Category: New York
Bus and Rail Mantras
Bus is cheaper than rail. Paint is cheap. Rail only made sense a hundred years ago when construction costs were lower. Trains have no inherent advantage over buses. It doesn’t cost more to operate a bus than to operate a train. All of those are true in specific sets of circumstances, and Curitiba and Bogota deserve a lot of credit for recognizing that in their case they were true and opting for a good BRT system. Unfortunately, the notion that buses are always cheaper than trains has turned into a mantra that’s applied even far from the original circumstance of BRT.
The advantage of buses is that dedicating lanes to them and installing signal priority are financially cheap, if politically difficult in the face of opposition from drivers. Even physically separating those lanes is essentially cost-free. This advantage disappears completely when it comes to installing new lanes, or paving an existing right-of-way. Hartford is paving over an abandoned railroad at a cost of $37 million per km.
Not to be outdone, New York’s own MTA just proposed to pave about 8.5 km of the Staten Island Railway’s North Shore Branch for $371 million. A light rail alternative was jettisoned because the MTA insisted on continuing the line to the West Shore Plaza, along what is possibly the least developed road in the city.
Another, related mantra is that light rail is cheaper than heavy rail. This contributed to the MTA’s decision not to pursue a Staten Island Railway-compatible solution, which would allow lower capital costs and cheaper maintenance since trains could be maintained together with the existing fleet without modifying the existing yard. As with all mantras, this one has a kernel of truth: it’s much cheaper to build on-street light rail than elevated rail or a subway. As with the BRT mantra, this is not true when the discussion is about what to do in an existing right-of-way.
Worse, because the MTA believed its own hype, it completely missed the point of surface transit. People who believe these mantras about bus, light rail, and heavy rail can easily miss the advantage of on-street running wherever the streets are more central than the railroad rights-of-way. The North Shore Branch hugs the shore for much of the way, halving station radius. The most developed corridor is Forest Avenue, hosting the S48, the third busiest bus in the borough and the busiest in the same area and orientation as the line in question. (The busiest in the borough, the S53, crosses the bridge to connect the North Shore to the subway in Brooklyn.) Of the three other east-west routes in the North Shore, the one that the North Shore Branch parallels the most closely, the S40, has the lowest ridership. It would be both vastly cheaper and better for bus riders to have dedicated bus lanes on Forest, or possibly Castleton, which hosts the S46.
In cities that did not develop around mainline rail corridors but rather around major streets, the only reason to use mainline rail corridors for urban transit is that reactivating them for rail can be done at much lower cost than building on-street light rail. New York is for historical reasons such a city: Staten Island development follows Forest and Castleton rather than the North Shore Branch, and for similar reasons Park Avenue in Manhattan and the Bronx is a relatively unimportant commercial corridor.
Now, these mainline corridors have great use for regional transit. Queens Boulevard can’t be easily used for train service to Long Island, and Lexington Avenue can’t be easily used for train service to Westchester. Staten Island has great potential for regional transit – but only if it’s electrified rail going through a tunnel to Manhattan. It’s expensive, but it’s what it takes to be time-competitive with the ferry and with buses to the subway. A more competent agency than the MTA would keep planning and designing such high-cost, high-benefit projects, to be built in the future if funding materializes; such plans could also be used to concretely argue for more funding from the state and from Congress.
Instead, the MTA is spending more money than most light rail lines cost, to make such a mainline connection from the North Shore to Manhattan impossible in the future. The best scenario in such a situation is that the busway would have to be railstituted, for a few hundred million dollars – an embarrassing reminder of the busway folly, but still a much smaller sum than the cost of the tunnel. The worst scenario is that like on Los Angeles’s Orange Line, the need to keep buses operating during construction would make it impossible to replace them with trains.
There aren’t a lot of lose-lose (or win-win) situations with transportation, even if we ignore driver convenience, but this is one of them. It’s a fiscal disaster relative to predicted ridership and the operating costs of buses, it makes future transit expansion in the borough more difficult, and it follows a marginal route. All this is so that the MTA can say it’s finally making use of an abandoned right-of-way.
High- and Low-Speed Rail Coordination
The debate about what kind intercity rail to build tends to be either/or. On one side, there’s HSR-only advocacy: this represents the attitude of SNCF, especially in the earlier years of the TGV, and such American HSR proponents as John Mica. In this view, legacy rail is inherently slow and money-losing and the best that can be done is to start fresh; generally, this view also looks down on integration with legacy regional rail. On the other side, there’s a legacy-only advocacy, which represents how Britain upgraded its intercity rail network in and after the 1970s and also the attitude of proponents of Amtrak-plus lines in the US.
The problem with this is that there are a lot of different markets out there, and the service levels they justify and the construction challenges they impose are different. Sometimes such markets are in the same general area, and this means some lines should be HSR and some should be upgraded low-speed rail.
Countries that tried to go to one extreme of this debate are now learning the hard way that they need to do both. Britain radically optimized its intercity main lines, which now have the highest average speed in the world except for HSR – but it needs more, and this requires it to build a new HSR line at immense cost. In the other direction, France’s TGV-only strategy is slowly changing. SNCF still doesn’t care about legacy intercity lines, but the regions are investing in regional rail, and one region even uses the high-speed line for local service. Japan gets away with neglecting most of the intercity lines because its physical and political geography is such that markets that can support HSR dominate, but other countries cannot.
This means that best network design is going to have to deal with both approaches’ political difficulties at the same time. Upgrading legacy rail means upgrading legacy rail operating practices, against opposition of workers and managers who are used to old and inefficient ways of doing things. And building HSR on the thickest markets means giving special treatment to some regions with infrastructure that other regions don’t justify; it’s economically solid, but the optics of this are poor.
But the advantage of doing it this way from the start is that it’s more future-proof, and allows integrated design in terms of schedules, which lines are upgraded, how cities are connected, and so on.
Doing it piecemeal may require redoing a connection along a different alignment. The issue is that HSR compresses travel times along the line only. It’s like urban rapid transit this way, or for that matter like the air network. A legacy rail system (or a national highway system, or urban buses) has fairly consistent average speed. This means that in a combined system, the optimal path between two cities may not be the shortest path, in case one is close to the HSR trunks.
For example, look at Upstate New York. None of its four major metro areas is large enough to justify a high-speed connection to New York by itself, but all four combined do. Although international service to Toronto is overrated, it could be justifiable in light of Buffalo’s relative economic integration with Ontario and also the mostly straight, partially grade-separated right-of-way available in Canada; this would further thicken the market.
If we draw a rudimentary map of other desired connections, none thick enough to warrant more than an upgraded low-speed train, the fastest connections are not always obvious. For example, with average HSR speed of 240 km/h and legacy rail speed of 100 km/h, it’s faster to get from New York to Ithaca via Syracuse than directly via Binghamton. This is why the connection to Ithaca is through a line that points toward Syracuse, even if it’s not the shortest route to Binghamton. It’s one of many small local optimization problems.
More interestingly, we get a mini-hub in Syracuse. Although it’s the smallest of the four main Upstate cities, it lies at the junction of the trunk line and lines to Binghamton and Watertown, and also has secondary cities at the right location for regional rail. (The largest comparable secondary city near Rochester is Geneva, which happens to be close to and have a good rail connection to I-90, a prime candidate for HSR corridor; thus it should get commuter service using the trunk line, which would be far faster than an all-legacy train.) This means that schedules should be set up to coordinate transfers in Syracuse.
This is a normal way to set things up in an all-legacy format, as is done in Switzerland, but it can equally apply to HSR. The construction challenges on the Empire Corridor are nowhere near as complex as those in California, Pennsylvania, and other truly mountainous states, but they’re still nontrivial. But now that we know that Syracuse should be a hub, one answer to the question “How many design compromises to make to reduce costs?” is “Build just enough to allow integrated transfers in both New York and Syracuse.”
(In practice this means HSR arriving in Syracuse on the hour and in New York whenever convenient. The main intercity line into New York is the Northeast Corridor, a very thick market that at HSR speed would have enough traffic to support show-up-and-go frequency. This is not true of lines serving Syracuse; Watertown is not Washington and Binghamton is not Boston.)
The main cost of doing things this way is political. It requires willingness to both prioritize markets and cut construction costs, as necessary to build HSR, and improve legacy rail operating practices and carefully integrate services, as necessary to build a working legacy rail network. The fiscal cost is not outrageous – those legacy lines are cheap relative to everything else (rebuilding the unelectrified New York-Scranton line is $550 million), and HSR on thicker markets will at least partially pay for itself.
Once we discard the notion that present-day Amtrak operating patterns are adequate, the question stops being about whether one trusts Amtrak or not, and purely about how to build a new transportation network. And then the correct answer to “High-speed or legacy?” is “Both, seamlessly integrated with each other.”
Quick Note: How Much Tunnels Really Cost
New York is currently building a 3-kilometer tunnel between Brooklyn and Staten Island, using the same EPB method that Madrid uses to build subway tunnels. The cost of the single-bore tunnel is $250 million, and the project will be completed by 2014.
Of course, this is a water tunnel rather than a train tunnel. The diameter of the tunnel is somewhat smaller than that of a single-track train tunnel. Double-track tunnels, even ones built to high-speed rail standards, are substantially wider, but the amount of concrete lining required is proportional to radius rather than to cross-sectional area. For example, the double-track Seikan Tunnel is 9.7 meters wide, little more than single-track HSR tunnels in Europe, as Japanese construction tries to minimize tunnel clearances to cut costs and instead equip Shinkansen trains with elaborate aerodynamic noses. While 9.7 is more than 2.5 times the diameter of the water tunnel in question, 250 million times 2.5 is still far below the construction cost of any recent tunneling project in New York.
The expensive part of tunneling, then, is not the actual tunnel. It’s everything else, especially the station caverns. Both ARC and East Side Access included multilevel deep caverns in Manhattan with full-length mezzanines; of course they’d be more expensive.
For what it’s worth, an 8-kilometer long, 9.7-meter wide tunnel from Staten Island to Manhattan would cost $1.75 billion at the same per-km, per-meter cost of this water tunnel. Of course stations at St. George and especially Lower Manhattan would add much more, forcing a lot of difficult choices about location, but the basic infrastructure is not all that expensive.
What’s a Subway/El?
The rapid transit built in New York beginning with the first els codified two characteristics that spread to the rest of the US, and are often seen in other countries’ rapid transit networks as well. First, it is separate from surface transit – even when it did still have grade crossings, they were controlled railroad crossings, rather than street-running segments as is common on light rail. And second, it is separate from mainline rail.
Not much later than New York started building els, Berlin built the Stadtbahn, also an urban elevated railroad. However, it was meant to be used for mainline rail from the start, with two local passenger tracks and two long-distance passenger and freight tracks. Part of the impetus was to connect different railroad terminals within the city, which American cities did by building union stations disconnected from local traffic. Shortly later, Tokyo built its own mainline rapid transit system – the Yamanote Line bypass in 1885 and Tokyo Station connecting the Chuo and Tokaido lines in 1914. Both cities ran frequent local commuter service early, Berlin doing so even before electrification.
Of course, nowadays US regulations locked in the separation of rapid transit from commuter rail, but at the time, there was no such separation. New York could have built its subway to mainline specifications and run trains through to the LIRR. It didn’t because of historical accidents – it preferred compatibility with the els and even when the BRT chose a wider loading gauge for its own subway network, it still opted for narrower trains than on mainline track. At the time it seemed like no big deal, although some of the subway lines built were redundant with existing commuter lines (for example, the Flushing Line with the Port Washington Line). Again due to historical practice, commuter rail did not try to operate to rapid transit standards, keeping frequency low, and so nearly all urban stations closed. In both New York and Chicago, it’s often easy to figure out where the city ends or where the subway/L network ends because that’s the point beyond which commuter train stop spacing narrows, providing makeshift local service.
In subsequent decades, the German and Japanese approach proved itself much more capable of providing good transit to growing suburbs. In Tokyo, subways are legally railroads, and most lines are compatible with at least one commuter line in order to permit through-service. German cities have mainline rapid transit (S-Bahn) and also separate subways or subway-light rail combinations (both called U-Bahn). Many other cities and countries had to adopt the same system to increase transit ridership, at much higher cost since the necessary viaducts and tunnels connecting stub-end terminals were done much later. This is what led to the Paris RER, and what’s led to Thameslink and now Crossrail in London. Any other approach would require spending even more money on extending urban lines to the suburbs, exactly what’s done now in the two big suburban-focused US rapid transit systems, the Washington Metro and BART.
The kink is that despite the above problems of subways that are separate from both mainline and street rail, there’s now a different reason to build such lines after all: they can be made driverless. Most first-world cities already have legacy rapid transit or else have so much sprawl rapid transit is inappropriate, and third-world cities aren’t saving much money by eliminating drivers, but in the few cases of new builds (Vancouver, Dubai, Copenhagen, the newer lines in Singapore), driverless trains are common, and this allows trains to run more frequently, or even 24/7 in Copenhagen’s case.
This kink aside, there’s really no reason for a city to build a new New York-style subway, i.e. disconnected from light and commuter rail and running with a driver. Extending a legacy system is fine, but for new systems, there’s no point. This could be especially bad in growing third-world cities, which could find themselves paying too much for a subway they don’t need or unable to connect a subway they do need to the suburbs once they start suburbanizing. Third-world construction costs aren’t much if at all lower than first-world costs, but wages are much lower.
Some of the world’s largest cities have made or are making this mistake. Mumbai is building a new subway, on a different track gauge from the Indian mainline network, preventing through-service to the overburdened commuter trains. Shanghai and Beijing have vast subway networks, without express tracks or any ability for trains to run fast through city center; they have widely spaced stops so that they are faster than most other subway systems, but they have nothing on the rapid commuter trains in Tokyo. (Beijing is also developing a parallel commuter rail network, running diesel trains from the exurbs to the traditional city terminals at low frequency.) It works fine now, but when Shanghai grows and suburbanizes to the degree Tokyo has, it may find itself having to spend many billions on digging new tunnels.
Since a New York-style subway is inappropriate for new builds, some cities need to ask themselves which of the three kinds is the most appropriate. A subway-surface solution is mainly an option when one underground line can naturally split into multiple surface lines, as is the case in Boston, San Francisco, Cologne, and Frankfurt; this is because there’s a big difference between on-street and grade-separated capacity.
Tel Aviv, which is building a subway-surface line without any branching, is doing it wrong. For the other choice, I believe it’s a matter of how well-developed the suburban rail network is, and how much future suburbanization the city can realistically expect. In Tel Aviv specifically there’s also a separate element, which is that for religious reasons public transit does not run on weekend. If driverless technology makes the difference between trains that run 24/7 and trains that run 16/6, then it should be used even at the cost of otherwise worse service to some suburbs and destinations easily reached by legacy rail branches.
Finally, in North America, one of the reasons to engage in strong regulatory reform is to allow the mainline option to work. Some lines, for example the Harbor Subdivision between LAX and Union Station, should ideally host a mixture of local and rapid trains on the same tracks, and also allow intercity trains; if the Harbor Sub becomes an electrified commuter line then high-speed trains could serve the airport, providing a connection from the Central Valley to a major airport in addition to SFO, which would only get a station at Millbrae.
More in general, the only real disadvantage of legacy commuter networks is that they tend to not be very dense in the center of the city, requiring new builds; most of the Tokyo subway is just lines offering the commuter lines more capacity into the CBD, overlaying itself to also provide a tight in-city network. There’s no technical reason not to just build an electrified local mainline network as its transportation backbone, and if more capacity is required then build additional lines in the mold of Tokyo.
One-Way Pairs: the Bad and the Ugly
One of Jane Jacobs’ prescient observations about bus service in The Death and Life is that one-way pairs, as practiced on the avenues in Manhattan, are bad for riders. Her argument was that one-way pairs require people to walk too long to the bus line, and this cancels out any gains in speed. (This is truer today, when signal priority is an option, than it was fifty years ago.) Jarrett Walker has formalized this in two posts using station radius as an argument; the issue is that passengers need to be within a short walking distance of both halves of the line, and this reduces coverage.
However, not all one-way pairs are created equal. An underrated reason to keep bus services on one line is simplicity: it’s easier to remember that a route follows one street than that it follows two, and also service to specific destinations can become easier. Taking a cue from proper rapid transit, ITDP’s magnum opus BRT standard treats it as a given that buses should run in the median of a street and only even lists one-way pairs as an option on very narrow streets, and even then as an inferior one. The argument revolves around service identity.
In particular, one-way pairs that preserve a semblance of service identity and simplicity are not as bad as one-way pairs that do not. For the original walk-distance reason, it’s also better to have the one-way pair closer together. Jarrett specifically praises Portland’s light rail one-way pair, located a short block apart, as an example of a good couplet. Manhattan’s one-way pairs are located a long block apart, so the walking distance is worse.
But even Manhattan’s one-way pairs are at least coherent. The First/Second Avenue bus follows First and Second Avenues for the entire length of the avenues; south of Houston, it follows Allen, the continuation of First. This is the advantage of the grid. In Providence, things are not as nice, though still somewhat coherent, if one remembers, for example, that Angell and Waterman Streets form a one-way pair (they’re treated as such for car travel, too, so anyone in the neighborhood would know, though people from outside would not).
In contrast, this is how Tel Aviv’s one-way pairs work. They’re getting worse amidst the various bus reform. The post is in Hebrew, but look at the map at the bottom of bus #5, the city’s busiest (and most frequently bombed back in the 1990s and early 2000s). The travesty is that none of those streets on which the line runs in one direction only is even one-way. East of Ibn Gabirol, the street hosting lines 25, 26, and 189 on the map, the streets are wide and two-way. The reason for the complication is lack of left turns. In order to make car traffic flow a little more smoothly, Tel Aviv has completely eviscerated its bus service.
In principle, Tel Aviv has infrastructure for consistent one-way pairs when necessary and regular two-way service elsewhere. For example, Dizengoff and Ben Yehuda, the two north-south streets hosting buses to the west, function as such for cars. They both have contraflow lanes for buses, allowing buses to use them as two-way streets; some do (for example, #5 on Dizengoff), while others still go one-way (for examples, #9 and #55). Likewise, Jabotinsky, the east-west street feeding into the big circuit, is one-way and narrow west of Ibn Gabirol, and could be a one-way pair with Arlozorov to its south; but Arlozorov is kept two-way, and so #66 is two-way, and #22 uses the two as a one-way pair. (By the way, those are fan-made maps; the official maps don’t use color to distinguish routes, and are thus completely unusable.)
The results of the mess coming from ending any service coherence are predictable. Israeli car ownership, low by first-world standards, is rising rapidly, and the social justice and affordable housing protesters are now complaining about high fuel prices. None of them is anti-transit on principle, and all who I confront tell me they’d ride transit if it were usable. I live without a car in a city with worse transit than Tel Aviv, but to me car ownership is not aspirational. When the only transit people know in their country is unusable, people this generation will get cars. The next bus reform will then take into account more left turn restrictions coming from the need to accommodate more vehicles. The next generation of people will grow up with the expectation of even worse bus service and not conceive of any alternative to automobility.
Transportation-Development Symbiosis
The RPA’s Regional Assembly has included the following idea submission: expand reverse-commuter rail service. The proposal calls for surveying city residents to look for the main available reverse-commuter markets, and for expanding reverse-peak service on the model of Metro-North. It unfortunately does not talk about doing anything at the work end – it talks about looking at where city residents could go to the suburbs on commuter rail, but not about which suburban job markets could be served from any direction.
I don’t want to repeat myself about what transit agencies have to do to be able to serve suburban jobs adequately (if “suburban” is the correct way to think of Providence and New Haven), and so I’m going to sound much harsher toward the idea than I should be. Suffice is to say that talking about development requires a lot of reforms to operating practices. With that in mind, let’s look at some suburban job centers in the Northeast: Providence, Stamford, Hicksville, New Haven. As can be seen, those stations all look very suburban, and even Providence is surrounded by sterile condos, with the mall located a short, unpleasant walk away. Compare this with the urbanity that one finds around major suburban train stations in Tokyo, such as Kokubunji and Tachikawa.
But really, the kind of development that’s missing around suburban train stations in the US is twofold. First, the local development near the stations is not transit-oriented, in the sense that big job and retail centers may be inconvenient to walk to for the pedestrian. And second, the regional development does not follow the train lines, but rather arterial roads, or, in cities with rapid transit, rapid transit lines – for example, one of Long Island’s two biggest edge cities, East Garden City, is diffuse and far from existing LIRR stations (the other, Mineola, is relatively okay).
In both cases, what’s missing is transportation-development symbiosis. Whoever runs the trains has the most to gain from locating major office and retail development, without excessive parking, near the train stations. And whoever owns the buildings has the most to gain from running trains to them, to prop up property values. This leads to the private railroad conglomerates in Tokyo, and to the Hong Kong MTR.
The same symbiosis can be done with government actors, but isn’t, not in the US, and the RPA’s attempts to change this and promote integrated planning have so far not succeeded. Hickville recently spent $36.4 million on a parking garage adjacent to the station plus some extra sum on expanding road access, but none of the relevant actors has made any effort to upzone the station area for commercial, to allow easier commuting. Providence is renovating the station, with pretty drawings, but doing far short of a redesign that would add development to the area.
The importance of this symbiosis, coming back to the original idea, is that the correct question to ask is not, “Where can city residents go to the suburbs to work?” but rather “Which suburban and secondary-urban destinations can be adequately served by rail?” In all four Northeastern cities under discussion, there is more than one direction from which commuters could come. From the commuter railroad’s perspective, a rider who takes the train in the traditional peak direction but gets off in a suburb short of the CBD is a free fare, just like an off-peak rider or a reverse-peak rider.
The task for regional planners (as opposed to service planners and railroad managers) is then a combination of the following priorities:
1. As noted above, ensuring edge city and secondary CBD development is both close to train stations and easily accessible by pedestrians.
2. Aggressively upzoning near potential station sites, with an eye for junctions, such as Sunnyside, Secaucus, and New Rochelle.
3. Examining where people working in secondary centers are living, and which rail lines could be leveraged to serve them and where new construction would be needed. For example, Providence could use rail to Woonsocket and the East Bay and more local service to Cranston and Warwick, but reviving the tunnel to the East Bay could be expensive and needs to be studied carefully. Note that north of South Attleboro, there are very few people living near the Providence Line working in Providence, and so reverse-peak service is useful mainly in the original sense of people reverse-commuting from Boston, in contrast with service to Massachusetts suburbs of Providence such as Seekonk.
The problem with doing all three is political: current regional rail traffic is dominated by suburbanites using it as an extension of driving into the city. This influences local thinking because the economics of residential development are not the same as those of commercial development. Agglomeration and density are less important. Transfers and long access distances are more acceptable. People traveling within the suburb go toward the station in the AM peak rather than away from it, and so parking availability is more important. Take all of these together and you get a powerful constituency supporting continuing to choke suburban train stations with parking and sterile development for city-bound commuters, no matter how many tens of thousands of jobs are nearby.
This is why some symbiosis is necessary. One way to do it is via market mechanisms: if a well-capitalized company gets ownership of the transit infrastructure and is free to develop with few zoning constraints, it could decide to build office towers in Hicksville on top of the train station, or develop the empty lots near New Haven and Providence. This is possible, but may well be too hard politically, even more so than direct zoning reform, because every trope used by the community to oppose the changes (namely, fear of outsiders) would apply and also there would be explicit loss of control.
The other way is the public way, which is where integrated planning comes in. Even on the level of intransigent railroads, it may work if all done together. In other words, there would be simultaneous effort to add reverse-peak service on the LIRR and the MBTA, upzone surrounding station areas and make them more walkable at the expense of some parking spaces, direct major developments such as malls and office complexes to the resulting TOD, and integrate local transit with the changed commuter service in all directions.
But whatever is done, it’s critical to integrate the two functions, of transportation and development. There’s no need for an overarching bureaucracy to take care of it all, even – just cooperation between regional planners, local planners, and transit managers. Transit needs thick markets, and if all development outside the primary CBD is diffuse and auto-oriented, there will not be any thick markets for it to serve. A transit revival necessarily requires new markets, and this means going after what are now hopelessly auto-oriented suburbs. And what needs to be done is not just figuring out where new service is required or where car-free urbanites commute to, but also what kind of TOD can be done at each secondary job center.
Why Long Island Should Get An HSR Spur
Having looked into why high-speed rail from New York to Boston should go through Providence, I want to explain why it should go through New Haven, rather than through any of the fanciful Long Island routings proposed most prominently by the Penn design group. Like Hartford, Long Island should have high-speed trains use the LIRR Main Line, but at medium speed rather than high speed, and with careful consideration to the much more important needs of commuter rail.
Although the LIRR Main Line shares one characteristic with the New Haven-Springfield line, namely that it is very good for 160-200 km/h but bad for 300, the reasons are subtler and less geometric. The most visible is NIMBYism. Even increasing the traffic of existing LIRR trains raised the ire of some suburbs along the Main Line, which opposed the three-tracking project (since canceled due to budget shortfall) on the grounds that extra train traffic would reduce quality of life and that eminent domain would be required. This is not Caltrain, whose local residents do not know what electric trains sound like; this is Long Island, which has lived with these trains for generations. Introducing HSR is asking for trouble.
Of course, the same could be said about any suburb that HSR needs to pass through. Connecticut is full of NIMBYs, just like Long Island. The reasons usually given for avoiding the existing Shore Line are that it’s too developed and has too much local opposition. But those are present on Long Island, and are worse because of the higher population density. For examples, compare Westport and Cos Cob with Brentwood and Farmingdale. The LIRR offers multiple straight rights-of-way, but all are going to have the same speed limits as heavily upgraded and modified tracks on the Shore Line – 250 km/h in the better parts, and 200 in the worse parts.
The Penn design proposal is not even the best Long Island proposal, for three reasons:
1. It insists on proceeding from Penn Station to Jamaica on the Lower Montauk Line. If a connection from the line to Penn Station opens, it’ll be far more useful for local rail, while intercity rail can use the Main Line. The difference between appropriating a Manhattan-accessible Lower Montauk Line for HSR and replacing the Lexington Avenue Line with a truck tunnel is one of degree, not kind; in both cases, local passenger rail is the most valuable use of the infrastructure.
2. It departs from the Main Line to use the Hempstead Branch (necessarily eviscerating commuter service) as well as abandoned tracks through endless residential suburbs, full of urban grade crossings. The Main Line has grade crossings and would need to be four-tracked, but the local NIMBYs actually supported grade separation, and multi-tracking at least could be sold as the local transit improvement project that it is.
3. Last and worst, it sharply veers north after stopping at Ronkonkoma, along a curve whose radius judging by the alignment map is around 900 meters (=150 km/h if superelevation and cant deficiency are set at normal HSR levels, or 170 km/h at cutting-edge levels). Then it crosses the Long Island Sound at its widest, so that it adds more than 20 kilometers to the New York-New Haven route length over the Shore Line, all at medium speed.
A route similar to the Penn design route but using the more feasible Main Line alignment would be 9 minutes slower than the optimal Shore Line route – 41 versus 32 minutes – with stops at Jamaica and Hicksville, enforced by unfixable track curvature near the stations. But in addition to the extra travel time, fixing the alignment through New Rochelle, Darien, and Bridgeport is far cheaper than a long undersea tunnel. A better Long Island route would follow the Main Line to the end and tunnel near Greenport, trading deeper waters for shorter tunneling and a route length comparable to that of the optimal Shore/I-95 alignment, so it could achieve a comparable trip time. But even that’s unneeded: it’s 15 km of deep tunneling, whereas if one is willing to slightly compromise on trip times, the only Connecticut tunneling required for a Shore Line fix is 3 km in Bridgeport.
The other problem is what to do about commuter service. The Providence Line’s traffic level is low enough and its average interstation is long, allowing a blended plan. Shared tracks between New Rochelle and Penn Station would see more commuter traffic, but intercity trains would go slower anyway, and there is more room for four-tracking. The Ronkonkoma Branch’s 10-minute peak service requires at least one overtake between Hicksville and Ronkonkoma and probably two, in addition to four-tracking the Main Line; this is feasible, but less than optimal, and the overtakes would have to be constructed in more constrained locations than those available on the Providence Line. East of Ronkonkoma commuter service may need to be cut, but this is less of a problem on account of its low traffic. On the other hand, the Main Line west of Hicksville is not a problem with four tracks, and neither is the New Haven Line – express commuter trains could weave in and out.
On the benefits side, offering Long Island service to Boston that doesn’t go through New York is better than not doing so. However, the difference in benefits with New Haven, while positive, is smaller than it seems. The New Haven Line has almost as much ridership as the LIRR Main Line, and Stamford is a bigger edge city than Mineola and Garden City. On top of that, since the optimal LIRR option connects to the Shore Line in the far east of Connecticut, there is no hope for service to Hartford except on legacy track. On balance, the advantage of the LIRR option is just service to Jamaica, a larger draw than those smaller cities and suburbs, but there the time saving is the smallest.
On top of that, does such a small benefit really justify the cost? Having some high-speed trains run through to Jamaica, Mineola, Hicksville, and Ronkonkoma at lower speed requires re-electrifying the LIRR with catenary, which is a fraction of the cost of all those urban grade separations and 1-2 order of magnitude cheaper than an undersea tunnel and land connections. On a similar note, since half an undersea tunnel is of no use, it’s harder to break construction into small chunks if it is necessary, putting it at a disadvantage against a route consisting of cutoffs and modifications of the existing line. The route of 1834 may work now that we can build tunnels, but the cost structure favors that of 1846 and 1852.
Little Things That Matter: Railroad Junctions
One underrated difference between countries is how multi-tracked railroad junctions look. In France, double-tracked regional lines have grade-separated junctions that ensure no crossing oncoming traffic. For a plethora of examples, consult the RER track map and look at any bifurcation. Looking at Google Earth, the same is true near Tokyo. This is standard rapid transit practice anywhere I know of, and Paris and Tokyo both treat their regional rail systems like urban rapid transit.
In the US, this is not true. Even important, high-traffic mainline junctions are often flat – see for examples the Main Line-Hempstead Line junction on the LIRR (Queens Interlocking), and the Hudson-Harlem junction on Metro-North (Mo Interlocking). The major junctions involving the Northeast Corridor tend to be better, fortunately. Harold, the LIRR/NEC junction, is already grade-separated from oncoming traffic, and the current grade-separation project is only for same-direction traffic; and the junctions in New Jersey are grade-separated. The Kearny Connection splits the problem in half – it is grade-separated for NEC trains but requires Morris and Essex trains in opposite directions to cross each other at grade. However, even for NEC trains a few major problems remain, most notably Shell Interlocking between the Northeast Corridor and Metro-North in New Rochelle.
I suspect the problem is that double-tracked lines in the US are not consistently thought of as having one line in each direction. The arrival of centralized traffic control (CTC) has made wrong-direction running easy; some railroads ripped their second tracks, and the commuter lines that remained double-tracked freely run trains wrong-way during weekends or (as is the case on the Worcester Line) when there are freight trains on the line. At a few places, four-tracked segments on running track connect to two tracks in nonstandard ways: for example, at Providence Station, three of the four platform tracks merge into the southbound running track. The concept of having one track per direction and no crossing oncoming traffic, which is standard on the subway, doesn’t really apply to commuter rail, leading to scheduling problems.
In New York, there’s no alternative to grade-separating the worst junctions, including Mo, Queens, the Kearny Connection, and the unnamed Far Rockaway/Long Beach and Ronkonkoma/Port Jefferson junctions. Although frequent train service exists with flat junctions, the schedule is irregular and unreliable, and has few reverse-peak trains. Fortunately, this is a problem for commuter trains more than for intercity trains, for which schedule adherence is more important.
In Boston, the NEC itself has flat junctions at all of its branches. Fortunately, there are alternatives to concrete. The Franklin/Providence junction requires Franklin Line trains merging onto the NEC to cross oncoming Providence Line trains at grade, but lets them continue onto the Fairmount Line without conflict. Since the Fairmount Line is getting some investment and more frequency is under discussion, having additional trains serve the line is a net benefit, and all Franklin Line trains should go through Fairmount. The Needham Line branches at-grade, at a more constrained location, but there are plans to connect it to the Orange Line anyway, and much of its geography is suitable for subway service more than for a regional rail branch. This leaves the Stoughton Line, for which there’s no alternative, but fortunately Canton Junction is not a very constrained location and the junction is simple.
Transit Alternatives to the Tappan Zee Widening
Cap’n Transit is virtually alone in the transit blogosphere in opposing the Tappan Zee Bridge widening and replacement. Unfortunately, merely opposing a highway project, expensive as it is, is not enough; as we’ve seen in the failure of the ballot proposition to ban a highway tunnel in Seattle, opponents of highway expansion need to make it concrete and clear what transit alternatives there are. In the case of the Tappan Zee specifically, alternatives exist, but serve different markets, and it’s necessary to explain why the market that the Tappan Zee serves is not the most important to the region.
I propose a regional rail system instead, focusing on serving Rockland County and perhaps a few centers in Orange County. There are multiple lines crisscrossing Rockland County, with limited or no freight traffic, passing through old town centers that would make good regional rail stops and connecting to good alignments in North Jersey. For a regionwide perspective there are my original regional rail proposal and my more recent focus on connectivity from North Jersey to Lower Manhattan, but the important thing for the purposes of Rockland County is the question of which lines could be used. The Erie Main Line only goes to Suffern, but could collect passengers from the western parts of Orange County; the Northern Branch, including an abandoned northern end, goes as far north as Nyack; the Pascack Valley Line was abandoned north of Spring Valley but has an intact right-of-way as far north as Haverstraw; the West Shore Line goes north to Albany and has moderate freight traffic, easily accommodated in the off-peak if double-tracking is restored. There are so many options that the main question is which to activate just to maintain adequate frequency.
The main difference with any Tappan Zee proposal is that the existing rail lines go north-south, whereas the Tappan Zee is east-west. Fortunately, most existing movement is north-south. As can be confirmed by the 2000 census, Rockland and Orange Counties’ commute market toward Westchester and other suburbs accessed by the bridge is quite small: 18,000 to Westchester and Fairfield. The volume of commuters from those two counties to Bergen and Passaic Counties is somewhat larger (22,000), and that to New York City more so (27,000 to Manhattan, 14,000 to the other boroughs). And traffic over the bridge since 2000 has stalled.
Not only is the north-south or northwest-southeast market bigger than the east-west market, but also it uses the Tappan Zee when it could be diverted if there were alternatives. A breakdown of travel on the bridge reveals that 16% of eastbound travel is to the Bronx and another 15% is to the other four boroughs and Long Island; this could be done competitively by various transit options.
Thus, a transit option that emphasizes north-south connectivity and goes to Manhattan through Bergen and Passaic Counties is going to serve more people than adding more east-west connectivity. It could serve far more if North Jersey jobs clustered in Paterson, Hackensack, and other old city centers, but in fact they’re diffuse. It’s unreasonable to assume significant commercial transit-oriented development in North Jersey, though a few jobs in Paterson could still be captured; however, jobs in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens could be served well.
Finally, to serve Bronx and Upper Manhattan jobs from both North Jersey and Rockland County, the trains should be combined with good bus service across the GWB. For example, bus lanes on Route 4 could be a strong start, especially if the trains are timed to connect to the buses. More speculatively, there’s a subway bellmouth allowing an extension of the C along the GWB, and relative to the cost of tunneling it should be inexpensive to extend the C as an elevated line toward Paterson over Route 4; the drawback is that the C is slow and would poorly serve the Bronx.
Although Rockland County is very sprawling, it has just enough old cities to anchor regional rail at the residential end. The effect is magnified if we can assume some TOD – for example, developing over the many parking lots currently in place in Nyack near the legacy Erie station – but as with commercial TOD, this is desirable but not very likely with the current political structure. Fortunately, American commuter rail works very well as a shuttle that extends auto-dependent commutes into cities that have no room for more cars; as a narrow alternative to constrained highways, it often succeeds, and would be a no-brainer compared to a bridge as expensive as the Tappan Zee.
The cost of reviving and electrifying the four lines proposed in my regional rail post (Erie Main, Pascack Valley, West Shore, and Northern Branch) is quite small compared to either the cost of bringing them to Manhattan or that of rebuilding the Tappan Zee Bridge. The cost of bringing the lines to Manhattan is substantial, but done right it would be much lower than the Tappan Zee Bridge’s $8.3 billion excluding any transit component.
If costs could be brought down, a new crossing, slightly farther north of the existing bridge, could work well for rail. The transit mode selection report discusses commuter rail on the new bridge, and the concept would be similar except that there should be more stations to serve local traffic better. A rail-only bridge would leave the Hudson Line north of Tarrytown, allowing west-of-Hudson commuters to access this job center and also ensuring no loss of frequency to the station, and then cross to Nyack. It would have to be underground in Nyack because the Palisades rise too steeply from the water, and would surface just west of the urban area. If all trains serving the line are EMUs, rather than diesels or even dual-mode locomotives, then the grade could be sharp enough to limit tunneling to the urban area of Nyack; the TMS report, which only considers diesels, proposes 2 miles (3.2 km) of tunneling, but EMUs climbing 4% grades could cut this by more than half.
The advantage of the east-west option is that it would serve Westchester jobs; while the commute market from Rockland and Orange Counties to Westchester is as mentioned not large, it clusters along I-287, especially in White Plains, and is thus somewhat more rail-serviceable. In addition, although the chance of commercial TOD is small everywhere in the US, it is larger in Tarrytown and White Plains than in Paterson and Hackensack.
On the other hand, if the costs could be brought down, they would be lower for everything, including highways. The same factors that cause transit construction costs to be so high in New York (namely, overstaffing, and poor contracting practices) apply to highways equally. In particular, the decision about what mode to favor should only weakly depend on cost, since relative costs both within transit modes and between cars and transit are not too different from in lower-cost countries.
To cut costs to a minimum while still providing acceptable first-phase service, the initial network could include only the lines that could be brought to Secaucus, with some track modifications near the station allowing Erie trains to terminate at the station parallel to the Northeast Corridor tracks; this still involves a fair amount of concrete pouring, but much less than a new tunnel to Manhattan, and the transfer could be made as convenient as that at Jamaica. In addition, trains could be mixed and matched: that is, to let a few of the Erie trains serve Manhattan directly, some Northeast Corridor or Morris and Essex trains could be cut to Secaucus. The main disadvantage is that no such option is possible with the West Shore Line and Northern Branch, and so it would be more useful in the western part of Rockland County than in the eastern part.
The selling point of the regional rail alternative is that, despite job sprawl, Rockland County residents are still more likely to need to travel to Manhattan than to Westchester. Thus, the promise of a one-seat ride to Manhattan on frequent train service, or at least a two-seat ride with the same quality of transfer offered to Long Islanders, could carry some political weight. One does not drive into New York out of love of driving; one drives into New York out of necessity, and making this less necessary could reduce some of the political will to spend billions more than required on widening a bridge.
Why Moynihan Station Has Negative Transportation Value
Amtrak has been making noises again about the need for Moynihan Station as a replacement concourse for Penn Station for Amtrak travelers, but makes it clear it does not want to pay almost anything for it. While former Amtrak President David Gunn withdrew from the project on the grounds that it would not increase track capacity, and another former president criticized the project for the same reason, today’s Amtrak is interested in the prospects of not sharing concourse space with commuter trains.
The irony is that what Amtrak perceives as the value of Moynihan Station is actually negative value. Penn Station already has a problem with concourse integration – different concourses have different train arrival boards, and different ticket-vending machines. The need to change concourses lengthens access time, in my experience by a minute or two. Right now, Amtrak has just gotten $450 million to increase top speed in New Jersey from 135 mph to 160 mph for a 24-mile stretch (150 under current regulations), for a time saving of 100 seconds (64 if only 150 mph is possible) minus acceleration and deceleration time. From my perspective as a passenger, the minute or two I lose every time I need to change concourses at Penn Station is worse than a minute or two spent on a train.
Separating the concourses completely is even worse when it comes to access and egress times. In comments on Second Avenue Sagas, Jim (who comments here as well) says that the move one block to the west is not too bad for intercity travelers, because to get to Midtown hotels, people would take the E anyway. However, people who live in New York and wish to travel elsewhere, or people who visit but do not stay at Midtown hotels, are likelier to take the 1/2/3, and Amtrak as well as local Moynihan Station boosters want them (us) to need to travel an extra crosstown block to travel. That’s 3 extra minutes of access time; at current costs, how many extra billions would have to spent to save them on the train?
Even the stated purpose of Moynihan Station, bringing people to the city in grandeur, fails. The building is a former post office rather than a train station; its former main entrance (still leading to the post office – thanks to Jim for the clarification) requires people to climb stairs. There are planned to be step-free entrances, but those remove much of the neo-classical grandeur.
From the perspective of intercity rail passengers, the biggest problem with Penn Station is the tracks and track access. The platforms are narrow, and visibility is obscured by columns, staircases, escalators, and elevators. But even what exists is not used to its fullest extent. Although Amtrak checks all passengers’ tickets on board, it also conducts a prior check at the station, funneling all passengers through just one access point and lengthening the boarding process. It’s possible to go around the check by boarding from the lower concourse, but Amtrak trains are not posted there, requiring passengers to loiter on the upper concourse, see what track the train arrives on (information which is typically posted only 15 minutes before departure), and scramble. As a result of the convoluted boarding process, Regional trains dwell 15 minutes at Penn Station, and Acela trains dwell 10 minutes. Many of those minutes could be saved by just better station throughput.
If more infrastructure is needed, it is not a separate passenger concourse, but better platforms and platform access. Some of the platforms – namely, the southern ones, hosting New Jersey Transit trains but not Amtrak trains – have too few access points, and require additional staircases and escalators.
More radically, platforms may need to be widened, at the expense of the number of tracks. This is one of the advantages of regional rail through-running, though in reality, even today clearing a full rush-hour commuter train is fast enough (about 1.5-2 minutes on the LIRR) that at least the LIRR could stand to have tracks paved over and still have enough terminal capacity for its current needs; New Jersey Transit, which has fewer tracks and trains with worse door placement and smaller vestibules, may have problems, but Amtrak doesn’t use its regular tracks because they do not connect eastward.
Amtrak’s history with Moynihan Station is especially telling about the company’s priorities. Clearly, Moynihan is not a priority – that’s why Amtrak says it has no money for it, and that’s why Gunn removed it from the company’s list of projects. The biggest supporters of Moynihan are local boosters and developers, who want the extra retail space. The planned expenditure on the project is $14 billion: $2 billion in public money for the train station, the rest in private money for development around it. The family of Daniel Moynihan is a strong backer of a monument named after the late Senator. It is not surprising that a project whose benefit goes entirely to power brokers and not to transportation users is backed by the locals the most: Amtrak and federal agencies may be dysfunctional, but they are models of efficiency compared to the local governments in the US.
However, Amtrak is incapable of saying no to monuments and megaprojects that it thinks will benefit it. More crucially, it will argue for their construction. Its symbiotic relationship with local governments seems to be, we’ll support your boondoggles if you support ours. Today’s Amtrak is not Gunn’s Amtrak, but the Amtrak that fired Gunn for refusing to defer maintenance in order to boost on-paper profitability.
Moynihan Station represents a failing of not only transportation planning, but also urban planning. More than any other project in New York, it brings back my original analogy between today’s urban boosterism and the modernist suburbanism of the first two-thirds of the 20th century. The project’s backers tell us a story: Penn Station was a magnificent edifice destroyed by thoughtless planners, and now we must repair the damage and restore style to passenger railroad travel. Since they base their conception of infrastructure on moral and aesthetic claims, which always seem to coincide with what gives them more money and kudos, they do not care whether the project is beneficial to users, and find the preexisting situation self-evidently bad.
Because the argument for Moynihan is entirely about the need for a grand, morally good projects, the backers spurn incremental improvement of what already exists, finding it so repulsive that it must be replaced no matter what. This is quite similar to how some proponents of suburbanization opposed improving tenements on the grounds that it would detract from the purpose of razing them and sending their residents out to single-family houses.
For example, both Moynihan backers and New Jersey Transit have complained about lack of space for passenger circulation at Penn Station; in reality, IRUM‘s George Haikalis has computed that about half of the lower concourse’s space is used for Amtrak back offices and concessions rather than for passenger circulation. In reality, Penn Station’s low ceilings make the station appear cramped, but the concourses are still fairly functional, and even at rush hour the crowding level is normal by the standards of what I’ve seen at Paris’s Gare de Lyon and at Nice’s main station.
This interplay between bad local governance and federal agencies that coddle it is part of what caused Amtrak’s Vision plan to be so bloated. The single worst component, the new tunnels through Philadelphia, appear to come from Amtrak’s belief that the local officials want strict separation of high-speed and commuter train infrastructure, coming from the fact that the locally-designed Penn plan included such tunnels. And in New York, Amtrak’s proposed its own marked-up version of ARC, one that is not too much better than the cavern plan that was under construction. On a smaller scale, the Harold Interlocking separation, primarily a New York State project benefiting commuter rail riders, made it to Amtrak’s list of desired incremental improvements, and is now receiving funding earmarked to high-speed rail.
The only special trait distinguishing Moynihan from those other unnecessary or bloated projects is that it’s harmful to riders, rather than neutral or insufficiently beneficial. The main backers of the project do not care much for transportation users, but Amtrak should. It seems to believe that its passengers want to spend time sitting at its train stations as if they were airline lounges; nowadays, not even air travelers like spending time at airports, which is why such time-saving features as printing boarding passes at home are so popular. The only positive thing to say about the project is that the cost is so high relative to the effect on passengers that the return on investment is very close to zero, rather than the -4% figures seen for long-distance Amtrak projects. And I don’t think that “This project only has an ROI of -0.2%” is a valid argument for construction.
Pedestrian Observations 
