Human Transit

new york: free student fares and the budget crisis

Today's New York Times editorial on New York's transit funding crisis goes beyond general warnings about the need to fund transit, and digs into specifics: Raise bridge tolls, resist election year tax-cutting, hold the line on pay raises, and this:

What it should not mean is doing away with free passes for needy students. Both the state and city will have to contribute more to help pay $214 million a year to help keep these students in school.

Perhaps they read this.

new york: cutting service without cutting mobility

The U.S. service cut epidemic -- the result of transit agencies relying on recession-sensitive funding sources -- is about to touch New York again.  But as in the first round of San Francisco cuts, the New York MTA planners are doing their best to reduce service but not mobility.

As with everything in New York, the details are complicated, but here's a simple example.  The G subway line is the only line running directly between Queens (the top of this map) and Brooklyn (the bottom).  It has long included a segment from Court Square to Forest Hills where G trains run alongside two other subway lines, the E and V which connect Queens directly to Manhattan.  (Full subway map here.)

In happier times, a transit agency could indulge the preferences of people from Forest Hills who want to get to Brooklyn without having to change trains.  But when service needs to be cut, it's far better to cut this duplicative segment than to cut a segment that is somebody's only service.  And that's usually the real-world choice.

So in future, the G will run only as far as Court Square, and passengers who want to get to/from Forest Hills and Brooklyn will need to use the E or V between Court Square and Forest Hills, then change.  But as a result, frequencies and unique services will not be cut as much as they would have been otherwise.  That's the only way to get through a service cut without reducing mobility.

Full coverage of the service cuts is at Second Avenue Sagas, which often features thoughtful and detailed commentary on New York transit issues.  Thanks to Alon Levy for the tip.

why is new york's transit "always in trouble"?

New York City transit supporters are on fire today as their transit agency, the MTA, announced deep service cuts.  Service cuts are happening all over the US this year, as the economic crisis has cut into most of the local funding streams on which agencies rely.  In many cases, including California and New York, the problems have been compounded by raids on state transit funding streams to help balance state budgets.

There seems to be plenty of blame to go around for New York MTA's especially dire straits.  The New York Times offers three expert views on their "Room for Debate" forum, though the three don't seem to be disagreeing.  Two emphasize the need for more secure government funding, while the third points out the need to push back harder on labor costs, and it sounds like they can all be right.  None of them says that service cuts are a good thing. 

But here's an eerie echo of my last post, where I pointed out that sometimes transit agencies don't deliver environmental outcomes because they're being required to serve other competing goals.  This stunning graphic from Second Avenue Sagas tells a similar story about the New York MTA, but in the area of budgeting rather than service design.

It appears that in 1995, the governments of the State of New York (NYS), New York City (NYC), and the MTA decided to split three ways the cost of discounted transit fares for students.

Student ridership (high school and below) is a mixed blessing for transit agencies.  You'll hear a lot about how great it is that kids are "forming transit habits" at an early age.  But school-kids consume more than their per-capita share of the transit budget, and not just because they are more likely to damage buses and trains than adults are.  Schools tend to generate extremely high and sharp peaks -- very brief periods of the day when huge numbers of students want to travel.  Extreme peaking means overcrowding that disrupts schedules and that often requires extra buses to be pulled out for very short shifts.  Very short work shifts, in turn, mean higher per-hour labor costs, because labor contracts usually define a minimum shift period (often 4 hours) and the period of school demand is often much shorter.

During the 1990s, when I was a consulting planner in California, something similar was happening all over the state.  School districts, facing budget cuts, were choosing to cut school bus service rather than cut education, and the problem of school transportation was shifted, without much funding, to the transit agencies.  The worst part of this was that once school districts no longer cared about transport, they no longer thought about transport efficiency when they set their bell times, so transit agencies were constantly dealing with unreasonable expectations from schools about when they could serve them.  If four different schools all let out at 3:10 PM and want you to be there waiting, that's four buses you have to buy and maintain and four short driver shifts you have to run.  And the parents aren't yelling at the school, they're yelling at you, the transit agency.  When the schools had to do their own transport, they were more likely to stagger bell times so that longer shifts and fewer buses could do the same work.

So student discounts that push student ridership higher are going to be expensive for a transit agency, even if the agency's being compensated for the lost revenue.  But the MTA generously agreed to pay a third of the discount's cost, while the City and State were supposed to pick up the other two thirds.  The chart shows what happened next.   For some reason, as costs of this discount continued to grow due to growing numbers of children, the MTA found itself making up the difference.  (Note to dealmakers: state the deal in percentages, not dollars!)  Finally, in the budget crises of 2008, the State cut its own contribution.  Suddenly, MTA was paying the full cost of a discount that didn't really serve the agency's mission.  And of course, when they discussed reducing it, the story was cruel MTA trying to balance the budget on the backs of poor students. 

It's a brutal reminder that in many US urban areas, the multiple layers of government don't always support each other, and that especially in lean times they are strongly tempted to renege on the all-too-informal agreements that glue the system together.  In such moments, it often comes down to pure political clout, and special-purpose governments such as regional transit agencies usually have less clout than the governments of states or major cities.  So sometimes, as in this case, they end up bearing costs because they were the weakest party of the deal. 

So "Why is the MTA always in trouble?"   When even the transit-friendly New York Times frames the question that way, we really do have a problem.  If you're told that your neighbor's teenage son is "always in trouble," aren't you going to assume that the trouble must be his fault? We're being encouraged to think of transit, or at least the MTA, as having some kind of ongoing sustainability problem or weakness. To compound the insult, we hear talk of whether MTA needs a "bailout."  Cap'n Transit explores how these "frames" work in a must-read post today.

The MTA may be "always in trouble" because it hasn't made tough deals, but the toughness of the deals it can make, especially with more powerful levels of government, depends on the public's ability to blame the correct layer of government for the problem.  This is hard to do, because overlapping governments are often not as clear as they should be about who's responsible for what.  Cap'n Transit also discussed this a year ago, here. 

The only real long-term solution to this problem is for MTA to figure out how to be more transparent.  Organizations don't really like to be transparent, because if you're perfectly transparent you're invisible, and then nobody appreciates you.  But if you're completely opaque, you'll end up wearing all the blame, because blame and praise are both like light in this case.

Part of transparency is avoiding deals like the three way funding split of the New York school subsidy.  Don't just split the subsidy three ways.  Instead do the harder work of deciding why we fund school transportation and which level of government should be funding that outcome.  If you're going to split the subsidy three ways, be really clear about what happens when the demand rises and/or someone reneges on the deal.  The correct answer should be that the subsidy drops in ways that students will notice, and all parties to the deal refer complaints to the party who really dropped the ball.  Another angle would be for the MTA to demand clear separate pots of funding for (a) its ridership-maximizing mission, with all the environmental and urban life benefits, and (b) its social service mission, which is about responding to the needs of specific groups with low-ridership buses or fare discounts.  Let the legislature decide how much it wants MTA to spend on each goal, and then get out of the way and let them do it. (Much more on this angle here.)

And aim, too, for clearer divisions of responsibility.  If we're talking about funding for student transportation, there's a credible argument that it should go through the education budget.  The taxpayer doesn't care.  It's the same dollar out of her pocket whether it's an education subsidy or a transport subsidy.  Educational institutions have massive impacts on the real costs of student transportation through (a) how they set belltimes and (b) where they locate schools.  Of course, that would imply that everyone else is also responsible for the transport cost impacts of where they choose to locate, and if we opened those floodgates, the sudden transparency might be blinding.

For excellent wall-to-wall coverage of the New York transit budget crisis, see Second Avenue Sagas.  Chris Leary at On Transport is also on the case.  And for veil-stripping commentary on what's really going on inside the language, keep an eye on Cap'n Transit. 

Finally, to New York commenters, please feel free to correct me on matters of fact, but note that I am not claiming MTA's problems are solely due to the school subsidy, nor assigning broader blame for their troubles.  This story isn't really for New Yorkers at all; it's for everyone else who's ever wondered why their transit agency seems to be "always in trouble."  Short answer: it may not be their fault.  So don't automatically rip into your transit agency when they cut service, at least not until you understand who else may have let you down.

berlin: the s-bahn meltdown

Hello from Berlin, where I chanced to be in town for one of the larger transit meltdowns I've seen.  And I've seen a few! 

why isn't through-routing more common?

A reader asks:

[Alon Levy's] post on The Transport Politic about through-routing commuter rail in New York brought up a question I've had for several years regarding transit systems. Why isn't through-routing more common? This applies to rail, BRT, regular bus, etc. It seems that through-routing all or most of a city's lines via a central transit center provides all the benefits of the "hub-and-spoke" model but also eliminates the need for transfers for a significant minority of people. Is there a downside or cost that isn't apparent at first?

Through-routing means that a route designed to carry people to/from a downtown doesn't end in the downtown; instead, it flows across downtown and out the other side as a different route.  In Alon Levy's vision of New York area commuter rail, for example, the trains flowing into Manhattan from Connecticut (red on the map) would flow through the city and out onto southern lines in New Jersey, and vice versa.  Through-routing means that downtown is in the middle of a line, not at the end.  You can do the same thing with any kind of radial (i.e.to/from downtown) transit service, bus or rail.

Through-routing has these colossal advantages:

• Fewer "transfers."  Some people are actually going from Connecticut to New Jersey, for example, and through-routing lets them make this trip without changing trains.  More commonly, a lot of people from the north (i.e. Connecticut) are going to southern parts of New York City, while a lot of other people from New Jersey are going to northern parts of the city, and a through-routed system serves both groups, which are briefly on the train at the same time in the city.   Because of the decentralised structure of Paris, lots of Parisians are riding across the city to the far side, in both directions, so the RER's through-routed structure is absolutely essential to avoid forcing huge masses of people to change trains. 
• Reduced need for terminus facilities on expensive downtown real estate, and thus potential for higher frequency.  Ending a line downtown means having facilities to store a bus or train for at least a few minutes, consuming expensive space.  Trains typically reverse direction at an end-of-line station, so the driver needs to close her cab, walk the length of the train, and get herself set up on the other cab; she may also be entitled to some break time.  A train occupies one of a limited number of tail tracks while this is happening, so this function becomes THE limiting factor on the frequency of the whole line.  Downtown, there are lots of physical and cost constraints on station design, so you almost never have as many tail tracks as you'd like.  Buses need space to turn around and their drivers, too, are entitled to some break time at the end of a trip, so end-of-line stations on frequent services need space for a number of buses to pile up in a first-in-first-out queueing arrangement.  All this takes a lot of space, and this space is a lot cheaper at the end of a suburban line than it is in the middle of downtown. 
• Fewer line ends, for reduced operating and capital cost.  The time it takes to turn around a bus or train around, and provide the driver break, is usually not related to the length of the line.  Through-routing two routes eliminates two ends-of-lines, which reduces the cost, both operating and capital, of those inefficient turnaround movements.  Often, through-routing two lines actually reduces, by one or two, the number of buses or trainsets required.          
• Fewer vehicles downtown providing the same service.  Sometimes, too, the pre-through-routed lines overlap in downtown, so the through-routing eliminates that overlap.  Instead of having a bus dropping off passengers interacting with another bus picking passengers up, you have one bus dropping off passengers and picking them up at the same time.  For buses especially, downtown street capacity is a very limited resource in big cities, and through-routing helps economise on it.  

So why isn't there more of through-routing? 

• Unbalanced markets on the two sides of downtown.  There's never an exact one-to-one match between routes approaching from one direction and those approaching from the opposite direction.  For example, San Francisco's downtown is on the bay at the northeast corner of the city, so there are no routes extending north and east that could be paired to routes flowing south and west.  To the extent that such through-routes have been created (e.g. San Francisco's Muni Metro T line) the result is a circuitous approach to downtown for one of those lines.   
• Excessive line length.  The probability that your train or bus is delayed is directly related to how long it's been running since it last had an end-of-line break.  (When a vehicle arrives late at the end-of-line, its break time is reduced, so that it can leave on time or at least not as late.)  Through-routing makes lines longer, so it can compound this problem.  This is obviously more of an issue in services that are exposed to more causes of delay, such as services in mixed-traffic and services with driver-administered fare collection.
• Jurisdictional barriers.  Finally, there are plenty of cases where through-routing would be in order but the two sides of downtown are different jurisdictional turf.  They may be different states, as in New York, or different transit agencies.  In the UK and Australia, they may be different private operating companies -- and although both are government-subsidized, UK/Australia governments tend to defer to private companies about network design, so you often get designs that reflect company turf boundaries rather than efficient use of subsidies or meeting the needs of the customer. (London is an exception, and some Australian states are also working on this problem.)
• Infrastrucutre barriers.  Your great-grandparents' jurisdictional barrier is often your infrastructure barrier, and New York City is the obvious example.  Because each commuter rail line was designed by a separate entity, and each of these entities was thinking only about getting people into Manhattan, the terminal stations are not physically connected in the way you'd need in order for trains to flow through.  This is the cause of most of the capital expense in Alon Levy's proposal for New York above.  
• They just haven't thought of it.  If your transit agency has non-through-routed lines, and you can't figure out why, send them a link to this post, and ask them!  

how paris is like los angeles (via new york)

Alon Levy, guest-writing at The Transport Politic, recently did a great piece proposing that the New York region's commuter rail lines, which currently all terminate in Manhattan, should be connected to each other so that trains would flow through, for example, from Long Island to New Jersey and back.  The inspiration, of course, is the Paris RER, a system in which commuter rail lines on opposite sides of Paris flow across the city into each other.  Because all these commuter trains, merged into a common city segment, add up to reasonably high frequency, the RER also serves as an "extra-rapid metro" connecting major centres across the city with trips making just a few stops.  Alon's plan  (part one, part two) is a great read, as is Cap'n Transit's response to it. 

Such a system would be wonderful if it existed today.  Commutes from Long Island to New Jersey would certainly be much easier, and it would also be great to get the space-consuming and time-consuming end-of-line functions out of the core.  

rail rapid transit maps, to scale

Neil Freeman recently posted a great collection of rail rapid transit maps, all drawn to scale, and all at the same scale.  The image at right, of course, is New York City,

He calls them subway maps, but of course that term suggests that the service is all underground, which few "subway" systems are.  What matters is that they're rapid transit.  In this case, they're specifically rail rapid transit, which is why Staten Island's rail line in the lower left appears disconnected from the rest.  In reality, it's just connected by rapid transit of a different mode: the Staten Island Ferry. 

(By "rapid transit" this blog always means transit services that run frequently all day in an exclusive right of way with widely spaced stations -- linking centers to each other, for example, rather than providing coverage to every point on the line as local-stop services do.)