Transit-Oriented Airports

There are recurrent discussions of how to best connect public transportation to airports; I, too, have made my comments both on how desirable such connections are and how to best build them. What I think is less discussed is how to build airports in a way that makes it easier to serve them by public transit. Airport authorities spend billions every few decades rebuilding terminals, sometimes even moving the entire airport to a new location, but they never consider how to do so in a way that makes transit access the easiest; this means airport access is done by car, or another high-cost scheme must be implemented to bring a rail line to the airport. Now that there is a plan to replace the Newark AirTrain for a billion dollars, just twenty years after it was first built, it’s worth discussing what capital projects on the airport side should facilitate transit access.

First, recall from previous discussions on this blog that the best way to serve a major international airport is by a mainline train, which is capable of both providing fast service to the CBD (where most inbound air travel is headed) and to many suburbs (which have outbound travelers).

However, we can say more: it is better, other things being equal, for the airport to be on the way, rather than at the end of a line. If the airport must be at the end of a line, it should not be far from where the line would’ve ended if the airport were not there. For example, LaGuardia is a few kilometers east of the end of the Astoria Line, which can be extended. Vancouver’s airport is on a short branch of the Canada Line, which would have been built to Richmond Centre even without the airport.

An even better example would have been Floyd Bennett Field, just past where the Utica subway should end; there were plans in the 1930s to build such a subway, but not only were they never realized, but also Mayor LaGuardia preferred to build the airport that currently bears his name, for easier auto access to Manhattan than Bennett Field had. Thus we can catalog the decision to open the new airport and close Bennett Field as bad for transit access, and oppose similar moves when cities today propose them. The best location for an airport, from the point of view of transit access, is near a subway or commuter rail station, ideally close enough that no further people mover is required.

Let us now discuss internal airport design. I claim that, to maximize transit accessibility, airports should have just one terminal (or several terminals that can be served from the same station), or, failing that, one dominant terminal, as at such fortress hubs as Detroit, Frankfurt, and Charles-de-Gaulle. The reason is that trains are slowed down by additional stations, whereas cars are not slowed down by additional bays and driveways. Mainline trains, in particular, rarely make more than one stop at an airport, and in the cases I know of where they do, the airport is at the end of a branch (such as the RER B and the lines serving Narita), rather than on the way.

This introduces some tension into airport design. Large airport terminals are dendritic, to maximize the perimeter available for gates and jetways; in some cases, they feature satellite terminals, connected to the main terminal by underground passageways, people movers, or even landside buses (as at Charles-de-Gaulle). I encourage people to look at satellite images of Frankfurt, O’Hare, Atlanta, Zurich, and Charles-de-Gaulle. Frankfurt’s Terminal 1 is a kilometer from entry to the farthest branches to the west. This creates some demand for quicker small terminals, which are harder to serve by rail. In addition, the most efficient dendritic design has branches coming out from the center in every direction, except perhaps one direction for an access road; this makes it harder to be on the way of a rail line.

I think it is telling that the single- or dominant-terminal design is less common at airports that are not a single airline’s fortress hub. Haneda and Narita have two major terminals each, one used by Japan Airlines and one used by ANA. Madrid has four terminals, one for Iberia and three connected ones, sharing a Metro station, for competitors, including several low-cost airlines. In all three cases, there are two train stations per line connecting to the airport (with the understanding that Narita has multiple lines, operating by competing railroads).

Usually, airports make an effort to group airlines by alliance. Thus Charles-de-Gaulle and Frankfurt put their respective dominant airlines and partners in their main terminals, and competing airlines in smaller terminals; and Narita makes sure to group Star Alliance airlines with ANA and Oneworld airlines with JAL. Among the largest airports of Europe, Heathrow is the big exception, since it organizes terminals by alliances but splits Oneworld between Terminal 5 for British Airways and Terminal 3 for the rest.

In the US, this is not common, with some exceptions such as Detroit and JFK’s Terminals 7 and 8. This is because the US does not permit connecting air passengers to transit its airports. All passengers arriving at a US airport from a foreign airport without preclearance, even ones in transit, have to go through immigration, collect their bags, go through customs, recheck their bags, and go through security again; between the inconvenience and the real risk of literally being disappeared, few people connect in the US between two foreign countries. Hub terminals elsewhere facilitate easy transfers by maintaining large international areas where passengers can walk between gates, and keeping the passport controls between the international and domestic terminals short. Regardless, even with the vagaries of American immigration policy, it is easier to connect without having to go between terminals; moreover, for passengers leaving the US rather than arriving, the situation is if anything easier than in Europe since there’s no passport control at exit.

Let us now apply these concepts to New York’s two main international airports. Newark may be a fortress hub, but it is not configured as one; United and its Star Alliance partners are sprawled across all three terminals. Moreover, the terminals are just far enough from the commuter rail station to require a people mover. Since it’s better for an airport to be on the way, and have just a single terminal, what this suggests is that Terminal C should be lengthened to approach the train station.

There is currently a plan to replace Terminal A, for $1-1.25 billion of construction budget and $2 billion total development budget. Under this single-terminal paradigm, the terminal should not be redeveloped. Instead, it should be demolished, and replaced by extensions of Terminal C to the west, with additional concourses and piers both to the north and to the south, replacing the current road loop serving the terminals. People would arrive by road via US 1 or by rail via the commuter rail station. Security checkpoints would be conducted at a building just west of Route 1, and the airside terminal’s western end would be an overpass over the road. Rail passengers would have enclosed overpasses to the checkpoints; there would not be any need for a people mover, only moving walkways given the distance between the station and the terminal’s current eastern end. There is enough space for the new concourses to also replace Terminal B, which is of similar vintage to Terminal A.

At JFK, the situation is different. First, it is not a fortress hub. Its top three carriers – JetBlue, Delta, and American – are all reasonably happy with their terminals (Delta’s terminal is 4, not 2, which it is abandoning). British Airways is considering abandoning Terminal 7 and joining American at Terminal 8. Consolidating the airlines that use Terminal 1 at Terminal 4 is impossible until the US resolves its endless immigration lines, which at Terminal 4 are often longer than an hour.

Second and more fundamentally, the transit access situation there is good enough. JFK is far from any subway or commuter rail line, so the only way to serve it by rail is by a dedicated people mover, of which the AirTrain is not bad. The connection to Jamaica approaches the “be on the way” maxim well, since Jamaica is central to the LIRR network and has fast service to Manhattan on the subway as well. Some transit advocates in the region periodically propose a direct subway or commuter rail line to replace the AirTrain connection, but such plans always run against network design issues, since the branching is set up in a way that reduces frequency to Jamaica, a more important station. Given that there must be some people mover connection, traveling in a circle among the terminals is not terrible; straightening the route has some benefits, but the cost of rebuilding the infrastructure is almost certainly too high to be justified.

Update: James Sinclair argues convincingly that the Newark AirTrain is not really at the end of its life, but Port Authority is saying that to justify spending billions of dollars on a better replacement, including either a PATH extension to the airport station (which is largely dead) or an extension of the AirTrain to Newark Penn Station, as a sweetener for United.

Bergenline Avenue and New Hudson Tunnels

The main street of Hudson County from Jersey City north is Bergenline Avenue. It passes through the densest cities in the US (denser than New York, which is weighed down by outer-urban areas), and hosts frequent jitney service. Last decade, New Jersey began to document jitney service in North Jersey, producing a report in 2011 that identified major corridors; Bergenline is the busiest, with a jitney almost every minute, and almost as frequent additional jitney and New Jersey Transit service on the northern part of the route running into Manhattan via the Lincoln Tunnel. This was discussed extensively on Cap’n Transit’s blog three years ago, and I thought (and still think) Bergenline should eventually get a subway line. I bring this up because of a critical tie-in to Bergenline’s transit service: new mainline Hudson tunnels. If the new tunnels are built to host regional rather than intercity trains, then they should also make a stop at Bergenline to allow for easier transfers from the buses to Manhattan.

Unfortunately, there are no estimates of ridership on the Bergenline buses. The 2011 report did rough counts of passengers per hour passing through a single point, but that is not directly comparable to the usual metrics of ridership per day or per year. Moreover, the report assumed there are 16 passengers per jitney, where, at least in Cap’n Transit’s experience, the jitneys on Bergenline are considerably larger, in the 20-30 passenger range. Either way, they’re smaller than full-size buses, which means we can’t just compare the frequency on Bergenline with that on busy New York bus corridors. However, a bus in that size range almost every minute, both peak and off-peak, is bound to have comparable ridership to the busiest buses in New York: the single busiest, the M15, runs articulated buses every 3 minutes at the peak and every 4 off-peak.

There are several corridors heading into Manhattan. According to the summary on the report’s PDF-page 51, Bergenline has jitneys heading into Port Authority every 2-4 minutes at the peak, and New Jersey Transit buses (routes 156 and 159) every 5 minutes. Paralleling Bergenline, JFK Boulevard East has a jitney every 4-5 minutes (with larger vehicles than on Bergenline), and a New Jersey Transit bus almost every minute at the peak (route 128). There is also very frequent New Jersey Transit bus service, more than once per minute between routes 156, 159, and 166, running nonstop to Port Authority at the peak; unlike the jitneys, New Jersey Transit bus service is extremely peaky, with the combined routes 156 and 159 dropping to a bus every 15 minutes, and the Boulevard East routes (165, 166, 168) dropping to a bus every 9 minutes.

From the New Jersey Transit schedules, peak-hour buses spend 18-19 minutes getting into Port Authority from Bergenline, and 14 minutes getting into Port Authority from Boulevard East. In contrast, a train station located under Bergenline would have service to Penn Station taking about 3 minutes. Trains go through the existing older tunnel at about 100 km/h, and the new tunnel could support at least the same speed, while a through-running service plan would simplify the Penn Station interlockings enough that trains could enter and leave the station at speed. Even allowing for transfer time and for additional wait times, which are very short at the peak anyway, this represents an improvement of more than 10 minutes.

It goes without saying that the service should be frequent and affordable. The fare should be the same as on the subway, with free transfers. There’s some precedent in that PATH charges similar fares to the subway, but free transfers, a basic amenity in regions with integrated transportation planning, would be new to New York. At the peak, all trains would stop at Bergenline, since there’s not enough capacity to mix stopping and nonstop trains on the same tracks given expected traffic. But even off-peak, all trains should continue stopping at Bergenline – as well as at Secaucus – in order to maintain adequate frequency. Given how dense and close to Manhattan the area is, 10 minutes is the maximum acceptable headway, which corresponds to the combined off-peak frequency of all New Jersey Transit trains into Penn Station today.

While the busiest trunk line does not even enter Manhattan, the presence of fast, frequent regional rail with competitive fares is likely to change travel patterns. This is not the same as transit-oriented development: I am not assuming a single new building on top of the Palisades. Instead, some people who live and work in northern Hudson County would shift over time to working in New York, thanks to improved transportation links. In parallel, people working in New York would move to cheaper housing in Hudson County. In the other direction, companies that want to attract reverse commuters might locate to the area around the new station. The overall effect would integrate northern Hudson County into the core better, turning it into more of a bedroom community, like Brooklyn and Queens, while simultaneously concentrating its employment around the station. The upshot is that this station would already come equipped with a huge installed base of feeder buses, which run the route already without a connection to Manhattan. A longer-range plan to build a subway under Bergenline, from Fort Lee to Journal Square, would further integrate the entire west bank of the lower Hudson into the city core.

This tilts the best traffic plan for new tunnels away from Amtrak’s Gateway plan and back toward New Jersey Transit’s various flavors of ARC. First, it’s easier to build the station while the tunnel is excavated than to build the station in the preexisting tunnel. At the same time, whichever tunnel has the station should be the one without intercity trains: all peak trains would have to stop at the station for capacity reasons (there’s no room for bypass tracks), and this would slow down intercity trains unacceptably. Put together, this means Amtrak should stay in the old tunnels and all traffic in the new tunnels should be regional.

Second and more importantly, a high-grade new tunnel pair from New Jersey to Penn Station should also continue onward to Grand Central, with trains running through to Metro-North territory. The importance of through-running and good service to multiple urban nodes is greatest for local service and smallest for long-distance service. In Paris, the RER involves through-service for shorter-range commuter trains; the Transiliens, which terminate at the traditional terminal stations, serve farther-away suburbs. And in Tokyo, the local lines of the JR East network run through whereas the express lines either don’t or have only started doing so recently. The reason is similar to a pattern I mentioned before about airports: at long range, people only travel to the city for functions that their region lacks, and those are usually centered on the CBD, whereas at short range, people travel in all directions. The upshot of this discussion is that a Bergenline stop is likely to add many local travelers to the system, and they should get the service that’s more useful for their needs.

Of course, a good service plan will involve through-running in both the old and new tunnels. However, through-running is more valuable in the new tunnel, going to Grand Central, than in the old tunnel, going to Long Island and the Northeast Corridor. As a judgment call, I believe that through-running to Grand Central, Harlem, and the South Bronx connects to more neighborhoods than through-running to Sunnyside, Flushing, and Jamaica. It also has better subway connections, to the 4/5/6 if to nothing else, and local riders are accustomed to two-seat rides and subway connections. Finally, under a fuller regional rail plan, including service to Lower Manhattan, Grand Central has connections to Lower Manhattan and Downtown Brooklyn whereas Penn Station and Sunnyside don’t.

In contrast, Amtrak’s plan gets it exactly backward in proposing to use the Gateway tunnel for its own trains and some additional regional trains. The only advantage of this plan is that it would be possible for regional trains to maintain higher speed through the wider-diameter new tunnel (intercity trains could raise speeds more easily, since high-speed trains are pressurized to limit ear popping when they enter tunnels). But by hogging slots in the Penn Station-Grand Central tunnel, Amtrak would force many local and regional rail riders onto trains that do not serve their destination directly and do not have an easy transfer to it.

The only drawback of this plan is cost. The station would be located deep beneath the Palisades, complicating its construction. While the access shafts are not difficult – vertical bores for elevators are simply to build – the station itself would require blasting a cavern, or using a large-diameter bore. The cavern option is not cheap. I am not going to try coming up with a cost estimate, but I will note that the station caverns of Second Avenue Subway Phase 1, which are built cut-and-cover rather than blasted from inside, are around a billion dollars each. A large-diameter bore is more attractive, but is more expensive than twin small-diameter bores if there are no stations, and may well have difficulties emerging at the Manhattan end.

Without reliable estimates for either the incremental cost or the incremental ridership, I can’t say whether this is a cost-effective proposal. I suspect that it is, given the high ridership of the Bergenline buses and the high density of the region. Part of what makes an S-Bahn or RER system successful is its service to urban neighborhoods and not just suburbs and CBDs, and Bergenline could be a good addition to the system that the region should be building.

Redundancy is Overrated

The night before last, a Northeast Corridor Amtrak train derailed in Philadelphia, killing seven people. For some overviews of what happened, see Vox and Huffington Post. I am not going to talk directly about the accident here; it appears to be the same kind of derailment as on Metro-North a year and a half ago. Instead, I’m going to talk about the general issue of redundancy, which I saw people bring up in response to the train shutdowns that followed the crash. This is not the first time I hear about this; redundancy figures prominently into the list of benefits touted for new rail tunnels across the Hudson, allowing Amtrak to shut down the existing tunnels for repairs. Even before Amtrak proposed the Gateway project, transit activists talked about redundancy as a positive feature, for example Cap’n Transit. In this post, I am going to explain why, in public transportation and intercity rail, redundancy is in fact far less useful than other investments for the same amount of money.

First, let us list the various high-caliber rail networks of the world. In high-speed rail, the biggest networks are those of China, Japan, and France. None of them has redundancy, in the sense that there is more than one way to get between two cities on high-speed track. JR Central is building a second line from Tokyo to Osaka, but this is because the existing line is at capacity, running about 14 trains per hour into Tokyo at the peak; redundancy is a minor consideration. In regional rail, the busiest networks do have some redundancy, in the sense that if one line is shut down then people can take a parallel line, but this is because these networks are so busy that in most directions there’s enough demand to fill multiple lines. In Tokyo, which has the largest regional rail network, the parallel line is usually run by a competing company, so within each company’s network there’s little redundancy.

The reason for this non-redundant operation is simple: building new rail lines is expensive, while maintaining them adequately so that they don’t break down is cheap. Amtrak thinks that the Gateway tunnel will cost $16 billion. The program to repair the damage the preexisting tunnels suffered in Hurricane Sandy is $700 million, which assumes an accelerated construction schedule in which the tunnels will be shut down one track at a time, but conversely also includes work in the worse-damaged East River tunnels and not just the tunnels across the Hudson. This is a one-time repair after salt water intrusion, not annual ongoing maintenance. New Hudson tunnels are a necessary project for capacity reasons, but whatever benefit they have for redundancy is a fraction of their cost.

For high-speed rail, too, the costs of maintenance are far smaller than those of construction. The average maintenance costs of a single route-km of HSR are about €100,000 per year, versus €20 million for construction (see PDF-p. 9 of a study by Ginés de Rus about HSR between Stockholm and Gothenburg). With this amount of maintenance, there need not be any closures or disruptions in service.

Consider the Northeast Corridor, more concretely. To guarantee redundancy everywhere, so that train accidents do not disrupt the line, is to restore some passenger service along the former Baltimore and Ohio and tie-ins. Between Philadelphia and New York this means the West Trenton Line; between Philadelphia and Washington this means the CSX freight line. This also requires new Hudson tunnels. The cost of each of these elements is in the billions, and for the most part, with the exception of the new Hudson tunnels the transportation benefit is very low, especially south of Philadelphia, where there aren’t enough people to justify a second commuter line. Between New York and New Haven, there are no good alignments for a second route except for short bypasses; that’s what makes constructing HSR there so difficult.

Redundancy is a good feature of networks where failures are frequent and unavoidable; for such systems, redundancy is useful, as is the concept of failing gracefully. Rail transit is not such a network. It is both possible and desirable to reduce accident rates to levels approaching zero. Natural disasters remain hazardous, but are extremely infrequent, and at any rate when a deadly earthquake strikes, there are higher priorities than providing alternative passenger rail routes.

This is not to say that redundancy has no uses. Dense subway systems are redundant in the sense of providing multiple routes through the city – although, at the peak, they’re usually all very crowded. This makes it possible to shut down lines off-peak for maintenance; New York and London are both notorious for weekend service changes, and Paris shuts down short segments of lines for maintenance for a few weeks at a time (see for example here). But small subway systems manage to make do with just ordinary overnight shutdowns, and Copenhagen even runs trains 24/7, shutting down one track at a time at night and using the driverless operation to run trains on single track. It’s just more convenient to have more options, but not necessary.

The upshot is that when a subway or mainline rail network chooses where to lay additional lines, it should ignore all needs of redundancy, except possibly as tie-breakers. The benefits are there, but do not outweigh the cost of building less optimal lines. The operator should instead invest in systems, worker training, and maintenance regimes that ensure high reliability, and expand the network based on ordinary criteria of expected ridership and capacity needs. There’s no need to worry about failure, and it’s much better to design the network not to fail in the first place.

The Utica Subway

Last week, Bill de Blasio released a plan for New York’s future called OneNYC, whose section on subway expansion called for a subway under Utica Avenue in Brooklyn (PDF-pp. 45-46). The call was just a sentence, without mention of routing or cost or ridership projections, and no plan for funding. However, it remains a positive development; last year, I put the line at the top of a list of underrated subways in North America. Presumably the route would be a branch off the Eastern Parkway Line, carrying the 4, while the 3 continues to go to the current New Lots terminus.

The cost is up in the air, which means that people forming opinions about the idea don’t have the most important and variable number with which to make decisions. In this post, I am going to work out the range of cost figures that would make this a worthwhile project. This has two components: coming up with a quick-and-dirty ridership estimate, and arguing for a maximum acceptable cost per rider.

Before doing anything else, let us look at how much such a subway extension should cost, independently of ridership. Between Eastern Parkway and Kings Plaza, Utica is 6.8 km. The non-English-speaking first-world range is about $300 million to $3 billion, but around $1.4 billion, or $200 million/km, is average. Utica is a wide, relatively straight street, without difficult development alongside it. In fact, I’ve been convinced in comments that the line could be elevated nearly the entire way, south of Empire Boulevard, which would reduce costs even further. Normal cost should then be around $100 million per km (or $700 million), and even in New York, the JFK AirTrain came in at a $200 million/km. I doubt that an elevated solution could politically happen, but one should be investigated; nonetheless, a $1.4 billion subway would be of great benefit.

Now, let us look at ridership. Recall that Utica’s bus route, the B46, was New York’s third busiest in 2014, with 46,000 weekday riders. But two routes, Nostrand’s B44 and Flatbush’s B41, run parallel and provide similar service, and have 67,000 riders between them. Those numbers are all trending down, as residents gradually abandon slow bus service. A subway can realistically halt this decline and generate much more ridership, via higher speed: B46 limited buses average 13 km/h south of Eastern Parkway, but a new subway line could average around 35 km/h. Second Avenue Subway’s ridership projection is 500,000 per weekday, even though all north-south bus lines on Manhattan’s East Side combined, even ones on Fifth and Madison Avenues, total 156,000 daily riders.

Vancouver is considering replacing its busiest bus, the 99-B, with a subway. The 99-B itself has 54,000 weekday riders, the local buses on Broadway (the 9 and 14) have 43,000, and the 4th Avenue relief buses (the 4, 44, and 84) add another 27,000. Those are much faster buses than in New York: the 99-B averages 20 km/h, while the 44 and 84, running on less crowded 4th Avenue, average nearly 30 km/h west of Burrard. SkyTrain is faster than the New York subway since it makes fewer stops, so the overall effect would be similar, a doubling of travel speed, to about 40 km/h. The ridership projection is 250,000 per weekday in 2021, at opening, before rezoning (see PDF-p. 75 here). This represents a doubling of ridership over current bus ridership, even when the buses provide service SkyTrain won’t, including a one-seat ride from the Westside to Downtown and service along 4th Avenue.

In New York, as in Vancouver, the subway would provide service twice as fast as current buses. The distance between Nostrand and Utica Avenues is much greater than that between 4th Avenue and Broadway in Vancouver, so the analogy isn’t perfect (this is why I also support continuing Nostrand down to Sheepshead Bay). Conversely, the speed advantage of subways over buses is greater than in Vancouver. Moreover, Nostrand already has a subway, so actual demand in southeastern Brooklyn is more than what the B41, B44, and B46 represent. A doubling of ridership over bus ridership, to about 220,000, is reasonable.

For a quick sanity check, let us look at Nostrand Avenue Line ridership again. South of Franklin Avenue, the stations have a combined weekday ridership of 64,000 per weekday, as of 2014. But this is really closer to 128,000 daily riders, counting both boardings and alightings; presumably, few people ride internally to the Nostrand corridor. The Nostrand Avenue Line is 4.3 km long; scaled to length, we get 200,000 weekday riders on Utica.

Put together, a normal-cost Utica Line, with 200,000 weekday riders, would cost $7,000 per rider. This is quite low even by non-US standards, and is very low by US standards (Second Avenue Subway Phase 1 is about $23,000 according to projections, and is lower than most US rail lines).

As far as I’ve seen, from glancing at lines in large cities such as London, Paris, and Tokyo, the normal cost range for subways is $10,000-20,000 per rider. Paris is quite cheap, since its ridership per kilometer is so high while its cost per kilometer is not very high, keeping Metro extensions in the four figures (but Grand Paris Express, built in more suburban geography, is projected at $34 billion for 2 million daily passengers). Elsewhere in Europe, lines north of $20,000 are not outliers. If we set $25,000/rider as a reasonable limit – a limit which would eliminate all US rail lines other than Second Avenue Subway Phase 1, Houston’s light rail extensions, and Los Angeles’s Regional Connector – then Utica is worth $5 billion. A more generous limit, perhaps $40,000 per rider to allow for Second Avenue Subway Phase 2, would boost Utica to $8 billion, more than $1 billion per km. Even in the US, subways are rarely that expensive: the Bay Area’s lines are only about $500 million per km.

The importance of the above calculation is that it is quite possible that Utica will turn out to have a lower projected cost per rider than the next phase of Second Avenue Subway, a project for which there is nearly universal consensus in New York. The original cost projection for Second Avenue Subway’s second phase was $3.3 billion, but will have run over since (the projection for the first phase was $3.7 billion, but actual cost is nearly $5 billion); the ridership projection is 100,000 for each phase beyond the first, which is projected at 200,000. In such a situation, the line would be a great success for New York, purely on the strength of existing demand. I put Utica at the top of my list of underrated transit projects for a reason: the line’s worth is several times its cost assuming world-average per-km cost, and remains higher than the cost even at elevated American prices. The de Blasio administration is doing well to propose such a line, and it is nearly certain that costs will be such that good transit activists should support it.

Quick Note: MBTA Electrification

I’ve been thinking about MBTA modernization recently, and realized that although the principles underlying modernization are similar throughout North America, the concrete benefits and the resulting political alliances that could push for it are very different. In New York and Chicago, commuter rail is already quite good if you’re a suburban middle-class commuter working in the CBD at regular business hours. Penn Station may not be ideally located for Midtown commuters, but the LIRR is building East Side Access to fix that; this leads to arguments such as this one, about which group of riders (or potential) riders to prioritize.

The MBTA is completely different. It does not provide adequate service even for peak-hour commuters, because the speed leaves a lot to be desired; where the LIRR runs decent if not good rolling stock, the MBTA rolling stock loses 70 seconds accelerating just to 60 mph (FLIRTs lost 24 seconds accelerating to 160 km/h). As Purple City notes in comments, electrification would be a Pareto-improvement, allowing large increases in speed even with infill stops. The discussion of whether to prioritize short-distance or long-distance service is still important, but any choice would substantially improve service to everyone over the current offering.

This means that the politics of modernization is different. In New York, Long Island commuters are the primary obstacle: modernization would replace their peak express trains with reverse-peak trains on the one-way Main Line, and crowd their trains in the outbound direction. In Boston, there aren’t enough urban riders to result in so much crowding, the speed would go up substantially, and, with the North-South Rail Link, North Side commuters would have service to the CBD and not just North Station.

The cost of such modernization consists of four main projects: the North-South Rail Link itself, complete electrification of all lines, full-length high platforms at all stations, and new rolling stock. The latter is perhaps $1.5 billion initially, corresponding to 600 cars, but in reality displaces equivalent or higher cost that has to be spent on new diesel locomotives and cars under the current operating pattern. The NSRL was pegged at $3-4 billion, but since it’s in easy geology (the ground was already cleared during the Big Dig), costs do not have to be higher than in the rest of the world, which would be closer to $2 billion for two large-diameter bores. Complete electrification is perhaps another $1.5 billion. It’s a fraction of what the state spent on the Big Dig, and not a large multiple of what it’s spending on a few thousand daily riders for South Coast Rail.

The political alliance in this case would be the exact one that would oppose modernization in New York and Chicago. This list of projects does little for the inner city, with exceptions around possible infill station sites like Allston. However, it provides much higher speeds for the suburbs. This is what’s so interesting about it. It’s not even easy to unbundle the parts that are useful to the suburbs from the parts that improve service in general, since the North-South Rail Link, which is crucial for service from the north to Boston, requires electrification, and once that’s in place, high platforms and infill stations are cheap. Whereas elsewhere, political inertia makes modernization hard, in the Boston area, once someone proposes it, I believe large chunks of the mainstream will jump on the idea.

Homeowner’s Bill of Rights to Preempt State and Local Zoning Laws

After weeks of fraught negotiation, House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) announced that both houses of Congress had reached agreement on passing the Homeowner’s Bill of Rights (HOBOR), which uses the preemption doctrine to abolish most local planning restrictions. President Obama announced that he would sign the bill, which includes several provisions pushed by urban environmentalists. While the majority of Republicans announced their intention to vote yes and the majority of Democrats announced they would vote no, HOBOR relies on cross-bench support, as several prominent Republican lawmakers identified with the Tea Party, including presidential hopefuls Senators Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), announced they would oppose the bill on the grounds of federal overreach.

Despite early environmentalist hopes that the bill would be narrowly targeted at suburban single-family zoning, HOBOR casts a wide net. It preempts any separation of residential, commercial, and industrial uses; maximum heights and floor area ratios; open space requirements; environmental restrictions including noise limits and endangered species protections; urban growth boundaries; parking minimums and maximums; single-family mandates; form-based codes; anti-McMansion ordinances and minimum lot sizes; affordable housing mandates; and setback requirements. It also requires the federal government to study privatizing federal land adjacent to urban areas and to consider the effects of growth controls on the housing market, a move that is expected to liberalize construction in the West. It does not preempt private deed restriction, despite an attempt by urban Democrats to ban it, but does ban cities from giving public incentives for it.

Boehner’s office released a statement, “The Homeowner’s Bill of Rights will prevent power grabs by special interests and by the federal government, and reduce the level of regulation in America’s cities.” Governor Greg Abbott (R-Texas), who recently proposed a similar law in Texas before Congress federalized the issue, credited Texas’s strong economy to loose zoning, and specifically praised Houston’s lack of zoning as an engine of economic growth.

On the Democratic side, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio offered tepid support for the bill, saying that he expected the increased pace of construction to create jobs and affordable housing in the city, but added that the city would maintain its rent stabilization program. New York housing advocates were involved in obtaining necessary bipartisan support for the bill, and the city’s all-Democratic Congressional delegation is planning to vote for it, with the exceptions of Reps. Carolyn Maloney and Joseph Crowley. Crowley said in a statement that “the city’s planning laws are a cornerstone of neighborhood protection, and it’s hypocritical that the Republican Party, which claims it supports states’ rights, uses the federal government’s power so blatantly when it suits its needs.”

In San Francisco, opponents took to the street, protesting in front of the office of Senator Dianne Feinstein, the most prominent Senate Democrat to support HOBOR, with signs saying “gentrification = violence” and “the developer’s bill of rights.” A group of protesters attacked a shuttle bus ready to leave for Silicon Valley; the leaders of the main group of the protesters disclaimed the attack, and blamed agents provocateurs, but added that destruction of property is different from violent crime and that to compare the two is itself a form of violence.

On the ideological right, reactions are mixed. National Review has written in favor of the bill, while Reason continues to reject it. Joel Kotkin has editorialized that the bill “paves the way toward high-rises that Americans continue to reject.” Tea Party support is split, but largely negative; several groups have vowed to sue, connecting Democratic support with Agenda 21, the UN position paper encouraging more urbanization and restrictions on suburban sprawl. Senator Ted Cruz threatened to filibuster the bill, and openly called for a constitutional challenge. In contrast, Senator Marco Rubio (R-Florida) plans to vote for the bill. In his statement, Rubio pointed to redevelopment in Miami as “affordable housing provided by the free market without government subsidies paid by tax money” and welcomed Democratic support.

All around the nation, municipalities, business groups, homeowners, landlords, and tenants are preparing for the entry of the bill into force, which is scheduled for this September 1st. New York, San Francisco, Houston, and Chicago have all already written draft planning laws designed to comply with HOBOR restrictions, but city planners are still debating how to adapt to a situation without zoning rules to shape urban growth.

Several real estate companies are planning new skyscrapers in central business districts of multiple cities. In Washington, The Related Companies is planning a 1,330 foot tall, 4.3 million square foot tower in Farragut. In New York, Harry Macklowe, Forest City Enterprises, and Durst Organization are all expected to race to develop the tallest skyscraper in the city, in the East Midtown area; real estate analysts speaking on background expect towers exceeding 2,000 feet in pinnacle height, to overtake One World Trade Center, but closer to 1,500 feet in roof height.

Outside city centers, development is slower, but analysts expect it to accelerate in the coming years. Facebook has already announced an expansion of its campus as well as the construction of apartment buildings in its home city of Menlo Park, California, as well as Atherton and Palo Alto, to house its growing workforce. However, when asked if this trend means less demand in San Francisco and less demand for tech shuttles, a senior Facebook human resources manager speaking on condition of anonymity said, “Most of our new hires still prefer to live in San Francisco, so we may end up seeing more commuters from the city, at the expense of the East Bay.”

Ultimately, analysts agree, it is difficult to gauge the long-term effect of HOBOR this early. However, as an early indication that there would be a move to established business districts, stocks of publicly-traded companies involved in purpose-made redevelopment districts, such as the Boston Seaport and New York’s Hudson Yards, are down by an average of 3% since Boehner announced that he had secured support for the bill, whereas those of other major developers have been sharply rising, by 2-15%. But when asked whether they will scale back their plans, officials in Boston have replied negatively, and have even suggested a $2 billion Silver Line expansion to serve the Seaport.

Metro Systems by Ridership Per Kilometer

Last post, I brought up the fact that the Cairo Metro is by a large margin the world’s busiest per unit of length, to explain why the government should prioritize investing in more subway lines. In comments, some people asked, or brought up information, about other systems’ comparable figures. Here is a table of some systems, including all the major ones. System length is given in kilometers, ridership is given in millions per year, and ridership per km is given in millions per km-year. I’ve tried to use as current data as possible, and to use official sources (or occasionally media sources) – in other words, the citations Wikipedia uses, and not Wikipedia itself.

Note that this not a complete table. I didn’t find annual data for many cities, such as Milan, Athens, and Vienna. For others I didn’t find data of any kind – Wikipedia sourced me to dead links. I also didn’t find any complete data – ridership and length – for any major commuter rail system, despite my desire to include the RER, S-Bahns, and Tokyo, Seoul, and London commuter rail networks. The North American data is lacking, which I blame on APTA’s use of unlinked trips as its main metric; in contrast, all ex-Soviet subways appear, since they’re in one consolidated source, which is why the smaller ones cluster at the bottom of the table, where they’d share room with many American and Western European systems I didn’t find information about. All subway systems down to half a billion annual riders are included.

System Length Ridership Ridership/km
Cairo Metro 77.9 1504 19.3
São Paulo Metro 74.8 895.6 11.97
Tokyo Metro + Toei 310.3 3255.7 10.49
Prague Metro 59.4 589.2 9.92
Budapest Metro 31.4 302.4 9.63
Minsk Metro 35.43 328.3 9.27
Hong Kong MTR 174.7 1600 (122.7 Feb.) 9.16
Guangzhou Metro 260.5 2280 8.75
Kyiv Metro 67.6 536.2 7.93
Seoul subway lines 1-9 331.5 2619.5 7.9
Moscow Metro 327.5 2490.7 7.61
Mexico City Metro 226.5 1684.9 7.44
Kolkata Metro 25.1 186.9 (140.2 Jan.-Sep.) 7.44
Osaka Municipal Subway 129.9 927.8 (2.542/day) 7.14
Paris Métro 214 1527 7.14
St. Petersburg Metro 113.5 758.6 6.68
Santiago Metro 103 667 6.48
Beijing Subway 527 3410 6.47
Singapore MRT 148.9 921.6 (2.525/day) 6.19
Kharkiv Metro 37.6 231.1 6.15
Baku Metro 34.56 206.6 5.98
Shenzhen Metro 177 1036.7 5.86
Novosibirsk Metro 15.9 88.8 5.58
Taipei Metro 129.2 684.8 (1.876/day) 5.3
Shanghai Metro 548 2712 (7.43/day) 4.95
Nagoya Municipal Subway 93.3 449 (1.23/day) 4.81
New York City Subway 373 1708 4.58
Tehran Metro 152 633 4.16
Delhi Metro 193 799.6 4.14
Yekaterinburg Metro 12.7 52.4 4.12
Munich U-Bahn 95 384 4.04
Barcelona Metro 102.6 373.5 (93.4 Jan.-Mar.) 3.64
Tbilisi Metro 27.1 96.2 3.55
London Underground 402 1265 3.15
Stockholm T-bana 105.7 328 3.1
Nanjing Metro 179.5 503 2.8
Nizhny Novgorod Metro 18.8 40 2.13
Bilbao Metro 43.3 91.3 (22.8 Jan.-Mar.) 2.11
Madrid Metro 294 591.7 (147.9 Jan.-Mar.) 2.01
Chongqing Metro 202 400 1.98
Kazan Metro 15.84 31.29 1.98
Tashkent Metro 36.2 59.17 1.63
Samara Metro 10.3 15.64 1.52
Yerevan Metro 12.1 15.57 1.29
Dnipropetrovsk Metro 7.9 7.5 0.95
Almaty Metro 8.54 6.56 0.77

The Ultimate Authoritarian Anti-Urbanism

Cairo is a dense megacity, without the infrastructure such cities require for high living standards. The city proper, according to Wikipedia, has 10 million people, living at a density approaching 20,000 per km^2, and the metro area has 20 million. With a subway system fit for a city a tenth its size, Cairo is heavily motorized for its income level, congested, and polluted. Despite high construction costs, urgent investment in public transportation is required. Ignoring this need, the current military government has just announced plans to build a new capital outside the city, eventually to house 7 million people, with all the public monuments of a planned city, at a cost of $300 billion (exchange rate dollars, not PPP), about the same as Egypt’s annual GDP. The first phase alone will be $45 billion.

Cairo itself is already suffering from neglect and disinvestment. There are 2 million cars in the city. This is enough to cause so much traffic congestion it costs Egypt 4% of its GDP. Cairo’s air pollution is legendary: pollution levels are akin to smoking a pack of cigarettes per day. At least as of 1997, lead pollution caused by cars using leaded gasoline reduced Cairene children’s IQ by 4 points. The poor transportation options have led to a housing crunch, forcing half a million people to live in a historic necropolis as squatters.

The Cairo Metro would be a solution to these problems to a large extent, but is very small relative to Cairo’s size: it has 3 lines, totaling 78 route-km. Other cities of comparable size have many hundreds of route-km of urban rail, with a handful of exceptions infamous for their sprawl (such as Los Angeles) or pollution (such as Sao Paulo). Despite its small size, the Cairo Metro gets about 1.6 billion passengers per year, by far the highest number of passengers per route-km in the world, nearly twice as high as on the legendarily overcrowded Tokyo subway. Cairo has high construction costs, but in exchange rate dollars they only amount to about $130 million per km; a fully underground expansion of the subway to 400 km, somewhat more than the length of New York’s subway lines and less than that of Beijing and Shanghai’s, would cost about $40 billion, less than the cost of the new capital’s first phase alone. This is on top of all other possible infrastructure investments Egypt should consider: sanitation, sewage, water treatment, electrification, hospitals, schools, the Suez Canal. I bring up the Metro since so many of Cairo’s pressing problems would be substantially reduced if it had the capacity to transport a large share of the city’s population.

The problem is that the Egyptian government’s first priority is not to serve the needs of the Egyptian population. It is an authoritarian military government; it is not accountable to the broad public. I bring this up, because it’s a necessary check on things I have said in the past, attacking local American governance as authoritarian. Andrew Cuomo and Chris Christie have the power to overrule useful spending bills and cause traffic jams in cities run by political opponents. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has the power to jail political opponents without trial, and execute them by the hundreds after show trials.

Autocrats love planned cities, for two reasons. First, planned cities are monuments to their greatness, lasting long into the future. The people the autocrats trample will be forgotten. Tourists visit the Taj Mahal, and not museums commemorating the churches and temples Shah Jahan destroyed. They visit the Great Wall of China, and not any commemoration of the million-odd people who died in its construction. They visit the Old City of Jerusalem, while nobody commemorates any of the locals Herod taxed to build its monuments – even Judaism only commemorates the destruction of the Temple and the beginning of the Diaspora, generations later. Autocrats know this. Even in antiquity, they knew monuments would make them more famous. And even in modern democratic regimes, politicians like signature initiatives that have their names on them; going back to Andrew Cuomo, his proposed Queens convention center is a typical example. But Cuomo still faces some democratic checks and balances. Sisi does not.

And second, planned cities can be built in ways that enhance social control. City Metric compares the new planned capital with Naypyidaw, Burma’s capital, built in the era of military rule to replace Yangon. Purpose-built capitals can be (and are) built around the needs of the national elite, keeping the poor out of sight. They have street and building design plans that make it easy to bring in the military to quell riots: wide streets, buildings that do not touch, no central square where protests could happen. They also disallow squatters, without going through the difficult and controversial move of evicting squatters from the preexisting city. One rhetorical question I have seen on Twitter is, where will this city’s Tahrir be? An article on Cairobserver doesn’t make this exact argument, but does note that this plan disinvests in what will still remain Egypt’s largest city, and could only come about as a result of Egypt’s complete lack of democracy.

One of the bigger influences on my views of democracy is Brad DeLong and Andrei Shleifer’s paper from 1993, Princes and Merchants. I do not fully agree with the point they make, but one of the key components of it, on the spending priorities of an absolute ruler, is crucial to understanding the benefits of democracy. Per DeLong and Shleifer, absolutism chokes economic growth, since the absolute ruler will overtax the economy to maximize revenue. One may ask if actually, hereditary rulers would want to stimulate more economic growth in order to bequeath a stronger kingdom to their heirs. DeLong and Shleifer answer that no: even with clear rules of inheritance, succession wars are so common that kings have to constantly be on the guard against rebellion to make sure their heirs get to inherit anything.

For Sisi, it is perfectly rational to spend so much money building a capital city that would make an uprising against him less likely. The money is not going to come from his pocket, but from the pockets of people he need not care about too much – the Egyptian people. The personal benefits to Sisi are invaluable: Sisi’s two predecessors, Mohamed Morsi and Hosni Mubarak, were both overthrown and immediately charged with crimes, for which they were guilty (under Sisi’s influence, Mubarak was exonerated from most). Why not remove himself and the apparatus of the Egyptian state from the city where they were overthrown?

When I talk of infrastructure democracy in democratic first-world countries, I complain about (much) smaller versions of this exercise. One could reason with a democratic Egyptian government that there are better uses of the money in Cairo itself. One cannot reason this way with a military government. The same is true of the soft authoritarianism found in governments with a democratic deficit, from the European Commission to local American governments. Their power is ultimately limited by other layers of government, which are more transparent, and they are incapable of killing off political opponents, but they still do not have to listen to the people they impact, leading to decisions that are at times obviously ridiculous. Egypt’s new capital is this autocracy, taken to its logical end. A dictator, of the kind who the infrastructurists might praise as someone who can cut through the red tape and gets things done, is spending the country’s annual GDP on a plan to disinvest in the capital and build a monument to himself and his regime from scratch.

What Happened to the RPA?

Last month, New York’s Regional Plan Association published a report, Overlooked Boroughs, proposing various transit improvements in New York outside the Manhattan core to complement the existing Manhattan-centric subway network. I’ve been thinking for a while what to say about the report. I don’t want to mock too much, since the RPA clearly tries to improve things. But the report falls short in every way, and plays into fads about buses. The one point of light is a brief mention of subways under Utica and Nostrand Avenues, but it is vague and doesn’t even make any of the maps the RPA is producing for additional rail and bus service. Even the RPA’s positive past contribution to the region’s transit proposals, Triboro RX, is replaced by the inferior Crossboro system. All this is on top of wooden analysis of preexisting transportation options.

The Analysis

The technical report talks about low transit usage for travel within the Outer Boroughs, which for the study’s purposes include Upper Manhattan. Figure 3 on page 7 breaks down mode choice as transit versus other modes. This works in Queens, but in Upper Manhattan and the South Bronx, car ownership rates are so low that local transit is competing with walking (and biking). In the Bronx in general, the mode share for borough-internal commutes is 40% transit and 36% car; in Brooklyn, the corresponding numbers are 42% and 32%. Eyeballing figure 3, Upper Manhattan’s transit share looks like 35%, but the car share is almost certainly much lower, given very low car ownership. This means there’s a huge volume of non-mechanized transportation in those regions.

The study does mention expanding bike infrastructure, on pp. 50-51, with an emphasis on bike share. However, its conclusion is directly at odds with the fact that non-mechanized transportation is quite popular in Upper Manhattan, the Bronx, and Brooklyn. It calls for incremental enlargement of the current system’s coverage, which consists of Manhattan south of 59th Street and the innermost parts of Brooklyn. It specifically warns against rapid expansion, “so as not to spread the program too thin,” and says the next areas for coverage should be the bridge landings in Brooklyn and Queens and the Upper East and West Sides. Inexplicably, low-income Bedford-Stuyvesant, which is adjacent to the current coverage area, is explicitly listed as a future phase and not a current priority.

A better proposal would call for rapid expansion of bike share and bike lanes; this costs money, but so does transit. Moreover, since the neighborhoods that would gain the most are low-income, the city should give some thought to how to make its bike share system easier to use for low-income residents. The current system requires a debit or credit card and puts a $101 security hold per pass. A city-subsidized system allowing qualified low-income residents to ride without a security hold is required; for example, the city could allow EBT cards to be used in lieu of a security hold, even if their holders then need to put in cash or a MetroCard to pay, in case the federal government disallows using the cards for biking and not just food stamps.

Then, a few pages after the analysis of intra-borough commutes, the report makes another mistake: on table 2, it lists mode shares for commutes between city boroughs and suburban counties, as well as likely transit options. Where commuter rail exists, it lists it as an option: thus, the Manhattan, Queens, or Brooklyn to Essex County rows list “subway to New Jersey Transit” as an option, despite the fact that New Jersey Transit is expensive and infrequent in the reverse-peak direction. Most likely, transit commuters from New York to Essex County work in or near Downtown Newark and take PATH, or at the airport and take a bus.

Now, the report does talk about commuter rail’s deficiency in attracting urban riders, both in the discussion surrounding tables 2 and 3 and in the proposal to improve commuter rail on pp. 49-50. But it says little about frequency for reverse commuting. Even when it does acknowledge the LIRR’s one-way peak service, it pulls its punches and only says it “recommends this project” (three-tracking the LIRR Main Line); proposing to instead do away with peak express service in order to permit reverse-peak service on the other track – as is practiced on the two-track segments of the Chuo Line – is beyond its scope. The punch-pulling is significant; as we will see over and over, the report repeatedly lets itself be defined by current practices and low-level current proposals.

Finally, the analysis of buses leaves something to be desired. The report talks at length about issues regarding span, frequency, and speed, on the list of nine characteristics that determine the attractiveness of transit. There’s no attempt to look systematically at what the busiest bus corridors in the city are. At some places, the corridors proposed match those of busy bus routes, for example the main crosstown routes in Brooklyn, the B35 and B6. At others, they neglect them entirely: as Alexander Rapp noted in comments recently, Grand Concourse, hosting the Bx1/2, is one of the busiest bus corridors in the city, even though it parallels the subway – it’s busier than Nostrand, which is now a Select Bus Service (SBS) route. The third busiest Bronx route, the Bx19, running on Southern to 145th in Manhattan, is also neglected.

We Just Call It “The Bus”

I think it’s Zoltána who said that what Americans call bus rapid transit, Londoners call “the bus.” As she noted in the past, three-door buses with all-door boarding are ubiquitous in Italy. German-speaking cities tend toward all-door boarding as well, as does Paris, but the buses usually have just two doors. All of this is years-old discussion, here and on related blogs such as Human Transit.

The significance of this is that it throws a wrench in any and all attempts to plan surface transit in New York around SBS, which is a bundle of features: enforced off-board fare payment, longer stop spacing, dedicated (but not physically separated) bus lanes. Vancouver engages in similar bundling with the B-Lines, but at least gets it right by not enforcing off-board fare payment: there are no machines printing tickets at any B-Line bus stop, but instead passengers can pay the driver at the front, or board from any door if they have a monthly pass or a transfer slip, which most do. But even Vancouver makes a mistake by requiring everyone to board from the front and pay the driver on all but a handful of bus lines. Vancouver, at least, establishes B-Line routes to mark where it considers building SkyTrain extensions in the future. In New York, it’s not about subway extensions; the planners really do think these features are special, and should be combined.

The RPA could have pushed for citywide off-board fare collection. Instead, it chose to smother any such push:

Set up off-vehicle fare payment using a proof of payment system. Passengers will not only board faster, but they will also be able to board using either front or back doors. However, the high cost of this option makes it impractical for system-wide implementation. Alternatively, the MTA should shift to touch or vicinity passes, the successor to the MetroCard, which is fast becoming obsolete.

First, the invocation of high cost in any plan that includes subway extensions, as this report does, is laughable. One-word replies to this point include any city where all buses already use proof of payment (POP), such as Paris, Berlin, Zurich, or Singapore. This is especially true now that the front end of smartcard technology is so cheap that there are top-up consumer items sold for $30. The cost of putting a card reader at every bus stop and at every bus door is, in 2015, trivial; what is not trivial is the cost of paying drivers to idle while bus riders are dipping their MetroCards at the front one by one.

If we accept citywide POP and bus stop consolidation – again looking at practices in Europe (and in Singapore), bus stops here are spaced every 400 meters and not 200-250 as in the US – then the rationale for SBS breaks down completely. All that’s left is corridors that require bus lanes, and those do not need to be continuous, as a bus can run partly on dedicated lanes and partly in mixed traffic.

Planning for the best corridors for specially upgraded surface transit requires thinking in terms of key bus corridors; the report does this because it assumes SBS is special, and the discussion with Alexander Rapp about Grand Concourse was about light rail. But if this is really just about bus lanes, then planning should be in terms of street segments. Bus lanes are required whenever there are busy buses on congested streets, and feasible when the streets are wide enough to permit car lanes and parking lanes in addition to the bus lanes. The importance of congestion means that a citywide bus lane map would be much more Manhattan-centric: potentially all Manhattan avenues and most two-way streets should have bus lanes since Manhattan traffic is so slow, even if there are key corridors elsewhere in the city with higher ridership.

At this point it’s useful to step back and think about relative advantages of surface transit (in this case buses) and rapid transit. Surface transit will always be slower, more expensive to operate, and far cheaper to deploy than rapid transit. This is why bus maps look like dense grids or meshes in every major city whereas subway maps only do in a small number of megacities.

The upshot is that there’s less need to force buses into a few key corridors. If New York were to build a subway or even light rail on a corridor, it would have to choose the routing in a way that would replace multiple parallel buses. For example, light rail on Tremont would replace both the Bx40/42 and the Bx36, which run on or parallel to Tremont in different parts of the Bronx. There’s no need to do that with bus-based transit: the Bx40/42 and the Bx36 can stay where they are. Route consolidation is only beneficial insofar as it boosts frequency, which means it’s required on minor routes but optional on major ones – this is why there’s a bus on every Manhattan avenue except Park, with no consolidation of the various one-way avenue pairs. The Bx40/42 runs every 10 minutes in the midday off-peak, and the Bx36 runs every 7-8 minutes, so there’s no need for a combined corridor.

Another key difference, ignored in the report, is that surface transit needs to run on straight, continuous streets whenever possible. Turns slow the bus down much more than they slow the subway (although they do increase the subway’s construction costs, since the subway would need to go under private property). This is partly because the bus is already slower, so the extra travel distance is more onerous, and partly because turning from one street to another requires red-light cycles that may not be easily eliminated via signal priority.

One upshot of this is that the report’s proposed bus map has some routes that are completely insane. Figure 14, on page 40, has two proposed new SBS routes in the Bronx: one paralleling the Bx36 and Bx40/42 in a circuitous manner, and going north-south in the East Bronx with several jogs and turns larger than 180 degrees. Nobody needs such circuitous routes.

Another upshot is the situation in Brooklyn. Brooklyn has five of the city’s top ten routes: the crosstown B35 and B6, and the radial B41 (Flatbush), B44 (Nostrand), and B46 (Utica). The latter three follow their streets nearly the entire way. The first two do not, as Brooklyn does not have continuously important crosstown arterial streets the way it has Flatbush, Nostrand, and Utica. Now, to be fair, the B6 is as fast as the three radials, all averaging 11 km/h on local buses and 12-13 on limited ones, but the B35 is much slower, 8 km/h local and 9 km/h limited; all average speeds are computed departing eastbound or northbound at noon. Between this and the B6’s somewhat zigzaggy route, the circumferentials are slowed more than the radials, which means rapid transit becomes more useful.

Enter Triboro RX, which appears in modified form (see below) in the report. Although it doesn’t closely parallel the B35 or B6, it provides a similar kind of service, and could poach significant ridership from both. This means that the introduction of rapid transit service there would make it less important to upgrade the B35 and B6 beyond the upgrades all other buses receive; conversely, such service would get much more ridership than we see today on buses, since it would offer such a large speed benefit. Of course the same is true of subway extension on Nostrand and Utica, but the rail bias over the existing 12-13 km/h options is a bit less than over a 9 km/h option; it’s only the easy tie-in to the 2, 3, 4, and 5 trains and the very high ridership of three closely parallel bus routes that make two subway lines pencil out.

Unfortunately, there’s no attempt at combined planning in the report. There’s no attempt to tie upgraded bus routes in Brooklyn and Queens to new transfer points created by Triboro. At the city’s other end, in the Bronx, Second Avenue Subway Phase 2 would make an East 125th Street terminus desirable for some Bronx buses; this is again not shown. Figure 14 on page 40 doesn’t show subway extensions, and figure 15 on page 44 doesn’t show SBS routes.

Finally, one notable inclusion is that of North Shore Branch SBS. Everything I could say about this I said three and a half years ago; it’s a terrible plan, and the fact that the RPA is going through with it instead of explaining why a second Staten Island Railway line would be better speaks volumes to how little the RPA is willing to come up with its own ideas instead of following whatever fads the city and MTA engage in.

Rail: Even When It’s Right, It’s Wrong

The report’s proposals for subway and commuter rail expansion have good kernels, but manage to make big mistakes on top of them, producing projects of limited transportation value. Here the RPA’s mistake is less overrelying on bad government planning (there is none as far as rail is concerned) and more overrelying on its own hype and that of similar organizations.

The plan for Second Avenue Subway is still in place. However, one key proposal regarding phasing worries me:

There is a strong argument to move quickly to build the north segment first as far as 116th Street, which would be relatively inexpensive since much of the tunnel is in place from earlier work, leaving the more expensive last piece to 125th Street for later. This report supports this argument.

Although in East Harlem, 116th Street is the key throughfare, a connection to 125th Street is crucial, for the transfer to Metro-North and the 4, 5, and 6 trains. It’s not even too much more expensive than a Phase 1.5 to 116th Street, since the 106th and 116th Street stations would still need to be dug, and the stations are the dominant part of Second Avenue Subway’s cost, three quarters of Phase 1 if I remember correctly.

Moreover, the report suggests various tie-ins, all on page 43: going west across 125th, going north into the Bronx, going south to Brooklyn via a new tunnel and taking over the Atlantic Branch of the LIRR. The first one would be golden, but isn’t even depicted on the associated map, figure 15 on page 44. As with the Nostrand and Utica subways discussed on the same page, the best ideas in the report are presented as afterthoughts and not depicted on any map. The Bronx extensions are harmless, but the routes shown on figure 15 are at times circuitous. The Atlantic Branch plan, fortunately not shown either, is the worst: the Atlantic Branch should be part of a modernized commuter rail plan. Despite the fact that the report does talk about commuter rail upgrades, it still considers cannibalizing a key route for a Second Avenue Subway extension.

The second key piece of rail infrastructure proposed, Triboro RX, is the RPA’s key contribution, dating back to 1996. Michael Frumin worked on this project and, together with Jeff Zupan, one of this report’s two authors, estimated its ridership at 76,000 commuters, each taking a roundtrip per weekday, for about 150,000 weekday boardings. Unfortunately, this report scraps many of the useful features of Triboro, replacing the line with Penn Design’s inferior Crossboro, which runs alongside the Northeast Corridor in the Bronx instead of completing the semicircle around Manhattan.

Moreover, for reasons I do not understand, the report widens the interstations on Triboro. The original plan called for a station every 800 meters, excluding the Hell Gate Bridge; including it, there would be about a station every kilometer. The current version of the route has a station every 1.8 km; even excluding the Bronx and Hell Gate portions, this is a station every 1.6 km. Broadway Junction, a key transfer point with connections to the A, C, and J, is deleted; trains run nonstop from New Utrecht to the Brooklyn Army Terminal; successive spokes in Brooklyn get no stations between them, even when the distance between the radial lines is such that most subway networks would put in a station in the middle.

Finally, commuter rail modernization falls flat. The RPA correctly calls for lower fares and higher off-peak frequencies – but then fails to follow through with demanding reductions in marginal operating costs. A discussion of high off-peak frequency and subway-competitive fares is a waste of time if each train is staffed with five conductors. A more reasonable number of conductors, zero, is required for this to financially pencil out.

But even if we ignore the costs, the plan does not look like a plan with modernized commuter rail. There are no infill stations proposed. High frequencies and mode-neutral fares would make Astoria a desirable commuter rail stop; but the stations mentioned on pp. 49-50 for Penn Station Access service are only the ones currently proposed in the Bronx, omitting Astoria. Similarly, despite wild plans, not depicted on maps, to construct a commuter rail branch on Utica, there’s no mention of simply adding a Utica stop to Atlantic Branch trains. Nobody is going to use Utica or Astoria for today’s fares or on today’s schedules, but frequent, cheap commuter rail service to these areas would be very popular.

All of the ideas proposed for rail are good, in principle. I’m glad that Second Avenue Subway is receiving priority, that Triboro is on this map, and that there’s talk of commuter rail modernization. But every when the RPA gets it right, it wrecks things with bad details about phasing, station placement, and lack of consideration of what commuter rail modernization would do to demand patterns.

Where are the Forward-Thinking Proposals?

The report simply cobbles together various proposals by organizations and politicians, without trying to turn them into a coherent whole: some bus upgrades here, some subway and commuter rail expansions there, no real attempt to even make the various modes work together. Even within each tranche, the report often rehashes current city plans, no matter how inappropriate.

Is the RPA thinking forward here? I don’t see any evidence of forward thought in the report. Where Paris is beginning construction on 200 kilometers of driverless rapid transit, mostly underground, the RPA is proposing 10 km of subway in future Second Avenue Subway phases and 40 km of rapid transit on existing right-of-way in Triboro RX. If New York could build subways at Paris’s prices, about $250 million per kilometer, Ile-de-France’s budget for Grand Paris Express, about $35 billion, would build the entirety of Second Avenue Subway eleven times over. There would be money for multiple radial and crosstown subway extensions and commuter rail tunnels (at Parisian costs, my commuter rail through-running tunnels would together be $20 billion or somewhat less); bus upgrades, done right, would show as a rounding error in streetscaping, and actually save money since higher speeds would reduce operating costs.

The Third Regional Plan did talk about things that other people were not proposing at the time. It had more Second Avenue Subway tie-ins, for one. Here all the RPA is doing is slapping its logo on a bad bus upgrade plan and reminding people that there’s a Second Avenue Subway project waiting to be finished. What happened to the RPA?

Ferries

Last week, Bill de Blasio proposed a citywide ferry system in his otherwise perfectly boilerplate State of the City speech. Ferries, as Ben Kabak notes, are a tried and failed solution in New York, with a $30 per passenger subsidy on the ferry to the Rockaways, one of the neighborhoods mentioned in de Blasio’s speech. At the same time, some ferry routes do attract large numbers of passengers, including the Staten Island Ferry and SeaBus; in addition, MBTA Boat attracts fewer passengers than SeaBus, but achieves better cost recovery than the MBTA’s land transportation services. The purpose of this post is to explain which urban geographies could be well-served by ferries, and why New York could not.

Until the invention of the railroad, the fastest, cheapest, and most reliable form of transportation was the boat. Inland transportation of goods was by canal whenever possible. Overland transportation was so expensive that, as noted by Andrew Odlyzko, the cost of coal would double twelve miles away from the mine (see p. 14). As a result, cities were founded on shorelines and in river estuaries, and shrank if their rivers silted.

Railroads inverted this equation. Even in the 1830s, trains achieved higher speeds than ferries do today: the London and Birmingham averaged 31 km/h at opening, whereas SeaBus, which uses fast catamarans, averages at most 20 km/h. They could climb grades without resorting to locks and derailed much less often than boats sank; and, with the world still in the tail end of the Little Ice Age, the railroads did not freeze in winter. In this situation, a seaside location is no longer an advantage. At coastal locations, railroads have to cross more rivers, as did roads before; the current route of the Northeast Corridor in Connecticut was not the first but the third rail connection to be built between New York and Boston, after the Long Island Railroad (with ferry connections at both ends) and the inland Hartford and New Haven Railroad route.

The 19th century was a period of fast population growth in the industrialized world, especially the US, and fast urbanization. The industrial cities were then sited based on the optimal locations of a railroad network and not that of a shipping network. Birmingham and Manchester were already the largest cities in the UK outside of London, but the first railroad was, not coincidentally, built precisely to give Manchester port access without relying on the Manchester Ship Canal. In the US, we can see this in action, especially in New England: Boston has always been New England’s largest city, but many other early-settled cities – Salem, Newport, Plymouth, Provincetown, Portsmouth – declined, and now New England’s second cities include not just coastal New Haven and Providence but also inland Hartford, Worcester, and Nashua-Manchester.

In some areas of Long Island and New England, we can see towns with dual centers: an older coastal center, and a newer inland center, near the train station or a highway interchange. As Long Island had extensive suburban growth in the postwar era, the inland centers there are usually the larger ones, whereas in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, the coastal centers are usually larger.

Boston’s ferries serve these coastal centers. The Greenbush Line is locally infamous for its low ridership, about 3,000 per weekday in each direction. And yet, the ferries serving Hingham are fairly well-patronized: about 3,500 weekday passengers in both directions. (Both figures are from the 2014 Blue Book.) Now, the trains still carry nearly twice as many passengers as the ferries, but, relatively speaking, the ferries are doing quite well, since that part of the South Shore was settled before the railroad came, so the ferry serves passengers better than the trains do.

The other issue is which mode of transportation offers the most direct route. On the South Shore, the ferries go in a straighter line than the trains, which have to detour to remain on land. The Staten Island Ferry goes in a straight line, whereas roads and trains take big detours, especially for passengers leaving from St. George and not from near the bridges to Brooklyn and New Jersey. SeaBus, likewise, takes a direct route.

The significant fact for the Staten Island Ferry and SeaBus is that there economic centers of Staten Island and North Vancouver are right next to the ferry docks, coming from the fact that those areas were settled as suburban regions connected to the center by ferry. Because constructing a road or rail link across the New York Harbor or Burrard Inlet is difficult, those ferries were never replaced by fixed links; this is in contrast with Jersey City, which was also connected to New York by multiple ferry lines, but had enough demand a hundred years ago to fill the Hudson Tubes and later the Holland Tunnel with commuters.

None of these histories and geographies applies to the routes proposed by de Blasio and other ferry supporters. A Rockaway ferry has to detour around all of Brooklyn to reach Manhattan. The various waterfront ferries between Manhattan and Queens don’t really serve neighborhood centers, which are located around subway stations. Subway stations, like railroads, dislike coastal locations, not because of construction difficulties but because half their walk sheds would be underwater. Even Red Hook, which is cut off from the rest of the city by the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and has no subway service, is not centered around the waterfront: the projects are several blocks inland, and Ikea Dock is facing the wrong way, south instead of west.

New York’s commercial centers, likewise, are inland. Why would a Midtown office developer waste any time building a skyscraper on the East River when the easternmost subway stations in Midtown are at Lexington Avenue? Thus the high-rise towers that line First Avenue are more residential than commercial, making them poor candidates for ferry connections. Lower Manhattan is better-connected to the water, but it is served by a large number of subway lines in all directions, none of which is at capacity since Midtown is the bigger office cluster. It’s also far from the waterfront condo clusters de Blasio wants to serve with ferries.

Even service between Staten Island and Manhattan shouldn’t be a ferry. A rail tunnel would offer a large improvement in trip times: about 8 minutes or even less, compared with 25 by ferry, and one to two transfers less than today. The question is entirely whether the costs could be contained enough to be in line with a realistic demand projection. Of course this is best realized as part of a regionwide commuter rail modernization plan, but even without such a plan, a connection to the 1 train would substantially reduce Staten Island’s commute time, which, at least last decade, was the longest of all US counties.

And this is an origin-destination pair that, given current infrastructure, is actually well-served by ferry, unlike the routes that de Blasio proposed. Ben tried to propose a better way of running ferries in New York, but with no real anchors to connect to, Ben’s proposal is a polite way of what I would phrase as “just don’t.”

Unlike Cuomo, de Blasio is not inherently hostile to public transit. However, he does not particularly care about transit, either. In this view, what he says about ferries is of limited consequence; the amounts of money in question are trivial. He’s not like Bloomberg, who directed $2 billion of city money to the 7 extension ahead of more deserving subway investments. Perhaps it’s wiser to focus on his plan to deck over Sunnyside Yards, or, more specifically, his invocation of massive projects including Stuyvesant Town, Coop City, and Starrett City – precisely the models that a Sunnyside decking should avoid.

However, there’s a good reason to focus on this, unimportant as it is. Cuomo’s failings are characteristic of an autocrat who is hostile to transit. De Blasio’s are characteristic of an autocrat who is indifferent. Although there is a long-term transit plan in New York, centered around completing Second Avenue Subway, this is not what de Blasio talked about, at all. Instead, he went for projects that can be done during his first term: off-board fare collection on a few more bus routes (“Select Bus Service,” complete with the pretense that they are bus rapid transit), and ferries. He won’t just follow an agenda set by others a long time ago: he has to remind people he exists on this issue as on his signature issues, but, as he doesn’t actually care about it, he will propose distractions that would at best do little (Select Bus Service) and at worst would be complete wastes of money (the ferries).

In a democracy, good transit advocates can push themselves into key positions at the ministry of transport, or its equivalent, such as a parliamentary committee on transportation (including the Congressional one, even). The same is true for people who care about other aspects of government spending and policy: housing, health care, education, defense, social welfare, policing. In an autocracy, such as the strong mayor system, it boils down to asking the autocrat to care and to take the right position. But the autocrat is just one person, and cannot pay equal attention to everything. Hence, ferries and Select Bus Service, in lieu of real transit investment.