[PRCo] Re: Installment 5, Modern Light Rail and Subways

[Fred Schneider]

In spite of the Public Utility Divestiture Act passed during the Roosevelt Era, not all electric, gas, oil and trolley utility combinations were broken up in the 1930s and 1940s.   The last two transport properties supported by gas or electric customers did not succumb until the 1980s.   Transport of New Jersey, the successor in name to Public Service Coordinated Transport, operated by Public Service Electric and Gas, remained until 1980 when the state, under the name New Jersey Transit assumed operation of the PSE&G network.   (The final private venture to be broken up New Orleans Public Service's trolley, gas and electric utilities in 1983.)   

NEW JERSEY TRANSIT ASSUMED CONTROL OF ONE LIGHT RAIL OPERATION IN 1980, THE NEWARK CITY SUBWAY.   IT EXPANDED THE SUBWAY, AND BUILT TWO ADDITIONAL LIGHT RAIL OPERATIONS.

I've never seen passenger numbers for the Newark City Subway over its history but I suspect the highest year might have been immediately after World War II when the suburban lines to Caldwell and Bloomfield still funneled into the subway and servicemen were coming home and didn't have cars. By 1952 the unneeded platform tracks under Pennsylvania Station in Newark were turned into a repair shop.   In 1954, the 4 mile line needed 30 PCC cars to handle the traffic.   By 1958, several of them were permanently stored in the tunnel to the basement of the Public Service building.  A changing "complexion" of the neighborhoods along the line probably also contributed to declining patronage as people who commuted to the train were replaced with people who drove to jobs.    After the PCCs were replaced with the slower accelerating cars from Kinki Sharyo Ltd., some of the business may have evaporated.   In 2002 the line was extended northwest along the former Erie Railroad's Orange Branch to Grove St. and a new shop complex.   In 2010, weekday riding on both the main line and the Broad St. Branch numbered about 19,000 on weekdays.

     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AittR1dd2SI&feature=related

The Broad Street extension of the Newark City Subway opened in July 2006.  The mile-long line is partially on different alignments in opposite directions making it impossible for some office workers to use the cars for commuting in both directions.   Why?   I've been told that an influential individual property owner had a piece of land he needed to unload that was absolutely suited for the light rail, so it it runs on that property in one direction.   The result?   The line has been reduced to a care every 30 minutes.  It is included in the ridership numbers for the City Subway so we don't know how many people it actually hauls.   However, ridership numbers for the subway in Fiscal 2005 were 5.6 million, they were 5.5 million in 2006, 6.0 million in 2006, 6.2 million in 2007, 6.1 million in 2009 and 5.9 million in 2010.   That hardly implies that the second line added any more than 2000 riders a day in 2006.    Sounds like a great triumph for New Jersey's largest city and its politicians!  

     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgHPgbPasVg&NR=1&feature=fvwp

     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9bYzIx9Yr8&feature=fvsr

The most impressive of the NJT operations is the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail Line, named for the counties in proposed to service.   At this point operations are confined to Hudson County.   The initial line opened from Jersey City south to Bayonne along with a branch over the former CNJ Newark Line on April 17, 2000.   As of the last opening on January 31, 2011, the line now stretches from Tonelle Avenue in Weehawken to 22nd Street in Bayonne,  just short of 16 miles.   What is astonishing is what has happened to some of those waterfront neighborhoods!   Some that used to be industrial or slums have become upscale housing.   The entrance to the former Erie Railroad Pavonia ferry terminal is now a major shopping mall served by a light rail line.   I recall riding it with a friend from German Rail several years ago on a Sunday afternoon.   We got to Pavonia as the mall was closing.   A crush load boarded and I thought I was in Munich instead the USA except for one thing ... the train was northbound and the spoken language was Spanish.   Most of the train emptied out at Bergenline Avenue.   And if you want a great Mexican dinner ... an authentic one ... you will find restaurants in that part of West New York, N. J. that are truly real.   Weekday patronage on HBLR?   The agency doesn't publish the numbers ... somewhere around 41,000 to 42,000 for the year 2010 based on my disaggregation of the annual total.   That works out to about 2800 people per route mile (based on 2010 mileage).  

The north end of the line passes under West New York in the former West Shore Railroad (New York Central) tunnel that funneled commuter trains into Weehawken ferries until 1958 with one station in the tunnel at Bergenline Avenue.   Plans call to extend it north along the railroad to Leonia, Englewood and Tenafly North with a ground breaking in 2011.   That would confirm that the name Bergen belongs!

Sad thing about that first video ... the curve at the 9th minute ... you can no longer take the telephoto picture looking the other way with the light rail car in the foreground and the twin towers of the World Trade Center across the river in Manhattan.   Glad I did it when I could.   

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKMCAGuFk6k&feature=related     

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tg24l1Zboc&feature=related

The third route is the River Line, a diesel light rail line linking linking Camden with Trenton and running over the former Pennsylvania Railroad line up the east side of the Delaware River through Bordentown.   It opened in 2004 where trains like the New York to Atlantic City "Nellie Bly" used to fly.   About 9,000 people a day ride the 34 mile line, the primary focus of which is to connect those communities to the Amtrak and New Jersey Transit trains at the former Pennsy station in downtown Trenton.    Is it something we might call light rail or commuter rail?   Doesn't matter.   Calling it light rail puts it under the jurisdiction of the Federal Transit Administration.   Calling it commuter rail would have resulted in a different level of bureaucracy under the Federal Railroad Administration.   It is what it is.     

     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixMw5M9tt80

     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaVwndh-oVs&feature=related

Using the identical Stadler cars under identical conditions in Austin, Texas but calling it commuter rail from the beginning tossed it into the FRA prevue and resulted in months of delays because the FRA regulations said the cars were unsuited for commuter trains.

THERE ARE SEVERAL INTERESTING SUSPENDED RAILWAYS OPERATED BY THE PORT AUTHORITY OF NEW YORK AND NEW JERSEY THAT DESERVE INTRODUCTION.   ONE SERVES KENNEDY AIRPORT, THE OTHER NEWARK AIRPORT.   The Newark line hauls about 5,000 daily passengers.   I have no numbers for the Kenndy - Jamaica line.   The first video illustrates the Newark line, which opened in 2001, and connects the airport with Amtrak.   The takes you on an 8-mile-line ride from Kennedy Airport to the the Long Island Rail Road station at Jamaica.  The Kennedy operation is the same as Vancouver and TTC's Scarborough line ... the Bombardier linear induction system

     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VdWb44e7T4&feature=related

     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4roKyoesBI  

PITTSBURGH'S PORT AUTHORITY TRANSIT DIVISION'S ONLY NEW TRACK IS A FEW THOUSAND FEET FROM THE DRAKE LINE UP TO SOUTH HILLS VILLAGE MALL, THE SUBWAY THROUGH MOUNT LEBANON TO REPLACE TRACKS ON WEST LIBERTY AVENUE, AND THE SUBWAY DOWNTOWN TO REPLACE TRACKS ON THE SURFACE.  The surface tracks downtown were chewing up about one-third of the total running time from the South Hills so it did represent a major improvement.  The downside is that steel and related industries declined in the 1960s and then collapsed in 1982.   As a result, Allegheny County's population went from 1.629 million in 1960 to about 1.2 million today.   The City of Pittsburgh dropped from 604,232 in 1960 to 309,602 in 2010.  No matter what improvements you provide the transit rider, he or she isn't going to use them if he has moved out of the area.   PAT lifts about 25,000 daily fares on 25 miles of track  --- or about 1,000 passengers per route mile (that's about half the productivity of the new Phoenix light rail!).  While the South Hills is still a reasonably good place to live, there probably aren't as many jobs downtown as there were 30 years ago.   

As a parallel to this, as a child I recall killing time with my father along the route 87 Ardmore car line in Forest Hills while my mom was waiting in the doctor's office with my baby sister.  I was enchanted by the winking color-light signals on the trolley line that linked East Pittsburgh and Wilkinsburg.   Those signals were installed years before because two cars came together in a fog with disastrous results.   Throughout World War II they kept cars separated that ran on headways of every couple minutes.   Wilkinsburg and Homewood were bedroom communities for the Westinghouse Electric and Westinghouse Air Brake plants that once employed thousands of workers.  Air Brake is still there but not to the degree that it was.  WECo is empty.   The trolleys are gone.   The 69 Trafford replacement bus now runs an hourly base and a 30 minute rush headway.  That gives a fair idea what happened in the area.

     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9p6x6TGwRQ&feature=related     

     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q53NO_vS2Ro


BUFFALO'S NIAGARA-FRONTIER TRANSIT AUTHORITY OPENED A 6.4 LIGHT RAIL LINE ON AND UNDER MAIN STREET BETWEEN DOWNTOWN AND THE SOUTH CAMPUS OF THE STATE UNIVERSITY BETWEEN OCTOBER 1984 AND SEPTEMBER 1986.   Fares are charged only beyond the downtown area.   As the recent recession deepened, NFTA suggested they needed to charged for riders downtown and many of them protested saying "We won't ride if you make us pay."   Numbers of riders vary all over the place from 18,000 a day to 24,000 a day but those cars I've ridden outside of the free area are generally almost empty.   

Wikipedia shows an interesting riding trend, almost continuously downward from 7,135,746 in the year 1996 to 5,543,100 in 2007 and then, when the recession begins, riding jumped to 6,860,000 in 2008.   One wonders what the statisticians were smoking?   If there is any consistency, weekdays may have dropped from 22,000 to 17,000 since 1996 and many may be free riders.   

The Wikipedia story on the line notes that there has been a continuing movement to scrap the line so that parking can be restored to Main Street in the hope that the shoppers will come back.   Obviously the same thing happened here that took place in East Liberty (Pittsburgh) when it was made a pedestrian precinct and that is the people left because they couldn't park in front of the stores.   Parking behind them wasn't satisfactory.   

But there is another story here.   Like Pittsburgh and Detroit, you cannot serve riders who left down.  The stores cannot serve them either.  Since the light rail opened, more than 20% of the Buffalo population has vanished.   Buffalo in 1950 had 580,000 residents.   In might have been around 340,000 when the light rail opened.  Today it's down to 270,000.   Erie County peaked in 1970 at 1.1 million and today is down around 900,000.   Niagara County, it the north, dropped from a peak of 242,000 in 1960 to around 200,000 today.   A lot of the jobs disappeared in the area with the closure of Alcoa in Niagara Falls or Bethlehem Steel in Lackawanna and other heavy industries.   The Bethlehem Steel plant is a Superfund cleanup site.   Think also of Love Canal in Niagara Falls NY.  It is easy to blame the light rail for driving away customers who left because there were no jobs.   

It also may have been a risk in the first place to build a light rail line in a rapidly declining urban setting where the only way can get riders is give away the transportation for free.

     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_tCrGxc-XY&NR=1

     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFeJ9yqzy4w&feature=related   

CANDIDATE FOR THE LIGHTEST AVERAGE WEEKDAY RIDING?  TRY THE STREETCAR LOOP IN KENOSHA, WISCONSIN.   DEPENDING ON THE YEAR AND THE SEASON, SOMEWHERE BETWEEN 100 AND 140 A DAY.   The 1.8 mile line was opened in 2000.  Converted to passengers per mile, it's also the lowest in the industry: about 65 per route mile per day.  There are trolley museums that don't do that well but they don't involve paved streets.   By the way, all those beautiful new apartment buildings are situated where thousands of men used to toil.   That is where the American Motors (Nash, Rambler) factory used to be.     A total of $4.2 million in federal funds was allocated in 2010 to extend this line to Brass Village, a gambling casino.   You can draw your own conclusions.   

     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwVrabt9sVk&NR=1     

     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9HWcha28XE

THE ONLY OTHER NEW HERITAGE LINE IN THE NORTHEAST THAT RUNS MORE OR LESS FULL TIME IS NOT OPERATED BY A TRANSIT AUTHORITY BUT RATHER BY THE NATIONAL PARK SERVICE ON CITY STREETS IN LOWELL, MASSACHUSETTS.   I have no idea how many it hauls.  Service began with borrowed cars from Seashore Trolley Museum.   From that they progressed to custom made equipment from Gomaco including handicapped accessible open cars.   It connects a variety of historic sites in the area including the Boot Textile Mill Museum (the second link). 

     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nhn3ZTr0fsI

     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOBZ7bi3Z84&feature=related

DO WE COUNT GIRARD AVENUE IN PHILADELPHIA AS NEW?  I DO NOT.  It had been idle for a number of years when the city administration demanded that one of the "temporarily abandoned" SEPTA trolley lines be restored to service or the city would refused to sign the SEPTA operating budget for the following year.  Possible choices were routes  23, 53, 56, 47, 50 or 15, all of which had been replaced by buses "temporarily" because of sewer or water or other utility work.   Perhaps the most logical choice was route 15 Girard Avenue because it entered West Philadelphia and allowed cars to serviced at the new shop facilities.    Considering that the average number of passengers per streetcar line is only around 9000 per day, nothing is a really admirable choice.   However, SEPTA was caught in a nightmare.   Do something.   In 2001 SEPTA contracted with Brookville Locomotive Works to remanufacture 18 PCC cars for service on that line.  However, when you isolate 18 cars for a service, it rapidly becomes inadequate and buses have frequently been intermingled with the streetcars on route 15.  There were also problems with the neighbors next to Callowhill Carbarn who objected to the restored service and who were supported by the incoming city political administration which blamed SEPTA for doing what the last administration ordered.   

Oh well.  Politics.   More recently, in 2010, there is an extension of the line, which doesn't have enough cars, in order to serve a casino on Front Street.  Stay tune to this station.   :<)

By the way, some of the second oldest streetcar lines in the United States are in Philadelphia.   Parts of the Girard Avenue line date to a horse car route that opened in 1859.     

     http://www.phillytrolley.org/route15/girardavenue.html

     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RS8Kmyspxxc&NR=1

SO MUCH FOR OUR NORTHEAST....BUT CROSS THE BORDER TO THE NORTH AND PEOPLE WERE MOVING OUT TO WESTERN CANADA ONLY BECAUSE LIVING COSTS ARE SO HIGH THAT NO ONE CAN AFFORD TO LIVE IN PLACES LIKE TORONTO.  Vancouver, Victoria, Calgary, Saskatoon and Moose Jaw are overflowing with expats from Toronto because they cannot afford eastern Canada and not because the east is collapsing.   The Golden Horseshoe around the west end of Lake Ontario includes Kitchener, where a new light rail line is being built.  That area contains about 8 million people or one-fifth of all of Canada.  

Did I talk anyone into going out and looking at some of these new light rail / subway lines?   I hope so.  Some are very well done.   If I had to pick favorites to send you to:

San Diego 

Portland

Los Angeles

Houston

Phoenix

Calgary

Denver

Vancouver

I know ... they're all in the west.   The growth cities are all in the west.