Other Tappan Zee Bridge possibilities

In my post on the Tri-State Transportation Campaign's strategy for redirecting the Tappan Zee replacement and expansion towards transit and transit-oriented development, I wrote that, yes, I can see the strategy, and if it works it could transform Rockland from New York's answer to Raleigh, NC into a place where someone might actually want to walk around, with downtowns that function. If it works.

What if it doesn't work? Well, last year the State DOT split the environmental impact studies into a "highway phase" and a "transit phase." Of course, the highway phase comes first, and the transit phase may never happen. Tri-State's own intern, Paul Murphy, warned about the possibility. It's a trick that's been pulled many times.

If the transit phase never comes to pass, we'll have a bridge that's five lanes in each direction including one for "high occupancy/toll" vehicles, and there will probably still only be 1500 bus passengers per day. This would raise the private-auto mode share from 98.3% to 99.7%. It will probably also cost $23 billion dollars, a truly staggering amount, of which only $3.3 billion has been found.

Tri-State's Steven Higashide writes about finding federal money as though there's a limitless supply. There isn't. Even though the feds can theoretically print money, they are constrained by the influence of budget hawks, and the share that any given state gets is limited by inter-regional power plays. That means that this $20 billion has to come from somewhere. It will probably come from transit funds, including money that would otherwise have been available for the Second Avenue Subway, Metro-North to Penn Station, citywide BRT, Northeast Corridor upgrades, and every other deserving project you can think of. Like Boston's Big Dig, this could wind up sucking the cash out of every transit project for years, leaving us unable to build anything but a series of unconnected, slow, inefficient bus tunnels.

Even if, as Higashide writes, funding could come from user fees like Thruway tolls, parking fees or gas taxes, those fees could also potentially be used to fund transit, but would not be available if they're taken by the Tappan Zee Bridge project. Some of the other options are much worse: tax increment financing districts and income taxes would take money from people who may not even drive.

What bothers me a little bit is that it seems like Tri-State is actually trying to help the State DOT to find funding for this project. It's true that the transit costs are slightly more than half: $8.9 billion out of the total $16 billion estimated in preliminary financials (PDF). So you might expect people to feel that transit advocates ought to find some of the cash.

But let's look at another possibility: what if nobody can find enough funding and the bridge never gets built? If no one pays for anything, it would eventually just be condemmed, and shut down for years like the Poughkeepsie Bridge. But if we can find $3.3 billion, that's enough to cover the cost of the rehab. And if transit advocates can find another $2.5 billion, it would pay for a fully grade-separated busway from Suffern to Port Chester.


Commenter "Anon" on the Tri-State blog doesn't think that BRT on the existing bridge would fly. "You are not going to get the Suburban populations of Rockland and Westchester to give up a general use lane to bus only especially considering the current backups." At this point, probably not.

But what would happen, land-use-wise, if we did nothing? Would these counties continue to sprawl? I doubt it. Sprawl needs roads to survive. If you don't build any more road capacity, it will stagnate and fester. If you take away road capacity, it will wither. Westchester and Rockland have pretty much run out of room, and will have to densify if they get any more population growth. Since the general consensus is that the price of gasoline is going to go up, we'll probably see more people switching to transit and moving from sprawl to walkable neighborhoods, either in Rockland or elsewhere. Finally, whatever form the ARC tunnel takes, it will make commuting by train from Rockland much easier, fostering transit-oriented development there. Without the bridge widening, a constituency for transit will grow steadily until there is broad-based support for funding and building a real solution. That possibility is the most promising to me.

It all hinges on whether funding for the $7.1 billion in highway components will be found. If the State DOT finds it, the best position for Tri-State to be in is the pleasant helper; they can then envelop and redirect. If the State DOT doesn't find the money, all Tri-State has to do is to wait and be ready to influence Plan B.

But what if it is Tri-State's help that gets the funding? Between the overall cost and the uncertainty of the transit component, I worry that this project will do more harm than good. While it's certainly impressive to get the State DOT to support transit-oriented development workshops, I don't think that those are worth the downsides. It's a very dangerous game that Tri-State is playing, and I sure hope they have an ace or two up their sleeves that I don't know about.

Enveloping the Tappan Zee Bridge replacement study

Over the past year or so I've been very critical of the State DOT's plan to rebuild the Tappan Zee Bridge, and of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign's support of this plan. In the comments to Tri-State's most recent blog post on the plan, the Campaign's Steven Higashide took the time to respond.

Cap’n, this project will result in a much improved transit system that has the potential to target development in the Hudson Valley around transit stations instead of in open space. As you may know, at our urging NYSDOT has begun a training program for towns to do just that (the program is managed by Regional Plan Association, Project for Public Spaces, and Reconnecting America, all highly professional organizations). The new bridge will also provide pedestrian and bicycle access, which the current bridge does not. The existing bridge has 4 general purpose lanes in the peak direction already, so the expansion is primarily adding transit capacity.

While we support this project, we don’t support it passively. We continue to work with the study team and in the stakeholder working groups to improve the project. For example, in the Draft EIS the study team is now examining a busway option that replaces the Rockland HOT lanes/Westchester bus lanes with a separate dedicated transitway.

Another "Anon" commentator wrote this:

No new bridge, no radically improved transit for the I-287 corridor. You are not going to get the Suburban populations of Rockland and Westchester to give up a general use lane to bus only especially considering the current backups. I seriously doubt that commuter rail could be added to the existing bridge. Moreover, the bridge likely needs to be replaced one way or another as it was built on the cheap in the first place. If the bridge is going to be replaced, 3 additional lanes (IIRC, only one additional general use lane) are going to represent a marginal increase in cost for the project.

My recent post on the Tao Te Ching's recommended approach to conflict came out of my thoughts about Tri-State's approach. A more recent thinker, Morihei Ueshiba, the founder of Aikido, echoed the water metaphor in his own writings, and developed this idea further:

If your heart is large enough to envelop your adversaries, you can see right through them and avoid their attacks. And once you envelop them, you will be able to guide them along the path indicated to you by heaven and earth.

Ueshiba also stressed the value of redirecting an opponent's energy towards the good of all:

Opponents confront us continually, but actually there is no opponent there. Enter deeply into an attack and neutralize it as you draw that misdirected force into your own sphere.

This is the way I understand Tri-State's approach. The State DOT is not an opponent, they have just misdirected their force, and Tri-State is enveloping the DOT with their hearts and helping them to redirect that force towards bicycle and pedestrian access, bus rapid transit and transit-oriented development.

They may have something of a point, actually. I actually went back and looked at an earlier analysis that I did of the plans, and was a bit comforted. According to the DOT's 1999 survey, up to 7042 vehicles crossed the bridge per hour in the eastbound morning peak, and 98% of them were private cars and trucks. By their analysis, each lane can move between 1700 and 1900 cars per hour (fitting with Adirondacker's recent comment), so the planned configurations would be able to carry between 7600 and 8075 cars, depending on how many people drive in the HO/T lanes.

On the transit side, in 1999 there were 1350 people per day traveling by bus across the bridge (possibly four buses per hour with about 30 people each). Alternative 3B, the "BRT only" proposal, would transport 2100, but the theoretical maximum that a dedicated bus lane could transport per hour (basically a continuous line of packed buses) is 9000. Alternative 4D, "BRT plus commuter rail," is planned to carry 6800 people per hour, but the maximum is 39,000.



This means that the planned "BRT" by itself would not cause that much of a mode shift (just from 98% private auto to 80%), but Alternative 4D as planned would bring it way down to 54%. Alternative 3B maxed out to 9,000 passengers per hour would bring modeshare to 45%, and Alternative 4D maxed to 39,000 passengers per hour would bring it down to 12%.

So, yes, I can see Tri-State's strategy, and if it works it could transform Rockland from New York's answer to Raleigh, NC into a place where someone might actually want to walk around, with downtowns that function. If it works.

Of course, all this criticism of Tri-State is meant in a supportive way. One thing you can do in a supportive way is to buy tickets to their annual benefit dinner next week. They do a lot of really good work.

When we need private transit

A little while ago, NPR's Planet Money team did a report for This American Life on health care finance. I've been following the health care debate and noticing some areas that could inform a good transportation financing plan. Towards the end, there's a good quote from Miami University economist Melissa Thomasson:

Melissa Thomasson says that what we have combines the worst of the market and the worst of government. Markets are usually really good at controlling costs. When they work best, products come into existence, like cell phones or stockings. They start expensive, and then they get cheaper and better. But markets don't guarantee that everyone can afford the things they need. Government can be good at that, ensuring universal access. But when you're paying for everybody, it's hard to control costs.

I'm not for "controlling costs" when it's a euphemism for giving workers a raw deal, but I am for it when it means reducing administrative bloat, sinecures and abuse of retirement benefits.

Of course, universal access is one of our goals, so any transit system will have to have a "public option" to ensure a minimum level of mobility to get to jobs, shopping, socializing and health care.

Beyond the cost issue, government-run transit systems tend to be bad at customer service and full of bureaucratic inertia. This is also true of corporations, but the worst offenders in that regard tend to be government contractors, public utilities, insurance companies and other entities that are insulated from competition by some kind of monopoly.

Privately run transit operations have the potential to radically remake our transportation system, for a fraction of the cost of publicly-run ones. We just have to provide minimum service, keep the labor issues under control, and work out the proper set of subsidies and incentives to guide the private operators in the right direction.

How are we doing?

By now you've seen the Cycle images that I've made recently:



We've got our goals: access for all, health, safety, clean air and water, efficiency, and a better society. We have some ways of measuring the end results: incidence of asthma and other diseases, road deaths and injuries, amount of pollution, energy prices and various kinds of alienation. You can find some of these at Transportation for America's State Facts pages.

We don't have a great measure of access. We do have WalkScore, but that doesn't mention things that are a short train ride away. We have the census journey-to-work data that can tell us something about where people have long commutes, and is used by the Pratt Center to propose "BRT" routes (PDF), but they don't tell us about non-work trips like daycare or shopping.

We do have some measures of government priorities, like the transportation allowances granted to car companies vs. transit, the 80/20 funding split, and the relative tax benefit levels.

Unfortunately, the measures of government priorities don't often tell the whole story. For cars, the vast majority of operating costs are outsourced to the individual drivers, but this "time tax" is not counted. Most of the costs of manufacturing, maintaining, fueling, storing and insuring the vehicles are also outsourced, despite the subsidies I mentioned above, but these are not considered to be transportation taxes. Conversely, governments can often get much more "bang for the buck" from transit, pedestrian and cycling facilities, in terms of providing alternatives to private car ownership.

What I would really like to see, for every transportation and housing project, is an estimate for how it would be most likely to change the mode split in an area. How many riders will that widened bridge attract away from transit? How many people can be expected to buy cars once they move to a development that has 2,600 new parking spaces (PDF)? How many people who currently drive down Flatbush Avenue would take BRT instead?

I know it'd be an enormous task, but I'd like to see aggregate mode-split forecasts for policy decisions like the 80/20 funding split. How many people could be expected to switch to transit if we had a 50/50 funding split, and how would that affect transit system profitability? What about various potential gas tax levels? And how would those mode splits affect the indicators for our ultimate goals: health, safety, clean air and water, efficiency, and a better society?

I think this kind of thing is important to get it across to people that this isn't just abstract power games. Some people do stand to lose some things if transit advocates get what they want, but it may be possible to persuade them that the sacrifice is worth it. If we could say something like, "a 50/50 funding split could be expected to reduce asthma by x percent," it could really drive the point home.

The Tao of conflict

Of all gentleness and submissiveness in the world
Nothing compares to water,
And to tackle stiffness and toughness there is nothing better,
There is no easier substitution.

Be submissive to overcome dominance,
Be gentle to overcome toughness,
There is none in the world who knows not,
There is none who can follow.

Therefore the master says,
"Accepting the nation's shame, is being stately;
Accepting the nation's adversities, is being majestic."
Righteous words seem contradictory.

Tao Te Ching, collaborative Wikisource translation, verse 78.

Killing the cash cow

Last week WNYC's Brian Lehrer had a segment on tolls and transportation that made me squirm a little. There were several bizarre moments, including when Senator Savino embarrassed herself by giving a bike route from Boro Park to Flushing along the BQE service road and McGuinness and Northern Boulevards, and Stacey from Basking Ridge repeating the lie that "mass transit is not an option" for the disabled.



The most sensible people on the segment were callers Andres from Jersey City and TJ from Boro Park, and Lehrer himself. Despite her obvious windshield perspective and her partisan shilling for the car-oriented Bill Thompson, Savino was clearly pro-transit - although I'm disappointed that Lehrer didn't ask her to explain how she let bridge tolls fail in the Senate.

The biggest disappointment was Kate Slevin of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign and her resolutely sunny we're-all-winners-with-transit schtick - which might explain Tri-State's bizarre stance on the Tappan Zee Bridge widening. I was particularly frustrated at how Slevin completely missed TJ's question, responding with a stock speech about how people are turning back to transit, which wound up reinforcing his point. I think TJ's question is a great one, so let me quote it for you:

How much is policy set indirectly by retaining the car - and the driver in the car - as a cash cow, as opposed to developing public transportation more, which perhaps is a lower revenue earner?

TJ's question echoes one asked in June by commenter P on a Streetsblog post announcing the pro-XBL Streetfilm:

My guess is that the Port Authority doesn't want to forego the tolls from the cars currently using those lanes. Pressure needs to be put on the PA from elected officials and advocacy groups that see a larger vision than just the PA's bottom line.

I've been thinking about P's question ever since, and I've done a little number-crunching. According to the Port Authority's 2008 financial statement (PDF), 20,937,000 vehicles traveled eastbound through the tunnel in that year, and the total operating revenues were $153,536,000. The XBL study found that 1700 buses use the lane every day. I will assume that half the average daily traffic, or 28,681 vehicles, passes through during the XBL hours, or 8,994 per non-XBL lane. I will further assume that trucks are 7% of these vehicles, as they are on an annual basis, and that these trucks have four axles on average. The Port Authority website tells us that these trucks would pay about $32 each, while cars pay $8 and buses $4.

This leads me to conclude that each non-XBL lane brings in $87,058 per day, and replacing it with a second XBL would cut all but $6,800 of that out, leading to a annual drop of $30 million - 19% of the revenue from the Tunnel. We may all agree on this blog that it's worth it, but it's still a big hit to ask the Port Authority to take.

If the Port Authority currently loses thousands a day on the buses, it makes most of it back in gate fees at the bus terminal. Buses pay $40 per departure (PDF), including any bus that goes into the terminal and doesn't immediately deadhead back to Jersey. If we estimate that that's 1500 of the 1700 buses, it comes out to $60,000 a day. The problem is that the terminal is pretty much at capacity, so any additional buses going through the lane would probably drop off on the street somewhere - my recommendation is to send them through the planned 34th Street busway, but in any case they won't be paying any gate fees.

Also, none of this affects westbound traffic. Since the tolls are one-way eastbound, the Port Authority could keep that XBL round the clock and just reverse direction without losing any toll money. Sure, they'd cause the mother of all Manhattan traffic jams at first, but then people would get used to it, and more of them would take the bus.

All told, it makes sense that the Port Authority would drag its feet on setting up a second XBL. It also explains that they want it to be high-occupancy or toll, not a bus-only lane, even though that would significantly limit its effectiveness. P recommends pressuring the Port Authority to take a larger vision beyond their bottom line - which would be nice if it works. The only other solutions I can think of are to raise tolls on both cars and buses, or to build a new terminal somewhere else and charge for it.

Getting back to TJ's question, here's a pretty clear case where relying on car use to subsidize transit is unsustainable if we really want people to shift away from cars to transit. The good news is that if you build your transit right, as ridership goes up, so does profitability, so eventually either the passengers would pay for all the operating costs, but even if you don't, if enough people use the system, a consensus in favor of collecting taxes to fund "our transit" will probably form.

Parkway or highway? Pick one and stick with it

Bob Moses didn't build the first parkways, but he did create some of the most famous ones. Many started out as quiet, four-lane roads surrounded by trees and grass; some even had parallel bicycle and pedestrian paths. A few of these have been minimally altered; you can get a feel for the original design if you visit the Bronx River, Bethpage, Palisades or Jackie Robinson Parkways. On the other hand, most have been widened to the point where they are unrecognizable as parkways. The most outrageous of these is the Southern State Parkway on Long Island, which is now eight lanes wide, double its original width. The Hutchinson River Parkway is eight lanes for part of its length, as is the Grand Central Parkway. The Belt, Cross Island and Northern State are six lanes for most of their lengths.



The worst part of this is that most of these parkways forbid any kind of buses from traveling on them. In many cases, Moses actually built bridges that were too low for buses or trucks to safely pass under. The result is a highway that is only available for private cars - the least efficient, most polluting form of ground transportation.

Moses's justification for barring buses and trucks was to provide a bucolic, recreational setting for leisurely drives. But the widenings have obliterated this character of the parkways, turning them into commuter highways like the LIE and the Thruway. Trees have been cut down and grass paved over. In some cases, like the Hutch, the bicycle paths were eliminated. In others, the highway swallowed up the entire "park," leaving nothing but asphalt. So we have noisy, smelly, dangerous, expensive highways that don't even help move buses quicker.

The Garden State Parkway is a disaster in many ways, but at least it allows buses for the entire length. Many bus routes would be excruciating - and have very low ridership, if they survived at all - if they couldn't go on the Garden State.

It's time for New York state to get with the program. Return the parkways to their original four-lane configurations - with suitable modifications for safety - and rebuild the parks and greenways that once surrounded them. Or else give up the Jay Gatsby fantasies, face the reality that you're dealing with commuter highways, and allow buses to use them.

It is true that many of the bridges are too low for full-size buses. The State DOT often replaces parkway bridges, and in recent years they've even been trying to match the aesthetics of the originals; they can do this while raising the height to allow buses. In the meantime, there are many cutaway vans that can fit under these bridges with no problem. Allowing cutaway van service on the Grand Central, Interboro and Belt Parkways would be a big improvement for transit in those corridors.

The nutty Long Island Transportation Plan 2000 envisioned putting "Rapid Commute Vehicles" - don't call them buses! - on some of the parkways. But in a classic highway department move, these would be brand new lanes with "RCV priority." I haven't heard much of LITP 2000 since way back when; let's hope that those widening plans died with it.

Last month, in response to my post about improving bus service to Connecticut, Woody left a good suggestion:

Put bus lanes on the West Side Highway or Henry Hudson Parkway, whatever it's called, from the Port Authority Bus Terminal right up to the George Washington Bridge to Jersey and onto the Cross Bronx Expressway heading east.

Some of the parkways were designed to keep the riffraff -- that's us bus riders -- off these carriage ways by making the overpasses too low and the underpassings unpassable. But I don't think the Henry Hudson suffers from that design feature.

I checked, and in fact the first low bridge on the Henry Hudson is not until 232nd Street. Even beyond there, as you can see above, the Google Street View vehicle followed a full-size school bus all the way to Fieldston Road. That means that it's physically possible for buses to go from 57th Street all the way up to the George Washington Bridge without hitting a light. Let's make it legal.