The Antiplanner was in Portland Wednesday to talk about light rail, which is why there was no post yesterday. I’ll be in Seattle tomorrow to again talk about rail transit. As of 2016, Sound Transit has spend $335 million (in 2016 dollars) on commuter buses that carry 64,000 weekday riders and $2.1 billion on commuter trains that carry just 16,600 weekday riders. Another example of poor planning.
Meanwhile, New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority has blamed increasing subway delays on overcrowding, an explanation that raised the Antiplanner’s skepticism, partly because the city’s subway system carried far more riders during and after World War II and didn’t suffer similar delays.
Village Voice writer Aaron Gordon is also skeptical, noting that ridership has declined for the last two years but delays continue to increase. Instead, he blames the delays on a deliberate effort by MTA to slow trains down. For safety reasons, MTA has reduced speed limits in many parts of the system and imposed penalties on train operators when they exceed the limits. While the trains can theoretically meet the schedules at the reduced speeds, a tiny delay can cascade into serious problems.
In a follow-up article, Gordon argues that the MTA’s plan to restore the subway system will be ineffective as it is aimed at “preventing major incidents.” Yet such incidents cause relatively few delays.
On one hand, it is likely that the work MTA wants to do is essential to keep the trains running. On the other hand, the $836 million it wants to spend on this plan is a drop in the bucket compared with what the system really needs to keep going. Although the MTA is less forthcoming than other agencies about its maintenance backlog, it is likely in the tens of billions of dollars, not just billions. So less than a billion probably isn’t even enough to keep the system from deteriorating even further.
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Someone else who was skeptical about MTA’s plans was New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who had so little faith in the MTA’s experts that he decided to have a “genius contest” to see who could come up with the best ideas for fixing the city’s transit system. This wasn’t a mere publicity stunt: contest prizes amounted to millions of dollars.
The winning idea, which earned attorney Craig Avedisian an incredible $330,000 was (drumroll please) . . . run longer trains. If a given subway line has platforms long enough for ten cars, run fourteen car trains and have the first ten “A” cars stop at half the stops and the last ten “B” cars stop at the other half. People getting on and off at A stops could ride the first four cars; people getting on and off at B stops could ride the last four; while people getting on A or B and off at B or A could ride the middle six.
It is unbelievable that anyone would think this idea is worth $330,000. For one thing, most riders will simply use the middle six cars so they don’t have to worry about whether their stop is an A or B stop, so those cars will continue to be overcrowded. For another, as subway watchdog Benjamin Kabak observes, signaling systems are designed to have following trains stop a safe distance behind trains stopped in a station, but those systems will all have to be reinstalled to allow for trains that have four cars sticking out the backs of the stations. Finally, the plan still requires MTA to spend billions more buying new cars. Avedisian estimates total costs of $11.6 billion, which the MTA doesn’t have.
I have a much simpler way to reduce overcrowding: remove most of the seats from the subway cars. A seated passenger takes about 2-1/2 times as much room as a standing passenger, so removing 30 seats from a car increases the car’s capacity by 45 people. The average New York City subway car has 47 seats and room for about 88 standees, so leaving 17 seats behind for elderly and disabled passengers would increase each car’s capacity by a third. That’s not quite as good as the 40 percent increase resulting from Avedision’s solution, but it’s a lot less expensive. I’d ask Governor Cuomo to send the check to me care of the Cato Institute, but MTA has already thought of the idea.
First they blame transit service delays on overcrowding, overcrowding is the result of density.
Then before that they say density is good because it promotes efficient transit use.
Mega-structures per se deform urban life by placing too great a human footprint on a tiny area. For one thing they tend to overload infrastructure, second they are out of scale with urbanism based on human neurology and cognition (living in densest urban surrounding is psychologically degrading and depressing) unless it’s psychologically pleasing (hence my talks about architecture and aesthetic)
Also they are out of scale with the resource and capital realities of the very near-future. I said it before, the era of “Big government” infrastructure is coming to a close. Because politically they’re far too busy circle jerking or finger pointing to adhere to a schedule of getting crucial work done. It’s run by the same political losers that ran HUD. Andrew Cuomo. The crisis is a clear result of his incompetence, his abysmal politics, and his odious personality. A secondary problem is the aging technology, which has been in dire need of repairs and upgrades for decades. Much of the system is so outdated that the MTA has to keep up custom manufacturing and repair facilities to make and fix parts that haven’t been mass-produced for 50 years or more. (Efforts to replace the ancient fixed-block signaling technology with a more modern version have been plugging along for years, but are nowhere near complete.)
A third problem is that of the larger American problem of hideously overpriced infrastructure. One recently completed minor subway expansion up New York’s Second Avenue (the tunnels for which were already half-dug back in the 1970s) was something like two to 20 times more expensive than similar European projects. Inefficient maintenance and capital spending are also a major factor behind the MTA’s consistent deficit problem — and outrageous prices push desperately needed upgrades further out of reach. The transit projects Cuomo does support are the classic type of brain-dead ideas that rich idiots who never ride public transit are constantly coming up with. He wants a wildly overpriced airport connector from JFK to downtown Manhattan — which isn’t just a terrible idea in general, it’s so bad that it wouldn’t even be any faster than almost all of the existing transit connections. He funded fancy new trains and an expensive cosmetic makeover of many stations instead of prioritizing basic functionality — which ironically included wireless internet in stations that stranded commuters have used lately to lambaste him on social media. The man just does not have a clue.
Plus we don’t have the spare financial resources to invest in it.
If overcrowding isn’t the problem causing delays, why are you suggesting a “fix” to overcrowding to reduce delays?
Much of the signal system in the subways of New York is ancient, and in serious need of complete replacement. This is not cheap, but apparently many of the delays and service breakdowns are due to issues with the signals.
And not maintaining the signal system is a bad idea, as WMATA learned after the 2009 fatal Metrorail crash at Fort Totten that was due at least in part to a lack of maintenance of the signals and related infrastructure.
The “winning idea” of running longer trains is not a good one, and I think it could be hazardous to subway patrons and workers.