Without the subway, traffic, seen here along Houston St., would be crippling to New York City. (Photo by flickr user vauvau)
One of my more prominent themes here on Second Ave. Sagas over the last few years has focused around the role the New York City subways play in driving the city’s — and the region’s — economy. Although cars are the focus of politicians hellbent on keeping bridges unnecessarily free and congestion pricing away from the streets of Manhattan, without a subway system that takes seven million New Yorkers to and from work, school and play every day, the city would simply cease to function on the scale that it does today.
Those of us who fight for better transportation solutions and more public transit investment are well aware of the importance of the subway system, but for reasons relating to interest group politics, wealth and access, our representatives prioritize auto drivers to the detriment of the rest of us. Maybe a new report issued by the city can start to turn that tide.
The study is called New York City’s Green Dividend, and the Daily News offers up a short preview. The report, writes Pete Donohue, “says there would be 4.5 million more cars on the road if New Yorkers racked up the same average mileage as residents of other big metropolitan areas. Parking that many cars would require a lot about the size of Manhattan.”
He continues:
The city-commissioned study argues that improved transit and pedestrian-friendly changes to the city’s landscape benefit not just the environment but the economy. The findings
- The average number of miles driven per person daily in New York City is 9, while the average per person in other large metropolitan areas is 25 miles a day.
- Residents of the five boroughs save $19 billion a year because they buy fewer cars and avoid many auto-related expenses such as gasoline and car insurance…
- Nearly 57% of New York City workers commute by mass transit; 32% drive or take cabs; 10% walk, and 1.2% take their bicycles or use some other mode.
As previous studies have shown, the numbers of those commuting into the Manhattan Central Business District by mass transit are even greater, and auto trips plummet accordingly. As presented by Donohue, the study doesn’t appear to quantify how New Yorkers ride to school, but when it’s officially released, I’ll try to update these figures.
I’m not surprised by these findings at all. Without a cheap, reliable and relatively efficient subway system, people wouldn’t be able to live in Flatbush and work in Midtown. They wouldn’t be able to go from the north Bronx to Lower Manhattan for the cost of a subway swipe. On the other hand, a worse transit system — say one crippled by service cuts — would lead to more cars, more pollution, more time spent in traffic, more frustrating attempts at finding parking spots that just don’t exist. The city cannot afford that future.
Although I began this post hoping that politicians who control the purse strings would respond positively to this survey, the truth is that they probably won’t. New York’s elected representatives seem blind to the fact that public transit plays such a vital role in the region. Only when transit fails will they be forced to act. In the meantime, we’ll continue to argue that more investment transit and not more giveaways to drivers is the way to economic health and growth in New York City.
57 comments
People seem to forget that only 1.2 people come in per car, on average. As well, each car would require a parking space (and pathway or roadway to reach it) that, on average, is larger than a typical office cubicle.
In the photo caption, I think you meant to say “without the subway”.
I think it would be more accurate to say that politicians do not understand the transformative power of infrastructure generally. You are focused on mass transit, but NYC needs more of everything, both mass transit and road capacity.
Some of these stats and the implications you draw from them are off. take this one:
“Residents of the five boroughs save $19billion a year because they buy fewer cars and avoid many auto-related expenses such as gasoline and car insurance…”
They pay less because they are being subsidized. I can “save” on my food budget by getting a subsidized school lunch, but it’s not like the cost of the lunch is less, rather someone else paid for it. If 100% of travel was on mass transit and the subsidies were lifted, the cost would be higher. I’d also figure that the $19 billion figure excludes taxes levied on those same riders to subsidize the system.
You’d have to present a pretty rigorous argument to convince me that New York City needs more road capacity. What the city needs is more incentives to convince some drivers to take transit, thus freeing up roads for people who actually need them. The city needs to invest in road infrastructure to the extent that will avoid massive bridge collapses, but I don’t think expanding road capacity is a good idea for the city right now or going forward.
Meaning we currently have the metaphysical perfect amount of road capacity? It’s neither too little nor too much?
Would the city be better off or worse off if the Cross Bronx Expressway was expanded to two 5-lane alignments (east and west, respectively), both below grade and each with a park on top?
Worse. Just mindbogglingly worse. I would go into all the ecological/social/political/economic ramifications of that, but I think you’ve probably heard most of them before.
New York has road capacity comparable to other cities like Tokyo, Shanghai, Moscow, Mexico City. It’s how it’s used that differs.
Doubling the size of the CBE would be disastrous, since making the traffic jams disappear would attract many new drivers. A few of these new drivers would inevitably end up on local streets, which are not (and cannot) be expanded, so crazy street traffic jams would ensue.
Then remove a few exits and there won’t be anyone but locals using the service roads of the CBE. An exit every half mile is asking for congestion and suburban sprawl in general.
This area of the Bronx is already pretty built up, so converting it to sprawl is unlikely. Although the city has certainly tried, over the years.
Ask Boston how the “Big Dig” is coming along…
Actually, I thought the Big Dig was an enormously successful project. It looks like it spurred connectivity in Boston, eliminated the neighborhood-separating aspects of the old alignment and added through-capacity. The project may have been done in a corrupt manner, but that’s a point separate from whether the project was worthwhile.
I’m not sure I understand how adding capacity makes things worse. You mean, I’d quit my job and drive all day if NYC added a lane to the Long Island Expressway?
Well, aside from the being billions over budget and decades late.
Have you been keeping a running tally of the Second Avenue Subway project…
And having horribly shoddy construction that has directly led to the death of at least one passenger, who settled with the contractors…
Oh, and the “reconnected” Boston— doesn’t exist. The Greenway hasn’t been built because of cost overruns and the waterfront area is still fundamentally separated from downtown. I lived there, I was desparate for the Big Dig to work, but it has failed on so many levels (although some improvements are huge– the Ted Williams Tunnel, for instance).
Well, it still seems like a good idea to me. We have tunnels under battery Park, under First Avenue by the U.N. and under Park Avenue by Murray Hill. Another 100 of those would suit me fine.
Most of those tunnels are quite short, which makes the ventilation issues easier, cutting costs.
But even then, the urban environment around those tunnels isn’t very pleasant. I know First Avenue reasonably well from all my visits to the nearby German consulate; it’s very difficult to cross, and its streetscape is reminiscent of the unwalkable arterials of Tel Aviv and Singapore. Park Avenue and West Street are similar. In fact I’ve seen a study arguing that you could close parts of West Street and actually reduce traffic – I can hunt it down if you’re interested (the study looked at various downtown streets; some would increase traffic if they were closed, some would decrease it).
I would be interested.
I also wonder what would happen if the FDR is converted to a West Street type of road with intersections. The speed limit on it is only 5 mph lower than on the FDR right now (35 vs. 40) so it will probably work out well.
It turns out I remembered wrong about West Street. The study in question does in fact claim most major downtown road links could be cut without increasing travel time (and in a few cases reducing it), but West Street is a counterexample: if it were cut off, travel times would increase significantly.
Sorry.
How did it eliminate the neighborhood-separating aspects? As said below, the divide is still there, it’s just now basically rubble instead of a highway. The Big Dig wasn’t all-bad, but hindsight being 2020. they would’ve been better off Orange Lining the whole thing (which is to say, replacing the freeway proposals with mass transit alternatives). The long-term problem with the Big Dig is that Bostonians are so sick and tired of the whole thing that I suspect Bay Staters will not be looking to do another ambitious project in this generation. Shame that we spent it on that instead of true MBTA expansions.
The problem is that more roads only breed more traffic — a proven and unfortunate factor of traffic engineering and city planning. You absolutely need mass transit, subsidized or not, in order for road traffic to be an effective and viable mode of transportation. This is especially true with a centralized business district like NYC.
Do more trains breed more subway crowding? Does additional classroom space breed more crowded schools? What happens when you add a supermarket to an underserved neighborhood? Does your argument only apply to roads. If so, why?
Adding more trains increases subway ridership, yes. Both of those are induced demand, a concept that serious transportation planners, who publish in peer-reviewed journals (i.e. not Reason), understand well. If you make transportation easier, more people will use it. It’s not the same as classroom space.
Peer reviewed journals like Streetsblog or the Tri-State anti-car lobbyists? Ok, so ‘induced demand’ is a red herring as it applies to transit in all forms, not merely to roads. Still, it seems a neutral concept to me. If NY widens the Thruway so that I can reliably get up to the Hudson Valley on summer weekends to go hiking and camping, I may very well be induced to do so. I struggle to understand why this is bad, however. I’m not taking three trains and a bus to go hiking, and so either I get there by car or not at all. Why is it so awful that the Thruway facilitate recreational travel?
No. Actual peer-reviewed articles show it. There’s a whole wealth of academics who study these things rigorously.
The problem is that you don’t believe pollution is a social and/or environment ill. Wider roads = more cars = more pollution. More transit options = more people taking changing = fewer cars = less pollution. One of those outcomes is far more preferable to the other. As long as you refuse to recognize the problems that road congestion and pollution cause, you won’t buy everyone else’s arguments in this debate.
I don’t disagree that there is pent up demand for mobility. I disagree that serving that demand is some sort of bad thing.
No. Actual peer-reviewed articles show it. There’s a whole wealth of academics who study these things rigorously.
More cars = pollution just isn’t true anymore. Cars just produce much much less than was the case years ago, and auto-related pollution is declining further with hybrids and electrics coming onto the scene. Presumably, if you are basing your argument on pollution, than your argument should be less forceful over time as pollution levels in NYC have dropped dramatically since we were kids. And, of course, you have your own car! And so the awful pollution you generate is, well really not so awful because you’d really love for it to be the case that other people did not drive.
Then you claim that road “congestion” is a problem. But the problem is actually a solution in your own terms as it forces people to . . . well to avoid travel pretty much. The fact is you like congestion, you aren’t opposed to it at all. A family takes one look at the 2 hour backup to the Holland Tunnel and decides that they won’t go to Grandpa’s house in Hempstead after all today. To you, that’s progress. Funny kind of progress.
The pollution estimates are surprisingly recent. In particular, they postdate catalytic converters. For example, Mankiw’s $2.21/gal estimate for a pollution tax is from 2003. So, sure, there’s less asthma in New York now than there was in 1990. But there’s still a lot, none of which is paid by the people who are causing it.
There is definitely pent up demand. You can see it in action when you look at subway ridership maps.
Example of induced demand in the “Journal of Transportation Engineering” published by the American Society of Civil Engineers: http://dx.doi.org/10.1061/(ASC.....)134:2(78)
It’s weird how only some articles are available full text online at my school and not all, but I’ll figure that out.
You know, at trivial cost (measured in the tens of millions, even for the Northeastern US), there could be a direct train going from Syosset to the Hudson Valley. At worst there would be a timed cross-platform transfer, which is as good as direct service.
The three trains and a bus issue is a product of the MTA’s refusal to learn from French, German, Swiss, or Japanese practice; it’s not inherent to mass transit.
Correct! If a new lane is added to a roadway you end up back where you started in about three years studies show. Road planners know this to be the case. How else are the crooked polititions pay off & get payed off? Road & other development projects.
If mass transit were faster than cars, guess which system people would use. A car going 45 mph on Queens Boulevard on timed signals is much faster than the 35 mph express subway train below. The MTA has never cared about speeding up the subways, only slowing them down in the name of political correctness after 1990s accidents (Williamsburg Bridge and Union Square). The IND was engineered for 55 mph through the whole system. You can’t find that speed anywhere anymore. Grade timers and neutered acceleration on R44s and R142s have made subways competitive with bicycle nows.
The DC Metro, which got inspiration from NYC Subway, easily does 45 between stations, 60 mph on longer runs.
Yes, and the DC Metro has about the same ridership as the Lyon Metro, which has one sixth the route length and serves a metro area one fifth the size of Greater DC.
The subway does run at 50-60 mph in the underwater tunnels. It doesn’t run as fast underground because then people would notice. The MTA has to be perceived as doing something about each problem, and improving the signaling system is too much work.
The city’s $19 billion figure is a positive externality. Like health and education, the subway is a public good according to those numbers, which means that it needs to be subsidized. It’s no different from levying taxes on socially undesirable behavior, such as dumping toxic waste into the air.
Your own argument for road subsidies is similar: your attacks on East Asian apartment sizes are an argument that subsidizing driving leads to higher quality of life and is therefore justified. (I’m not going to dignify your “But I don’t believe pollution is a problem” quip by calling it an argument. It’s more like the smoker’s insistence that second-hand smoke doesn’t kill.)
So by having someone else buy my ride to work, not only do I save money, I actually create further positive externalities for everyone. Awesome! You add all the cost “savings” created by the subsidy and then ignore the corresponding cost of the subsidy payment. That does not compute. Of course using that logic, the most lucky and virtuous among us are the residents of St. George who commute for free to lower Manhattan via the free ferry.
Alon, do you recall as a kid hearing about people killing themselves by locking themselves in the garage and turning their cars on and asphixiating (I know I spelled that wrong)? You still hear about those incidents? Cars don’t pollute very much these days.
I don’t read enough local news to know. But there was an episode of House about it a few years ago.
The subsidy to the MTA is not $19 billion. New York City Transit’s operating subsidy is about $2 billion a year, if I’m not mistaken. If you include depreciation, add another $1-2 billion. (Check MTA financial reports on this.) New Yorkers’ lower-than-average transportation costs are not just subsidy; in fact they’re mostly not subsidy.
Don’t forget the surplus toll revenue from MTA Bridges and Tunnels that gets used for the various transit divisions. That’s also “subsidy” in the sense that it’s money being spent on trains and buses that doesn’t come from the people using them.
I’m not forgetting those. My numbers come from the revenue and outlay figures from each individual transit agency.
According to the National Transit Database, total operating costs minus fare revenue is $100 million for Long Island Bus, $3 billion for NYCT, $360 million for Metro-North, $500 million for the LIRR, and $370 million for MTA Bus – altogether, about $4.5 billion. Capital expenditure is $3.3 billion for NYCT, $500 million for Metro-North, $350 million for the LIRR, and trivial for the bus companies – altogether, $4.1 billion.
In other words: for an annual subsidy of $8.5 billion, the MTA is cutting New Yorkers’ cost of living by $19 billion. Sounds like a good deal to me.
(This, of course, is completely separate from questions about waste. It’s possible for the MTA to be overall socially profitable for the region, as the city is implying, while still not nearly as profitable as it could be if it were run well.)
I would imagine LA would be a prime example of how bad things would get if we didn’t have the subway. And to think, we have Robert Moses to thank for directing us down this path. He had the opportunity to direct money into the subway, and regional commuter rails, but his car obsession killed any chances for that to happen.
Moses has been gone from the scene for 40 years. In that time exactly zero useful infrastructure has been added to this city. Only now do we get the fits and starts of 80 yaer-old transit ideas. This city is much poorer for losing the contributions of a planner that can actually get projects built. We needed more of everything then and we need it now. We are living off the work of past generations.
I’d say that after the 60’s or 70’s, when the center of power shifted from the city to the suburbs, things more or less froze in place. Many people became happy with the way they lived, and since they divested themselves from urban problems they saw no need for more change.
In general, I would say there used to be much more socialism and central planning from FDR’s time to Reagan’s, so it was easier to get things done. It’s often in the news now how Obama’s new taxes are miniscule compared to what rich Americans used to pay in the 50’s and 60’s. Correspondingly, back then governments had surpluses that they spent on infrastructure.
There has been new infrastructure over the last 40 years, but you’re right in spirit: there has not been much.
But a lot of what Moses did was just plain wrong. It is because of his unchecked errors that the current environmental planning process exists. That process helps prevent the same mistakes, but it slows things down. WAY down. Moses himself, if he existed today, couldn’t get the same things done.
Would NYC have been better off without any Moses highways? Would SI be better off without the Verrazano? Would Queens be better off without the LIE and GCP?
I say no. If there were no interstates or highways in the 5 boroughs, the lack of transportation capacity, other than 100 year old commuter rail (alot of which has been abandoned in NYC) and poor to no subway service in large portions of Queens and Brooklyn and SI, would have depopulated Manhattan to suburban areas with highways, then permanently decayed like Philadelphia and Baltimore are today.
Um, Pete, Philadelphia and Baltimore aren’t lacking in highway capacity.
I think the city for the most part is better off with the highway system that was built. It would’ve been *much* better off had Moses dedicated even 1/4 of the resources to public transportation as he would have to roads.
He considered public transportation a demeaning mode of transportation only to be used for the lower class who couldn’t afford a car, and offensive to the eye ruining his beloved parkways. He even went so far as to make the Grand Central parkway unusable to buses by lowering the overpasses.
People like to idolize Moses for all the work he did, but there is just as much fault to find in his methods and his self-serving ego which was more concerned with his legacy and preserving his notion of the city and transportation, than what could be good for the city and Metro region in general.
I can’t wait to see what this report says about parking requirements and widening/”one-waying” policies. Because current city law aims to do exactly what’s described as bad in this report, create enough roads and parking for every resident to be able to drive.
Instead of debating road capacity, why is there little focus on the existing streets, boulevards, and expressways so that they are reasonably free of tire-eating potholes? I have not seen New York road conditions this poor since I obtained my learner’s permit 25 years ago.
1. Bad winter.
2. Broke city.
That’s the problem. It costs money to repair the roads, and the city doesn’t have the money. That’s also why discussions about road-widening projects are pipe dreams. Until the state releases its transportation bill, nothing will get fixed, and until the economy marked improves, nothing will get built.
One comment about potholes– the 311 system has streamlined pothole repair, although you might now have recognized it given how awful the winter was…
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/l.....XsJiO7tVIP
No doubt that the winter of 2009-10 was awful, Ben, but this was also noticeable before December. (I have tried to avoid the Harlem River Drive and Gowanus for the better part of a year.) As for money, who is responsible for the city devoting precious resources to intersection sidewalk extenders in Brooklyn neighborhoods?
Well, now you’re talking about highway repairs vs. street repairs. I believe NYS DOT have control over highway repairs and NYC DOT definitely has control over street repairs and sidewalk upgrades. The Gowanus is part of the federal interstate system and may be under federal jurisdiction in terms of repair money, but I’m not sure about that one.
The feds will cover 90% of the cost of building interstates, and grants are often awarded for capital improvements. But routine maintenance is the state’s responsibility. So, the bill for simply repaving the Gowanus would go to Albany.
As Duke87 said, the feds only pay for construction. The last few years have been the first time ever that repairs and maintenance became a serious issue for US road builders. Previously hey had papered over the issue going back to the 1910s, delegating it to local governments.
Honestly, when *isn’t* the BQE or Gowanus strewn with potholes?
Half the potholes are made by snow plows chipping and hitting the asphalt….
Benjamin, I just wanted to inform you that the 7 million number many people quote is simply innacurate and is actually the number for all of NYC transit. The subway alone only carries about 5 million passengers per weekday (http://mta.info/nyct/facts/ridership/index.htm).
Buses help keep cars off the streets as well. Why should we omit those from our count?
[…] We heard yesterday how the fact that New Yorkers drive much less than other Americans makes the citymore livable, environmentally friendly and economical and has lead to over $19 billion in auto-related savings. (The full report — called New York […]