Some time in the very near future, the cost of the Medicare program will exceed Medicare tax revenues by enough that general revenues cover more than 45 percent of the program. Social Security will start running a deficit, to be made up by money diverted from elsewhere, within a decade. Generous early retirement for state and local employees, combined with increasing lifespans, mean that in any community without significant population growth the number of ex-government workers receiving pay and benefits for nothing will approach or even exceed the number actually still providing public services. The massive infrastructure built after WWII is aging, the previous urban infrastructure is still not at a state of good repair, little new infrastructure has been added since 1973, and the cost of building and repairing the infrastructure has soared. And on top of this, there are the enormous debts bequeathed by the generations now in charge to those who will follow. Whereas today’s elected officials stay in office by handing out favors to interest groups, tomorrow’s may face the ongoing task of handing out sacrifices, disappointments and losses to an increasingly stressed public. In an attempt to do something else, they’ll be looking for initiatives that can be sold as public benefits that have one critical characteristic – little or no public cost.
In the absence of money, one thing leaders can do is show leadership – motivate, organize and accommodate people working together to do things for themselves without compensation, and helping them rationalize the fact that they are really better off for it. And in the case of transportation, leadership can be shown through the reallocation of the infrastructure that is already in place, especially the roads.
One way to do so is carpools. The roads already exist, the cars are already driving down the roads, and all one has to do is convince people to accept a little inconvenience and fill the empty seats in those cars and more transportation would have been provided, and people would have saved money, at little public cost. A second way is unsubsidized (that’s right, unsubsidized – we’re going bust, so drop the fantasy) private ferries. The water is already there, and with a little dock space and some coast guard monitoring, people could be free to pay to use it themselves. A third way is telecommuting, which takes advantage of the extensive telecom capacity now being installed for entertainment.
A fourth way is bicycles. Compared with mass transit, bicycles require very little public capital cost. All that is required is the installation of bicycle racks for parking, and solid barrier separated bike lanes to ensure non-Lance Armstrongs cruising at 10 miles per hour aren’t run over. If separate rights-of-way were to be bought and built for that purpose, the cost would be high, as for any road (though lower in proportion to narrower width). But if the existing road space were simply redistributed the cost would be low. With that cheap infrastructure in place, and people convinced they can ride by the example of other people doing it, additional transportation — and recreation — could be provided at little additional expense. Bicyclists provide their own transportation, and even their own energy supply, for themselves while paying taxes (for the benefit of more important people) for the privilege of doing do.
That it what has impressed me about the bicycle the more I think about it. Personally, it provides exercise with massive saving of time. But from a public perspective, it saves money. Public capital costs are low. Public operating costs are zero.
Today the bicycle is thought of as an “urban” transportation mode, if by “urban” one means older areas of settlement built at higher densities prior to the onset of mass automobile ownership. In reality, however, walking is the “urban” transit mode. Bicycles pedaled by non-athletes move at three times the speed of walking, and thus provide the same level of access at one-third the density, so the bicycle may be better described as a “suburban” mode of transportation. And now that I’m riding one for the first time since childhood, I see it as the solution for certain suburban problems. By “suburban,” for the purpose of this discussion, I also include lower density parts of New York City such as the eastern Queens and Bronx, southeast Brooklyn, and Staten Island.
On problem is transportation to commuter rail stations, express bus stops or ferry terminals from suburban homes, now constrained by the availability of automobile parking. At suburban densities the walk-transit lifestyle that a rising share of young people are seeking is simply out of reach, because the distances take too long to walk.
If sufficient bicycle parking were permitted, and riding to and from the station (even after dark) was safe, people could bicycle rather than drive to the train, express bus, or ferry terminal — saving the cost of the “station car,” the additional car many suburbanites have to have just to use mass transit. Reallocating street space to bicycles is actually easier in post-auto communities than in pre-auto communities, because city planners designed suburban road system to direct traffic to major arterials and away from neighborhood streets. Those local streets, the majority, are extensively over-designed and carry very little traffic as a result. The only problem is that to discourage through traffic the local streets tend to dead end at the arterials rather than connect together. But that problem could be solved.
Take the area where my wife grew up after her family left Brooklyn — North Wantagh, Levittown Schools. It’s an area built for the auto and for the middle class, a place we couldn’t imagine living the way we wanted to live, a place that may now face severe socio-economic decline as its housing stock hits 50 and gasoline becomes more expensive. In areas within walking distance of the Wantagh train station there are individual non-development houses built pre-auto, but these are far more expensive to buy (and far less lucrative to sell) that the development houses farther away. The broader area has lots of peaceful local streets, but the funnel into heavily trafficked roads like N. Jerusalem Avenue, Jerusalem Avenue, Newbridge Road, and Wantagh Avenue. Train station parking fills up, leaving those who arrive later stuck, and neighbors sometimes vandalize cars parked on residential streets nearby. Yet most people don’t ride the LIRR without also driving.
But could they? The ride from her childhood home to the train station is 3.6 miles according to Google maps, given the need to go out of one’s way to the arterials, a 9 minute drive. A more direct route, if one existed, might be 2.5 miles or less, or a 15 minute bicycle ride for a middle-aged non-athlete. Theoretically, at some cost Nassau County or the Town of Hempstead could build bicycle-only cut-throughs to connect the local streets between the houses and behind the stores, allowing cyclists to cross the arterials without ever having to ride on them, and providing an alternative street system for bicycles.
The cut-throughs would be controversial no doubt — this is an area where yards are small, and in some cases entire houses might have to be purchased to create a 12-foot wide right of way. In other cases, more expensive connections over or under parkways would have to be built. But any other alternative measure to improve access, including building additional structured auto parking at the train stations, would be vastly more costly and even more controversial. In some cases, the solution is to allow these areas to decline while fighting their attempts to suck up more tax dollars from elsewhere (ie. NYC) as they do so, so resistant are the locals to anything new. But in other cases, with enough leadership, such places could be reconfigured.
Of course Long Island is relatively flat, and bicycling from Yonkers Station to my childhood home near the top of Nodine Hill would be a different matter entirely. In large areas of the metro area, however, improved suburban livability (and marketability to the young) via the bicycle is possible. And with it would come the NYC practice of doing convenience shopping at what regional economists might call the “break of bulk point” — the point where a transfer is made from bicycle to transit, and where such shopping can be done quickly without a separate trip. Improved economic vitality might draw people to bicycle down to those centers on the weekend, too.
Most existing residents would want nothing to do with bicycle transportation, but its availability might be a reason for a future resident to buy their home for more than one-half the cost of a similar home within walking distance of a subway or commuter rail stop. Otherwise, who will the eventually sell to, and at what price? If they don’t care about that now, I’ll bet they will care a year or two from now.
In New York City, bicycles could provide the key to the increased use of water transportation. The problem with ferries is that they require three trips — the trip to the water, the water ride, and the trip from the water to the destination, and only at South Ferry in Manhattan, St. George on Staten Island, and Hoboken in New Jersey is the water directly connected to the city’s rail transit network. Buses are so slow an infrequent, particularly in low-density areas with low ridership, that the only alternative is to drive to the water, so ferries are prevented from gaining mass ridership by the high cost and limited availability of parking.
Even if many people in, for example, the Beechhurst/Whitestone area of Queens might like to ride a fast ferry to Manhattan, no matter where the ferry docked the number of people who could walk there is a reasonable amount of time, plus the number who could park nearby, would be low. However, the number of people living within two miles — a reasonable trip by bicycle — could be quite high, and the space needed to park bicycles would be much less than the space needed to park automobiles.
How about the other end of the trip, presumably in Manhattan?
Today those arriving via ferry, commuter bus and commuter rail, unless they are lucky enough to work within a short walk of their particular terminal, have to transfer to the subway system — generally the IRT, the most crowded lines, and at the most crowded points, when the trains are already packed with city residents taking the subway for their entire trip. These peak-hour, peak-direction trips are the most costly to the transit system (off-peak travel is the best from the point of view of the MTA). For decades all kinds of high-cost options have been discussed to provide one-seat-ride alternatives for commuter rail riders. That has particularly been the case for Lower Manhattan, which (since the commuter rail terminals are in Midtown and Downtown Brooklyn) has been in relative economic decline since the era of mass suburbanization, due to the lack of a one-seat ride from the suburbs.
As of now, the only major commuter rail investments that have even a chance of being built are in Midtown — to provide MetroNorth and LIRR riders with a choice of the East Side and West Side, Grand Central or Penn Station, through the East Side Access connection and the re-routing MetroNorth trains. The cost is high enough to call the success of even initiatives into question. New Jersey and the Port Authority are planning a new tunnel to Penn Station, but what New Jersey residents really want is a direct connection to Grand Central as well, to provide that same East Side/West Side choice. That would exponentially increase the cost. As it stands, those working on the East Side and arriving at Penn must often ride not just one subway but two — the 1/2/3 and the Shuttle/7, with two walks, two waits, and two sets of stairs. A vastly costly pie-in-the-sky proposal to bring the Long Island Railroad or a suburbanite-only super subway directly into Lower Manhattan appears to have disappeared.
I even had my own pie in the sky proposal — one vastly less costly than the others I must say — for ferries: the extension the Times Square Shuttle east on 41st or 40th street, through the Con Edison redevelopment site, then south at grade to the 34th Street ferry terminal, to provide a quick hop into the heart of Midtown for those arriving by water. Downtown, the jobs are located within a short walk of the water, but in Midtown they are a very long walk away, and the crosstown and private buses that move people inland crawl along in traffic.
New Yorkers may have read about the Velib bicycle system in Paris, in which the Paris transit system rents bicycles at a low cost from different stations around the city, using electronic payment. In New York City, the assumption is that any system that made bicycles available to just anyone would result in all of the bicycles being stolen, stripped, and sold for parts and scarp metal within weeks. Imagine, however, that such a system was in place just for those arriving at Grand Central, Penn Station, Flatbush Terminal in Brooklyn, and the private ferry terminals, with availability limited to identified customers of those other modes of transport. And that enough barrier-separated bicycle lanes were in place to allow a safe and secure ride by a novice to various parts of the CBD.
According to Google Maps, the ride from Grand Central to 2 Broadway, down by Battery Park, is 4.2 miles via Park Avenue and Broadway. Now imagine that one lane of Park in each direction was replaced by a barrier separated lane for bicycles, leaving one moving lane in each direction for other traffic and making Park Avenue more of a local street than a through street. Imagine that 7th Avenue from Central Park to Times Square and Broadway from Times Square to the Battery were two-way streets with wider sidewalks and other lanes limited to bicycles, skaters, Segways, and emergency vehicles. And imagine that one area of GCT was used to store bicycles that MetroNorth riders could rent for modest fee (along with rain gear for the worst days), with MetroNorth bike parking all around Lower Manhattan on the other end. Those looking to preserve their health and enjoy a little fun could ride the half hour in each direction each day on the way to and from work, instead of trying to pack on the Lex express.
The ride from Atlantic & Flatbush over the Brooklyn Bridge and down to 2 Broadway is 3.6 miles, according to Google. Imagine that similar separated bike lanes and locking facilities allowed the same option for LIRR customers? That 20 minute ride each way each day would have to be more pleasant than packing on the 2/3/4/5 in Brooklyn.
It might be decades before more than half of the suburban riders would choose a bike ride over even a packed subway ride. With the cost of even East Side Access and MetroNorth to Penn now estimated at city crushing levels, however, it is clear that the one-seat ride to Lower Manhattan isn’t going to happen without the destruction through financial starvation of the rest of the transit system. An extensive bicycle access system, in contrast, could probably be developed for the cost of studying one-seat ride alternatives every decade or so. And it could be implemented in a couple of years.
How about those arriving at Penn Station and working in East Midtown, perhaps at 50th Street and Third Avenue? That’s a ride on the E train today, and perhaps 20 minutes between the walk, wait, stairs, etc. But it’s only about 1.7 miles, which is only 12 minutes on a bicycle for anyone in decent shape (and if people rode bikes from young adulthood on they would be in decent shape). How about the ride from Grand Central Terminal to 23rd Street and 6th Avenue? That’s only 1.3 miles, perhaps 10 minutes on a bicycle but takes far longer on two subways. East Side Access, already being built, is certainly worth doing, and with that capacity freed up MetroNorth to Penn is worth doing also. But New Jersey Transit to Grand Central probably isn’t, and the State of New Jersey is so broke they’ll be lucky to get a second tunnel as far as Penn. And MetroNorth to Penn doesn’t include a connection to the Harlem Line. Bicycles could provide, for many people, a similar improvement in access within a year or two, at very low cost.
“One seat ride” connections, moreover, only provide improved access to limited destinations. Easy access to rented bicycles could provide broad access to any place in the Central Business District. One might imagine, for example, someone riding in on commuter rail or commuter bus, grabbing a bike, and riding to Greenwich Village, the Upper East Side (if anyone should be up for this kind of transport it is the health care industry), the Flatiron District, or the shopping area on Lower 6th Avenue, for recreation as well as work.
And as for ferries, the ride from the 34th Street ferry terminal to Times Square is just 1.5 miles. Most residents of Dyker Heights, Brooklyn are beyond walking distance of the subway, and must take a bus to (say) the Sea Beach (N) line to use transit. If parking were provided, they could ride a bike to the Sea Beach Line instead. But for those who don’t like subways, for some more money a bike ride to the ferry terminal in Bay Ridge could be combined with a water ride to 34th Street and the East River and a ride on a rented bike to a destination.
And in addition to improving access for suburban residents to the city, bicycles rented by transit agencies could also do the reverse. Affluent suburbs tend to zone out working people but zone in office and industrial parks that need them as employees, most beyond walking distance of a transit stop. The poor link between city residents who need jobs and suburban employers who need moderate wage, moderate skill workers is an issue nationwide, one often handled by private vans and similar services. Rented bicycles could put more workers in reach of suburban employers — and other destinations. In summer, the LIRR provides a bus to bring city residents from Freeport Station to Jones Beach. That 6.2 mile, 40 minute bike ride would be too far for one leg of a daily, multi-modal commute, but might be just fine for a day at the beach. MetroNorth provides a bus connection for those traveling to Playland in Rye. That two mile ride would take 15 minutes on a rented bicycle, and those using the service could get to see a little of the town (something I’m sure the locals would love).
Point to point access to a variety of destinations, including places where land was cheap and owner-occupied housing more affordable, is the reason most Americans abandoned mass transit for the automobile to begin with. The automobile, however, uses lots of energy (not good if energy costs are rising), takes up lots of space (so much that due to traffic congestion it isn’t that fast anymore), can be dangerous (which leads to high insurance payments) and doesn’t provide exercise (which we need now that most of us do not do manual labor). Because it uses so much space, the land cost of building new roads is so high that we have virtually stopped doing it. But transit isn’t cheap either, even in big cities where the bus or train has a reasonable chance of being full, let alone lower density areas where near-empty buses can be more costly than limousines.
If the limited availability of money, personal and especially public, is factor number one, which it will be from this point forward, bicycle transport is one solution that still works. Something tells me that people without connections will be seeking similar assisted self-help solutions for other government-related needs — for health care, education, the care of the aging, recreation, even the needs of their poor neighbors — into the future, despite paying lots of taxes.