Public Transit Policy

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.

Once upon a time, cities reached only as far as people could walk and horses could ride. In the early days of New York City, Washington Square Park was for the rich while Washington Heights was the country, far out of town. Slowly, the arrival of railroads changed that perspective.

At first, in the late 1880s, the elevated lines allowed folks to commute to downtown from 14th Street and beyond. By the dawn of the Twentieth Century, the subways started to open up even more frontiers. The Upper East and West Sides were no longer 90-minute elevated rides away from downtown. Instead, they were 25-minute subway rides away. As the subway expanded, the neighborhoods filled with people sprang up all over town. The jobs were concentrated in certain areas in Manhattan, but one could live a life by walking around the area near subway stops.

Cars, of course, changed the city landscape as well. Now, even the areas with no subway access weren’t that far away, and the suburbs become the idealized American Dream: two cars, a garage and a backyard. Those living in Westchester and Long Island and New Jersey could make it into the city. Slowly, the city had to accomodate cars. Highways tore apart neighborhoods, and sidewalk widths decreased to make room for parking. Urban population decreased.

Today, the pendulum has seemingly swung back the other way. Urban life is more desirable than ever, and more of the U.S. population than ever before resides in cities. Still, the battle goes on between cars and pedestrians. The livable streets crowd say that cars are a drain on urban resources. They take up space and cause pollution and congestion. Our investment priorities should be in mass transit in order to free up road space for vital trips and discourage auto use. Others say the car is a personal choice and one that should not be taken away from Americans. Where I fall on this divide is obvious.

Over the weekend, The Times looked at the new focus on pedestrians in cities except they do so through the lens of Europe. Elisabeth Rosenthal wrote:

While American cities are synchronizing green lights to improve traffic flow and offering apps to help drivers find parking, many European cities are doing the opposite: creating environments openly hostile to cars. The methods vary, but the mission is clear — to make car use expensive and just plain miserable enough to tilt drivers toward more environmentally friendly modes of transportation.

Cities including Vienna to Munich and Copenhagen have closed vast swaths of streets to car traffic. Barcelona and Paris have had car lanes eroded by popular bike-sharing programs. Drivers in London and Stockholm pay hefty congestion charges just for entering the heart of the city. And over the past two years, dozens of German cities have joined a national network of “environmental zones” where only cars with low carbon dioxide emissions may enter…

While some American cities — notably San Francisco, which has “pedestrianized” parts of Market Street — have made similar efforts, they are still the exception in the United States, where it has been difficult to get people to imagine a life where cars are not entrenched, [Stanford’s Lee] Schipper said.

I found this article to be a strange one because of the way it almost fetishizes “pedestrianization.” Those kooky Europeans in Zurich where 90 percent of elected officials ride public transit might be deprioritizing cars, but that’s just a European thing, says the article. In fact, Rosenthal seems to miss a major component of congestion alleviation efforts: It’s all about economics.

As cars sit in traffic, they impact the environment around them. I waste time inching across Canal Street or up 6th Ave., and time, as we know, is money. Meanwhile, my car isn’t operating at optimal speeds, and I have to spend more on gas while my emissions increase. Furthermore, constant overuse leads to disrepair, and the money invested in roads could be better utilized by promoting vibrant urban life. It’s more than just about the crazy ideas.

Ultimately, road development has been driving American transportation policy for six decades, and that likely won’t slow down. We can’t get high-speed rail off the ground, and transit agencies throughout the country struggle for money. Until Americans embrace city life and recognize what that means for our transportation policies, efforts at curtailing car use in dense urban environments not initially designed for cars will be met with skepticism. It’s too European for us.

It’s clear from their words that officials within the Obama Administration are well aware of the funding crisis facing local transit authorities. Across the country, vital agencies are short billions of dollars for necessary maintenance, repairs and upgrades, and yet, dollars trickle out of Washington at a snail’s pace. It’s easier and more palatable for the government to spend billions bailing out the auto industry than it is for them to invest in transit operations.

If the Obama Administration has its way — a long shot for sure — that tied could turn. In comments yesterday at the American Public Transportation Association meeting, Federal Transit Administrator Peter Rogoff said that he wants to see transit agencies stem their economic tide. “We are trying to deal with all those challenges at once,” he said. “Not just maintenance but also on expansion, also to provide increased formula funds.”

Rogoff spoke at length about the age of American transit networks and the need to modernize. “There are power substation facilities serving the SEPTA system that have equipment in it dating from the 19-teens and 20’s. Thank heaven they overbuilt those systems back in the 20’s because they actually have been able to endure and serve the service,” he said. “But it is, sometimes it is rather spooky when you see how many tens of thousands of daily commuters that are dependent on the continuing reliability of systems that are approaching 50, 60, 70 years-old in some of these cities. That’s why we really want to surge forward with the investment because some of those systems are going to have to be replaced you cannot keep milking them along another half century.”

Transportation Nation offers more from Rogoff’s press conference:

The tension between just fixing everything that’s broken — or about to break — and all the new transit that’s needed to really give Americans mobility options was fully on display at an APTA press conference at its annual rail conference Monday. Federal Transit Administrator Peter Rogoff argued: “We want to provide the American public in the maximum number of communities with real transit choices, and give them the opportunity to keep more money in their wallet rather than hand it over at the gas pump, but in order to do that the transit service has to be available, it has to be safe and clean. It has to be reliable and desirable.”

…But before thinking about making transit a real option for most, if not all Americans, Rogoff said, there’s a $50 billion hole that needs filling. In the seven largest systems, which carry 80 percent of the rail transit passenger load in the U.S. – including New York, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Washington and Los Angeles — there is a $50 billion backlog of major maintenance needs. Rogoff said the FTA has proposed combing funding streams to “rifle shot” resources to where they are most needed.

“Reliable transit is really the difference between getting home in time to have dinner as a family, or not getting home in time to supervise homework, or not being able to pick your kid up on time from day care, all of these core quality of life issue, which are critical if we are going to entice more people on transit. But for for the millions of transit riders who do not have an automobile option these investments are critical to maintaining a viable transit system,” Rogoff said.

Now, this push to convince Congress to approve billions in transit assistance is one we’ve heard before. Senator Chuck Schumer has worked to wring dollars out of DC while Obama’s officials have spoken about it for years. The money, of course, never materializes. Despite Rogoff’s strident words, I can’t get my hopes up. We’ve seen no amount of leadership on federal assistance.

Meanwhile, on a local level, transit funding is under attack. A growing chorus of voices wants to remove $1.3 billion in the form of the payroll mobility tax from the MTA’s budget. The money to replace those lost funds won’t just materialize, and eventually, we’ll have a transit funding crisis — that is, if we don’t already. The time for talk is over. Where’s the action, from D.C., Albany or even City Hall?

While discussing the suburban payroll tax revolt last night, I briefly alluded to USB’s looming decision to move back to Manhattan. I went to spend a little bit more on that story tonight as it highlights the importance of both fast transit for the suburbs and the allure of being close to it all.

The story goes a little bit something like this: In 1996, UBS garnered headlines when it became one of the first major financial institutions to move its headquarters out to Stamford, Connecticut. Thanks to some generous tax breaks by the state as well as the promise of subsidized office construction, the company parked its trading floor, the largest in the world, nearby the Stamford Metro-North stop.

Now, they want to move back. And why? Because they’re just too far away from where people live. Charles V. Bagli has more and his writing is very telling:

Now, though, UBS is having buyer’s remorse. It turns out that a suburban location has become a liability in recruiting the best and brightest young bankers, who want to live in Manhattan or Brooklyn, not in Stamford, Conn., which is about 35 miles northeast of Midtown. The firm has also discovered that it would be better to be closer to major clients in the city.

As a result, UBS is seriously considering a reverse migration that would bring its investment banking division and up to 2,000 bankers and traders back to Wall Street and a new skyscraper at the rebuilt World Trade Center, according to real estate executives and city officials.

“They just can’t hire the bankers and traders they need,” said one landlord who has spoken with UBS but requested anonymity so as not to alienate a potential tenant.

A piece in today’s Times delves even further into the employee reaction to this news. “I live in Manhattan, so I do the reverse commute,” Jon Gimpel, a UBS employe, said. “The train ride is like 45 minutes, then I ride my bike through Central Park to get home. If UBS moves back to Manhattan, I’ll save $300 a month in train fare and major aggravation. Awesome.”

And that’s the truth of it. Right now, people — especially younger people — want to be close to the city. They want to be able to commute to work with one fare card or walk or bike. They don’t the aggravation of a long train ride to and from work every day. They want, in a nutshell, the pinnacle of transit-oriented development.

Now don’t get me wrong; for some people, the Connecticut suburbs are a few place to live. One of my friends found himself working for a financial institution up there around four or five years ago, and he made it work. But the nightlife was very limited, and the restaurants varied from overpriced to mediocre. And transit-oriented development can work in the suburbs if the jobs draw from the resident base. Here, though, the jobs drew from Manhattan, and that doesn’t work.

I doubt UBS’ actions are going to signal some grand trend of big companies repatrioting to urban areas, but it’s worth dwelling on development priorities. The ‘burbs might be willing to grant the tax break, but the people want an urban life, transit and all. Once-an-hour commuter rail just doesn’t cut it.

A photo I took in March shows just how poorly maintained New York City's roads are. (Photo by Benjamin Kabak)

Every now and then, I’ll volunteer to help some friends move. I grew up driving in New York City and don’t find myself fazed by the traffic and manic drivers as out-of-towners often are. Still, driving around the city is no easy task, and yesterday, I saw first-hand just how bad conditions have become.

My route was a fairly straightforward one yesterday. We started in Park Slope, had to make a pick-up in Midtown Manhattan and then had to travel a few miles into Queens before circling back to Brooklyn. I was tasked with driving the U-Haul van, and while these Ford vehicles don’t have great shocks, we felt every single pothole around. On the BQE and at Tillary St., rutted roads create hazardous conditions; in Manhattan and on the side streets of Brooklyn, potholes are everywhere.

As I drove, I reflected on the state of the roads and how indicative they are of the general transportation policy in the city and state right now. At its most basic level, the purpose of a government is to fund, maintain and repair things we deem to be common goods. Because of free-rider problems, that has always included roads. After all, if my neighbors want to pay for road improvements, why should I contribute anything and not just free-ride onto their efforts?

Right now, though, the government seems to be failing at even simple road maintenance. At a time when municipality spending is tied up in health care and pension costs, the roads — that most basic element of government responsible — are falling apart. In New York City, at least, one might argue that the subways should replace roads because a much higher percentage of the city’s population rely on subways than rely on the road, but the point remains the same. The city and state cannot afford to fund the subways either. After driving around three boroughs today, I’m almost inclined to say that the subways are now in better shape than the roads, and that’s saying a lot.

But beyond the condition of the road, something else jumped out at me: From around 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. on a Monday, the roads were absolutely clogged with people. Our full route required three legs, none of them smoother than the other. We had to travel around 9 miles from Brooklyn to Midtown, and that took an hour. We had to go from Midtown into Queens, and that took an hour. We had to go from Queens to Brooklyn, and that took only around 40 minutes. That doesn’t count the time I spent circling blocks in Park Slope looking for a final parking spot.

Everywhere in Manhattan, the roads were crammed with cars. Across the Manhattan Bridge, up to Houston, west to Sixth Ave. and north, traffic was stop-and-go. I’d hate to have to make this ride at Midtown, and it’s no stretch to say that the subway would have been faster. The ride east out of Queens to the Ed Koch Bridge was just as bad. Wall-to-wall delivery vans and trucks, taxis and passenger cars mar the roads.

All of this brings me to a simple conclusion: For the sanity of its drivers, for the sake of its roads, for the quality of its air, for the ability to drive around the city when necessary, New York needs a congestion pricing plan. Had we needed to pay an additional fee to drive through Manhattan yesterday but with the promise of fewer cars on the road, I gladly would have made that trade-off. If I knew, trucks weren’t going to back up on Canal St. from one end of the island to the other, if I knew getting across 59th St. to the bridge would be a faster ride with fewer one-person cars hogging up precious space, I would pay.

Ultimately, maintaining control over the quality of the roads involves significant investments. The city has to keep the roads in good repair, but it also must figure out how to prioritize the use of those roads. Right now, things have run amok in New York City, and the inmates seem to control transportation policy. No one is winning that battle.