From Staten Island to 34th Street

Commenter and occasional contributor George K has pointed out something that the Department of Transportation's bus planners seem to have missed: it's not just Manhattan and Queens. Thousands of commuters from Staten Island also ride buses that use the 34th Street bus lanes.

Route	Daily Trips	Operator	Crossing	Major corridor	Neighborhood	Council district(s)
X17J	1893	MTA	Lincoln Tunnel	Huguenot Avenue	Huguenot	50, 51
X22	1830	MTA	Lincoln Tunnel	Forest Avenue	West New Brighton	49
X23/X24/AE7	1899	Atlantic Express	Lincoln Tunnel	Woodrow Road	Woodrow	51
X31	740	MTA	Brooklyn Battery Tunnel	Forest Hill Road	New Springville	50
Total	6362

The total ridership for all branches of the X17 was 5680; I estimated that one third of that is the X17J. Atlantic Express did not publish any ridership figures like the MTA, but their 2006 filing in the National Transit Database (PDF) lists 693,076 unlinked trips for the year. George suggests that the X30, which brings 840 people to 42nd Street, could also use 34th Street, bringing the total number of trips to 7,202.

That means that Councilmember Ignizio from the South Shore has 2,846 34th Street bus trips from his district, almost as many as Dan Halloran does. Mitchell from the North Shore has 1,830, slightly less than Ulrich, and Oddo from the center has 1,682, a few more than Crowley. The grand total is over 42,200 bus trips using the bus lanes every day.

I've heard that some people in Queens are starting to contact their City Council members. If we can get the Staten Island delegation on board, it will be that much more of the city in favor of this project.

Peak oil, climate change and transportation infrastructure

Here's an idea that's been slowly crystallizing in my mind. I've posted earlier stabs at this idea, but here's my current thinking about it. It's about what kind of transportation infrastructure we want knowing about global warming and peak oil.

I'm pretty sure most of you believe that global warming is real, but I know that not everyone accepts the idea of peak oil. I'd rather that you were right than me, but you have to wonder why we'd be mucking around with deepwater oil drilling, tar sands and hydrofracking if we didn't have an energy supply problem.

Wind, solar, hydroelectric and maybe nuclear energy will take up some of that slack, but global warming limits the usefulness of coal, tar sands, and other fossil fuels. In fifty of a hundred years it's likely that our ability to move large heavy objects will be significantly reduced.

It's clear that a lot of people are aware of the implications of peak oil and climate change for transportation of passengers and freight. It's not so clear that very many people have thought about the implications for manufacturing and construction.

First, think about all the infrastructure components that are made out of oil: plastic car, bus and train parts, synthetic fabrics. Well, they were once made with renewables like wool, wood and rattan, and abundant, recyclable minerals like metal and fiberglass, so that's not such a big deal. But roofs and roads are made with tar, which comes from petroleum and is in limited supply. Substitutes are a lot more expensive and not always as effective.

Then we get to the question of manufacturing. We will probably have enough energy to manufacture bicycles and horse carts, but will we have enough to make automobiles, buses, trucks, train cars and ships?

Finally, there's the facilities themselves. If we're having a hard time maintaining the roads, railroads and bridges we have now, how are we going to be able to maintain a larger system with a fraction of the energy?

Imagine that it's the year 2111, and your great-grandchildren are trying to run a decent transportation system. Think about the energy currently available for transportation operations and maintenance - moving all those cars, trucks, trains, boats and planes on all those roads and railroads to all those docks and airports. Now imagine that your great-grandchildren have to run the system with a tenth of the energy that we use now.

With a tenth of the energy available, which do you think they would want us to have left them: the Joel Kotkin "people's choice" system of sprawl and highways? The Aaron Renn "balanced" system with some rail lines and some highways? The Walter Hook "cheap mobility for all" system of crowded buses on asphalt?

I don't want any of those. I don't want my great-grandchildren to ride donkey carts over crumbling ten-lane interstates. I don't want them to have to spend valuable energy replacing concrete roadbeds over and over again for buses. I don't want them packed into aging buses. I want them to inherit the most efficient transportation system that humanity has ever devised: a network of compact, walkable and bikeable cities and towns connected by multiple, redundant rail lines. None of the three infrastructure plans I mentioned above will do this. The only thing that will is to pull as much money from road construction as possible and throw it into rebuilding our rail infrastructure. The President's proposal and the Mayor's research are promising; let's see how much further we can go.

We don't have much time before the oil runs out. In that time we need to put together a system that can be run and maintained on a fraction of the energy that we currently use. That's why we can't afford to indulge outdated fantasies of sprawl and the open road. That's why we can't afford to do it half-assed out of a phony sense of balance. That's why we can't afford to do it on the cheap out of ill-timed egalitarianism.

I'm a pragmatist. I know that the roadbuilders and the pseudo-American Dreamers will fight my vision with everything they've got. And that's exactly why I don't want people like the Urbanophile and the ITDP giving them any ammunition. If you think there's a chance we could run out of oil, you shouldn't be supporting false balance or false economies. You should throw your weight behind building as much rail as we can, and building it to last.

The chickens come home to roost

I think that's a nice evocative metaphor, even though it seems like you'd want the chickens coming home to roost. Then you get eggs! And you can cut off their fingers and fry them up. But I'll just assume that these are Chickens of Evil, because it's a bad thing when they come home to roost. Any farmers that can clarify this?

What the fuck am I talking about, you ask? Well, it's the latest round of bus service cuts announced by the MTA this morning. Ben at Second Avenue Sagas has a good summary, and also makes the point that these kinds of service cuts can lead to a death spiral, where more and more people get fed up waiting for the bus and drive to work instead, until there's nobody left to take the bus and the MTA cancels the route.

This is kind of a far-fetched scenario, but if you're worried about your bus losing funding, you should fight for bigger cuts to driving so that driving remains a worse option. That means no BQE widening, no Gowanus tunnel, no hundreds of millions to replace (and widen) the Kosciuszko Bridge or the Pulaski Skyway, no billions to replace (and widen) the Tappan Zee and Goethals bridges.

Some of the information about these cuts is a bit misleading, though. In the announcement that Ben links from his post, New York City Transit President Thomas Prendergast writes, "Forty of the 64 bus schedule changes represent reductions in service levels to more closely align service with customer demand and established guidelines for bus operation; and to concurrently improve reliability through running time modifications where needed."

Hm, more closely align service with established guidelines. That doesn't sound too bad. In comments on Ben's post, Alon Levy and BrooklynBus were very understanding of this. The problem is that these loading guidelines are not fixed. They were revised in 2004, to bring the goal up from 80% of seats full to 100%. The subway loading guidelines were increased during the last round of cuts a year ago, but the bus cuts used a different methodology. Since these guidelines aren't published anywhere, I have no idea what they're at now for buses, but they may be up over 100% of seats full.

The main problem with this dance is that it diffuses the target for opposition. If they cut the loading guidelines and cut bus service to match, then you'd be able to say, "Damn you, Marty Golden, you didn't support the Ravitch plan, and now my bus is being cut!" Instead you have to say, "Damn you, Hakeem Jeffries, you didn't support congestion pricing, and now they're raising the loading guidelines!" and then everyone gets this puzzled look and says, "so what"? And then when they cut the bus service, everyone says, "Well, they're just aligning it with established guidelines!"

The "established guidelines" are not fixed. They are a function of the transit system's funding levels, which is set by the budget. These cuts are the fault of the legislature just as much as any other cuts. The two-step dance obscures that information, and Jay Walder should end it as soon as possible. Publish the loading guidelines, and make it known when they are raised, and why. And for God's sake, find someone in the MTA headquarters who knows how to print a Word document to a PDF file!

Yes, we do need to build more....

Last week, the Urbanophile posted an article called "Yes, we Do Need to Build More Roads." He expected that a lot of people wouldn't like it, and that he would come under a hail of criticism. I didn't really see this hail materialize, but hey, I didn't like the piece, and I'm ready to add my criticism.

I criticize a lot of people on this blog. Some of them, like Joel Kotkin and Chris Christie, are dishonest trolls who are not likely to be swayed by any argument here, and the best thing to do is to discredit them and hope they go away. Some, like Roger K. Lewis and Walter Hook, seem to share my goals, but are clueless as to how to accomplish them and too arrogant to realize how clueless they are; I try to point out what's wrong with their arguments, but don't have much hope that they'll change them. Others, like Yonah Freemark and Steven Higashide, I regard as allies who share most of my goals and are generally pretty sharp; I try to be pretty gentle with them and hope they'll see my side of things.

The Urbanophile is definitely in the third group: he clearly cares about cities and the environment, and is always looking to learn more and revise his thinking, so let's all hope that he reads this, doesn't get defensive, and is persuaded that no, we don't actually need to build very many roads at all.

Basically, the Urbanophile argues that the population of the U.S. is growing, and in the last decade the country added more people than were living in the top twelve cities in the country. Future populations will need a way to get to work, but a lot of the jobs are in the suburbs, and building new transit is hard. Therefore, we should build highways to avoid "decades of commuting misery." Let me take each of these one by one.

The population of the U.S. may have grown quite a bit over the last decade, but as they say, past performance is no guarantee of future return. As a specialist in Rust Belt cities, the Urbanophile knows that populations can go down.

Migration is the primary source of population growth in the United States, and it is not some mysterious force of nature. It is a phenomenon whose causes are pretty well-understood: if life sucks in one place, move to another where you think it won't suck as much. When the U.S. economy tanked, a lot of Mexicans decided not to come here.

But let's assume that we will see a significant increase in the population over the next fifty years. Why does that mean we need more roads?

Do we need more roads because there's no room in the walkable, transit-oriented old urban areas? No, because we can just build more walkable, transit-oriented new urban areas. Do we need more roads because the jobs are in the suburbs? No. If more people come, it's because they expect there to be jobs for them, and these new jobs can be located in walkable urban areas. Alternatively, we could transform the sprawl where the existing jobs are into walkable urban areas and build residential developments within easy walking or transit access.

And now the weakest point in the Urbanophile's argument:

But even if we achieve our potential in transit, America still needs to build more roads. We've got an interstate system originally designed for a 1960 population of 180 million and we are now well over 300 million and going up. By 2050 we'll have more than double the 1960 population. This will require a major expansion of infrastructure, and that includes highway infrastructure.

There is nothing that says that a major expansion of infrastructure will require any of it to be highway infrastructure. You might just as well say that since we have a canal system originally designed for an 1820 population of ten million, we have to dig more canals. There may be good reasons to build roads, but the fact that our roads were originally designed for a smaller population is not one of them.

Finally, let's look at the way the Urbanophile frames the whole piece:

Road are clearly out of fashion in urban planning circles. Conventional wisdom now decries roads in favor of public transit, walking or biking in developments designed to mimic traditional 19th century urbanism. Common refrains are “we can't build our way out of congestion” or “widening roads to cure congestion is like loosening your belt to cure obesity.” Also frequently noted is the vehicle miles traveled has – at least until recently – outpaced population growth.

But this piece of conventional wisdom is also deeply flawed. It obscures the bigger point that in a growing country we need to expand infrastructure to keep pace.

[...]

Thanks to a fortuitous lease of the Indiana Toll Road however, over 50 miles of freeway in the region are now being widened. Without this, the region would have faced decades of commuting misery.

The principle that we can't build our way out of congestion is not "conventional wisdom." It's an established generalization built on observations of multiple events over the course of the twentieth century. It has provided the basis for past predictions that have proven true. It does not obscure the idea that we need to expand infrastructure to keep pace with a growing country. On the contrary, it shows how unwise it is to apply that idea unthinkingly and simplistically.

Sure, it's possible to fail to build adequate infrastructure to deal with a growing population; this has happened in Lagos, Mumbai and Rio de Janeiro. But the assumption that all infrastructure must include a minimum proportion of auto infrastructure guarantees an incentive for people to drive, and is essentially a recipe for decades of commuting misery.

There's a larger point about the relative efficiency of various transportation infrastructure, but I'll leave that for another post. I'm going to close with this request: that the Urbanophile take seriously the principle of induced demand, learn about it, and put the same amount of thought and energy into any critique of it that I put into this critique of his ideas. Dismissing it out of hand as "conventional wisdom" is arrogant, thoughtless and disrespectful. It's the kind of thing I'd expect from Joel Kotkin or Roger K. Lewis, but I generally think that Aaron M. Renn is above that.

Two New Yorks

Some of you may remember Freddy Ferrer's assertion in his 2001 mayoral campaign that there were "two New Yorks" - the one he came from, and the one that Mark Green came from. You may remember how he lost that campaign, and then resurrected the slogan in his 2005 run against Mike Bloomberg. Then Bill Thompson tried to use it against Bloomberg in 2009, and lost. You may, like Barry Popik, connect it to Jacob Riis's book How the Other Half Lives. You may have heard Lew Fidler connect congestion pricing to the concept.

The oldest use of the term I can find is by the historian Mary Louise Booth in 1859. P.G. Wodehouse used it in 1912. It pops up a few times in the 1970s: a 1972 review by Eugene Gaier of a book on the teachers' strike, a 1977 Time Magazine article about Bella Abzug's mayoral campaign, and a 1979 article by Joyce Purnick about a debate between Ed Koch and Chuck Rangel.

"The Two New Yorks" was the title of a sneering 1993 article by Frank J. Macchiarola in City Journal, one prong of the conservative two-prong strategy to thwart progressive policy in New York City. Later that year it was used by Elizabeth Kolbert in an article about the campaign of Rudy Giuliani, who happened to be a big fan of City Journal, against David Dinkins.

Last month I had a feeling that there were two New Yorks. It was when I read that at a City Council hearing on bicycle policy, a guy named Norman Steisel who was Deputy Mayor eighteen years ago was allowed to jump ahead of two hundred cyclists who had been patiently waiting to talk, and then to speak for over twenty minutes while all other speakers were limited to five. Who was the entitled civil servant demanding government subsidies for his lifestyle, and who were the do-it-yourselfers? Not who you'd expect if you listened to Macchiarola and Thompson.

Macchiarola admits that his distinction is not an economic one. That's good, because if you go back to Jacob Riis's idea of "how the other half lives," just about everyone thundering about Two New Yorks and Our Billionaire Mayor live in the top half. The median income in 2008 was $55,980, and I'm pretty sure that Rangel, Macchiarola, Giuliani, Ferrer, Steisel, Thompson and Fidler, and probably Kolbert as well, make more than that.

The fight over the 34th Street Transitway really shows how limiting the "Two New Yorks" worldview is. In that case you have wealthy Manhattanites against poorer outer borough residents, but the "billionaire Mayor" and the "elitist bikers" are on the side of Queens and "the community" is on the side of the wealthy Manhattanites.

There is a principle at work: the haves tend to oppress and screw over the have-nots. It's true wherever you go: Manhattan, outer boroughs, suburbs, country. Sometimes the haves are in Manhattan and the have-nots in the outer boroughs, sometimes not. Sometimes the Mayor and the DOT are on the side of the haves, and sometimes not.

I have to say that I have yet to see a case where people with cars were being genuinely oppressed or screwed over by people without cars. But maybe that's because I don't consider restrictions on reckless or negligent car use to be a form of oppression, and I don't think that ending subsidies for pollution, carnage and wasting energy constitute screwing anyone over.

There is a sense in which there are two New Yorks. One New York is made up of people who believe there are two New Yorks, and the other is not.

The other users of the 34th Street Transitway

If you've seen television reports, newspaper columns and blog posts about the City's plans to provide physically separated bus lanes on 34th Street, you might be forgiven for thinking that this was some arbitrary exercise with empty buses, with the entire goal being to deprive car-dependent residents of Murray Hill of their right to be picked up and dropped off in front of their buildings - or worse, to let them try to pick up or drop off someone and then - gotcha! revenue generation!

If you read pro-transit blogs and tweets, you would know that the buses contain thousands of bus riders: about 33,000 trips per day. Apparently there has been some representation of these riders by the Straphangers Campaign, but the meetings seem to be completely dominated by people who identify as either drivers or taxi riders.

Other than the Department of Transportation staff themselves, no one has acknowledged that the majority of these riders don't even live in Manhattan. There are more than twenty express bus routes from central and eastern Queens, and a little bit of southern Brooklyn, that bring thousands of riders into Midtown every day. They travel down the Long Island Expressway through the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, west on 34th Street, north on Third or Sixth Avenue, east on 57th Street, back across the Queensboro Bridge, and down Queens Boulevard. Here are figures from the 2009 ridership data released by the MTA:

Manhattan
Route	Ridership
M16	8540
M34	9250
Total	17790

Route	Ridership	Major corridor	Neighborhood	Council district(s)
QM1/QM1A (now QM1, QM5, QM6, QM7, QM8)	5362	Union Turnpike	Fresh Meadows	23, 24
QM2	1926	Whitestone Expressway	Bayside	19
QM24	1682	Fresh Pond Road	Ridgewood	30
QM15	1237	155th Avenue	Lindenwood	32
QM2A	1187	Willets Point Boulevard	Bayside	19
QM4	1007	Jewel Avenue	Utopia	24
X63	750	Francis Lewis Boulevard	Rosedale	31
X68	650	Hillside Avenue	Bellerose	27, 23
QM21	606	Guy R Brewer Boulevard	Locust Manor	28
QM12	578	Yellowstone Boulevard	Forest Hills	29
QM10	517	63rd Road	Forest Hills	29
QM11	503	63rd Road	Forest Hills	29
BM5	500	Linden Boulevard	Spring Creek	42
X64	450	Linden Boulevard	Cambria Heights	23
QM17	363	Beach Channel Drive	Far Rockaway	31
QM16	337	Rockaway Beach Boulevard	Rockaway Park	32
QM18	273	Lefferts Boulevard	Ozone Park	32
QM3	131	Northern Boulevard	Flushing	23
Total	18059

There have been at least five meetings about this project in Midtown Manhattan, but to my knowledge there have been no meetings in Queens. There is a Community Advisory Committee for the project, but are there any representatives from Fresh Meadows or Bayside? I certainly haven't heard from them in the news, the blogs or the Twitter feeds.

It's true that this is a pretty good case of a situation with concentrated costs and diffuse benefits, and these often get hijacked by the people who perceive themselves as having something to lose. While it may be no big surprise that Steve "real New Yorkers don't like pedestrian plazas" Cuozzo and Debra "Alt Side" Alfarone don't bother to get the bus passengers' perspective, it would be nice if Jill Colvin and Noah Kazis could at least find one person from Queens willing to talk about it.

The DOT is in a weird situation: they're supposed to be serving the public, and in this case I think they are. But if everything they hear from "the public" is anti-transitway, they're going to be hard pressed to continue the project. It seems reasonable to me that they would reach out to Queens bus passengers, but as far as I know they haven't.

As far as I know, we have also heard nothing from the City Council members who represent these riders. Here they are, roughly:

District	Last Name	Weekday trips
2	Mendez	5930
3	Quinn	5930
4	Garodnick	5930
24	Gennaro	3688
23	Weprin	3587
19	Halloran	3113
32	Ulrich	1847
30	Crowley	1682
29	Koslowitz	1598
31	Sanders	1113
28	Wills	606
42	Barron	500
27	Comrie	325

The numbers fall into four nice groups: Manhattan with almost 6,000 trips per district; Northeast Queens with 3-4,000 trips; Central Queens and the Rockaways with 1,000-2,000 trips, and Southeast Queens and James Barron's district in Brooklyn with less than a thousand trips each.

It would be nice to see more participation from people representing express bus riders, particularly from Gennaro, Weprin and Halloran. A few letters probably wouldn't hurt. And I'll give a tip to anyone interested in organizing the bus riders: after sitting in clogged traffic on 34th Street, they're usually pretty annoyed with the deal. Transportation Alternatives and the Straphangers Campaign could probably get a whole bunch of supporters signed on just by handing out leaflets at the bus stops in Manhattan.

Why replace the Tappan Zee Bridge?

Okay, I'm still not getting the answer I want.

Photo by Flickr user Fovea Centralis

I think the latest estimate is $8.3 billion dollars to replace the Tappan Zee Bridge. Some of it may come from tolls, some may come from a "public-private partnership," some may come from the Tooth Fairy, but most of it will come from us taxpayers. I think we need to know what the public purpose of that spending is.

So far, all I've heard from the State DOT is, "Rehabilitation is not an option." Okay, fine. I've heard from Adirondacker 12800 about how the shipworms will eat the bridge if we don't do something. Okay, fine. But what's the point of the bridge in the first place? Why not just tear it down or prevent people from driving on it, like we've done with so many other bridges? Why do we have a bridge there?

I've never gotten any comments from DOT or Thruway staffers involved in the project, but I would be interested in hearing from them: why did the "no build" scenario in the Alternatives Analysis (PDF) involve maintaining the bridge's current capacity, when all the other documents show that they know perfectly well that there will have to be some "building" to maintain that capacity? Doesn't that violate the some kind of project review law? What would a true "no build" alternative look like?

I'm particularly interested in hearing from Kate Slevin, Veronica Vanterpool and Steven Higashide of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, who last month wrote to the man who is now Governor, asking him to drop the commuter rail portion of the project, and on Friday reiterated that call, specifying that the "highway improvements" (widening) could be dropped as part of the scaling down. That would bring it down to around $5.2 billion dollars for the bridge, plus $900 million for bus lanes or $3 billion for a busway. What do we get for the money?

And yes, I am being Socratic here. I do have an answer in mind. But I'm being open-minded about this, and if someone can come up with an answer that will persuade me, I will change my mind. Let me tell you in advance some things that won't change my mind. I don't give a rat's ass about "mobility"; it's a means to an end, nothing more. And "reducing congestion" is a fool's errand when you're talking about building highways, so I don't want to spend $8.3 billion dollars for a "congestion reduction" project that won't. Finally, I'm not likely to be impressed by anything that takes the NYMTC population and economic projections as a given.

If you need data, the project documents are here.

Anyone want to give it a crack? How 'bout you, Joan McDonald?