Tappan Zee traffic volume: Don't pee on my back again!

Yes, it's time for another episode in our "Don't pee on my back and tell me it's raining!" series about the Tappan Zee Bridge replacement project. Last month I addressed one of the New York State Department of Transportation's favorite claims, that the crash rate on the bridge is more than twice that on the rest of the Thruway, and that the only way to fix that is to build a new bridge. Today I'm going to address another claim that they love to make: that bridge traffic will increase over the next several years, and therefore a new bridge is necessary to accommodate that. I've already covered this back in October, but today I've got support from a famous economist, a team of financial experts and the State Transportation Commissioner herself.

Figure 1. NYMTC projected increases in residents and employment.

Here's what the Federal Highway Administration says in the Draft Environmental Impact Statement, copied directly from the Scoping Packet:

The New York Metropolitan Transportation Council (NYMTC) projects that both population and employment growth will continue in Rockland and Westchester Counties (see Figure 1-4). Between 2010 and 2047, the populations of Rockland and Westchester Counties are expected to increase by 50,000 and 134,000 residents, respectively. Employment is projected to increase by 47,000 jobs in Rockland County and by 160,000 jobs in Westchester County during this timeframe. This growth in population and employment will increase daily volumes across the Tappan Zee Bridge for the next thirty years.

This increase in traffic volumes is presented as a fact of nature, one that nobody can control, least of all the little ol' Federal Highway Administration and New York State Department of Transportation. But the State has the authority to set tolls, and in today's New York Times, economist Nancy Folbre, recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "Genius Grant," summarizes the well-supported case that toll prices can affect traffic volumes. And on Friday, libertarian columnist Nicole Gelinas struck gold in the 2009 Merrill Lynch / Loop Capital preliminary financial plan for the Tappan Zee Bridge replacement project:

Even a significant toll increase is unlikely to full fund the Project capital costs, and could pose potentially adverse traffic demand response. Toll increases require significant efforts to gain stakeholder support.

An "adverse traffic demand response" just means lower traffic volumes. Well, ahem, one man's "potentially adverse traffic demand response" is another man's problem solved! It's only a problem if you've already built a bigger bridge and you need the tolls to pay for it. If you reduce traffic volumes instead of building a bigger bridge, well, you just saved us five billion dollars.

But wait, there's more! Now let's connect these statements to the principle that roads compete with transit for people, and thus to New York State Transportation Commissioner Joan McDonald's statement last week:

Our position has always been you cannot build transit until you replace the bridge. We don’t think it is financially feasible at this time for transit to be included, but we are building a bridge that will last for 100+ years, so at some point in the future, if the ridership numbers, and the fare box recovery ratio warrant the investment, we will make sure that it happens.

This pretty much wraps up the case. The current plan is to widen the bridge, and probably to sneak a couple of extra car lanes in, making it easier for people to drive. The Thruway will always keep tolls low on the bridge, making it cheap for people to drive. In other words, the government of New York State will do everything it can to make sure that there is never enough demand to warrant setting aside bus-only lanes on the Tappan Zee Bridge.

The current Tappan Zee Bridge is a sprawl-generating machine. A replacement bridge with transit would not stop the sprawl. The replacement bridge will not have transit anyway, if Governor Cuomo has any say in the matter. Let's tear down the bridge and not build another one. But we'll be okay, and we can have jobs.

It's time to end this charade. To find out more, visit my new website, www.thetappanzeebridgeisacancerinourmidst.com.

Who will stop the Tappan Zee boondoggle?

Last week the Federal Highway Administration released two sets of documents relating to the Tappan Zee Bridge reconstruction project. There wasn't much discussion of the Scope Summary Report, where hundreds of people complained about the way the Federal Government has been handling this project and were completely blown off. That's backward-looking and old news. A lot more attention has been paid to the Draft Environmental Impact Statement because it finds, in the words of an Associated Press writer, "no ecology obstacles" to the plan.

Streetsblog's Noah Kazis has recycled several of my posts with added points, including a critique of the bridge planning under New York State's own Smart Growth law, a more thorough corroboration of my toll calculations by Charlie Komanoff, a report embarrassing the State with its own clumsy denial of Streetsblog's Freedom of Information requests, and a striking illustration of the FHWA's lack of interest in public input: the old outreach offices have been closed.

One of the craziest things about this is that the thing is supposed to cost five billion dollars, and nobody has said where that money will come from. The Governor has floated several different "trial balloons," but in the end declared that it will have to be "publicly financed." In theory this is all in the Governor's budget proposal, but in practice the budget is the usual spaghetti of confusing similarly-named funds and accounts folding endlessly back in on itself; the Tappan Zee Bridge is mentioned once or twice, but not in a way that seems connected with anything.

Despite the fact that lots and lots of people said there should be "transit on the bridge," the FHWA said they wouldn't do more than "not preclude" transit. Transportation Nation's Kate Hinds called New York State Transportation Commissioner Joan McDonald and asked her about this. McDonald's response was interesting:

That is what we have said all along…Our position has always been you cannot build transit until you replace the bridge. We don’t think it is financially feasible at this time for transit to be included, but we are building a bridge that will last for 100+ years, so at some point in the future, if the ridership numbers, and the fare box recovery ratio warrant the investment, we will make sure that it happens. So we are building the bridge to not preclude it in the future. And what that means is the footings will be spread appropriately and there will be enough weight-bearing capability on the bridge to hold transit in the future.

I've highlighted a key phrase that jumped out at me the second time I read it: if the ridership numbers and the fare box recovery ratio warrant the investment. You could read the part about "ridership numbers" as McDonald simply saying she's not going to put the State in a position where it's vulnerable to the Empty Lanes Attack. If they're going to reserve a lane for buses, they want to be able to say that that lane moves enough people to justify keeping private cars out.

The bit about farebox recovery is more troubling. Currently, fares paid by Tappan Zee Express and Orange-Westchester Link riders cover about ten percent of the cost of running those buses. What McDonald is saying here is that it's not "financially feasible" to spend that much money subsidizing bus rides as well as reserving the lanes for buses. Cannily, she doesn't say what kind of farebox recovery ratio would warrant the investment, allowing herself and her successors to dismiss any request for transit.

The troubling part is that McDonald seems to have no clue that roads and transit compete with one another - or possibly to be deliberately ignoring this fact. If we add a lane to the Tappan Zee Bridge (and everyone knows it's going to be at least three lanes), that makes it easier to drive, and lowers the demand for transit. In other words, as long as the government keeps widening the roads and bridges the farebox recovery ratio will never warrant the investment in transit.

McDonald has just flushed any credibility she had left on smart growth issues down the toilet, but what about her boss? Most of the posts about the bridge point the finger at Governor Andrew Cuomo, and clearly he's the one pushing for the bridge to be started this year. It's not hard to figure out why: he wants to have at least one inspiring infrastructure project finished by the time he runs for President in 2016. He doesn't see transit (much less "BRT") as necessary to this bullet point on his resume.

Transit advocates do not have the power to take away this bullet point that Cuomo so desperately seeks, and I can't think of anything we could offer him that would have equal political value. Is there a transit project that would move 150,000 people a day for $5 billion dollars and be finished by 2016 without requiring Cuomo to share the glory with anyone else?

If we want to stop this project, appealing to Cuomo or McDonald will not help. There are a few other avenues, though. Since October, the lead agency on the bridge replacement project has not been the State Department of Transportation, but the FHWA. The FHWA is part of the United States Department of Transportation, headed by everyone's favorite Republican ex-congressman from Peoria, Ray LaHood. LaHood has been actively courting the smart growth and alternative transportation crowd, and seems most passionate when he talks about bike facilities and high speed rail. Why not lobby him and his boss, President Obama? At the very least, every time LaHood shows up to speak at a pro-transit or pro-bike gathering, someone could say to him, "You know, Ray, this Tappan Zee Bridge project is a disaster, and your agency is leading it!" Not out loud, to embarrass him, but quietly, privately, so that he gets the message that people are paying attention and connecting it with him. (You can also mention the eerily similar Columbia River Crossing).

Another possible route of opposition is New York State's traditional system of checks and balances, known informally as "three men in a room." Streetsblog has mentioned that Senate Finance Committee Chair John DeFrancisco expressed frustration with the vagueness of the transportation budget. Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver has killed boondoggles in the past; would he or Dean Skelos be willing to expend enough political capital to kill this bridge project?

Since both the pro-bridge coalition and the pro-BRT coalition have reserved domain names for their positions, I have set up a website at www.thetappanzeebridgeisacancerinourmidst.com showcasing all the reasons to tear down the bridge and not replace it. Please link and tweet it widely!

On Bleecker Stroad

There's been a lot of brouhaha lately about New York University's plans to expand its main campus, and the (sometimes successful) efforts of the Greenwich Village Society for Historical Preservation to thwart and scale back those efforts. As a former Village resident, I feel the GVSHP is wrong, but so is NYU.

I've lived in the Village and been a regular visitor all my life. There's something about the Village that's never felt right to me, but I've only recently acquired the vocabulary to describe it. It's Bleecker Street. It's also Houston Street and West Third, but I feel it most on Bleecker, in part because I avoid that part of Houston.

Bleecker Street is dead to me. I don't mean that the Red Lion has seen better days, although that may be true. I mean that when I walk from Sixth Avenue to Broadway on Eighth or West Fourth Streets, there's always something going on. There are stores, or NYU buildings bustling with students, or there's Washington Square. When I walk on Ninth or Tenth Street it's almost all residential, but with beautiful brownstones and carriage houses, and lots of stoops with interesting-looking people coming and going.

This is important because the Village has one concentration of shops around the subway stations at Sixth and Seventh Avenues, and another around those at Broadway and Lafayette Street. I regularly find myself on a trip to the Village with one thing to do near Sixth Avenue and one near Broadway, and I'm not the only one. There's steady traffic from one side of the neighborhood to the other, for work, shopping, entertainment and study. There's no direct subway connection, and the one bus is slow and unreliable, though, so most people walk.

When I walk down Bleecker Street, it's a jumping, happening place from Sixth Avenue (or even Seventh) to La Guardia Place. From Mercer to Broadway it's quiet and residential, but it works. From La Guardia to Mercer, Bleecker Street is dead. There's one ugly driveway on the north side and a couple of pedestrian paths on the other, in a stretch that's two blocks long (Wooster Street doesn't go north of Houston). The rest is just blank walls on one side and windows with curtains drawn on the other. Yeah, there are a few trees. So what? They don't help.

Houston and Third Streets are similar, at least on one side, and so are Mercer Street and La Guardia Place. Third Street is actually worse, because it's much wider in that area, and much less pedestrian-friendly as a result. Why are they this way? There are two black holes that are sucking the life out of those streets, and they have names: Washington Square Village and Silver Towers.

Photo: Jacob Riis, View of a back-lot house on Bleecker Street between Mercer and Greene Streets, almost toppling into an excavation site.

There is some interesting history behind these superblocks, fairly well summarized in the Wikipedia articles I linked in the above paragraph. The area was considered a slum in the days of Jacob Riis, and beginning in 1954 it was condemned, cleared and divided into three superblocks. The north superblock was given to NYU, and it now holds several NYU buildings. The central superblock was given to a private partnership including Paul Tishman, who built Washington Square Village, with 1200 apartments over a 650-unit parking garage. The south superblock was originally given to the developers, but after they couldn't get financing it was turned over to NYU, who built the Silver Towers and a Mitchell-Lama building over an underground parking garage. In 1964 the developers sold Washington Square Village to NYU, giving it control of all three blocks.

I'll write more about the current fight - and the problems with what both sides are saying - later.

The Tao of economic incentives

I haven't yet read Gernot Wagner's new book But Will The Planet Notice: How Smart Economics Can Save the World, but I heard him interviewed by Leonard Lopate, and the approach he's promoting seems very sensible. If there is a major economic incentive encouraging people to do negative things (drive, accept plastic bags, buy food sweetened with high fructose corn syrup), is it easier to fight that behavior directly, or to change the incentive?

We can think of this as an application of the Tao, or of Ueshiba's notion of enveloping your adversaries. If you prefer, you can think of it as leverage: if someone is using a lever to magnify their force on an object, is it better to push back on the object, or on the other person's foot? You can also think of it as getting past the superficial story to the real story underneath. The best kind of compromise is when it doesn't matter whether anyone gets what they said they want, but everyone is getting what they really want.

One example of incentives working in transit is Hasselt, Belgium, which is usually held up as a paragon of free public transit, but where it seems that the key was actually converting the government-sponsored inner ring road from an incentive to drive to a "Groene Boulevard" where buses and bikes have priority. However, in order to pass both free transit and the Groene Boulevard, their promoters had to convince the citizens of Hasselt that it was "their" town, their mobility plan, and their bus system. Getting to the levers is not easy, and neither is controlling them once you do.

Three factors in density

I concede defeat on one aspect of the density thought experiment: the commenters convinced me that there are places that don't have "the density to support transit" even if everyone who wants to go anywhere takes the transit. Phelan, California and Fort McMurray, Alberta may be examples of this. However, there are three aspects of the story that I'm sticking to:

1. If these places can't support transit, most of them probably can't support roads either. That's "support" either in the sense of inducing enough tax revenue to pay for their construction and maintenance, or providing a public service that would be considered worth the investment.

2. Most of the places that are generally claimed to "not have the density to support transit" are of the kind that would have the density to support transit if it had a 100% mode share.

Image: Transit Nerds (Jeff Wood) / Flickr

3. As Jonathan said, if you make driving expensive or unpleasant enough (or if you just don't bother to make it cheap and comfortable), people will move to places where they can access things easily through walking and transit. That's the transportation-land use cycle that I identified in 2008 (here seen in a cleaned-up version by Pantagraph Trolleypole).

So the next time you're tempted to say something about "the density to support transit," ask yourself these three questions:

1. Would transit work if it had a better mode share?
2. Does the area have the density to support roads either?
3. Would people live or work more densely if the car infrastructure was less subsidized?

Density thought experiments

In recent posts, I've discussed how density isn't all that important in transit demand, how the idea of "supporting transit" is problematic, and how different people have different goals for transit, and density affects these goals differently. Because my own goals (see the top of this page) are wrapped up in a feedback loop based on mode share, my most intermediate goal is getting people out of their cars.

Transit mode share, in fact, is where density is least relevant. This may seem surprising, but only if you believe that density is the only way to control the relative value that people get from various modes. The transit boosters who worry about density actually believe that it's possible in the short term to increase the value of transit by throwing more money at it, but that that's unsustainable in the long run. Their big blind spot is that we actually have quite a bit of control over the value of driving, if we can find the political will.

This brings us back to the Magic Formula for Transit Ridership:

1. Give transit its own right-of-way and good terminals
2. Make it hard to use cars
3. Make it expensive to use cars
4. Profit!

Many transit advocates have enough exposure to the concept of (3) in the form of congestion pricing and gasoline prices, but they seem very resistant to considering step (2), probably because they don't want to be accused of wanting to take anyone's car away. The Very Serious People are all afraid to talk about decreasing the size of the road network.

But what if, while Spain was building all those high-speed rail lines, they didn't also pump billions into a truly gigantic highway network? If drivers faced constant congestion on old highways, wouldn't we expect higher ridership on the trains? Wouldn't we also expect that if the highway network was old and small enough, but the train network was the size it is today, eventually there would be enough demand for the trains that they would be completely profitable - operations and capital?

You can do the same thought experiment with any place. No matter how sparsely populated it is, just subtract some roads while keeping the rail and/or bus network constant, and eventually the place "supports transit." Take Wyoming. Now imagine it without interstate highways. Would that be enough to support restored passenger service on the train lines? How about if we turn all the roads to gravel?

Back in 2010, I had a similar discussion on Human Transit about the supposed convenience of cars. A lot of people had problems with the idea that convenience was dependent on the quality of the infrastructure, but I think I showed that if you throw enough money at any transportation system you can make it feel convenient to its users.

Similarly, if you make the car infrastructure shitty enough and expensive enough, you can make transit feel like a bargain. Density may make it politically easier to support transit expansion or harder to support road expansion, but that's not a matter of "the density to support transit," it's "the density to make it likely enough that transit will receive more political support than roads," which is not the same thing at all.

If you're really not convinced, I challenge you to come up with a place, or a route, where you can't increase transit ridership by taking away roads or increasing prices. If you want data, I have density and mode share figures for all of the municipalities and census-designated places in the New York Combined Statistical Area. Go for it.

Density and our goals

On my last post I got some great comments! Jeff "Pantagraph Trolleypole" Wood pointed us to Pushkarev and Zupan suggesting that commercial density is more important than residential density back in 1977; Jeff summarized that argument in 2010. So that's where a lot of this comes from.

Richard Layman points out that some parts of the transit network can reinforce others, and that it may therefore be valuable for apparently unjustified transit routes and runs to be cross-subsidized by "popular" routes, or even by the government. Jeff also pointed to the value of high-speed rail in inducing dense development near stations, and I think if we put these together we get something that Germà Bel's analysis misses: that an "unprofitable" high-speed rail line can be worth subsidizing if it gets people to downtown stations where they will walk and ride transit instead of driving.

Bel himself left a comment pointing out that any transportation investment yields private benefits (which should probably be paid for by the user) and public benefits (which could be paid for by the government), and pointing us to an interesting study of the new Italian high-speed rail network (PDF). I think that's very important, but I would add that the public and private benefits are not a matter of universal agreement, and especially with the public benefits there will be people who disagree about the relative value of transit cross-subsidy or economic development or emissions reductions. The debate is not just a matter of how much a project affects these outcomes, but how much the outcomes matter.

With that in mind, let me try to clear up a few more things about return on investment. If our goals are to induce economic development then we'll be looking at measures like levels of employment and tax revenue generated by that development. If we don't care about any of that and we just want to make sure that this project doesn't bankrupt the state, we'll be focused on capital and operating outlays. Either way, density of development plays a role. Just as importantly, though, we need to look at the transportation system as a whole consisting of redundant bus, rail and private auto networks, and figure out the most cost-effective way to make use of it. It's idiotic to declaim the waste on high-speed rail while ignoring the ROI of the multitude of inefficient highway expansion and rehabilitation projects. As Chuck shows, development density improves the ROI of both road and transit infrastructure.

As you can see at the top of the page, my goals are to increase access and improve society while reducing pollution and carnage and avoiding resource depletion. Because of that I may look at individual measures like access to jobs and services, pollution, fatality and injury levels, and rate of depletion of the various natural resources used by transportation and development. Many of these metrics are sensitive to the density of residential, commercial and industrial development.

However, other than access, all those goals require getting people out of their cars. This means that I can look at VMT reduction as a long-term goal, and increasing the mode share of transit and walking in the short term. More importantly, there's a cycle of government and private investment in transit. The more transit ridership there is, the less subsidy will be required, and the more money that will be available for expanding the transit network. In addition, the more transit ridership there is, the more political support there will be for government investment in expanding the transit network. Conversely, the less driving there is, the less political support there will be for driving subsidies. Transit mode share is really key here, more important than any of the individual measures.

Transit mode share, in fact, is where density is least relevant. This may seem surprising, but only if you believe that density is the only way to control the relative value that people get from various modes. I'll talk more about that soon.