On 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.

As more New York State Republican representatives try to whittle down the MTA-supporting payroll tax, their colleagues in Washington are trying to do the same with federal funds dedicated toward transit. Last week, the House Ways and Means Committee voted to send a markup of the transportation bill to the floor, and if passed by the House and Senate and approved the president — a tall order indeed — the bill could rob New York City of billions of dollars of transit funds.

For extensive coverage of the bill, check out articles from Reuters and The L.A. Times. Streetsblog D.C. offered a short summary of the mark-up’s impact. Essentially, the Ways and Means Committee is hoping to bar gas tax revenue from funding transit. Today, those taxes are essential part of federal transit grants. Ben Goldman writes:

The Ways & Means bill [PDF] would funnel all gas tax revenue toward road programs, redirecting billions of dollars per year away from transit, which for decades has received about 20 percent of fuel tax receipts. Instead, the House GOP wants transit funding to come entirely from the general fund, pitting transit against all other government spending. To offset that spending, $40 billion would have to be cut from the rest of the federal budget.

Essentially, the House GOP is holding transit hostage to achieve budget cuts elsewhere — and they don’t seem to care if the hostage dies. They will also be tossing aside a precedent set during the Reagan administration, one that has enjoyed bipartisan support through several transportation bills, including the 2005 law, known as SAFETEA-LU, which was passed by a Republican president and Republican Congress.

The announcement of the mark-up, which you can read here, came just one day before the committee voted to send the bill to the House floor, and a broad coalition of union officials, politicians, contractors and transit agency heads have voiced their opposition. Later today, in fact, MTA Chairman Joseph Lhota will join with TWU President John Samuelsen, NYC DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan and four New York House representatives to speak out against the bill.

In the meantime, Lhota, a one-time Giuliani deputy, has penned a letter to David Camp, the chairman of the House Ways & Means Committee. “The 2.86 cents of the motor fuels tax currently dedicated for public transportation provides a stable fund source that the MTA relies on to fund its capital investments. It is critical,” he wrote, “that these funds continue to be dedicated for public transportation purposes.”

He later warned of the consequences of federal divestment. “Consistent, on-going investment by the federal government is critical to ensure that the MTA continues to be a safe and reliable system for the long term,” he said. “A less predictable funding stream for public transportation will not only result in degraded service, but will also have a ripple effect on manufacturers and suppliers that serve the transit industry.”

This is an issue that extends far beyond the borders of New York. It would cost hundreds of thousands of jobs throughout the nation in various domestic industry. Within the city, it would likely impact any future work on the Second Ave. Subway or other system expansion plans. It is yet another attack on transit dollars from those who underestimate the importance of public transit to the nation’s economy. It is a measure that likely won’t survive the Senate or the President’s veto power, but the House GOP is serious about gutting the funding mechanism for capital plans for transit agencies through the nation. That is a scary future to ponder indeed.

The MTA's familiar bucket seats aren't wide enough for most New Yorkers. (Photo by flickr user bitchcakesny)

The 2 and 3 trains out of Brooklyn represent a chunk of my daily ride to work, and when my office moves to the West Side, I’ll be riding those trains for longer. In the morning and in the evening, I always root for the 2 train to arrive. It’s not the overall experience of the new rolling stock per se, but rather it is the seats. The bucket seats on the 3 train — as well as various other cars across the system — just do not work.

New Yorkers, you see, just don’t fit into the bucket seats. It’s not that New Yorkers are getting wider. Some are; some aren’t. But rather, the seats themselves aren’t wide enough for a normal sized adult who rides the subway, often with coats and layers. While the bench seating feels more natural, even in tight squeezes, the bucket seats are inefficient, impractical and uncomfortable. People try to squeeze into their perfectly defined spaces only to find the lip of the seat digging into certain areas where things should not dig.

As transit agencies are planning for next-generation rolling stock, the subways at least have done away with the buckets. All new cars have the bench seats. Yet, commuter rail cars still have something approximating bucket seats, and as car configurations are redesigned to conform with wider bottoms, seating may be a victim. Christine Haughney of The Times explored this conundrum yesterday. She wrote:

Each time an agency decides to purchase new trains or buses, it must consider whether to make its seats wider, knowing that a decision to do so could come at the expense of passenger capacity. New Jersey Transit has a five-year plan to add 100 double-decker train cars that have seats 2.2 inches wider than the 17.55-inch seats found in its single-deck trains; the seating configuration has been changed to two seats on either side of the aisle, rather than three on one side and two on the other. Amtrak intends to introduce “designs that will be able to accommodate the larger-sized passengers” on 25 new dining cars starting next year, said a spokesman, Cliff Cole.

But while transit agencies consider the needs of heavier passengers, they do not always yield to them. Over the past half-century, the width of New York City subway seats has not changed much, said Marcia Ely, assistant director of the New York Transit Museum. If anything, the seats have occasionally gotten smaller — and immediately encountered resistance.

Joseph Smith, who retired in 2010 as a New York City Transit senior vice president who also oversaw bus operations in the city and on Long Island, said that the agency once had to abandon plans to introduce Mercedes-Benz Citaro buses, which are popular in Europe, after riders complained about too-narrow seats.

Haughney’s article focuses on how transit agencies and the federal government are changing their requirements for weight distribution as well. Metro-North’s M9 cars will require double seats that can handle loads of up to 400 pounds while new federal crash-test standards for buses require 175 pounds and 1.75 square feet per person, up 25 pounds and 0.25 square feet over previous standards. “It’s clear that the US population is getting heavier,” Martin Schroeder, an engineer with the American Public Transport Association, said to The Times. “We are trying to get our hands on that and figure out what is the best average weight to use.”

This is are just a polite way of dealing with the reality of expanding waist lines, but that’s a genuine concern on public transportation (or anywhere, really). We’ve all been squeezed in the middle of people who are wider than the bucket seats or find ourselves underneath someone trying to sashay his or her way into a space that just isn’t big enough. It’s a hazard of the job, so to speak.

On the other hand, though, the increasing weights of passengers will require different federal standards which will require heavier and more plodding vehicles. We’ll lose seats on trains as New Jersey Transit, for instance, plans to cut out a third seat on some new cars, and we’ll lose speed as buses and rail cars, like their passengers, become heavier to cope with the added weight.

A cutaway of Moynihan Station as seen from Penn Station.

Over the past decade and a half, spurred on first by Daniel Patrick Moynihan and later by supporters who wanted to continue his efforts, well-connected New Yorkers have fought for an expansion of Penn Station into the Farley Post Office. Part of their reasoning is to boost train service and ease customer congestion underneath Madison Square Garden while the rest of their efforts are driven by the idea of a Great Public Work. Penn Station, they rightfully say, is an eye sore. It’s dirt, dingy and ugly, and the post office would provide a setting of grandeur that could right the wrong of destroying the original Beaux Arts building.

To that end, the project has been divided into two parts. Phase 1 includes better egress points into the current Penn Station, and it is currently funded and ongoing. Phase 2, which will cost upwards of $1 billion, involves moving Amtrak’s operations into the Moynihan Station area and perhaps readying the station for high-speed rail if the stars and money align properly. That is more of a dream right now than anything else.

Lately, news about Moynihan Station has been scarce. After the October 2010 groundbreaking, the project has moved quietly forward, and only an announcement that the Port Authority will oversee the new station made a ripple earlier this year. Now, though, Amtrak is making noises about its eventual potential move to Moynihan Station. In fact, they won’t be able to pay the rent.

Bloomberg News had the report shortly before Chirstmas (and Eric Jaffe at The Atlantic Cities picked it up as well). Wrote Lisa Caruso:

For Amtrak to move more passengers on trains between Washington and Boston, its only profitable route, it must move out of New York’s Penn Station, said Drew Galloway, assistant vice president for the eastern region. The new space it covets is across the street, where New York state and two developers plan to transform the 97-year-old James A. Farley Post Office into a $1 billion train hall and retail complex.

The rub: Officials at U.S. taxpayer-subsidized Amtrak, which lost $1.3 billion last fiscal year, say they can’t afford to leave Penn Station, which the railroad owns, unless their new home is effectively rent-free. With the development’s finances unresolved, New York officials haven’t made guarantees.

…Amtrak won’t have to help pay to build its new home, Gilchrist said. How much it will contribute to operations is under discussion, though Washington-based Amtrak won’t occupy it if it faces more than a “modest increase” from costs at Penn Station, Galloway said in an interview.

Now, Amtrak can hardly be faulted for their stance here. After all, Moynihan isn’t their idea. In fact, David Gunn pulled Amtrak support from the Moynihan project because it does nothing to add track capacity into or out of New York City. It is simply an expensive cosmetic upgrade that helps ease overcrowding across the street. It is, Gunn said, “an example of how the whole transportation planning system has broken down. It was controlled by a bunch of rich developers.”

Current Amtrak officials are going to attempt to get creative with funding. They could lease out their current Penn Station space to offset costs, and developers in the area may look to throw in some millions as well. Yet, it’s the same story as the one we’re seeing downtown where billions are being spent on a PATH train that doesn’t add capacity while the upgrades at Fulton St. aren’t worth the dollars.

In a time when transportation money is scarce, the available dollars are being burned on things that look good instead of things that deliver better transportation service. If that seems backwards to you, well, that’s because it is, and until things change, we’ll be left with fancier train stations and no better service than what we already have.

Twelve years after neighborhood opposition torpedoed a subway connection to La Guardia Aiport, the city is hoping to improve bus access instead.

New York City as we know it today exists under the shadows cast by the ghost of Robert Moses. From the bridges that connect the boroughs to roads congested with automobiles to the elevated highways that cut through neighborhoods to the lack of airport-centric transit options to the parks and greenspaces we so enjoy, Moses’ influence runs far, wide and deep. We might even miss him.

Last week, as I took a few days off to spend some time in the Caribbean, I left up a short post on the upcoming plans to turn Robert Caro’s The Power Broker into a movie. Who, I asked, should play Robert Moses, and in doing so, I offhandedly called him the villain of the story. The reaction from regular readers was loud: Robert Moses was a man of many hats, but to call him a villain is an oversimplification. By the end of his career, the Master Planner single-handedly set the stage for decades of growth and stagnant transit development, but he also realized a vision for New York City that wasn’t all bad. Although Caro’s book, written at the city’s nadir in the mid-1970s, may have needed Moses to be that villain, his legacy is far more complicated than that.

For all the good Moses did early in his career, he is best known through the prism of Caro’s biography. We know Moses as the man who built low overpasses in order to limit bus access and the people who ride buses to the area around Jones Beach. We know him as the man who wouldn’t move his highways one block over in both the Bronx and Brooklyn, thus destroying two vibrant neighborhoods in the process. We know him as the planner who refused to allow for a rail right-of-way along the Van Wyck to provide better access to Idlewild Airport.

Yet, through the prism of today, we see Moses as the man who got things done, and since the state decentralized the planning process that Moses once helmed, things rather get done with any efficiency and speed. As the conversation flowed on my post last week, I kept thinking about the recent alternatives analysis NYC DOT is conducting for access to La Guardia. The city is trying to figure out how best to improve surface transit into and out of La Guardia airport while tying in those routes with Manhattan and the rest of the city’s transit network. It is a plan a long time coming.

As I’ve revisited from time to time, Mayor Giuliani in the light 1990s tried to grow support for a subway extension to the airport. He secured funding but lost out to Queens NIMBYs. As I’ve dug into that history, I’ve learned that New York City along with the MTA and FTA had engaged in some serious planning. By early 1999, they had identified two alternate routes for the subway extension that would have been included in an environmental impact study. The Federal Register from the time explained:

The 19th Avenue Alternative would be an extension of the BMT Broadway-Astoria Line (“N” Train service) beyond its present Ditmars Boulevard Terminus. From that point, the line would be extended northerly as a modern aerial transit guideway structure along the centerline of 31st Street up to 20th Avenue. From there, the alignment would curve easterly across the Con Edison property to 19th Avenue, where it would continue along the avenue. At 45th Street, the alignment would swing northerly and then enter a tunnel section, in which the alignment would remain as it crosses onto the airport property. After serving the Marine Air Terminal and passing around the runway at the airport’s western end, the alignment would rise onto an aerial section, and extend to two other on-airport stations–one at the Central Terminal Building (CTB) and a second to jointly serve the USAir and Delta terminals.

Sunnyside Yard Alternative would be a branch of the BMT Broadway-Astoria Line (“N” Train service) starting at the Queensboro Plaza Station in Long Island City. From that point, the alignment would extend as a modern aerial transit guideway structure along the northern side of the Sunnyside Yards, and would then pass over and run along the eastern side of AMTRAK’s Northeast Corridor tracks. At approximately 30th Avenue, the alignment would turn east and run along the northern side of 30th Avenue before turning north along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (BQE). At that point, the alignment will enter a “depressed section” (where the tracks are below grade but in an “open cut” section rather than enclosed in a tunnel) as it travels along the southern side of the Grand Central Parkway (GCP). As it approaches the airport, the alignment would rise and cross over the GCP to enter the airport. On-airport stations are projected to be provided at the CTB and USAir/Delta terminals as noted above for the 19th Avenue Alternative.

The problem, of course, was that “modern aerial transit guideway structure.” The 19th Avenue alternative included nearly 12 blocks of a new elevated structure through some residential neighborhoods. The Sunnyside Yard plan also would have included new elevated tracks, albeit through neighborhoods not quite as residential as the northern ends of Astoria. Neither were good enough for certain factions of Queens’ politicians. City Councilman Peter Villone, the loudest opponent, called it a “horrible, loud, noisy ugly elevated train line through the heart” of a vibrant neighborhood. “Extending the elevated track will cause unnecessary hardship to residents and businesses in the area,” he claimed in 1999.

Eventually, this NIMBYism killed the project, and today, we’re left with a study that may call for something resembling better bus service. Our dreams and goals certainly have shifted downward over the past 12 or 13 years.

As this torturously slow La Guardia planning process plays out — whatever alternative is selected won’t debut until 2013 — I kept thinking about Moses. Does New York need a Moses that can work through neighborhood opposition to realize a plan that would benefit the city as a whole? We want a Moses whose ideals are aligned with ours when it comes to transportation planning. We want a figure who can cut through countless Community Board meetings and the red tape of planning. But we don’t want a Moses who will run roughshod over too many neighborhoods.

In Queens in the late 1990s, the memories of devastating elevated structures still percolated in people’s minds. These New Yorkers remember what happened along 3rd Ave. in Brooklyn when Moses refused to move the Gowanus to the more industrial 2nd Ave. They saw the way the Cross-Bronx Expressway cut through Tremont. They didn’t want the same, and we’re still paying the price in a never-ending planning process to improve access to a nearby but inaccessible airport. With NIMBYism on the creep and threatening to rise as the population ages, it all almost makes me yearn for Robert Moses and his power to move mountains.

A $3.8 billion PATH station will not bring increased capacity to the rail system.

As the United States’ economy remains in a slump and the MTA has been forced to scramble for construction dollars, how the authority spends its billions has often come under the microscope. Along the East Side, Phase 1 of the Second Ave. Subway will deliver three stations for $4.5 billion. While those costs are high, at least SAS is increasing transit capacity. The same cannot be said for other projects.

Down in Lower Manhattan, various stakeholders — the federal government, the Port Authority — have contributed billions to two projects that are more ostentatious than functional. The Calatrava PATH terminal has been billed as part of the rebirth of Lower Manhattan after September 11, but for $3.8 billion, all we’re getting is a giant porcupine. The Fulton Street Transit Center will be a hub for the subway in name only as the $1.4 billion renovation includes a fancy above-ground entrance and some reconstructed walkways.

For over $5 billion, then, New York is getting a few buildings that may or may not be visually appealing, and no added transit capacity. I’ve long believed that to be a waste of precious resources, and I’m not alone. Over at Forbes, Stephen Smith of Market Urbanism fame writes about spending priorities. Starting his argument with a nod toward Japan’s train system, Smith notes that the country’s rail hubs are not architecturally attract. “Shinjuku doesn’t even seem nice by modernist Japanese standards,” he writes, “and the most extravagant post-war station I can find is Nagoya, which doubles as the skyscraper headquarters of the country’s biggest Shinkansen company.”

Moving along, Smith says that the spending patterns in New York are “indicative of our warped priorities” when it comes to transit spending. A greater proportion of dollars are funneled toward aesthetics rather than capacity. He writes:

Spending a lot of money on flashy stations is also not something that Spain, the world leader in cheap and efficient tunneling projects, recommends. In a report on railway expansion in Madrid, tunneling expert Manuel Melis Maynar writes: “Design should be focused on the needs of the users, rather than on architectural beauty or exotic materials, and never on the name of the architect.” And it makes sense – the point of transit is to transport. Money buys movement, and funds are finite. When a system is running well, people aren’t sticking around to stare at the ceiling, anyway.

As always though, America must be the exception. Spain would never spend $3.8 billion on a single starchitect-studded station, but its own Santiago Calatrava was happy to build one if New York was footing the bill. Calatrava’s original design called for an enormous bird-like World Trade Center PATH station whose walls would open up in a sort of flapping motion, but it was scaled back for security and cost reasons. The wings were clipped and evolution was set back a few hundred million years – the bird will now be a ”slender stegosaurus.” Even the originally projected $2.2 billion cost would have been more than Paris spent on its entire new 9 km-long Métro Line 14.

And then just one block away from the WTC boondoggle, we find the $1.4 billion Fulton Street “Transit Center” (a.k.a., subway station). Back in 2002 there was talk of selling off air rights above the station, the largest undeveloped parcel in Lower Manhattan, but that never happened…If American cities are ever going to grow beyond their currently stunted sizes, they’re going to need new transit infrastructure. But no amount of government subsidies will ever be enough to build more than a line here and there until we get our astronomical costs under control.

Expensive design isn’t the only driver of cost in the U.S., but particularly in Lower Manhattan, design gives transit spending a bad name. It’s tough to justify spending billions on two projects within a few blocks of each other that do next to nothing to increase ridership, but that’s what politicians want. It doesn’t make much sense.