Today’s Headlines

I’d like to know why Cuomo has such a hard-on for airports? Instead of prioritizing projects which make it easier to get to airports how about doing things to make it easier for the millions who use the subway each day? If you did a survey the average NYer probably uses the airports a few times in their life. Even frequent fliers probably don’t fly more than once a month.

Another thing which annoys me is we’re making the same mistake with the LaGuardia air train as we did with the Kennedy airtrain. It’s not a one-seat ride to Manhattan. It makes far more sense to just extend the Astoria line. That extension will also be useful to non-airport users (and useful if enough common sense ever prevails to just shut down LaGuardia like it should be).

Andy is a fossil fuel fetishist who is in love with making people into suburbanites. He also seems to be kind of dumb, and dumb people often get fixated on loud, shiny, and flashy stuff. Why do you think gun nuts don’t give a fuck about other constitutional rights? A big reason is other constitutional rights don’t involve loud noises* followed by target being pulverized.

* well, maybe the free exercise clause includes this 🙁

The Astoria line seems like the best way to me. I think AirTrain between LGA and JFK could at least make sense, if they really plan for that. Streetsblog is being a bit hyperbolic to say the extension is useless, but it is horrifically flawed.

I’d like to see LGA shut down too, of course.

I didn’t say LGA could be shut down, but if it can be it would be nice.

Newark makes sense to expand, maybe. JFK doesn’t. By and large, busy metropolitan airports belong in the suburbs, and should be accessed by fast commuter rail. With that, even Stewart could be a suitable airport. Unfortunately Cuomo is anti-conventional rail.

Fun fact:

The Port Authority was originally *created* to solve NYC’s freight rail transportation problem by developing a more efficient network for trains to get in and out of the city.

That was the organization’s sole purpose for existence.

They were required upon creation to produce a design outlining the rail improvements that would do this. They dutifully came up with a “Comprehensive Plan” that included things like a new freight rail tunnel between Staten Island and Brooklyn.

Their eventual gravitation toward trucks was initially a practical temporary measure: they argued that congestion relief was needed *immediately* but it would take years and major money to build out the rail crossings that would ultimately do this. So they initially designed a simpler system with upgrade slots the rail connections would eventually come.

One of their earlier versions of the plan actually traced out a comprehensive series of driver-free “rail loops” that would cross from New Jersey under tunnels into Manhattan, where they’d run through the business districts and stop under strategically placed terminals where elevators could pull the trains up for loading / unloading. I have a few neat diagrams of this if anyone wants to see.

It was only in the 40s that the Port Authority as we know it today – a much bigger org with a much broader mandate (most notably about cars) – came into being. That came out through a combination of the Depression, collapse of the railroad industry, and belief in the time that cars were the future of the world.

You can replace many of the domestic flights coming out of LGA, Newark, and Kennedy with high-speed rail. Basically, anything 500 miles or less can be done just as quickly door-to-door with HSR. Kennedy and Newark would easily be able to handle whatever air traffic remains once domestic flights of 500 miles or less were replaced with HSR. Longer term, if we want a carbon-neutral future, we need to get serious about reducing air travel. Either find a viable replacement for longer distance air travel, like maglev in vacuum tubes, or do less long distance travel. A lot of air travel is business travel. Much of that could be eliminated today if we really wanted to via teleconferencing and VR. Hopefully, we’ll make a concerted effort to encourage this in the future, perhaps by eliminating business deductions for travel.

Stewart could be a viable airport for NYC. With a true HSR link, it’s 30 minutes from Manhattan, not 100 minutes.

He’s still saying it will be great for Long Islanders when it won’t even connect to the mainline, which would make it necessary to back-ride or transfer to the subway at Woodside. People will still just drive. This is such a boondoggle. How can we keep our tax dollars from being wasted on this?

Exactly, it’s as bad for Long Islanders as it is for New Yorkers. I am so furious that we’re potentially blowing a billion dollars on such a boondoggle.

I just want to chime in here to remind everyone as I did when this was suggested before: please don’t imply that LGA mostly handles flights under 500 miles. This seems to be an inaccurate perception that shapes LGA discussions among the “just close it down” crowd. The vast majority of LGA traffic is to destinations that are not competitive with rail, and investing billions in high speed rail would not change that in our lifetime. Top city pairs with LGA are ORD, ATL, MIA, DFW, and FLL. Those are not close enough for rail substitution. LGA has shuttles to DC and Boston, but they’re a small percentage of total traffic. Investing in HSR cuts into that market, but you really can’t argue that most of LGA traffic could be shifted to rail any time soon.

I think the idea of shifting all the business travel between Manhattan and Chicago or Miami from LGA to Stewart is particularly absurd.

Isn’t that the population you’d expect to use LGA? :-p

My wording deliberately avoided the word “closer.” There is a pretty high-population band of potential users from northern New Jersey to Connecticut with better geographic access to Stewart, all things being equal. But of course, Long Island and much of New Jersey is at least geographically closer to LGA.

You could do it with some combination of investing heavily in HSR and just plain reducing the use of air travel via disincentives like carbon taxes, eliminating business travel deductions, etc. Perhaps 95% of business travel is unnecessary anyway if you look at it logically. Business travel accounts for something like half of all air travel, so eliminating that unnecessary 95% cuts the amount of air traffic practically in half. Heck, if HSR is built out so it’s viable out to ~1000 miles the NY Metro region might be able to get by with one airport. It’s just a question of whether it would be more logical for that airport to be Newark or Kennedy.

Obviously we don’t currently have plans to build HSR but no reason we couldn’t start on a wholesale program to cut out unnecessary business travel yesterday. In fact, despite this being a transportation blog, I’m puzzled by how little anyone actually proposes helping to solve transportation issues by simply reducing the need for certain types of trips. That even includes stuff like taking some of the load off local mass transit by shifting as many jobs as possible to telecommuting.

I think the question is whether they’re closer in terms of travel time, not distance. It easily takes many NYC residents an hour plus to go to either of the two local airports. Someone in LI or NJ or CT going to Stewart mostly on freeflowing highways could take the same amount of time to cover 30, 40, even 50 miles.

Buses in the Bronx would benefit tremendously from:

-Off board payment through all doors. This alone would speed up the buses pretty significantly.

-Bus entrances that are flush with elevated station platforms. The Bronx has a high concentration of people with more limited mobility, and seniors especially depend on the buses. That quicker flip down ramp and lean is still a delay.

-Bus lanes and queue jumps wherever traffic is a problem (which is common in the Bronx).

-Fixed camera enforcement, painful fines for violations, and physical separation on certain routes (e.g. make Fordham Road bus only already like Fulton Mall).

-Traffic signal prioritization.

-The next bus order should have more doors and a subway like seat configuration. The side by side seating makes moving through the bus a headache and leads to conflicts among riders.

The vast majority of people in this borough do not even drive on a regular basis. We need to orient these streets towards mass transit, walking and biking. Crosstown trips are currently a nightmare.

Absolutely not a myth. I can prove this to you if you’d like to get involved in a deeper discussion.

You’re looking at one specific snippet of legalese but skipping the political, economic, and cultural context that created it. Without that context this wording says very little. This clause needed to be clear that the PA had mandate over a wide range of transit facilities, including road facilities. But that doesn’t mean that’s where the focus was, nor that a viable trucking industry even existed then (which it didn’t).

The Port Authority was created as a permanent body intended to implement the comprehensive plan reported by the NY, NY Port and Harbor Commission in 1920. This was a direct reaction to the area’s rail transportation network bursting at the seams due to a complete lack of coherent organization, since it was owned in different parcels by private railroad companies that competed against each other and had no interest in sharing infrastructure or providing equal rail access for everyone. See article X (and elsewhere) for a very significant commitment to produce said plan within about 18 months. This commitment was built into very existence of the Port Authority. And it was their unequivocal primary focus at the beginning.

You can see the original report here: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=umn.31951001547797e;view=1up;seq=12

You’ll find a lot of it interesting, but see in particular the introduction to the “Comprehensive Plan” at the bottom of page 2:

“Our port problem is primarily a railroad problem…Therefore the comprehensive plan … is essentially a railroad plan”.

Also see the Port Authority’s very first annual report (from 1921, accessible from their web site), which lays out the exact details of the plan. You’ll see it’s all about connecting railroad spurs together, building terminals to support them, and building a new rail tunnel across the Hudson Bay.

Trucks did play a role as the plan evolved. But this was only a very small-scale supporting role. At the time this plan was envisioned there simply was no viable trucking industry – trains were how goods moved over land, period. And the challenge was to optimize the train network.

Only when this entire paradigm fell apart in the 1930s did the Port Authority pivot and dive deep into car-based ideologies. They did, of course, build the George Washington Bridge and Lincoln Tunnel and a few Staten Island crossings, as well as take over control of the Holland Tunnel. But these were not deep parts of its original mandate. And they very clearly tried to stay on focus on that mandate as much as possible until the 30s.

I can go into a lot more detail if you like. Also check out James Doig’s (superb) “Empire on the Hudson” for a great and much deeper overview of these themes.

Leisure travel accounts for 70% of all travel. Business travel is a much smaller portion than you think.

That back-ride transfer is a total pain. I remember kids on LI would take LIRR to Forest Hills to watch the US Open (Tennis). When it moved to Flushing, nobody took the train anymore.

There aren’t freeflowing highways.

That might not help much. A trip is still a trip. Ultimately the capacity constraints are getting into Manhattan. It doesn’t matter if the people getting in are just across the river or 8 miles away.

I certainly favor any rezoning or redevelopment which lets more people run businesses out of their homes. Besides potentially creating jobs, you’re also creating jobs with no commute whatsoever.

On the seating, I find sitting sideways on a bus to be nausea-inducing. I’m probably not the only one, which is why the buses mostly have seats facing the direction of travel. I’m not too fond of the sideways seating on trains, either, as it leaves you staring at your fellow passengers the entire ride. I’ll miss the seating on the R46 and R68 once they’re gone. From a comfort standpoint, it’s much nicer. In an ideal world, we would have enough service so you wouldn’t need sideways seats to eek the maximum amount of standee capacity out of buses or trains.

There are many capacity constraints other than getting into Manhattan. Most travel is not to Manhattan.

It was only in the 40s that the Port Authority as we know it today – a much bigger org with a much broader mandate (most notably about cars) – came into being.

Goethals and Outerbridge opened in 1928. GWB started construction in 1927. The two states told the PA to start working on the Staten Island bridges in 1924.

In fact, ALL of the vehicular crossings opened before 1940 (yes, the George Washington Bridge and Lincoln Tunnel were subsequently enlarged).

No factual way to say the focus on cars was something newly added in the 1940s. The new areas for the Port Authority in the 1940s, were the airports and the bus terminal.