Two days in New York City last week made the transportation game plan for the future – in NYC and elsewhere – more clear. While traffic levels were exaggerated on Thanksgiving Eve day and Thanksgiving itself, it is clear that apart from the collapse of transit, the solutions proposed to solve other issues are sorely misguided. I am speaking of Mayor-to-be Zohran Mamdani’s “solution” to his $6B bail-out to rent control as “increased building.” We’ll just build more and more taller buildings, and that will produce the revenue needed.
In the early Aughts, with my office on Fulton Street in Manhattan, I was automatically enrolled in the Downtown Alliance and regularly received its newsletters. One statistic that knocked me out of my seat was that there were currently 2,500 residential living units below Wall Street, while another 7,500 were under construction! This period encompassed the small slice of time before former Mayor Bloomburg allowed Uber into the City without its driver-owners having to purchase taxi medallions – and subsequent Major De Blasio ballooning the volume of these unneeded vehicles to a point where outgoing Mayor Adams had to cap the City’s Ubers at 60,000 (now estimated to be 100,000, although many include accessible taxis which could increase the efficiency of the City’s formerly van-only Access-A-Ride paratransit fleet.) Yet traffic was ballooning, transit was dying, and we were still building – at breakneck speed! (Since then, my former 5-story office/residence on Fulton Street was knocked down and replaced by what I estimate to be a 30-story replacement.)
It is likely too late to resurrect a coherent transit system. We squandered the chance to provide the full array of pieces needed to make it work for decades now – promising ideas that began to blossom briefly in the 1970s: More park-and-ride lots throughout the suburbs (see https://transalt.com/article/making-public-transportation-work-part-2-park-and-ride-lots/); feeder services (see https://transalt.com/article/making-public-transportation-work-part-3-feeder-service/); alternative work schedules (see https://transalt.com/article/making-public-transportation-work-part-1-alternative-work-schedules/); actually designing systems and networks will all the pieces (see https://transalt.com/article/making-public-transportation-work-part-4-system-design-and-networks/) and high-occupancy vehicle lanes (see https://transalt.com/article/making-public-transportation-work-part-6-high-occupancy-vehicle-lanes/). Further, instead of encouraging commuters to direct ridesharing to park-and-ride lots, we actually proposed it as an alternative to transit (see https://transalt.com/article/making-public-transportation-work-part-5-ridesharing/).
But In New York City and other major cities where such innovations could have galvanized decision-makers into creating streamlined, fluid, inner-city transit systems by minimizing traffic and speeding up travel in general, and bus travel in particular, we squandered these opportunities to a point where it is now much too late. The land and infrastructure costs for an additional 500 or so park-and-ride lots is no longer remotely affordable. But subsidizing social programs by building endless more rental units is, frankly, idiotic. But options still remain. Among them is not merely the construction of many underoccupied office buildings into residential units, but the building of one structure badly needed: High- and mid-rise parking structures with bus terminals – and bus and motorcoach parking spaces – on the lower levels.
A few small, doable tweaks in policy could further contribute: My pet peeve, among them, would be eliminating bridge and tunnel fees for motorcoaches. Another would be to create “inverse” parking fees: Cars showing up with a single driver could pay $100/shift (they range from $70 to $90/shift now), while fees should be scaled back to cost less and less as the cars arrived with more passengers in them: One with four passengers could park for free.
Larger-scale projects – like actually thinning the City’s residential population and moving residents and businesses to western Connecticut and northern New Jersey – would seem politically impossible. Creating new bus services for the otherwise “homeless” to far-less-expensive housing units in the suburbs would also compliment such changes and save enormous amounts of money in the process. The task of making New Jersey Transit (like the New York MTA) competent and responsible would seem completely impossible. But a gallon jug cannot hold 3600 ounces of liquid. Nor can Manhattan hold the number of residents Mayor-to-be Mamdani expects the City to expand to in order to accommodate them.
Because of past mistakes no longer correctable, we can engage in different solutions – before we also shut them down by inertia, or by simply making the problem worse by spewing nonsense into the dialog that sounds great in the land of Magic, where arithmetic has no place.
#toomuchbuilding #publictransitexpert #transalt #transitsolutions