The MTA 20 Year Needs Assessment Reminds Us They Can’t Build
The much-anticipated 20 Year Needs Assessment was released 2.5 days ago. It’s embarrassingly bad, and the reason is that the MTA can’t build, and is run by people who even by Northeastern US standards – not just other metro areas but also New Jersey – can’t build and propose reforms that make it even harder to build.
I see people discuss the slate of expansion projects in the assessment – things like Empire Connection restoration, a subway under Utica, extensions of Second Avenue Subway, and various infill stations. On the surface of it, the list of expansion projects is decent; there are quibbles, but in theory it’s not a bad list. But in practice, it’s not intended seriously. The best way to describe this list is if the average poster on a crayon forum got free reins to design something on the fly and then an NGO with a large budget made it into a glossy presentation. The costs are insane, for example $2.5 billion for an elevated extension of the 3 to Spring Creek of about 1.5 km (good idea, horrific cost), and $15.9 billion for a 6.8 km Utica subway (see maps here); this is in 2027 dollars, but the inescapable conclusion here is that the MTA thinks that to build an elevated extension in East New York should cost almost as much as it did to build a subway in Manhattan, where it used the density and complexity of the terrain as an argument for why things cost as much as they did.
To make sure people don’t say “well, $16 billion is a lot but Utica is worth it,” the report also lowballs the benefits in some places. Utica is presented as having three alternatives: subway, BRT, and subway part of the way and BRT the rest of the way; the subway alternative has the lowest projected ridership of the three, estimated at 55,600 riders/weekday, not many more than ride the bus today, and fewer than ride the combination of all three buses in the area today (B46 on Utica, B44 on Nostrand, B41 on Flatbush). For comparison, where the M15 on First and Second Avenues had about 50,000 weekday trips before Second Avenue Subway opened, the two-way ridership at the three new stations plus the increase in ridership at 63rd Street was 160,000 on the eve of corona, and that’s over just a quarter of the route; the projection for the phase that opened is 200,000 (and is likely to be achieved if the system gets back to pre-corona ridership), and that for the entire route from Harlem to Lower Manhattan is 560,000. On a more reasonable estimate, based on bus ridership and gains from faster speeds and saving the subway transfer, Utica should get around twice the ridership of the buses and so should Nostrand (not included in the plan), on the order of 150,000 and 100,000 respectively.
Nothing there is truly designed to optimize how to improve in a place that can’t build. London can’t build either, even if its costs are a fraction of New York’s (which fraction seems to be falling since New York’s costs seem to be rising faster); to compensate, TfL has run some very good operations, squeezing 36 trains per hour out of some of its lines, and making plans to invest in signaling and route design to allow similar throughput levels on other lines. The 20 Year Needs Assessment mentions signaling, but doesn’t at all promise any higher throughput, and instead talks about state of good repair: if it fails to improve throughput much, there’s no paper trail that they ever promised more than mid-20s trains per hour; the L’s Communications-Based Train Control (CBTC) signals permit 26 tph in theory but electrical capacity limits the line to 20, and the 7 still runs about 24 peak tph. London reacted to its inability to build by, in effect, operating so well that each line can do the work of 1.5 lines in New York; New York has little interest.
The things in there that the MTA does intend to build are slow in ways that cross the line from an embarrassment to an atrocity. There’s an ongoing investment plan in elevator accessibility on the subway. The assessment trumpets that “90% of ridership” will be at accessible stations in 2045, and 95% of stations (not weighted by ridership) will be accessible by 2055. Berlin has a two years older subway network than New York; here, 146 out of 175 stations have an elevator or ramp, for which the media has attacked the agency for its slow rollout of systemwide accessibility, after promises to retrofit the entire system by about this year were dashed.
The sheer hate of disabled people that drips from every MTA document about its accessibility installation is, frankly, disgusting, and makes a mockery of accessibility laws. Berlin has made stations accessible for about 2 million € apiece, and in Madrid the cost is about 10 million € (Madrid usually builds much more cheaply than Berlin, but first of all its side platforms and fare barriers mean it needs more elevators than Berlin, and second it builds more elevators than the minimum because at its low costs it can afford to do so). In New York, the costs nowadays start at $50 million and go up from there; the average for the current slate of stations is around $70 million.
And the reason for this inability to build is decisions made by current MTA leadership, on an ongoing basis. The norm in low- and medium-cost countries is that designs are made in-house, or by consultants who are directly supervised by in-house civil service engineers who have sufficient team size to make decisions. In New York, as in the rest of the US, the norms is that not only is design done with consultants, but also the consultants are supervised by another layer of consultants. The generalist leadership at the MTA doesn’t know enough to supervise them: the civil service is small and constantly bullied by the political appointees, and the political appointees have no background in planning or engineering and have little respect for experts who do. Thus, they tell the consultants “study everything” and give no guidance; the consultants dutifully study literally everything and can’t use their own expertise for how to prune the search tree, leading to very high design costs.
Procurement, likewise, is done on the principle that the MTA civil service can’t do anything. Thus, the political appointees build more and more layers of intermediaries. MTA head Janno Lieber takes credit for the design-build law from 2019, in which it’s legalized (and in some cases mandated) to have some merger of design and construction, but now there’s impetus to merge even more, in what is called progressive design-build (in short: New York’s definition of design-build is similar to what is used in Turkey and what we call des-bid-ign-build in our report – two contracts, but the design contract is incomplete and the build contract includes completing the design; progressive design-build means doing a single contract). Low- and medium-cost countries don’t do any of this, with the exception of Nordic examples, which have seen a sharp rise in costs from low to medium in conjunction with doing this.
And MTA leadership likes this. So do the contractors, since the civil service in New York is so enfeebled – scourged by the likes of Lieber, denied any flexibility to make decisions – that it can’t properly supervise design-bid-build projects (and still the transition to design-build is raising costs a bit). Layers of consultants, insulated from public scrutiny over why exactly the MTA can’t make its stations accessible or extend the subway, are exactly what incompetent political appointees (but I repeat myself) want.
Hence, the assessment. Other than the repulsively slow timeline on accessibility, this is not intended to be built. It’s not even intended as a “what if.” It’s barely even speculation. It’s kayfabe. It’s mimicry of a real plan. It’s a list of things that everyone agrees should be there plus a few things some planners wanted, mostly solidly, complete with numbers that say “oh well, we can’t, let’s move on.” And this will not end while current leadership stays there. They can’t build, and they don’t want to be able to build; this is the result.
Pedestrian Observations 
I agree that NYCT is ableist– the fact that it had to be taken to court to install elevators and that it is installing them so slowly is evidence enough for that. But I don’t see what ableism has to do with the ridiculous cost of the elevators– I’d think it would incentivize the agency to cheap out on elevators, rather than wasting money on excessively expensive ones.
1. Boston is nearly 100% accessible, at $25 million/station (which the MTA could do if it cared).
2. The expensive elevators aren’t even good – this isn’t going beyond the minimum or anything like that, it’s just not bothering to handle utility conflict (which the MTA does handle for bigger projects, albeit at a cost) so the contractors are stuck for weeks to months waiting for some electric or water permit, plus very large contingencies so that leadership can say “we said it would cost $70 million and it’s actually $65 million, yay us.”
Why not both? If you want to appear virtuously prosocial in your justification for not building elevators, your case is “low benefit to cost”, thus you want the costs to be higher. Separately, you can also make the benefit lower by getting them to break down by not maintaining them.
While as a proud New Jersian, I like the praise of New Jersey as being less incompetent than the MTA, I’m not sure what the state has done to deserve that. I don’t think NJT has built anything new since the HBLR which was finished in 2011 and cost $81 million per km (not adjusted for inflation), which would be great for a subway but is pretty terrible for a tram train, even one with a short elevated section. Its current capital plan includes lots of extravagant-seeming costs. Some examples: a $1.4 billion new bus garage (not including real estate acquisition cost), a $250 million new Jersey Avenue station, $500 million to “study and design” (but presumably not implement) ways to make surface transit faster. The funny thing is some projects costs are reasonable– hunter flyover is still $300 million.
Click to access NJ%20TRANSIT%20Capital%20Plan%202022%20Update_Appendix%20B%20Project%20Sheets_7-24-23.pdf
One interesting thing I notice is that costs seem to be weirdly inconsistent– replacing the 378ft Newark Draw over the Passaic River is cited as costing $676 million while replacing the 1100ft long HX Draw over the Hackensack River is cited as costing $310 million. Portal North and Portal South which are 960 ft long are budgeted at $2.262 billion and $800 million respectively (the former justified as being somewhat more expensive than the rest as it will be a fixed bridge rather than a lift bridge, but still…)
Portal South’s fixed span version is $3.6 billion; $800 million is for a lift bridge (and this needs to be the option at American costs – the conflicting boat traffic is sludge barges, which can be scheduled at night if need be).
I mentioned the fact that Portal North is a fixed bridge while the rest are all lift bridges. The weird part is that the longest of the three lift bridges mentioned has the lowest cost
Portal isn’t just a bridge. It has a lot of associated work on either side of the bridge. It depend how of “new bridge” requires work on either side of it. Building all of the stuff the second bridge will need some day is a lot easier and cheaper than doing half of it twice. That’s probably part of the cost of the first bridge. I think the stuff in Kearny, where two tracks of the Northeast Corridor cross over the Morris and Essex lines is a separate project with separate costs. I don’t know for sure.
In Sim City movable bridges always move the way they are supposed to. In the real world whoever said Murphy was an optimist was looking on the bright side of things. It will go wrong. More than once. You’ve then halved capacity for most of your plans for intercity high speed rail all across the Northeast and Midwest. And all your cockamamie plans for commuter service west of the Hudson to Penn Station New York. That’s if only one of them gets stuck. Over the next century, both of them will get stuck and then there is no service to and from Penn Station New York.
There will always be sludge. Because if there are passenger trains, passengers have bladders and bowels and there will be sewage. They are moving it fairly frequently because there will be more sewage, tomorrow, to turn into sludge and water that can go in the river. There have been times in the past when they can’t move it by barge, so they have to move it by truck. Which costs a lot more money and adds congestion to already congested roads. People who keep more than one thing in mind want sludge to move by barge. There is other river traffic and except for pleasure boats, moving that on the river is cheaper and doesn’t put trucks on congested roads too.
And in there someone has considered how many times the movable bridges will have to move. Moving things have higher maintenance costs and they considered what those costs are over the next century. I don’t know what they are. Or care. They are significant. Keep more than one thing in mind.
The sludge boats come from Hackensack and such. And the Northeast Corridor has a ton of movable bridges, and the big reliability problems never come from their staying up – that’s why the plans to raise the bridges always talk about conflicting boat traffic (in SE Connecticut) or about maintenance costs (on the New Haven Line). The lift bridge option is intended to be intermediate – apparently it’s internally called mid-level, contrasting with both a high (fixed) bridge and a low (like the current) bridge, so that it’s going to have lower maintenance costs and just need to open whenever there’s a boat.
There you go again bringing up irrelevancies and generally distracting.
The subject is how often the bridges over the Hackensack would be moving, not how often if ever the Navy wants to move the bridge between New London and Groton. Or how much river traffic there is on the Susquehanna in Maryland.
There are a lot of trains and will be more passing over the Hackensack. More than there ever will be in New England or Maryland. There are lot of people who put the water from their sewage into the Hackensack and the sludge from the that or those plants moves by barge for a lot of reasons. Frequently because there is going to a lot of new sludge tomorrow. Moving two bridges more often than one bridge that has radically different traffic is something to consider. Because it would involve two of them whatever problems, whatever they are, going to happen twice as often.
How often: very little, because it’s a boat that can run nightly. I can ask how many times a night; I don’t think it’s more than once a night.
Also, if its only sludge, build a pipeline and pump it. Surely going to be much cheaper than the capex and opex costs to build and run the bridge, even if you need to dilute than dewater the sludge to make it easier to pump. Then just build a non-movable low bridge.
It’s dewatered sludge. “dewatered’ is industry jargon. I strongly suspect you don’t know what dewatered sludge is.
I have about 10 years of experience designing pumping and piping systems for non-Newtonian slurries. Everything from petroleum products, mining ores and wastes, to domestic waste systems. So yeah, I think I know what they are and have a pretty good idea what is involved with dewatered sludge. Its not rocket science, more art, but regularly dealt with by mechanical and process engineers everyday.
Most of the boats going up that river might be sewage boats, but not all.
I am sure if I turn up in a boat with an appropriate draft for the river that they have to open the bridge at some point within 24 hours or so and let me through. It will be grandfathered in to the contracts to build the railway originally – if it’s not required by precedent or otherwise from common law. Don’t forget common law comes from an island nation.
Just because you can doesn’t mean you want to.
They pump it now. From the dryer side of dewatering to the barge or the truck…. They ain’t doing this with a wheelbarrow. And wherever it goes to they aren’t using a wheelbarrow either. While I can imagine other solutions it’s getting pumped now.
They could incinerate on-site. There is still, whatever goes into the fluidized bed along with the sludge, probably sand, to ship in and ash to ship out. It’s a lot less volume. Fluidized bed incinerators aren’t cheap and I suspect would be quite arduous to approve in rich suburban parts in the most densely populated state in the country. So would a pipeline. Probably less so but either solution is probably “2040”.
It hasn’t occurred to you, instead of “add water back”, they could take less out? It might just be a matter of adjusting the SCADA for the dewatering process? Assuming they do it with a process involving belts it might involve using a belt that is less porous? Consider that for a moment. They might have to add more dewatering capacity but adding, lets say 20 percent would probably be cheaper and more compact than adding 100 percent of a new process. Hmm. the people who touch this stuff, daily, would only have one process instead of two? Hmm.
….industrial processes can be noisy. …PPE… hearing protection… sometimes gloves… masks… when whoever is accompanying me to my task is giving the speech about it being noisy past here I’ve already pulled the ear plugs out of the dispenser. I know how to put disposable gloves on and take them off. If the visit involves a hard hat with hearing protection I’m ready to let them go when he gets to the end of the script. We both understand that he, it’s almost a he, has to give the speech and I listen. Have you ever seen dewatering? it’s quite magic. .. SCADA…. porous belt… wash your hands before you leave.. Getting into a clean room can be fun. Clean rooms and sewage plant involve the script about washing your hands. I know how to wash my hands. Came in quite handy in 2020 and how to put on N95 was too. And having gloves and N95s in the house was very handy. I don’t have P100s in the house but I know how to put them on. They’ve come back down to reasonable prices. Hmm. I don’t know what the best-if-used-by date is for the filters. Hmm. And selecting filters will be fun. Hmmm. I digress. I don’t imagine I will ever want positive air flow. I digress.
This isn’t a mom and pop operation. Calling the swamp “the Meadows” has been common forever. In the past the Meadows was a swamp and nobody cared that it was being filled in. They probably dumped the sludge in the landfills that were out there. Not dumping it the landfill in the nearby swamp was a complicated process. That came up with whatever is happening on the other side of Portal Bridge. I don’t know where that is, what they do, if it’s dedicated to the sewage plant in question or other sewage plants between there and Sandy Hook also use it. How far is the sewage plant in question and the place the filled barges go? There is so much to consider, isn’t there?
Coming up with “fixed bridge” isn’t a mom and pop operation either. It may appear to be Keystone Kops but someone, somewhere decided “one of the major consideration is the sludge.” and that involved considering incinerators or pipelines. ….. there are going to be barges on the river until someone comes up reverse Star Trek Replicators. If they have come up with Star Trek destructors they have come up with Star Trek transporters and trains are obsolete – for passengers anyway.
I see “110 mph fixed bridge” and consider that for a moment. And consider that every train will be stopping in Penn Station New York. Likely decelerating or accelerating at the bridge. People who consider that for a living came up with 110 being good enough and call it that. And reminisce how back in the day, before the accident, before the connection for Midtown Direct, before Secaucus Junction, the schedule between Penn Station New York and Penn Station Newark was “15 minutes or less”. Before the accident westbound trains would clear the tunnel portal and acccccelarate. And pass over Portal Bridge at 90. Because I’ve never sat on a rush hour train. In the many decades I’ve did that at least occasionally. And when you are standing the vestibule of a married pair in the cab end, which is “closed” you can still see the speedometer and the air pressure gauges…. 90 over Portal Bridge and higher between there and Harrison…. And will in the future because my complicated decisions about getting from here to points in New Jersey will involve considering Penn Station Newark. I don’t know what the speed limit is for movable bridges. Alon probably knows that. That would be interesting, would it? ……
… dewatering is magic.. take less water out instead of putting water back in… barges wasn’t a rash decision and neither is considering them now.
The high platform item on this list is $26 million/station. This is a slight premium over Boston and a larger one over Berlin, but nothing worth firing execs over. In contrast, the MTA thinks Elmhurst infill is $210 million – and in Boston and Philadelphia, infill and high platforms on an existing station cost about the same.
The only time I looked they are rehab’ing Elizbeth. It’s not just removing peeling paint and resurfacing the platforms. It’s cantilevering the platforms from the viaduct, elevators etc and adding a fifth track. For 53 million. I don’t know how much of the cost of “a new Jersey Avenue station” is allocating costs to changing the “Jersey Ave train” to the “North Brunswick train” It’s unlikely it’s just building a new platform on the northbound side at Jersey Avenue. Those projects aren’t just three platforms, one at Jersey Ave and two at North Brunswick either.
The Hunter Flyover is a very long bridge in a wasteland of railroad and highway that nobody is going to have serious objections to. I’m not going to evaluate if 300 million is reasonable. Sounds a bit pricey to me for something that won’t involve a lot of community outreach, environmental etc. Hmmm it might have significant costs associated with building stuff where there has been railroad for almost 200 years. It has a lot of cleanup to be done first. You don’t have to evaluate if there is toxic waste – there will be – what it is and how to remove it, if you aren’t planning on disturbing something somewhere. I don’t know if you need to evaluate all the stuff between the holes you will be digging and remediate that too. I haven’t seen plans and don’t know if it’s a single track that someday can have wires over it or something more elaborate. Since everybody calls it “Hunter Flyover” it doesn’t involve the “Aldene Connection” or very little? Questions occur to me that I don’t need answers to.
Before Midtown Direct opened people who wanted to go Hoboken, there were and are a few, or go to the World Trade Center for “Wall Street”, went to the train station and took a train. Or they would go to the train station and take a bus to the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan. And most of them have local buses of many varieties. The buses to the Port Authority have more or less gone away. Building a bigger bus terminal might not be needed if the people using it now – to go down to the train station to catch a bus to the PABT – if there were trains to Penn Station. Everybody has been discussing that since the 80s but nothing gets done.
Whatever gets done, level boarding improves train service. They don’t have program to achieve that in a methodical way. I lived in Newark and it’s suburbs most of my life. Railfans can have very peculiar notions about local conditions. I’ve typed enough for now.
Hunter Flyover is grade-separating Hunter Junction and is a good project. The 19,000 word doc I’ve been mentioning specifically calls it out as a good investment in commuter rail.
The Aldene Connection is separating passenger and freight trains farther south, with extensive surplus extraction by Conrail, which wants 25′ track separation; it’s the sort of behavior that should get the state to have a conversation with it about how much it thinks its ROW is worth, but doesn’t (I’ve been told that a plan to do this with shared tracks was budgeted at $200 million in the 2000s but shot down).
The general vicinity of where “Hunter” is, is in Newark. On the northwest side of the spaghetti bowl of highways at Newark Airport, west of State Highway 21 and north of Interstate 78. Just north of Newark Airport Station which is south of I-78, among other roads. Aldene is in southwestern corner of Roselle Park. which is quite a distance away. Between the Roselle Park station and Cranford. Stuff that goes on west of the municipality of Roselle Park isn’t Aldene. Stuff that is proposed to happen in Newark might have Aldene in the title. Stuff that is proposed to happen west of Roselle Park might have Hunter in the title. I don’t know or care the scope of which project. The interested parties have been spending a lot of money on white collar workers producing studies since at least the 50s. Each round of proposals starts off with everybody putting their wish list on the table and what eventually gets done is different.
Everybody does agree that sending what we call Raritan Valley Line trains across the Northeast East Corridor, at grade, is a bad idea. Especially after new tunnels across the Hudson are in revenue service. There will be more trains.
How much anybody thinks the ROW is worth is a thought experiment, here on Planet Earth. Everybody agrees what’s left of the former Lehigh Valley or the former Central of New Jersey are major, nationally significant freight routes and the freight isn’t going away. And what still has service is valuable for passenger service. That’s not going away either. whatever is on the wish list today isn’t what is going to be in the Record of Decision if it gets that far. Keep more than one thing in mind.
You say that “Everybody does agree that sending what we call Raritan Valley Line trains across the Northeast East Corridor, at grade, is a bad idea,” but it’s not viewed as a priority at the top level; the reason the cost is staying reasonable is that the politicians and their appointees haven’t noticed the project, so the professionals keep working at it.
It was decided that it wasn’t necessary at this time, in 1959. When multiple proposals were being considered. To eliminate the high cost ferries railroads – plural – that were operating on the Hudson. They picked the one in use today. Which has changed in relatively minor ways over the years mostly because Conrail rationalized a lot of things. The politicians who it affects know about it and the legends and myths about what has happened since 1959. And want it. And are quite articulate about it. Even it if they appear to be clueless, they can keep more than one thing in mind, realize that it’s hypothetical until there is more capacity across the Hudson and understand not everything can be done at once.
It’s worth noting all of Britains public transport operations are good – not just TfL.
The great western mainline fast tracks into and out of Paddington run 15tph off peak for example.
Heathrow runs an absolutely insane number of flights off two runways.
It doesn’t work as well in the north – but the south has had more grade separation etc over the last 100 years.
Well the North could learn what a passing loop is, rather than demand a giant tunnel before they’ve maxed out cheaper and easier alternatives.
Full grade separation at Crewe and Stafford in particular wouldn’t go amiss too.
And presumably in equivalent places in the east.
And platform edge doors at places with express trains and curved platforms would be good too. Oxenholme is slow to get trains out of for such a small stop.
? We already have grade separation there, its a mainline in the UK.
I believe there aren’t bridges to carry the lines from birmingham over the lines along the Trent valley. And where the Stoke on Trent line splits off there is a flat crossing.
I do also think Alon that when you say the leadership of the MTA should be fired/retired early and never allowed to work again you have a strong point.
Given the HS2 debacle which has led to most of it being cancelled I think that about HS2s management. Especially as its taken until this week to get a sensible value option for Euston.
I’m increasingly convinced everybody at the top of British non-TfL transport should be fired. East-West line built a new depot in…central Oxford which one of the many reasons why that project costs have exploded.
Well I mean east-west rail costing I believe 3x what Belgium spends for high speed rail is pretty indefensible. And some of A303 upgrades are eye-watering compared to the M40.
The upgrade of the A1/A428 roundabout to a grade separated road junction near Bedford is like £1.5bn which is crazy – especially as the M40 extension under Thatcher was at most £22m a mile adjusted for inflation.
Yep, and none of the rail advocacy groups seem to have noticed this much.
I have a friend of a friend who worked on the legal side for land acquisition. He hinted it was a horror show of incompetence…and that I seemed to know more than anybody on the project.
Want to set one up?
Do you have a source for the east-west rail depot being in central Oxford – might be worth seeing if it can be pointed out to both Oxford MPs – after all it could be housing.
Sorry, its sidings not a depot. https://www.google.com/maps/@51.7605547,-1.2716972,160m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu
Oxford in general needs to have sidings and deports consolidated to say Didcot and Banbury. Also evidence of the pathological unwillingness of British railways to build passing loops.
Ah more sidings there. Yes it probably is fixable but not straightforward.
Stage one is to stop terminating trains at Oxford – which I fully support but which requires alternative locations to terminate them. It’s not completely trivial.
J8 of the M40 would be a decent terminus if you reopened the old Wycombe railway that far.
There are ton’s of places. One of the SE’s problems is so many rail yards and siding are in places they no longer need to be given DMU and EMU are so much less demandings over steam locomotives. But because the cheaper land is greenbelt, they can’t do a land flip. This is less of problem in the North because of the rationalisation of the Postwar decades (Brum and Nottingham being the exceptions). Its a bigger problem in the sub-500,000 cities, Oxbridge, Bristol, Norwich etc.
Although this is something only the Chinese and Koreans have handled well because their systems are new build.
Europeans are often worse than us (Paris Gare de Lyon good grief). Japanese understand the problem, but land acquisition without coercive land assembly is hard so they’ve chickened out of depot rationalisation, outside the post-1990 new build lines (Tsukuba express).
Hong Kong of course just builds on top of depots.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Tsuen+Wan+Station/@22.3737626,114.1170049,622m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x3403f8f2857cbc89:0xcc397231104b10b8!8m2!3d22.3736788!4d114.1177168!16s%2Fg%2F12vrg3v2g?entry=ttu
I think the green belt thing could be worked around. But you need to do a suitable quid-pro-quo.
And rail advocates need to be sensitive to rural issues – which they are weak on. The most obvious example being the lack of station in the southern part of HS2.
Rail advocates in the UK are for the most part nostalgic onanists, its not like there’s a coherent discussion about takt or proof-of-payments systems, its just “do more of what we are currently doing with shinier rolling stock and expensive new lines”.
The MTA ignored QueensLink in its 20 year needs assessment.
https://www.rockawave.com/articles/mta-ignores-queenslink-communities-in-20-year-needs-assessment/
(Rescued from spam.)
The assessment does include Rockaway Beach Branch reactivation, it’s just assumed to have a ridiculously high cost just like everything else.
Railfans viewing it from Manhattan or beyond greatly over estimate it’s value. And imagine that it’s going to be running every five minutes. It’s not it, if actually gets built, it won’t, it has to make do with capacity available in the East River Tunnels. There isn’t much.
There goes all my hope of seeing good transit in the US after reading this, I should’ve realized this way earlier to be honest.
There’s just too much incompetence in the decision making and generally a childish and uncivilized attitude among officials who oversee their respective transit systems. The mentality will never change over there, I feel like everything in the US is seen too black or white with no space for a grey area, this is even true for political discussions among GenZ and millenials.
Among the ones who’ve had the chance to visit other cities around the world and ride their transit systems, they only make up a tiny fraction of the overall population in the US. In addition to that, the hostile attitude, phobia and lack of interest in anything foreign (either taking inspiration from or adopting working solutions, concepts and systems in other countries) in the US, is a huge barrier to for one to even adopt a mindset where one would be keen to improve existing flawed systems in the first place (Cuomo being an asshole and kicking Andy Byford).
The social environment is just too fragmented in the US which is complicated by a huge barrage of double standards, hypocrisy and deliberate bigotry, I mean even if socio-political discourses spin out of control in Europe (exempting the UK ofc) or Asia (South Asia and East Asia), there’s still a general consensus of not letting it screw over what’s perceived as a critical need; i.te transit infrastructure.
I don’t see any positive change in the US transit sector anytime soon, at least not on a level where it’s actually comparable to the undertakings in the EU and Asia. It’s too surface level or child level due lack of interest generally and different social perceptions of transit in general. There may be huge online fanbases about it with fantasy maps, but that’s as far as they’ll come to any “serious discussions” of transit related development.
AOC has actually shaken things up a bit. Within her district she has done some very impressive stuff and has a good team.
(Not directly to do with transit – but more generally)
I was impressed by how she pivoted to YIMBYism.
Theres probably a whole bunch of people within the traditional New York establishment who would be up for fixing some of these state issues too.
I mean for a start its super embarrassing that New York doesn’t have proper waste disposal and/or that the subway is grimy, that there is no RER style service etc etc. And actually for a lot of people it is super useful – the London underground averaging 20mph is faster than you would get anywhere driving in London.
The waste disposal is slowly being fixed. Slowly. The comms person at sanitation, when asked why Rome could do it faster, said that it had an easier time with it because it was leveled in WW2 and rebuilt from the ground up (it was famously an open city).
Famously the Pantheon in Rome was rebuilt in the 1950s.
I sadly share your pessimism. I think a lot of US cities with “good” transit amount to glorified parking shuttles. It’s a bit harsh but systems like BART, the DC metro, and even the Chicago L come to mind as systems that are overly focused on their respective CBDs while the suburbs are overwhelmingly car oriented.
NYC is the greatest example we have in the US of a comprehensive transit network that serves more than just trips to and from work. But it’s obvious it needs a lot of work and lacks the ability to get it done in a cost effective manner.
Meanwhile I live in LA at least partially because I’ve given up on transit in the US. This is a city that is spending billions to not even make a dent in ridership. I would say largely because the urban fabric is overwhelmingly auto oriented, but also because nobody seems to be capable of building heavy and regional rail anymore in the US which is what LA really needs to move the needle.
It’s legitimately impossible to imagine a US that could have world class transit.
LA’s terrible ridership is mostly because of its terrible land use, due to NIMBYism.
Los Angeles is also at this weird density point where there are too many people for everybody driving everywhere to work but not quite high enough for transit to work.
LA has two options: build transit so they can get dense enough, or become less dense. They are building transit (Others have commented on if it is good – I’ll let you form your own opinions). While there are NIMBY and other code problems in CA, LA doesn’t seem to be as bad as the bay area (at least from my outsider perspective) it is a necessary condition to have transit in an area before it can become dense.
Of course there are other conditions, but traffic is bad enough that people – even people who like dense areas – will move to less dense areas if possible. This includes moving to a different job, or getting the job to move to a less dense area on the edge so they can in turn move to a less dense area and drive. You either accept that and build more suburbs and more roads ($$$), or you build transit (and make other changes) so that people can build denser.
All cities are at the above cross roads all the time. Most are so far behind the transit curve that a small investment in transit won’t move the needle and people don’t trust you with a large enough investment to be worth making.
@henrymiller74: “LA has two options: build transit so they can get dense enough, or become less dense.”
Like many big cities, LA is doing both: relentlessly expanding on its outer edges while the more central bits are densifying. Paradoxically, though logically, its very size and car-dependence and inadequate freeways (congestion increasing to most daylight hours) are big factors in driving (sic) densification. It would be aided by continued rapid growth but that has taken a pause recently. In turn that will drive use of the Metro as more and more destinations will be within walking distance of transit stations. Quite a few cities within LA County have relatively high densities, at least within an American context. Santa Monica has ≈4,200/km2 and many others are 3,000-4,000/km2; that may be almost tenfold less than Manhattan but it is striking distance of San
Francisco’s ≈7,000/km2 the second densest urban zone in the US.
@Lee Ratner: “LA has better geography for a transit network than the Bay Area because the built up area is basically a giant blob of building.”
I think the opposite. The Bay Area approximates a linear city, ie. a strip of urbanisation squeezed between the bay and the mountains, and forms a joined-up ring (with one northerly spur Richmond etc). That is the easiest format for transit. One can only wonder how it might have developed if the original concept of BART of circumnavigating the bay had come to pass early rather than after all the development has occurred. You know, high-density TODs at 3-5km spacing around the bay. Of course that very concept is why so many NIMBYs fought it back then. To work, it probably also needs local transit to bring suburbanites to the local BART station which is obviously another stumbling block. If the TODs were of sufficient density it could have had significant impact, ie. even if half the population was still in suburban sprawl and driving their cars everywhere. TODs would have had a big positive impact on housing affordability, one reason the NIMBYs fight it.
LA has better geography for a transit network than the Bay Area because the built up area is basically a giant blob of building. The Bay Area has wide gapes of empty between the built up area and other geographic features dividing it.
Empty space is only a small problem of extra cost. Often empty space is a large expanse of water, so transit is much cheaper (a two track train bridge can handle as many people as a 20-40 lanes of cars) to cross it than roads. You should buy trains that can go fast over that empty space, so some metro trains won’t work, but your goal is to beat a car on an empty freeway not achieve HSR rail speeds. Of course you city (zoning, transit transfers) needs to develop around those trains once you build them and people realize they can get across those empty areas.
What is hard is if those empty areas are not actually empty, they are just very low density. If there are people there they will want a station and that drives up cost, makes speeds slower, and so isn’t a good idea. If the area was denser (like LA!) you put in local and express service on the same line so that people can get long distances fast with a few transfers, while short trips you ride the local. However in low density you can’t get enough riders to support this service at reasonable prices.
Americans have neglected transit for decades. There was something of a big push in the mid-1960/1970s and later in the early aughts but nothing as extensive as needed. Too many politicians and civil servants have it ingrained in them to focus on roads and cars over transit. The NIMBYs make doing TOD really difficult. Lots of Americans just want to drive everywhere.
The question becomes, what levers need to be pulled to make a turn around on this? (besides your suggestion of MTA heads rolling, definitely agree there)
(I’ve stopped using the expression “heads should roll” after learning that the original citation was the Nazis saying this about the leaders of Weimar Germany.)
Alon, in your expert opinion should it take 2+ years to replace just over one mile of track?
Referring to this:
It’s not an isolated piece of track. It threads it’s way …. through a lot of stuff… go ahead look at the satellite images between Journal Square and Harrison. And who knows if it involves considering modern storm surges or not. It’s just about mean sea level near an estuary. And while everyone considers it to be itty bitty obscure PATH it is among the country’s busiest mass transit systems. That runs to all stations – normally – 24 hours a day seven days a week. It’s probably complicated. Perhaps not two years worth but it’s complicated.
To be fair there’s only a train at least every 15 minutes in at least one direction from 5am to 11:30pm, plus the whole weekend has less frequency than that, so there’s clear scope for full weekend and nighttime closures with a rail replacement bus service.
Perhaps you can do a train service via Newark and then use the northeast corridor into Manhattan.
PATH trains never leave PATH tracks while they are in revenue service. And no other trains run on PATH tracks. Bustitution might make sense over night. And I stopped trying figure out what you are imagining.
That section has 20 minute headways during the weekend days and 40 minutes at night.
And massive service disruptions. This coming weekend will be 40 minute headways for the entire weekend.
Two weeks ago there was no Sunday service at all (bus substitution).
Basically every other week, for 2 years, they are making Sunday service useless.
But a track laying machine can lay a mile or 1500m of track in a day.
But I guess there hasn’t been a third party run who promises to actually coherently collect the rubbish in New York City yet so.
And collecting the rubbish along with fixing potholes is a thing normals actually care about.
Normals don’t want to care about fixing potholes, they just want a nice road to drive on (or walk on if that applies). They only want to care about rubbish as far as getting it in the trash can in the room (If I could get my local garbage collection to come get it from each room saving me the bother of the weekly get it all to the can by the road I’d be happy).
We have been burned before though because someone cut pothole repairs, or someone didn’t properly manage a landfill and so we are forced to do something. More than once I’ve seen the accusation that there was money for pothole repair, but the road department redirected the money to something else. Thus we are forced to care about those things even though we want to not care (except for a few fanatics – we are transit fanatics here – most people shouldn’t care about transit it should just work)
To fill in a bit here–what would you consider the measures that constitute coherent trash collection? (I haven’t paid enough attention to this issue in other systems to know what’s missing here.)
Where I live we have wheelie bins for mixed recycling, garden waste and refuse which are collected every two weeks with a smaller bin for food waste which is collected weekly. Aside from the food waste these are all lifted up automatically into the garbage truck.
When I lived in a flat in the UK it was similar, except with larger bins that were stored in a bin store. My impression of other countries is that it is fairly similar, although sometimes there are community bins of different types e.g in Barcelona.
My impression of New York City is that that just throw the garbage out on the street in black bin bags not in any kind of bin. This makes it easy for vermin to steal food from them.
@Tiercelet Trash collection needs to get trash from where I am to a safe disposal location. There are lots of things that an be done with trash: recycle, incinerate, compost, landfill (I’m not aware of anything more, but if you come up with it…). It needs to not pollute the environment if possible. It needs to not attract pests near me (which means somewhat frequent collection and containers that repel pests – in some places that means bear proof).
That is to say once I decide to get rid of something, the less I have to think about it the better. I do not know all the possible issues with trash, I want someone else to figure them out and take care of them for a small fee (really I want free, but since that isn’t possible as small as possible)
@Matthew Hutton Ah, okay. Thanks.
As I understand it, our trash is picked up thrice weekly, recyclables once weekly. Both are currently bagged but there is a brand-new experiment with rodent-proof containers in some neighborhoods (with predictably massive complaints from the free-street-parking-forever lobby, so, sadly, the containers are still a sidewalk obstruction and aren’t readily fed to automated lifters).
Food waste doesn’t have a separate stream for curb pickup, but the sanitation department has introduced a decent-but-could-be-extended network of collection bins for compostables; probably the biggest barrier is that the nearest one may be a few blocks away. Not ideal.
But surprisingly it actually has been a political issue here recently! Just, yet another one blighted by car-centrism.
I think the biggest barriers to it being more of a political issue are a) this city’s politics are so locked within one party that there’s no room for third-party candidates regardless of the quality of platform, and b) the sizable proportion of voters whose guiding political principle is knee-jerk rejection of anything slightly different from yesterday. (And sure, things are a delicate balance around here, but come on… surely better things are possible…)
The comment about MTA’s cost disease problems being offloaded onto disabled people kind of reminds of TfL’s milder version. They only know how to build super-expensively so disabled access improvements are limited to project they are doing anyway (Northern Line extension, Crossrail, Bank-Monument upgrades).
Making the Tube universal access isn’t easy, but its not nearly as hard as they make it to be. Especially since the Tube needs station rebuilding to improve ventilation (not just heating, air quality too), passenger flow and in the long run platform doors*. Heck there a bunch of places where you could probably have a luxury hotel built to pay for it all (Lancaster Gate).
*Which TfL is convinced the only way to do is full Jubilee extension style PED, meanwhile in Tokyo they just do chest-high gates.
I think outside the centre they have done smaller scale accessibility projects on their own.
Boy, this is gonna be a lot to get through.
Some things that piqued my immediate interest:
1) The Metro-North GCT trainshed project. I’ve always wondered if closing Park Avenue to cars would accelerate the 15-20 year construction timeline?
2) IBX – should build/expand the Middle Village tunnel instead of that crazy zig-zag street-running proposal.
3) Nostrand Junction – it’s de-interlined and then interlined again lol! (What’s up with that 8 train?) Did anyone catch that the plan doesn’t actually address the junction itself, but elements beyond? It appears 4/5 both run express to Utica, then the 5 and 8 interline past there.
4) Rockaway Beach – while the cost estimate for a subway is still wildly inflated at nearly $6 billion, this is actually a drop from the previous sky-high $8+ billion figure! (Not that this should inspire any confidence. Also, QueensLink already debunked the whole “park and transit in conflict” nonsense.)
5) On new commuter rail cars: can MTA get with the times and install bike racks on all cars? Much as they may not want to believe, more folks (me included) are using bikes to bridge the “last mile” between the train and work – it ain’t just for recreation, and they shouldn’t be banned at any time!
Anyhow…I’ll check out the rest later. Reading through the comparative evaluation tables, you can almost hear the “we don’t want to do this” echoing out of the subway/rail expansion alternatives. Or maybe that’s just my pessimism talking? But I haven’t seen much to indicate otherwise.
Honestly, I can’t get excited about these things anymore. It’s part of the reason why my NYTIP series has been dormant, despite the fact that I actually have some stuff ready to go.
You can’t run high-ish frequency freight and high frequency passenger on the same tracks. You can have freight – Cross Harbor Freight Tunnel – and food, paper goods, beer, drywall etc. coming in and garbage and recyclables going out or you can have all day gridlock and passenger trains. You can’t have both.
They make bicycles you can take on rush hour trains, now. All the other people on the train manage to make their trip without a bicycle.
I’m not necessarily advancing an argument for intermingling the IBX and freight; the issue is whether the Middle Village tunnel can be widened to maintain separation. I’m aware of the challenge – a cemetery on one side, residences on the other. But the actual cut appears to be wide enough at points, judging by Google Earth images/measurements.
I’m also aware of folding bikes; however, given that the M-8s already have bike racks, I’m sure MTA is aware that such a demand exists. That most riders don’t take bikes on trains does not obviate the need for accommodation.
A two-track cut-and-cover tunnel next to the freight tunnel would not disturb any of the graves (or the residences). The MTA can’t build (because it’s run by people like Janno Lieber and Jamie Torres-Springer) and therefore is too afraid to do it and proposes bad operations instead.
It has to be four tracked from Bay Ridge to Astoria. Or it’s a choice between passenger service or eating I suspect most people would pick eating.
Fine, so build 4 track. Either in a wider trench, or a double deck trench. Both have been done before. You can also build some of the tracks elevated. There are lots of options when you are building.
If there are no bikes in the racks I can stand there. I want personal helicopter to the top of the Met Life building at Grand Central. That doesn’t mean I’m going to get it.
The IBX will cost billions more than it could because they’re building it to be 4 tracks over the whole ROW in case the Cross Harbor Freight Tunnel is ever built. That tunnel may never be built.
They could build the IBX as cheaply and quickly as possible with just 2 tracks over the ROW that LIRR owns, which is most of the project. Later if the freight tunnel is ever done they could fund adding 2 more tracks as apart of that project.
They’re increasing the cost of a project in the present in order to deduce the cost of a future project that will probably never happen.