TAPPAN ZEE BRIDGE:Light rail nuts after NY toll bridge

Light rail enthusiasts are proposing to run their trolleys in a High Occupancy lane on the Tappan Zee bridge, so watch out New York State Thruway Authority! At a recent conference of the Federated Conservationists of Westchester County a transit planner Gordon Thompson said that a Suffern-Port Chester light rail line could make use of the TZ Bridge HOV lane to get across the Hudson river. This kind of multimodal innovation, I bet they’ll call their toll lane grab, would help keep the cost of the 45km (28mi) rail line around $1.6b, it was said. At a $2.50 fare covering operating costs, it was claimed, studies showed the line could attract 14,800 riders/day. The capital costs presumably would be found by taxpayers.

Which means that these guys want a taxpayer handout of $108,108 ($1,600,000,000/14,800) per daily rider. Now that’s more than a BMW, or a Mercedes isn’t it? And they probably expect to be excused the toll on the bridge too, these spoilt chauffeured few. Just how elitist can you get?

These are the same people who knocked down a highway widening on the Cross Westchester Exwy that would have carried several times the travelers and a diversity of traffic at a third the capital cost of the nutty trolley and without operating subsidy. A salaried and besuited professional living in a house with a view over the Hudson in Nyack carrying a light briefcase and working in an office in White Plains might indeed use the $108k/seat trolley system. It doesn’t promise much however for a vanful of parts being delivered to a small factory in Yonkers or a shipment of biotech specimens for Pleasantville or Rye, or the renovation crew in a pickup truck, or Mom going to the supermarket, or ....about 95% of the trips being made on the highways outside the downtown area.

Spiderweb patterns of trips now

The world of urban transport is no longer dominated by people with a tidy, regular, point-to-point commute, some of whom a steel wheel-on-rail system can indeed serve if it is heavily enough subsidized. The world out there now consists of people who do a diverse mix of trips of spiderweb-like complexity in plan, with a diverse collection of goods, children, tools, even animals aboard. For 95% of trips outside the downtown there is no competitor with these amazingly adaptable rubber tired vehicles we run on roads, that go when we’re ready, directly to where we want to go, and will haul along a great mix of stuff.

Splurge the taxpayers money on the $108,000/seat system if you can get it out of Uncle Sam, guys, but cut the cant about it serving the social good and please spare us the nonsense about having any noticable effect on traffic on the Cross-Westchester. That’s where the American masses are and where they’ll remain... on rubber tires on hard pavement.

If you choose not to build enough hard pavement there in NY, and to inflict perpetual congestion on your people with your neat rail fantasies, then the jobs and the people will just keep on moving to places like the Carolinas, Texas, and Virginia where practical people set the tone of public discussion, people motivated to deal with the world as it is, not some world of boyish fantasy.

Trenton-Camden ‘lite rail’

In the Philadelphia-South Jersey area plans proceed for a 53km (33mi) light rail line estimated to cost $450m to build and Lord knows how much to subsidize annually thereafter. It’s another Mercedes-plus job at $90,000 capital outlay per estimated daily rider, with the sponsoring agency projecting only 5,000 riders/day. The route is close to I-295 for most of its length which is alongside the NJ Turnpike for about 2/3rds of the distance. If they ran buses, assuming 25 riders per bus, only 200 trips/day would be needed — about 10 to 15 minutes of the daily capacity of a single roadway lane. An extra lane on I-295/NJ Turnpike would cost less than the light rail and cater to plenty of cars and trucks as well — which of course is definitely NOT an objective of the financially unaccountable state transit agency. (The situation is the opposite in Houston and Dallas TX where transit agencies run HOV lanes and are pro-HOT.)

The project is even too much of a state boondoggle for the normally pro-transit Tri-State Transp Campaign which calls it “Lite rail” and says it has caused “even regular transit boosters to raise eyebrows and voices.”

An I-295/NJ Turnpike HOT lane, with free passage for the buses, might have been self-financing, but such was not even studied by NJ Transit. (Come to think of it if 5,000 riders/day are assumed to be 2,500 people making a trip to work and back, then the light rail capital subsidy is $180k/patron which would pay for the Mercedes plus an endowment to support a personal chauffeur!)