Category: Urban Transit
Park and Rides, and Good Planning
Some people with experience in American bus planning have come strongly for park-and-rides, as a convenient means of concentrating all people boarding buses at one spot in order to improve frequency. The charge is led by Joel Azumah of Transport Azumah, who, responding to my question of whether it’s worth it to have strongly peaked buses, says,
Instead of running a separate park & ride and regional service, you can broaden the span of park & ride service. That would allow you to use some buses more than once or to add the early & late buses for flexibility. Park & riders that use services with a narrow span will drive in if they think their schedule is going to change. The extra buses will reduce that tendency.
In this view, the primary purpose of off-peak service is to provide peak riders with extra flexibility, making it a loss leader. This is indeed one of the main purposes of an all-day clockface schedule, as opposed to the essentially peak-only service provided by nearly all North American commuter lines. And yet, one part of Joel’s response bothered me. Observe that he contrasts his view with “running a separate park-and-ride and regional service.” In other words, a bus that serves a park-and-ride can’t serve walkable residential and commercial suburban strips. While this is a plausible constraint for an express bus, it is not a real issue for commuter rail, as long as the commuter rail is done right: trains make multiple stops, and those can include both walkable towns and some regional park-and-rides.
Of course, American commuter rail is without exception done wrong. This manifests itself in three different problems, all of which make park-and-rides look much more important than they actually are.
First, the rolling stock used, except on the LIRR, SEPTA, and Metro-North, is substandard. In particular, trains hauled by adapted freight locomotives take a long time to accelerate to even medium speed: the MBTA’s current trains lose 70 seconds just accelerating from 0 to 60 mph, and the FRA-compliant improvement, using Colorado Railcar DMUs, only cuts this to 42, as established in Table 3.1 of the Fairmount Line study. For comparison, modern EMUs, even of the FRA-compliant variety, lose about 13 seconds. The result is that trains can’t make frequent stops while maintaining acceptable average speed. Thus the service pattern already includes widely separated stops, forcing people to drive to stations, and moreover involves complex patterns with express trains.
Second, nearly all agencies, assume because of tradition that they can only serve peak riders to the CBD. Occasionally there’s some reverse-peak service, but its usage as a percentage of employment in the suburbs served is trivial. Even Metro-North, perhaps the most forward-thinking agency for reverse commuting, is uncompetitive for suburban employment. Stamford has a ridership of about 4,000 employees, in addition to about 3,000 residents working in New York; the total number of transit users working in Stamford is 8,600, itself only 11% of the city’s employment. This pattern in which nearly all ridership is inbound peak reinforces itself, and agencies do not usually try to provide adequate off-peak and reverse-peak service. The MBTA provides two-hour service off-peak on most lines. The LIRR runs trains one-way on the Main Line during peak hour, to allow the peak frequency of 20 trains per hour to run express trains rather than just locals.
And third, invariably, the suburban stations are all park-and-rides themselves. Some are explicitly configured as such, such as Metropark and Route 128. Those are good and need to be there. The problem is that pretty much all stations are friendlier to cars than to pedestrians. Sometimes they’re located outside the towns they purport to serve – for particularly bad examples, look at satellite photos of Plymouth and Westborough. Plymouth’s station is to the north of the old train station and town center, robbing the station of pedestrian traffic, and because Plymouth’s ridership has to come from drivers, the MBTA prefers to have most trains skip Plymouth entirely and just serve Kingston-Route 3, a standard park-and-ride. In a similar manner, Hicksville has a fair amount of development near the station, but so much parking that it’s poorly connected to the station for the pedestrian. Even Providence, Worcester, and New Haven get stations without much pedestrian-oriented development nearby; Providence, the best of the bunch, has development, but it’s sterile residential plus a mall flanked by pedestrian-hostile arterials.
The result of all this is that there isn’t a single example in the US of a commuter line, rail or bus, where most people walk to the station. Thus, issues including off-peak ridership and development near the stations look unsolvable. Those park-and-ride users grumble about difficult parking and do not take trains except to the city during rush hour. Who will drive to take a train that comes every two hours when it’s possible to just drive to the city?
Commuter rail done right does not have this problem, because it runs good (high-performance, low-energy consumption) trains with only one or two staff on board, and so it can run with long span and high frequency while serving many stations. This is roughly how many modern light rail lines in North America operate: there are a few park-and-rides, and a lot of stations located in between that are accessible to pedestrians and interface with feeder buses.
But for mainline rail, one has to look for examples outside the US. In Japan, new transit construction outside the dense city cores is accompanied by intense development near stations: see, for a recent example, the Tsukuba Express. Shopping centers and dense residential areas will generate ridership all day and in both directions; park-and-rides exist, but do not occupy center stage as they do in the US. Likewise, in Germany, one of the practices that evolved in the recent transit revival is closely spaced stations, located everywhere a railroad intersects a walkable place; speed is maintained via trains with good acceleration and level boarding, resulting in average speeds that match those of American commuter lines despite the shorter interstations.
The political infrastructure that exists in Germany and Japan and allows this and is absent in the US is coordinated planning. There is no way a single entrepreneur can create all the required development and local transit coordination. Transportation isn’t web entrepreneurship; it has no Mark Zuckerbergs or Larry Pages, who can almost singlehandedly create all the agglomeration required to support the new technology. Most of the time, this is done by cooperative government planning. The rest of the time it’s done by established conglomerates, usually combining real estate and transportation, including the Hong Kong MTR and the private railroads in Japan.
There is also some component of technology there. Small-scale entrepreneurs can run express buses, which can’t adequately serve many stations while maintaining competitive speed, much more easily than they can run trains, which can. They cannot run trains at all in the closed-access paradigm that rules American (and Japanese) railroading; they have an easier time in open-access Europe, and yet even then most private players are again big conglomerates, such as Veolia and Virgin.
Although transit must make room for the private sector, a transit revival that relies on uncoordinated private players will necessarily fail. Britain, the most privatized of the countries with a revival (high-income East Asia has no revival, as in the big metro areas transit never declined in the first place), needed to revert to public infrastructure planning with Network Rail, and maintains some of the key features of cooperative planning, including integrated tickets and fares. The rest of Europe contracts out services, but still strives to improve intermodal and interagency transfers; in Switzerland, transfers are timed even when multiple operators are involved. The role of people like Joel and the other private-sector players is to bid for operating routes that fit into a combined system, and add service (still within a fare union!) on thick routes where timetable coordination is less important.
What this means is that a transit revival must include more competent government planning. If there had been no Interstates, and certainly if there had been no expressways built by the states from the 1930s on, some of the railroads would’ve survived to do planning entirely in the private sector, as is the case in Japan. But given that there’s nothing like Japan’s private railroads in the US to plan integrated transportation using market principles, the government needs to do it, and it needs to do it well. It can’t privatize everything; the operators will just loot it for subsidies and neglect any components of development that don’t lead to immediate profit. And it needs to learn from some of the practices of express bus operators, but recognize when it can do better than just copy them.
Macrodestinations and Microdestinations
In her book Dark Age Ahead, Jane Jacobs complains that freeways as built are good at getting people to macrodestinations (downtown) but not microdestinations (particular addresses within city center). In her example from Toronto, this is correct, but in general, each mode of transportation will be good at serving microdestinations in an urban form that’s suited for it. Cars are not good at serving an intact city center; but equally, transit is not good at serving suburban sprawl, and regional rail that’s not integrated with urban transit is not good at serving urban destinations away from immediate train stations.
The idealized job center in an auto-oriented city is the edgeless city. Even the edge city, as explained in Lang and LeFurgy’s now-paywalled article Edgeless Cities, is too dense, and becomes congested too quickly; indeed, Tysons Corner is infamous for its lunchtime rush hour conditions. Ideally, cars drive from low-density residences to low-density office parks, primarily on freeways but with fast arterial connections at both ends; the freeway network in the auto-oriented city serves an everywhere-to-everywhere set of origins and destinations.
In such an environment, transit can’t do well. The distance between suburban attractors is too great for an easy walk, and the roads are too wide and fast for a pleasant walk. Buses and trains can serve a general macrodestination (“Warwick Mall/CCRI”), but not individual microdestinations, not without splitting and cutting frequency to each destination or detouring and raising travel time. The buses serving Warwick Mall and CCRI have hourly frequency, and are a long, uncomfortable walk from the hotel in Warwick I needed to go to. Judging by the frequency, I’m not the only person who chose not to use them, and take a taxi instead; everyone who has a car or who isn’t extremely price-sensitive does. The only way transit can serve such a destination is by concentrating development near the station – in other words, making a mini-transit city in the sea of sprawl, which generally conflicts with the goal of easy station parking.
In a city, the opposite situation exists. It’s easy to just pronounce transit more suited to dense city centers than driving, but the situation is more complicated. Transit, too, thrives on good connections to microdestinations. It can’t serve employment that’s dense but evenly dispersed in a large area – people would need too many transfers, and the result would be service that’s on paper rapid and in reality too slow. Instead, it works best when all destinations are clustered together, in an area not many subway stations in radius.
In this view, one failure of urban renewal is its failure to recognize that most people who visit city centers are going to do a lot of walking, and amenities should make it easier rather than harder. Traditional urban renewal would build cultural centers and other projects at the fringe of the CBD, to help its growth: Lincoln Center just north of Midtown, Civic Center just southwest of the San Francisco CBD, Providence Place and Providence Station just north of Downcity. In New York and San Francisco, there’s at least rapid transit serving those destinations, mitigating the effects. In Providence, no such thing exists. It’s an inconvenient walk from Kennedy Plaza to the mall and the train station – it’s not too long, but it crosses Memorial Boulevard right when it turns into a freeway on-ramp. Walking to the Westin, immediately adjacent to the mall, is practically impossible without rushing across roads without crosswalks. Even the walk between the station and the mall, which were built together and are close to each other, is much worse on the street than on a map, again involving crossing auto-centric roads.
Organic city amenities do not look like this. If they cluster at the same location (for example, 125th Street in New York, or Thayer Street in Providence), they tend to be along roads that facilitate rather than hindering pedestrian movement. And if they don’t, they are all located along a rapid transit network in its shared service area, where it is still a tight mesh rather than a network of radial lines.
In view of the recent emphasis on parking policy, due to Donald Shoup but now mirrored by other urban planning and transportation experts, the observation is that in any city center, on-site parking is difficult to find. Even in cities that make downtown parking relatively easy to get to, people can’t hope to park at every single microdestination, so instead they trip-chain, driving into the city and parking but going to multiple points within the city, all within a short and easy walking distance from one another. This is roughly the urban geography of the French Riviera, which combines easy parking with a dense, lively center in Nice and a fair amount of urbanity on some streets even in auto-oriented secondary cities such as Monaco and Menton.
The connection to regional rail is that, historically, it descends from intercity trains, and therefore the conception of connecting the suburbs to the city is very macrodestination-driven. To name two egregious American examples, the Boston’s north side lines and Caltrain both connect many suburbs to the city while also connecting people to the suburban tech job corridor, but in reality miss the biggest job centers at both ends. North Station is two subway stations north of the CBD, and as a result ridership underperforms the south side lines; 4th and King is far enough outside the Market Street CBD that it’s not close to the CBD jobs – the proposed Transbay Center site, which is, is located near more jobs than all existing Caltrain stations combined. And if microdestination-level service to an already transit-oriented CBD is bad, then service to other urban destinations is worse: urban station spacing is wide, there’s no attempt to develop near stations, and the poor integration with local urban transit ensures that even people who could be willing to make the last-mile transfer don’t.
Trip Chaining
Gendered Innovations’ charts of trip chaining and gender breakdown of public transit riders got me thinking about how different systems of transportation handle a mixture of short and long trips. Eric Jaffe at The Atlantic Cities reports this and suggests that transit agencies orient physical features such as accessibility to the needs of women who trip-chain care and work trips.
But to me, the first observation is that although women trip-chain more, it doesn’t seem to be true that women are more likely to ride transit in the US than men just because of trip-chaining features. Instead, women traditionally have been less likely to have jobs requiring commuting, and the commute gap has been shrinking more slowly than the gap in employment.
This comes from the fact that trip chaining on transit is cumbersome in most cases. Both cars and transit have to deal with the time it takes to stop for an errand, but transit tends to handle this worse, unless it’s very frequent and has practically zero access and egress times. Transit cities instead get people to take their short errand trips on foot – since their neighborhoods are denser and have more mixtures of uses, they make retail and care trips attractive on foot. In light of the fact that walking is not useful for long commute trips and transit is not useful for short errands, we can construct the following typology of cities:
| Long \ Short mode | Foot, bicycle | Car |
| Transit | Transit-oriented | Traditional suburban |
| Car | New urbanist, small-town, auto-oriented dense | Auto-oriented |
Auto-oriented cities are the easiest: in those places, people drive for all purposes. Trip chaining can be done on a commercial arterial road, dropping off laundry or kids or buying something on the way to work, and because of ample parking availability, the time each additional link in the chain consumes is very small, since the longest access and egress time comes from navigating from the residential cul-de-sac to the arterial and from the arterial to the office park.
Traditional suburbs, common around New York and Chicago and sometimes in other old North American cities, are similar for trip-chaining purposes. In those areas, the urban form is suburban and auto-oriented, but work trips to the city are done by commuter rail or occasionally commuter bus, since the city is not as auto-friendly as the suburbs.
Transit cities too have their long-range commuter rail, but it is built as an extension of walking rather than of driving. Neighborhoods tend to have mixed uses, and there’s a concentration of retail development near the outlying stations, sometimes forming large secondary clusters but sometimes just acting as neighborhood centers. It could take considerable time to add more trips to one chain, especially if not everything is located at the train station. But conversely, the amount of time a single short trip takes is small, unlike the case for auto-oriented cities – the supermarket is right around the corner, and within five minutes’ walk are plenty of stores. When people walk, the concept of a single trip begins to lose meaning then. Potentially, every single purchase can be considered a separate trip, in which case the chaining becomes quite long.
In many places the transit is absent and people drive outside the neighborhood, while still doing errand trips on foot. This is the typology that characterizes different environments including new urbanism, traditional cities like Providence and Tel Aviv that have been made car-oriented, and auto-oriented modernist projects such as Co-op City. Those environments all differ in how trip chaining is done. In principle, it can be done on foot, but usually people who can drive do.
If my own experience is any indication, one feature of cities in this typology is that children and teenagers walk more. In Tel Aviv, my father drove me to elementary school on the way to work while (in later grades) I walked back, and I took the bus to and from middle school. Most trips my parents did in a car, but there was a reasonable number that were short enough to walk. I’d walk to farther destinations such as the cinema and the urban mall. The view of the North Tel Aviv middle and upper-middle class of the 1990s as I remember it is that the bus is fine for trips to school, but adults drive. I doubt I’d have had the same view if I’d grown up in New York, or for that matter in the Houston suburbs, where everyone drives or is driven.
Although most of the discussion about transit cities contrasts them with car-oriented cities, the other two typologies need to be examined, too. When adults and children trip-chain differently, children can get a distorted view of who transit is for (poor people, people who can’t drive yet), and the next generation will make the city auto-oriented; this is indeed what is happening in Tel Aviv, which despite population growth in the core is adding cars and spawning low-density suburbanization well outside the built-up urban areas.
Likewise, Cap’n Transit’s attacks on park-and-rides don’t quite capture what is wrong with the car/transit typology. A transit agency that wants to make it easier to trip-chain will want to concentrate development near the train stations, because that’s where it’s easiest to add minor trips without having to walk ten minutes out of one’s way. Of course in the middle of the dense city there’s development everywhere, which may well be orthogonal to where the subway is, but then trip-chaining becomes easier because each foot trip is so short.
The principle is that cars are a big one-time purchase but have a much lower marginal cost of usage. If one major class of trips can’t be done on transit – and chained trips generally can’t when they require the rider to wait for the next bus and the next bus will come in 15 minutes – then people will buy a car and then drive it even for trips they’d happily take transit to if they didn’t already own a car. The class of trips that can only be done conveniently by car needs to be kept small enough that people will use car share, take a taxi, or beg a friend who does own a car.
Thus what transit agencies and pro-transit politicians should devote more time to is appropriate development more than physical features of the transit system. Accessibility is important for so many reasons other than strollers. In contrast, the primary importance of using transit to extend the range of the pedestrian rather than provide a capacity boost for the car is precisely that transit needs minor trips to be doable on foot. A transit system that one needs to take to the supermarket may be technically successful, but it’s in a failed urban area.
MBTA Mode Shares
As a followup to my claim in my first post about improving the MBTA about the low mode share of commuter rail for trips into Boston, here are some figures about commuter rail use, by sector. All numbers exclude commuters from inner suburbs and from Boston itself, since those would use the subway. Only Boston-bound commuters are included. I’m providing wider and narrower numbers, wider numbers corresponding to the entire sector defined by a commuter line and narrower numbers including only towns within reasonable range of a commuter station.
All commuter rail numbers come from the Bluebook and are averages as of February 2009, from page 74; be careful not to use numbers from the map on page 70, as they inflate the ridership on the Providence Line. All commute market numbers come from the 2000 census; I do not believe commuting patterns have changed so radically as to significantly alter the picture.
Update: we obtain the following table, explained below (see also computation error fix for Haverhill):
| Line | Wide market | Narrow market | Riders | Share of wide | Share of narrow |
| Old Colony | 43,587 | 34,934 | 20,907 | 48% | 60% |
| Providence, Stoughton | 23,297 | 17,490 | 11,719 | 50% | 67% |
| Franklin | 14,899 | 12,747 | 7,043 | 47% | 55% |
| Worcester | 19,997 | 15,581 | 7,479 | 37% | 48% |
| Fitchburg | 16,544 | 13,358 | 5,883 | 38% | 44% |
| Lowell | 15,551 | 11,912 | 5,586 | 36% | 47% |
| Haverhill | 19,196 | 16,902 | 8,922 | 46% | 53% |
| Newburyport, Rockport | 26,926 | 25,534 | 13,230 | 49% | 52% |
Old Colony Lines (including Greenbush)
Commute market (wider): all of Plymouth County; Cohasset, Weymouth, Randolph, Holbrook, and Avon towns in Norfolk County
Commute market (narrower): including only the above Norfolk County towns and Plymouth County’s towns of Abington, Bridgewater (including East and West), Brockton, Hanson, Hingham, Hull, Kingston, Lakeville, Middleborough, Plymouth, Rockland, Scituate, and Whitman
Commuter volume (wider): 43,587
Commuter volume (narrower): 34,934
Inbound commuter rail ridership: 12,065 (excluding JFK-UMass, Quincy, and Braintree)
Extra transit use: 7,244 subway and commuter rail boardings in Quincy and Braintree beyond those accounted for by those two towns’ commuter market; 1,598 commuter ferry riders, mostly from Hingham
Mode share: 60% of the narrow market, 48% of the wide market
Providence and Stoughton Lines
Commute market (wider): all of Rhode Island, all of Massachusetts’ Bristol County, and the towns of Sharon, Canton, Stoughton, and Plainville in Norfolk County
Commuter market (narrower): the three Norfolk County towns omitting Plainville, all of Rhode Island’s Providence and Kent Counties, and Massachusetts’ Bristol County’s towns of Attleboro (including North), Mansfield, Easton, Norton, and Seekonk
Commuter volume (wider): 23,297
Commuter volume (narrower): 17,490
Inbound commuter rail ridership: 11,719
Extra transit use: none
Mode share: 67% of the narrow market, 50% of the wide market
Franklin Line
Commute market (narrower): Norfolk County’s towns of Dedham, Westwood, Norwood, Walpole, Norfolk, and Franklin
Commute market (wider): the above plus the towns of Medfield, Medway, and Wrentham
Commuter volume (wider): 14,899
Commuter volume (narrower): 12,747
Inbound commuter rail ridership: 7,043
Extra transit use: none
Mode share: 55% of the narrow market, 47% of the wide market
Worcester Line
Commute market (wider): all of Worcester County except Fitchburg, Harvard, Westminster, Gardner, and Leominster; Wellesley; and Middlesex County’s towns of Natick, Ashland, Framingham, Marlborough, Hudson, Hopkinton, Holliston, and Sherborn
Commute market (narrower): Wellesley; Middlesex’s above counties omitting Hudson, Holliston, and Marlborough towns; and including only Worcester County’s towns of Southborough, Westborough, Northborough, Shrewsbury, Grafton, Worcester, Auburn, and Millbury
Commuter volume (wider): 19,997
Commuter volume (narrower): 15,581
Inbound commuter rail ridership: 7,479 (west of Newton only)
Extra transit use: none, as all Green Line usage is accounted for by Newton commuters
Mode share: 48% of the narrow market, 37% of the wide market
Fitchburg Line
Commute market (wider): Worcester County’s Fitchburg, Harvard, Westminster, Gardner, and Leominster towns; Middlesex County’s Belmont, Waltham, Wayland, Weston, Concord, Sudbury, Acton, Maynard, Stow, Lincoln, Littleton, Boxborough, Ayer, and Townsend towns
Commute market (narrower): Worcester County’s Fitchburg and Leominster only; Middlesex County’s above towns, omitting Stow, Townsend, Wayland, and Sudbury
Commuter volume (wider): 16,544
Commuter volume (narrower): 13,358
Inbound commuter rail ridership: 5,883 excluding Porter
Extra transit use: two local bus lines (70, 70A) to Waltham with 4,343 trips in each direction and two more express lines (553-4) with a combined 681 trips (none serving just Waltham, but also Newton or Cambridge), but conversely much of the ridership Waltham generates is non-commuter student traffic
Mode share (assuming neutral Waltham effect): 44% of the narrow market, 36% of the wide market
Lowell Line
Commute market (narrower): Middlesex County only, towns of Winchester, Wilmington (half, shared with Haverhill Line), Woburn, Billerica, Lowell, Chelmsford, Tewksbury, and Dracut
Commute market (wider): the above, plus the Middlesex County towns of Dunstable, Westford, and Tyngsboro, and all of New Hampshire’s Hillsborough County
Commuter volume (wider): 15,551
Commuter volume (narrower): 11,912
Inbound commuter rail ridership: 5,586 excluding West Medford
Extra transit use: none – if anything, this line is missing more of its potential coming from its inability to serve Medford well under current commuter rail paradigms
Mode share: 47% of the narrow market, 36% of the wide market
Haverhill Line
Commute market (narrower): Middlesex County’s towns of Melrose, Stoneham, Wakefield, Reading, North Reading, and Wilmington (half, shared with Lowell Line); and Essex County’s towns of Andover, North Andover, Lawrence, and Haverhill
Commute market (wider): the above, plus Essex County’s towns of Boxford, Middleton, Groveland, and Lynnfield
Commuter volume (wider): 19,196
Commuter volume (narrower): 16,902
Inbound commuter rail ridership: 5,343 excluding Malden
Extra transit ridership: Malden’s two subway stations get 8,375 riders beyond the commute market, but they could be coming from people from Everett and Medford – let’s just add the number of parking spaces, which is 976, plus one half of the remaining ridership at Oak Grove, representing Melrose and Stoneham’s share, which is 2,603 (total bus ridership in Malden and the cities to its north is 3,394 in each direction, and I’m willing to believe 2,603 of this is from north of Malden)
Mode share: 53% of the narrow market, 46% of the wide market (update: a previous version of this post gave slightly lower numbers coming from forgetting to add the 976 subway parking spaces to the imputed ridership)
Newburyport and Rockport Lines
Commute market (wider): all of Essex County except the towns of Andover, North Andover, Lawrence, Haverhill, Boxford, Middleton, Groveland, and Lynnfield
Commute market (narrower): Essex County omitting, in addition to the above, the towns of Amesbury, Georgetown, Essex, West Newbury, Topsfield, and if one wants to be very narrow then also Saugus
Commuter volume (wider): 26,926
Commuter volume (narrower): 25,534 with Saugus, 22,999 without
Inbound commuter rail ridership: 8,821 excluding Chelsea
Extra transit use: no rail, but likely high bus ridership coming out of Lynn – total North Shore ridership is 4,409 in each direction excluding the 430, which is assigned to the Haverhill Line, and some lines that do not serve subway stations (429, 431, 435, 436, 451, 455, 465, 468)
Mode share: counting commuter rail only, 38% of the narrowest market and 33% of the wide market; counting also buses, 52% of the narrow market including Saugus and 49% of the wide market
Conclusion
The best-performing sectors capture about half the ridership of their general area of service and two-thirds of the ridership coming from the towns served by transit. Except for the Providence Line, this requires heavy use of subways and buses; the high contribution of commuter buses north of Boston suggests that better regional rail service, with more useful frequencies and integration between the CharlieCard and Charlie Ticket, really would make a difference, effectively railstituting the trip to Boston and allowing redirecting the buses to feeder service. The worst-performing lines only capture a third of the market, and for those there’s less that can be done; regional rail improvements would help, especially with regards to speed and reliability, but often those areas are too sprawled out.
Another conclusion is that for the purposes of constructing timetables for an electrified, FRA-free MBTA, we should ignore current ridership patterns, and instead look at the volume of commuting. The southwesterly slice serving Providence is not special; it just gets higher mode share on commuter rail since the service levels are higher than elsewhere. A 15/30 timetable on each line or branch (counting Kingston and Plymouth as one, but not any other split) would more or less approximate market demand; it would still underserve the South Shore, but the South Shore has ferry use and subway use, and therefore there’s no lower-level service to replace with good commuter rail.
A third conclusion is that it matters whether commuter rail can serve shorter trips or not, such as trips from Waltham, Medford, Malden, Lynn, and the Fairmount Line area. Those towns and neighborhoods have much larger volumes of commuters heading toward Boston than farther-out towns. This observation favors the regional rather than intercity interpretation of commuter rail, sacrificing speed in order to improve coverage in the innermost suburbs and in outer-urban neighborhoods.
On no line is express service a good proposition except when it’s downright intercity service, such as high-speed rail to New York via Providence, or even intercity trains to Maine or deep into New Hampshire. The problems coming from runtimes that aren’t a short turnaround time less than an even multiple of 15 minutes should not be fixed with express trains, but with closing some stations that aren’t necessary (such as River Works and Mishawum), and building more infill together with the North-South Rail Link, redistributing lines in such a manner as to maximize efficiency. For example, if the branch from Lynn to Marblehead is reactivated, then even with several additional infill stops, trip time from North Station to Marblehead would be about 22 minutes, which together with time gains from the tunnel (travel time through the rail link should be a hair lower than a turnaround time) would allow mixing with the Worcester Line. Currently it’d be difficult to do Worcester-Boston in 55 minutes even under best operating assumptions, and impossible with infill stations, but with the rail link and through-service to Marblehead, the limit would be closer to 1:01, and this allows a few infill stops in Brighton.
What’s driving all of this is the fact that there isn’t all that much demand mismatch. The South Side lines have a larger (wide) market than the North Side lines, but the difference is much smaller than the difference in ridership, and decreases even further if one lets the subway take care of certain parts of the South Shore. This means that, in terms of planning, all lines should be upgraded and should receive ample attention toward service levels, and in terms of operations, through-service should be based on infrastructure capabilities and scheduling constraints rather than on service demand matching.
Improving the MBTA: Electronics and Concrete
Where improvements in New York and other very large cities can easily include multiple new subway lines, the same is not true of Boston. The concrete pouring would be wasted, since Boston’s existing subway lines are not at capacity. The busiest line, the Red Line, has a peak frequency of one train every 4.5 minutes, which could be doubled with appropriate signaling improvements and more rolling stock if necessary. The Green Line has bigger issues coming from branching – its core segment already runs close to 40 trains per hour – but this could be resolved by obtaining fully low-floor vehicles and lengthening trains to allow one or two extra branches.
Another thing that Boston lacks and other US cities do is very busy bus lines to railstitute. Boston’s busiest bus line is the Silver Line to Dudley Square, which used to be the southern part of the Orange Line and should be light rail; unfortunately, the MBTA rejected it as cost-ineffective (see pp. 36-7) by applying a wrong cost-per-rider metric, as I will explain in a later post. But beyond that, the list of bus lines (p. 50 of the Bluebook) doesn’t contain anything nearly as juicy as New York’s bus lines: New York’s 50th busiest bus is roughly even with Boston’s top bus at 15,000 weekday riders, and its top routes have 50,000, making them obvious choices for subway extensions.
Since Boston does not have a capacity problem requiring more concrete pouring on its subway lines, nor high-productivity buses to railstitute, concrete pouring should focus on the other main reason to build rapid transit: to extend service to areas that do not have it. That’s the main reason to build the North-South Rail Link: it’s as much about direct service from suburbs north of Boston to downtown and maybe Back Bay as about rationalizing service and permitting through-running. As in Philadelphia and as should be the case in New York, through-running is primarily not about suburb-to-suburb service, but about access to job centers near the stations of the other half of the commuter network (in New York those would be at Newark, Brooklyn, and Jamaica; in Philadelphia, at Temple and 30th Street Station and in University City).
The list of concrete-pouring, lines-on-a-map extensions of the MBTA in or near Boston should therefore be limited to required Big Dig mitigations, and not much more. This is not just because they are legally mandated. They are also good transit by themselves – the North-South Rail Link for the aforementioned reasons, the Assembly Square stop on the Orange Line because of the TOD potential, the Red-Blue connection because of the East Boston-Cambridge service need, and the Green Line extensions because they provide much-needed transit service in Somerville that would otherwise need to be picked up by commuter rail, at the cost of good intercity service on the Lowell Line. Apart from these, the only major radial extension that should be pursued is the dismembering of the Needham Line outlined in my last post, in which the Orange Line would take over the portion within Boston and the Green Line would take over the portion in Needham.
What should be done instead of more expansive extension plans is very aggressive use of electronics to make regional rail more useful, recalling that its share of the suburbs-to-Boston market is about one third. This necessitates a lot of concrete pouring as well – on high platforms, on track repairs, on double-tracking some single-track segments, and on other things that do not show up easily on maps – but much less than adding tunnels.
The one difficult bit of concrete pouring that has to be done, in conjunction with the North-South Rail Link, is grade-separating the junctions that lead up to North and South Stations. Without the rail link, the South Station throat is such that, run right, it’s operationally at least two stations (one for lines serving Back Bay, one for the rest), and as many as four (Worcester, the lines feeding into Ruggles, Fairmount, and Old Colony and Greenbush); this allows for zero-conflict moves, higher capacity than the MBTA thinks, and a system in which delays on one line do not affect the others. With the rail link, those two to four systems need to feed into one track pair in a way that avoids opposite-direction flat junctions. The need for grade separations right in the station throats would add substantially to the cost of the rail link over a simple two-track tunnel; that’s why I’m not instantly dismissing it as something that at normal-world costs would take a relatively trivial $500 million.
Despite the rail link’s cost, the electronics are themselves substantial. Signaling improvements are also required, to enable tighter overtakes. Moreover, full electrification should be non-negotiable – the MBTA’s stop spacing may not be as close as that of Metra or the LIRR or Metro-North or SEPTA, but it’s short enough that electrification would make a significant difference in performance. It also interacts interestingly with FRA waivers: on the one hand, without electrification, there are no good FRA-compliant trains – the Colorado Railcar DMUs have mediocre performance and are expensive and vendor-locked, and locomotive-hauled trains have terrible performance. With electrification, there exist decent FRA-compliant trains, but there also exist very good noncompliant trains. According to the Fairmount Line DMU document, current trains have a total acceleration-only penalty of 70 seconds to 60 mph, and Colorado Railcars shave that to 41 (see chart on p. 10); judging by timetable differences and dwell times, the best compliant EMUs lose about 20-25, and judging by YouTube videos FLIRTs lose 13.
The timetable examples I’ve put out – for the Providence Line in past posts, and for the Lowell Line in comments – are very ambitious, and require the signaling, electrification, and rolling stock to be perfect. The costs are not very high by US standards, but are nontrivial. Electrification costs a little more than a million dollars per kilometer (or about $2 million per mile), though it’s unclear whether this is based on route-km or track-km, as one citation I have is for a single-track line and another does not make it clear which one is under consideration. The cost is thus either about $750 million or about $1.5 billion, exclusive of rolling stock. But the benefit is commuter trains that can beat the freeways while also providing adequate regional service and connect to urban rail.
Improving the MBTA: Regional vs. Intercity Service
The MBTA commuter rail lines are laid in such a way that there’s an inherent tension between providing local service and providing longer-distance intercity service. It’s less apparent on the Providence Line because the intercity component, i.e. Boston-Providence, follows immediately just from serving the suburbs between Boston and Providence, but elsewhere there are greater problems. Good local service would have intense frequency in the inner portions of commuter lines; unfortunately, most lines only meet right next to the termini, reducing the opportunities to use interlining to create high-frequency inner segments.
Good local service also needs many infill stops, while good intercity service needs higher speeds. My proposals for the Providence Line essentially go with intercity service needs, justified by the facts that Providence is a major anchor, that high top speeds are possible on the line, and that the line should also host high-speed trains. Fortunately, the Providence Line has an opportunity for more intense local service using the Stoughton Line to add frequency; while this would end up overserving Canton Junction and Route 128, Readville and points north would get adequate peak service, and acceptable off-peak service. This is not as true on other lines, especially on the North Side, in which there’s a tradeoff between fast service to outlying cities and good service within Cambridge and Somerville.
Of course, the issues I’ve focused on in my previous post on the subject – electrification, high platforms, modern rolling stock – are useful for both. A fast-accelerating EMU could connect Boston with the various terminals at the same time as today’s express trains while making all stops as well as some extra infill stops. The problem comes from trying to fit trains into a clockface schedule. On a few lines, for example the Lowell Line, it’s actually easier to close very lightly used stations (Mishawum) or stations that are very close to other stations (Wedgemere).
Another issue is outbound extensions. With some, there’s so little traffic beyond the current terminus, or sometimes even beyond a point slightly closer than the current terminus, that the decision should be easy. This contrasts with the MBTA’s approach of proposing more and more outer extensions. With others, the intercity functions make extensions more reasonable, within certain bounds. I believe the following list of judgment calls would be reasonable:
1. Providence Line: no extension required – the line’s natural end is Providence. If Rhode Island wants to provide a low-frequency glorified parking shuttle from Wickford Junction and the airport to Providence, it’s its business, as long as it doesn’t muck up timetabling that’s based on Providence-Boston service.
2. Stoughton Line: an extension to Taunton would work, and possibly even to New Bedford. I’m iffier on Fall River, which has stronger commute ties to Providence; however, Providence-Fall River requires too much new infrastructure to be easy.
3. Franklin Line: either extend it to Milford (which may be easier to serve from the Worcester Line), or cut it back to Franklin. The Forge Park terminus is close to a lot of office park jobs, but the local road network is so sprawled out that it’s not worth the extra few minutes of travel time.
4. Fairmount Line: building infill stations is an excellent idea, though it should be coupled with increase in frequency and service level to make them more useful. One way to improve off-peak frequency is to route all Franklin Line trains along this line, and perhaps add supplementary trains that turn at Readville. The advantage of this is that the Fraknlin and Fairmount Lines used to be one railroad, with a grade-separated crossing over the Providence Line; in contrast, the junction at Readville is flat, making it more operationally cumbersome to have trains cross from one line to the other.
5. Needham Line: no extension necessary – the only possibilities would dismember the line in favor of much lower-density suburbs than Needham. Better would be to eliminate the line entirely and put Needham on a branch of the Green Line, and restore past plans to extend the Orange Line to West Roxbury. This would dismember the line too, but in favor of more service to dense areas rather than less. I don’t know what’s Needham’s commute tie to West Roxbury, but its commute tie to Newton and Brookline is fairly strong, 1,300 vs. 3,400 to Boston and another 3,400 in-town.
6. Worcester Line: Worcester is the natural terminus, so no extension should be entertained.
7. Greenbush Line: Greenbush is the natural terminus. The greatest urbanization is on the coast rather than along the railroad, and this limits the line’s usefulness.
8. Kingston/Plymouth Line: the natural terminus is downtown Plymouth, slightly farther out from the current Plymouth station, which should be renamed North Plymouth or just closed for lack of utility. In addition, Plymouth sends Boston 2,565 commuters, and Kingston only 797. Either the roles of Kingston and Plymouth should be switched – Plymouth would get served all day and Kingston would get only supplemental rush hour trains – or the Kingston branch should be closed, and replaced with a station on the main line.
9. Middleborough Line: for ordinary regional traffic, the line should be marginally cut back, to place the Middleborough station at the center of the town. In fact, there’s a dropoff in commute volume south of Brockton, and yet another south of Bridgewater; Middleborough is a fine terminus, but is not a proper anchor like Providence, Worcester, or especially Plymouth. On the other hand, there’s some potential for intercity traffic to Cape Cod, capturing some commuters as well as vacationers heading the other way.
10. Fitchburg Line: the MBTA’s proposed extension to Gardner looks weak to me, though not completely daft. That entire region of northern Worcester County has much stronger commute tie to Worcester than to Boston, in similar vein to the issue of Fall River’s connection to Providence. The commute tie to Framingham, as in the MBTA plan to have a branch leaving Framingham toward Leominster, is even weaker than that to Boston. It would be better to have a regional line connecting Gardner to Worcester, which would also have the advantage of taking a much more direct route than the freeway network; connecting Fitchburg and Leominster would require more work and compete with I-190 directly.
11. Lowell Line: here an outbound extension is natural and desirable, since Nashua and Manchester have a nontrivial commute tie to Boston and are significant cities in themselves, though as with Cape Cod this would be more of an intercity line. New Hampshire had a plan for such an extension, but it was killed by state Republicans early last year. This is unfortunate, since Nashua in particular has a less than great freeway connection to Boston, which a fast electric train could consistently beat.
12. Haverhill Line: Haverhill is a natural terminus. Although Rockingham County has a strong commute tie to Boston, the greatest part of it comes from very sprawled out towns near I-93, far from the line.
13. Newburyport/Rockport Line: the split at Salem allows natural interlining to give the towns with the strongest commute ties the most frequency. An additional branch to Marblehead would be prudent, providing even more frequency to Lynn, Chelsea, and additional infill stops in Revere. At the north end, Portsmouth looks like a fine intercity terminus, but in fact that part of Rockingham County is a marginal commute market to Boston, better than that feeding into Haverhill but much worse than the I-93 sprawl.
Not discussed above are station placement and infill stations. Station placement is relatively easy, since bad cases like Westborough and the aforementioned Middleborough and Kingston look obvious on a map. In addition, such office park stations with terrible ridership as Mishawum and River Works are already treated as such, so almost all trains skip them and their ridership is very low, making them clear candidates for closure.
Infill stations are harder. The problem is that on the North Side, the four lines split too early. This means that, while infill stations are possible, it’s hard to give them adequate frequency. Short-turning local trains could help somewhat, but is the most difficult on the two lines that serve Cambridge and Somerville, the Lowell and Fitchburg Lines. It’d be much easier to do this with Lynn (which already benefits from interlining and would benefit even more from a Marblehead branch) or Malden (which has the Orange Line).
That said, the Lowell Line might be able to support a local train to Winchester and an intercity train that makes zero or one intermediate stop between North Station and Winchester. The commute market is not great at this distance, though; Belmont has 3,100 Boston-bound commuters, and 290 inbound riders at its two commuter rail stations. A reroute of the Fitchburg Line along the Charles River Branch through Watertown might get more ridership; it would be slower, but it has zero intercity function, compared with strong potential at and east of Brandeis. To succeed, high frequency and short station spacing are required. For an example using the Charles River Branch, see here.
On the South Side, the Worcester Line begs for infill between Yawkey and Newtonville, but some of the people it would serve may already be riding the Green Line. The Green Line doesn’t perfectly parallel the line the way the Red Line parallels the Old Colony Line or the Orange Line parallels the Providence Line and the Haverhill Line, though, and there’s room for two or three stations serving Allston, Brighton, and Nonantum. On the other hand, some of these stations would compete with Watertown somewhat, and are less ideally placed in that the Worcester Line has an intercity function whereas the Fitchburg Line doesn’t.
Finally, another unmentioned issue is the effect of rapid transit extensions, especially of the Green Line. The extension plan to Somerville, which the state is obliged to build as one of many mitigations for the traffic induced by the Big Dig, is effectively a replacement for Lowell Line infill in Cambridge and Somerville; the line would only really need one infill stop to connect to the Green Line, and perhaps the Green Line would need to be extended to West Medford, if not to Winchester. That said, the interaction with rapid transit is more complex than this, and I will discuss it more in a future post.
Improving the MBTA
The MBTA has a problem. And I say this coming from New York, whose standards for good regional transit aren’t all that high, but now Metro-North looks like something to look up to from the MBTA. Ridership on the system is rising, but not very quickly; the MBTA moreover has no plans to modernize. Most of what I’m going to suggest will involve commuter rail, not because it’s the most important portion of Boston’s public transportation but because it’s the part I’m most familiar with and also the part that seems most direly in need of improvements. Put another way, I’m necessarily going to talk about the MBTA as perceived from Providence, rather than from within Boston.
The main difference with New York and past proposals for improvements, both subway extensions and regional rail, is size, and scope. In New York, practically everyone who works in Manhattan takes public transportation or walks. The transit mode share to Boston is lower and the car mode share is much higher. This seems especially true for people commuting from north of Boston.
The main prescriptions will not surprise people who have read my posts on best industry practices. In short, the MBTA commuter rail needs to do the following:
– Full electrification, starting from running EMUs rather than diesels under the catenary on the Providence Line, but also extending to all other lines.
– Level boarding along the entirety of all platforms, rather than just one car length, in order to shorten dwell times to no more than 30 seconds at outlying stations.
– Higher-quality rolling stock, with better-configured doors than the present cars as discussed in a DMU conversion study; all new EMUs available, both FRA-compliant and noncompliant, would be fine, though noncompliant trains with a waiver would have somewhat better performance and lower operating costs.
– Reasonable frequency all-day on a simple clockface schedule: ideally, all branches should have 4 trains per hour at the peak and 2 off-peak – the lowest-ridership lines tend to be the shortest-distance, for which frequency matters the most, whereas the highest-ridership lines (Providence, Worcester) are practically intercity, the higher demand balancing out a lesser need for frequency.
– A fare union with local buses and the subway, so that commuter train tickets are automatically valid without extra pay.
– Relocation of stations to walkable urban areas, away from park-and-rides that only serve to extend the suburbs into Boston rather than extending Boston into the suburbs.
– An end to outbound extensions, such as the ongoing project to extend the Providence Line to Wickford Junction, and instead a shift toward infill stations, especially in underserved Cambridge and Somerville.
In the longer term, a North-South Rail Link is unavoidable – North Station is too far from the CBD, some through-service from south of Boston toward Cambridge is advisable, and the rail link as proposed would give a direct connection to the Blue Line and thus to East Boston and the airport. Although the official cost estimate is $9 billion, for barely 2 kilometers of tunnel and associated connections, such an estimate would make the project more expensive km-per-km than any other I know of except perhaps East Side Access, and a more honest attempt at cost estimation yielded $3-4 billion, on a par with outsized American subway construction costs; at European costs, it would be less than a billion. Observe that electrification could reduce the cost by allowing steeper grades; the official proposal still uses heavy diesel locomotives. In either case, this is far more expensive than the points above; concrete costs much more than organization and electronics.
Let me now explain in more detail what’s happening in and around Boston – more precisely, what is wrong, and potentially what ridership level should be expected of good regional rail.
The main datasets I’ll be working with are the American Community Survey as of 2009, the town-to-town commuter flows as of the 2000 census, and the MBTA Blue Book, offering ridership numbers as of 2009 and going back to 1989. Bear in mind that most data from the 2009 ACS will be scrubbed from the net on January 20th, giving us only 2010 census-based numbers, which undercount immigrants and the poor and thus undercount cities; however, while the 2010 census gets magnitudes of change wrong, it’s very close in terms of absolute populations, absolute mode shares, etc. All numbers I cite here are from the 2009 ACS; you can verify that a source exists now, but not beginning a week from now.
The current background trends to observe are:
– Boston’s population is increasing, quickly. The 2000 estimate base, using a 2010 backdate that also depresses intercensal estimates to fit the 2010 undercount, was 692,745 for Suffolk County, which contains Boston and three small inner suburbs. By 2009, the county’s population was 753,580, a growth of 8.8%. Boston itself had 9.5% growth from the 2000 census, which is not directly comparable to the ACS and the estimate base but is extremely close in numbers. The metro area grew only about 4.5% over 2000 – a little less if one takes the full Combined Statistical Area, which includes slow-growing satellite metros like Providence.
– Transit ridership has grown in the last 10 and 20 years, but by much less than in New York. The Red Line’s grown 50% in the last 20 years, but the other T lines barely grew. The commuter rail grew quickly as lines were put into service in the 1990s, but had little growth in the 2000s, despite high gas prices.
– The Silver Line BRT is very underused, despite the promise and branding as rapid transit on tires. Even for airport service, where the Silver Line gets to the terminals, it gets less than half the ridership of the Blue Line (2,600 vs. 6,900), which only serves a station connected to the terminals by free shuttle buses. The Washington Street branches (SL4, SL5) are more frequented, but their combined ridership is only about the same as that of a single subway station, and are just bus-plus.
– Boston is the opposite of a bedroom community – it has 520,000 jobs vs. 278,000 employed residents, all as of 2000. This 1.87 ratio is much higher than that of New York (1.18), which contains most of its bedroom communities, and is more comparable to that of Manhattan (2.75). The same is true of Cambridge, with 114,000 jobs and 55,000 employed residents, for a ratio of 2.08.
– Unlike New York, both Boston and Cambridge draw substantial numbers of commuters from suburbs outside urban transit range – Boston draws about 200,000, and Cambridge draws about 55,000. Inbound commuter rail ridership on the MBTA is 70,000. Cambridge is a lost cause under current operating paradigms – it has no stations, and if it did they’d be too poorly integrated with the top two employers.
– Total transit vs. car mode share is 26-52 for people working in Cambridge and 37-50 for people working in Boston; the corresponding numbers are 56-29 in New York (including bedroom communities like Queens) and 73-14 in Manhattan (which is more comparable to Boston in terms of workplace geography).
– There are about equally many suburban commuters into Boston from the north as from the south. People driving to the edges of the Orange and Red Lines cannot make too big a difference (Alewife has 2,700 parking spots, and Malden and Oak Grove have just under 1,000 between them), so the difference seems to be that more people are commuting into South Station than into North Station. Observe that South Station is right next to the Boston CBD, whereas North Station is a little farther out.
– Boston has built too much highway infrastructure for a kernel of a transit-oriented edge city to exist along Route 128 as it does in Stamford. 10% of people who work in Stamford take transit to work. There aren’t numbers for all edge cities near Boston, but where they exist, they’re much lower, e.g. 2% in Burlington. Furthermore, since Route 128 exists and is continually upgraded, there’s not much hope of serving these centers by commuter rail from suburbs on the opposite side of Boston.
The upshot of all this is that there’s room to more than triple MBTA commuter rail ridership, while also maintaining healthy urban rail ridership coming from population growth in Boston itself. However, this requires very good service from the suburbs to the city, and the MBTA isn’t providing it. The problem is that the MBTA relies too much on cars: Middleborough and SouthWestborough are particularly egregious for their poorly located stations, chosen for drivers’ convenience rather than for that of transit users. Even worse, Plymouth, a city that’s older than Boston, gets few trains, while most trains serving the Plymouth Line instead stop at a park-and-ride nearby, at Route 3.
Although the focus of all suburban rail is service to the urban core, this can only be done by treating it as longer-range, lower-frequency rapid transit, rather than by treating it as shuttles from parking lots to the CBD (or almost the CBD, in North Station’s case). People won’t use the trains if they’re too infrequent past rush hour; it’s not 1960 anymore, and people do not always work 9-to-5.
For an example of what the MBTA is doing wrong, let’s look at commuter flows in Rhode Island. There are 4,700 people living in Rhode Island working in Boston. The biggest single source of Boston-bound commuters is Providence, with 1,100; Providence Station has 2,000 inbound weekday riders, so it also draws people from some nearby suburbs – but not too many people. Cranston and Warwick have 700 between them – and they’re getting an airport stop with a very small number of trains. Even Washington County, with 170 commuters, is getting a station. Those two stations cost $336 million between them. Meanwhile, Pawtucket, with 600 commuters plus another 800 in suburbs to its northwest and in Woonsocket, is not getting an infill station.
I hope to discuss concrete schedules, possible changes to station placement, and ways to keep operating costs under control in a future post. For now all I’ll note is that the MBTA needs to stop pushing for extensions far out into suburbia. It’s not going to get ridership out of 9 roundtrips per weekday with a 5-hour service gap, which is what the T. F. Green Airport station gets. It’s going to get it out of reliable, frequent all-day service.
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.
What’s the Infrastructure’s Highest Value?
A piece of land and infrastructure may have multiple uses. Land might be needed for urban development or for a highway. A two-track structure might be needed for freight or passenger service. A right-of-way might be needed for multiple kinds of rail, or a road, or a power line easement, or a park. In all cases, the correct policy choice is to allocate the land to the use that has the highest social value, and this use depends on the situation at hand. It should not be allocated to whatever one fancies.
Concretely, let us consider the following cases:
1. The High Line. Occasionally, railfans grumble about the linear park, and say it should’ve had passenger rail service instead; read the comments on Ben Kabak’s post on linear parks, or New York City subway forums. But in reality, the High Line is very useful as a park in a busy neighborhood that doesn’t have other parks. In contrast, it’s nearly worthless as a transit line: it’s parallel to a north-south subway that’s operating well below capacity, it would be nightmarishly difficult to connect to any existing line, and the only east-west service it could possibly be useful for is connecting to 14th Street, not the most important job destination in the city.
2. The Northeast Corridor in Rhode Island, south of Providence. The expansion of MBTA commuter rail southward into sprawling exurbs is a major failure of regional transportation policy. Providence is not all that congested by the standards of the larger Northeastern cities; auto-oriented commuter rail toward it is doomed to fail, and near-downtown parking is cheap and plentiful. (The commute market from Warwick and Wickford Junction to Boston is trivial.) In contrast, the line is perfect for intercity service, since it has relatively gentle curves outside city limits, and is straight south of East Greenwich. The South County project not only costs $200,000 per weekday rider, but also makes poor use of high-speed track. Since the line is more important as high-speed rail than as a commuter line, Amtrak should be more aggressive about demanding that commuter projects create their own capacity.
3. The Northeast Corridor in Maryland, north of Baltimore. For the same reasons as the MBTA extension’s eventual failure, MARC underperforms north of Baltimore. Although the line has extensive three- and four-track segments, the bridges are two-tracked, and high-speed rail should again be given priority, including canceling commuter rail if necessary. Ironically, because of more extensive four-tracking, the need for bypasses around Wilmington and perhaps North East, and the at-grade track layout, Perryville is quite easy to connect to Philadelphia by commuter rail without interfering with intercity rail.
4. Caltrain to San Jose, the MBTA to Providence, MARC to Baltimore. In contrast with the situation in points #2-3, those three lines are all useful commuter lines; they are all similar in that they connect two distinct cities that share suburbs, with a rump extension that exists purely for show (into Gilroy, Perryville, and soon to be Wickford Junction). Any and all high-speed rail use of these corridors should permit a reasonable frequency of commuter trains, with timed overtakes when possible and full four-tracking otherwise. On Caltrain, in particular, interference with commuter rail is one reason why the chosen Pacheco Pass alignment is inferior to the Altamont alignment.
5. The Lower Montauk Line. Despite perennial railfan desires (and an empty Bloomberg campaign promise, since scrubbed from his campaign website) to restore passenger service, there’s not much point in regional rail that stub-ends in Long Island City. To give an idea how much demand there is, the LIRR currently runs 5 trains per day per direction into Long Island City. Thus, the line is more useful for freight trains than for passenger trains. This will change if, and only if, there is a way to connect the line to Manhattan through the existing LIRR tunnels, or perhaps new tunnels, but then the cost is going to be orders of magnitude higher than just restoring service.
6. Urban freeways, e.g. the BQE. American freeways were built at a time when, even more so than today, land was allocated based on political power rather than any sort of social consensus or market pricing concept. While Japanese cities have to make do with 4-lane freeways due to high land costs and strong property rights protections, American cities demolished entire neighborhoods to make room for freeways with wide exclusion zones around them. The land occupied by some would be more useful for additional neighborhood housing growth than it is for a freeway. For example, the BQE hogs prime real estate in Williamsburg, right next to the under-capacity Marcy Avenue subway station, and to a lesser extent in the rest of Brooklyn and Queens, and this land could be used for high-density development instead.
Different Kinds of Centralization (Hoisted from Comments)
As an addendum to my post about transit cities and centralization, let me explain that the term centralized city really means two different things. One is diffuse centralization throughout the core, typical of pedestrian cities and bus cities and of Paris ex-La Défense; the other is spiky centralization around geographically small transit hubs, for examples Midtown Manhattan, the Chicago Loop, and Central Tokyo. A transit city will tend toward the latter kind of centralization, which is based on walking distance from the subway.
By bus city, I mean a specific kind of urbanism that never existed in the West, but crops up repeatedly elsewhere. It occurs when a city grows too large for walking and cycling while it’s still too poor to build rapid transit, whose construction costs are very high as a share of GDP in developing-world cities. Old buses are not expensive to buy, and their main cost component is labor, which isn’t expensive in a poor city; Beijing for example has only recently gotten rid of conductors on buses.
For a good source on different typologies, I as usual recommend Paul Barter’s thesis – it’s not the main subject of the thesis, but the thesis explains it as background. Bus cities, much like pedestrian cities (which are cities where most people walk to work), tend to be dense all over and monocentric in the sense that there aren’t large suburban centers around them, but they do not have a dominant CBD since buses don’t have the capacity.
Paris is unique among first-world megacities in having preserved this arrangement with its height limits. But it’s still moving in the spiky direction somewhat: the RER has wide stop spacing, which encourages spiky development; and the proposed orbital may be marketed as a circumferential line, but it’s for the most part just a north-south line through La Défense that’s being run together with other lines to potential secondary centers. The difference is that La Défense is more sterile and less pedestrian-friendly than Midtown Manhattan and the Chicago Loop. I may write about this in another post, but greenfield CBDs seem to be always worse for pedestrians than legacy ones, and if the legacy CBD hasn’t evolved to the spiky transit city form, then urbanists may conflate the spiky transit city form with the pedestrian-unfriendliness of the greenfield CBD.
Transit city centralization works differently – it’s based on walking distance from the main rapid transit nodes. Recall that transfers at the downtown end are the most inconvenient for suburban commuters, so that one subway stop away from the center is too far. This makes the transit city CBD inherently geographically small, so that the job density is much higher than that of any other urban form; the job density can also be higher because of the larger amount of space afforded by skyscrapers.
In contrast, the transit city is unlikely to be monocentric. A dominant CBD accessed by rapid transit is a geography that tends to create extremely long commutes – much longer than car-accessible edgeless cities, though not longer than trying to access the same CBD by car – and this leads governments to promote the growth of secondary centers, which are also spiky. Because those secondary centers look like CBDs and not like endless sprawl as do the secondary centers in the US, they make the city look polycentric, even if measured in terms of the CBD’s share of metro area employment they’re very CBD-dominated. When I say a transit city is inherently a centralized city, I do not mean that secondary centers are impossible or undesirable, just that the CBD needs to have a relatively large share of jobs, and that the secondary centers should be actual centers – if they can’t be like Shinjuku, they should be like Jamaica or Newark or how Tysons Corner wants to look in 20 years and not like how Tysons Corner looks now.
For example of how this kind of centralization emerges from the other kind, we can look at the evolution of cities that built large rapid transit networks. Tokyo around Nihonbashi would be the best example, but New York around City Hall is as good. While Lower Manhattan is clearly a smaller CBD than Midtown, it still looks like a spiky CBD, which it did not a hundred years ago. If you plot the locations of the skyscrapers in Lower Manhattan, with few exceptions they’re all south of Chambers, usually far south; peak employment is around Fulton and Wall Streets. The old elevated terminal for Brooklyn trains at Park Row would be inappropriately located. North of Chambers there are city neighborhoods with names like Chinatown or TriBeCa, which are mixed-use enough to have many jobs but have nowhere near the job density of Wall Street.
A related kind of centralization occurs in a multipolar city region, composed of many small cities. None of the cities of the Ruhr is large enough to spawn spiky subcenters on its own, but because the region has grown so interdependent it’s as big as a megacity, the legacy centers in the various cities have turned into a spiky centralization, only without one CBD dominating the rest.
I think it’s the last kind of spiky centralization that transit advocates think of when they propose to turn LA into a multipolar region. Or perhaps it’s in a limbo between a true multipolar region and a unipolar one with well-defined, transit-oriented secondary CBDs. On the one hand, the transit lines proposed in and beyond Measure R are not very downtown-centric. Each direction out of downtown generally gets one line, the exception being the west because of the low-hanging Expo Line fruit and the higher-demand Wilshire corridor. The focus is on connectivity between different poles, since unlike a true transit city Los Angeles has no capacity crunch on its transit system. The subway proposal for going beyond Measure R is to continue south of Wilshire on Vermont, missing downtown entirely, rather than, say, continuing east of Union Station along Whittier.
But on the other hand, the secondary cores are defined in relation to downtown – west (Santa Monica, UCLA), north (Burbank), south (Long Beach), and so on. It’s not like the organic buildup of agglomeration that merged the various cities of the Ruhr into one megaregion, or the merger of the metro areas of New York and Newark, or on a larger scale San Francisco and San Jose. Instead, these secondary cores emerged as secondary to Downtown LA, and only became big because Downtown LA’s transportation capacity is limited by the lack of rapid transit. Put another way, a transit revival in Los Angeles that includes rapid transit construction would make Los Angeles more downtown-oriented rather than less.
Pedestrian Observations 
