Category: Regional Rail

Suburban TOD

Hicksville is located 43 kilometers east of Penn Station on the LIRR Main Line. It’s a major job center of eastern Nassau County, with 25,000 jobs and a rather large shopping center adjacent to the train station. The station itself gets about 8,000 weekday boardings, more than any other suburban LIRR station except Ronkonkoma.

However, the station has no TOD. The shopping mall is transit-adjacent, but the route to it from the station passes through parking lots at both ends. The station is surrounded by thousands of parking spaces; a recent reconstruction of a parking garage cost $364 $36.4 million for 1,400 spaces, which at $26,000 per space is more than the per-rider cost of such expensive transit lines as Second Avenue Subway. As a result, the total number of people getting off at Hicksville in the AM peak is 700, for a rail share of 3%.

Such failure is quite common in the US. Leaving aside stations explicitly configured as park-and-rides, such as Metropark or Ronkonkoma, off-CBD stations have to have at least some retail and office space usable by reverse commuters, on the pure financial grounds that reverse-peak service is nearly free to provide. Otherwise, light rail and subway trains run empty in the reverse-peak, and commuter trains park downtown, leading to outsized costs for CBD railyard expansions.

For a comparison of how good TOD looks like, see this industry presentation about Tokyo’s Tsukuba Express. As is normal in Tokyo, the line is very expensive: $140 million per km for a line that’s just 26% in tunnel, though the tunnel percentage is much higher within the central city. But per rider this is not too bad, because as the images in the presentation demonstrate, intense TOD followed construction. Stations are surrounded by high-density office and residential buildings and not parking lots.

A theme I am going to revisit is that high construction costs should not be an excuse to scale down service levels. It may be expensive to develop on the parking lots adjacent to the station, but the ridership is always worth it.

If there’s to be a transit revival, it’s imperative to increase mode share at major suburban centers. The transit mode share for people working in Manhattan is 75%, while the auto share is only 14% – and the auto mode share is dominated by the suburbs that use the GWB, rather than Long Island. There’s some room to expand Manhattan employment, but not enough to make a dent in the region’s car use. It’s critical to instead make it easier to use transit and harder to drive to work in such secondary downtowns as Flushing and Jamaica, and in such major suburban centers as Mineola and, yes, Hicksville.

Yes, Transit is Green

I’ve just found a post by Brad Templeton arguing that US mass transit is less green than high-efficiency cars, at least when compared per passenger-km. (He agrees that transit is overall better because it is more efficient when used more extensively, as in Europe and especially East Asia.) The analysis of how this can be given the numbers is cogent, but the numbers themselves are suspect, and are worse for transit than other numbers I’ve seen.

Better numbers can be found in this FTA presentation, on pages 10-11; the data is sourced to the National Transit Database. They’re expressed in pounds of CO2 per passenger-mile; if you’re more used to thinking in terms of passenger-miles per gallon of gasoline equivalent, then convert x pounds per passenger-mile to 19.374/x passenger-miles per gallon. The New York City Subway gets the equivalent of 114 passenger-mpg, versus 47 on Templeton’s page. Even FRA-regulated commuter rail does significantly better than cars – the low efficiency of the trains cancels out with the fact that there’s almost no off-peak traffic.

Another piece of evidence Templeton’s transit numbers are too low: he lists JR East’s energy use as equivalent to about 78 passenger-mpg. In reality, JR East claims much lower emissions, about 13 grams per passenger-km (400 passenger-mpg equivalent) or 19 (280), depending on whether one counts the emissions of the company’s buildings or just transportation emissions. It could be that Japanese power generation is that efficient; but given that Japan’s overall per capita emissions are not low by non-US developed country standards, I doubt it.

Finally, although it appears as if technology is about to make cars much more efficient, in reality technology is expensive if you’re a driver and cheap if you’re a transit agency. Take hybrids: the market share of new hybrid car sales is in the single digits, about 300,000 out of 8 million light vehicles sold in the US in 2008, but the market share of new hybrid bus orders was 22% in 2007. Electrified trains are also gaining efficiency, perhaps more slowly but the important thing for them is to transition to low-carbon power generation; if their emissions are nontrivial thirty years from now, then we have bigger problems than transportation to worry about.

New York’s Awful Grade Separation

After Rick Scott rejected the Florida high-speed rail funds, a bunch of states as well as Amtrak applied for the redirected funds. The money has just been redistributed – see breakdown here. New York State applied for $300 million to grade-separate a junction between Amtrak and the LIRR, which it spins as an important capacity upgrade and which some online commenters have misinterpreted as a speed upgrade. Let me dispel the myth here.

The track map of the LIRR (link scrubbed for copyright reasons) shows clearly that, in the westbound direction, the junction has no conflicts. Amtrak trains (blue) using the northern tunnel pair to Penn Station have no conflicts with any other trains, except for other trains using the same tunnels. This is not a grade crossing, but a simple switch. In the eastbound direction, trains using the northern tunnels do have an at-grade junction with LIRR trains (purple) – but only trains going to a track farther north than the tunnels to Penn Station, and those all stub-end at Hunterspoint Avenue or Long Island City.

There aren’t a lot of trains going to Hunterspoint or Long Island City: at the peak, only 5 per hour, and of those one uses the Montauk Line, so we’re really talking about 4 trains per hour; Amtrak never runs more than 2 trains per hour to New York from the east. To put things in perspective, the 3 and 5 train on the subway have more than 10 trains per hour each and have a similar conflict in Brooklyn. What’s more, Hunterspoint’s main use is that it has an easy subway connection to Manhattan’s East Side, so once East Side Access opens and LIRR trains can go to Grand Central, traffic there will go down even more, making the flat junction even less relevant than it is today.

So the $300 million the state applied to has no relevance to either Amtrak or LIRR traffic. The only use is to let Amtrak use the southern tunnel pair to Penn Station without conflicts. Since Amtrak can already use the northern tunnels without any conflict apart from the one mentioned above, it is a pure nice-to-have. It would be good for operational flexibility if the tunnels were at capacity, but they aren’t: total LIRR plus Amtrak traffic into Penn Station peaks at 37 trains between 8 and 9 am, where the capacity of the tunnels is about 50 – and as with Hunterspoint traffic, Penn Station LIRR traffic will go down once East Side Access opens.