New York is far denser than any other large American city, with an average of 27,000 people per square mile compared with 2,500 to 4,000 for most American cities. Although the city is criss-crossed by an extensive subway system, there are still some neighborhoods that are more than half a mile from a subway station.
So naturally, what those neighborhoods need is an ultra-low-capacity, high-cost form of urban transit: a streetcar. At least, that’s what Mayor Bill de Blasio thinks: last week, he proposed to spend $2.5 billion building a 16-mile streetcar line connecting Brooklyn with Queens.
This is such a dumb idea that even transit advocates oppose it. Streetsblog observes that the proposed streetcar route doesn’t easily connect with subway stations that would give riders access to Manhattan. It also argues that bus-rapid transit (which New York calls “select bus service”) makes a lot more sense than streetcars.
TransitCenter advocate and Brooklyn resident John Orcutt argues that “the American streetcar ‘renaissance’ of the past 15 years has mainly turned out turkeys”: slow (“Reporters for The Oregonian, CharlotteFive and Atlanta magazine have all laced up sneakers and outraced their local streetcars on foot”), expensive (“L.A.’s streetcar has seen its initial cost estimate more than double”), and underperforming (“ridership on Salt Lake City’s S-Line is less than half of planning projections”).
TransitCenter head David Bragdon, who previously was president of Portland’s Metro Council, agrees. “Most streetcar projects in the U.S. provide slow, unreliable service that does not serve many people,” Bragdon noted, urging New York not to “repeat the mistakes of other places and spend $2.5 billion if the result is not useful transportation for riders.”
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TransitCenter also questions de Blasio’s claim that streetcars will generate enough new development to pay for themselves. “Much of the property adjacent to the route is undergoing large-scale development without the spur of a new transit proposal,” says a TransitCenter blog post. “Would more value be realized by supporting transit projects of proven effectiveness in other parts of the city?” In fact, as the Antiplanner has repeatedly pointed out, streetcars don’t generate any economic development unless that development gets additional subsidies. Even Portland’s city auditor agrees.
None of the critics appear to have commented on the high cost of de Blasio’s proposal. Portland spent just under $150 million on its 3.3-mile Eastside streetcar line, which it said somewhat proudly was the most expensive streetcar line ever built. De Blasio’s line would cost more than $150 million per mile. Labor costs in New York may be somewhat higher than in Portland, but I don’t know of any inherent reason why construction costs should be more than three times as much as elsewhere.
Nor does anyone raise the capacity issue. For safety reasons, a single streetcar line can only support about 20 cars per hour. When jammed full, with most people standing and packed together more closely than most Americans are willing to accept, a streetcar is rated to hold about 134 people, for a throughput of 2,680 people per hour in each direction. By comparison, New York City’s subways can move close to 50,000 people per hour, and buses on city streets with a dedicated lane and parking strip can easily move more than 10,000 people per hour (and nearly double that on double-decker buses), most of them comfortably seated. Plus, if a bus breaks down, others can go around it while if a streetcar breaks down most of the line must shut down as they are built with few passing tracks.
Also little noted is the conflict between bicycles and in-street rails. New York has seen a quintupling in bicycle commuting since 2000, and streetcar tracks are a major hazard to these cyclists. A survey of 1,520 Portland cyclists revealed that two-thirds “have experienced a bike crash on tracks.”
The real purpose of the streetcar is to give the owners of housing projects that are currently under construction along its proposed route a Disneyland-like ride they can use to distinguish their projects from others in the city. They won’t get it very soon, however: de Blasio’s plan calls for construction to begin no sooner than 2019 and completion in 2024. For a lot less money, they could start a locally branded bus service in a few months that wouldn’t cause as much congestion and wouldn’t create a street hazard for cyclists.
The irony is that de Blasio campaigned for office on the claim that, unlike his predecessors, he wouldn’t cowtow to developers. Now, when the city has far higher transportation priorities elsewhere, he wants to blow $2.5 billion on a toy train that, at best, will slightly enhance the value of developments that are being built anyway and at worst add to congestion and make streets more dangerous for cyclists.
“slow (“Reporters for The Oregonian, CharlotteFive and Atlanta magazine have all laced up sneakers and outraced their local streetcars on foot”), expensive (“L.A.’s streetcar has seen its initial cost estimate more than double”), and underperforming (“ridership on Salt Lake City’s S-Line is less than half of planning projections”).”
When the modal split calculations were done, something must have gone badly wrong. How did anyone calculate success based upon those facts? Did they add in a factor of ten, because the streetcar was so achingly cool?
If you’re going to spend that kind of money, a light rail system, with multiple car trains, is the least that should be expected, with subway sections where the roads are congested. Please compare to the situation in Karlsruhe, Germany, where they have buried their light rail within the city centre.
“By comparison, New York City’s subways can move close to 50,000 people per hour, and buses on city streets with a dedicated lane and parking strip can easily move more than 10,000 people per hour (and nearly double that on double-decker buses), most of them comfortably seated.”
That’s an improvement on the previous theory, which had subways replaced one-for-one with buses. But it’s still 200 regular-sized buses per hour, or one bus every 18 seconds. One bus every minute is more realistic, or 3000 people per hour. One light rail train per minute works out as much more than that.
We come to the classic question. Why are they spending money on something new when they’re struggling to come up with funding for the stuff they already have?
Every great politician has a pet project, that which regardless of cost/usefulness or effectiveness will permanently define themselves long after they’ve left office or cement their status in the minds of others.
For Jerry Brown, it’s the California High Speed Rail, Giffords/Feinstein – Gun Control, Bloomberg was aimed at taking your salt and oversized drinks.
This streetcar will be De Blasio’s pet project, as well as his redemption machine. As a mayor De Blasio as done nothing but alienate himself among generational New Yorkers. He cares more about thugs, bums, illegal aliens and drug dealers all the while shrugging the police and tax payers that actually keep the city running and building momentum on the same Marxist rhetoric that led “So many other cities to prosperity”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HY0JwGg6cUY
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but I don’t know of any inherent reason why construction costs should be more than three times as much as elsewhere.
” ~ Anti-planner
I’m curious, too. It seems like a lot of these projects face having to move utilities that weren’t originally built with this sort of thing in mind. The relocation seems to be rather example for these projects. Half of Milwaukee’s up front trolley costs are because of this. How much is this affecting NYC’s costs?
That is just an astonishing fact to wrap my brain around. Twenty-seven THOUSAND. Per square mile. It takes a special kind of person to tolerate that density, and I’m certainly not one. The county where I moved to in NorCal 30 years ago has a population density of two per square mile. TWO. (Interestingly enough, when I was last at Penn Station, I bumped into two people from that NorCal county. Small world.) It is impossible to be alone in NYC and impossible to find a truly quiet spot.
Back on topic: Streetcars have become planners’ wet dream and fetish. Even cities with very low population densities (KC @ 1,400/sq mi) are getting on board with this foolish extravagance. It’s like playing Sid Meier’s Civilization where you’re rewarded with bragging rights for pursuing trophy-like government projects. It’s likely this will continue until the entire financial system and economy again grinds to a halt. Or maybe QE4 will be initiated with public works and public transit as the primary beneficiary of this pork.
I’m not surprised fare revenues in Portland are only four cents per trip. Why pay? If you see a fare inspector come on, just hop off. There is no good way, other than hiring someone to stand at the doors to collect nickels, to enforce fares on street cars.
Seattle just recently opened a new streetcar line, and “free” rides are soon coming to an end according to one article. Some people were up in arms, but I told them to relax. If Portland is only collecting four cents per trip, Seattle is likely to experience the same phenomenon. Let the gravy train continue!
Frank wrote:
That is just an astonishing fact to wrap my brain around. Twenty-seven THOUSAND. Per square mile. It takes a special kind of person to tolerate that density, and I’m certainly not one. The county where I moved to in NorCal 30 years ago has a population density of two per square mile. TWO.
That, sir, along with an extremely high density of employment on the island of Manhattan (New York County), is the reason that transit works at an entirely different level in New York City than the rest of the United States. Though I doubt it will ever be replicated anywhere else in the U.S., now, or ever. Regardless of what promoters of transit on rails say.
I’m not surprised fare revenues in Portland are only four cents per trip. Why pay? If you see a fare inspector come on, just hop off. There is no good way, other than hiring someone to stand at the doors to collect nickels, to enforce fares on street cars.
The solution is a person with the title of conductor, to walk around the car (or cars) and collect fares and check that riders have proof of payment.
Do conductors on electric street railway vehicles (streetcars and light rail vehicles (LRVs) make sense? Note that I am not asking if the light rail vehicles and streetcars and the rest of it makes any sense.
It is certainly a way to greatly increase revenue collection, and also cut-down on vandalism of the interior of the vehicles (conductors even work pretty well on long, multiple-unit LRV consists).
But I doubt that Portland’s Tri-Met can afford to greatly increase its hourly workforce by hiring conductors to ride all of their LRVs and streetcars. New York might be able to (it is not clear if the New York City line were to get built that it would belong to the New York MTA or to New York City – or if the city might just hire NYMTA to run it for the city).
>Do conductors on electric street railway vehicles (streetcars and light rail vehicles (LRVs) make sense?
No they do not. It’s not cost effective to check everybody’s fare. Most NYC SBS lines (brand name for bus rapid transit) work by proof of payment (POP). The rest (just the S79 SBS?) have everybody board only through the front door and pay their fare there like normal buses in the city. They have transit cops get on SBS buses and give tickets to people who haven’t paid. If the city/MTA were to build a streetcar or SBS line on this route POP would presumably be done the same way. It’s enforced a lot more than in Portland. Going after fare beaters has been a part of NYPD’s broken windows policing for decades, though there is some push to lighten the penalty. Whether or not that happens enforcement is unlikely to be reduced to the level you see in Portland, even with a liberal mayor like De Blasio.
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/fare-evasion-arrests-surge-years-article-1.1906667
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/josmar-trujillo/bratton-oks-broken-window_b_9075150.html
>It is certainly a way to greatly increase revenue collection
LIRR and MNR, the two commuter railroads run by the MTA, both have conductors to check the fare of everybody on board. Inefficient staffing drives up costs. POP gets you almost as much revenue for much less.
https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2015/07/26/why-labor-efficiency-is-important/
>it is not clear if the New York City line were to get built that it would belong to the New York MTA or to New York City – or if the city might just hire NYMTA to run it for the city
The city owns the subway and leases it to NYCTA, an MTA subsidiary. The streetcar could be done the same if built. It seems unlikely that NYC would seek to operate it in house.
The good news is that this streetcar will never be built.
Unlike smaller cities, where a small group of connected developer/politicos can push something useless through before it can be stopped, it is almost impossible to get something useful done in NY without dealing with a large number of “stakeholders”.
The plan will be defeated by its complexity and overreach moreso than by the fact that it is a useless boondoggle that will cost a very much for very little benefit.