Earlier this year, the cars that run along Staten Island Railway, the city’s loneliest train route, came back from the Coney Island railyard all prettied up. To go along with a rehab, the cars all received new logo bullets to strengthen their ties to the SIR. That’s probably the best news to come from this railway all year.
In an article that reads like a laundry list of bad news, Maura Yates from the Staten Island Advance went through the trials and tribulations of the SIR earlier this week. We start with ridership.
More than any other MTA-run train line in the city, the Staten Island Railway is very dependent on the economy. Because the line doesn’t offer up any connections off of Staten Island besides at the ferry terminal where boats head to Lower Manhattan, when demand for access to Wall St., when firms stay laying off workers, ridership drops. After serving a record 4.4 million passengers in 2008, ridership is down six percent through 2009.
To make matters worse for Staten Island, soon more riders will have to pay. Currently, passengers can travel for free between Tottenville and Tompkinsville with fare collection at the ferry terminal only. In January, to combat the rising number of passengers who walk to and from Tompkinsville, the MTA will begin fare collection efforts at the railway’s second most northern station. Whether or not this will negatively impact ridership remains to be seen.
Meanwhile, Yates profiles a few projects bogged down with problems:
Unveiled with much fanfare in 2007, a $1.75 million security monitoring system, including surveillance cameras and a push-button intercom on the wall of the platform waiting area, was first installed at the Old Town station in Grasmere, the site of a brutal mugging in 2005. Funded by City Councilman James Oddo and former state Sen. John Marchi, the system was originally expected to be rolled out to all stations along the 15-mile route by the end of this year.
The closed circuit television monitoring system is still functional, and has already been credited with at least two arrests, including a purse-snatching at Old Town, said Railway chief John Gaul. But plastic bags are now covering the intercom button, which was disconnected after problems with the fiber optic cables connecting the stations to a monitoring center at St. George. The project remains a top priority and the system is expected to be back up and running by next October, Gaul said.
Started in 2007, the project to re-tile the 60-year-old walls of the St. George station and lay a new terrazzo floor was sidelined after it was determined the aging floor needed to be reinforced after decades of pounding by commuters. Borough President James Molinaro offered $1 million to assist in the rehabilitation, to modernize the rail station to match the new ferry terminal upstairs. “A year from now, the rider should experience a seamless transition,” Gaul said.
One day, perhaps, the subway will reach to Staten Island and offer up a speedier ride to the rest of New York City. A harbor tunnel would certainly qualify as a megaproject. For now, though, the Staten Island Railway is suffering through the same problems delays and technological upgrades as other ongoing subway projects. Alas.
32 comments
A subway connection will never happen. The mta, the city, and the state will never want to spend that much money on staten island.
Even if they decided to do it, can you imagine all the studying and red tape? My future grandchildren would never live to see it completed. The nonstop studying of the north shore rail is a good example.
With the SIR mostly free, things like free cross-town buses should be no-brainers. I’m surprised the comparison hasn’t come up.
The Tottenville station is 1.1 miles away, as the crow flies, from the Perth Amboy NJTransit station. The two could be connected fairly cheaply because all that’s required is a low railroad bridge (like the one just north of the Goethals Bridge), connections to existing tracks on the New Jersey side, and a new station. The political opposition would be measured in light years.
Conversely, the huge amount of old tracks (in freight use or abandoned) in the New Jersey towns closest to Staten Island can be used to create a light rail system to rival HBLR, with a spur to Tottenville, or even a whole line up to Bayonne.
Just a dream or two.
In January, to combat the rising number of passengers who walk to and from Tompkinsville, the MTA will begin fare collection efforts at the railway’s second most northern station. Whether or not this will negatively impact ridership remains to be seen.
I doubt it. Even if you grumble at paying an extra $2.25, Any other commuting option would surely cost a lot more money. I have nothing against Staten Islanders, but they should pay for their commutes, just as I do.
I suspect that the current structure was not implemented out of charity. The intent was to charge for riding the SIR to the ferry. If people have avoided that by riding to Tottenville and walking, that loophole ought to be closed.
One day, perhaps, the subway will reach to Staten Island and offer up a speedier ride to the rest of New York City.
Aren’t you the same guy who thinks the #7 extension is not cost effective? That project is a bargain compared to a Staten Island subway extension.
The 7 extension, but it also has about an order of magnitude less demand for it. A straight SI-Manhattan tunnel would get close to 100% the SI-Manhattan commuter market on day 1, which gives about 100,000 daily boardings. An SI-Bay Ridge tunnel would get somewhat less, perhaps two thirds, which is still about 70,000.
I’m with Marc re: the cost of any SIR subway far outstripping its usefulness. I am a firm believer in the efficiency of ferry transit, both economically and environmentally. I’d far sooner add additional SI ferry stops on the Southern End of SI than construct a $50 billion subway tunnel under New York Harbor. The mere fact that Staten Island is a part of New York City doesn’t change the fact that it is geographically distant, and that as a result, any subway connection would be an obscene waste of resources. The time (if there ever was one) to add subway service was when the Verrazano was constructed. But, alas, that ship has sailed.
First, it’s not $50 billion; based on the cost of the comparable Brooklyn-Jersey City tunnel, it’d be $7 billion.
Second, ferries are very efficient, but they’re also very slow. A train would take 7 minutes to do the journey that the ferry currently does in 30, and would cut the number of transfers by between 1 and 2. It would get more Staten Islanders out of their cars and shorten their commutes.
1. Alon, you seriously believe a SI-Lower Manhattan tunnel would cost 7 billion? If you are referring to a Brooklyn tunnel, maybe but even then…
2. It wouldn’t take 7 minutes at all. If it connected to the R in Brooklyn, it would take about 35 minutes to get to Lower Manhattan.
3. The SI ferry is 25 minutes.
4. If you want commuters out of their cars, raise the toll on the Verrazano and improve bus service/ferry service from the southern end of the island.
1. Yes, I do. The length of that tunnel is nearly the same as for a Brooklyn-Jersey City tunnel, and the extra land infrastructure, namely a new station under Fulton, is comparable to the railyards proposed for the freight tunnel.
2. If it went straight it would take 7 minutes. If it connected to the R, and the R switched places with the N north of 59th, it would get to Canal Street in 35 minutes.
3. Okay, 25.
4. Improving bus and ferry service won’t get the one-way commute from SI to Manhattan under an hour.
We just established ferry service took 25 min with the old orange ferries. Now, it would take longer, obviously, from the Southern part of the island, but faster ferries aren’t out of the question. I obviously do not share your views about cost. I have little confidence in the Brooklyn-Jersey tunnel price tag you cite being a realistic cost prediction. But I certainly can’t prove that feeling.
What developments could reduce ferry travel times?
There are significantly faster ferries available, Alon. For instance, on the Portland, ME– Nova Scotia route, as well as the Hyannis, MA– Nantucket routes, there are two tiers of tickets– one for the regular old “slow” ferry (like the current SIF), one for a really fast ferry (often called “the Cat”). No reason to think we couldn’t have both options and price them differently or that transit companies would be incapable or unwilling to use “Cat” technology on the SI-Manhattan route.
What is the speed advantage of the Cat? On Google I only saw luxury branding, nothing about speed.
And in either case, using a ferry would require two inconvenient transfers…
The Cat goes roughly 45 mph. I don’t see how it would require two inconvenient transfers any more that a subway route would. First, if it were a subway, commuters would (a) have to get to the subway, then either (b) transfer to the N express at 86th street or (c) ride a lower R to Whitehall and then, presumably, transfer again. For East Siders, the only transfer point between R and Lex Ave line is at Canal, so they’d have to transfer to another LOCAL train. This will be fixed with Fulton’s expansion, but that’s a ways off. If it were a direct Staten Island-Manhattan tunnel, commuters would still (a) have to get to the train, (b) transfer to subway (c) transfer to another subway line upon entering Manhattan (which begs the question of whether it is even feasible to have the SI line connect with the Fulton Street hub– I imagine it is and that the SI line would fold into the RW track at Whitehall). With ferries leaving from two locations, people would obviously still have to (a) get to the ferry, but then, by docking at South Ferry, people are within walking distance to whatever subway they require, including the Lex Ave line at BG.
Subway-subway transfers can take 30 seconds, cross-platform. At Fulton they’d look more like subway-mainline transfers, which take a minute. For the SI Ferry, just getting from the 1 to the terminal takes about 2 minutes, and the ferry adds about 2-3 minutes of time just to wait in line…
I know I have posted this before, but I agree with having a fare for all sir stations. However, how much of that money would go for the staten islander’s commute? The same amount they get from the Verrazanno Bridge (none). Thats the problem. Though some people just dont wanna pay…
Staten Island does have potential to get better transit, but with everything I’ve read about staten island and other boroughs, there is no way the city, state, and mta will ever want to spend any money on si. they cant even get the funds for the second ave subway!
All they will do for staten island is study. That’s it. Just like with the brookfield landfill. Just like the north and west shore rails. All talk. No action.
Could you imagine the R being extended from Bay Ridge 95th Street to tottonville? All you would here is how the R is a local & too slow for S I residents to bear. Next studies would need to be done on how to get express service to Staten Island. Do ridership figures demand such service? I don’t know, but there would be plenty of noise made about it from locals.
I couldn’t – at most, I could imagine the R extended to Grasmere with a cross-platform transfer.
And, honestly, such a line would get a high mode share, but it would be slow. SI-Manhattan would be more expensive, but it’d be a guaranteed hit.
I was in my early teens when the Verrazano Bridge was completed in 1964.
I can remember that there had been some talk about extending the subway to go over the bridge, or maybe build a monorail over it. Such ideas were rejected in the end beacuse of the cost involved and the belief that it was not necessary.
Staten Island had a much lower population at that time. It was as if the politicians of the early 1960’s had not realized that the existence of the Verrazano would permanently change the demographics of Staten Island.
It’s not a matter of “wanting to spend money on SI”, it’s the fact that SI can’t possibly generate the revenue to make up for the enormous cost of pie-in-the-sky projects like a tunnel under the Bay ($7 billion?? Very, very unlikely–I would double or triple that just like every other construction project in NYC turns out). The fact is, SI is almost entirely car-dependent because the vast majority of its growth came after the Verrazzano Bridge was built. The money doesn’t exist to give the island’s spread-out population NYC style-transit. If islanders want to crowd up to Brooklyn or even Queens-level population densities, THEN we can talk about a connection to Manhattan. But nobody seriously expects that to happen.
But do you know why Brooklyn and Queens got built up to their current population density levels? Because the companies that built the subways had the foresight to build it through undeveloped areas. The Flushing Line went through farmland when it was built, and only after the subway was there did the area fill in.
If you build it, they will come.
Those were private companies, which had a reason for such speculation. Public agencies don’t work that way.
Rhywun, cost overruns aren’t a fact of life. Projects that are managed well, like water tunnel 3, can stay within budget. There’s no reason to believe a well-managed tunnel would cost much more than $7 billion, which, after all, is a real figure for an NY-area project in a field where massive cost overruns are uncommon (freight rail).
The revenue the line would generate equals, in year one, 100,000 riders a day times 300 weekdays plus weekends a year times, say, $4.00 average express fare. It’s a real ROI of just under 2%, which is okay for a deep recession, and which will go up as further development on SI increases ridership on the line. Government bonds have a real ROI of well under 1% right now.
But Staten Islanders don’t WANT further development.
Good point Rhywun – it seems though that for everything that is said about staten island, all thats left is talk. No action.
I seriously doubt that Staten Island’s population can physically handle population numbers similar to Brooklyn or Queens. Its at about 500 thousand now? I dont know the exact numbers of Queens or Brooklyn, but Its not far fetched to say that Staten Island’s population is less than half of Queens or Brooklyn.
There are alot of marshlands and toxic waste sites (brookfield) that the city promised to clean up for decades. Again, all talk. No action. Not to mention there are alot of protected areas in the Greenbelt that cant be built either. I guess the dump can always get developed, but why would you want to live on a waste site?
I believe that it might just be possible that Staten Islanders can go from their cars and into mass transit. However, if they keep just studying instead of doing, it will not happen.
I hope it does, because I WISH I could never drive again.
SI’s population is around 500,000. Bkn and Qns each have over 2 million, in roughly similar areas each. In other words, the population density of Staten Island is around 8,000 per sq. mi., which is about the same as upstate cities like Buffalo. That is, not enough to support extensive rail transit beyond what already exists.
Staten Island’s population density is 3,200/km^2, the same as in Budapest, and higher than in Hamburg, Rome, Frankfurt, and Prague. It’s more than twice the population density of Calgary, 1,400/km^2, which hasn’t prevented Calgary’s light rail from getting 250,000 riders a day.
Staten Islanders should be lucky to even have the SIR… the fact that SI is a borough of NYC is solely due to a quirk of geography and history. In development character it’s mostly single family suburbia, and has population densities and car ownership rates similar to areas of New Jersey and Long Island which don’t have nearly as much transit service. The “if you build it they will come” argument doesn’t hold sway here because most of SI is zoned for low density and auto dependency and Staten Islanders would like to keep it that way (all while complaining about their long commutes into Manhattan).
If there were a big public effort to upzone Staten Island, bring on the transit investment. But PlaNYC doesn’t identify it as a major opportunity area, and the existing services are probably more than the Island “deserves” to begin with — it’s a Republican stronghold and Bloomberg et al realize that they recieve significant campaign contributions (and tax revenues) from the mostly upper middle class families who would otherwise flee to the suburbs proper.
Why do you need to upzone Staten Island? It’s already growing by itself, and with decent transit, it would grow even more. I don’t think an area with higher population density than Rome and Frankfurt needs special development incentives.
I like the idea of tying Staten Island to the NJ-side transit system. While Staten Island is politically part of NYC, geographically, it is part of New Jersey.
Economically, Staten Island is part of New York. The top four counties of employment for residents of SI are SI itself, Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens, in this order; 90% of SI residents work in one of those four counties. The top two counties of SI resident employment in New Jersey, Hudson and Middlesex, each have about one half as many commuters from SI as Queens and one tenth as many as Brooklyn.
The economics would surely change over time to suit a new transit reality. Transit policy can be–and has been in the past–used as an intentional tool to drive demographic and economic change. The idea that it must be used solely to respond to and reinforce existing economic patterns of activity is short-sighted and foolish.
Now whether altering the economic relations of SI in this way would ever be politically tenable is, of course, a separate question.
Staten Island was developed the way it was developed because it didn’t have a rail connection to Manhattan. If tunnels were built in the 1920s or 30s (as they were planned), it would have developed like the rest of the city. Back then, there were three branches of the SIR, two of which could have been extended to the West Shore and connected, and a third which headed down to the beaches along the south and east shore, may have been put underground (Hylan Boulevard) and send further south.
I would argue that if the two dead lines, which were closed in the mid-50s, were still in use, the argument for a tunnel would hold more weight, as more people would be immediately affected.
But there are still plenty of advantages to the city for building the infrastructure to reactivate the North Shore line, which heads through populated neighborhoods after a shoreline jaunt, and tunneling directly to Manhattan from St. George. Mostly, it would get Islanders off their over-crowded roads by providing a one-seat alternative to driving and taking express buses.
But the biggest benefit to the city would be property tax revenue, as property values — especially those on the North Shore, nearest trains making the first stop out of the city — would increase dramatically.
The reason property values and rents are not consistent with the rest of the city is because of the Island’s access issues. My house in Tompkinsville (a 10 minute walk and five minute bus ride to the ferry) would be worth two to three times its current value if it there was a 10 minute train ride to the city a block away.
The ferry is great. I get a lot of work done while a ride it an hour a day. Sometimes, I’ll have a beer and enjoy the views.
But it is anything but convenient.