Benjamin Kabak

The other day, when I took my painfully slow ride home from LaGuardia Airport, I clearly chose the worst route possible. As many commenters here pointed out, taking the Q33 to the Queens Boulevard line or hopping on the Q train in Astoria would have sped up my trip by a few minutes, but the fact remains that the trip was sluggish and slow from the US Airways terminal to the exit from the airport. No amount of better planning would have improved that trip, and a taxi will always be faster, if significantly more expensive.

An article I came across yesterday had me revisiting that commute. It’s a piece from The Globe and Mail in Canada about some transit reluctance. Despite traffic in two big Canadian cities, commuters aren’t embracing transit alternatives because they’re just too slow.

According to a recent Canadian study, a whopping 82 percent commuted by car while just 12 percent rode public transit. The Canadian Press explained the why of it:

“Commuters who used public transit took considerably longer to get to work than those who lived an equivalent distance from their place of work and went by car,” says the study. Nationally, users of public transit spent 44 minutes travelling to work, compared with 24 minutes for those who went by car.

Commuting times are door-to-door, StatsCan notes. Times for public transit are generally longer because its use can involve walking to a transit stop and waiting for a bus, it says. In the six largest cities, the average commuting time was 44 minutes for public transit users and 27 minutes by car. The gap in average commuting time was slightly larger in mid-sized metropolitan areas — 46 minutes on public transit and 23 minutes by car.

“The gap was not a result of distance travelled,” the agency says. “Among workers in (cities) with at least 250,000 residents who travelled less than 5 kilometres to work, car users had an average commute of 10 minutes, compared with 26 minutes for public transit users. The same held true for longer commutes.”

Now, on the one hand, this isn’t a surprising result. By and large, public transit is going to be slower than personal automobiles. They stop more frequently than cars do; they don’t deliver commuters directly from point A to point B; and despite pre-board payment technologies, bus in particular aren’t adept at picking up passengers in a speedy fashion.

These factors clearly matter to many. People in New York dislike the bus system because for many routes, it’s faster to walk. Once you calculate waiting time and travel speeds, buses aren’t great time-savers. Even the subways over great distances at off-peak hours provide little to no time savings. It’s only during congested rush hour commutes that public transit can save significant time.

While I’m not as familiar with the ins and outs of Canadian transportation policies and politics, in New York, cost as well as speed plays another factor. I was willing to take the bus to the subway on Monday because I had all the time in the world and didn’t feel like dropping $35-$40 on a cab. For Manhattan-bound commuters, the costs of daily parking often outweigh any time benefits that may accrue from driving, and those costs help push commuters toward environmentally and socially friendly transportation options.

Yet, it’s important to note the results of studies such as these. Speed and the perception of speed matters. New York City buses — and buses in various locations through the world — are artificially slowed because transit agencies haven’t yet embraced pre-board fare payment systems. They don’t have enjoy dedicated lanes or signal prioritization. Some subways — such as those old IRT routes that run through Downtown Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan — simply stop too frequently. These factors create inefficient and slow systems.

As the MTA looks to encourage more transit ridership, it would do well to assess travel speeds. It shouldn’t take me 20 minutes to leave LaGuardia because everyone waiting to board the bus has to dip their MetroCard as lines form. Buses, especially during peak hours, shouldn’t be at the whims of surface traffic. If you make the rides faster, they will come.

Someone once thought it was a good idea to build a bridge across the widest part of the Hudson River.

Over the past few years as New York and New Jersey have engaged in infrastructure expansion project, planners on both sides of the Hudson River have had to make some key decisions, and in nearly every instance, the decision has been to trim back and cut. The future is going to pay for this dearly.

The obvious example of course concerns the ARC Tunnel. Claiming concerns over cost overruns and, later, project design, Gov. Chris Christie pulled the plug on a project that had been funded and planned. Instead of redesigning it to save money or reengineering it on the New York side to improve it, the New Jersey executive cut it without proposing an alternative. The future is left with nothing, but that’s only the most egregious example.

In New York City, the MTA’s major subway expansion project has seen something fall off from the original plans. The 7 line has lost a key station at 41st St. and 10th Avenue while the Second Ave. Subway, being built in phases, has gone from four tracks to three to two. As I joked on April Fools, they might as well just cut it down to one.

Now, why is this important? After all, we need these projects to open sooner rather than later, and if the choice is between a smaller version of the project and nothing at all, I’d take the smaller version ten times out of ten. Costs aren’t going down any time soon, and it’s too much of a hassle to get a major initiative off the drawing board.

What we forget today when we cut though is the future. Planning decisions we make in the here and now have ramifications practically forever. Take, for instance, this NPR story about the location of the Tappan Zee Bridge. As David Kestenbaum noted, the Tappan Zee Bridge is in a terrible location. It’s amidst a 15-mile stretch of the river that is the Hudson at its widest. Four miles south and 15 miles north, the Hudson tapers off significantly, and the decision to build a bridge there seems foolish. Kestenbaum explains why:

I started digging through newspaper clippings from the 1940s and 1950s. It turns out, the bridge was part of a much larger project: The New York State Thruway, one of the first modern highway systems. The clippings also reveal something suspicious. There was an alternate proposal for a bridge at a narrower spot nearby. The proposal was put forward by top engineers at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. But that proposal was killed by New York governor Thomas E. Dewey. The New York Thruway was his baby; in a 1954 speech he proclaimed that it would be “the world’s greatest highway.”

…If the bridge had been built just a bit south of its current location — that is, if it had been built across a narrower stretch of the river — it would have been in the territory that belonged to the Port Authority.

As a result, the Port Authority — not the State of New York — would have gotten the revenue from tolls on the bridge. And Dewey needed that toll revenue to fund the rest of the Thruway. So Dewey was stuck with a three-mile-long bridge.

As Kestenbaum notes, now that the bridge has aged and degraded, someone is going to have to spend a few billion dollars to repair it. We can’t now correct the mistakes of the past either because “it’s too late now: Highways and towns have grown up based on the bridge’s current location.” The replacement bridge will cost a lot, and eventually, it too will be pared down. Already, the transit options are being threatened with elimination.

And so as the city looks to build and expand, we must remember that what happens today matters. It matters in the short term because we have to pay for it, but it also matters in the long term because eventually someone else will have to pay even more to fix or replace it. Repairing the Tappan Zee Bridge would seem less onerous had it been moved one way or another in the 1950s, but leaders too concerned with photo ops and ribbon-cutting ceremonies never want to take into account someone else’s future.