Public Transit Policy

SHop’s Domino development will add a lot of subway riders to an area ill-equipped to absorb them.

It’s hard to believe less than a year remains in the reign of King Bloomberg. The Mayor since shortly after 9/11, Bloomberg has left a stamp, for better or worse, on the city, and the greatest impact of that stamp appears to be development related. From Atlantic Yards to Hudson Yards, from Long Island City to Williamsburg, developers have benefitted tremendously from Bloomberg’s three-term tenure. Unfortunately, transit hasn’t enjoyed the same boost.

It hasn’t always been from lack of trying. Bloomberg led an effort to implement a congestion pricing plan that would have generated hundreds of millions of dollars for the MTA’s capital plan that had the support of both City Council and the majority of New Yorkers. It died at the hands of Sheldon Silver in the back rooms of Albany, and Bloomberg hasn’t prioritized MTA-based transit since then.

Still, development has continued apace, and two of the last projects pushed by Bloomberg may yet have transit implications. The first concerns the Midtown East/Grand Central area, and it’s one I’ve already examined in depth. In a nutshell, by upzoning Midtown East, Bloomberg could strain transit offerings well beyond the point of acceptability in the area. The MTA has discussed the need for wider platforms and more entrances and has threatened temporarily closing station entrance points if crowding grows too extreme.

Some of the figures put forth by the Bloomberg Administration are coming into view though, and the money could alleviate the problem. According to The Post, district-improvement bonuses of $250 per square foot would go, by and large, to the MTA, and the agency could see as much as $750 million over the next 20 years. Now, $37.5 million per year isn’t all that much when you realize that the MTA spends $5 billion a year on capital construction projects, but that money can help with the Midtown congestion problem. We should know before Bloomberg leaves office if the rezoning goes through.

But what of another area that has benefited from pro-development and natural gentrification forces? In Williamsburg — an area with few options for transit expansion — Two Trees and SHoP unveiled their plans for the Domino Sugar factory area. It’s an ambitious plan for the Williamsburg waterfront. Nestled between the Williamsburg Bridge to the south and Grand St. to the north, it would bring office space and over 2000 apartment units to the area by 2013.

I like the look and feel of the SHoP plans, and I like the green space and park lands the developers will preserve. I’m concerned though about transit. The plans include a ferry stop, and the East River Ferries have been surprisingly popular. But most people will turn to the subways. The plans are weighted a bit toward the south — which should push subway riders to the J/M/Z stop at Marcy Ave., but those who live and work near Grand St. will be closer to the L at Bedford. The L at Bedford is one stop that can’t really absorb too many more straphangers.

Now, it’s tough to ask more of developers in New York. If we expect them to pay for transit infrastructure — which we should — can we ask them to also pay for affordable housing, community spaces and parkland? How do we begin to prioritize such demands? Yet, we can’t just ignore the need for adequate transit spaces. Adding hundreds of thousands of new square footage to Williamsburg will put more pressure on some of the city’s most taxed transit facilities, and someone has to pay for the upgrades. The folks who stand to benefit the most from developer should help foot that bill as well.

For some reason or another, the concept of transit-oriented development seems to rankle nerves and raise eyebrows. Outside of the city, at least, in suburban areas where “density” is a bad word, issues surrounding class and race often lead to intense debates over TOD. But within New York City, it’s a fact of life. In fact, the city is one giant transit-oriented development, made possible because of the reach and frequency of our transit network.

After so many decades and years of development, it’s easy to lose sight of how transit has spurred development — both residential and commercial — in New York City, but a new spate of projects serves to remind us of New York’s origins and showcases its future growth. As Grand Central Terminal turns 100 this year, a big dig underneath it will soon usher in over 80,000 new commuters per day to the area, and across town at 34th St. and 11th Ave., a new subway stop will deliver New Yorkers to one of Manhattan’s last truly undeveloped frontiers at the Hudson Yards.

In this week’s Crain’s New York, a big story on Grand Central drives home this point. Daniel Geiger looked at the planned and expected growth around Midtown that stems out of Grand Central and its importance to the city. Opening with the story about the owners of 140 E. 45th St. building out a real entrance that leads to Grand Central on East 44th St., Geiger’s piece highlights the up-building that will soon happen throughout Midtown.

Rockwood’s move is just one of many by which countless landlords and tenants alike are demonstrating that even at the ripe old age of 100, the grand dame of New York’s transit hubs is more central and vital than ever. What’s more, with the planned arrival by 2020 of Long Island Rail Road trains in Grand Central’s sub-basement and the expected rezoning of the surrounding neighborhood to spur development of a whole new generation of bigger, smarter office buildings, the terminal is destined to become only more important.

“When the LIRR link opens, it will bring about 80,000 new commuters per day through the terminal,” said an MTA spokeswoman. Those new faces will add to the roughly 800,000 people—including tourists and, increasingly, shoppers—who will pass through the building each day by the end of the decade.

Similarly, the extension of the 7 subway line—which runs beneath the station out to Manhattan’s newest neighborhood, Hudson Yards, just beginning to rise west of Penn Station—will further knit the terminal into the city’s future growth. In a sort of virtuous circle, it is those beefier transportation links that effectively lay the groundwork for the big new towers, which are expected to add 10 million square feet or more of additional space in the coming decades—the equivalent of more than three Empire State Buildings—and their tens of thousands of additional tenants. They could begin arriving as soon as 2020.

In addition to the increase in office space in the area, the New York City Planning Commission with some prodding by the Regional Plan Association and Municipal Art Society will reassess how the space surrounding Grand Central is utilized as well. Parts of Vanderbilt Ave. may be turned into pedestrian plazas, and the city will consider widening sidewalks along Madison and Lexington Avenues. As midtown occupancy numbers increase, wider sidewalks will become a matter of safety for the tens of thousands of new workers in the area.

So Grand Central — the epicenter of Midtown East — continues to deliver transit-oriented development benefits a century after it first opened its doors. I can’t help but to draw comparisons to the way the city and its politicians treat transit today. It is so clearly the economic driver of the city. People clamor to live near subway stops, and rents increase as commute times decrease. Businesses want to be located closer to train stations, and an increase in commuting capacity is driving a push to rezone Midtown and add density to one of the denser areas in the country.

Still, when it comes to political priorities, transit takes second fiddle to just about anything else. It is a struggle to move rail projects forward, and future funding is up in the air. We look for tiny incremental improvements rather than transformative initiatives that could easily see the light of day with a political champion and some progressive funding. Let the Grand Central Terminal be a reminder of what transit development in New York City can do and what it still does. It’s a powerful driver indeed.

At some point this summer — although when exactly we do not know — New York City will unveil its bike share program. With a payment structure that favors short rides and long-term memberships, the 10,000-bike system run by Alta will change the way many New Yorkers commute. As I explored a few weeks ago, it should, in fact, enhance the city’s transportation network.

Full integration though remains a challenge. Right now, the city’s transportation payment picture looks a bit muddled. The buses and subways run by the MTA take MetroCards while the East Side Ferries, seemingly far more popular than I and may others anticipated, take cash while the bike share system will be membership-based for many and pay-as-you-go for others. Without integrating payment systems, these modes remain more siloed than they need to be.

New York City Transit meanwhile is slowly moving toward a new fare payment system. By around 2015 or so, the MetroCard will be ushered out in favor of a contactless debit or credit card-based solution, and the MTA may be more amenable to cooperating with the city on a unified fare system. Cody Lyon at The Gotham Gazette reported on Monday:

In the near future, subway riders may be able to use their fare cards to check out a bike from hundreds of nearby docking stations. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority said it is open to evaluating ways to integrate fare payment with the city’s bike share program as it moves toward a wireless, smart card-based system by 2015, agency spokesman Aaron Donavan said in a recent interview…

Department of Transportation spokesman Nicholas Mosquera said that in other cities, up to 50 percent of bike share trips are connections to other modes of transit. But he said while he expects to see the same here, the DOT is currently not working on fare payment integration at this time. “We look forward to exploring it in the future,” Mosquera said…

Mosquera said New York City’s bike share program is designed to provide sufficient bike share capacity at transit hubs, allowing riders to transfer quickly from bike other modes or vice versa. He said the bike share stations extend the reach of the transit system, making distant parts of neighborhoods easily accessible from subway stations. “The system will be perfectly suited to any potential fare integration,” Mosquera said.

The idea of integrating fare systems is hardly a ground-breaking one. Yet, at many levels, the MTA has struggled to achieve success. We can’t use the same tickets on Metro-North and the LIRR. MetroCards are useful only with the realm of subways and city buses. Even integration with the PATH system is more limited than it need be, and transportation options that operates outside of the auspicies of the MTA rely on a separate payment system entirely.

Seeing both the city and MTA be willing to discuss ways to make this work is a heartening development. The bike share system will complement the rapid transit network and making connections between the two — and the way we pay for those connection — as easy as possible should be a priority as the MTA readies the MetroCard replacement. Forward thinking and cooperation will go a long way toward attaining success and avoiding unnecessary turf wars as resources are grow more and more stretched.

Late last week, the dysfunctional members of Congress managed to come together for a few minutes to pass something resembling a federal transportation bill. The two-year measure is short on reform and couldn’t, for instance, find a way to bring tax breaks for transit riders in line with those for drivers. Steven Higashide offered up a transit advocate’s view on the bill at Mobilizing the Region yesterday, and I don’t have qualms with his analysis or conclusions.

I want to instead focus on an insidious provision buried toward the back of the bill that concerns federal oversight of subway safety. As I’ve mentioned before, a few Washington politicians led by Maryland Senator Barbara Mikulski have decided that DC’s problems and everyone’s. When a few high-profile Metro crashes, caused generally by human incompetence and a poorly-designed system, made headlines, Mikulski sprung into action, and for three years, she’s been trying to foist federal safety standards onto subway systems that just do not need them.

Finally — and unfortunately — she succeeded this year, and the new transportation bill contains the National Public Transportation Safety Program. As with many federal mandates, these underfunded requirements will put some burden on local transit agencies. Once President Obama signs the Transportation Bill, the Secretary of Transportation will promulgate interim safety standards and a certification process. State agencies that want federal dollars will have to comply with these regulations or else forfeit the federal investments.

As a carrot, Mikulski has oh-so-generously dangled a whopping $66 million to be split up in whatever ways Ray LaHood deems necessary to help transit agencies to adopt the safety regulations. It’s a laughable contribution, but the Senator from Maryland didn’t seem to care.

“My promises made are promises kept,” she said in a statement. “After the tragic crash in June 2009, I promised two things to the workers at Metro and my constituents that ride Metro. One, I would deliver the $150 million in dedicated funding for Metro’s capital improvements in the annual spending bill which I have done every year. Two, pass legislation giving U.S. Department of Transportation the authority it needs to establish safety standards for metro systems across the country. Today, this legislation delivers on that promise. We always say a faithful nation will never forget. Then we move on and nothing is ever done. Well, not this time and not with this Senator.”

It’s hard to get around such woeful tunnel blindness. Mikulski and her fellow representatives seem to think that Washington’s problem is everyone’s when clearly it is not. So because their local papers featured stories of WMATA’s inept practices, they think everyone needs some help. Now, our MTA will likely be burdened with mandates it can’t fund and rules that limit future rolling stock upgrades. Our subway cars, already too heavy, may need to be heavier, slower and clunkier all because Washington, DC, couldn’t better manage its employees.

It’s telling that all representatives in praise of these standards cite to Washington’s accident record. In New York, we’re far less concerned with such safety issues but we’re going to have to pay anyway. Sometimes, no policy might be better than a bad one.

In a sense, I offered up yesterday’s post on the progress on the Penn Station Access project on its own when, in reality, it came out of the larger context of a City Council hearing on intra-city mobility. Noting that reverse commuting and non-Manhattan-based job centers are growing, the Council’s Transportation Committee wanted to know what exactly the MTA was doing to help improve access throughout the city. After all, while Manhattan is the biggest driver of jobs, other areas are growing rapidly.

“More workers are commuting from Brooklyn to Queens, from the Bronx to Westchester, from Staten Island to New Jersey or Brooklyn than ever before and yet our city’s transit infrastructure has not kept pace,” Transportation Committee Chairman James Vacca said. “If it means that a person is going to take three buses, that person is likely to get into a car.”

In response to Vacca’s question, officials from the MTA took the opportunity to talk up the plans to beef up Metro-North service in the Bronx. Already, the commuter rail line is seeing rampant growth, and while we may have to wait the better part of a decade if we’re lucky, adding more stations will further help New Yorkers get where they need to be. It’s not really enough though, and it’s definitely not a fast enough solution.

First, Metro-North isn’t intended to be an intra-city transportation network. It’s designed to bring commuters from the suburbs to the city’s job and entertainment centers. Fares are significantly higher on Metro-North than on the subways, and stations are much further apart. Adding more stations in the Bronx may help the locals, but it be a disservice for the core Metro-North commuters trying to reach Midtown. The MTA may have to consider overhauling the City Ticket system and the entire fare structure if it intends for Metro-North to serve as urban transportation.

Second, promising Metro-North improvements some time after East Side Access is completed in 2019 isn’t fast enough. The city’s job patterns are showing decentralized growth now, today in 2012, and they have been for more than a few years. We can’t wait another seven or 10 or 15 years for Metro-North to amble its way through four or six stations in the Bronx.

The answer, despite my lukewarm embrace of it, is a faster and more creative approach toward Select Bus Service. For reasons unknown, the MTA and New York City’s Department of Transportation have treated borough borders as though they are immutable and uncrossable. Select Bus Service routes currently in service and on the drawing board rather cross from one borough into the next. They serve to deliver isolated commutes to the subway faster, but they don’t bring people to job centers. Where’s the SBS route from the far reaches of Brooklyn to JFK? Where are the radial routes from Jamaica Hospital? Where’s the bus from the Bronx to LaGuardia?

If the City and MTA want to bring more Metro-North stations to the Bronx, by all means, they should do so. It shouldn’t be the only solution to new job patterns and commuter demands. Buses can offer a flexible long-term solution, and it can be an interim one. Those bus routes could one day be replaced with a higher-capacity rail system. For now, though, we’re suffering from a strange borough-based territoriality and a lack of drive, urgency and creativity when it comes to adjusting our public transit system to new commuting patterns.

In a sense, the New York region’s rail transportation has stalled out. New York City Transit and PATH cooperate only in a minimal sense of the word while the LIRR, Metro-North, New Jersey Transit and Amtrak would seemingly rather be caught dead than sharing or fighting together for precious funds and resources. So we’re left with infrastructure that doesn’t expand. We can add a few tunnels and some stations, but truly transformative projects do not happen.

Recently, after years of talking about the ARC Tunnel and now a Gateway Tunnel, the region’s transit leaders have started to take notice of this problem, and MTA head Joe Lhota has begun to speak out against it. At the RPA’s conference earlier this week, he issued a call for unity. “Right now, we’re as Balkanized as you can possibly imagine,” he said. “We need to find a way to coordinate that.”

Transportation Nation’s Jim O’Grady had more:

New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority Chairman Joe Lhota told a conference of transportation professionals that the only hope for moving more people under the Hudson River between Manhattan and New Jersey is for the area’s commuter railroads to set aside their traditional enmity and work better together…

Lhota tossed out three ideas, each aimed at boosting capacity at Penn Station in Manhattan…He said the station’s 21 platforms should all be made to accommodate 10-car trains, which would mean lengthening some of them. He also said that the railroads using the station—Amtrak, New Jersey Transit and Long Island Rail Road—should do a better job of sharing platform and tunnel space…

Lhota’s third suggestion was the most ambitious. He said the three railroads—plus the MTA’s Metro-North line, which connects Manhattan to Connecticut and several downstate New York counties—should use each other’s tracks. In other words, trains should flow throughout the region in a way that sends them beyond their historic territory. For example, a train from Long Island could arrive in Penn Station and, instead of sitting idly until its scheduled return trip, move on to New Jersey. That way, trains would spend less time tying up platforms, boosting the station’s capacity.

For many transit advocates in the area, these are common-sense proposals that have been on the table for years, if not decades. Barring a new tunnel — and that may still be at least a decade away — these ideas may help alleviate some of the rail problems plaguing the area. The other problem, of course, is one of funding, and to that end, Lhota wants some political action as well.

“There’s been an absence of leadership on transportation in this country since the creation of the Port Authority,” he said. “I would imagine you know that both the president and former Governor Romney come to the New York metropolitan area and raise hundreds of millions of dollars. Not once is anybody talking to them while they’re in New York about the critical need for transportation. We’re losing that effort. So we may be losing this entire political campaign. We need to make it a big issue.”

If we want to see needed upgrades, improvements and expansions any time soon, that we do. That we do.

Over the years, I’ve mentioned the ways in which the federal government overreacts when it comes to rail safety. High-profile train accidents are so few and far between that the feds seem to deem them great failures that require immediate legislative responses. If only our representatives were so attuned to the problems of pedestrian safety.

Anyway, a few years ago, a train accident in California that caused the deaths of 25 passengers set off a flurry of action. Investigators determined that the train operator was texting while driving and failed to stop at a red light. The solution: Require all rail roads to implement Positive Train Control, a costly technology that doesn’t really even exist in a form usable by the most heavily trafficked commuter lines. Amtrak has spent an exorbitant amount of money on it and likely will not meet the federally-mandated 2015 deadline. The MTA is struggling with the unfunded mandate as well, The Post reported.

Jennifer Fermino had more:

A federally mandated safety program that will cost at least $750 million has forced the MTA to put off upgrades that would benefit millions of riders on the LIRR and Metro-North, The Post has learned. The improvements would have eased crowded train cars, reduced delays and increased parking spots, sources said. But instead, the MTA is being forced to spend money on a system called Positive Train Control, which must be installed by 2015. It’s even more outrageous because the agency has already spent $1 billion on safety upgrades that make Metro-North and LIRR the safest commuter railroads in the nation.

Still, to meet the deadline, the MTA has had to defer a host of rider-friendly projects. That includes signal upgrade work on Metro-North’s upper Harlem and Hudson lines, which would allow officials to run more trains in a shorter period of time and reduce delays. It will also defer the addition of electrical substations on the upper Harlem line, which will give officials the juice needed to run longer trains that would ease rider overcrowding. The Long Island Rail Road, meanwhile, has shelved plans to expand and add parking at busy stations…

The MTA’s preliminary estimates for PTC, which allows a computer to reduce a train’s speed in a number of situations, will cost $750 million for both railroads combined. But a recent MTA analysis found the true cost could soar to $1 billion, in part because the technology will have to be specially adapted to suit the nation’s two largest and busiest commuter rail systems. Adding to the cost, much of the software and hardware needed to install PTC in New York — which includes retrofitting 1,200 miles of track and 1,000 rail cars — hasn’t even been developed yet.

With many agencies looking at few options, price tags will be significantly higher than they should be as well. “All the railroads in the Northeast simultaneously are having to do the same thing in a very small industry, so there’s clearly going to be a lack of competition” Metro-North President Howard Permut said last week.

The MTA failed to get a exemption two years ago and will now lobby the FRA for a compliance extension to 2018. No matter the outcome, the authority will have to spend money it doesn’t really have on a technology it doesn’t need. And this is why I grow wary every time the feds start talking about subway safety regulations or rail standards. It’s a hindrance to good oversight and future growth.

Whether we recognize it overtly or not, competition is a key to New York City’s transit success. The MTA doesn’t necessarily care too much if bus ridership is down if the subways are capturing those trips, but if, for example, the combined New York City Transit ridership declines while some other mode share increases, Transit loses out on revenue. If auto trips increase, the New York City society on the whole loses as well due to the impact of increased congestion and decreasing environmental conditions. The equation grows a bit more complicated when bike trips enter the picture.

Over the past few years of the Bloomberg Administration, biking in New York City has taken center stage. Reimagining street space for pedestrians and cyclists is something the city can do without interference from Albany. We may need a “home rule” message to institute a congestion pricing scheme or enforce bus lanes with cameras, but city planners do not need such approval to reapportion space as they see fit. So where biking was once a rather terrifying proposition in the city, an ambitious expansion of dedicated bike lanes and traffic-calming measures had made cycling safer and saner.

For transit both with a capital T and without, the rise of biking is a mixed bag. Most folks cycling to work are doing so not at the expense of a car but at the expense of a MetroCard swipe. I’ve heard many stories of riders switching to pedal power who are fed up with slower and less frequent subway service, more crowded trains and more expensive fares. Now that the city has unveiled its initial plans for the ambitious bike-share network, we have an even better sense of what the future will hold in New York City.

The details have been covered extensively elsewhere, but I can summarize: In late July, the first bike-share stations will hit the streets, and by the end of the year, the city will have 420 docking stations in the southern half of Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn and Queens. The initial map — available here — clearly shows how the Citi Bank-sponsored initiative will, at first, compete with transit. By targeting Manhattan south of 59th Street and the readily-accessible areas in Queens and Brooklyn, the bike-share network readily imitates the subway system.

Over at his Spaciality blog, Steven Romalewski charted bike-share docking stations against distance from subway entrances and came up with the map below.

Click to enlarge.

He also offered up the following commentary:

Here are the stats:

• 89 locations (22%) between 14 and 250 feet (length of a typical Manhattan block);
• 117 kiosks (28%) between 250 and 750 feet (the average distance between Manhattan avenues);
• 97 kiosks (24%) between 750 and 1,320 ft (a quarter mile);
• 89 kiosks (22%) between 1,320 and 2,640 ft (a half mile); and
• 21 kiosks (5%) further than 2,640 feet.

(The percentages do not equal 100% due to rounding.)

Closest/furthest:

• The proposed kiosk closest to a subway entrance is in lower Manhattan, on the west side of Greenwich St near Rector St (ID 12364), 14 feet from the Rector St entrance to the 1 train.
• The kiosk furthest from a subway entrance is on Manhattan’s west side, in the Hudson River Greenway near West 40th Street (at the West Midtown Ferry Terminal; ID 12092), almost three-quarters of a mile (3,742 feet) from the 40th St entrance to the 42nd St/Port Authority Bus Terminal station.

In other words, half of the proposed kiosks are within an avenue of a subway entrance, one-quarter are within two avenues, and the rest are further away.

As Romalewski notes, a bike-share system is well designed if it works within the existing ideological framework of “first and last mile.” The bike-share isn’t supposed to be a replacement for transit; rather, it’s supposed to deliver people too and from transit in an cost-effective, efficient and quick manner. At some places, the early kiosks will do that; in other places, the first docking stations may make it easier for riders to eschew transit all together.

Eventually, as docking stations spread out to the areas of the city not so conveniently located to the Manhattan Central Business District, the “first and last mile” concept will become more important. Can bike share convince travelers in the areas of the city with poor transit connections to eschew their cars? Will potential drivers in Sheepshead Bay and beyond be willing to use bike-share to reach the B or Q instead of their cars to reach Manhattan? When we know the answer to those questions and can ascertain usage patterns, we’ll have a better sense of how bike share meshes with the transit network and how it competes as well.

At first, it will be tough to gauge the impact CitiBikes has on New York City Transit and mode share. It may, in fact, shift potential straphangers out of the subway. After all, it’s cheaper to join bike share than it is to buy monthly MetroCards, and many riders don’t often take particularly long trips. But eventually, bike share should increase transit usage as it brings people from isolated areas to the subway. If all goes well, bike share won’t compete with the subway system as much as it will enhance it. That last mile may wind up shorter yet.