The history of the United States is pockmarked with terrible architectural and urban design decisions. We tear out trolley tracks in favor of cars. We build massive roadways without leaving rights-of-way in place for rapid mass transit. We tear down architectural gems such as Penn Station and replace them with, well, Madison Square Garden. Today, Infrastructurist examined 10 train stations along with an endangered one that faced the wrecking ball during the Twentieth Century. How and why city planners decided to destroy these beautiful and useful buildings make up some of the saddest tales of transit neglect from the last 100 years.
Earlier today, the first of the MTA’s planned fare hikes went into effect. A remnant of the Doomsday budget proposal, today’s hikes impacted riders on Metro-North and the Long Island Rail Road. On June 28th, New York City Transit riders will suffer through the same fate, and two weeks later, the MTA’s bridge and tunnel tolls will rise.
As part of the compromise out of Albany, the MTA will be raising the fares at least every two years to keep pace with inflation. MTA budget-watchers warn that even a biennial fare increase won’t cover the MTA’s rapidly increasing debt payments. Enter the federal government.
As first reported by the Poughkeepsie Journal on Saturday, Congress is may approve a provision in the federal stimulus bill that would allow 10 percent of transit aid to go toward operating costs. In the past, federal aid has been earmarked specifically for capital programs and procurement plans that spur on job creation. With transit agencies facing extreme budget shortfalls and the specter of job cuts, the government may allow the flexibility to maintain workforce levels.
Today, The Times and The Daily News got in on the act. They both, however, dance around the real issue: Once again, Congress is acting on a national transportation issue after the ship has sailed. Financial problems at transit authorities has been a not-so-secret problem for a while. Only after jobs and services are cut and fare are increased does Congress find it prudent to act.
As The Times notes in one paragraph, “But the change, if approved, will come after many transit agencies have already planned their budgets for the coming fiscal year.” The Daily News reports that this provision — which could provide a whopping $122 million for an MTA facing a $1.8 billion short fall — would stave off this year’s fare hikes or service cuts and won’t eliminate the planned payroll tax either. It’s simply a case of throwing pennies at a problem.
In the end, this move is indicative of the problems plaguing the federal approach to public transit. The commitment to sensible funding solutions just aren’t there. Transit is a public good, and the authorities running rail and bus lines can’t jack up fares to cover the entire cost of running a system. But until we have a real national investment policy, fare hikes and service cuts will remain the norm for debt-laden transit agencies.
In 17 days, New Yorkers will have to suffer through another fare hike, and straphangers are bound to complain about the 8 percent increases. Little do we realize how, according to one study, we have it good in our car-less lives of subway commutes. Last month, the American Public Transportation Association issued a report claiming that those who eschew automobiles for the pleasures of public transit can save an average of $8000 a year. According to the results of the survey, New Yorkers who use transit have the second highest rate of savings in the country. Our savings come in at $1049 montly and $12,589 annually.
In terms of methodology, the APTA looked at local transit rates for a monthly ride pass and compared the total to gas, parking, insurance and car maintenance costs. When I owned a car, I don’t believe I spent $12,000 on it a year. However, I do not doubt the conclusion that, in urban areas, mass transit commuters maximizing their savings by riding rather than driving.
Pedestrians take advantage of a car-free Broadway in Times Square on Sunday. (Photo by flickr user bmaryman)
Recently, Janette Sadik-Khan and her revolutionary livable streets plans have been garnering a lot of headlines. With the pedestrian takeover of Broadway around the Times Square and Herald Square areas, Sadik-Khan has thrust her pro-bike, pro-pedestrian, anti-car, anti-congestion policies onto the crossroads of New York.
In an effort to bring Sadik-Khan’s vision and personality to those impacted by her decisions, New York Magazine wrote a sprawling profile of the DOT commissioner. Various sites have covered the profile, but I wanted to highlight a few points.
First are the comparisons to Robert Moses. “One of the good legacies of Robert Moses is that, because he paved so much, we’re able to reclaim it and reuse it,” Sadik-Khan said. “It’s sort of like Jane Jacobs’s revenge on Robert Moses.”
In the past, I’ve called for a Robert Moses-type figure to lead the city’s much-needed transit revolution. I’m almost on board with Sadik-Khan’s plan, except for one detail: She hasn’t embraced the transit expansion aspects of a livable streets plan. Getting cars off the roads and restoring the streets to those who walk and bike is an admirable goal, but the second part of that plan is to offer more mass transit options. People can still get around fast when they need, and they won’t be compelled to drive.
The New York Magazine piece does not comfort me:
While Sadik-Khan seems genuinely taken by the idea of bus rapid transit, she has clearly put it on the back burner—even though it would likely have practical and utilitarian appeal. But getting a new bus system going is a lot less sexy than making pop-up public spaces, or leading Bike to Work Day rides, like she did last Friday. It would take longer, cost more, and require a lot more bureaucratic tussling (with the MTA, no less). It would be a different kind of revolution—slower, more compromised, perhaps more lasting—and would probably require a different kind of revolutionary leader.
The plans are out there. Some people want streetcars for Brooklyn, and the DOT Commissioner plans to work this summer with the MTA to identify more bus rapid transit corridors.
The truth is, though, that Sadik-Khan could implement BRT with the same sense of purpose as she has livable streets. She could close road sections on cross streets and avenues while installing dedicated bus lanes with separated lanes and pre-board fare options. She could connect disparate parts of the city that aren’t transit accessible right now, and she could do it while pushing her pro-bike, pro-pedestrian plans. After all, making the city more livable involves transit, and if the will exists, we shouldn’t sacrifice the chance to expand our public transportation network.
Over the weekend, the Queensboro Bridge turned 100, and the city celebrated with a processional of old cars across the span and some East River fireworks. As part of the celebration, Gridlock Sam made light of the fact that cars had to pay three cents to cross the bridge in 1909. The audience reportedly chuckled. A toll — all of three cents — to cross an East River Bridge! Imagine that!
To those of us in favor of East River tolls as a way to fund the MTA, a toll 100 years ago is no laughing matter. It is a sign that free trips across the East River are not a God-given right. It is a sign that people 100 years ago had a better sense of transportation policies than we do now. Three cents in 1909 money would be a hair under 75 cents today, and all of a sudden, the idea of tolls across the East River to help fund the MTA seems more inevitable. After all, if 1909 New York could do it, why can’t the 2009 version do the same?
Elliot Sander is the unfortunate victim of circumstance, and we the subway-riding public are worse off for it.
Up until around around 10 days ago, Elliot Sander was the CEO and Executive Director of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. At a time when the agency was suffering through a crippling financial crisis, his was a thankless job, but Sander was the right man for it. A run through his faculty profile at NYU Wagner School of Public Service shows a highly qualified and extremely experienced transit expert.
When the MTA had to turn, cap in hand, to Albany this year, politicians trotted out the old tired tropes in an effort to portray the MTA as a less than scrupulous organization. Some claimed the MTA keeps two sets of books, a charge found to be untrue in a court of law. Others called the agency heads “untrustworthy and corrupt,” as Sander puts it an Op-Ed in The Times today. In the end, the MTA, a transit agency entrusted with making the trains on time, were no match for a bunch of politicians whose specialties all seem to be making themselves look good even when approving poorly-constructed funding fixes.
In the end, despite his qualifications and despite his clear success — major projects moving forward, modernization efforts, on-time performance — Sander became the sacrificial lamb. He was ousted from a position most suited to his talents after less than 29 months on the job, and transit advocates all over the city lost a very important ally in the fight for better service in the city. Today, in a piece in The Times, Sander fights back. He writes:
The M.T.A.’s shortcomings are well known: crowded subway cars (ridership has increased by 50 percent in the past decade), outdated signal technology that limits the number of trains that can run per hour, decaying subway stations, buses stuck in traffic, the still incomplete Second Avenue line…
The M.T.A. has long been burdened by convoluted and overlapping operating charters, work rules and politically dictated mandates. But during my two years as chief executive we made significant progress in consolidating the back office functions of seven regional agencies — those in charge of trains and buses as well as bridges and tunnels. We arranged for the two commuter railroads, the Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North, to save money by jointly purchasing equipment and supplies. And we merged what had been three bus companies into one.
Only with genuine support from our elected officials can the next chief executive keep improving the transit system. With enough financing, for example, the M.T.A. could form a single regional bus authority to provide seamless service from Suffolk County to Westchester County. And with the Legislature’s political support for labor negotiations, the agency would be better positioned to conduct serious and respectful conversations with its nearly 60 unions about modernizing work rules to increase productivity and embrace new operating technologies…
With an adequate budget, the M.T.A. could not only maintain but also expand the transportation system. Rather than just finish projects under way — the first phase of the Second Avenue line, the extension of the Long Island Rail Road to Grand Central Terminal and of the 7 train to Manhattan’s far West Side — we could extend the Second Avenue line into Brooklyn and the Bronx, have Metro-North service at Penn Station, modernize the subway signal system and provide high-speed buses to underserved city neighborhoods as well as Long Island and the Hudson Valley.
Sander saves his attacks against the state legislature for the end of his piece, and even then, they are tame by Op-Ed standards. “All of us should wish that whoever takes the helm gets the backing of all of New York’s elected leaders. As the people who call the shots on M.T.A. financing, they really are the agency’s shadow board of directors,” he writes. “If, on the other hand, politicians continue to run against the M.T.A., their rhetoric may become self-fulfilling prophecy, and the system may devolve into the state of dysfunction they denounce.”
While Sander’s departure leaves the MTA worse off than it was a few weeks ago, maybe Sander can become a rallying point for transit experts in New York City. We have long been out-maneuvered by politicians in Albany who protect their own interests but not those of the transit-riding public. We live in a city in which people don’t really believe the subways can be better than they are, and we are held hostage by automobile interests in the most densely populated city in the country. Transit should thrive here, and it does not.
Sander’s Op-Ed is just a start. We all should push Albany for a fully-funded five-year capital plan and a true commitment to public transit. We have to convince the public and the people that matter to dream big. In the end, the subways and New York City will be better off far it. The fight goes ever on.
David Yassky, center, and Mayor Bloomberg, left, announcing a residential parking plan in 2008. (Photo via flickr user cmyassky)
During the debate over the Ravitch Plan, New York City drivers and their advocates often acting as though free East River Bridges were a constitutional — or at least a God-given — right. How could transit advocates even think of tolling the East River bridges, that bastion of “free” roads? Never mind the tolls on bridges into and out of Staten Island or various points between Manhattan and Queens and the Bronx.
In a similar way, the debate over free on-street parking features much of the same themes. While other cities — Philadelphia, D.C. — have implemented residential parking permit programs, New Yorkers have been loathe to adopt one for dubious grounds. Generally, these programs allow municipalities to charge a rate closer to the market price for convenient parking while filling their coffers for much-needed transit, sidewalk or road improvement projects.
In New York, though, anti-RPPers find interesting and creative ways around the idea. When a program was proposed around three years ago as a way to combat a lack of space, a Brooklyn business association determined that, in Brooklyn Heights, an area saturated with subway lines, there was less than one space for every four registered vehicles. On to the shelf the program went.
Now, though, three New York politicians — Councilman David Yassky, Assembly member Joan Millman and State Senator Daniel Squadron — are at it again. The three Brooklyn Democrats are pushing for another residential parking permit program. This one help fund the MTA while also ensuring drivers a spot close to home. Veronika Belenkaya has more:
If the bill passes, the city and individual neighborhoods would decide whether they want the residential permits, which wouldn’t be allowed on commercial strips and would cover 80% of residential neighborhood streets…
“It’s a real hardship. Anyone who lives here and has a car can’t find parking,” said Brooklyn Heights Association President Judy Stanton.
The current plan, in which the permits would have to be purchased and the revenue would go to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to fund city buses and subways, got a more positive review from the partnership. “If the idea here is to connect drivers and supporting mass transit, that is an interesting approach . . . but the devil is in the details,” said the [Downtown Brooklyn] Partnership’s director, Michael Burke.
While the politicians seem to like this plan for the money it brings in and for the congestion-curing possibilities, the policy wonks don’t agree. Department of Transportation officials feel that an RPP plan can cure congestion only with the help of a congestion fee as well. Without such a plan, we don’t believe this bill will actually solve neighborhood parking problem,” Seth Solomonow, a department spokesman, said.
My only issue with the plan is the projected price point. According to NY1 News, the permits would cost around $50. Considering the true market value of a parking space, the city could charge far more for it. If this plan though can generate more money for the MTA and more money for the city’s transportation coffers, only fear of challenging the free driving mindset will prevent it from becoming a reality.
Update 9:45 a.m.: For a more robust look at Squandron, Millman and Yassky’s efforts than the one presented by the Daily News, browse on over to this Brooklyn Paper article. Mike McLaughlin crunched some numbers from prior reports and notes how, currently, some Brooklyn areas have nearly 700 more cars than spaces.
Any RPP plan also has an added benefit I originally neglected to mention: By requiring permits, the city can make sure that its residents have registered their vehicles in New York City. Right now, due to price discrepancies many short-term New Yorkers keep their registrations active in their native states. It is, as always, all about paying for the resources one uses.
Remember David Gantt? He’s the Rochester-based representative responsible for squashing a NYC home-rule bill aimed at BRT lane enforcement efforts. He angered a lot of pro-transit advocates last summer, and even The New York Times spoke out against him. Today, Assembly Chair Sheldon Silver continued to give the proverbial finger to New York City as he reappointed Gantt to the transportation committee chair despite strident opposition.
Politicians bemoan transit cuts and fare hikes, but when push comes to shove, it’s clear that they are not looking out for the transit needs of the New York City area. Thanks once again to Silver, we’re left to fend off hostile representatives heading up a committee that is supposed to encourage sensible transit solutions. When the MTA is in shambles and navigating through New York City is worse than it already is, just blame Gantt — and Sheldon Silver, too.
A few months ago, with gas prices at all-time highs, commuters started flocking to public transit in record numbers. When the economy — and oil futures — tanked, a funny thing happened on the way to work: People continued to rely on public transit, and ridership has continued to increase. It is, then, alarming to read in The Times today about how mass transit systems around the nation are suffering from major budget crises. Meanwhile, the Senate is debating amendments to strip transit from the stimulus bill while propping up highways.
It’s tough to understand the rationale behind that move. The nation needs public transit. It needs it environmentally; it needs it economically. Right now, the public have shown that they will use public transit, and to read that cities are cutting thousands of bus stops and service options in the face of record high ridership numbers is to fear for the future of the nation. While I try to stay focused on New York City issues here, nationwide transit impacts us all. The new Streetsblog Network covers this issue in depth, and now is the time for action on public transit in the New York area and around the U.S.
Amidst all of the talk of MTA financial difficulties, service cuts and fare hikes, on the other side of the Hudson, a major transit just got the federal go-ahead. The ARC tunnel earned environmental approval from the FTA last week, and this key project is one step closer to becoming a much-needed reality.
Right now, the plan for this project is an ambitious one, and a new tunnel underneath the Hudson River would double commuter rail capacity in the region. If everything continues to go according to plan, the project will cost around $9 billion and should be completed in 2017. The Port Authority, New Jersey Transit and the federal government will split that lofty price tag, and per NY1, the project would include a block-long underground connection between Penn Station and the PATH and subway station at 34th St. and Sixth Ave.
Michael Pagan of Politicker’s New Jersey-based site had the reaction from the politicos:
Sens. Frank R. Lautenberg (D-NJ) and Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and Gov. Jon Corzine (D-NJ) today announced that the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) has completed its environmental review process for the Hudson River Mass Transit Tunnel project, which is expected to create 44,000 permanent jobs throughout the New Jersey–New York region.
“We fought hard to secure this approval because the new tunnel will be critical to our region’s future. This new tunnel will help ensure that New Jersey commuters have reliable, convenient and energy-efficient transit options for years to come,” Sen. Lautenberg said. “We will keep fighting to reduce congestion and modernize public transit. Our work to secure this approval is a significant step in the right direction.”
“I support the Mass Transit Tunnel project because it provides a path to short- and long-term economic benefits and helps us advance toward our national objective of reducing our reliance on fossil fuels as we build capacity in renewable, environmentally friendly energy resources,” said Sen. Robert Menendez.
With this key approval in hand, funding remains the project’s final hurdle before the shovels hit the ground. Already, New Jersey and the Port Authority have committed $5.7 billion to the project, and the state’s two Democratic senators are looking to the Obama administration for federal contributions.
Meanwhile, Gov. Jon Corzine believes that construction on the tunnel could start this year once the funding is in place. If this tunnel truly can bring in more than 44 million new passengers a year and remove thousands of cars from the road, as the New Jersey governor’s office said it would, it should — and, in all likelihood, will — earn a top position on the list of federally funded projects. The region will really enjoy this tunnel when it opens in eight years. Now if only the rest of the area’s transit wishlist could earn some funding too.