Over the past few weeks, I’ve had to make a few trips between Washington Heights and Forest Hills. If I had unlimited hours, I could take a few trains, but we had more pressing matters to attend to (and groceries to cart home). Thus, I’ve had the experience of driving on a weekend over the Triborough Bridge, across the Cross Bronx, over the Whitestone Bridge, through that ugly part of the GWB approach in Manhattan and down the Deegan and FDR Drive. I’m always amazed anyone can do that on a regular basis.
While driving around on roads that were too small for the traffic, perennially under construction and in various states of disrepair, I marveled at our infrastructure. Here was a city that once built out a vast transit network but hasn’t managed to expand it much past the 1950s. Bus routes seem set in stone; subway expansion plans can be counted in new stations instead of new miles or even boroughs transversed. We don’t dream big, and we barely dream at all as many areas of the city feature bridges, roadways and elevated trains plagued by rust and potholes.
The problem, of course, is one of money. New York doesn’t have the money to spend maintaining antiquated roads, and few people are advocating for road expansion within the confines of the five boroughs. The MTA, meanwhile, definitely has no money. It has trouble covering operating costs and had to beg for its vital capital dollars just a few weeks ago. Over the years, Albany has rolled back taxes, denied other revenue-generating measures and generally acted as naysayers at a time when investment can both save our infrastructure and spur job creation.
Within New York City, at least, this trend of scorning transit could change if local politicians and officials have their way. Today, two stories showcasing various ways in which we could see a radical change in transit policy, if only Albany would act, hit the wires. Scott Stringer, a mayoral hopeful and current Manhattan Borough President, wants to see the commuter tax restored with dollars heading to the MTA. “I don’t want us to have a first-rate city with a second-rate transportation system. I am tired of the old ideas. I am tired of people saying it can’t be done,” he said to New York 1.
Stringer has been pushing for sensible transit policies for a few years now. (In fact, I attended and spoke at a conference on the future of transportation in New York City that his office hosted.) Whether it will play with the general electorate remains to be seen, but the Commuter Tax is a relatively “safe” issue. It doesn’t impact people voting for mayor and could in fact generate money for the transit network we all use. Stringer’s plan would siphon commuter tax revenue into an infrastructure bank, and considering how those who commute also avail themselves of the transit network, such a tax could serve as an equitable funding mechanism for the subways.
Then, of course, there is Sam Schwartz’s ambitious congestion pricing plan (pdf). Schwartz’s plan would lower some tolls on less congested routes while rising the fees to enter the busiest parts of the city and includes investment in the transit network. As Crain’s New York wrote in an editorial endorsing the plan, “Lowering the tolls between Queens and the Bronx, or Brooklyn and Staten Island, would increase commerce. Use of outer-borough bridges is light enough that their tolls can be lowered without snarling traffic. By the same token, imposing fees on users of congested roads would speed traffic, benefiting businesses whose time is more valuable than the cost of tolls.”
Of course, the same problems remain: Albany is obstinate. Suburban representatives won’t endorse a Commuter Tax, and no one seems to have an appetite for a congestion pricing plan or a bridge toll plan, no matter how sensible they are. So we’re stuck in the same old rut. Our transit network is decaying; our roads are forever clogged; and simple solutions that are on the table are ignored out of stubbornness and petty politics. That’s no way to run a city.
44 comments
The problem is not one of money but of how it’s allocated. Or of the lack of growth which used to trick us into the illusion of having money. Either way, America wasn’t a richer country in 1950; just a different one, with different values, system of taxation, and rate of growth.
Yep. One of the values America professed then was deferred maintenance. It would build Interstates with 90/10 funding, but it would put local governments on the hook for full maintenance costs. The subway was run on the same principles, only there was no longer any money for expansion.
The MTA’s issues begin and end with the Three Men in a Room. And while I applaud any candidate advocating for mass transit, it’s hard to take this seriously as the Mayor really has no control over these areas.
But if Scott wants to run for Governor…
New York has the highest state and local tax burden in the country. But it also has the most spending on public schools, health care for seniors, public employee pensions, and debts. The people who benefit from such things, and are seeking to extract what they can before going elsewhere, are not going to let that change.
Step one is to get rid of every single incumbent politician in Albany. Far from using his political skills to do this, Stringer was once one of them, and voted for many of the decisions which left us where we are. The commuter tax is a straw man. As the suburbs slowly get poorer and the city slowly gets richer, it will eventually become inequitable.
It’s not exactly inequitable to have people pay for what they use. Even as they become poorer, suburbs still put a strain on the transportation networks – a disproportionate strain, if anything. It’s inequitable to have the city pay for that use, especially in light of the fact that how we got to where we are – not to mention the hole we’ve only mostly crawled out of since the 1980s – is precisely because we were expected to pay for the growth of far-flung suburbs.
And, FWIW, Stringer seems way less of an authoritarian thug than Christine Quinn or Ray Kelly or whoever will run against the mostly braindead crop of Dems we’re getting. :-/
If the city is straining under the weight of these commuters why are we subsidizing them to show up in the first place? I don’t see the point of raising a commuter tax to pay for an agency that allocates a large part of its resources to subsidies for commuters. The logical solution is just to raise the fares on the commuter rail networks.
We’ve been subsidizing them since we nationalized the transportation infrastructure, if not before. We probably have little say in the matter, anyway.
I wasn’t even talking about the commuter railroads, but the majority of the expenditure at least at the LIRR might be for featherbedding. Naturally, local pols have almost as much trouble saying no to unions as they do to suburbanites, and as such the fares are absurdly high already – and so are the subsidies.
Unless you mean forcing the commuter railroads to subsidize NYC transit?
If commuter rail wasn’t subsidized the MTA would have more money for NYC transit.
More broadly, commuter tax advocates want to take money from commuters and have it wind up in the hands of the MTA. The MTA currently employs hundreds of people and substantial amounts of capital in a fare collection system designed to extract money from commuters. Why are we talking about changing tax law.
Diagrammatically we have a system to accomplish the following as a sunk cost:
Commuters =$=> MTA
Tax proponents would like to spend money and time establishing the following system in addition:
Commuters =$=> (costly middlemen & gov’t employees) =$=> MTA
Hell, if you want to be an idealist, if you ask me, the subway’s operating costs should be paid more or less fully by fares and perhaps to an extent fines and/or advertising. This is probably impossible on bus systems, but something closer to sane should be possible. Subsidies should only go to capital expenses. It should be theoretically feasible on the commuter railroads, though probably is illegal.
The problem with this approach is that if you’re raising commuter rail fares but not commuter highway fares (i.e. tolls, including tolling the free bridges), you’re just inducing commuters to drive into the city. That means spending more rather than less city money on cleanups.
In the case of the NYC metro area, I’d be suspicious of that claim. The train would need to be made way more expensive to make gas and parking expenses more desirable. And that’s before you consider that driving also costs people, Very Important People, their time.
You’re right that New York gets away with more harassment of train riders than other cities. (For example, despite requiring most commuter rail riders to transfer to the subway to reach their workplace, something that’s usually a ridership killer, Manhattan manages a high transit mode share even among people living in the suburbs.) However, there’s a limit to how much people will tolerate.
The Very Important People have ways of managing congestion. For example, their work schedules are more flexible, and they can require the plebs to come to Westchester and the North Shore. They don’t have to vote personal interest – that’s why they vote for anti-stimulus politicians. They vote based on who fellates them, and urbanists don’t and shouldn’t. Even Bloomberg’s cutting them out of the loop unless he knows them personally – he’s an autocrat rather than an oligarch.
When you have an organization such as the MTA (Money Taken Away), who wastes $135m on The Broadway-Lafayette/ Bleeker St subway station complex, so that people can connect to an uptown 6 from the F (And vice versa), so they can avoid walking 2 blocks with an unlimited Metro Card (I made that trip on Sunday, going from Canal to Bleeker on the 6 (To go to Best Buy, and walked 1 block to the F)), it becomes difficult to support funding them (Beyond existing projects) without a 180 degree turn in the way they operate.
Money Taken Away is truly one of the more inane nicknames for the MTA I’ve heard. Plus, you’re being critical of a transfer that will serve literally thousands of people per day. Furthermore, construction costs are up due to ADA upgrades as well. It’s not just about a free transfer that many people don’t want to, can’t and shouldn’t have to make aboveground. Please.
I cannot believe you think spending $135m is not a total waste of money. Money Taken Away fits the MTA perfectly (Because that is what they do with people’s hard earned money, while wasting it). I am not saying ADA is important, but they could have taken those resources and put about $100m of those about 2 minutes away at West4th st (And still extended the platform and added elevators)
Letting those TWU acronyms brainwash you is no way to go through life. First, investing in a very useful transfer has nothing to do with West 4th. You’re basically advocating for the MTA to spend more money upgrading additional stations (which they should do) while also complaining about their spending.
If you want to see money taken away, let’s kill the transit system and then have millions of New Yorkers try to drive while paying $4.25 for a gallon of gas. The transit network is a good thing. Trust me.
Economics is defined as the study of scarce resources, and how best to allocate them. The key word is SCARCE not unlimited. Spending $135m on ONE station is a quite poor allocation, while there are other project in needs (West 4th being just one (Coming home from Penn Station I hate its smell and pounding drums)). Nassau County got rid of the MTA, because they were getting screwed over LI Bus, and Rockland wants to do the same. Guess why? Money Taken Away, with limited benefits to users and taxpayers.
That’s how much a station rehab costs. There’s a reason why this transfer wasn’t already in place, and that reason was money. Anyway, if you think $100 million is enough to save West 4th St., you’re dreaming. It’ll cost just as much.
Meanwhile, ask Nassau County bus riders how Veolia is working out for them. Nassau County get rid of the MTA because its county executive is a delusional tea party nut job, and now bus service is getting cut faster and more extensively than the MTA would have cut service. You are talking of things about which you seem to know very little other than TWU talking points if you really think the transit network is of “limited benefits to users and taxpayers.” Get real.
I think you’re conflating the waste – created with the complicity of elected officials – with the merit of the MTA’s capital projects. It’s true that the MTA overspends on capital projects, but that’s a structural problem with the MTA. If that $130M wasn’t spent badly on the meritorious Bleecker/Lafayette transfer, it would have been spent badly on another projects of similar or lesser merit.
The structural problems that lead to such waste definitely need to be addressed, of course, and even (especially?) reformist pols are cowardly for not doing it.
I agree with you 100% about the structural issues at the MTA, with is why I said they need to do a 180 degree change in their operations. Every single person, organization, agency, etc, needs to be accountable for their actions. When they go over budget from $50M to $135m, something is wrong. The sad thing is they really don’t get it. Look at their nice ads about construction projects like East Side Access (Forgetting it is years behind schedule and billions over budget). Or this goody: A critical link for Brooklyn (Culver Viaduct) is off the critical list (However Smith & 9th St is closed for over a year, and people must rely on the B-61, until hopefully the fall, oops overlooked that). When people see stuff like this (Not to mention borrowing $7b to complete projects (Not even talking about the 2nd Avenue Subway phases 3 & 4, and new projects)). For that reason, people are not exactly in a rush to bail them out.
Since eminent domain wasn’t used (AFAIK), even $50M seems a bit steep, near as I can tell.
OTOH, the MTA’s job is probably more to funnel cash between the state and the TWU plus connected contractors. Transit service is an afterthought.
“Letting those TWU acronyms brainwash you is no way to go through life.”
The original acronym was “Money Thrown Away’ with blame placed on the unions. Notably in this book.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Grav.....155395484X
That is not a waste. Making transfers easier saves people time, and only about half of riders use an unlimited Metrocard. Ridership always goes up substantially after one of those transfers is completed.
Advocating the resurrection of the commuter tax while claiming to be tired of old ideas is more than a little hypocritical. And aside from that rhetorical malpractice, it’s a hardly a bold move to advocate a tax on people who can’t vote against you. Even more so when two out of the three people who would have to approve it (i.e. Cuomo and Skelos) represent the people who would pay that tax, and therefore won’t approve it. Let me guess: Stringer is also in favor of free ponies for everyone.
But the real problem with his proposal is that the suburbs are going bankrupt, whereas the city is not. Whether we like it or not, the subsidies are flowing in exactly the opposite direction from what Stringer envisions.
We’re not going to see a substantial increase in transit funding until we, the people who live in New York City, decide to pay for it ourselves. So Schwartz’s plan seems practical to me, although we really should eliminate the extra road construction in the plan.
Well, it’s hardly an easy task to resurrect the commuter tax precisely because the suburbanites can and did vote against it in the state legislature. It’s certainly not a simple case of taxing people who can’t vote against you.
But the real problem with his proposal is that the suburbs are going bankrupt, whereas the city is not. Whether we like it or not, the subsidies are flowing in exactly the opposite direction from what Stringer envisions.
It’s true regarding suburbs going bankrupt, but not all of them are equal. There’s a big difference between Yorktown & White Plains for example. The former is totally car dependent while the latter has a walkable downtown where all daily needs can be acomplished without a car. Plus there’s frequent Metro-North service to GCT as well as the bee-line bus.
Over time the suburbs that will end up depopulating are those that don’t adapt to this new reality. Arlington VA & Portland OR saw this coming a while ago & planned by changing development policies. http://www.walkscore.com is a good resource. The site has several tools for casual users who want to find a transit rich neighborhood to move to. It also aids realtors as well as policy makers in making better choices.
“But the real problem with his proposal is that the suburbs are going bankrupt, whereas the city is not.”
The city’s situation is as bad. Our debts are higher, and our pensions are more underfunded. But our economy is stronger, and city residents are used to higher taxes and worse schools.
You know, of all the adjectives I’d use to describe White Plains, “walkable” doesn’t really spring to mind. “Surrounded by insane amounts of parking,” maybe.
All these places in Westchester are doing well for themselves independently of their awful, awful urbanism. They’re a favored quarter, and the upper middle class clusters there because they’re already upper-middle class. They have the resources to fund public schools at rates that are reserved for private schools everywhere else. Why be Arlington when you can be Fairfax County? It may not work for everyone, but Westchester isn’t everyone; it’s part of the upper 20% of the metro area.
Our roads are forever clogged andpeople realize more and wider roads ad nauseam are not the answer. I call that progress and cause for optimism. Beyond that, as so many above note, the city, not the suburbs, is now in a/the better position for the long term.
And while I agree it’s good to think “big,” it’s equally good to think “smart” or “efficient” or “compact” or pick your adjective, so better subway transfer points aren’t a (conceptual) waste of time or money at all.
I’ll still politely dispute the assertion that “[o]ur transit network is decaying,” or at least question the time frame used to justify that claim. Put the 1970s into that timeline, and the argument falls apart–but I understand why someone who didn’t live through that dark period might not use it as a reference. I can’t do that–I lived (and rode the subways) in the 1970s. It’s much better now. Really. For one thing, there are blogs like this monitoring what’s going on, no?
So while it may be more true that “we’re stuck in the same old rut,” externalities may just force or sway us no matter where our minds or bodies are stuck–and right now, when it comes to transportation, the change may be for the better.
McGuinn and Hillman had it right: Change is now. Things that seem to be solid are not. Or, if you’re even older, opt for Dylan: The times they are a’changin’.
“people realize more and wider roads ad nauseam are not the answer.”
What roads have been widened in NYC in the last 40 years? Was the West Shore Expressway widened to two whopping lanes at some point from one, or maybe from half a lane? What are you talking about? What endless road widening program are you referring to?
He said they haven’t been widened because people realize it’s a bad idea. He’s probably half-right too; they haven’t been widened, but more because NIMBYs wouldn’t allow it than because of any atavistic common sense. And, for better or for worse, they probably haven’t been widened for the same reason the only new transit infrastructure we’ve seen is no-brainer necessary even at 10x the costs of what it should cost.
There’s an implicit claim in “people realize more and wider roads ad nauseum” that there has in fact been “more and wider roads ad nauseum”, thus leading to the realization. NYC roads are not wide. We have 2 and 3 lane limited access routes. These routes are not wide by L.A. standards. They are not wide by Chicago standards. They are not wide by D.C. standards. They are not wide by Toronto standards. We don’t have wide roads in NYC.
Adding some lane miles could make a world of difference on some key routes.
Well, there have been more – elsewhere. He could just as easily be implicitly referring to the norms in other parts of the country.
I’m not exactly sure what the best (engineering) solution for the roads is, but my take is the major concern should be accommodating freight better, as you’ve probably seen me say before.
Eric,
Here are the roads that have been widened in just the last 15 years:
Gowanus Expressway – bus/carpool lane added in mid 90’s. I remember taking the express bus around 1998 and watching workers jackhammer the raised median to turn it into a lane. Ramp at the BQE/BBT tunnel split – I think it used to be one lane (or anyway, it was narrower). There’s also continuous, wasteful maintenance that takes as long as the projected lifetime of the “improvement.” These billion dollar boondoggles are what people should be screaming about, not the MTA.
Staten Island Expressway – Also bus/carpool lane, early 2000’s. New and wider ramps being built right now; try driving out there – it’s a huge construction site at this very moment.
Note that this is a widening because buses and carpools are removed from the general traffic lanes, giving more space to cars with a single occupant in each.
Koscziusko Bridge – I heard just yesterday from the NYS DOT Commish herself, a brutish woman with no understanding of transportation – she admitted she was an English major in college and has no formal transpo planning/engineering education – is going forward. That will be a much wider bridge than what we have today, meaning we’ll start getting LA-style traffic jams the entire length of the BQE.
Brooklyn Bridge – new, wider ramps to go in, sometime soon.
But what’s even worse are the “death by a thousand cuts” local street widenings and conversions from two-way to one-way. A good example is the area around the minor league stadium on Coney Island. For the old DOT (and, to some extent, for the DOT under Janette Sadik-Khan as well) it’s all about getting motorists to the game. Nobody cares about the bus riders or local residents. The local roads have been reconfigured three times, having gone from two-way, residential streets with parking to one-way speedways that remind one of downtown Dallas, perhaps, but not Brooklyn.
In my parents’ neighborhood in Staten Island, the cross streets have been made one-way, even though they are really too wide for it, so cars now fly down the block whereas earlier they had to watch out for oncoming traffic. These are all, essentially, widenings.
Looking back perhaps 20-30 years, the additions of rush hour parking restrictions and peak direction lanes on bridges and tunnels are widenings as well. I think they were originally created because of the misguided belief that adding peak capacity will reduce congestion (of course, it simply encourages more people to drive). That’s why Manhattan is hopelessly clogged at rush hour – it’s pumped full of cars every morning through additional capacity.
Needless to say, all of the EDC’s recent suburban-style megaprojects got new, wider roads with turning lanes and signals and other expensive technological crap that prioritizes cars over everyone else.
That’s all I can think of for now; of course that’s only a small subset of NYC street widenings of the past 40 years.
Boris: To your point, I’m sure these widening projects dwarfed the #6 Train Station. Meanwhile, the #6 project was not going to induce more people to drive.
As for Ben Kabak’s desire for the City to think “big”, I’ve had enough of that from our Governor on the TZ Bridge.
These are MINOR!!! The HOVs are on a small portion of two roads. Ramp widenings are hardly capacity additions, they address antiquated road standards. The mentioned changes are operationally nothing. And note that the West Side Highway has been demolished! Now if you want to access the Hudson River park you have to troop across a boulevard where there was once a highway (and could have been a road underground).
Note also the SI Expressway was specifically built with interior room for future 4 laning. Instead we have the silly partial HOV on the eastern part of the island. The whole thing should have been 4 laned over 20 years ago and an express route added with no SI exits.
The Koz. bridge is a disaster. It is scary to drive over. The new bridge, decades overdue, will simply add auxillary (i.e., exit lanes). It’s not a through-capacity addition. The BQE will still be a 3-lane (2 in Brooklyn Heights) substandard geometry mess.
The money spent on all this stuff is a fraction of one year’s spending on the current mass transit mega projects in NYC.
By the way, the idiotic tinkering with Staten Island arterial streets is because NYC abandoned its highway plan for the Boro. The Willowbrook plan was abandoned and the belt plan was abandoned. So you have a single limited access through route. You are failing to understand that it is the lack of limited access routes that causes the nonsense on the interior streets. When the highway network is adequate, the arterial streets function as local traffic routes and work quite well.
Staten Island Expressway – Also bus/carpool lane, early 2000?s. New and wider ramps being built right now; try driving out there – it’s a huge construction site at this very moment.
Note that this is a widening because buses and carpools are removed from the general traffic lanes, giving more space to cars with a single occupant in each.
Well, in a sense you are right – each of these projects individually is minor, and benefits just a few people. But like I said, it is death by a thousand cuts. The process of going from lively, friendly and safe residential streets to barren stretches of road with lined with boarded up windows is a slow, incremental process.
You seem to be totally uninformed about the cost of the road projects, which makes sense because road cost overruns and mismanagement are never in the news. Each of the major projects I mentioned cost several times as much as the 6 transfer, cause more pollution and inconvenience, and undercut the transit system by encouraging driving. Each of these are a negative thing for the city.
“decades overdue”. What’s your point? The Second Avenue Subway is 70 years overdue. The Koz. IS a through capacity addition precisely because it won’t be as “scary” to drive over, plus it will have extra lanes (just check this blog and other sites for coverage).
“The money spent on all this stuff is a fraction of one year’s spending on the current mass transit mega projects in NYC.”
Do you have any evidence of this? The current Gowanus Expressway work alone is $600M, will take 10-15 years, and will increase the life of the structure by 10-15 years. All the bridges are $1B+ projects.
“the idiotic tinkering with Staten Island arterial streets is because NYC abandoned its highway plan for the Boro.”
No, it’s because of the old (and, again, misguided) belief that wider streets = more mobility. It’s not true.
NYC did not abandon its highway plan because it had no plan to abandon. It was Robert Moses’s plan. No reasonable NYC resident could dream up such a thing, then or now.
“The process of going from lively, friendly and safe residential streets to barren stretches of road with lined with boarded up windows is a slow, incremental process.”
Where is this happening?
And it might not be an exaggeration to say the mass transit mega projects are an order of magnitude cheaper, both to build and to operate. And that’s before you consider that the mass transit projects probably make a way bigger contribution to the economy, and move considerably more people. The additional eminent domain costs of a road widening project in this region must be huge by itself.
Just look at the difference peak years for these major bridges compared to 1989 on page four of this document. (Yes, I wish the numbers were more recent.) If you see transportation as a catalyst for economic activity, that’s pretty damning evidence for why major highway expansion is a secondary concern even if you think it’s a good idea.
The Texas Transportation Institute – i.e. the people who publish the traditional statistics about congestion that every urbanist except me seems to hate – claims a rise in freeway lane-miles in the region from 5,425 in 1982 to 7,220 today (I wish I had a link, but the TTI scrubbed or moved its master file. Death to all link-breaking webmasters). Probably we’re talking about a host of small things – upgrading an already grade-separated road to a full freeway here, adding a lane on each side to a road there.
Or a changed definition of freeway lane miles? Or a new definition of the region? Heck, even growth in really distant exurbs? Some combination of the three? 😐
Could be distant exurbs in the Poconos, but the Mid-Hudson Valley and Connecticut are considered separate urban areas according to the TTI.
Pretty sure it’s not a changed definition of freeways. The TTI report makes a big deal about how they need to build more freeways and the problem is that road supply growth is too slow to meet demand. Its tone is very much on the side of building one’s way out of congestion; it’s just that the raw data suggest the opposite conclusion.
[…] before the Association for a Better New York, Stringer laid out his views on transit. We know he endorsed a commuter tax plan, but he had far more to say on the subway system. “We have a basic problem: The Metropolitan […]
Your style is very unique compared to other people I have read stuff from.
I appreciate you forr posting when you’ve got the opportunity, Guess I will just book mark this page.