The Triboro: Transit plan for the NYC Boroughs | Hacker News Reader

The Triboro: Transit plan for the NYC Boroughs

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105 pointsjseliger51 comments

>Providing a reliable connection between the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn by rail will provide more direct trips within and between these boroughs than either the subway or bus networks can do today. Buses make up 43% of transit ridership in these three boroughs, but buses operate at an average speed of 8 mph as they fight the city’s heavy traffic.

It's amazing to see New York City suffer almost half a century after Robert Moses's decline.

One of the worst consequences of Moses's 600 (or was it 700?) miles of highway is how residential areas outside of Manhattan developed: Because he built the city around highways and hence commuting by car, residential areas outside of Manhattan developed into thinly spread suburbs, making it near impossible to create an efficient network of trains. To New York City's credit, they've made a laudable comeback with subways: After all, it's the city you can live without owning cars in the United States. Yet, our generation continues to pay the price of Moses's ego and lack of foresight.

RM is a humbling reminder that getting wrong stuff done so effectively has grave and lasting consequences.

The story of Robert Moses is a fascinating one and hugely relevant to the shape of NYC, but I'm not sure he really had much to do with the specific issue under discussion. With some relatively small exceptions the city was highly developed and dense before Moses and the car came along, and while he did ram highways through it, he didn't have the effect of making it less dense.

This proposal discusses connecting well populated inner city areas laterally, where are these thinly spread suburbs you mention?

The issue described here is that the rail transit system is highly Manhattan centric, which well predates Moses.

There were inter-borough light rail lines, specifically streetcars between Brooklyn and Queens, which died of malign neglect in the Moses era (though I don't know how much he personally had to do with that).

While the issue started and was establish before Moses, it was his control over nearly all the transportation budget that prevented any new growth. If he had been friendly to mass transit, nyc would have far more subways options.

Perhaps. But on the flip side the Moses era ended by the mid-1960's, which by now is over fifty years ago. There are a lot more reasons than Moses for why the idea of building new subways in NYC basically collapsed and still to this day hasn't been revived in any meaningful way.

For example there are reasons why the new 7 extension doesn't stop at 42nd street and 11th avenue despite that making perfect sense, and they don't have anything to do with Moses. The reality is that the entire process is just completely dysfunctional.

You can argue that both ways.

As public sector unions appears and pay & conditions improved, the only way that NYC mass transit has been remotely sustainable has been by consolidating the Moses empire into the MTA. The tolls provide the cash flow to sustain the system.

It's impossible to self-sustain the current subways, and the perpetual near-bankruptcy of NYC throughout most of the 20th century wouldn't have allowed for subway construction at all.

Moses's genius was getting the state government to give a shit about NYC and create the authorities to bond his projects.

    After all, it's the city you can live without owning
    cars in the United States.

I know a lot of other people in Boston that don't own cars.

Yes. And some other cities as well. But there's really no US city other than [EDIT: parts of] NYC where not owning a car is widely viewed as typical and just part of the culture.

You can certainly live in Boston, say, without a car but many/most of the tech jobs are out in the suburbs as are, most likely, many of your friends. As a result, most people will find that not owning a car becomes limiting at some point.

(This is probably less true than it used to be. If nothing else, services like Zipcar make it easier to drive out to the suburbs for a party or whatever. And more people of a certain demographic are probably clustering in the city after school. But move forward a few years and most people will want the mobility provided by a car.)

Chicago, for many demographics and parts of the city, though admittedly much less pervasively than NYC.

Boston has the third lowest car ownership of US cities, with 63%, compared with New York's 44%. But that understates the difference. NYC contains suburban areas and Boston proper doesn't. Manhattan (population 1.6M) has just 23% car ownership, far lower than Boston, population .6M. So while over 200k people live carless in Boston, over 1.2M do in Manhattan alone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_most_...

http://www.nycedc.com/blog-entry/new-yorkers-and-cars

Anecdotally, the people I work with in Cambridge, who live in Boston, Cambridge, Somerville and Arlington own cars, but don't use them to get to work. The cars are for the weekends and vacations because there's a lot of leisure activities in the area that are out of reach of the T. I know a lot of people that don't ski and don't even dig their car out after the first big snowfall - They just let it sit from December until March.

Certainly there are a lot more tech jobs within easy reach of public transportation within the city than there were even 20 years ago. Back then, the tech industry was almost entirely well outside the city.

And if you don't need a car to commute, it is weekends that are mostly the issue. Of course, people can always rent but that gets to be a hassle if it's every weekend or every other weekend. It also gets back to culture. As an adult, being that person in a group who always needs a ride gets old after a while.

Yes, lots of tech jobs have migrated from 128 to the city over the 10 years that I've lived here. There are still a lot of jobs on 128, and those companies run shuttles from the city out to the offices for people who live in the city.

I'm not sure it's so much that jobs have migrated but that a fair number of new startups and branch offices of firms tend to locate in Boston/Cambridge rather than the suburbs. Companies may continue to expand in the suburbs but new offices for both new and existing firms are more likely to be in or near the city.

You're also correct about the shuttle buses. Those were unheard of when I first started working at a computer company on 495 in the 80s. Boston and Cambridge, as well as attitudes about city living, have changed a lot in the past 2-3 decades.

When I first moved back to the area after grad school, some people I knew lived in the city but not many. It certainly wasn't the norm.

That's not really true at all.

I grew up for half my childhood in a 19th century farmhouse in Queens and did a lot of research about the area. As early as 1900 the pattern of development that you see in Queens was well underway. The farms around my childhood home were mostly sliced up before the formation of greater NYC. Queens Blvd was a big driver of traffic and medium density development.

Brooklyn was even more different -- the Moses parkways were specifically built there to feed the Bridges and tunnels -- the road and transit network had mostly built out Brooklyn already.

Moses's early works, especially the Long Island Parkways and the Triboro Bridge were seen as solutions to traffic problems initially -- people didn't understand that more roads generates more traffic.

Moses was a flawed man ultimately corrupted by he power he accumulated. He became inflexible with time and many of his ideas were stuck in a 1920s perspective. But he wasn't pure evil, and excoriating his ideas in hindsight doesn't really tell the story. More than most other metropolitan areas in the US, NYC has a really balanced transit infrastructure -- it's a positive thing too. He also built out the pretty amazing NYC and NYS park system, all things that left a positive, multi-generational legacy.

New York City and State had the first real regional highway network because of Moses ability to innovate. The country learned a big lesson from that. If you want to critique highway planners, point the flames at the anonymous architects behind shitshow regions like Boston, Los Angeles and Atlanta, which are hopelessly and permanently car-dependent regions.

"like Los Angeles...which are hopelessly and permanently car-dependent regions"

LA is doing an enormous amount to get away from car dependency: a brand new rail line that just opened last week (Expo 2), another line that opened a few months ago (Gold line foothill extension), two rail lines under active construction and a $150B transportation plan (including several rail lines and even a huge rail/highway tunnel) that's going on the ballot in November.

It's really slow, difficult, expensive work to completely re-engineer a city, but it's far from hopeless.

Most of the outer boroughs, especially Brooklyn and the Bronx, were developed in the pre-automobile era around subways. And many of the suburbs beyond were developed around railroad lines. Moses did indeed emphasize highways at the expense of transit for a generation— but the outer-borough subways nearly all still work as originally planned, and the rail lines to suburbs beyond would be far more effective if modernized to 'regional rail' rather than being operated as 'commuter rail' operated to haul suburbanites from park-and-ride lots to Midtown around a 9-5 schedule. e.g.: http://www.thetransportpolitic.com/2009/07/17/regional-rail-...

> Because he built the city around highways and hence commuting by car, residential areas outside of Manhattan developed into thinly spread suburbs, making it near impossible to create an efficient network of trains. To New York City's credit, they've made a laudable comeback with subways: After all, it's the city you can live without owning cars in the United States.

Your assertions about the suburbs of NYC and the ease of transport into NYC with public transportation are very wrong.

1. There is a massive light rail system that is hugely important to NYC. The Long Island Railroad, Metro North Railroad and NJ Transit Railroads bring hundreds of thousands of people into the core of NYC every single day. You can get directly into midtown Manhattan - which is the most concentrated business district in America - from large parts of NJ, CT, Long Island and Westchester without having to drive. Right now, in the law firm in which I sit in midtown Manhattan, a full 2/3 of the partners commute from CT, NJ and Westchester.

2. A large percentage of people who commute into NYC by car are commuting to the boroughs - not to Manhattan.

3. The residential suburbs outside of Manhattan are comically crowded. We have millions and millions of people living within a 30 square mile radius of NYC. It is absurdly, laughably crowded. Virtually all of Long island is either at city-density or chopped up into 1.4 acre parcels. White Plains and its "suburbs" are super densely packed. Brooklyn - if you want to call it a "suburb" - is the fourth largest city in America. The counties surrounding NYC are all hugely populated: Rockland County (>300k), Westchester County (~1M), Nassau County(>1.3M), Suffolk County (!1.5M), Hudson County (>600k) (NJ), Bergen County (>900k), Fairfield County (~1M) (CT). The city itself is also crazy dense, with >8 million people over 5 counties: New York (~1.6M), Kings (~2.6M), Queens (~2.3M), Bronx (~1.4M) and Richmond (~470k).

So, your "sparsely populated suburbs" contain 6.6M - and that isn't including New Haven County, Essex, Passaic or Union County. I mean, want to talk about a city with sparsely populated suburbs? Look at Boston - or hell, look at Albany. You head out of the city for 20 minutes you are in farmland. It takes hours of driving to get out of NYC and into the bucolic country - unless you happen to come upon some loss-leader farm on long island.

Look, Moses was an autocrat and the decisions he made destroyed a lot of neighborhoods - highways running through residential neighborhoods are very hard to cope with. He was also pretty unapologetically classist and racist in his decision making process. There are many, many good reasons to take issue with Moses the man, his vision and his methods. However, the things you are saying about NY are just not true. The biggest problem we have now is that we need to make at least one more tunnel across the Hudson - probably two more - redo the Port Authority and move Penn Station. I can assure you, however, that our suburbs are about as densely packed as they come in America, and that NYC is, if not the easiest, one of the easiest cities in America to commute into downtown from the suburbs without driving.

I suspect that the expanse of the density around NYC is also a contributor to why people are less inclined to own cars there. As you say, 30 minutes from Boston can put you in, well, perhaps not farmland as such but certainly woodland areas and generally uncrowded areas of seashore. 45 minutes to an hour will put you in apple orchards and genuine farms.

And you can't get to most of those places easily using public transportation. Which makes not having a car you can hop into quickly more of a sacrifice than in NYC where driving out to "the country" is generally a bigger expedition.

I'll believe it when I see it. The original IRT network was built in 2 years (!). They've been working on the 2nd avenue line since 1972 and it still isn't open.

Modern public transit projects in the US are an embarrassment. It takes 20 years now to do something that used to be 1 year. :(

I suspect it has a lot to do with building in urbanized areas and using construction and siting methods that care about things like public input and how the environment is affected. (Note: I do not deny that the process can be twisted to suit a particular goal of a small minority--see also Sound Transit's East Link planning through Bellevue, WA.)

Instead of the days of the "city fathers" coming in and declaring that a thing will be built in a place and that which exists can either get out of the way or get flattened--and the thing being built in a way that benefits those who greased the right palms with the public coming in a distant second or third--we study, plan, and consider a lot more.

As a secondary bit, we also don't have the financial capacity, either by accident or intent of the legislature and voters. Many projects are built with bonding authority backed by voter-approved taxes. The legislature of an area restricts what authority and taxes can be used and in what quantities. Dallas Area Rapid Transit's light rail system was built with a 1% sales tax in member cities...and it still doesn't extend to every city that was a charter member. Sound Transit's light rail and express bus system was built with a combination of taxes, mostly on vehicle registrations and sales, that are under periodic assault from statewide initiatives. Many countries have a "land bank" where the national or provincial/state government "front" the money for the local bonds. (Like Canada and British Columbia did in Vancouver.) Most U.S. states do not.

We "did this" to ourselves. It's not the construction, it's the mechanics of getting there.

You had lots of cheap labor in 1900. Now between the 12 government agencies with the ability to say "no", about as many unions, absolute liability for falls from ladders in NYC and a thousand other cuts its wacky expensive to do anything.

This was so well written that it makes me want to hop on a plane to New York and give it a ride.

Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. -Mike Tyson

As a New Yorker, I'll be stunned if anything comes of this "plan" except hundreds of billions of dollars wasted and endless hours of sitting in traffic while I pass construction areas filled with equipment and completely devoid of workers or activity.

someone posted this in response to another comment a while back. thought it was relevant

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/why-do...

An amusing thing about this proposal is that it comes only a few weeks after De Blasio’s plan to put a light rail along the Brooklyn/Queens waterfront.

Though it would personally benefit me greatly, I must confess that it would mostly be a convenience for yuppies who can afford to live along the water. This Triboro would benefit people who need better transportation.

> An amusing thing about this proposal is that it comes only a few weeks after De Blasio’s plan to put a light rail along the Brooklyn/Queens waterfront.

The Triboro RX proposal has been around for a much longer time than De Blasio's light rail thing. Here's an article about it from 2013: http://www.citylab.com/commute/2013/07/transit-project-new-y...

Does it seem odd to anyone else that this plan seems to pretend northern NJ doesn't exist? It would make much more sense to me to make the "triboro" a full-circle rather than a half-circle. If you look at underground map of London you don't see any half-circles.

This and the rest of the subway system. It kind of hilarious looking at that map and seeing a dense web of subway lines with none of them going to New Jersey.

I'm guessing this is because the administrative boundary means there's no incentive for New York governance to do anything to benefit New Jersey?

And vice-versa. See also: ARC.

There are subway lines going to New Jersey— they are just operated by the Port Authority as the PATH.

This is a much deeper issue that transcends just rapid transit, and is based on the competing politics and priorities of the two different states.

For smaller scale but completely astonishing example of just how dysfunctional that whole issue is, take a look at this: http://newyorkyimby.com/2014/09/the-port-authoritys-missed-c...

We did manage to get the world's most expensive and amazing $2bn open atrium shopping mall on that site. And for just a few bucks more we could have had a direct rail connection potentially stretching all the way from Grand Central to Newark Airport. Oh well.

Good luck convincing CSX to share rails. It took Amtrak decades to get a deal in place for the Hudson River line.

Why not just extend the G? It already is Queens<->Brooklyn.

That would require a whole bunch of grade-separated right-of-way & track that doesn't currently exist. The brilliance of the Triboro is that it's all already pretty much there.

Note also that there's a long history of truncating the G train [1].

I personally would love to see the Franklin Ave Shuttle extended to make a loop out of Brooklyn portion of the current G train route along Church Ave, connecting north-central Brooklyn to Williamsburg, Greenpoint, and Long Island City. That's probably a pipe dream.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_(New_York_City_Subway_servic...

This proposal and the G serve very different areas. The motivation is more than just "connect the three boroughs".

In addition to what other people have said, the G is VERY slow.

Why call it the Triboro? Even leaving behind the negative associations (one assumes advocates of rail would not want to call to mind thoughts of Robert Moses), there are, err, four boroughs it proposes to connect.

The Staten Island connection is shown as a possible future extension, not part of this plan.

As a Staten Island resident, this sucks as usual. I lived here for 10 years, moved to Manhattan and recently moved back because I just can't get the same amount of space for the price in the other boroughs. The work on the Verrazano and SI Expressway has slowed down traffic to worse delays than before, and this island really needs some better transportation options.

Currently, I take the express bus every day to my office in the Flatiron district - this takes me on average an hour and 10 minutes door to door, but can easily hit 2 hours due to something happening on either the Verrazano or the FDR. Alternatively, I live close enough to the (there is only one) train on Staten Island that can take me to the Ferry - from there I would get off with everyone else and fight with the crowds taking the various subways up town. This commute is about an hour and 20 minutes, and is broken up in 3 parts that are mildly frustrating during each leg of the commute.

Obviously a direct subway connection to the island would be amazing, either to Brooklyn or Manhattan directly, but that plan was scrapped in the 20's and isn't likely to come back any time soon. Some transportation proposals include commuter connections to the NJ light rail via Bayonne; and there is a 20 year project ahead to improve and widen the Verrazano - I don't know how much of that time will cause more delays than there already are.

As the North Shore gets gentrified with the new luxury residential buildings like URL (Urban Ready Life - sigh - though it looks like it has now been renamed URBY...), the Wheel (the future world's tallest ferris wheel), Empire Outlets, etc - the area will become a hot new destination for those looking to escape the ever rising prices of the coveted Brooklyn and New Jersey areas like Williamsburg, Crown Heights, Jersey City, etc. Hopefully they have a lot more in store for transportation options when it comes to the island when these projects open to the public over the course of 2017.

Sorry for the rant...

It isn't a coincidence that commuting time and price of a sq-ft of space are negatively correlated. I guarantee you if someone built a 5 min connection from downtown to Staten Island, the real-estate on SI would very quickly be developed to the exact same state as all the other places that are 5 min from downtown. The thing you want (affordable, spacious, fast transit) simply can't exist.

They can if the supply greatly increases. That's among the reasons why a project longer the Triboro brings so much opportunity. Decentralizing New York real estate would drastically improve affordability.

Then more people will see that New York provides better bang for the buck (economic opportunities per rent dollar), which will cause population to increase by migration, which will increase demand, which will eventually get us back to where we started.

I'm not saying this proposal is bad. I quite like it. But let's not get the causation backwards. Urban poor aren't poor because of bad access to transit. Urban poor have bad access to transit because they are poor. Building transit ultimately changes the real estate value along the line, temporarily makes everyone's rent cheaper, and permanently increases the population of the city.

This is why I moved upstate. Construction doubled my commute last week -- 15 minutes.

When I need to get to Manhattan, it takes me about 30 minutes more than it takes you to do so on a bad day, in the relative luxury of an Amtrak car.

The top image is the new splash screen. Why not lead with a map of the proposed line above the fold, instead of a pretty but non-informative title page that leads into a page full of text?

This proposal sounds great, but seems to wave its hands furiously about right-of-way and eminent domain. I used to live in Astoria on Ditmars Blvd, and the proposed line would most certainly be going on/over thousands of private residences. I presume their placement is to try and connect this to the end stop of the N subway line, but It's not like Astoria is a junkyard or railyard, it's a dense residential neighborhood with single family and multi-family housing.

The plan here is to use the existing above-ground rail line that runs parallel to Ditmars from the park, then along the BQE and into Brooklyn. It is the line that literally has a bridge over the Astoria-Ditmars stop with all the Greek murals.

WITHIN BOROUGH, just try to get from LGA to the Ronkonkoma LIRR line. Not an unreasonable request. The line shows sort of helps. But at the least, it should have a station at LGA.

In a dream world this would go underground at Jackson Heights and connect LGA to the subway system.

As a Bronx resident this sounds very exciting.

As a jaded consumer of modern media this sounds suspiciously one-sided. What are the downsides? It doesn't seem to generate revenue or lower costs for the city. Why would a politician back this plan?

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