Staten Island

Since the MTA eliminated fare-collection agents on the Staten Island Railway as a cost-measure in the 1990s, the agency has seen its SIR-related revenues dry up. That will change tomorrow when the agency begins collecting fares at Tompkinsville as part of a $6.9 million program designed to turn around the SIR’s money-losing ways.

For years, the SIR has been unique among the city’s transit options. The MTA has collected fares at only the St. George Ferry Terminal and the Staten Island Yankees’ ballpark stops. Tompkinsville is but a half-mile away from the northern end of the line, and many customers are more than happy to hoof to avoid paying the fare. The MTA launched this project in 2008 with an eye toward completing it during the summer of 2009, but tomorrow — a few months late — the free ride will end.

As part of the Fare Collection Project, the agency has beefed up the Tompkinsville stop. Riders will now have a station house in which to wait as well as turnstiles to serve as the fare gates, cameras for safety and enforcement efforts, and fare vending and communications equipment. The agency says this move is expected to bring in approximately $702,000 annually, a 15 percent increase in total SIR fare revenue and will cut the estimated $3.4 million in operating losses incurred on Staten Island by more than 20 percent.

Staten Island residents looking to evade the fare could still choose to walk yet another three-quarters of a mile to the Stapleton stop. If a 25-minute walk from the ferry terminal is a better use of your time than simply paying a fare that is, at most, a $2.25 MetroCard swipe, then, time isn’t always money.

Earlier this year, the cars that run along Staten Island Railway, the city’s loneliest train route, came back from the Coney Island railyard all prettied up. To go along with a rehab, the cars all received new logo bullets to strengthen their ties to the SIR. That’s probably the best news to come from this railway all year.

In an article that reads like a laundry list of bad news, Maura Yates from the Staten Island Advance went through the trials and tribulations of the SIR earlier this week. We start with ridership.

More than any other MTA-run train line in the city, the Staten Island Railway is very dependent on the economy. Because the line doesn’t offer up any connections off of Staten Island besides at the ferry terminal where boats head to Lower Manhattan, when demand for access to Wall St., when firms stay laying off workers, ridership drops. After serving a record 4.4 million passengers in 2008, ridership is down six percent through 2009.

To make matters worse for Staten Island, soon more riders will have to pay. Currently, passengers can travel for free between Tottenville and Tompkinsville with fare collection at the ferry terminal only. In January, to combat the rising number of passengers who walk to and from Tompkinsville, the MTA will begin fare collection efforts at the railway’s second most northern station. Whether or not this will negatively impact ridership remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, Yates profiles a few projects bogged down with problems:

Unveiled with much fanfare in 2007, a $1.75 million security monitoring system, including surveillance cameras and a push-button intercom on the wall of the platform waiting area, was first installed at the Old Town station in Grasmere, the site of a brutal mugging in 2005. Funded by City Councilman James Oddo and former state Sen. John Marchi, the system was originally expected to be rolled out to all stations along the 15-mile route by the end of this year.

The closed circuit television monitoring system is still functional, and has already been credited with at least two arrests, including a purse-snatching at Old Town, said Railway chief John Gaul. But plastic bags are now covering the intercom button, which was disconnected after problems with the fiber optic cables connecting the stations to a monitoring center at St. George. The project remains a top priority and the system is expected to be back up and running by next October, Gaul said.

Started in 2007, the project to re-tile the 60-year-old walls of the St. George station and lay a new terrazzo floor was sidelined after it was determined the aging floor needed to be reinforced after decades of pounding by commuters. Borough President James Molinaro offered $1 million to assist in the rehabilitation, to modernize the rail station to match the new ferry terminal upstairs. “A year from now, the rider should experience a seamless transition,” Gaul said.

One day, perhaps, the subway will reach to Staten Island and offer up a speedier ride to the rest of New York City. A harbor tunnel would certainly qualify as a megaproject. For now, though, the Staten Island Railway is suffering through the same problems delays and technological upgrades as other ongoing subway projects. Alas.

Poor Staten Island. It is, by far, the most transit-neglected borough in the city. Once envisioned as a destination for a subway line spurring off the R in Brooklyn, the city’s least connected borough enjoys a slew of buses and one fare-less subway line that runs from the ferry terminal to Tottenville along the island’s south side.

Now, though, Staten Island’s borough representative to the MTA Board wants to increase transit offerings on the car-dependent island. Allen Cappelli told the Staten Island Advance’s Maura Yates over the weekend that the time is now for SI-based transit improvements. From the sound of it, the SI transit outlook may actually be a rosy one. Yates writes:

With Albany’s approval of a bailout package back in May that included a payroll tax and other revenue sources to help the MTA address its forecasted $1.2 billion budget deficit, the MTA board can now turn its attention back to moving forward with much-needed projects, including the borough’s proposed light rail system.

“I’d like to see us have rail access,” Cappelli said. “We’ve got to get cars off the streets. We’ve got to give people a real way to commute, because we’re not going to be able to handle the cars to a greater extent than what we’re doing now.”

With projections of population growth that will further tax the borough’s clogged road network over the next two decades, “We’ve got to plan this now, or 20 years from now, somebody will ask, ‘Why didn’t they do anything about this’?” Cappelli said. He said he hopes funding will be included in the MTA’s 20-year capital plan.

Cappelli has made progress on the bus front as well, with Staten Island receiving the first of the city’s brand new hybrid-electric local buses. The new buses will eventually account for more than half of the borough’s local bus fleet, he said.

Staten Island is ripe for transit experimentation. The borough could really benefit from a light rail system and from legitimate bus rapid transit plans. Ideally, of course, those BRT routes would connect into and through Brooklyn and Manhattan for faster commutes. The light rail would be an intra-borough mode of transit.

In the end, the MTA should probably look at reviving the Brooklyn-to-SI underground subway connection. While the project would be expensive and wouldn’t become a reality for decades, a subway to Staten Island would do wonders for the mobility of a part of the city often considered the forgotten borough.

As the MTA stares down the barrel of a financial crisis, the agency has, rightfully, adopted a new motto: no fare left behind. As tangible talk of a fare hike swirls, New York City Transit has already beefed up its fare-enforcement efforts, and now the authority is putting Staten Island on notice.

The Staten Island Railway is one of the quirkier aspects of the MTA’s transit network. It runs for 13 miles from the Staten Island Ferry terminal at St. George south to Tottenville. The railway features a daily ridership of around 17,000. And very few of them pay a fare.

The SIR, you see, only has fare-collection points at the ferry terminal and the Staten Island Yankees’ ballpark stop a few blocks away. Otherwise, the ride is free, and many riders enter and exit at Tompkinsville, a half-mile walk away from the ferry terminal.

But those halcyon days will soon be over. As CityRoom reported late last week, the MTA is set to introduce turnstiles at Tompkinsville too. Gone are the free rides. Jake Mooney has the details:

The Tompkinsville station is being renovated to install turnstiles, which means that come next summer, riders will have to pay to get off the train there, too. The closest free stop to the ferry would then be Stapleton, a little over a mile away, and whether people will get off and walk from there is an open question…

John G. Gaul, the chief officer of the railway, provided some background in an interview on Thursday about the decision to add fares at Tompkinsville — a decision that was not greeted too warmly this week.

First, Mr. Gaul said, the shift was motivated, “in large measure, but not totally,” by the desire to get $2 apiece from some of those people who are now getting off the train to avoid paying. That, he said, would yield about $661,000 more in annual revenue — about a 10 percent increase over the line’s current revenue.

Gaul goes on to explain how MetroCards rendered the SIR’s manual, on-board fare collection efforts moot. With the technological advances of the MTA, apparently, they could no longer collect tokens from the riders. Supervision dropped; crime rose; and now the MTA is, eleven years after introducing MetroCards, taking the time to address this problem.

The efforts at Tompkinsville — some HEETs and closed-circuit security cameras — are something of a test run for the rest of the Staten Island Railway. If it succeeds in capturing more revenue, the MTA may expand the pilot program down the line. The only catch is that these renovations are going to cost $6.8 million and result in just, as Mooney reported, an additional $661,000 a year. It’ll take a while for the revenue to pay for the renovations, let alone standard operating costs.

Of course, the riders are begrudgingly accepting of the MTA’s efforts to collect the proper fare, but some of them plan to walk the mile from Stapleton to the ferry. While I admire the exercise and effort at which people will go to avoid the fare, at some point, the $2 — or less with a pay-per-ride discount or Unlimited MetroCard — seems like less of an effort. People will do anything for a buck or two in New York City.

The only New York City Transit rail line on which I’ve never ridden. (Photo by Chris Slaight / NYCSubway.org)

Yesterday’s discussion of Staten Island got me thinking more about the city’s forgotten borough. Did you know, for instance, that Staten Island nearly seceded from New York City in the early 1990s?

But civil politics are neither here nor there. We here to discuss the subway, and so we shall look at what one City Council member from Brooklyn is proposing: a subway tunnel from Brooklyn to Staten Island.

Say what? The MTA is already working on a rather lengthy tunnel down Second Ave. and a planned expansion westward of the 7 line. No way can they find the resources to build another massive project. Well, Lew Fidler thinks that for the environmental sake of the city, we should consider his plan. The Brooklyn Paper reports:

Here’s an idea whose time has come — again: How about a subway to Staten Island?…

In addition to a transit tunnel, Fidler supported a cross-Harbor freight tunnel and burying the BQE to open up the Sunset Park waterfront to parkland and economic development — both dreams of transit wonks. To pay for it, Fidler would levy a one-third-of-one-percent tax on all employer payrolls in the tri-state region.

“Congestion is a regional problem and requires a regional solution,” he told The Brooklyn Paper. “In order to get off Staten Island, residents have to use one fossil-fueled vehicle or another — car or bus. It’s ridiculous that the fastest-growing borough has no access to the rest of the city.”

In reality, Fidler’s proposal is a red herring, designed to stir up opposition to the congestion fee plan. But his statement, as far-fetched as it may be, brings us back to an era before anyone under the age of 75 was alive and kicking.

Back in the early decades of the Twentieth Century during post-Great War boom times for the City, the operators of the subway — the BRT company — wanted to build a rapid transit tunnel from Brooklyn to Staten Island. I’ll delve into the back story soon; the history told through articles in The New York Times is fascinating to any student of history of the New York City subways. But the short version is here.

The BRT started building the tunnel but entered bankruptcy in the mid-1920s. The city bailed out the subways but wanted no part in the tunnel construction to the then-isolated and very rural Staten Island. The tunnel — extended about 150 feet out in the harbor — has laid dormant under Owl’s Head Park ever since.

This tunnel surely would be a boon to Staten Island. But it’s not happening now, and it probably won’t happen ever. But we can all dream even our motives, like Fidler’s, are less than pure.