Category: New York
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.
Staten Island Rapid Transit
The great missing piece of New York’s rail network, and the most controversial of any of my proposals, is Staten Island. Connected to New Jersey by the B&O but not toward Manhattan, it relies on buses to the subway and the ferry for its connection to jobs in the rest of New York. Unsurprisingly, this is too slow and low-capacity for the full benefit of rapid transit to emerge, and the borough’s character remains suburban.
Plenty of railfans and transit supporters believe that the subway should be extended from Bay Ridge to Staten Island across the Narrows; the Fourth Avenue Line contains some landside infrastructure preparing for such an extension. While this is one of the options that should be studied, it suffers in two ways: first, the Narrows are the deepest part of New York Harbor, at about 25 meters (83 ft.), and second, the Staten Island end would be at Grasmere, a low-density area.
In contrast, according to the nautical chart, paths that go from St. George to any point between Manhattan and the Bay Ridge freight terminal are at the deepest 16 meters (53 ft.) below mean low water. In addition, the North Shore is the densest and most densifiable part of the borough, and would get better service; the South Shore would get about the same amount of service no matter where east of the Narrows the tunnel landed, but is the less important part of the borough to connect.
I contend that the list of options is as depicted on this map. The main choice is between a direct route and a route that goes through Brooklyn, trading off speed versus intermediate stops and possibly cost. Observe that it is much easier for a line that detours through Brooklyn to serve Downtown Brooklyn at Borough Hall than at the existing train station; this provides some justification for adding a Borough Hall station to a New Jersey-Brooklyn regional rail tunnel.
Not depicted on the map is the interaction of the various alignments with Harbor geology. If the primary factor is minimizing tunnel depth, then there are two options, one more easterly, near or under Governor’s Island or even farther east, and one more westerly, near the mouth of the Hudson. The westerly option opens the possibility for an east-west alignment through Manhattan that goes the “wrong way” – that is, has the Uptown direction pointing in the same direction as the Brooklyn-bound direction of the New Jersey-Brooklyn tunnel. This would give a cross-platform transfer from Staten Island to Brooklyn, which is lacking from the standard direct option.
Another issue is a South Ferry stop. As discussed in my post about the Lower Manhattan station siting, a South Ferry station becomes necessary if the main Lower Manhattan station is too far north, roughly north of Fulton Street. Even if the station is at or marginally south of Fulton, a second Lower Manhattan station could help reduce dwell times at the main station, increasing capacity.
A related issue is keeping all traffic that doesn’t need to be in Manhattan out of the main station. The Staten Island-Brooklyn transfer hogs passenger circulation space. It’s bad enough that a greenfield 100 km/h regional rail tunnel would get people from Atlantic/Pacific to Grand Central in about 11 minutes plus transfer time, versus about 20 on the 4/5, which make more or less the same stops, adding cross-platform transfers. A relief station at South Ferry, or Borough Hall, would go a long way toward mitigating this. (Observe that in the service patterns I’ve proposed for the lines that converge on Midtown, the main transfer points are Secaucus and Sunnyside, avoiding Penn Station.)
For the options that detour through Brooklyn, the choice of neighborhoods to serve and the choice of how much land versus sea tunneling both give rise to several options. One option would serve Red Hook, connecting it either directly to Manhattan or via Borough Hall, giving it a rapid transit connection it currently lacks. Offering new rapid transit service to neighborhoods that lack it is always a positive, and could also get very good ridership: for a similar example, the MTA’s ridership model for New Rochelle-Penn Station commuter rail service was bullish about the potential of a Co-op City station.
A separate choice is regional rail versus subway. A subway alignment’s main advantage is that it requires less tunneling, just enough to hook the Staten Island Railway into the Fourth Avenue Line. The main disadvantages are that it’s slower than express regional rail, and that the southern Brooklyn subways already suffer from excessive branching and middling frequency.
From the start, the BMT had a problem with merging eight tracks to six, with suboptimal junctions. The Chrystie Street Connection did not change this – it merely allowed all six tracks (the four Broadway Line tracks and the two express Sixth Avenue Line tracks) to serve Midtown. On top of this, Manhattan-Coney Island is not as thick a market as it used to be; with today’s usage patterns, nobody would think to build four different routes to Coney Island plus one to Bay Ridge while leaving Utica unserved and Nostrand a short stub. Additional branching would cut into the frequency of existing lines, worsening service to existing middle-density neighborhoods in southern Brooklyn. Thus, a regional rail option, if it’s at all affordable, would provide much better service. Even the option of connecting the new line to the 59th Street station in Sunset Park would be preserved if the line followed the Gowanus Expressway.
For a few numbers: the proposed cost of the Cross-Harbor Tunnel is $7.4 billion for the double-tracked option; the length and geology are comparable to Staten Island-Manhattan. As of 2000, the total commute market from Staten Island to Manhattan is 53,000 people, i.e. 106,000 trips; additional travel to Brooklyn is 29,000 people, and travel to points north and east of Manhattan is 8,000. Cutting one to two transfers and about twenty minutes from each one-way trip could ensure nearly 100% mode share for travel to Manhattan, as well as a significant mode share to other parts of the city.
Moreover, a zoning deal raising density in St. George and right next to the train station could raise the size of the commute market, adding to ridership. While Staten Island is not particularly pro-development, and has engaged in downzoning recently, a deal in which Staten Islanders get their commute improved so much in exchange for accepting change to their neighborhood could be acceptable. Tellingly, for the North Shore Branch reactivation, the people near the line seem more interested in the higher-intensity options: rail over bus, and possibly heavy rail rather than light rail. NIMBY attitudes are reduced when the change in question is bundled with solving a known local problem, in this case very long commutes.
Connecting New Jersey to Lower Manhattan
In my regional rail series, I proposed a new tunnel connection from Hoboken to Lower Manhattan, allowing regional trains to use the line and serve Manhattan and continue to Brooklyn on new track. I would like to revisit this concept, in light of my more recent post about where the Lower Manhattan station could be located. Hoboken is just one of many former railroad terminals on the west side of the Hudson, and there are alternative locations in Jersey City.
The importance of the connection is threefold. First, it’s a potential relief line for the near-capacity North River Tunnels: not as important as quadrupling the tunnels, since Lower Manhattan is a smaller CBD than Midtown, but still useful. Second, it’s a direct connection from New Jersey to Lower Manhattan, making life simpler for travelers who don’t have access to the PATH transfer at Newark Penn. And third, it’s useful for serving jobs in Hudson County, which has sprouted a secondary CBD in Jersey City; currently trains can only reach inner Hudson County from the north and west, or from the Manhattan CBD, but not from Brooklyn or Queens. It is the third aspect that makes through-running valuable – none of the commute markets crossing Manhattan is large on its own, but all combined have about 200,000 people among them.
Since the secondary CBD is in Jersey City and not Hoboken, the Jersey City options should be explored in addition to Hoboken. Since my concept for how New York regional rail should look is something like the Paris RER, let me draw the following analogy. The Ligne de Vincennes, which became the eastern branch of the original RER A, had its Paris terminus at Bastille. However, due to SNCF pressure to veer off and serve a more southerly location at Gare de Lyon, it was cut off near the city line, and its route into the city follows a different course, while the original route was abandoned. The upshot is that existing train stations that are at inconvenient locations can be left off the mainline, or closed entirely.
Thus, we should not be wedded to keeping a regional station at Hoboken, whose primary advantages are merely the PATH and light rail connections and the large railyard. Although the railyard may seem important, it’s pointing in the wrong direction for trains from New York. For short-turning movements on the shoulder of rush hour, railyards should make it easy for outbound trains to veer off at a location just after where demand drops off – for example, east of Jamaica, and west of Newark or Secaucus or eventually Paterson.
Many of the original rights-of-ways used by the railroads to deposit travelers across the Hudson from Lower Manhattan still exist. Of course, given the cost of constructing a new station in Manhattan, the cost of Jersey City construction should be regarded as secondary, though non-negligible. But an entirely greenfield option using new tunnels would have sizable cost: at about 3-4 km from where today’s Erie trains turn due east to Hoboken to the Hudson; at normal-world construction cost this is $1 billion, compared with about $2.5 billion for ARC before the cavern’s costs exploded.
Based on the need to leverage existing rights-of-way, there are four options. For distance calculations, it matters very little where the Lower Manhattan station is, but it is notionally measured from the point where Erie trains turn east to the Hoboken station to Broadway and Fulton; the straight-line distance is exactly 6 km.
Hoboken
Description: trains follow the existing route to Hoboken, but start descending as they exit the tunnel to the east, and go under the existing station, next to the PATH station. They cross to Manhattan on one side of the PATH tubes, then turn south to Lower Manhattan.
Stations: new station under Hoboken Terminal, and a Greenwich/West Village station.
Length: 8.5 km.
Manhattan station preference: any, but with north-south preference.
Advantages: less construction in New Jersey, Hoboken has a spacious railyard for station construction, easy transfer to PATH and light rail, plenty of space in the Village valley to align along the proper streets for service to Lower Manhattan, possible transfer to the West 4th Street subway station.
Disadvantages: longest, too far from Jersey City jobs, passes very close to the uptown PATH tubes and must cross under them somewhere, more construction in Manhattan, the most useful Village station requires crossing the three-level IND West 4th station or one of its two-level approaches, most north-south alignments require crossing the Holland Tunnel or an east-west subway to Brooklyn (the more easterly alignments more than one).
Pavonia-North (Erie)
Description: trains follow the Bergen Arches into Jersey City, go underground in the vicinity of Jersey Avenue, and enter Manhattan at Canal Street, turning south close to but without intersecting the Holland Tunnel.
Stations: Pavonia/Newport, possibly Chinatown, possibly a future infill station on the Bergen Arches.
Length: 7.5 km.
Manhattan station preference: any, but with north-south preference.
Advantages: space in the TriBeCa valley to align along proper streets, possible transfer to the Chinatown Canal Street subway station, the unused four-tracked Bergen Arches are elevated in an open cut and thus have space for local infill stations if necessary later, not much construction in New Jersey.
Disadvantages: Newport is not Jersey City’s biggest cluster of towers, the ideal construction location of a Pavonia station is 300 meters from the PATH station and any less requires going under the mall or between tall buildings, a fair amount of construction in Manhattan.
Pavonia-South (PRR)
Description: trains cross to Journal Square in a new tunnel, follow the former PRR mainline alongside the PATH tracks, branch off to the PRR Pavonia terminal, start descending at Marin, and cross to Manhattan at a street between Worth and Vesey.
Stations: Journal Square, Pavonia/Newport
Length: just under 7 km.
Manhattan station preference: any works, but east-west under Vesey is exceptionally easy and north-south under City Hall Park slightly less so, and east-west under Liberty is slightly harder than the rest.
Advantages: relatively little Manhattan construction, flexible about Manhattan station location, several easy Manhattan station options.
Disadvantages: the Newport-south tower cluster is smaller than the Newport-north cluster, requires new elevated structures through Jersey City for the kilometer between Newark Avenue and Marin as well as about a kilometer-long tunnel (neither terribly expensive).
Exchange Place
Description: trains cross to Journal Square in a new tunnel, follow the former PRR mainline alongside the PATH tracks, go underground when PATH goes underground, and cross straight east to Manhattan on one side of the PATH tubes.
Stations: Journal Square, Exchange Place.
Length: 6.5 km.
Manhattan station preference: any east-west.
Advantages: serves the biggest office building cluster in Jersey City, easy transfers to PATH, all east-west Manhattan station options are relatively easy, least construction in Manhattan, shortest length.
Disadvantages: north-south Manhattan options are difficult, generally inflexible in Manhattan, passes very close to the downtown PATH tubes, needs about 1.5 km of tunnel in downtown Jersey City (for which there are some right-of-way options) and another km of tunnel north of Journal Square, partially duplicates PATH service.
The general theme here is that there’s a tradeoff between construction in New Jersey and in Manhattan, but most likely construction in New Jersey is cheaper. However, the cheaper options involving more construction in New Jersey are less flexible in Manhattan – the Hoboken and Pavonia-North option do not constrain the choice of Manhattan station locations as much as the two PRR options.
For the record, my guess is that the best option is Exchange Place if the Manhattan station has to be east-west, and Pavonia-North if it is north-south.
The Rockaway Cutoff
When I went to an IRUM meeting nearly two years ago, the participants crowed about the possibility of restoring rail service on the Rockaway Cutoff. New York urban planner and technical activist David Krulewitch recently posted his proposal in a comment, showcasing multiple ways of reusing it for faster connections between Midtown and the Rockaway branches of the A, serving JFK and/or the Rockaways. Although the possibility has raised excitement among most local transit activists (some of whom have posted fantasy maps in the various subway forums including such an extension), I’m more skeptical.
First, the potential for JFK service is limited. The reason is that the Rockaway Cutoff only reaches Howard Beach, making it just a faster version of the A. The AirTrain is technologically incompatible with any other transit system in the region: it’s a vendor-locked Bombardier technology, of the same type used on the first two SkyTrain lines in Vancouver, in which the trains are driverless and propelled by linear induction motors placed between the tracks. This system allows trains to climb steeper than usual grades, and the maximum grade used on the AirTrain is 5.5%, considerably more than the usual for a normal subway or regional EMU (though less than the absolute maximum).
In addition, the needs of the mainline regional system and the subway are different from those of an airport people mover. A people mover needs very high frequency at all times, which is why such systems are normally driverless. In contrast, most subways are not driverless, and I do not know of a single mainline railroad that is driverless. Driverless operation requires some serious upgrades to electronics, and those upgrades are pointless if used only on a single line. If instead the JFK connection has a driver, then frequency will necessarily be very low, since there isn’t too much airport demand, and this will depress demand even further.
Although the current AirTrain system suffers from the lack of a one-seat ride to Manhattan, the situation is not too bad. Jamaica offers a very frequent LIRR connection to Manhattan at all hours, and Howard Beach offers a frequent if not fast connection to Brooklyn. This requires multiple transfers to reach most destinations, but this is not a major problem for locals who are traveling light. It’s a bigger problem for locals with luggage and even more so for tourists, but a one-seat ride to Penn Station, as proposed in LIRR connection proposals, is not too useful since most hotels are too far north. Even Grand Central is at the southern margin of Midtown proper.
For an honest estimate of how much demand there is, let us look at airports with very good transit connections. At Charles de Gaulle, 6 million passengers board at the RER station per year, 20% of airport traffic, and another 3 million use the TGV. At Frankfurt, 11% of passengers use the S-Bahn, and 15% use the ICE. Neither airport has a subway connection. Heathrow, which does have an Underground connection, has a total of 13 million Underground boardings and alightings, 20% of traffic (see data here); I do not know the ridership of the two mainline rail connections to Central London, but a thesis studying air-rail links puts the mode share as of 2004 at 9%. Assuming the train usage in Paris, New York could expect JFK to see 4.6 million boardings, or 9.2 million boardings and alightings; assuming that in London, New York could expect 13 million. The AirTrain’s current ridership is 5.3 million. Although the extra ridership would be useful at low cost, the higher cost of allowing mainline or subway trains to use the AirTrain tracks may be too high.
More importantly, 13 million passengers a year – an upper bound more than a median estimate in light of Frankfurt and Paris’s lower ridership – do not make for very high frequency by themselves, and therefore JFK could at best be an anchor rather than the primary ridership driver. Airport-only trains would be quite lonely; one of Krulewitch’s proposal’s most positive aspects is that it never even mentions premium express services such as Heathrow Express, which tend to underperform expectations as passengers prefer to ride cheaper local trains. Thus, not only would it be expensive to do an infrastructure and technology retrofit to permit direct Midtown-JFK service, but also the market for it would not be very large.
This brings us to the second possible market: the intermediate stops on the Rockaway Cutoff. They may seem useful, but in fact the development is elsewhere. Observe the land use maps of Queens Community Boards 6 and 9, which host most of the Cutoff: along the Cutoff’s right of way, the primary uses are single-family residential, with only a little commercial. Moreover, the commercial development is often very auto-oriented, for example at Metropolitan Avenue. Indeed, the only proposed station with significant dense development is Rego Park, which is on the LIRR Main Line and could be restored without restoring an entire line. Rezoning near the other stations is possible, but why not rezone near existing subway stations first?
In general, development in the US along linear corridors follows arterial roads, not railroads that haven’t seen passenger service in many decades. In the area in question, the primary north-south commercial artery is Woodhaven Boulevard; for service to the intermediate areas, the proposal should be evaluated against a light rail line on Woodhaven, providing local service from Queens Boulevard to Howard Beach and hitting multiple subway transfer points but not the airport.
The third market posited, fast service to the Rockaways, is the weakest. The stations in the Rockaways are some of the least busy in the subway system, with only a few hundreds of thousands of annual boardings each. They only support 15-minute service, with half of the A trains terminating at Ozone Park; since there are two Rockaway branches, the less busy only gets a shuttle except at rush hour, when there is enough demand for a few direct trains. Even with 15-minute service, it’s expensive to serve an area so far away with a flat fare; until a series of fare unifications, the subway charged a higher fare to stations in the Rockaways.
The problem with the Rockaways is that stations are too far from Manhattan and too lightly populated for it to be otherwise. Moreover, service along the LIRR to Penn Station using the Cutoff is about 18 km long measured from the intersection of the Cutoff with the A at Liberty, and service along the R is 16 km to Lexington and 19.5 to Times Square; service along the A is about 21.5 km long to Penn Station and 22 km long to Times Square, longer but not very much so. The main advantage of the R is that it hits Midtown proper better, rather than skirting it on 8th Avenue, but there’s practically no speed advantage – about 6 kilometers of travel distance and 2 station stops, translating to perhaps ten minutes.
As appealing as sending a single local subway service from the Queens Boulevard Line along the Cutoff to serve the Rockaways and give direct service to every branch, there would be a large demand mismatch; moreover, service to Forest Hills, which has nearly twice as many riders as all Rockaway stations combined, would be degraded.
LIRR service to the Rockaways could be better, but only if it’s modernized. The way it’s run today – infrequently, not very quickly, and expensively – it has no appeal. Far Rockaway has 4,500 weekday boardings on the subway (with a travel time of 1:06-1:14 to Times Square), and 158 average of boardings and alightings on the LIRR (with a travel time of 0:50-1:00 to Penn Station). Cutting another ten minutes from the LIRR travel time to Far Rockaway isn’t going to change anything as long as operating patterns remain as they are.
But if operating patterns are modernized, is there a point in service along the Cutoff? It saves very little distance measured to Far Rockaway: 21 vs. 24.5 km. It’s more useful farther west in the Rockaways, but those are less useful areas to serve – those are the areas with the lowest subway ridership, whereas Far Rockaway’s ridership is merely below average. Although the ridership would not be as pitiful if LIRR charged subway fares for in-city service and provided reasonably high speed and frequency, and it could be studied further as a case of an in-city S-Bahn line, there are more worthwhile S-Bahn destinations on the LIRR, for examples southeastern Queens, Hempstead, Bayside, and Great Neck. The main problem is that the Rockaway Beach branch would still have too little ridership to justify high frequency, and the round-robin proposal would have the same frequency-splitting effect on the stations except Far Rockaway and its immediate vicinity as running two separate branches; each station may have frequent service, but half the trains would take too long.
Finally, the three above-described markets – JFK, neighborhoods between Rego Park and Howard Beach, and the Rockaways – cannot all be served at the same time. The intermediate neighborhoods are free, but it’s impossible to serve both JFK and the Rockaways without an additional branching, reducing frequency even further. This means that the two markets can’t be combined to create more powerful demand. It’s one or the other – either the 13 million boardings and alightings one could optimistically expect of JFK, or the 4.5 million boardings times an appropriate growth factor one could expect of the Rockaways. Neither is high by S-Bahn standards; measured in ridership per terminus excluding short-turns, the least busy RER line, the RER C, has 20 million riders per terminus.
Because of the low potential ridership of the Rockaway Cutoff, I suggest New York transit advocates look elsewhere first. Service to JFK could be beefed up with sending surplus Amtrak trains to Jamaica for an interchange, and service to the Rockaways first with modernizing regional rail and second with having it take over the Far Rockaway branch of the A if there’s demand. If there’s higher than expected growth in demand, then the Cutoff could be activated, at as a low a cost in 15 years as today. But for now, the low cost of activating the Rockaway Cutoff comes hand in hand with low benefits.
Pedestrian Observations 
