneys in the absence of scheduled service," they write on Page 39.

The Flushing-Chinatown van run is an example of a thick market. You could say that the subway provides an anchor, but it's a very inconvenient one: if you give up on the van you have to walk three blocks north to the subway, and then take that to another subway that might not go exactly where you want to go. These vans really function without any anchor.

The vans from Bergenline Avenue to the Port Authority are an example of a thin market. The New Jersey Transit 156 and 159 buses provide scheduled service in case the vans don't come; I've used them myself. They are run by NJ Transit, but they could probably be run at a profit by a private company.

Thick market	Ridership can sustain a jitney cascade without an anchor	Flushing-Chinatown
Thin market	Ridership can sustain a jitney cascade with an anchor	Bergenline-Port Authority

This doesn't capture other possibilities, though. What about a line in some far-flung sprawl suburb where car ownership is very high and roads are wide? For example, Dutchess County Loop A. A line like that is never going to make a profit as long as those conditions persist. To exist, it must remain subsidized until gas prices rise above eight dollars a gallon. Let's call it "No market."

There's also a scenario in between Loop A and the Bergenline Avenue buses, where jitneys can run with an anchor, but the ridership doesn't provide a profit for the anchor, so it has to be subsidized. The Bergenline Avenue buses that go across the George Washington Bridge may be an example of that. Let's call it a "Wafer-thin market."

I would argue that most of the routes chosen by the TLC for their pilot program are wafer-thin markets. Due to competition from parallel routes and private cars, they cannot support profitable transit by themselves, but they may be able to support a jitney cascade if they have a subsidized anchor.

The B39 route across the Williamsburg Bridge had potential to be a thin market. If it were better marketed, it might have worked. The only one that had the potential to be a truly thick market was the B71, if it had been extended through the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. It could have provided Red Hook and Carroll Gardens residents with a one-seat ride to Financial District job sites, possibly being time-competitive against the subway. I guess we'll have to wait to see that one tried.

Here's our new table:

Market type	Description	Existing example	Potential TLC route
Thick market	Ridership can sustain a jitney cascade without an anchor	Flushing-Chinatown	B71 through Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel
Thin market	Ridership can sustain a jitney cascade with a profitable anchor	Bergenline-Port Authority	B39
Wafer-thin market	Ridership can sustain a jitney cascade with a subsidized anchor	Bergenline-GWB	B23, B71, Q74, Q79
No market	Ridership cannot sustain jitney service, even with a subsidized anchor	Dutchess Loop A

Notice that I've still put the Q79 up as a wafer-thin market. The TLC has put that route out for bid, but I really don't think there's enough ridership to support it without some kind of subsidized anchor. It's great that Bob Friedrich is still fighting for service on Little Neck Parkway, but his best bet is to try to find some funding to subsidize the service. It's just not going to work without subsidies unless there are other drastic changes in the neighborhood.

Quote of the Day: Jan Morris on Motorcades

From Coast to Coat: A Journey Across 1950s America by Jan Morris, originally known as As I Saw the U.S.A. by James Morris, about motorcades in Manhattan:

And there in the recesses of the grandest car can be seen the distinguished visitor, opera singer, or diplomat or bronzed explorer, shamefully delighted at being able to ignore the traffic rules. I rode in one such a cavalcade, and found that the psychological effect can be disturbing. A mild little man sharing my car was soon hurling vicious abuse at the less agile of the pedestrians, and the wife of the distinguished visitor fainted.

It makes me wonder: when almost all drivers are able to ignore the laws against killing pedestrians and cyclists, and dismiss all enforcement efforts as "revenue generation," what are the psychological effects?

Westchester-Rockland Pick-a-Mix

In browsing the Tappan Zee study documents, I occasionally come across a really useful nugget, and the latest one is on Page 7-3 of Chapter 7 of the Transit Mode Selection Report (PDF). It's a cute little pair of tables supporting a pair of charts. Don't look at the charts, they're just there to argue that commuter rail on the full corridor is too expensive.

The value of these charts is that they provide a breakdown of the cost estimates of individual components of the bridge, and taken with the figures on Page 3 of the Preliminary Financial Assessment (PDF), we get a fairly complete picture. This information is hard to come by, either as a deliberate plan to favor road construction, or out of general obtuseness, depending on how much you want to use Hanlon's razor.

Code	Component	Cost in millions
BHB1	Bridge with HO/T lanes	$ 5,180
BR1	Commuter rail capacity on bridge	1,220
RWH1	Highway "improvements" (widening)	1,800
RB1	Rockland HO/T lanes	263
RB1	Rockland busway	800
WB1	Westchester bus lanes	560
WB2	Westchester busway	2,210
RR1	Rockland commuter rail	4,410
WR1	Rail connection to Hudson Line	1,500
WR2	Westchester light rail	2,295
WR3	Westchester commuter rail	7,080
WR3	Westchester commuter rail	7,080

The $16 billion figure (estimated to be $23 billion after inflation and debt service) you often hear bandied about comes from the current Alternative 4D: in Tier 1, BHB1 + RWH1 = $6,980,000; in Tier 2, RB1 + RR1 + WB1 + WR1 = $8,383,000. However, as I've written before, the organization into tiers was completely arbitrary and decided behind closed doors, subject to none of the rigorous and intensive public participation requirements of the rest of the project.

You can kinda sorta see why they would want to build the bridge before putting in the "BRT" lanes (they're actually High Occupancy/Toll lanes and don't qualify for federal transit funding), but there's absolutely no reason why the $1.9 billion in "Highway Improvements" (reconstructing the Thruway interchange with the Westchester Expressway at Exit 8 and widening the Thruway from the bridge west to Exit 12) need to be done before anything else. So I'm going to do my own Pick-A-Mix, and I suggest you try yours.

Phase 1: WB2 + RB1 = only $823 million, but I would make the Rockland "BRT" a real exclusive bus lane connecting to a reversible bus lane in the middle of the existing bridge. The total cost would be well below $4 billion dollars, and it might just take enough cars off the bridge so that there would no longer be any justification for replacing the bridge.

If the demand is there, Phase 2 would be BBH1 + BR1 + RR1 + WR1, for a total of $12,310,000. The total is slightly more than the current DOT proposal, but you could probably shave a few million off that by only building six general-traffic lanes on the bridge instead of eight. What's your mix?