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.

Update on the Grapevine (Hoisted from Comments)

Put a fork in the idea of saving a few billions of dollars on California High-Speed Rail by switching from the Palmdale alignment to the I-5 alignment through the Grapevine. The HSR Authority conducted a new study and found that, after fiddling with the parameters to create the maximally bad result for the Grapevine alignment, the Grapevine alignment does not save money. Go to page 39-40 to see how convoluted the studied Grapevine option is. This is driven not by geotechnical considerations, but by political ones: the owners of Tejon Ranch, which covers much of the area of study, oppose HSR through their property. Even so, the base cost of the Grapevine is $13.5 billion, versus $15 billion for Palmdale; this difference was papered over by fudging a risk adjustment factor. As commenter Jon explains,

Having skimmed through the study, a few points come to mind:

1) The length of the I-5 route has increased largely due to the requirement to diverge from the current route east of Bakersfield rather than bypass Bakersfield to the west. I’m sure this requirement is driven by a desire to get the Frseno – Bakersfield EIR/EIS certified in time to start construction on the ICS. What would the effect of a west Bakersfield bypass be on the cost and travel time of an I-5 route?

2) The cheapest and fastest I-5 route bisected the proposed Tejon Ranch, but the study didn’t take this route forward to detailed analysis. Instead they analyzed a ‘considerably more expensive and slower’ route which cuts right through Lebec, in order to avoid the ‘significant cost and schedule risk’ involved in bisecting the Tejon Ranch. How fast and expensive would the I-5 route through the Tejon Ranch have been? How difficult would it be to permit this route?

3) Also the risk adjustment to account for the 5% design- this seems to be an obvious fudge. You can see everything they changed in Appendix B. What is the justification for increasing the risk allocation for real estate from 20% to 40%, for example?

Despite the potentially large cost difference, the HSR Authority is loathe to use eminent domain, even when the cost is much smaller than the alternative. Something similar happened in the Central Valley, when the initial plan to hew to existing transportation corridors became untenable as it became clear it would require many viaducts and grade separations, and only after value engineering has the cost overrun been limited by running around unserved cities. With a less positive result, it’s happened repeatedly on the Peninsula, for example with the substandard San Bruno grade separation project.

The problem here is that no value engineering is possible unless the I-5 option is kept open. Thus it’s important for us as good transit activists to demand that the HSR Authority engineer both options to learn more about the risk, allowing eventually for the cheapest and most reliable option to be picked.

Little Things That Matter: Railroad Junctions

One underrated difference between countries is how multi-tracked railroad junctions look. In France, double-tracked regional lines have grade-separated junctions that ensure no crossing oncoming traffic. For a plethora of examples, consult the RER track map and look at any bifurcation. Looking at Google Earth, the same is true near Tokyo. This is standard rapid transit practice anywhere I know of, and Paris and Tokyo both treat their regional rail systems like urban rapid transit.

In the US, this is not true. Even important, high-traffic mainline junctions are often flat – see for examples the Main Line-Hempstead Line junction on the LIRR (Queens Interlocking), and the Hudson-Harlem junction on Metro-North (Mo Interlocking). The major junctions involving the Northeast Corridor tend to be better, fortunately. Harold, the LIRR/NEC junction, is already grade-separated from oncoming traffic, and the current grade-separation project is only for same-direction traffic; and the junctions in New Jersey are grade-separated. The Kearny Connection splits the problem in half – it is grade-separated for NEC trains but requires Morris and Essex trains in opposite directions to cross each other at grade. However, even for NEC trains a few major problems remain, most notably Shell Interlocking between the Northeast Corridor and Metro-North in New Rochelle.

I suspect the problem is that double-tracked lines in the US are not consistently thought of as having one line in each direction. The arrival of centralized traffic control (CTC) has made wrong-direction running easy; some railroads ripped their second tracks, and the commuter lines that remained double-tracked freely run trains wrong-way during weekends or (as is the case on the Worcester Line) when there are freight trains on the line. At a few places, four-tracked segments on running track connect to two tracks in nonstandard ways: for example, at Providence Station, three of the four platform tracks merge into the southbound running track. The concept of having one track per direction and no crossing oncoming traffic, which is standard on the subway, doesn’t really apply to commuter rail, leading to scheduling problems.

In New York, there’s no alternative to grade-separating the worst junctions, including Mo, Queens, the Kearny Connection, and the unnamed Far Rockaway/Long Beach and Ronkonkoma/Port Jefferson junctions. Although frequent train service exists with flat junctions, the schedule is irregular and unreliable, and has few reverse-peak trains. Fortunately, this is a problem for commuter trains more than for intercity trains, for which schedule adherence is more important.

In Boston, the NEC itself has flat junctions at all of its branches. Fortunately, there are alternatives to concrete. The Franklin/Providence junction requires Franklin Line trains merging onto the NEC to cross oncoming Providence Line trains at grade, but lets them continue onto the Fairmount Line without conflict. Since the Fairmount Line is getting some investment and more frequency is under discussion, having additional trains serve the line is a net benefit, and all Franklin Line trains should go through Fairmount. The Needham Line branches at-grade, at a more constrained location, but there are plans to connect it to the Orange Line anyway, and much of its geography is suitable for subway service more than for a regional rail branch. This leaves the Stoughton Line, for which there’s no alternative, but fortunately Canton Junction is not a very constrained location and the junction is simple.

When Should HSR Serve New Urban Stations?

Greenfield high-speed rail lines frequently serve new stations rather than legacy stations; the TGV network is famous for this, and the discussion of whether to place intermediate stations in the city or on the outskirts has arisen in many reports and studies on the subject. What is less commonly discussed is what to do at the main urban stations. More often than not these are the legacy stations, but there are several exceptions.

Those are not the infamous beet-field stations in France, but something quite different – they’re in different neighborhoods from the older stations, but are still in dense urban landscape, often (but not always) as close to downtown as the older stations. Trains do not pass them at very high speed, so they’re chosen primarily to make through-service easier, in cities whose legacy stations are terminals or otherwise difficult to connect through. Indeed, I do not know of a single case in which such new stations are intended to serve as terminals – they are either through-stations from the start, or terminals intended to be used as through-stations with a later extension.

Example 1. Shin-Osaka is located just outside central Osaka, about 4 kilometers from Osaka Station. Osaka Station is a through-station, but there are sharp curves from it to the legacy Tokaido Main Line at both ends, and also there was not enough room to build additional tracks for dedicated Shinkansen use. Since the goal was subsequent through-service west of Osaka, it was easier to build a new station just outside the CBD, at the intersection of the Tokaido Shinkansen with the Tokaido Main Line (now Kyoto Line). The station is also connected to one subway line, which goes to Osaka Station and beyond. Although there has been development near the station, it is a secondary station, with far more traffic at Osaka; a transit-oriented CBD is too compact and dependent on a huge subway network to move so easily.

Example 2. Lyon Part-Dieu was built specifically for the TGV, since the old station, Perrache, was at a poor location for connection to the high-speed line. Part-Dieu is located in a busy neighborhood area of Lyon and has seen ample development, and the Lyon Metro, which is not much older than the LGV Sud-Est, serves it from multiple directions. In addition, commuter trains have been diverted to Part-Dieu from Perrache, so that now the station is France’s busiest mainline station outside Paris. Despite its use as a through-station, the construction of further LGV segments south of Lyon in the 1990s made it somewhat of a terminus for TGVs, while through-trains skip the city at full speed on a greenfield alignment to the east of the urban area or stop along the way, near the airport.

Example 3. Lille’s legacy train station, Lille-Flandres, is a terminus. This was unacceptable for TGV service, not least because the main draw of building a line to Lille was the onward connection to the Channel Tunnel, which was constructed at the same time. Thus, a new station was built a few hundred meters from Lille-Flandres, on the land of a former helicopter base; because of the city’s new position at the junction of high-speed lines to Paris, London, and Brussels, the station was named Lille-Europe. Like Shin-Osaka and unlike Part-Dieu, Lille-Europe is primarily a high-speed train station; Lille-Flandres is much busier (it is the second busiest provincial French station, after Part-Dieu). This is despite the fact that Lille has extensively redeveloped, using the TGV as a catalyst.

Example 4. Because of difficulty reaching Barcelona’s main station, Sagrera, the AVE is initially serving a terminal station a few kilometers to the west, Sants. A new track connection to Sagrera was built, in order to allow full through-service to points north and east of Barcelona. In this case, the choice of a new station was a temporary measure allowing the line to open earlier, rather than a change in alignment.

What all of these examples have in common is different from the usual conception of building new HSR stations, both in an outskirt setting and in a CBD setting. None of these stations has been about digging greenfield tunnels under city center – indeed Shin-Osaka was explicitly about avoiding such tunnels, and Sants was built as a way to allow service to open before such a tunnel were finished. None involves a station cavern; Lille-Europe is above ground, despite its CBD location. None is an urban prestige project.

Indeed, the decision to build a new underground station complex under Marseille’s terminal station, Saint-Charles, is one of many contributing to the very high projected cost of the LGV PACA project linking Marseille (and Paris) with Nice. A though-station very close to downtown exists, and an underground option there was judged slightly cheaper in an alternatives analysis, but all currently considered scenarios involve an underground station at Saint-Charles.

Another thing to observe is that neither Japan nor France compromised on station location in the capital, but at the same time neither built extensive infrastructure for it. None of the Paris RER lines or of the TGV projects has included any provision for building a single central Paris station for trains in all direction; such a station would require a large cavern with multiple tunnels, and the space and money for such tunnels is far more valuable for local transit use. Likewise, Japan has had no trouble cutting back legacy intercity and long-range commuter trains to bring the Shinkansen to Tokyo Station, but stops short of building a new cavern for it. The most it has done is reserve space at Shinjuku for a future tunnel for use by the Joetsu Shinkansen, requiring new subway lines that go nearby to be built deeper.

The upshot in the US is that the emphasis should be on functional train station locations, rather than on the most central locations. In particular, the Amtrak Vision‘s plan to bring intercity trains to Market East and Charles Center through new tunnels should be shelved in favor of the existing 30th Street and Baltimore Penn Station. In addition, a new track connection between Grand Central and Penn Station should be used only by commuter trains, which need it far more than intercity ones (it would also allow tighter curves, saving on expensive Midtown land acquisition), mirroring the fact that no TGVs serve Chatelet-Les Halles. If the example stations in this post are any guide, any Manhattan location south of 60th Street would work for New York’s primary train station, and Penn Station’s location is as good as any.

In California, what this means is not surprising: converting Los Angeles’s Union Station configuration from terminal to through-station is paramount. In addition, at the Bay Area end, it’s fine to end high-speed trains at the existing 4th and King terminal rather than Transbay, until future money for the final tunnel is committed. In the longer run, in San Diego, although the existing Santa Fe depot should be used if possible, another urban location would not be hurtful as long as it had some transit accessibility and was in a walkable location.

Transit Alternatives to the Tappan Zee Widening

Cap’n Transit is virtually alone in the transit blogosphere in opposing the Tappan Zee Bridge widening and replacement. Unfortunately, merely opposing a highway project, expensive as it is, is not enough; as we’ve seen in the failure of the ballot proposition to ban a highway tunnel in Seattle, opponents of highway expansion need to make it concrete and clear what transit alternatives there are. In the case of the Tappan Zee specifically, alternatives exist, but serve different markets, and it’s necessary to explain why the market that the Tappan Zee serves is not the most important to the region.

I propose a regional rail system instead, focusing on serving Rockland County and perhaps a few centers in Orange County. There are multiple lines crisscrossing Rockland County, with limited or no freight traffic, passing through old town centers that would make good regional rail stops and connecting to good alignments in North Jersey. For a regionwide perspective there are my original regional rail proposal and my more recent focus on connectivity from North Jersey to Lower Manhattan, but the important thing for the purposes of Rockland County is the question of which lines could be used. The Erie Main Line only goes to Suffern, but could collect passengers from the western parts of Orange County; the Northern Branch, including an abandoned northern end, goes as far north as Nyack; the Pascack Valley Line was abandoned north of Spring Valley but has an intact right-of-way as far north as Haverstraw; the West Shore Line goes north to Albany and has moderate freight traffic, easily accommodated in the off-peak if double-tracking is restored. There are so many options that the main question is which to activate just to maintain adequate frequency.

The main difference with any Tappan Zee proposal is that the existing rail lines go north-south, whereas the Tappan Zee is east-west. Fortunately, most existing movement is north-south. As can be confirmed by the 2000 census, Rockland and Orange Counties’ commute market toward Westchester and other suburbs accessed by the bridge is quite small: 18,000 to Westchester and Fairfield. The volume of commuters from those two counties to Bergen and Passaic Counties is somewhat larger (22,000), and that to New York City more so (27,000 to Manhattan, 14,000 to the other boroughs). And traffic over the bridge since 2000 has stalled.

Not only is the north-south or northwest-southeast market bigger than the east-west market, but also it uses the Tappan Zee when it could be diverted if there were alternatives. A breakdown of travel on the bridge reveals that 16% of eastbound travel is to the Bronx and another 15% is to the other four boroughs and Long Island; this could be done competitively by various transit options.

Thus, a transit option that emphasizes north-south connectivity and goes to Manhattan through Bergen and Passaic Counties is going to serve more people than adding more east-west connectivity. It could serve far more if North Jersey jobs clustered in Paterson, Hackensack, and other old city centers, but in fact they’re diffuse. It’s unreasonable to assume significant commercial transit-oriented development in North Jersey, though a few jobs in Paterson could still be captured; however, jobs in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens could be served well.

Finally, to serve Bronx and Upper Manhattan jobs from both North Jersey and Rockland County, the trains should be combined with good bus service across the GWB. For example, bus lanes on Route 4 could be a strong start, especially if the trains are timed to connect to the buses. More speculatively, there’s a subway bellmouth allowing an extension of the C along the GWB, and relative to the cost of tunneling it should be inexpensive to extend the C as an elevated line toward Paterson over Route 4; the drawback is that the C is slow and would poorly serve the Bronx.

Although Rockland County is very sprawling, it has just enough old cities to anchor regional rail at the residential end. The effect is magnified if we can assume some TOD – for example, developing over the many parking lots currently in place in Nyack near the legacy Erie station – but as with commercial TOD, this is desirable but not very likely with the current political structure. Fortunately, American commuter rail works very well as a shuttle that extends auto-dependent commutes into cities that have no room for more cars; as a narrow alternative to constrained highways, it often succeeds, and would be a no-brainer compared to a bridge as expensive as the Tappan Zee.

The cost of reviving and electrifying the four lines proposed in my regional rail post (Erie Main, Pascack Valley, West Shore, and Northern Branch) is quite small compared to either the cost of bringing them to Manhattan or that of rebuilding the Tappan Zee Bridge. The cost of bringing the lines to Manhattan is substantial, but done right it would be much lower than the Tappan Zee Bridge’s $8.3 billion excluding any transit component.

If costs could be brought down, a new crossing, slightly farther north of the existing bridge, could work well for rail. The transit mode selection report discusses commuter rail on the new bridge, and the concept would be similar except that there should be more stations to serve local traffic better. A rail-only bridge would leave the Hudson Line north of Tarrytown, allowing west-of-Hudson commuters to access this job center and also ensuring no loss of frequency to the station, and then cross to Nyack. It would have to be underground in Nyack because the Palisades rise too steeply from the water, and would surface just west of the urban area. If all trains serving the line are EMUs, rather than diesels or even dual-mode locomotives, then the grade could be sharp enough to limit tunneling to the urban area of Nyack; the TMS report, which only considers diesels, proposes 2 miles (3.2 km) of tunneling, but EMUs climbing 4% grades could cut this by more than half.

The advantage of the east-west option is that it would serve Westchester jobs; while the commute market from Rockland and Orange Counties to Westchester is as mentioned not large, it clusters along I-287, especially in White Plains, and is thus somewhat more rail-serviceable. In addition, although the chance of commercial TOD is small everywhere in the US, it is larger in Tarrytown and White Plains than in Paterson and Hackensack.

On the other hand, if the costs could be brought down, they would be lower for everything, including highways. The same factors that cause transit construction costs to be so high in New York (namely, overstaffing, and poor contracting practices) apply to highways equally. In particular, the decision about what mode to favor should only weakly depend on cost, since relative costs both within transit modes and between cars and transit are not too different from in lower-cost countries.

To cut costs to a minimum while still providing acceptable first-phase service, the initial network could include only the lines that could be brought to Secaucus, with some track modifications near the station allowing Erie trains to terminate at the station parallel to the Northeast Corridor tracks; this still involves a fair amount of concrete pouring, but much less than a new tunnel to Manhattan, and the transfer could be made as convenient as that at Jamaica. In addition, trains could be mixed and matched: that is, to let a few of the Erie trains serve Manhattan directly, some Northeast Corridor or Morris and Essex trains could be cut to Secaucus. The main disadvantage is that no such option is possible with the West Shore Line and Northern Branch, and so it would be more useful in the western part of Rockland County than in the eastern part.

The selling point of the regional rail alternative is that, despite job sprawl, Rockland County residents are still more likely to need to travel to Manhattan than to Westchester. Thus, the promise of a one-seat ride to Manhattan on frequent train service, or at least a two-seat ride with the same quality of transfer offered to Long Islanders, could carry some political weight. One does not drive into New York out of love of driving; one drives into New York out of necessity, and making this less necessary could reduce some of the political will to spend billions more than required on widening a bridge.

Why Moynihan Station Has Negative Transportation Value

Amtrak has been making noises again about the need for Moynihan Station as a replacement concourse for Penn Station for Amtrak travelers, but makes it clear it does not want to pay almost anything for it. While former Amtrak President David Gunn withdrew from the project on the grounds that it would not increase track capacity, and another former president criticized the project for the same reason, today’s Amtrak is interested in the prospects of not sharing concourse space with commuter trains.

The irony is that what Amtrak perceives as the value of Moynihan Station is actually negative value. Penn Station already has a problem with concourse integration – different concourses have different train arrival boards, and different ticket-vending machines. The need to change concourses lengthens access time, in my experience by a minute or two. Right now, Amtrak has just gotten $450 million to increase top speed in New Jersey from 135 mph to 160 mph for a 24-mile stretch (150 under current regulations), for a time saving of 100 seconds (64 if only 150 mph is possible) minus acceleration and deceleration time. From my perspective as a passenger, the minute or two I lose every time I need to change concourses at Penn Station is worse than a minute or two spent on a train.

Separating the concourses completely is even worse when it comes to access and egress times. In comments on Second Avenue Sagas, Jim (who comments here as well) says that the move one block to the west is not too bad for intercity travelers, because to get to Midtown hotels, people would take the E anyway. However, people who live in New York and wish to travel elsewhere, or people who visit but do not stay at Midtown hotels, are likelier to take the 1/2/3, and Amtrak as well as local Moynihan Station boosters want them (us) to need to travel an extra crosstown block to travel. That’s 3 extra minutes of access time; at current costs, how many extra billions would have to spent to save them on the train?

Even the stated purpose of Moynihan Station, bringing people to the city in grandeur, fails. The building is a former post office rather than a train station; its former main entrance (still leading to the post office – thanks to Jim for the clarification) requires people to climb stairs. There are planned to be step-free entrances, but those remove much of the neo-classical grandeur.

From the perspective of intercity rail passengers, the biggest problem with Penn Station is the tracks and track access. The platforms are narrow, and visibility is obscured by columns, staircases, escalators, and elevators. But even what exists is not used to its fullest extent. Although Amtrak checks all passengers’ tickets on board, it also conducts a prior check at the station, funneling all passengers through just one access point and lengthening the boarding process. It’s possible to go around the check by boarding from the lower concourse, but Amtrak trains are not posted there, requiring passengers to loiter on the upper concourse, see what track the train arrives on (information which is typically posted only 15 minutes before departure), and scramble. As a result of the convoluted boarding process, Regional trains dwell 15 minutes at Penn Station, and Acela trains dwell 10 minutes. Many of those minutes could be saved by just better station throughput.

If more infrastructure is needed, it is not a separate passenger concourse, but better platforms and platform access. Some of the platforms – namely, the southern ones, hosting New Jersey Transit trains but not Amtrak trains – have too few access points, and require additional staircases and escalators.

More radically, platforms may need to be widened, at the expense of the number of tracks. This is one of the advantages of regional rail through-running, though in reality, even today clearing a full rush-hour commuter train is fast enough (about 1.5-2 minutes on the LIRR) that at least the LIRR could stand to have tracks paved over and still have enough terminal capacity for its current needs; New Jersey Transit, which has fewer tracks and trains with worse door placement and smaller vestibules, may have problems, but Amtrak doesn’t use its regular tracks because they do not connect eastward.

Amtrak’s history with Moynihan Station is especially telling about the company’s priorities. Clearly, Moynihan is not a priority – that’s why Amtrak says it has no money for it, and that’s why Gunn removed it from the company’s list of projects. The biggest supporters of Moynihan are local boosters and developers, who want the extra retail space. The planned expenditure on the project is $14 billion: $2 billion in public money for the train station, the rest in private money for development around it. The family of Daniel Moynihan is a strong backer of a monument named after the late Senator. It is not surprising that a project whose benefit goes entirely to power brokers and not to transportation users is backed by the locals the most: Amtrak and federal agencies may be dysfunctional, but they are models of efficiency compared to the local governments in the US.

However, Amtrak is incapable of saying no to monuments and megaprojects that it thinks will benefit it. More crucially, it will argue for their construction. Its symbiotic relationship with local governments seems to be, we’ll support your boondoggles if you support ours. Today’s Amtrak is not Gunn’s Amtrak, but the Amtrak that fired Gunn for refusing to defer maintenance in order to boost on-paper profitability.

Moynihan Station represents a failing of not only transportation planning, but also urban planning. More than any other project in New York, it brings back my original analogy between today’s urban boosterism and the modernist suburbanism of the first two-thirds of the 20th century. The project’s backers tell us a story: Penn Station was a magnificent edifice destroyed by thoughtless planners, and now we must repair the damage and restore style to passenger railroad travel. Since they base their conception of infrastructure on moral and aesthetic claims, which always seem to coincide with what gives them more money and kudos, they do not care whether the project is beneficial to users, and find the preexisting situation self-evidently bad.

Because the argument for Moynihan is entirely about the need for a grand, morally good projects, the backers spurn incremental improvement of what already exists, finding it so repulsive that it must be replaced no matter what. This is quite similar to how some proponents of suburbanization opposed improving tenements on the grounds that it would detract from the purpose of razing them and sending their residents out to single-family houses.

For example, both Moynihan backers and New Jersey Transit have complained about lack of space for passenger circulation at Penn Station; in reality, IRUM‘s George Haikalis has computed that about half of the lower concourse’s space is used for Amtrak back offices and concessions rather than for passenger circulation. In reality, Penn Station’s low ceilings make the station appear cramped, but the concourses are still fairly functional, and even at rush hour the crowding level is normal by the standards of what I’ve seen at Paris’s Gare de Lyon and at Nice’s main station.

This interplay between bad local governance and federal agencies that coddle it is part of what caused Amtrak’s Vision plan to be so bloated. The single worst component, the new tunnels through Philadelphia, appear to come from Amtrak’s belief that the local officials want strict separation of high-speed and commuter train infrastructure, coming from the fact that the locally-designed Penn plan included such tunnels. And in New York, Amtrak’s proposed its own marked-up version of ARC, one that is not too much better than the cavern plan that was under construction. On a smaller scale, the Harold Interlocking separation, primarily a New York State project benefiting commuter rail riders, made it to Amtrak’s list of desired incremental improvements, and is now receiving funding earmarked to high-speed rail.

The only special trait distinguishing Moynihan from those other unnecessary or bloated projects is that it’s harmful to riders, rather than neutral or insufficiently beneficial. The main backers of the project do not care much for transportation users, but Amtrak should. It seems to believe that its passengers want to spend time sitting at its train stations as if they were airline lounges; nowadays, not even air travelers like spending time at airports, which is why such time-saving features as printing boarding passes at home are so popular. The only positive thing to say about the project is that the cost is so high relative to the effect on passengers that the return on investment is very close to zero, rather than the -4% figures seen for long-distance Amtrak projects. And I don’t think that “This project only has an ROI of -0.2%” is a valid argument for construction.

Commuter Rail Speed (Hoisted from Comments)

For commuter rail, even more so than urban transit, there is a tradeoff involving speed, cost, and coverage. Higher speed is useful all else being equal, but all else is frequently not equal. American commuter rail is on average faster than European and East Asian commuter rail, but fails because relative to the distances people travel and the amount of sprawl it must compete with it is quite slow. Because of the need for higher speed, my previous commuter rail modernization proposals have featured average speeds higher than those that are normally found elsewhere.

That said, speed should be increased by means of better rolling stock, adequate maintenance, and better timetable adherence leading to less schedule padding. The American practice of running low-frequency trains from each suburban station expressing to the main city station makes service worse rather than better. Consider the following practices:

In Paris, RER trains are more or less local. There are some trains skipping stops, but in RATP territory (see schedules here), trains will just skip a few stops, rather than running truly limited-stop. In SNCF territory there are some express trains. In addition, the Transilien trains run on legacy routes even in the city, and run express outside it; often they’ll run nonstop between Paris and the terminus of the parallel RER line.

In Berlin, the S-Bahn lines run local. As in Paris, there are regional lines that are separate from the metro-like S-Bahn, and those make fewer stops in the urban core.

In Tokyo, there are local trains and rapid trains. Local trains make all stops. Rapid trains come in several flavors – they only stop at select stations, but sometimes there are several levels of rapid trains (all on the same tracks). The busiest lines have a track pair dedicated to local trains, and a track pair dedicated to express trains, and then there are usually two consistent express patterns, one more express than the other. The local trains (Yamanote, Keihin-Tohoku, Chuo-Sobu) run on dedicated tracks and are very metro-y in their lack of branching, and the rapid trains run on separate lines and look more legacy, just without the brand separation of France and Germany. In addition, there’s less separation of infrastructure.

For example, the Chuo-Sobu Line has local trains running to Mitaka, and the Chuo Rapid Line has trains making limited stops to Mitaka and local stops farther west as well as trains making limited stops all the way, with timed overtakes at the express stations; the express trains’ stopping pattern is consistent. Consult this schedule for details (click on “interval timetable”).

The speed of all of those lines is quite low – for example, the RER A averages 47 km/h between Boissy-Saint-Léger and Saint-Germain-en-Laye. However, this comes from short station spacing, coming from the fact that they serve dense urban areas, with reasonably dense suburbs. The need for speed in Paris is much less than in Boston or even New York. In Paris, 20-30 kilometers out of the city one already leaves the built-up area. Even in Tokyo, a much larger city, Takao, 53 kilometers from Tokyo Station, is near the end of the urban area. In contrast, Providence is 70 kilometers from Boston, and Ronkonkoma is 80 kilometers from Penn Station.

Consensus and Astroturf

Anthony Flint’s article in The Atlantic Cities, which compares Jane Jacobs’ protesting to current Tea Party protests against urban planning, inadvertently unmasks a serious issue in any consensus society. In drawing parallels between the near-riots of the 1960s and those of today, he invites us to look at what giving communities more power has wrought. Although his description of the Tea Party is clearly unsympathetic, he leaves two issues incompletely treated – grassroots activism versus astroturf, and starting versus shutting down discussions – and this gives a feeling of a meander, or at worst a late defense of top-down planning with no civic engagement.

Part of the issue of the attitude toward public debate has already been covered elsewhere. Emily Washington does a good job at demolishing the pretense that the Tea Party is consistently against government intervention, in favor of a view that it supports intervention as long as it’s in favor of what its members consider their kind of people. And far from trying to explain to people why its preference for intervention is better, as Jacobs did in The Death and Life, it prefers to yell: see, for example, how it acts in the East Bay.

But the issue of fake grassroots campaigns is as important. Although liberals should be wary of carelessly dismissing the Tea Party as merely a brand for the Koch brothers’ lobbying, it is a general fact that people who perceive themselves as the normals tend to think they speak for everyone when they do not. The Lower Manhattan Expressway really was unpopular in most of the West Village. How could it be otherwise in a neighborhood where a large majority of households did not even own cars? Jacobs, in other words, really was speaking for the community. The same is not true of people who think themselves the silent majority; going back to the East Bay example, after the local Tea Party leader had her tantrum, people informally voted on their priorities in urban planning, and urban priorities like controlling pollution came out on top whereas big houses with big yards came out at the bottom.

Fortunately, formal democratic governance can also reduce the influence of a pernicious majority. For example, the referendum process could be made binding, and more long-term. It’s unthinkable that a governor elected by a bare majority of voters can unilaterally cancel a long-term infrastructure investment without a referendum. In Germany, when the Stuttgart21 disaster led to a state government led by the anti-Stuttgart21 Greens, the new coalition did not act as Rick Scott did. Not only was the Greens’ approach more responsible – they put forth a counter-plan and hired Swiss railroad experts to help – but also they put the cancellation to a referendum, and when the cancellation lost, they accepted the result. And in Switzerland, the referendum process tends to lead to continuity of policy, rather than to the situation in the US, in which the referendum process means that groups will put their preferred policy on the ballot every two years until it passes, and then lock it in so that it cannot be repealed. Although in principle the California governance system looks like direct democracy, in practice it has as much to do with it as Putin’s managed democracy has to do with actual democracy. But insofar as consensus democracy was attempted in the East Bay, the Tea Party disruptors lost.

Of course, merely dismissing the Tea Party as a noisy minority is not enough. The importance of this episode is that consensus governance is vulnerable to this kind of astroturf, or even an independent community of true believers who think they represent many more people than they actually do. On issues that have a clear expert consensus, you won’t find many defenders of consensus governance. Voting on science education means that some school boards will support creationism (not for consensus reasons, but for religious ones). There is an entire movement dedicated to restoring top-down social control, whose leaders come from a background in science popularization that really does boil down to transmitting the experts’ conclusions to the masses.

And yet, urban planning is not evolutionary biology. The need for consensus comes from the fact that planners have a history of getting things wrong in a disastrous fashion, and often of being upended by laypeople like Jacobs. Authoritarian planning will treat entire classes of people as problems to be solved, and house them in a series of projects modeled after the modern prison system: project towers, group homes, low-rise projects, supervised releases to suburbia. Giving people this power over others and hoping that the people in power will be wise is wishful thinking; one might as well support absolute monarchy.

Thus, there is no way to both have a good governance mechanism and prevent people from staging revolts for wrong reasons. A democracy will sometimes vote the wrong people into power; democratic urban planning will let itself be disrupted by a group of organized radicals. In both cases, the change in power should not spell the end of democracy; the ousted side routinely regroups and wins later in national bipartisan politics, and regularly has some input about government in national multiparty politics. Maybe all cities need is to treat their planning process with the same respect that countries treat their legislative process.

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.