Tomorrow’s Transportation Today: Start thinking bigger and bolder to move people and goods around New York in the 21st century
In the 1980s, as New York City’s graffiti-covered subway system was on the verge of collapse, Richard Ravitch and Bob Kiley demonstrated unrelenting perseverance by securing the necessary capital to rebuild our regional transportation network and executing a bold plan to ensure its reliability and safety.
Three and a half decades later, we are neglecting the lessons of their collective vision. Once again, New York City faces an overcrowded, aging and slowing transportation network.
The major problem is that New Yorkers are commuting on a transportation system that was conceived in the early 20th century, when the city’s population was a fraction of the 8.5 million who now inhabit it as well as the tens of millions of people who travel here annually from outside the boroughs. These strains will only worsen as the city’s population grows over the coming decades.
The irony is that Gotham can trace its greatness to technological transformations in transportation. In the first half of the 19th century, as steamships carried larger loads at faster speeds and lower costs, New York became America’s most critical port and ultimately its largest and most important city.
Today, all of the city’s major modes of transportation are in decline. The subway system, which began running in 1904 but now services a record 6 million daily rides, is stretched to the limits and running way beyond its capacity levels. Worse, the L train, one of the city’s most crowded lines, handling about 400,000 passenger trips each weekday, will temporarily shut down in January 2019 to repair the tunnels damaged by Hurricane Sandy.
Any regular user of surface roads and highways knows they move like molasses, year round, and are often in dire need of better upkeep.
A recent study ranked the area’s three airports, essential to maintaining our place as a global leader, as the worst among the nation’s 30 busiest airports based on timeliness, accessibility and amenities.
The 650,000 daily train commuters who must navigate Penn Station, the continent’s busiest train station, represent three times more travelers than anticipated when it was originally built in 1908. Within the station, to find the Long Island Rail Road, New Jersey Transit, Amtrak or the subways, passengers must maneuver through depressing, dimly lit corridors.
Of greater concern, the existing rail lines and tunnels to connect Newark and New York City, also constructed over 100 years ago, have not only reached full capacity but also suffered major damage during Hurricane Sandy. While the $24 billion project to build new Hudson River rail tunnels has been designated a federal priority, the project’s critical tunnel portion has yet to begin construction and awaits final funding, even as local officials worry that the region could be paralyzed should the tunnels need to be closed for interim repairs.
Even with such capacity constraints and antiquated infrastructure, subway fares and bridge and tunnel tolls have outpaced inflation. Take the subway, for example, where single ride and 30-day unlimited passes have risen from $1.50 and $63 respectively in 1998, to $2.75 and $116.50 respectively today ($2.20 and $90 in inflation-adjusted dollars). During this same period, the income of New Yorkers has essentially remained flat, disproportionately hurting those who can least afford it and who likely endure the longest daily commutes.
Such prices exclude looming toll and fare hikes in 2017 that will invariably increase the pricing of both pay-per-ride cards as well as weekly and monthly MetroCards.
But there’s hope of reviving our diminishing transportation network. Oversight of and investment in transportation is largely a state issue, and Gov. Cuomo has recently articulated a much-needed vision for our transportation needs, particularly for improving Penn Station and our airports to meet our 21st century demands. And new transportation technologies are creating more choices for consumers.
Some forward-thinking transportation overhauls like the MoveNY Fair Plan, a grassroots campaign created by Sam (Gridlock Sam) Schwartz, contain many compelling ideas, like rationalizing the prices of car trips across the East River bridges.
Still, we must go further in order to maintain New York’s place as a global leader. Otherwise, New York City will reach a standstill in this technologically driven urban age.
Upgrade subway infrastructure. Before we invest billions of dollars on additional subway expansions that take decades to build, the MTA must first heavily invest in upgrading the subway system’s technology, infrastructure and trains to enable greater efficiency. For example, the Second Ave. line, in the planning stages for decades, is not only years behind schedule but also has cost an estimated $2.7 billion a mile.
To start, a state-of-the-art signal system will increase the number of trains operating on any given track. The MTA must also expedite its plans for wider doors, which have the potential to reduce wait times by about one-third, and for open-gangway trains. For example, Toronto, which has the continent’s third largest subway system in terms of ridership after New York City and Mexico City, uses open-gangway trains designed to create about 10% more capacity per car.
With a new signaling system, the MTA can expedite its plans to install real-time countdown clocks for all subway and bus lines — currently in only about a third of the city’s 469 subway stations — so riders can manage wait times. The plans to install a tap-card card system and add cameras in all subways and buses must too be expedited. The bottom line: Although the MTA has indicated its interest in moving forward on many of these upgrades, it must commit to a much shorter time frame with a larger capital investment.
We also need to fully assess subway ridership and changing travel patterns. After New York subway ridership soared last year to 1.8 billion rides, its highest levels since 1948, the number of passengers has fallen slightly each month this year since April as compared to the same months in 2015.
While premature to draw firm conclusions about this decline, commuters and tourists may be shifting to other modes of transportation. For example, overall bike use has increased in the city among all demographics and both genders. The number of New York City adults who rode a bike at least once a month increased from 12% in 2007 to 16% in 2014, paralleling the 40 miles of bike lane barriers added over the same period. Ride-sharing (Uber, Lyft, Via) is also increasing.
How about buses? Buses, while declining in overall usage, still carry over 2 million riders daily. They may currently be slow-moving, but they cost significantly less to operate than subways. It is time to rethink the bus system in imaginative ways. Pre-boarding payment systems, Wi-Fi accessibility and smartly redesigned routes (including fewer stops) would speed buses up and boost their appeal. Look at the “dollar vans” that operate in a quasi-legal network in the outer boroughs — they offer their 125,000 daily riders the speed, reliability and convenience that commuters seek.
Reduce traffic. Even before increased slowdowns around Trump Tower, midtown New York had become a virtual gridlock zone where drivers forfeit millions of cherished hours each year stalled in traffic.
At the same time, the growing young and college-educated population in New York City — 20% of the city’s residents are between the ages of 25 and 34 — are less interested in car ownership and more apt to use new ride-sharing apps. They also have enhanced environmental concerns for such issues as reduced carbon emissions.
We should reconsider variable pricing to reduce traffic in highly congested areas during those hours when traffic tends to peak. Other large cities such as Singapore and London have already adopted such systems and benefit from significant traffic reductions. Barcelona recently announced it would limit vehicles in certain swaths of the city to reduce traffic and air pollution and to use public spaces more efficiently.
Ironically, New York’s visionary 1811 city grid, with 50-foot-minimum street widths and a rectilinear map of roads, can actually accommodate cars quite well. Yet the city has built over 50 pedestrian plazas since 2007, with plans for about 20 more, not to mention all the new bike lanes.
Such developments, including bike lanes, are beneficial for our evolving 21st century urban needs and certainly expand mobility choices among residents, even as pedestrians, cyclists, motorists and public transport compete for usage.
To better manage overall flow of cars through the city and quell previously raised concerns that areas adjacent to new pricing zones will face rising traffic and reduced parking, we should place tolls on the bridges and crossings along the East River. Available technology (like cameras or EZ Pass) will curtail traffic slowdowns on these crossings. We could start by charging modest tolls at the same cost of a subway fare on the four no-toll crossings to enter Manhattan or simply test by imposing higher fees on two of those four crossings to maintain some free access.
Increased revenue from new variable pricing and new tolls must be clearly earmarked for infrastructure improvements in New York City as well as a reduction in subway fares for the lowest-income New Yorkers who are burdened with the longest commuting times.
Concurrently, we should aggressively rely on cameras to fine both double parking and vehicles that block intersections.
The city’s focus. The de Blasio administration is working with the private sector to build a multi-billion dollar streetcar line along the Brooklyn-Queens waterfront as well as invest $325 million into an expansion of the city’s ferry system. The proposed 16-mile BQX connector from Astoria, Queens, to Sunset Park, Brooklyn, would serve a corridor not now served by subways.
While the BQX has merit, to be cost effective and truly beneficial, this connector must integrate seamlessly with buses and subways and accept subway passes for its use. Above all, it must justify its high cost as opposed to new fast-moving buses, even if many transportation thinkers do not believe that buses can provide the same capacity to move people in this corridor.
With respect to ferries, too, without integrating seamlessly into subway and bus networks, the additional costs for ferry use will be out of reach for the lower-income New Yorkers whom the city is targeting, even if the fare is lowered from $4 on weekdays and $6 on weekends to the price of a subway ride. Assuming the city realizes its estimate of serving 4.5 million riders annually, the ferry system will become the third most highly subsidized form of transportation in the city at $6.60 per passenger trip — and higher if ridership fails to meet projections.
Make better use of new technology. Ride-sharing is here to stay. Uber’s popularity is unquestioned. Real estate developers nationwide are shrinking or eliminating parking places and instead offering Uber subsidies; major venues such as Yankee Stadium are incorporating curbside pick-up areas typically found at airports.
New York City’s iconic yellow cabs have struggled to keep up with the competition and have seen the value of taxi medallions fall. Surcharges imposed on taxis should also apply to ride-sharing companies.
E-hailing services must also support the travel needs of the elderly or people with disabilities. A pilot program in Boston is currently testing Uber and Lyft for shuttling around passengers with disabilities. Now, the MTA is smartly undergoing a limited test to determine how such services may improve and lower costs for its sub-par service $500 million annualized paratransit program.
Even with these improvements, innovation in transportation will continue to evolve. The current thinking on urban travel does not even begin to address the dramatic effects that the advent of autonomous vehicles will bring. By some estimates, the introduction of such vehicles will slash parking needs in half and enable the space currently devoted to parking to be available for parks and housing.
Just as our transit network is always moving, we cannot rest in re-envisioning it. Earlier New York visionaries had the courage to build a system that far outlasted its architecture. We must now avail ourselves of fast-moving, cost-effective technologies and apply our imagination to the quest for greater mobility options.