Fare wait and New York
City transit news
If you’re wondering
what happened to the threat of a TTC fare hike, it’s been postponed –
briefly. The city councillors who sit on the Toronto Transit Commission
were to meet in a special session last week, but the debate over the TTC’s
budget will now take place at the regular monthly meeting at City Hall,
next Wednesday, Jan. 21.
In the meantime, I am
in Washington DC, looking for solutions to Toronto’s gridlock problems at
the largest conference in the world for transport experts (and transit
geeks like myself). The Transportation Research Board annual meeting
brings together planners, engineers as well as transit and highway
officials who politely debate how to make commuting safer, and faster.
One of the experts
here is Sam Schwartz, otherwise known as “Gridlock Sam”, who writes a
daily commuting column in the New York Daily News. He is a traffic
engineer by trade, and introduced the term “gridlock” to world lexicon.
New York City’s transportation network has been undergoing a lot of change
since the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. The PATH commuter rail
line underneath the World Trade Center was destroyed when the twin towers
collapsed, and at the same time most cars were banned from lower Manhattan
for security reasons and to reduce severe congestion. Thousands of New
Yorkers had to drastically change their travel habits, many taking new
ferry routes or crowding onto already overloaded subways and buses. Add to
that a 25% increase in local transit fares earlier this year, and New
York’s “straphangers”, or subway riders, have been struggling.
Two years after the
disaster of 9/11, automobiles can enter downtown again. In late November a
temporary PATH station opened, once again allowing direct access to New
York’s financial district from suburban New Jersey. Commuters
coming to Manhattan from across the Hudson River also use New Jersey
Transit, a major train and bus network similar to GO Transit. In December,
a new transfer station for ten of NJ Transit's eleven rail lines opened
outside the city, allowing train riders better access into New York’s busy
Pennsylvania Station. Also last month, the brand new “AirTrain” started
service to JFK Airport on Long Island, linking the huge air hub to subways
and commuter trains in the east end of New York.
And
there is more to come, says the Daily News’ Gridlock Sam. Planning is
underway for two major transportation hubs in lower Manhattan, an area
that has seen an exodus of residents and corporations after 9/11. A $2.6
billion “intermodal” transit terminal for buses and PATH trains is to
replace the temporary station at the
World Trade Center.
The terminal, which Sam calls “Grand Central Downtown” after the historic
station further up the island of Manhattan, will be linked to a second
major hub called the Fulton Street
Transit Center. Nine subway lines currently converge in a maze-like mess
that stretches under several city blocks. Funding from
the U.S. government will allow several subway stations to be unified –
easing a major headache that has existed since the underground train lines
were built by separate companies.
Schwartz says that
reconstruction money made available after 9/11 will also allow for some
other large projects to be built – but which ones? A new subway line is
proposed for 2nd Avenue on the east side of Manhattan, an area
poorly served by the city’s existing train network. Because powerful
interests in other parts of the city are putting forward their own
mega-projects, funds might be available for only a shortened line – the 2nd
Avenue “stubway”, according to critics.
Another
subway line could be extended to the island’s west side where a major
sports stadium is planned, in the hopes that New York will win rights to
host the 2012 Olympics Games. Also proposed is a plan to bring
Long Island Rail Road
trains directly into Grand Central Station, while downtown businesses
want to revitalize lower Manhattan by building a direct rail link to JFK.
Both
New York and Toronto have big wish lists of new transit improvements, but
only one has the money. Gridlock Sam says that for the first time in
decades, his city is actually back in the game of building transit.