How Residential is a Residential Neighborhood?
Last post, I brought up the point that the neighborhoods along the Interborough Express corridor in New York are residential. An alert commenter, Teban54transit, pointed out that this should weaken the line, since subway lines should connect residential neighborhoods with destinations and not just with other residential neighborhoods. To explain why this is not a major problem in this case, I’d like to go over what exactly is a residential neighborhood and what exactly is a destination. In short, a predominantly residential neighborhood may still have other functional uses, turning it into a destination. It’s imperfect in the case of IBX, but the relative ease of using the right-of-way makes the line still viable.
Residential-but-mixed neighborhoods
Residential neighborhoods always have nonresidential uses, serving the local population: supermarkets, schools, doctors’ offices, restaurants, pharmacies, clothing stores. These induce very few trips from out of the neighborhood, normally. But things are not always normal, and some residential areas end up getting a cluster of destinations.
In New York, the most common way such a cluster can form is as an ethnic center, including Harlem and several Chinatowns. People in and around New York travel to Harlem for specifically black cultural events, for example the shows at the Apollo Theater; they travel to Chinatown and Flushing for Chinese restaurants and supermarkets. Usually the people who so travel are members of the same ethnic community who live elsewhere; this way, in Washington Metro origin-and-destination travel data, one can see a few hundred extra trips a day between black neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River and Columbia Heights, whereas no noticeable bump is seen in work trips between those two areas on OnTheMap.
On the IBX route, this is Jackson Heights. It’s on net a bedroom community, whereas Flushing has within 1 km of Main and Roosevelt 43,000 jobs and 29,000 employed residents, but such ethnic cultural centers over time grow into destinations. People travel to the neighborhood for Indian restaurants, groceries, and cultural events, and it’s likely that over time the area will also get more professional services that cater to the community, creating more non-work and work destinations. The growth of Flushing as a job center is recent and has to be understood as part of this process: in 2007, on the eve of the Global Financial Crisis, there were only 17,000 jobs within 1 km of Main and Roosevelt. Jackson Heights, too, has seen growth in jobs from 2007 to 2019, though much less, by 27%, or 50% excluding Elmhurst Hospital, which over this period saw a small decrease in jobs.
Not only ethnic neighborhoods have this pattern. A neighborhood can grow to become mixed out of proximity to a business district, for example the Village, or out of a particular destination, for example anything near a university. On IBX, there’s nothing like the Village or Long Island City, but Brooklyn College is a destination in and of itself.
Building neighborhood-scale destinations
New public transit lines can help build neighborhoods into destinations. At the centers of cities, central business districts and rapid transit systems tend to co-evolve with each other: a high degree of centralization creates demand for more lines as the only way to truly serve all of those jobs, while a larger rapid transit system in turn can encourage the growth of city center as the place best served by the network. The same is true for secondary centers and junctions of other lines.
This, to be clear, is not a guarantee. Broadway Junction is very easily accessible by public transportation from a large fraction of New York. It’s also more or less the poorest area of the city, where working-class Bangladeshi immigrants living several to a room to save money on rent are considered a sign of gentrification and growth in rent. Adding IBX there is unlikely to change this situation.
But in Jackson Heights and around Brooklyn College, a change is more likely. Jackson Heights already has large numbers of residents using the radial subway lines to get to Manhattan for work, and a growing number of nonresidents who use its specialized businesses and cultural events. The latter group is the greatest beneficiary from circumferential transit, if it connects to the radial lines well; strong radial transit is a prerequisite, but in Jackson Heights, there already is such transit. Brooklyn College is already a destination, in a neighborhood that’s much better off than East New York and already draws widely because of the university trips; I expect that rapid transit service in three directions, up from the one direction available today (toward Manhattan), would encourage the growth of university-facing amenities, which generate their own trips.
Where to build circumferential rail
The best alignment for circumferential rail remains one that connects strong secondary destinations. However, that is strictly in theory, because usually such destinations don’t form a neat circle around city center, especially not in a city so divided by water like New York. If we were to draw the strongest secondary destinations in the city outside the Manhattan core excluding Downtown Brooklyn and Long Island City on the G, we’d get Morningside Heights for Columbia (centered on 116th), maybe 125th Street, the Bronx Hub, LaGuardia, Flushing, Jamaica, and Kings County Hospital/SUNY Downstate. These barely even form a coherent line if dug entirely underground by tunnel boring machine, diagonally under private blocks. And this is without taking into account destinations in New Jersey on the waterfront, which don’t form any neat circle with those city destinations (for example, Fort Lee is well to the north of Morningside Heights and Harlem).
In practice, then, circumferential lines have to go where it is possible, making compromises along the way. This is why it’s so important to connect to every radial, with as short a walk as practical: they never connect the strongest destinations and therefore have to live off of transfers. The G, which does connect the two largest job centers in the region outside Manhattan, fails because of the poor transfers. IBX works as a compromise alignment, connecting to interesting secondary destinations, with transfers to the most important ones, like Flushing and Jamaica. It is fortunate that the route is not purely residential: the neighborhoods are all on net bedroom communities, but some have the potential to grow to be more than that through both processes that are already happening and ones that good rapid transit can unlock.
Pedestrian Observations 
Its interesting thinking about this in Tokyo which is the mega-city in the world with the world’s most extensive network heavy rail circumferential lines.
The Musashino-Nambu system was originally a freight bypass so its not optimised for connecting the suburban employment centres of Tokyo (Hachioji, Chiba city, Omiya, Kawasaki), it is mostly a connector of the radials at the boundary between inner and outer suburbs. But Japanese urbanism is so naturally mixed use, there is juice there (I used it a lot for my suburban Chiba job). I have my criticisms (missed connections with Seibu’s network) but it gets the job done.
I really think it would be the best model for IBX to look at.
The Musashino Line works despite missing almost all key destinations since Japanese urbanism is able to turn places with convenient access into places with things to access.
It’s a great if flawed model for what a circumferential model to look like for a city, but the most important lessons extend a lot beyond just the transit service itself.
I wonder. Chiba/Omiya/Hachioji/Kashiwa were and are served by the Tobu-Noda/Kawagoe/Hachiko/Sagami system. There was definitely space for something closer than those. As Alon suggests serving your radial corridors is more important than the expense of trying to get a perfect bypass. The mistakes are as I said the missed Seibu connections and Minami-Urawa only connecting to Keihin-Tohoku (although that’s easy to solve especially if demographics means capacity constraints are easing on the Tohoku-Mainline).
It also relates to how JNR got freight operations wrong post and pre privatisation. Musashino line is too close to be a cost-effective freight bypass since its passenger traffic role is so valuable. It retrospect turning Ryomo-Hachiko-Sagami lines into a Tokyo bypass system that would have done more good (it wouldn’t have been cheap duplication and electrification)
I wonder if freight usage is part of why East-West rail from Bicester to Cambridge is so expensive, and that they should have gone for 4 tracks from the start or had another freight bypass.
It has nothing to do with it. Some parts of the Musashino system peak at 24 passenger trains per hour minimum 14. The Varsity line doesn’t need that level of frequency.
The reason its so expensive is simply normal Anglo-cost disease. These are the brilliant minds who though the best place to put sidings and a depot was….central Oxford and have never heard of a passing loop.
The Purple Line is the exception here. Bethesda, Silver Spring & the University of Maryland are the strongest secondary destinations, by far, in the Maryland suburbs of DC. And a fourth lesser destination but with extraordinary rail connections, New Carrollton. All on a straight line, with an abandoned rail corridor connecting two of them.
It really says something about US transportation policy that it took a 30-year political struggle to get it built.
Now they just need to extend the Purple Line across the river to Tysons Corner, the strongest secondary destination in the region period.
The right-of-way basically stops being useful in Bethesda though; there’s no real way to get it to Tysons without carving a new path from whole cloth. That’s probably still a good idea with there being a massive need for additional cross-Potomac capacity everywhere, and the political recalcitrance can and should be overcome; but it’s hard to see that penciling out as light rail.
And definitely not when Washington DC has given up on serious rail expansion, preferring fanciful nonsense like “what if we made a loop?”
First, line itself will form city around with time going, travel patterns will change. So it is better to have straight, quick alignment, then meandring route, wich would directly try to catch all destinations.
Second, this line is no brainer, if build to sufficient speed standard, it will break all projections, simply because currently there is no viable circumferential transit at this moment. This line will create completly new routes and rearange trfic flows.
I checked ridership numbers from 2019. 168th and Broadway is busier than 116th. The hospital, Columbia-Presbyterian, is likely a bigger destination. I’d hazard a guess that City College at 137th has more commuting students than Columbia. If your fantasy train is going to go across 149th in the Bronx it’s going to connect to the A/B/C/D or the 1 at 145th. One station centered on Amsterdam Ave. would serve both. Change trains.
168th is a busier subway station, but the biggest job concentration in Uptown Manhattan is 116th. Columbia has twice as many students as City College.
People travel for things other than work. Like getting treated for an illness at a hospital.
How many dorm rooms does City College have?
”If we were to draw the strongest secondary destinations in the city outside the Manhattan core excluding Downtown Brooklyn and Long Island City on the G”
But why would you set aside the two largest secondary centers? It seems to me the ideal answer would be to send the G through Astoria (according to Vanschnookenraggen’s track map, there is a connection that would allow this going south, but going north is less clear), and then across the East River and Manhattan on 125th. Then from 74th/Roosevelt IBX would leave the RR ROW and go to LaGuardia, the Hub and 145th.
These inner and outer loops wouldn’t be perfectly spaced, but both seem more feasible than an even more hypothetical line from Columbia to Flushing to Jamaica. That said, there are many more projects in NYC I would do before building new tunnel/ROW for either of these.
Also, if circumferential lines live on transfers, then both of these “ideal” lines are far from ideal in transfers, often as much because of layout of the G or IBX. The G is where it needs to be at Broadway, it is the J/M with stations in the wrong spot to either side. Bringing IBX to the Hub would be hugely more useful if Metro North had a station there. And so on.
A post on a station closing/consolidation/moving plan for NYC (like Junius/Penn/Van Siclen vs Livonia, or what to do with Hunterspoint/21st/Vernon Blvd) would be interesting.
Fully agree that extending the G or IBX so they do a fuller loop would be a good idea.
Currently with the London Overground you can circumnavigate the city with two trains and a short walk in Dalston. The city isn’t quite the same but if the G went across 125th street it would be similar/arguably better.