Bus vs. Rail in Manhattan

The formerly free-market Manhattan Institute, which has lately become a shill for transit and other big-government subsidies, has taken a stand against spending $10 billion on a bus terminal in New York City. The only problem is that, instead of the bus terminal, the Manhattan Institute proposes to spend multiple tens of billions of dollars on new underground rail transit lines connecting Manhattan with New Jersey.

The Port Authority Midtown Bus Terminal. Photo by Hudconja.

The 1937 opening of the Lincoln Tunnel led to hundreds of buses roaming the streets of Manhattan after bringing commuters and other travelers from New Jersey. To reduce congestion, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey built a midtown bus terminal near the Manhattan entrance of the tunnel in 1950. That terminal cost $24 million, less than $210 million in today’s dollars. Continue reading

Let the Banks Pay for the Subway

Everyone knows that New York City is the heart of the United States, Manhattan is the heart of New York City, and the subways are the arteries that keep that heart pumping. Thus, when the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) warns that it will have to make “doomsday cuts” if Congress doesn’t give it another $12 billion, and that such cuts would “devastate the city for years to come,” people listen.

At the same time, New York officials say that subway riders should not have to suffer any fare increases to keep the system running. After all, the whole country benefits, so why should the lowly subway riders have to pay the full cost of their rides?

But who really benefits from the New York City subway? The extensive subway network has allowed Manhattan to grow to and maintain population and job densities found nowhere else in the country. So Manhattan property owners benefit, but how does that benefit the rest of the country? Six years ago, the land alone in Manhattan was estimated to be worth more than $1.7 trillion, which is more than $120 million an acre, and a considerable portion of this value is due to the subway system. Continue reading

Blowing Up the MTA

New York governor Andrew Cuomo says he wants to “blow up the MTA.” He is angry because MTA had decided to shut down the L subway line, one of the most heavily used lines in Brooklyn, for 15 months for repairs without telling him that it could have done the repairs while still running the trains, albeit with some delays.

Cuomo claims he went along with the proposed shutdown, which some called “L-mageddon,” until an angry constituent asked him why he hadn’t considered the alternative of keeping the train going on a limited basis. He had replied that he was relying on the experts to tell him what could be done, but the constituent pointed out that the experts said the state couldn’t replace the Tappan Zee Bridge, but he found a way to do so.

So Cuomo went back to the MTA which said yes, it was possible to keep the trains going while doing the repairs. After adopting that plan, Cuomo told the New York Daily News that he wants to “blow up” the MTA for not being accountable to anyone. Continue reading

Does New York MTA Have Enough Money?

Conner Harris of the Manhattan Institute argues that New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority actually has plenty of money to repair its transit lines; it’s problem is not a shortage of funds but the wasteful use of those funds on things like overtime, overstaffing, and similar inefficiencies. While those problems are real, and fixing them should be a high priority, the Antiplanner isn’t convinced that this alone will solve MTA’s financial woes.

Harris, for example, points to the fact that MTA’s operating expenses grew by 58 percent in the last decade, while inflation was just 18 percent. But he claims this increase came “though it scarcely expanded service.” In fact, as measured by vehicle-revenue miles, New York City subway service grew by a coincidental 58 percent between 2007 and 2017. Update: Mr. Harris kindly pointed out that I am in error on this; in fact, subway service grew by only 3 percent.

Harris also points to lower costs in London and Paris, noting that New York subway operations cost about 60 percent more, per vehicle mile, than those in London or Paris. I’m not sure about Paris, but London subway cars are a lot smaller than those in New York, so you would expect costs to be lower. Continue reading

Paying for New York’s Transit System

Last week, the Antiplanner observed that the New York City subway system has a $40 billion maintenance backlog, a $40 billion debt, and a $20 billion shortfall in pension and health care funds. On top of this, CBS News reports that the Metro North and Long Island Railroad commuter-rail systems have a $20 billion maintenance backlog. As I read MTA’s budgets, it is paying off its debt at the rate of about $2.8 billion a year ($1.5 blllion of which is interest).

If the debt service is funded, MTA still needs another $80 billion as soon as possible; call it $4 billion a year. As noted in the CBS News story above, New York politicians are diligently looking for the funds using the time-honored principle of taxing the powerless. The problem with that is that the powerless usually have little money to tax. Continue reading

Can New York City Afford Its Subways?

This is a question the Antiplanner asked almost exactly one year ago, but it comes up again because New York governor Andrew Cuomo and mayor Bill de Blasio are still arguing who should pay to repair the subways. Those subways are contained entirely within New York City. They were built by New York City. They are owned by New York City. Yet New York City mayor Bill de Blasio argues that all of the projected $37 billion cost of restoring the subways to a state of good repair should be paid by the state, not the city.

de Blasio’s reasoning apparently is that, although the city owns the subways, it has leased them to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, a state agency that also manages commuter trains and other transit lines that connect New York City with suburbs in Connecticut and New York. de Blasio claims to fear that, if the city gives any money at all to the MTA, it will spend some of that money on transit outside of the city.

New York governor Andrew Cuomo is willing to meet de Blasio halfway, agreeing that the state will pay for half the cost if the city picks up the other half. “We’ve lost a year because the city wouldn’t pay” its share, he says. Comments on the Gothamist article reporting Cuomo’s statement show that New York City residents don’t think much of this argument. Continue reading

What’s Causing New York Subway Delays?

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. Continue reading

Bringing Soviet Planning to New York City

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio wants to bring the same policies that worked so well in the Soviet Union, and more recently in Venezuela, to New York City. “If I had my druthers, the city government would determine every single plot of land, how development would proceed,” he says. “And there would be very stringent requirements around income levels and rents.”

As shown in the urban planning classic, The Ideal Communist City, soviet planners also believed they were smart enough to know how every single plot of land in their cities should be used. The cities built on their planning principles were appallingly ugly and unlivable. They were environmentally sustainable only so long as communism kept people too poor to afford cars and larger homes.

If de Blasio believes in this planning system so much, why doesn’t he implement it in New York City? The biggest obstacle, he says, is “the way our legal system is structured to favor private property.” He blames housing affordability problems on greedy developers who only build for millionaires. Continue reading

It’s the Deferred Maintenance, Stupid

A couple of weeks ago, there was a flurry of stories blaming New York subway problems on overcrowding. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) presented data showing that the number of delays caused by crowding had tripled since 2014, while the number caused by track maintenance or signal problems had remained relatively constant.

The MTA also helpfully pointed out that the number of trips taken on the subway had grown from 1 billion a year in 1990 to 1.8 billion in 2015, while the number of miles of subway lines and subway cars had remained relatively constant. That sounded persuasive, but the Antiplanner was suspicious. This explanation conveniently shifts the blame from MTA’s mismanagement to subway users and also invites the solution of giving MTA a lot of money to increase capacities–a solution MTA would be very happy to implement.

Besides, New York subway ridership first reached 1.8 billion way back in 1926, when the system had many fewer route miles than it has today. Construction of the Independent system, which is more than a quarter of the total, began in 1932 and wasn’t completed until 1940. Subway riders in 1926 complained the trains were crowded, but delays due to that crowding weren’t a significant problem. Continue reading

Transit Ridership Down? Blame Uber

New York City subways are becoming less reliable, with delays growing from 28,000 per month in 2012 to 70,000 in 2016. To fix the problems, MTA did a lot of maintenance work in 2016, mainly at night or on the weekends.

Ridership data for 2016 are now in, and they show that weekday ridership grew slightly but weekend ridership fell by 3 percent. So who do they blame? Uber. Isn’t it more likely that the decline was due to all the maintenance work done over the weekends?

Perhaps so, but it is still possible that Uber is having an impact. In 2015, New York subways carried an average of around 4.4 million trips on a typical weekend day, so a 3 percent decline is about 133,000. Based on an analysis by Todd Schneider, Uber and Lyft carried about 141,000 trips on January 9, 2016 and 270,000 trips on January 7, 2017 (both of which are Saturdays), an increase of about 129,000. Taxi ridership declined by about 32,000 in that time period, so it appears possible that Uber and Lyft may have captured up to 97,000 riders away from the subway, or about 73 percent of the subway’s weekend decline. We don’t know that all of those 97,000 people would have taken the subway, so the actual capture is probably less.
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