Author Archive
Feb
10
LI Pols protesting better train service to NYC
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Penn Station access for Metro-North will not be a grievous insult to Long Islanders.
There must be something in the water out on Long Island that makes its politicians put forth some crazy ideas. A few days after one group of Long Island State Senators proposed a further repeal of the MTA payroll tax, another is protesting what is, in essence, better commuter rail service for New Yorkers from both the Island and Westchester.
The story goes a little something like this: On and off for the last decade or so, the MTA has toyed with a Penn Station Access Study that discusses how best to bring Metro-North trains into Penn Station. In November, thanks to a push from Bronx politicians, the authority announced that it is engaged in a Federal Environmental Assessment that is exploring the impact such a routing would have. The assessment will be finished by the end of 2013, and at that point, the MTA will determine how best to proceed with this project.
Meanwhile, a group of Long Island Senators is having what can charitably be described as a freak-out. They are already calling upon the MTA to reject Metro-North service to Penn Station, and their complaints seem utterly short-sighted. “To make room for the new Metro-North Trains, the LIRR could be forced to cut the number of trains it runs into Penn Station,” Kemp Hannon, a Republican from Nassau County, said. “The LIRR is already sharing ingress into Penn Station, and any reduction of service could have a devastating impact on commuters and other travelers. With only seven of Penn Station’s existing 21 tracks being allotted to the LIRR, any reductions would seriously impair LIRR operations and affect all LIRR riders.”
The Senators, as Newsday reports, sent a letter to MTA Chairman Joe Lhota expressing their displeasure with the move. They don’t want to see a reduction in LIRR service to Penn Station, but they seem to be ignoring both common sense and commuting patterns.
Right now, as we know, the MTA is building out the East Side Access project that will, by 2016 or 2018 or some point this decade, bring LIRR service to Grand Central. The MTA studies show that tens of thousands of people from Long Island want and need direct service to the East Side. These folks currently travel via LIRR to Penn Station and then make their ways to the East Side. It’s circuitous and inconvenient.
Based on the current MTA funding proposals and the speed of construction, any Metro-North service into Penn Station is unlikely to see the light of day before the East Side Access project is completed. By then, the LIRR won’t need to run as many trains into Penn Station becomes some of its ridership will choose instead to go to the East Side. The Long Island Senators claim that, even after ESA is in service, LIRR must operate the same service into Penn Station. They want it all at the expense of better commutes for New Yorkers from Westchester. It simply defies transportation reason.
Feb
09
Do you know what it means to miss Penn Station?
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The original Penn Station lives on only in photographs.
Amongst the transit literati and New York architect community, nothing triggers more nostalgia than old Penn Station. The McKim, Mead and White original met its demise 49 years ago, and its destruction along with the threatened demolition of Grand Central led to today’s wave of overly enthusiastic preservation. Yet, thanks to the dingy, cramped and ugly underground replacement, someone always wants to find a way to bring Penn Station back.
This time around, the argument belongs to Michael Kimmelman, architect critic for The New York Times. In a piece set to appear in Sunday’s paper but already available on the web, Kimmelman argues for a grand restoration of dignity for Penn Station commuters. His overall idea is an intriguing one. When the Javits Center is torn down as part of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s convention center scheme, we will move Madison Square Garden to 34th St. and 11th Ave. and rebuild a grand train station where the Garden is now. Sounds great, right? Stay tuned.
In the piece Kimmelman is very dismissive of the Moynihan Station plan. Why? Read on:
Because the open secret about the Moynihan plan is that Amtrak alone would move across Eighth Avenue. Long Island Rail Road, New Jersey Transit and the subways wouldn’t budge. And only 30,000 of those 600,000 people who use Penn Station each day take Amtrak, never mind all the subway riders passing through.
That’s right: 95 percent of commuters will still have to contend with Penn even when the Moynihan plan is realized.
It’s true that the Moynihan plan will eventually improve a few access routes to subways and commuter trains. But it will add no new tracks and have limited effect on the congestion and misery of Penn Station. New tracks aside, the challenge is at the bare minimum to bring light and air into this underground purgatory and, beyond that, to create for millions of people a new space worthy of New York, a civic hub in the spirit of the great demolished one, more attuned to the city’s aspirations and democratic ideals.
This, of course, is no secret for many of us. We’ve bemoaned the dollars to be sunk into Moynihan will little o no upgrade to train capacity. It’s a similar story at Fulton Street where the headhouse represents a large chunk of an expensive project and sits a block away from a $4 billion PATH hub that also won’t increase capacity. In fact, as he proposes this new Penn Station, Kimmelman draws it in comparison to the PATH hub.
“We depend on developers to improve neighborhoods,” he writes, “and at the same time we waste unconscionable amounts of public money on architectural follies like the much-delayed World Trade Center PATH station, which is projected, even after ground zero is fully developed, to serve only perhaps 60,000 riders and whose exploding cost is already approaching $4 billion, a scandal still waiting to dawn on New Yorkers.”
So the solution here appears to be…spending billions to build something that will create a “light-filled Penn Station” without increasing train capacity? Kimmelman manages to skirt the real issue: We can build the most glorious Penn Station possible and spend lavishly on it, but without an added tunnel underneath the Hudson River, without an expansion of track capacity underneath Penn Station and an increase in the number of trains that can cross into and out of New York City, we would just be repeating the same spending mistakes.
Maybe one day we’ll have a glorious train station on the West Side. Maybe we’ll have something to match the splendor of Grand Central (and hopefully, it will be a little less bland than the LIRR’s Atlantic Terminal). But we shouldn’t ask to spend billions at 34th Street just for the sake of aesthetics. A pretty building might look good, but it won’t allow for more trains and more rail commuters.
Feb
09
As food ban moves forward, TWU subway rat contest showcases rodents
Posted by: | CommentsAs part of their effort to draw attention to the fact that subway rats are really gross — a fact I did not realize needed attention drawn to it — the TWU has recently hosted a subway rat photography contest, and yesterday, they crowned a winner. The grossest rat in the subway dates back from 2008, and it’s really gross. If you want to see what Michael Spivack saw at the 7th Avenue station along 53rd St., click here. The entire gallery is equally disgusting.
Spivack, who has won himself a free monthly MetroCard for spotting this grotesque rodent, said the creature was still living when he snapped the photo. “I was waiting for the D train when I saw something on the platform,” he said to The Daily News. “The thing wasn’t moving but it was alive. I got as close as I dared to get.”
While the TWU’s contest brings visual attention to the rat infestation in the subway system, Albany is slowly attempting to do something to address the problem. The bill to ban food underground moved out of transportation committee by a 16-3 vote although nine of the ayes came with reservations. The bill now sits with the State Senate Finance Committee.
Feb
09
Editorial: Stop the House Transportation Bill
Posted by: | CommentsOn Monday, when it wasn’t clear if the House Ways and Means Committee mark-up of the Transportation Bill would see the light of day, I discussed New York’s staunch opposition to the bill. MTA officials as well as the region’s federal representatives gathered a few days ago to speak out against a bill that would turn guaranteed transit dollars into, well, nonguaranteed dollars. Our region stood to lose more than any other.
Now, as the bill is moving toward a floor vote with signs that it could pass the House, The Times has lent its editorial voice to the fight, and they aren’t holding back. Calling it a “terrible bill,” the Grey Lady urges the House to reject it, and if it passes, the Senate to turn it back. Here’s their take:
Here is a brief and by no means exhaustive list of the bill’s many defects:
¶It would make financing for mass transit much less certain, and more vulnerable, by ending a 30-year agreement that guaranteed mass transit a one-fifth share of the fuel taxes and other user fees in the highway trust fund. Instead it would compete annually with other programs.
¶It would open nearly all of America’s coastal waters to oil and gas drilling, including environmentally fragile areas that have long been off limits. The ostensible purpose is to raise revenue to help make up what has become an annual shortfall for transportation financing. But it is really just one more attempt to promote the Republicans’ drill-now-drill-everywhere agenda and the interests of their industry patrons.
¶It would demolish significant environmental protections by imposing arbitrary deadlines on legally mandated environmental reviews of proposed road and highway projects, and by ceding to state highway agencies the authority to decide whether such reviews should occur….
In any case, none of this is good news for urban transit systems, including New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which, in 2010 alone, received about $1 billion from the trust fund.
If we want to enjoy future subway expansion projects, if we want to see the Second Ave. Subway‘s Phase 1 wrapped up on time, this bill cannot become law. Transportation for America has more on speaking out against this bill with the details on contacting your federal representatives. New York City denizens need not worry about our representatives voting in favor of HR 7, but this is a national issue. Say no to HR 7.
Feb
08
Taxis and Transit: A love-hate relationship?
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New York City Taxi Activity from Juan Francisco Saldarriaga on Vimeo.
Advocates for better transit in New York City focus most of their attention on issues facing buses and subways and rightly so. After all, over 7 million people per day use the buses and subways. But in terms of increased mobility and flexibility, taxis play an important but understated role in the city’s transportation network. Still, they are cars and bring with them the ups and downs of cars. How do we reconcile the two?
A few recent pieces have put the spotlight on taxis, and they each highlight how these vehicles are both integral to a successful city and could also be a problematic part of an auto-centric attitude. Eric Jaffe at The Atlantic Cities’ blog focused on the complementary nature of taxis. He highlighted recent research by Columbia professor David King who studied taxi ride frequencies. King has found asymmetrical taxi throughout the day, and Jaffe explains:
King sees an important pattern for the data points: the origins and destinations have a geographical asymmetry that suggests people are only using cabs for one leg of their daily round trip. If this were a video of people driving their own car to and from work, the morning and evening rush would be a perfect mirror. It stands to reason, then, that the other leg of the trip is taken by public transportation; after all, it’s unlikely that many people park their car somewhere then take a cab home.
In other words, writes King, New York City taxi cabs appear to work within the existing transit network, not against it:
This matters because it means that individual’s travel journeys are multi-modal. If we want to have transit oriented cities we have to plan for high quality, door-to-door services that allow spontaneous one-way travel. Yet for all of the billions of dollars we have spent of fixed-route transit and the built environment we haven’t spent any time thinking about how taxis (and related services) can help us reach our goals.
King, for one, has spent a lot of time thinking about this subject. He and colleagues Jonathan Peters and Matthew Daus of CUNY recently presented a paper on the complementary transit nature of taxi cabs at a meeting of the Transportation Research Board. In it, they argue that “taxi service is a critical aspect of a transit system.”…There’s a good bit of common sense. Taxis enable car-less travelers to switch modes in the middle of a journey. A New Yorker can take the subway to work, walk to a bar, then cab it home, and many do just that every day. This “asymmetrical mode share,” as King and company call it, is a hallmark of transit-oriented cities — granting easy, flexible travel to no-car residents.
Jaffe wonders “why many urban transport experts ignore the idea of using cabs to expand a transit network.” The answer, I believe, can be found in a recent piece by Charles Komanoff. Using his congestion pricing model, Komanoff has determined that adding an additional 2000 yellow cab medallions could increase Manhattan traffic by a considerable amount. In fact, based on the amount of time taxis spend in Manhattan, that increase projects to an around 10 percent of current traffic levels.
Therein lies the rub. We need taxis to offer the flexibility for those who do not want to drive or cannot afford a car, but taxis also contribute to congestion which has a strong negative impact on pedestrian life, the city’s productivity and its environment. In other words, taxis — can’t live with them, can’t live without them. It’s an irreconcilable conundrum.
Feb
08
Dogs the latest Second Ave. Subway ‘victims’
Posted by: | CommentsThe Second Ave. Subway construction isn’t even for the dogs, according to irate pet owners along the Upper East Side. Although a recent study conducted by MTA contractor Parsons Brinckerhoff found no concerns with the air quality along Second Avenue, residents have continued to claim that dust and debris from the blasting is creating unsafe conditions for people. Now, canine lovers say their dogs are suffering as well.
As DNA Info’s Serena Solomon reports, pup owners say their animals are suffering as well. Some dogs have been coughing with runny noses while others are exhibiting skin conditions and “psychological issues” relating to the ongoing subway blasting. “As soon as the sirens go off, the whole building starts barking,” dog owner Noura Insolera said. Her dog Winnie, she explains, “runs back and forth, scratches at the walls, tries to jump out the window.”
Even if the air quality isn’t impacting these pups’ lives, their owners say the animals have either become skittish or lethargic in the face of more blasting. Color me skeptical, but it seems as though dogs are just the next pawn in the great NIMBY fight against a new subway line.
Feb
08
Map: FASTRACK hits the West Side
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Just in time for Valentine’s Day, the MTA’s Orwellianly-named FASTRACK program continues next week as stations and tracks along the West Side IRT will be without service for four nights. Starting on Monday, the MTA will be terminating all 3 service at 10 p.m. while the 1 and 2 will run only between their northern terminals and 34th St./Penn Station. West Side redundancies, however, will ease commuters’ angst.
To ready for this service change, the MTA has published a map showing connections and the outages. I’ve included the Manhattan portion above and the Brooklyn portion below. To see the entire thing as a PDF, click here. The authority has also summarized the changes.
From 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. and from Monday night through Friday morning of next week, the following route changes go into effect.
- The 1 will run between 34 St-Penn Station and 242 St
- The 2 will run between 34 St-Penn Station and E 180 St; Rerouted via between E 180 St and Dyre Av
- Free shuttle buses run to/from 3 stations at 148 St, 145 St, and 135 St.
- The 4 will be extended to New Lots Av early, trains run local in Brooklyn
- The 5 will run its regular route between Flatbush Av and E 180 St; Rerouted via the 2 between E 180 St and 241 St.
- 42 Street Shuttle runs all night.
While those who rely on the East Side trains had fewer redundancies at least north of 14th Street, those who are traveling between Brooklyn and Manhattan on the 2 or 3 will be able to rely on the BMT and IND lines on the West Side or the 4 and 5 in Lower Manhattan. Straphangers who must transfer and wait for another train will find their commutes lengthened.
FASTRACK will continue along 6th Ave. at the end of the month and along 8th Ave. in mid-March. I have an inquiry in with the MTA as to why the Broadway line hasn’t been included in this program and will report back when I have an update.
Feb
07
Port Authority audit shines light on organizational flaws
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When I started writing Second Ave. Sagas, Peter Kalikow was in charge of the MTA. Since then, I’ve seen Lee Sander and Dale Hemmerdinger take the reins; I’ve seen Helena Williams succeed them on an interim basis; I’ve seen Jay Walder come and go; and now Joe Lhota sits atop the agency. Depending upon how you wish to count, that’s six folks in charge over the span of five years and three months. With that kind of turnover, it’s amazing anything at the MTA gets accomplished at all.
The Port Authority has it worse. It must answer to two state governors and has a complex leadership structure that has seen seven executive directors since 2001 and frequent turnover in the chairmanship position as well. It was tasked with rebuilding the World Trade Center, and it recently enacted steep fare hikes and toll increases in order to fund an ambitious capital plan. It is a deeply dysfunctional and non-transparent bureaucracy that can’t even answer simple FOIA requests in less than four months.
Yesterday, Navigant Consulting released an independent audit of the organization, and its critique was a scathing one. Their preliminary review revealed ” a challenged and dysfunctional organization suffering from a lack of consistent leadership, a siloed underlying bureaucracy, poorly coordinated capital planning processes, insufficient cost controls, and a lack of transparent and effective oversight of the World Trade Center program that has obscured full awareness of billions of dollars in exposure to the Port Authority.”
The headlines today are all focusing on the World Trade Center. The Port Authority must contribute $7.7 billion — and perhaps a few hundred million more — to rebuild the felled towers, and no one can offer a regular accounting for the project. For those of us who have seen the costs of the Calatrava PATH terminal jump by a few billion dollars, this revelation can hardly be much of a surprise.
The more alarming lesson from the audit though concerns the Port Authority’s capital plan. As the PA is now, Navigant charges, a major real estate developer and holding company, it may not have the money or capacity to realize its ambitious capital plan. Navigant is urging further examination of the plan and process.
For now, though, what I read in the audit — available here as a PDF — reminds me, in part, of the MTA a whole bunch of years ago. The organization is overflowing with unnecessary and redundant positions while workers are making far too much money for their jobs, and no one really understands the organizational structure within the authority. Patrick Foye, a former MTA Board member, is now in charge, and he’ll have to do what Jay Walder spent a few years doing at the MTA. Cutting costs and reorganizing will become key buzz words.
For their parts, the men in charge seem to recognize this reality. “The consultant’s preliminary review underscores the need for the Port Authority to refocus,” Foye, the Executive Director, said. “A poorly coordinated capital planning process, insufficient cost controls and a lack of transparent and effective oversight of the World Trade Center program that has obscured full awareness of billions of dollars in exposure to the Port Authority all played a role in getting us to where we are today. Further, having the World Trade Center as the focal point of the agency’s work over the last decade has led to mission drift from our core role. We have much work to do to fulfill the agency’s mission as the provider of critical transportation infrastructure needs for the region and as an engine for economic growth and job creation. I am fully committed to working with the Governors and with Chairman Samson, Vice Chairman Rechler and the full Board to get this agency back on track.”
That’s a mouthful of buzzwords, but it has to become a reality. We’re too dependent upon Port Authority infrastructure for the agency to falter. It must move beyond the World Trade Center. It must address our 21st Century needs. It must find some stability at the top. As the MTA seeks stable funding sources, the Port Authority must become leaner. Not doing so puts our transportation infrastructure at a great risk indeed.
For a more skeptical take on the audit and the Port Authority’s work at the WTC site, check out this piece by Steve Cuozzo. Like I am, Cuozzo is highly skeptical of the billions spent on the PATH hub, few of which are going toward actual transportation capacity improvements.
Feb
07
Link: Explaining the high costs of building new subways
Posted by: | CommentsSalon, on its Dream Cities blog, tackles a question near and dear to my heart: Why does it take so damn long to build a new subway system? As the MTA already has nearly 17 years worth of documents on its website for only the current attempt at a Second Ave. Subway, by the time construction on Phase 1 alone is wrapped, it will have been over 20 years from the release of the initial scoping document in 1995 to revenue service in 2016. At that rate, it’ll take 80 more years for the other parts of the subway extension to see the light of day.
So what, then, takes so long? According to Salon’s Will Doig, seven different elements, many of them interrelated, slow down transit expansion plans in the United States. Up front, he pinpoints the obvious. By combining funding from various sources — the feds, states, cities, the bureaucracy slow distribution of money, and oftentimes, there isn’t enough money guaranteed up front to see megaprojects through to completion. He also pays heed to the physical challenges of working around 100-year-old city infrastructure that was never properly mapped, and he fingers a societal addiction to cars that often serves to marginalize transit. He certainly isn’t wrong there.
In my opinion, though, his two key elements concern mismanagement and what he terms basic fairness. With a small group of companies qualified to build subways, mismanagement runs rampant. That is a problem that should be addressed if other SAS phases receive funding. The fairness element though is a tough one. He writes:
Good public transit is a cherished ideal of many progressives. Ironically, progressive values can end up making transit construction take longer. Part of the reason we don’t build as fast as China does is because we have workers’ unions, ADA compliance rules, and environmental concerns that require time-consuming impact studies. “If we didn’t have to put elevators everywhere and we imported non-union Mexican immigrants to do the work, you could build a lot more of everything,” says Duke, who hastens to add that he’s not in favor of that. Good, affordable transit is a human rights issue too, though, and in many ways the common link in our desire for healthier, less wasteful cities that serve everyone equally.
Many transit advocates may whisper that the fairness balance has tipped too far to the other side. The MTA issued its notice of intent to prepare an environmental impact statement for the Second Ave. Subway in March of 2001. The FEIS saw the light of day 38 months later in May of 2004, and the authority had to further revise its assessment in 2009 to find no material impact when it had to redesign station configurations at 72nd and 86th St. That is a time-consuming and costly process that should be streamlined as well.
Doig doesn’t dwell on another issue — NIMBYism — that can often stop subway expansion projects in their metaphoric tracks before they move much beyond an idea on paper. Lawsuits and community outrage can slow down worthwhile projects as well. Still, his list of seven can serve as a primer for readers of this site who want to know just why it’s taking so long for such a short subway extension underneath Second Ave. to become a reality.
Feb
07
An early Apple bump for GCT businesses?
Posted by: | CommentsWhen the Apple Store opened in Grand Central Terminal, the lease deal between the MTA and Apple came under fire for being of the sweetheart variety. Even though the MTA had managed to significantly boost its revenue stream from the space, the per-square-foot price was still markedly lower than what Apple had paid at other locations throughout the city. Still, the MTA noted that if Apple delivered the traffic gains as predicted, other businesses in the terminal would see a rise in sales, and for every percentage increase in sales through Grand Central, the MTA would enjoy $500,000 more in revenue.
Today, we get the early word that the Michael Jordan Steakhouse enjoyed a seven percent boost in business since the Apple Store opened. Its owners say the bump happened not when Metrazur closed but when the Apple Store finally opened its doors. “We know their customers are coming here,” Matthew Glazier, the owner’s son, said to Crain’s New York. “I’m always looking for the little white bags.”
Of course, Apple’s GCT opening coincided with the busy holiday season, and it remains to be seen if other businesses enjoyed a similar bump in foot traffic and purchases. From my experience, the Apple Store has been perennially crowded, and other businesses appear to be enjoying the success as well. It will be a few months before we know the extent of the economic boost Apple will lend to the Grand Central shopping mecca, but this supposed sweetheart deal may just end up as a good one for the MTA yet.
