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Building a better BQE: Greening the trench

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on November 24, 2010

Could a solar-panelled canopy cover the BQE Trench? (Courtesy of Starr Whitehouse)

New York City has long had a love/hate relationship with the BQE. Built by Robert Moses, the road is dug into a trench along Hicks St. in Carroll Gardens. This cacophonous highway has cut off much of Brooklyn from the waterfront district and created an array of dead-end streets and constant pollution. While some city planners would love to bury the BQE underneath Brownstone Brooklyn, a new plan to green the Carroll Gardens trench and reconnect the disjointed neighborhoods is gaining steam.

Last week, the Economic Development Corporation presented three proposals to better integrate the BQE trench into the surrounding area. The plans range in price from $10 million to $85 million and include a focus on green energy. If implemented, they would truly beautify an ugly part of the eastern edge of Brooklyn.

Developed by Starr Whitehouse Landscape Architects and Planners, the plans are as follows:

  • Maximum Green: For $10-$18 million, the city would plant 412 new trees along the trench that would “help buffer the mayhem below.” Plans also include a market at Union St. and sound barriers.
  • Connections: For $20-$45 million plus an additional $123,000 in annual upkeep, the city would build six pedestrian and bicycle bridges over streets that dead-end at the BQE. Those streets included Warren, Baltic, Degrew, President and Carroll.
  • Green Canopy: The $85-million proposal is of course the most luxurious. As The Brooklyn Paper’s Gary Buiso describes: “A latticed, steel canopy is constructed over the trench to shield the view of traffic and provide environmental benefits by reducing noise and creating its energy from the sun, thanks to photovoltaic panels. Retail uses are also possible at Union Street, including an aptly named Trench Café.” Upkeep on this canopy would cost $477,000 a year, but it would offset costs by generating at least $300,000 in solar energy.

For improved access and safety, six pedestrian and bicycle bridges could span the BQE. (Courtesy of Starr Whitehouse)

From the outset, the city raised immediate concerns about the cost of both installing these green projects and maintaining them. “This would be a challenge to maintain additional bridges,” DOT’s Christopher Hrones said. “We think this is compelling, but we are clear that maintenance funds have to come along with this to make it successful.”

Brad Lander, though, the councilman for the area, believes in the project. “It’s not just a pipe dream,” he said. “We can work to make it happen.”

Essentially, the EDC and the neighborhood groups are hoping to achieve five goals for an area whose growth has been stunted by the highway that passes through it. The ideal project will feature noise reduction, pollution mitigation, beautification, improved connectivity and pedestrian safety. The BQE, which is a testament to a time in which Moses was allowed to build without regard for surroundings, has long been a blight on Brooklyn, but perhaps, if the money materializes, access to the waterfront will improve as an ugly trench turns into a swan. It might not be a plan as dramatic as a tunnel, but it’s far more feasible.

For just $10 million, trees planted along the Hicks St. trench could beautify the area. (Courtesy of Starr Whitehouse)

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7 Line ExtensionSubway History

The Subway to NJ: A history of futility

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on November 24, 2010

A 1931 rendering of proposed expansion of the New York City subway system into New Jersey. (Click to enlarge)

In January 1926, The New York Times discussed a report from the North Jersey Transit Commission on the state of travel across the Hudson River. “The report,” said The Times, “declared that congestion in the Northern New Jersey zone near New York City was becoming so great that measures for relief must be taken immediately.” To combat congestion, the NJTC unveiled a sweeping array of plans to bring subway service from Manhattan to New Jersey. Eighty-four years and two auto tunnels later, we’re still waiting for those tunnels to materialize.

The planing for such an extensive undertaking had started in 1924 when New York transit officials and New Jersey representatives met to map out a region-wide transit system. The initial proposal involved extending the two IRT trains to New Jersey via the local tracks from City Hall on the East Side and South Ferry on the West Side. The plan was trumpeted as a great one for everyone. It would relieve overcrowded commuter rail lines and bring more passengers — and more revenue — to the subway system.

Almost immediately, this plan drew opposition from within New York City. Before engineers had a chance to put their pens to paper, the Queens Borough President spoke out against it. “The Transit Commission, which comes begging the New York City taxpayers for millions to keep its existence has had the brazen effrontery to broadcast in the newspapers a plan it has to extend subways to New Jersey by way of City Hall and the Battery so that the traveling public may easily be carried to New Jersey while 60 per cent of the land in Queens remains undeveloped,” Maurice E. Connolly said.

Still, the Transit Commission and NJTC moved forward, and their initial engineering were immense in scope. As articles from the Electric Railway Journal and available on NYCSubway.org detail, the commissions outlined a plan that was cost-prohibitive but was to serve as a guide for future generations:

As the result of the study of these problems the commission has recommended a program consisting of six principal parts. Listed in the order of their importance, they are as follows: (1) Construction of a new North Jersey rapid transit system. (2) Hudson & Manhattan Railroad extensions in New Jersey. (3) Interborough extensions of its Manhattan lines to New Jersey. (4) Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit system extensions from Manhattan to New Jersey. (5) Extension of North Jersey rapid transit system, listed as part one of this program, to serve a larger area. (6) Electrification of existing steam railroads…

The North Jersey rapid transit system, part one of the program, would consist of the following five lines: (1) Interstate loop line, running north and south between the Hackensack River and Bergen Hill in New Jersey, passing under the Hudson River via a tunnel at the Battery, up through Manhattan to 57th Street and back through another tunnel to New Durham. Its length would be 17.3 miles. A so-called Meadows transfer station would be located near the intersection of the Erie and D., L. & W. Railroads. (2) A line from Paterson through Montclair and Newark, following the interstate loop route through Manhattan to New Durham and thence to Rutherford and Hackensack. The length of this route would be 41.9 miles. (3) A line from Ridgewood via Paterson, Passaic, Rutherford, New Durham, the interstate loop route in New York City, to Newark and Elizabeth. Route mileage would be 39.8. (4) An intrastate route from Elizabeth through Newark and Rutherford to Hackensack, 18.8 miles in length. (5) Another intrastate line from New Durham to Newark, 13.0 miles in length.

The commission stuck a price tag on it that seems laughably low today. This entire plan was to cost $382 million in 1926 or around $4.6 billion in today’s money. That’s the current cost estimate for only Phase 1 of the Second Ave. Subway.

Various loop plans, including an extension of the 7 line to New Jersey, are show on this 1926 illustration. (Via NYCSubway.org)

The proposed loop garnered the most attention. In addition to the Battery Loop described above, the commission offered numerous other possible points of expansion. Among those were discussions to extend the Queensboro subway — today’s 7 line — under 41st St., the Hudson River to a stop along Franklin St. between Boulevard and Bergenline Aves. in Union City; and a plan to send the BMT 14th St. line — today’s L train — from its then-terminal at Sixth Ave. to Hoboken and Jersey City before terminating at the planned transfer station at the Meadowlands. “This is a very logical extension,” the New Jersey planners said of the 14th St. extension, “and should be made at the earliest opportunity. Conference has revealed that such an extension would be acceptable to the New York Rapid Transit Corporation.”

Over the next few years, these plans never went anywhere. To fund them would have required a fare hike to ten cents, a substantial bond issue and special taxing powers. The Transit Commission debated the idea in January 1927, and New Jersey kept working toward it that February. By then, the most realistic portion of the NJTC’s proposal would have involved sending the 7 from 41st St. to Dumont, New Jersey. As the current 7 line extension to Secaucus has the backing of real estate interests, that plan in the late 1920s had the Forty-Second Street Property Owners and Merchants’ Association.

When the Great Depression hit, these nascent plans all but disappeared from public view. New Jersey tried to revive its subway connection in early 1931 in an effort to draw WPA money to the region, but that idea went nowhere. The mayor of Newark tried again in March 1937 with no support from our side of the Hudson River, and that would be that for nearly two decades.

For the next 17 years as automobiles arose to remove congestion from the rails — and create their own on the roads — and the region turned its attention to vehicular tunnels, the New Jersey subway plans languished. In 1954, the Regional Plan Association briefly issued a call to extend the BMT 14th St. line to Jersey City. Instead of building another motor vehicle crossing for $100 million, the RPA believed a subway tunnel would cost just $40 million — or around $315 million today. Neither the New York City Transit Authority nor the Port Authority would ever act on that call or a plan to build a vehicle tunnel to Hoboken from 14th St.

And so today, 56 years after the subway to New Jersey last reared its head, these plans are back. Yet again, as The Times details today, no one knows how much it will truly cost or who will foot the bill. The $5.3 billion figure floated by the Bloomberg Administration hasn’t been explained away, and it seems only tenuously based in reality. “It’s a nice idea, but you don’t see dollar signs attached to the commitment,” Martin E. Robins, an early ARC advocate, said. If history is any guide, I wouldn’t expect those dollar signs or a subway to New Jersey to materialize any time soon.

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MTA Politics

A solution to New York’s transit-robbing ways

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on November 23, 2010

Reinvent Albany's report urges Gov.-elect Andrew Cuomo to protect dedicated transit funds. (Read the PDF here)

For the last few years, transit advocates have decried the state’s stealin’ ways. Last year, New York legislature approved a budget in early December that took $143 million in MTA money and removed it back to the general fund. Thus, the authority had to implement a sweeping array of service cuts in mid-2010. The same could very well happen again before the end of this year, and Gov.-elect Andrew Cuomo seems to have no problem raiding the MTA.

In an effort to shore up the authority’s fiscal security, transit groups are searching for a solution. In California, a new measure approved by voters acts as a constitutional amendment that bars the state from moving money specific earmarked for one purpose to another. In effect, the West Coast leader in car use has created a transit lockbox well before the idea has gained significant political traction in New York state.

Now a new group called Reinvent Albany that is aiming to promote a fair, accountable and effective state government has issued a report urging Cuomo to protect dedicated transit funding through an Executive Order. As part of a report containing 11 EOs Cuomo could sign immediately to improve the state’s government, Reinvent Albany, run by John Kaehny for whom I’m doing an MTA budget project, has garnered of seven advocacy groups including the Tri-State Transportation Campaign and Transportation Alternatives to sign for its lockbox order.

“These orders are tailor made for Governor Cuomo to use to launch his campaign to transform New York government,” said Kaehny. “Governor Cuomo will have enormous unilateral power to make government more open and accountable. The ball is in his court to do that.”

The order in question proposes in part:

1. The Executive Branch, including the Division, shall not request, recommend, or order appropriations, across-the-board cuts, or programmatic budgets, or any other action that diverts dedicated funds or dedicated revenue sources from the intended and sole purpose defined in the legislation that originally established them.

2. The Executive Branch, including the Division, shall propose a budget that transfers dedicated revenues directly to the dedicated funds, authorities or agencies they were enacted to support.

3. The Division shall not implement or propose across-the-board cuts that have the effect of diverting dedicated revenues from the dedicated funds, authorities or agencies they were enacted to support.

It would require the creation of “a clear and easily understandable description of how dedicated revenues and funds are raised and spent, highlighting and explaining the diversions of dedicated revenues and funds.” This information would be maintained on the New York State Division of Budget’s website for all to see.

In essence, such a move would inform voters of the MTA’s financial status and show how the actions and decisions of our elected representatives — the same representatives who bash the MTA over service cuts — lead to those service cuts. Now that the EOs are out there, it’s imperative that Cuomo gives the idea serious thought. He has said very little of any comfort on transit, and while an EO can’t replace legislative action, it can usher in better government and wiser choices. If not, the future of the MTA and transit in New York City may be a tenuous one indeed.

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AsidesBuses

Building a better bus system: The need for lane enforcement

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on November 23, 2010

Yesterday marked a big day for the MTA’s and City’s joints efforts aimed at improving the bus lane for bus-lane camera enforcement went live. Today, two articles highlight the various approaches and attitudes to lane enforcement techniques.

At Transportation Nation, Alex Goldmark reports on the NYPD’s recent ticketing blitz. As of Nov. 17, police officers have written 13,833 summonses to those blocking bus lanes — and that, Goldmark notes, is without the aid of cameras. In essence, officers have written 350 tickets per day since the 1st and 2nd Ave. Select Bus Service lanes went live and have generated $1.6 million in revenue. I’m happy to see such institutional support for a key transportation initiative, but I wonder why a similar ticketing blitz wasn’t as publicized along Fordham Road as it has been along the East Side.

The second article worthy of attention comes from C.J. Hughes of The Times, and it focuses on drivers annoyed by the bus-only lanes. For years, the city has had “bus lane” stenciled on its avenues, and for years, few have bothered to obey the law. The money quote comes from a limo driver from Staten Island who said, “This is crazy. Bloomberg needs to go to a psychologist. He closed the whole city.”

Officials have promised that drivers will be allowed to unload but stopping for errands will not be tolerated. “It’s important that people understand that these are rules and they need to be followed, but they will not be enforced in an arbitrary way,” East Side Assembly representative Brian Kavanagh said.

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7 Line Extension

Christie endorses 7 line extension to Secaucus

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on November 23, 2010

A rough sketch of the proposed 7 line extension to Secaucus. (Via The Wall Street Journal)

Updated (1:55 p.m. with Sen. Lautenberg’s reaction): Now that he doesn’t have to pony up much state money for a rail project, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has hopped aboard the 7 expansion plan. In an appearance yesterday on 101.5’s Millenium Radio, Christie endorsed New York City’s nascent plans to send the 7 to Secaucus and even pledged some New Jersey dollars to the project. “I think it’s a much better idea than the ARC,” he said, citing the supposed $5.3 billion price tag.

During the radio appearance, Christie spoke out against his detractors who claimed that his actions in killing the ARC Tunnel would lead to decades of stalled progress on a cross-Hudson rail tunnel. “They said nothing was going to be done for generations, nothing would happen, there’s no other way we could do this,” Christie said.

“Within weeks,” he continued, “we have New York City coming forward with an idea. You know why? Because it’s good for New York City. And once they knew that New Jersey wasn’t going to be the stooge that paid 70% of the cost of this project with no contribution from them, and they weren’t going to get that access of New Jerseyans going to New York, now they decide to step up and come forward with another idea.”

Of course, Christie is all in favor of a plan that doesn’t require his state to fund a project that, by and large, is a benefit to his constituents. If someone else is, as he put it in a similar context, willing to be “played for a patsy,” why not have them foot the bill and offer nominal political support and minimum economic aid?

Christie, who bashed N.J. Sen. Frank Lautenberg for his ARC support, wanted to hear capitulation from his political foe but got only a perfunctory statement. Said New Jersey’s federal representative via a statement, “The senator strongly supports expanding rail across the Hudson River and is closely examining the 7 line proposal.”

Lautenberg calls for firm fiscal support

In a letter sent today from Lautenberg to Gov. Christie, the New Jersey Senator urged the governor to pledge New Jersey dollars to the project. Noting that he’ll continue to fight for federal dollars, Lautenberg writes, in part:

While the No. 7 Subway proposal is not perfect — for example it does not offer New Jerseyans new direct rides to New York City from their local trains — it merits serious consideration…As I’m sure you’re well aware, before Federal transit funds can be sought for a new transit project, state and local funding sources need to be identified first. Under U.S.C. § 5309(d)(2)(C), the law governing Federal funding of new large transit projects, local financial commitments of funding must be identified before these projects are eligible for federal fudning. Therefore, please inform me of the amount and nature of New Jersey’s financial commitment to this project. Specifically, please verify that the $1.25 billion in New Jersey Turnpike Authority funding that was slated for the ARC Tunnel would be available for this new project.

I anticipate that you will aggressively seek comparable local commitments from New York City and/or State as well. Together with Federal resources, if local sources fo revenue are identified, an impressive financing package could be put together to make the No. 7 Subway proposal or another trans-Hudson crossing a reality.

I’ve posted the full letter after the jump, but it’s worth noting two aspects of it: First, it’s clear that Lautenberg and Christie have a chilly relationship at best. Second, if New Jersey ponies up some dough — and that’s a big “if” — and if Lautenberg can again secure federal financing for a cross-Hudson tunnel, this crazy 7-to-Secaucus idea just might have wings after all.

After the jump, the letter from Lautenberg to Christie in full.

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Subway History

Adding an IRT express stop: The story of 59th St.

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on November 23, 2010

A 1958 subway map shows local service only at 59th St. and Lexington Ave.

When IRT and BRT officials signed their half of the Dual Contracts in 1913, the area around midtown east was not the commercial hub it is today. While Bloomingdale’s attracted its fair share of shoppers, the Queensboro Bridge had opened only four years earlier, and the area was just beginning to grow. For reasons of both anticipated demand and engineering, the IRT plans up Lexington Ave. included only a local stop at 59th St.

Almost from the start, subway planners came to rue that decision and worked to rectify the omission. In 1914, Alfred Craven, the chief engineer of the Public Service Commission, issued a studied on the IRT’s two 59th St. stations. In the plan, he endorsed converting 59th St. at Columbus Circle into an express stop — a plan that never came to fruition — but “report[ed] adversely upon the application to convert the 59th Street Station of the Lexington Avenue line into an express station.”

Beyond that brief mention in a one-paragraph Wall Street Journal article, details of Craven’s decision are lacking. As far as I can surmise, the chief engineer couldn’t sign off on the IRT’s wishes because the work required to construct a station along the express tracks deep underneath both the local tracks and the BMT 60th St. tunnel would have been either too challenging or too expensive at the time. After all, the express level at 59th St., 73 feet below Lexington Ave., is among the deepest IRT stations in the system, and planning for a station after the fact would have been cost-prohibitive in 1914.

The local-only station opened in 1918, As the decades wore on, the need for an express stop somewhere between 86th St. and 42nd St. became acute. The platforms at Grand Central/42nd Street were dangerously overcrowded with IRT passengers switching from local to express trains, and with more passengers entering the IRT via a transfer with the BMT at 59th and Lexington Ave., the Bloomingdale’s stop seemed to be the ideal choice for a new station. By the mid-1950s, it was after all the fourth busiest IRT stop, behind only Grand Central, Fulton St. and Union Square.

In 1954, it seemed as though Midtown East would finally get its IRT express service. A front-page article in The Times screamed out the news, perhaps too optimistically: “East 59th Street I. R. T. Station To Be Express Stop in 2 Years.” At the same time that the Transit Authority requested money to turn Columbus Circle into an express stop, they did the same for the Lexington Ave. station due to “the rapid development of the East Side of midtown.” For $5 million, the TA planned to build the express platform below the BMT level. Escalators were to help usher passengers into the bowels of the subway system.

An illustration shows the cross-section of the 59th Street subway complex at Lexington Ave. (Via The Times)

The money wouldn’t come through for another five years. In 1959, the TA again voted for an express stop at 59th Street. This time, the project carried with a $6 million price tag and a mid-1963 completion date. The agency planned to cart out 17,000 cubic yards of dirt and construct two 14-foot-wide platforms that would span 525 feet — or the length of a ten-car train. “New high-speed escalators” would connect the express platforms with the BMT mezzanine and the IRT local level above.

To accommodate the work, the East Side riders suffered through years of service delays. From 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. every night from March 1, 1960 until mid-November 1962, the TA ran only local service along Lexington Ave. The project though was well worth it to TA planners. They believed it would reduce crowding at Grand Central; allow for more convenient transfers between the BMT and IRT express lines; and ease crowding on the 42nd St. shuttle and complaints over the long walk from the IRT by providing a more convenient trip to Times Square.

“Providing this rapidly growing section of the city with subway express service is only one of the benefits,” TA chair Charles Patterson said in 1959. “It will greatly reduce crowding at Grand Central. It will take a good deal of the load from the Grand Central-Times Square shuttle. For many it will eliminate the bother of transferring. For others it will make the transferring easier and faster.”

On November 15, 1962, at 11:40 a.m., a southbound express train ushered in this new station. The project cost a total of $6.5 million — or slightly over $47 million in today’s dollars — and took around three months less than anticipated. As part of the celebration, the first train through the station was a new red bird designed to mark the TA’s $100 million modernization and platform-lengthening campaign along the IRT lines.

Today, we take for granted the express service patterns and often assume how it is today is how it always was. As this express stop opened nearly 50 years ago, it’s certainly easy to forget a time when only local trains served what is now, with nearly 19 million annual passengers, the 9th busiest stop in the system. So as we look back at a time without express service, ponder where else in the system an express station would do wonders for transit. As history has balanced out the subway map, express and local service patterns have emerged to meet demand — unless of course it’s the other way around.

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View from Underground

Photo of the Day: The Hogwarts Express at Union Square

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on November 22, 2010

The Daily News tracked down some creative sign editing from Harry Potter aficionados. (Photo via the Daily News)

Via Lauren Johnston of the Daily News comes this amusing edit of a subway sign. A few mischievous Harry Potter fans decided to slap a new sticker onto one of the subway entrances at Union Square. The bullet proclaims a stop for the 9 3/4 train — a number near and dear to Potter fans for it is the track at London’s Kings Cross Station from which the Hogwarts Express departs.

The new sticker, notes Johnston, is “slapped in the slot that featured a “W” until June when that line went out of service. The design mirrors the style of standard Metropolitan Transportation Authority signage and at first glance could pass for a relic from the days of the defunct No. 9 line.”

The agency said it had nothing to do with this rogue train marking and reminded people that the fine for defacing an MTA sign is $75. “We are not part of any sort of Potter campaign, but I’ve seen things like that before,” Transit spokesman Kevin Ortiz said to the News.

The sticker was last seen on the south side of 14th St. just around the corner from the Regal Union Square 14. Well played, I say. Well played.

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Buses

Defending the 34th St. Transitway

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on November 22, 2010

Project opponents believe the 34th St. Transitway will blight the area. (Image via NYC DOT)

Since early 2008, New York City has been working its way toward implementing a true Transitway along 34th St. The city’s plan would include all of the trappings of Select Bus Service — dedicated and physically separated lanes, pre-board fare payment, etc. — and an elimination of two-way traffic along the thoroughfare. This heaven for pedestrians and transit would provide for higher-speed connections to, from east to west, the 6, N, R, Q, B, D, F, M, 1, 2, 3, A, C and E trains as well as a stop at Penn Station. Who could argue against it?

Well, as the Stop the 34th Street Transit website makes abundantly clear, the Murray Hill Neighborhood Association thinks these upgrades are the devil incarnate. Powered by people who are mostly irate over the fact that taxis won’t be able to drop them off directly in front of their apartments, these wealthy residents have couched their opposition to the Transitway in faux-populist terms. They claim that a “wall of buses” that operate at “rapid” speeds will “create safety issues for young children.” They claim the Transitway will “clog small streets with traffic.” They claim noise and air pollution levels will increase. They ignore the reality that pedestrians will find 34th St. far friendlier with the Transitway than without.

My favorite argument is one of blight. Saying that they’d prefer elevated train lines because they “had the courtesy of being above street level,” the Transitway opponents claim that the bus lane improvements “risk re-creating the old els’ blight, depressing home values and the viability of local businesses.” Even though the NYC DOC is aware of the more legitimate concerns, Murray Hill will not be easily swayed.

It’s easy to mock these folks not brave enough to put their names on their critiques for their windshield/NIMBYism perspectives, but as Streetsblog notes, those who support this project have to take these opponents seriously. CB4 on the West Side supports the project while CB 6 on the East Side isn’t a fan. Thus, proponents of better bus transit need to convince CB 5 that this is a worthwhile project, and at 6 p.m. today at the YMCA on 14th St., that vital community board is hosting an open house.

With this Transitway, bus speeds will increase by 20-35 percent depending upon the time of day, and the city is prepared to ensure adequate curbside access. Traffic will be calmed, and the area will become more accessible. Streetsblog’s Ben Fried sums up the benefits:

Passengers on 34th Street currently travel at an average 4.5 mph in regular curbside bus lanes. The transitway project can set a major precedent, establishing the city’s first physically separated bus lanes and speeding up the tens of thousands of daily bus trips on 34th Street. New curb extensions, pedestrian medians, and, potentially, public plazas would transform the corridor and transfer large swaths of space from traffic to people.

So if you have a chance tonight, go to the YMCA at 125 West 14th Street at 6 p.m. and make your voices heard. After all, in the area around the proposed Transitway, 86 percent of workers commute by transit or their own two feet and 82 percent do not even own cars. We don’t want to see a vocal minority stop a vital transit project, and their spurious claims should not carry the day.

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MetroCard

MetroCard: A problem of proprietary technology

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on November 22, 2010

MetroCard error messages seem to be an increasingly common phenomenon. (Photo by flickr user Triborough)

One day in the not-so-distant future, the MetroCard will die an ignoble death. Instead of an extraneous piece of plastic with a sensitive magnetic stripe, New Yorkers will wave their smart chip-enabled credit cards at a reader to pass through a swipeless entry point. It will speed of the city’s buses and eliminate the need for those annoying tics and error messages so prevalent at subway entrances.

For now, though, the MetroCard, outdated for years and clunky in its uniqueness, lives on. In his subway column today, Daily News writer Pete Donohue looks at the state MetroCard Vending Machines and finds maintenance and service lacking. As the system and technology grows older, it is, unsurprisingly, breaking down more frequently. He writes:

Transit workers have been called to repair the machines 234,170 times this year through September – approximately 870 times a day, Metropolitan Transportation Authority data show. This year, each defect went uncorrected on average 6.18 hours, up from 5.08 hours two years ago…

There are 1,648 MetroCard machines. Even with a defect, a machine regularly will still work to some degree. It might not accept dollar bills but will process a debit or credit card. It might sell MetroCards but not single-ride tickets…

You can thank those shifty-looking guys standing by the turnstiles for some of your MetroCard woes. The aptly named “swipers” swipe people through turnstiles for less than the $2.25 fare. They jam different machine components, like the bill-handling unit, to increase demand for their services. Still, even these ubiquitous scammers aren’t prolific enough to cause an average 26,000 repairs a month. Only 30% of repairs are attributed to tampering, the data show.

The machines are relatively old, and definitely cranky. They were installed about a decade ago and never replaced. They are at the edge of their “useful life,” an MTA spokesman said.

Donohue notes that Transit employees 124 workers who can service these machines. Based on these numbers, each worker must make approximately seven service calls per day to machines that could be anywhere in the system. Keeping the MVMs operating at top shape then is a Sisyphean task.

Meanwhile, as the MVMs break down, I’ve noticed an increasing number of error messages on the turnstiles themselves. “Please Swipe Again” has never been so abundant. Perhaps that’s because of the decreasing number of MTA station agents turnstile cleaners who are around to remove build-up from the magnetic card readers. Perhaps these error messages are due to the “useful life” of the technology. Most likely, the problems are a combination of the two.

Ultimately, the end-of-life problems that we’re seeing with the MetroCard technology is indicative of the issues with proprietary technology. Back in 2000, the Village Voice ran an exposé on Cubic and its multi-million-dollar relationship with the MTA, and the alt weekly highlighted the Closed Loop problem. Many of the problems mentioned in the article have since been addressed, but the MTA is still working with a clunky technology designed in the early 1990s that hasn’t achieved widespread adoption outside of the city. It will inevitably break down, and if the failure happens before the MTA’s next-generation fare technology is in place, it will be both costly and disastrous to maintain this aging infrastructure.

Those in charge at the MTA are well aware of this problem. In my conversations with the MTA officials, I’ve heard about the need to bring the contactless fare payment system online sooner rather than later. Still, we’re a few years away from that reality, and the MetroCard machines and card readers must last until then. Frequent breakdowns will just become a fact of life as the technology nears its 20th anniversary.

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Staten Island

Building a subway to Staten Island with ARC dollars

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on November 22, 2010

Schematics of a 1912 plan to connect Staten Island with the BMT via a subway tunnel under the Narrows. Click to enlarge.

While New York City’s rail plans for Staten Island include just a modest proposal to reactivate the North Shore rail line and Mayor Bloomberg wants to spend the federal government’s $3 billion left over from the ARC Tunnel on a 7 line extension to Secaucus, one Staten Island politician would prefer to see the city deliver on a long-promised subway line to the island. State Senator Diane Savino (D-North Shore/Brooklyn) said this weekend that instead of pursuing a subway extension to New Jersey that “flies in the face of practicality and fairness,” the city should connect Staten Island to the rest of New York’s extensive subway system.

“If the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) wants to truly move people out of their cars and onto rail, extending a subway to the Island is the way to do it,” Savino said in an interview with SILive.com’s Judy Randall. “The MTA should complete a 1912 plan that would have rail and freight access from the terminus of Victory Boulevard to Brooklyn, along 67th Street, and then utilize the R train route along Fourth Avenue. The projected cost of the plan is $3 billion, the same as the extension of the 7 line under the Hudson River.”

The long-planned extension of the R train under Narrows wasn’t the only idea Savino put forward. “If a bi-state alternative is necessary in order to access federal funds, the city could extend the Hudson Bergen Light Rail from its present terminus at 8th Street in Bayonne over the Bayonne Bridge, making a ‘northwest passage’ to Manhattan via the PATH trains in Jersey City and Hoboken,” she said. “Keep in mind that 12,000 Islanders work in Hudson or Bergen County and 100,000 Islanders work in Manhattan every weekday.”

By my count, this is now the fourth public claim New York officials have staked to the ARC tunnel money. U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has called for the money to go toward MTA capital projects, and a group of House representatives echoed that call on Friday. Mayor Bloomberg of course is working on his 7 line program, and Savino wants to bring it home for Staten Island. Is her plan feasible?

In August, I explored the long and tortured history of a subway to Staten Island, and even then, I omitted the early years. Since the dawn of the 20th century, city planners had promised a subway to Staten Island from via the Narrows. Articles from 1901 and 1903 mention those plans, albeit in skeptical tones.

In 1919, the most ambitious expansion plans involved a tunnel under the Narrows as well as another to Lower Manhattan through the New York harbor. Had that Staten Island subway been realized, it would have traveled under Kill Van Kull and through New Jersey or via a direct line past Ellis and Bedlow Islands under the shallow part of the bay. Both routes would have connected to the IRT just north of South Ferry.

Today, the only feasible — and I use that word loosely — approach would seem to be via the Narrows to the BMT Fourth Ave. line. It’s five miles from South Ferry to the northern tip of Staten Island but just one mile under the Narrows. The line would branch off at around 59th St. where a short tunnel stub exists, but the trains would make the long, slow slog to Lower Manhattan via the 4th Ave. local and Montague St. tunnel. Such a trip would arguably be slower than taking the ferry, and without significant subway development in Staten Island, it wouldn’t provide comprehensive service at that end either.

Ultimately, it seems as though Savino’s subway plan is a wise one on paper that flies in the face of practicality. It would, however, make far more sense to Hudson Bergen Light Rail because it would draw riders from an underserved part of Staten Island. Only then with ARC money could dreams of better transit from Staten Island be realized a century in the making.

“In 1898, when the boroughs voted to consolidate,” Savino said this weekend, “Staten Island voted overwhelmingly to become part of New York City on the basis of two promises, a municipal ferry and subway service. After seven years we got ferry service, but 112 years later we are still waiting on the subway. Staten Island is part of New York City, with over half a million people. It is past time we have similar transportation alternatives that other boroughs have.”

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