Land Use Around the Interborough Express
Eric and Elif are working on a project to analyze land use around the corridor of the planned Interborough Express line in New York. The current land use is mostly residential, and a fascinating mix of densities. This leads to work on pedestrian, car, and transit connectedness, and on modal split. As might be expected, car ownership is fairly high along the corridor, especially near the stations that are not at all served by the subway today, as opposed to ones that are only served by radial lines. Elif gave a seminar talk about the subject together with João Paulouro Neves, and I’d like to share some highlights.
The increase in transit accessibility in the above map is not too surprising, I don’t think. Stations at both ends of the line gain relatively little; the stations that gain the most are ones without subway service today, but Metropolitan Avenue, currently only on the M, gains dramatically from the short trip to Roosevelt with its better accessibility to Midtown.
More interesting than this, at least to me, is the role of the line as a way to gradually push out the boundary between the transit- and auto-oriented sections of the city. For this, we should look at a density map together with a modal split map.
At the seminar talk, Elif described IBX as roughly delineating the boundary between the auto- and transit-oriented parts of the city, at least in Brooklyn. (In Queens, the model is much spikier, with ribbons of density and transit ridership along subway lines.) This isn’t quite visible in population density, but is glaring on the second map, of modal split.
Now, to be clear, it’s not that the IBX route itself is a boundary. The route is not a formidable barrier to pedestrian circulation: there are two freight trains per day in each direction, I believe, which means that people can cross the trench without worrying about noise the way they do when crossing a freeway. Rather, it’s a transitional zone, with more line density to the north and less to the south.
The upshot is that IBX is likely to push this transitional zone farther out. There is exceptionally poor crosstown access today – the street network is slow, and while some of the crosstown Brooklyn buses are very busy, they are also painfully slow, with the B35 on Church Avenue, perennially a top 10 route in citywide ridership, winning the borough-wide Pokey Award for its slowness. So we’re seeing strong latent demand for crosstown access in Brooklyn with how much ridership these buses have, and yet IBX is likely to greatly surpass them, because of the grade-separated right-of-way. With such a line in place, it’s likely that people living close to the line will learn to conceive of the subway system plus the IBX route as capable of connecting them in multiple directions: the subway would go toward and away from Manhattan, and IBX orthogonally, providing enough transit accessibility to incentivize people to rely on modes of travel other than the car.
This is especially important since the city’s street network looks differently by mode. Here is pedestrian integration by street:
And here is auto integration:
The auto integration map is not strongly centered the way the pedestrian map is. Quite a lot of the IBX route is in the highest-integration zone, that is with the best access for cars, but the there isn’t really a single continuous patch of high integration the way Midtown Manhattan is the center of the pedestrian map. East Williamsburg has high car integration and is not at all an auto-oriented area; I suspect it has such high integration because of the proximity to the Williamsburg and Kosciuszko Bridges but also to Grand Street and Metropolitan Avenue toward Queens, and while the freeways are zones of pedestrian hostility, Grand and Metropolitan are not.
What this means is that the red color of so many streets along the IBX should not by itself mean the area will remain auto-oriented. More likely, the presence of the line will encourage people to move to the area if they intend to commute by train, and I suspect this will happen even at stations that already have service to Manhattan and even among people who work in Manhattan. The mechanism here is that a subway commuter chooses where to live based on commuter convenience but also access to other amenities, and being able to take the train (for example) from Eastern Brooklyn to Jackson Heights matters. It’s a secondary effect, but it’s not zero. And then for people commuting to Brooklyn College or intending to live at one of the new stops (or at Metropolitan, which has Midtown access today but not great access), it’s a much larger effect.
The snag is that transit-oriented development is required. To some extent, the secondary effect of people intending to commute by train coming to the neighborhood to commute from it can generate ridership by itself; in the United States, all ridership estimates assume no change in zoning, due to federal requirements (the Federal Transit Administration has been burned before by cities promising upzoning to get funding for lines and then not delivering). But then transit-oriented development can make it much more, and much of the goal of the project is to recommend best practices in that direction: how to increase density, improve pedestrian accessibility to ensure the areas of effect become more rather than less walkable, encourage mixed uses, and so on.
Pedestrian Observations 
Interborough expess looks gamechanging. It blows my mind that New York has had this track just chilling there doing basically f all for so long.
London has a similar orbital line (gospel oak to barking), which I think was also built mainly for freight. However, even though it has a route that I would argue is much less useful that the IBX , it is now a successful Overground line.
There are a couple things based on vibes I want to add. Firstly, you say the ‘people can cross the trench without worrying about noise the way they do when crossing a freeway’. I think another factor is the sheer size of freeways. The unpleasantness is the feeling of emptyness crossing it. A 15/20 m gap between active frontages in the crossings accross pairs of train tracks feels like nothing, but a 50 m freeway crossing feels completely different. There’s this feeling of insecurity and isolation, like if something happened to you, nobody would see/know. It’s not really a rational feeling, it’s just the vibe.
I think it might also be underappreciated the impact of feeling like you can go “everywhere” in a city without a car that the IBX will bring. Being able to take a train in all four cardinal directions (and then walk or take a bus), is a completely different feeling to just having a train that can take you into the city centre. It greatly increases how open people are to car free living.
I suggest you examine the flood plain maps before anticipating the number of new job locations the IBX will generate in Brooklyn.
Brooklyn College is not in a floodplain?
Brooklyn College is pretty close.
https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Environment/Sea-Level-Rise-Maps-2050s-500-year-Floodplain-/qwca-zqw3
https://dcp.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=1c37d271fba14163bbb520517153d6d5
The IBX between Utica and New Lots Aves, is in the either the 100 or 500 year flood 2080 flood plain. That may be enough for insurance companies not to provide insurance for building on the sites.
First, no where in this post does Alon talk about Brooklyn job growth. Just the opposite, Alon talks about residential impacts not employment impacts – IBX is shown to increase job accessibility in inner Queens neighborhoods that have direct service to downtown on the M but currently no easy subway transfer to midtown. Alon also talks about residential neighborhoods that are currently high car use become more car free, because instead of only having easy subway access to Manhattan/jobs, would also have easy subway access to Brooklyn & Queens/shopping & entertainment.
Second, only 2.3km of the IBX route is at the very edge of the 2080 flood plain (it isn’t continuous between Utica and New Lots), go just half a block north and you are out of it. This is a very small amount of possible new job locations in Brooklyn. The 2050 flood plain covers even less area.
Third, no one is going to cancel a project because of possible flood impacts 30-60 years from now. The developer, bankers, underwriters will all be retired or dead by then, with the project long since paid off. Do you really think anyone cares about a 500 year floodplain?!?! An area that is expected to flood twice a millennium!?!? 500 years ago NYC didn’t even exist! These flood plains also assume no future mitigation, which is a poor assumption. Lots of areas that were in the 5 year floodplain in the Netherlands are now unlikely to flood at all due to the Zuiderzee and Delta Works projects.
Finally the entire area of all flood plains is completely built out now with homes and businesses. Could you please point me to the news reports of every business south of Kings Highway closing soon because of lack of insurance? Being in a flood plain doesn’t mean you can get no insurance, it means you have to pay extra for flood insurance (or depending on the area can’t get flood insurance). But flood insurance is not a requirement to build a building or run a business. You can still get regular property insurance.
The M train goes to Midtown and through the 53rd Street tunnel to Queens Blvd. … Through Jackson Heights…
”inner Queens neighborhoods that have direct service to downtown on the M”
(emphasis added)
The issue isn’t the north end of the M in Forrest Hills or through Jackson Park but the southern end in Ridgewood that have to detour to downtown to get to midtown, even though the direct service on the Queens Blvd lines are just a few km away.
They don’t have to transfer because the M train crosses the Williamsburg Bridge and then heads uptown to Midtown and then through the 53rd Street tunnel. When service is running normally. It’s terminating at 57th Street – in Midtown – currently. It’s the J train that crosses the Williamsburg Bridge and goes downtown. With same platform transfers to the M train. That goes to Midtown from the bridge.
I did not explain myself correctly. The M from Ridgewood does go to Midtown, but it takes the long way around via Brooklyn. It would be much faster to reach Midtown from Metropolitan/Fresh Pond to take the IBX to 74th/Roosevelt Ave and then the 7 or Queens Blvd lines. That’s why on Alon’s first map starting this post the highest increase in job access was for IBX stations at Eliot/Metropolitan/Myrtle even though most of those areas are already within walking distance of an existing M station.
Honest question, not being a New Yorker: Doesn’t the Williamsburg Bridge connect Brooklyn to Downtown? Isn’t it Downtown south of Houston St and Midtown north of 34th (or so)?
Silly me, I was imagining sending a train from Queens Blvd to the Mrytle Ave. El. Taking the M to the end of the line, hiking to another train, toddling along, local, to Jackson Heights and then changing trains again would not be faster than just taking a one seat ride to Midtown from an M train station.
All of the trains from Brooklyn enter Manhattan downtown. Because that is where Brooklyn is. All of the trains from the Bronx enter Manhattan uptown. Because that is where the Bronx is. The trains from Brooklyn continue going uptown once they enter Manhattan and eventually get to midtown. Some of them keep on going uptown and eventually get to the Bronx. Some of them make a turn and head to Queens. The trains from the Bronx continue to head downtown and get to Midtown. And keep on going, becoming trains to Brooklyn!
……and you do realize the subway map is not geographically accurate?
From Metropolitian Ave via the Williamburg Bridge to Times Square may be slightly shorter than going allllllllllllllllllllllLLLl the way up to Queens Blvd. to head west from there.
For the type of trips I am talking about you wouldn’t need to get on the M and then transfer, you could get right on the IBX at Metropolitan or Myrtle, etc. The IBX will not be “toddling” along during this stretch, it is in fully grade separated right of way. Being new build it might have faster average speed than some old subway lines.
“……and you do realize the subway map is not geographically accurate?
From Metropolitian Ave via the Williamburg Bridge to Times Square may be slightly shorter than going allllllllllllllllllllllLLLl the way up to Queens Blvd. to head west from there.”
You are wrong. Taking the M from Metropolitan to 42nd St is ~14.75km, from Metropolitan along the IBX route to Roosevelt and then the 7 to 5th Ave is ~13km. That’s the best case for the M. Going further north is even longer than getting on a Queens Blvd service and going anywhere to the East Side is faster from Queens as well.
For someone claiming the need to be geographically accurate you are showing surprising ignorance by saying “allllllll the way up to Queens Blvd.” Metropolitan Ave is about ‘level’ with 34th St. Midtown is north of 34th. Going north to Queens Blvd gets one closer to Midtown before turning west. Taking the M involves going south to Brooklyn, taking one farther from Midtown before turning west.
There is also the issue of speed not just distance. From Roosevelt you can catch a <7> or the <F>. With the M you are stuck on a local.
Lower Manhattan is from about Chambers Street south; Midtown is from 34th to 59th, with employment peaking toward the northern end (high 40s) if you’re middle-class and toward the southern end (30s) if you’re working-class. There are also something like four times as many jobs in Midtown as in Lower Manhattan.
So yes, you can get to Midtown via the Williamsburg Bridge on the M, but it’s a pretty slow, roundabout connection. You can get to Lower Manhattan via the J/Z, but the Manhattan end of the bridge is not yet Lower Manhattan but rather a few stops away.
Changing to the IBX at Metropolitan to change again at 74th/Roosevelt isn’t particularly direct either…. If you don’t want long subway rides pay Manhattan rents…
“Changing to the IBX at Metropolitan to change again at 74th/Roosevelt isn’t particularly direct either”
See above how going north from the end of the M, to get somewhere farther north (Midtown) is more direct that going south from there. Its true that the farther out you live the longer your trip to the center will be. That doesn’t mean there is no benefit to improving the transit system and making those longer journey’s shorter than they are now.
“Lower Manhattan is from about Chambers Street south;”
Thank you for the clarification. I had no idea that DT was such a small area at the tip of Manhattan.
“B35 on Church Avenue, perennially a top 10 route in citywide ridership, winning the borough-wide Pokey Award for its slowness. So we’re seeing strong latent demand for crosstown access in Brooklyn with how much ridership these buses have, and yet IBX is likely to greatly surpass them,…”
A comparison to the B35 would be relevant, if the IBX were within walking distance of the B35 stops and duplicated its service. It’s not. Just because there might be perceived demand for service in one area doesn’t mean that demand would be replicated in another location.
684K people live within a walking distance of a B35 stop. Of these, 546K already live within walking distance of an existing subway station. The IBX would increase figure by 26K to to 572K. The 26K increase is a sober measure of how relevant the B35’s ridership is to the IBX potential demand.
The B35 is not the only high-ridership circumferential route in Brooklyn – the B6 and B82 are very strong too, and at least at one point last decade were also top-10 citywide.
The same relevance criterion applies to the B6 and B82.
906K people live within walking distance of a B6 bus stop. However, only 70K people live within walking distance of both a B6 both and a proposed IBX stop.
The figures for the combined B82/B82+ service are: 1.2M live within walking distance of a B82/B82+ bus stop. When the stops outside of walking distance to a proposed IBX stop are removed, that number drops to 12,670.
100k people using the IBX for work each day is like 25 million rides a year. Assuming another 25 million leisure trips and you are talking the same ridership as the Manchester Metrolink, or 1/4 of the ridership of the whole London overground network.
Those 546k live within walking distance of an existing subway station that only provides N-S service, not E-W. The fact that B35 has so many riders shows how much the existing subway stops are not meeting their travel needs. By providing an E-W route, you allow people the opportunity to take an existing subway line to the IBX to get where their are going, much faster than their current journey of bus to subway. People will also walk farther to a subway stop than a bus stop for exactly the higher speed/saved time, increasing those 546k/26k figures you give. The IBX can also of course be used by people who don’t live within walking distance of a stop, but who would take another subway line to the IBX to get to their destination (like many of the approximately 20k students at Brooklyn College).
Just based on your numbers, there are ~110k people within walking distance of an IBX stop who would gain subway service. If half of them took one round trip a day, that would be ~9,000 boardings per km if every trip was a transfer, more if trips stayed on the IBX, which is higher than any rapid transit system in the US except NY, Bos, Phila, or LA (Red/Purple line only). Riders from outside the IBX walkshed to places like Brooklyn College would drive that number up when they board to go home. That’s good for a radial line 10-15km out.
“like many of the approximately 20k students at Brooklyn College”
Here’s some fact checking.
From Brooklyn College’s website:
https://www.brooklyn.edu/about/fast-facts/
Total fall 2023 enrollment was 13,889, including 10,443 undergraduate and 2,379 graduate students.
As of fall 2023, we have 457 full-time faculty members, 939 part-time faculty, and 117 graduate assistants.
Faculty comes to 1543. That makes 15,432 for the student body and teaching staff combined. Non-teaching employees might bring the total up to around 17K. Not all would be using the IBX, going to and from the College.
“People will also walk farther to a subway stop than a bus stop for exactly the higher speed/saved time, increasing those 546k/26k figures you give.”
I’m using are 1/4 walking distance mile for a bus stop and 1/2 mile for a subway stop. Sorry, if I did not make that clear.
What I did was place a point at each bus stop and figure out which census block centroids were within 1/4 mile of the stop. The 2020 population for these census blocs was the basis for the 684K population figure within walking distance of the B35.
I then measured the distance from these census blocks to its closest existing subway stop. Those census blocks within 1/2 mile of its closest existing subway stop were considered to be within walking distance. That’s the basis for the 546K figure for the population that’s within walking distance of a B35 bus stop and an existing subway stop.
Finally, redid this calculation but included the IBX stops with existing subway stops. I recalculated the census block distance to the nearest stop. Again, those within 1/2 mile of an existing or proposed IBX stop were considered within walking distance. That raised the total to 572K for a net gain of 26K
The 1/4 and 1/2 mile “walking” distance to bus and subway stops is in accordance with generally accepted practices.
It appears I used a source that was either reporting the 2019 enrollment at Brooklyn College, or confusing total versus undergraduate. Either way you are correct, total students and staff is 15-17k, not 20k. Although you are correct that not all would use IBX, I suspect many would since the campus is right next to it and would have a stop, plus college campuses are major ridership drivers, with faculty and students far more likely to use transit than the population at large. More to the point, this is a ridership pool not reflected in your walkshed population, since Brooklyn college enrolls from well outside of the route of the B35 or path if IBX.
Regarding those walkshed numbers, although it was not clear you used different distances, 1/4mi bus and 1/2 mi train is well established as you note, so I accept your values.
Here’s some data from the LEHD O/D census regarding journey-to-work commutes from, to and within 1/2 mile of the IBX stations.
For 226K commuters living within 1/2 mile of an IBX station: 3.00% work in the Bronx; 37.32% work in Brooklyn; 40.84% work in Manhattan; 17.24% work in Queens and 1.59% work on Staten Island.
For the 169K jobs within 1/2 mile of an IBX station: 10.49% live in the Bronx; 53.68% live in Brooklyn; 7.22% live in Manhattan; 23.40% live in Queens and 5.21% live on Staten Island.
These figures include 23K commuters who live and work within 1/2 mile of an IBX station. For 51.32% of them, the journey-to-work distance is less than a 20 minute/1 mile walk. The average and median journey-to-work distances for the remaining 48.68% are 3.680 and 3.152 miles, respectively. These short distances suggest that bike-to-work is a realistic option for 30.35% of the 23K. (Bike-to-work distance is between 1.0 and 4.0 miles.) This leaves 18.34% or ~4K people whose journey-to-work for whom the IBX makes sense.
This is completely facetious logic. Subway lines have benefit to people beyond just those who live and work on the same line. First of all this thing called a “transfer” or “connection” exists, whereby a person who lives within 1/2 mi of an IBX station rides the IBX to another subway line, before arriving at their job. Based on your pre-school-level logic of only considering people who live and work on the same line, virtually the entire NY Subway system doesn’t “make sense” – huge numbers of people take the 7 in from Queens before transferring to another line in Manhattan to reach their job, or start on one of the branches in the Bronx before transferring to a different trunk line to reach Midtown.
In short IBX makes sense for almost all of the 395k commuters living or working along its length (excluding perhaps those in SI who can’t commute via subway, and some proportion in Queens where the subway doesn’t reach), not a paltry 4k.
As an aside assuming that everyone who lives within 6km of their job will bike is not at all correct. Age, disability, inclement weather will all mean that not everyone who could bike will. If New Yorkers biked at anywhere near this rate then the city’s busses would be empty, since the average bus trip is this distance or shorter.
And of course journey-to-work is not the only kind of trip people make on the subway. Post-Covid it may no longer even be the most common trip. People going to school, going shopping, going to the doctor, going to visit friends, going to a concert, etc., etc., etc., are all trips that people make. Not only do every single one of the 395k commuters/workers along the IBX make these kinds of trips, but there are hundreds of thousands of more residents along the IBX who do not commute who also make them, and millions more in the city who could take trips to a destination along IBX. IBX makes sense for all of them too.
“Subway lines have benefit to people beyond just those who live and work on the same line. First of all this thing called a “transfer” or “connection” exists, whereby a person who lives within 1/2 mi of an IBX station rides the IBX to another subway line, before arriving at their job.”
It’s fairly easy to answer the transfer question. There’s really only 1 – to the Flushing Line at Roosevelt Ave. One could place an upper bound by remembering that the Queens figure of 17.24% comes to 39K commuters who work in all of Queens – not just those along the Flushing Line.
The number of commuters who live within walking distance of IBX station (excluding the Roosevelt Ave station) and work within walking distance of a Flushing Line station between Queensboro Plaza and Main St is 10K.
“In short IBX makes sense for almost all of the 395k commuters living or working along its length (excluding perhaps those in SI who can’t commute via subway, and some proportion in Queens where the subway doesn’t reach), not a paltry 4k.“
People who do not live and work within walking distance of a proposed stop are more likely to use one of the existing subways along the IBX route. It’s obviously the way to go to/from Manhattan or the Bronx. I could break down origin/destination by neighborhood for those that live and work in Brooklyn. However, those that don’t live and work within walking distance of an IBX station would most likely just take an existing subway. The reason is the IBX stations provide very little additional walk to station access that isn’t already provided by existing station.
Equally important to the number of people who gain walk-to-station access is the total distance saved. Here are the figures for the IBX stations in decreasing order of new found use:
Utica Ave: 21,770; 14,453 mi; Eliot Ave: 17,784; 8,482 mi; Grand Ave: 17,459; 8,423 mi; Remsen Ave: 15,468: 5,290; Myrtle Ave: 7,791; 2,083 mi; Flatbush Ave: 7,256; 1,036 mi; 8th Ave: 694; 9 mi; Metropolitan Ave: 471; 30 mi; Divide the total miles by the number to get an estimate of distance saved by the IBX station. It’s around 0.3 – 0.6 for these stations.
4th Ave, Atlantic Ave, Brooklyn Army Terminal, E 16th St, Linden Blvd, Livonia Ave, McDonald Ave, New Utrecht Ave, Roosevelt Ave, Sutter Ave and Wilson Ave offer no additional walk to station access.
“journey-to-work is not the only kind of trip people make on the subway.“
Agreed. However, the census LEHD O/D census is the only one that is publicly available, yearly and does not use stratified sampling. The IBX team used NYMTC’s 2010/2011 Regional Household Travel Survey to estimate IBX demand. Participants are supposed to write down all their travel trips. This data was then entered, categorized, etc. It’s got several problems. First, it’s regional so that the number of samples for trips within NYC is limited. The number that originate or terminate along the IBX is even smaller. In order to get decent sample sizes, the data was grouped by census tract – not the much smaller census block. There was another reason for using census tracts. The numbers were weighted by population, income, etc. to adjust for under sampling. The weights are based on the 2010 census at the census tract level. The anticipated completion date for the IBX is around 2030. It’s projected use predictions will be 20 years old by that time.
The census LEHD RAC, WAC and OD census numbers are based on state unemployment insurance tax records. It’s updated yearly. The data is resolved into census block precision. It’s not without problems. The biggest is job location. It’s based on the employer’s tax address which may differ from the worker’s actual job location.
“It’s fairly easy to answer the transfer question. There’s really only 1 – to the Flushing Line at Roosevelt Ave . . . . The number of commuters who live within walking distance of IBX station (excluding the Roosevelt Ave station) and work within walking distance of a Flushing Line station between Queensboro Plaza and Main St is 10K.”
Your logic is beyond absurd. The IBX would offer transfers to the R, N, D, F, Q, L, 3, LIRR, A, C, J, M, 7, <7>, E, F (again in Queens), <F>, and R (again in Queens). My list discounts the B because I’m not sure if they would change Avenue H to be a B stop, and the 2, 5 because the Flatbush Av stop is not directly on top of the tracks like every other transfer. Include those and it is 21 different services with a transfer to IBX.
Why are you only counting people who work between Queenboro and Main St? Have you heard of something called Midtown Manhattan? It is the largest job center on the continent of North America. For people living north of Atlantic Ave or so it would be faster to take IBX to the 7 or Queens Blvd lines to reach Midtown than taking the long way through DT Brooklyn and Downtown.
More broadly, you have an extremely juvenile view of how rapid transit works, whereby you appear to think that if someone is at a station they are fully served because they can get on a train to somewhere, without considering actual service and travel patterns. Someone who lives in Midwood and works in Ozone Park would take IBX and transfer to the A, they might not take the B and transfer in DT Brooklyn because of how much extra distance and time it adds.
“People who do not live and work within walking distance of a proposed stop are more likely to use one of the existing subways along the IBX route”
Real life disproves this so thoroughly it calls into question your competence to comment on this matter. People transfer all of the time. Everyday thousands of people who don’t live within walking distance of the 7 use that train to get to work by, for example, first taking the G from Greenpoint or the N from Astoria and then transferring at Court Sq or Queensboro. Everyday thousands of people in the Bronx who don’t work along the 4/5/6 start their trip to work on one of those lines and then transfer to a west side line at 161st or 149th. I gave the simplest example of how a south Brooklyn to east Brooklyn commute vastly benefits from IBX. If people only rode subway lines when both their origin and destination were within walking distance of a station on that same line then the system would be empty. It is not.
“4th Ave, Atlantic Ave, Brooklyn Army Terminal, E 16th St, Linden Blvd, Livonia Ave, McDonald Ave, New Utrecht Ave, Roosevelt Ave, Sutter Ave and Wilson Ave offer no additional walk to station access.”
Those stations do not gain ‘walk-to-some-station-access’ but I hope I’ve made abundantly clear how having a short walk distance to a station on a north-south line does not help if your travel need is east-west.
The fact that employment data is better than non-commute travel data does not mean that the non-commute trips do not exist, it just means they are not measured as well. If I don’t go check the thermometer in the afternoon it does not mean the temperature is the same at sunrise. As transit ridership has recovered from Covid the percentage of trips that are commute trips is lower. That means people are making more non-commute trips (probably from people working at home). That means IBX would benefit more than the data from 2010.
The subway map is not geographically accurate. North of Atlantic Ave the IBX won’t be traveling east/west it will be traveling north/south. There aren’t going to be a lot stations either.
There is no place to change from the IND ( A train ) to the BMT ( B train ) in downtown Brooklyn. Changing from a B train to an A train can happen at West 4th Street or Columbus Circle in Manhattan. I suspect that both people who live in Midwood and work in Ozone Park, drive.
“There is no place to change from the IND ( A train ) to the BMT ( B train ) in downtown Brooklyn.”
Technically you could double transfer, from the B to Changing from a B train to an N/R/W at Barclays and then to the A at Metro Tech, but that all just proves my point: IBX provide connection options that don’t exist today, despite Stephen Bauman’s incorrect focus on the fact that most IBX stops are already subway stops today.
“I suspect that both people who live in Midwood and work in Ozone Park, drive.”
I also suspect they do today as well, but with IBX they would have an option to commute via subway, and some would. This is the crux of the failing of Stephen Bauman’s analysis, it ignores these very valid new riders/trips by only analyzing the line as if it were stand alone and could only serve trips that originate and end on the line.
why would I hike from the Brighton Line across the IRT to get to the Fourth Ave platforms at Barclay’s when I could change from a B or a Q train to an R train across the platform at DeKalb? You would be very very disappointed if you changed to an N at Barclays. Except in the dead of night the N train uses the bridge – it doesn’t stop at MetroTech. ….And you meant weekday daytime because the B only runs on weekdays.
It feels particularly disingenuous to highlight the benefits of IBX as a whole and in particular as a wholly grade-separated rail line, and then not mention that the MTA is currently forging ahead with a version of this plan that builds a massively wasteful parallel light rail line which is forced onto a street-running alignment immediately north of Metropolitan Avenue due to the presence of a cemetery precluding the same wasteful parallelization happening everywhere else.
Parallelization which is happening everywhere else in the plan for the usual bad operational reasons: we can’t possibly figure out how to share a rapid transit corridor with two freight trains a day, using conventional rail equipment means it “has” to be M7s/LIRR and not “a subway” (what is PATH?), capacity on the corridor has to be built today to plan for the everdistant possibility that freight rail traffic might need more of it 20 years from now if they manage to complete the cross-harbor rail tunnel, etc.
ETA, for reasons I truly cannot fathom, currently holds the position that the problem here is the street running segment and the solution is to waste even more money on punching through a tunnel expansion in spite of the inevitable backlash (because naturally anyone who has a problem with this is just a NIMBY, has an axe to grind, or is seeking payoffs for their neighborhood) – and, crucially, not that maybe fully quad-tracking an all-but-abandoned right-of-way to preserve an average of one dedicated track per each daily freight train is an exorbitant and unapologetically indulgent response to a problem that exists primarily in law books and not in the physical world.
ETA is wrong and must abandon its support of the light rail option, which actually is unsuitable for IBX, and return to advocating for a conventional rail solution.
The reason for the support for the tunnel is that a cut-and-cover tunnel is really cheap. Usually cut-and-cover is not pursued because it disturbs the nearby residents, but everyone near the site of the tunnel is dead.
It’s infinitely more expensive then spending $0 to not build a second tunnel next to the one that sees two trains a day; the tunnel would be “fine” (or at least, going to war over the technicality that it’d only be disturbing landscaping/mourning visitors and no actual graves need be relocated would be justifiable) if the main reason to do it was that we couldn’t fit any more trains through there.
We can, though. Two freight trains a day are hardly an obstacle to frequent all day rapid transit service on a fully double-tracked line. The main reason to spend infinitely more than $0 is merely that we don’t want to and we also don’t want to conceive of the possibility of a subway-like train on FRA controlled railroads.
You could probably run 15 trains an hour off peak with only 2 freight trains a day on the line.
CSX currently owns the Fremont Secondary from and including the All Faiths Tunnel to Jackson Heights-Roosevelt Av. They probably won’t agree to allowing the IBX to run on their 2 tracks, and buying the Fremont Secondary from them would likely be very expensive. So it wouldn’t be $0 to run on the existing tracks.
Furthermore, most of the cost of the IBX is in building accessible stations, rebuilding bridges crossing the ROW, etc. These are all things that would cost roughly the same amount if the existing 2 tracks were rehabilitated for the IBX. The ROW is already wide enough for 4 tracks except for the All Faiths Tunnel, so adding 2 new tracks is not very expensive.
Also, getting FRA waivers to run 24-hour rapid transit on the same tracks as freight won’t be easy. PATH PA5 cars don’t actually run on the same tracks as freight or mainline rail. They receive their own FRA waivers based on this, as the cars themselves are not fully FRA compliant. So getting a waiver for the IBX would be much more difficult.
That said, triple tracking could be much more feasible. Freight currently uses only one track, so full separation would be possible, and an extra one track under All Faiths would not go underneath the mausoleum. If they actually end up building the Cross Harbor Freight Tunnel in the future, they can add a fourth track under All Faiths.
The freight railway companies in America are privately owned, so you do a commercial deal where they get to run half a dozen freight trains a day in exchange for the city covering all/most of the full running costs of the line. Seems like a no brainer.
Also getting a waiver really doesn’t seem hard to me.
Can’t some senior New York politicians make sure the process of getting these waivers etc it is prioritised?
The issue of light rail or heavy rail having that much of a difference in capacity has always been a red herring, especially in the age of modern light metro technology. As for the tunnel, MTA should definitely be looking at temporal separation to run FTA passenger trains FRA freight tracks as a phase 1, regardless whether by law it’s technically light or heavy rail. Tunnel plans should all be drafted and ready to go in at the same time as Cross-Harbor.
Right, temporal separation is an option as well. I don’t consider it the best option but it’s certainly a better option than quad-tracking. (New York already has PATH trains, which are FRA-compliant, and that FRA-noncompliant rapid transit rolling stock which could run on the line also exists in the world and we can go out and get it. Either way, it’s still all jurisdictional rather than physical problem-solving.)
The capacity issue to me is purely about the capacity of trains that you can fit through the tunnel – it is not that I don’t think light metro can handle the expected passenger load, but rather that light metro to keep passenger uses separated from a line whose freight traffic “might” intensify in 20 years is wasteful and indulgent when the capacity of the tunnel that exists is such that you could run all the IBX service today; certainly we can plan for the future and have the second tunnel on a shelf ready to go should it become necessary, but that money can be spent on other subway expansions or things useful today if we don’t spend it in anticipation of it being useful 20 years from now instead.
Not only that, but it’s possible to have temporal separation AND run 24 hour service.
The way you do this is that during the “freight hours”, you single-track the passenger service for the brief segment of the tunnel. Since headways in the middle of the night are probably every 10 minutes or worse, this does not affect frequency. During “passenger hours” you can still run every 2 minutes (if there’s demand for it) as you have two passenger tracks along the whole length of the line.
Alon, what do you think are the odds the IBX is completed with no street running portion?
I don’t know.
It’s hard to evaluate the odds on a human emotion/sentimentality issue but the fact that it’s a cemetery and tunnel advocates already need to clarify that only landscaping would be dug up and no actual graves are in the path of the tunnel leads me to believe that the odds are quite bad actually.
Of course, if IBX is anything other than a street-compatible mode, the odds of it being built without street running become equal to the odds of it being built at all. This is one more reason why support for light rail should be dropped in favor of pushing for a conventional rail solution.
(There’s a mausoleum in the way and it would need to be moved; there are 500 crypts there, about half full.)
Although the tone of my commentary easily drifts into hostile, I am acting in good faith here – the anger is real and it is born of passion that we can, should, must and will do better than we are currently. Similarly, it takes a lot for me to conclude that anyone I’m arguing with on this site or anywhere else is not similarly doing so from a place of good faith.
With that in mind, I’m again making the assumption that ETA genuinely believes what they have posted under IBX on their initiatives page and what I have quoted above. A less charitable person might see a comment clarifying that a mausoleum is in the way and assume that ETA is in fact lying or at least misdirecting through the promise of “not a single grave needs to be disturbed” while anticipating that value engineering will make such an outcome occur anyway.
Re tone of commentary: I don’t mind, it’s fine :).
Re the ETA piece: it was published before the issues with the mausoleum became better-known, and we just edited it to reflect this.
Putting a new cut and cover tunnel through a cemetery sounds like an extremely bad idea that has no political viability.
You’d probably need to have half a dozen freight trains an hour or something before you’d consider it.
You’re exactly right, of course, which is why – not the only reason why, but certainly a key reason why – IBX light rail is a terrible idea.
Picking this fight at all is an unforced error on the part of ETA and transit advocates in general.
Why is building a cut-and-cover/SEM tunnel underneath the corner of a mausoleum less politically viable than convincing politicians that the Cross Harbor Freight Tunnel is not going to happen, negotiating with CSX to run on their tracks and squeeze freight trains in between 3 tph nighttime IBX service, and convincing the FRA to grant a waiver to run rapid transit alongside freight, which it has never done before?
Because to get the waiver you have to persuade a handful of politicians to lean on the FRA to be sensible.
Plus those same politicians benefit in a quid-pro-quo from a real project that benefits their constituents and that they can put on their campaign literature.
Well, two of those three things aren’t even necessary in this case: building IBX as mainline-compatible rail means running mainline-compatible stock, which can be a rapid-transit-like EMU while also meeting standards appropriate for the FRA waiver (you could also give up and just run M8s, but I’m confident that there’s a middle ground here between that and “must get a waiver for exactly R211s”), and doing nothing on the second tunnel now in no way precludes building it later following the successful completion of Cross-harbor. Actually, even then, because freight only cares about its final destination and not how far it is deviating from the optimal route in the name of efficiency, it’s much easier to then build a freight relief line literally anywhere else – including deviating 1000 feet out of the way to be outside the cemetery, but also, the freight does not care if it deviates a few extra miles to avoid having to build another tunnel at all versus looping back around via the Lower Montauk and some freight capacity relief track.
Negotiating with CSX is the only one of those things actually required for this, and CSX clearly does not place high value on the existence of that tunnel since it currently allows it to sit empty for about 95% of the day. Incidentally, CSX runs far more freight traffic straight through the heart of northern Virginia on its main line to the south – a line which does have enough current and projected traffic to justify a full separation of freight and passenger uses. CSX there has agreed to sell 384 miles of ROW to the state of Virginia (https://www.csx.com/index.cfm/about-us/media/press-releases/csx-closes-sale-on-first-phase-of-the-525-million-rail-transaction-with-the-commonwealth-of-virginia/) at a going rate of $525 million, including a permanent easement and half the tracks on the RF&P to Richmond plus all or nearly all of the Buckingham Branch from Doswell to Clifton Forge. At the going rate set by this transaction, buying the Fremont Secondary outright – all 4 miles of it – would cost a cool $5.5 million, and buying just the 0.1 mile tunnel would cost a hair under $137 thousand – though I will concede that this is not $0 and therefore a new tunnel is “merely” a roughly 10000% cost overrun rather than infinitely more.
And, of course, it’s also worth restating what this is about: it’s about properly utilizing the resources we have and the infrastructure we have today, before building new infrastructure as rising capacity requirements warrant that – later. So we can still plan for the second tunnel and shelve it in a “break glass for emergency” project to do 20 or 30 years from now. (I suspect it’s more likely that freight would secure an alternate route since gravel doesn’t care if it takes even a 10 mile detour to avoid a tunnel, but…)
It’s eminently doable, and without temporal separation or any kind of tunnel expansion, so long as we’re willing to give up on it being “light rail” specifically; conventional rail is absolutely capable of supporting rapid transit frequency while still operating in a context that involves the possibility of freight movements.
Bad spamfilter :(.
We’ve moved cemeteries to build freeways, reservoirs, and all sorts of other public works. Not sure why a freight lane would suddenly be the impossible task.
You wouldn’t move a cemetery for those things now though.
And you never would have moved a cemetery in a wealthy area for those things.
You might for a reservoir where you cant avoid doing otherwise.
What exactly are the pedestrian and auto integration maps measuring?
Do the auto integrated areas along the IBX provide good opportunities for large scale TOD because they are not ‘nice’ and needing to be protected like sought-after neighbourhoods further west? With the proviso that they perhaps need more large scale intervention to be made walkable etc.?
The integration maps show the Space Syntax method‘s “Integration” measure, defined as:
“a normalised measure of distance from any a space of origin to all others in a system. In general, it calculates how close the origin space is to all other spaces, and can be seen as the measure of relative asymmetry (or relative depth)”
So basically, which areas are more likely to become destinations, solely based distances in the street network.
We analyzed the road network (cars) and pedestrian network that also included pathways and routes through parks, separately. What this implies for us, is that, Manhattan is already a pedestrian friendly center, whereas the IBX corridor’s street network is more car friendly, which we see as a good reason to invest in street re-designs and additional measures to improve walkability, along with other TOD changes. Walkability is important if we want more people to walk to transit stations, and it would already improve with densification and better mix of land uses, but street-level improvements are also necessary.
Wouldn’t this encourage gentrification and displacement of the existing residents along the route for wealthier city commuters? Even the outer areas of Brooklyn and Queens are getting expensive as it is. Buses aren’t used by real estate interests to signal areas ready for gentrification. To me this suggests that bus rapid transit may be a better option instead, or implementing a rent freeze for areas impacted by the IBX.
Concerns over displacement are valid.
In fact, a less charitable person than I am would read the last paragraph of Alon’s post and conclude that displacement is actually the goal since you can’t upzone a property without replacing the building that’s already on it and that this is literally displacing whoever lived there already (even if only temporarily). I certainly hope that they support strong resident protections including but not limited to a guarantee of rent-controlled housing during construction followed by permanent occupancy in the new building at an equal or lower cost or at the very least that they are deferring to housing policy advocates to take that fight while staying focused on transit.
However, refusing to build or enhance transit (or building a literal second-class system, as bus rapid transit here would be) is not a viable solution to that problem as it simply further entrenches the paradigm of unequal access to services and the false dichotomy of rich man’s trains / poor man’s buses.
The right answer is to prevent displacement from occurring, not to prevent investment into communities as a way to forestall displacement.
Concerns over displacement are never valid. If you have a healthy zoning/permitting process you will easily build enough homes for rents to stay reasonable and people to be able to afford to live somewhere they want to/will be happy in/is convenient for their life.
If you have a healthy economy people should be moving all of the time, coming or going for school, a new job opportunity, to live with someone they love, etc.
If your position is that certain neighborhoods only belong to certain communities (a certain race, ethnicity, nationality, socio-economic group etc.) then you are just a racist/classist/bigot repeating talking points of the people who created redlines and sundown towns, a practice that has somehow been adopted by the progressive left for reasons I can’t fathom.
Finally, the logic of gentrification is that improvements (new housing, better transit) are a liability which will attract people and drive disadvantaged residents out. But this is a self-defeating (self-fulfilling?) paradigm that condemns disadvantaged communities to remain disadvantaged, because anything that they could use to better themselves (a new park for fun, a shorter commute) is denied them. ”Only rich areas get new homes or trains so that no one wants to move to the poor areas” is about the most harmful thing you can do to the people living in poor areas, it is literal economic discrimination.
If you ever wonder why all of my comments sound like I’m angry pretty much all of the time, it’s because people can literally just post:
And then spend the rest of the comment justifying that statement instead of re-reading that line, immediately deleting the draft, and carefully rethinking what comment they want to make.
I didn’t read the rest of your comment. I am sure when I do there will be a chain of logic justifying that statement based on things which might be true in a fair or objective political landscape but certainly are not true today in New York or anywhere else in the USA and I may or may not follow up with a proper response.
”I didn’t read the rest of your comment.”
I read the entirety of your comment, as I do with all comments I reply to. If you do not wish to hear opinions that are different than yours or debate ideas that is your choice, although I’m not sure why you are commenting on a blog if that is the case since it’s pretty much all we do here.
Displacement has nothing to do with transit, it is solely a factor of inadequate supply of homes with respect to demand. It is also a completely solvable issue, even in NYC and the USA. Places exist in the US right now with reasonable rents with respect to income, plenty of housing despite rapid population growth, and no cries of displacement as seen in NY or SF. If you want to end displacement in NYC then repeal the 1961 zoning act that down zoned so much of the city from the six story mid rises that made the city affordable beginning with the New Law Tenement Act. That’s it.
With that economic argument out of the way, and issue over displacement on social grounds just boils down to bigotry, a desire by some people to not see people different than them (people of a different race, different sexuality, different employment sector, different education, etc.) move into ‘their’ neighborhood.
Neither logically incorrect economic arguments nor bigoted social ones should be valid.
I am more than happy to argue in good faith with people who I vehemently disagree with, whose opinions are in my opinion wrong, or even with people holding opinions that are objectively wrong.
That’s not you, in this comment thread. You have posted, quite smugly, that you feel displacement is not only not a problem, but in fact that you believe being concerned over displacement is not a valid position to have. And much in the same way other complete denials of objective reality are simply not worth engaging with beyond acknowledging that someone has said something deeply disturbing and wrong, this comment serves to highlight only that you have said something that is not worth interrogating or discussing further, that you getting the last comment when you reply to this one does not mean you have secured silent agreement.
Are you upset by this comment? Frustrated perhaps that I’m not going to “engage” in any way other than this? I hope you are. I want you to experience and understand the feeling of being ignored, shut down, talked around, and told your thoughts are not worth consideration. Experience it, and then imagine what it must be like to have these feelings when the subject is your actual life and home or anything with higher stakes than “a faceless internet stranger won’t meet me in the middle.” I would invite you to actually get out in your community and introduce yourself to the people who are different than you, to learn about their lives and their struggles… but somehow, I suspect that you do not live in a place where that is possible. The people who have been harmed by this do not live in your glass tower. They’ve already been removed.
You are willing to engage with “people holding opinions that are objectively wrong” but “complete denials of objective reality are simply not worth engaging”? I hate to break it to you, but “objectively wrong” and “denials of objectively reality” are the same thing, so you basically said “I am always willing to debate people from New York” followed by “People from New York are not worth debating.”
I have been very clear. Displacement is not a valid concern for transit projects because transit has nothing to do with displacement; displacement is not a given but entirely a policy choice; and concerns over displacement just mainly hide bigoted attitudes. You may agree or disagree with me, offer different opinions or not, reply or not.
I never hope that anyone gets frustrated or upset by any comments on a blog. I didn’t say your thoughts are not worth consideration. Just the opposite, you are the one who said you were not going to read (i.e. not consider) my thoughts, I considered your thoughts worthy enough of consideration to take the time to offer a different opinion, and I suggested that the whole point of this comment section was to read and consider posts by different people.
In New York, we have a serious problem where wealthier transplants are displacing locals. Colonization is not the same thing as migration. And New York is not a place with a healthy zoning and permitting process.
“And New York is not a place with a healthy zoning and permitting process.”
But that is the problem, not the idea that a new transit line which benefits people could make some people switch homes so we should not do it. Fix the zoning and permitting problem and displacement goes away.
The idea of colonization vs migration is exactly the kind of bigoted thinking that underlies the gentrification/displacement debate. It is identical in logic to the people who wrote sundown codes and redlining policies to keep black people from moving to white areas – they didn’t see black people as moving to become residents but as displacing “real” residents and “colonizing” what should be a white area. Switch up the races (white people moving to a hispanic neighborhood, Indian immigrants moving to a Chinese neighborhood), sub in religion (Muslims or Jews moving in), use sexist or classist terms (“tech bros”) and its all still the same.
The wealthier people are not displacing locals, they are becoming locals by moving to the neighborhood. The fact that you can’t see someone different than existing residents (the only difference being they have more money! that’s as shallow as considering skin color a difference! they might agree politically and have the same interests!) being a valid member of the community is the problem.
Colonization and migration are absolutely different? But often it’s fairly subtle. For example, the people on the Windrush said “England colonized us, now we’re colonizing England.”
And switching terms is a really stupid way to look at the world, because changing the words in a sentence can change its truth value. The Nazis say the Jews lie about the Holocaust. The Jews say the Nazis lie about the Holocaust. One group is wrong (deliberately so); the other is right. So if you say things like “cops kill minorities at elevated rates” then it’s true and if you instead substitute “cops kill whites at elevated rates” [or, in Israel, Jews] then it becomes false. Or if you say things like “when black people move into a majority-white neighborhood they have historically faced physical violence and threats thereof” then it’s true in the history of the Great Migration, but if you try to flip the races, it’s just completely false.
“changing the words in a sentence can change its truth value.”
Yes, but we are not dealing with objective truth statements but value statements/subjective opinions. ”The Nazis killed the Jews in the Holocaust” and “The Jews killed the Nazis in the Holocaust” are statements with words flipped that mean opposite things. ”We shouldn’t let black people move in and destroy the character of our white neighborhood” and “We shouldn’t let white people move in and destroy the character of our black neighborhood” are statements with words flipped that mean the same thing – bigotry and exclusion based on skin color.
The historical accuracy of a statement about the violence faced by blacks during the Great Migration has no bearing or justification on present day calls to limit who can move to a neighborhood, even if the same statement with races swapped would be historically inaccurate.
The 21st-century anti-displacement line is something a lot more specific than “we shouldn’t let.” It’s “in a gentrifying 21st-century American neighborhood, the preexisting neighborhood residents are displaced to lower-opportunity neighborhoods.” (If I remember correctly, the paper in question defines gentrification in race-neutral terms, but it maps to the white population rising and the black one falling in New York neighborhoods.) This isn’t what happened during mid-20th century white flight, or in the gentrification of white ethnic neighborhoods – in both of these cases, the people leaving the neighborhood moved to higher-opportunity suburbs and considered their lives to have improved.
It’s a good question; it was discussed at the seminar, but there are no final answers on this.
So, to make it clear that this is what I think and not what Elif thinks: not all neighborhoods along IBX have genuine risk of displacement. I don’t have the most current poverty mapping, but this, from 2009-13, shows the neighborhoods along IBX that don’t have subway service at all right now, i.e. the gap between Middle Village and Jackson Heights and the area around Utica and Remsen, are fairly well-off. Drivers in those neighborhoods think they’re not being listened to by some nebulous Manhattan elite, but they’re not poor or at risk of poverty.
In parts of Southern Brooklyn where IBX would provide east-service on top of existing north-south subways, the incomes are lower. Some of these areas have displacement risk; others don’t, like Borough Park. The poverty is worst around East New York. But that’s an area that already has a ton of subway access to Manhattan, via the A/C, L, and J/Z; if East New York undergoes gentrification and displacement, it’s probably not going to be because of access to Jackson Heights but because of preexisting gentrification from Bushwick spreading outward along the L train. To the extent IBX could induce gentrification in East New York, it’s along the lines of working-class Bangladeshi immigrants living in overcrowded conditions displacing even poorer people, which is already happening but could potentially accelerate with Jackson Heights access.
Real estate’s attitude toward urban rail is strange more than anything else. The Manhattan real estate community loved the 7 extension and didn’t at all like Second Avenue Subway, on the ground that Yorkville is already developed so why even bother building there. It’s a community that most loves extensions to empty or nearly empty places, not to preexisting neighborhoods where homeowners could sell to developers piecemeal, regardless of income (of note, half the 96th Street shed was in East Harlem as understood in the 2000s and the real estate interests still didn’t like the idea). Among the extensions I crayon the most, they’ll probably most love the idea of a 7 extension to College Point for the opportunity to build in the former Flushing Airport.
they’ll probably most love the idea of a 7 extension to College Point for the opportunity to build in the former Flushing Airport
Noise from LaGuardia Airport, FAA building height restrictions, and being entirely within the flood plain will probably prevent that.
Just because someone, in a fit of 19th century railroad mania, thought it was a good idea to send trains to Whitestone, doesn’t mean it is a good idea today. There are more people if trains head south from Flushing instead of north.
This thinking sounds very weird to me. So you say, that it is better for residents to have bad services? Being from other country, I do not understand this logic. Should not be it good for people living in the city to improve it?
My logic is that if flats or houses are expensive, we need to built them more and we need to improve transit so tht people would not need to concentrate in narrow area.
…sort of; there have been serious issues in New York with residents pushed out to lower-amenity neighborhoods (again, Bushwick is a good example of a neighborhood with this kind of displacement). It’s not every case of gentrification, but it does exist; there were some studies looking at 1980s-90s gentrification concluding that there was no additional displacement out of then-gentrifying neighborhoods, like Williamsburg, but in the 2000s and 10s it changed and there absolutely is displacement.
It’s a question of who that new housing and improved city services are for. Urbanists love talking about removing freeways. I think that’s generally good. But when they’re led by white planners without consulting the community to displace Black neighborhoods, that’s a form of violence.
I mean, New York has high rents, but it also has very high salaries, much higher than in other places. Reason is that NY has good public servicies. Sure, there are other, more afordable places, like towns in Apalchachian mountains, Louisiana or Detroit, but salaries are much lower there, among other things.
Real solution is to change zoning laws and build new houses, or even new boroughs, something like Aspern Seestadt in Wien or Hafencity in Hamburg.
”I mean, New York has high rents, but it also has very high salaries, much higher than in other places.”
The wages are not high enough to outweigh the rents. The Census Bureau calculates a Supplemental Poverty Measure that takes into account housing and cost of living. It is far superior to the official poverty rate, which naively assumes someone making $26k in rural Idaho has the same standard of living as someone making $26k in NYC. Although you listed Detroit, Appalachia, and Louisiana as stereotypically low salary places, the Supplemental Poverty Rate for New York State is higher than Louisiana, Michigan or West Virginia.
No, salaries are high because it’s a big city which allows businesses to be run more effectively due to economies of scale.
(Private sector) salaries are always equal to what people are willing to pay you due to the value you provide them.
New York City has terrible public services compared to Europe.
Wow, shocking to learn that the ridership effects of upzoning aren’t considered in funding requests. The ideal planning proposal would look like “we’ll transform zoning around these stations – unlimited and minimum height and density – if you fund our project, but only if you fund our project, because it wouldn’t make sense to upzone so much without transit access.”
Do you have more background/reference/history on the FTA rule?
Ideally, grant agreements would make the promised upzonings obligatory and court-enforceable, to re-enable the full consideration of transit-oriented development potential.
It’s already impossible to build homes for real people as well as transit that serves them; ensuring that the only transit that gets built is the shuttle line between a dozen different luxury high-rises with names like One Nostr-at symbol-nd built by Related Properties is not going to help either problem and will in fact exacerbate both of them.
It’s complicated, because there are many carbrains out there who oppose transit, and many NIMBYs who oppose upzoning. If you make transit and upzoning a package deal, then both of these groups will fight you, and chances are much higher of getting neither transit nor upzoning.
if you’re worried about car brains opposing transit maybe step one is to improve metro north/the LIRR.
Question: You said the IBX mostly goes through residential areas. In contrast, I believe the consensus on designing circumferential transit routes is that they’re typically more effective when connecting people to employment centers and other destinations, rather than connecting neighborhoods to other neighborhoods. (This was also discussed in comments to this post, while the post itself discussed “failure” of the G train.)
So what makes IBX seem much more promising than these high-level principles would suggest? I know ROW availability is a reason, but are there other factors?
Do these neighborhoods have particularly strong demands for other neighborhoods on the line? Or is IBX used by people who would otherwise be in transit deserts (or with inconvenient radial routes), who are using the line as a feeder to other radial routes?
(I understand not everyone takes transit for work, but even post-Covid, commutes still take up the majority of transit rides.)
The G train has a lot of missed connections to be fair.