More Than a New York Minute

By Alec Appelbaum

Flowing funds and roaring machines have put into action some big plans for speeding up transportation in New York City. More subway seats, ferry routes, bike lanes, and streetcars look discernible on the horizon.

The city's old transit network runs on axes that well served the goal of shuttling millions each day into Manhattan south of Central Park. Now that work schedules, commute routes, and lifestyles all defy that basic assumption, New York City needs to invest in new trains, bike infrastructure, and other means of getting from here to there.

For low-income people, the rigid lines and the brittle signals that move trains along them often cancel efforts to get to work, school, or interviews. The last mayor tried and failed to raise funds for transit upgrades through a charge on single-occupant cars in busy Manhattan; the current one wants to usher in a streetcar connecting newly upmarket waterfront neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens. It will take steady management at many levels, from governors to shift supervisors, for transit in Gotham to speed up properly.

And maintaining all this transit is something else again.

We can see progress overall. The long-delayed Second Avenue line of the city subway was expected to open four stations by the first of the year or so. That will take the edge off crowding along the most congested transit line in America — the Lexington Avenue line, with 1.3 million daily riders — which runs up Manhattan's east side from the Wall Street area to the Bronx.

With that elbow room come more strategic openings. Can the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the state agency that runs the bus and subway system, come through on plans to ease commutes from Long Island to the busy East Side? Can the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey wrap its hydra-head around upgrading bus commutes into the city and air travel into the region's reviled airports? Can bikes and ferries continue to gain share and become core services for a variety of people?

The questions tie up in knots, because their answers depend on funding and financing for projects planners can't control. And the gaps in service that come up when different agencies fund different kinds of transit can thwart any New Yorker's plans.

But these days, after decades of delay, crucial kinks in the network seem to be smoothing, and money has turned from studies to shovels. Will these improvements in transit service keep pace with other changes in how people commute, relax, and parcel out their day? It's hard to say.

A platform controller directs commuters at Union Square in Manhattan last March. Subway use, now at nearly 1.8 billion rides a year, has not been this high in New York City since 1948. Today, train delays are rising, and even a hiccup like a sick passenger or a signal malfunction can inundate stations with passengers. Photo by Sam Hodgson/The New York Times.

Under pressure

New Yorkers travel more and work more hours than ever before, says the Regional Plan Association's head of transportation, Richard Barone. "The subway system is under extreme pressure," he says. "Ridership has exploded — throughout the day, on weekends. If you jump onto the Lexington Avenue line at 1 in the afternoon, it's packed." The Lex — officially the 6 local and the 4 and 5 express — should see some relief when the Second Avenue line opens. But Barone's larger point holds.

People work odd shifts or multiple jobs. They build freelance work schedules around school dropoffs or when they walk their dogs. They commute from Manhattan to Brooklyn (as this author does). They try, says Barone, to use the convenience of 30- day MetroCards to ride when it's less crowded, but they often find themselves elbowing others trying the same trick. Buses, meanwhile, run slowly and the dedicated-lane Select Bus Service covers relatively little territory. "It all puts pressure on the system," says Barone.

Forget the old pattern, with a thrumming heart in the center and quiet boroughs around it. The city is a web of clusters where people live and work and play, with bikeways and waterways and one old, not exactly efficient subway system connecting them.

Looking ahead, let's start with the subway. The Second Avenue subway, proposed in 1919 and abandoned at least twice, is under construction. The next phase, due to follow the opening of four stations in January, will cost roughly $1 billion in federal and local money. This project has driven older waves of planning — my family moved to a newish apartment building when I was three, in 1974, to take advantage of it after construction began in 1972 — but work was halted in 1975 due to the city's fiscal crisis. According to sources from within the MTA's Upper East Side field office, the Second Avenue line — officially the T — is expected to serve about 200,000 daily riders and decrease crowding on the Lexington Avenue Line by about 23,500 fewer riders each weekday when the first phase is completed.

Adding a line strengthens the system's overall reach, but its joints and limbs remain old and fragile. Breakdowns — and attendant delays — are common. The antidote involves automating train signals, which Barone says, "allow you to squeeze more trains" into a given rush hour by overriding human error. Paris, whose subway system opened in 1900, now runs communications-based train control on several lines of the Metro. New York only has CBTC on two lines.

Passengers chat on a ferry bound for Governors Island as a New York Water Taxi crosses the East River in its wake. So many New Yorkers can forget that their city is a city of islands; Mayor Bill de Blasio's plan to dramatically increase ferry services could rewire the city's cultural and commuting life. Photo by Byron Smith/The New York Times.

Shifting to CBTC would mean more prolonged shutdowns of each line to make the upgrades. "A big piece of the problem lies around the fact that we try to work around a system that runs 24/7," says Barone. New York City Transit introduced the cheerily named "Fasttrack" in 2012, shutting down select lines overnight on weekdays. Even so, says Barone, the city that never sleeps ends up running itself down. "You're spending most of workers' labor to set up and break down repairs" in order to open the line back up in the morning, he says. "It's not cost-effective."

MTA made a bold choice in July, calling for the complete shutdown of the Canarsie tunnel for the L train, which snakes from Brooklyn through mixed-income neighborhoods and affluent Williamsburg into Manhattan. It will be out of service for a year and a half, beginning in 2019.

The tunnels, like nine others, flooded in Superstorm Sandy, and officials concluded they could most reliably fix it by keeping everyone out as opposed to working on an operational line. So the subway corridor from several Brooklyn neighborhoods into Manhattan will vanish. "Approximately 80 percent of riders will have the same disruptions with either option," New York City Transit president Veronique Hakim said in a press release. "The 18-month option is also the most efficient way to allow MTA to do the required work. It gives us more control over the work site and allows us to offer contractor incentives to finish the work as fast as possible." Barone says this kind of shutdown will happen more in the coming years.

Can a PeopleWay Fill the Gap?

When the L train between Brooklyn and Manhattan shuts down in 2019 for 18 months, Transportation Alternatives thinks it has a solution to pick up the slack: a car-free 14th Street PeopleWay that would prioritize buses, biking, and walking to keep commuters moving. Here's how many people that corridor could handle, mode by mode.

Source: Transportation Alternatives

Ferries and bikes

So where will resourceful New Yorkers turn? The question serves as proxy for the larger unknowns about how people will leverage — or avoid — an aging subway system. Cars make little sense for Manhattan and, as council member Jimmy Vacca told a local reporter for New York's inside-politics City & State magazine, can force people from other boroughs to sit in stalled traffic for nearly an hour. Ride-sharing — from inescapable Uber to competitors like Via — faces similar challenges with traffic. What about boats and bicycles?

The New York City Economic Development Corporation oversees the Staten Island Ferry and a growing network of private companies providing ferry service. "The city is investing $55 million in infrastructure improvements around New York Harbor to build and support other ferry landings that will expand the existing East River Ferry network to a full system that will be comprised of 21 landings serving six routes. Those routes will be run by a private operator that EDC selected last year and who will run over 19 vessels," said EDC spokesperson Stephanie Baez in a statement.

Ferries look and feel stirring, and the city seems proud of their expansion. In a September 27 announcement, Mayor Bill de Blasio said ferry landings would open as soon as next year. The fare will be the same as a single subway ride — down from more than twice the price of a swipe now — and will connect crowded waterfront neighborhoods in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens to jobs in Manhattan.

Still, it probably won't entice New Yorkers whose origin and destination aren't already quite near the river. "The Citywide Ferry Service expansion was designed primarily to serve a walking market of those living and working in the immediate vicinity of a landing on either side of their trip," the mayor said in those remarks. The city analyses found, he continued, that pursuing a combination ferry-subway trip isn't likely to be efficient for most people.

Ah, New York. Even when commuting gets easier, choices remain complicated.

Some advocates are using the L train shutdown to argue for grander experiments. Prominent among them is Transportation Alternatives, a membership organization that pressed hard for bike lanes around town and allied with de Blasio to promote a Vision Zero safety campaign. Now that the L train's erasure offsets the long-awaited Second Avenue subway's arrival, the group is pushing to make 14th Street a car-free boulevard called a "PeopleWay" — a complete street favoring transit and active transportation — over the dormant L tracks.

Paul Steely White, who heads the advocacy group Transportation Alternatives, emerged in 2006 as a chief proselyte of complete streets. Now he's taking on parking spaces, which would have to vanish to accommodate more displaced subway riders on buses and bikes. "We have a big poll that we're going to be doing next month that will hopefully show the mayor and his campaign managers that this is good politics," White says. "Many [people] would give up on-street parking for shorter commutes and a safer bike and pedestrian experience."

This may read as heretical, but then so did the idea of meaningful bike-share in the Big Apple a decade ago.  Bikes now factor into the cityscape. New York's bike-share program, already the nation's largest, will double its bike fleet and expand service farther into Brooklyn neighborhoods, Upper Manhattan, and Queens this year. That promises to foster more off-peak commuting and nontraditional work patterns — even as it does little for neighborhoods like Jimmy Vacca's in the eastern Bronx, which he described as a "transportation desert."

Barone agrees with White that a rollout of "really good surface options" can reset common perceptions. The proposed BQX streetcar (Brooklyn Queens Connector), designed to run along trendy waterfront neighborhoods, may spark public support for more frequent and reliable transit outside the traditional corridor. That could, in turn, improve public appetite for more prolonged and aggressive maintenance work on subways, tunnels, buses, and roads. At a cost of at least $2.5 billion, it had better.

But even a boulevard of biking dreams — or White's grander vision of a city where most arterial roads banish cars — can do little to slow down gentrification and unaffordability. Those factors drive families below the top income levels to hamlets on Long Island and traditional small towns in New Jersey. That puts pressure on another ring of MTA maintenance — the one that leads out of town.

We can't depart soon enough

The MTA has also been working for years on a project called East Side Access that aims to more efficiently shunt suburban commuters into crowded job centers. The work, which connects Long Island Railroad trains four long blocks underground to Grand Central Terminal, awarded its last big contract in January 2016. That contract, which will run between $53 and $79 million depending on progress, covers tunneling into Manhattan. When the project ends — currently estimated to be in 2023 — the MTA says it will save commuters from the east up to 20 minutes in travel time.

Elsewhere, officials show some enthusiasm for serving customers outside the traditional Manhattan core. Former transportation commissioner Sam Schwartz has put forth a plan called MoveNY, which would put tolls on the popular Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges and lift tolls at river crossings In other boroughs. This notion would yield shorter commutes for truckers working between outer boroughs and higher revenues for the city's transportation department. That money could then fund efforts to spruce up more Manhattan streets.

This could fit a theme of upgrading facilities around town. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey has, after six-plus years of wrangling, agreed with local groups on a design and plan to upgrade its main bus terminal near Times Square. And New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has put forward a plan to refurbish the tired, clunky terminals at LaGuardia Airport.

Residents discuss the expansion of bike share in Queens at a Citi Bike Planning Meeting in Astoria last October. Photo courtesy NYC DOT.

What's next

While these projects and plans tick along, thoughtful planners might eye other forces. An aging population and an increasingly freelance workforce combine to require more flexibility in transit forms and schedules. In this context, Barone calls for investments in technology to make commuting of all flavors smoother for all users.

The MTA has been looking at collecting fares through objects you wave rather than swipe, which Barone applauds. "The whole concept behind open fare payment is that you can use your Apple Pay or whatever contactless ID you have in the future for Citi Bike or whatever. You don't have to have an account with every agency."

Barone also thinks transportation planners should think about public agencies banding together to face driverless cars. "I don't think there's any evidence to contradict the idea that in 25 to 30 years we would have significant penetration by autonomous vehicles," he says. And the hassle of public transit for people "who are aging, who have children and luggage" could be, he argues, a real pain point for vendors of self-driving cars to exploit.

"These are huge issues for a transit agency," says Barone. And an agency with as many capital demands and as much aging infrastructure as the MTA, with aggravated customers and often misaligned politicians, sees little margin for error.

In that context, it's easy to imagine the triumph of the Second Avenue subway opening vanishing in a series of setbacks. It's also easy to imagine another player, from MoveNY to Uber to Google, complicating all this funding. It's hard to imagine the MTA getting a grace period — after all, the folks running MoveNY have been pushing for major reform for a decade. And even when ideas click, like the Second Avenue subway decades ago, lack of funding can upend those plans.

Like way too many New York commuters, this city's transit fixes seem to always — understandably but frustratingly — be running late.

Alec Appelbaum writes and teaches about urban systems.