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27 May, 129 tweets, 43 min read
One of the lesser known elements of New York’s transportation geography is the Port of Albany. Thanks to the lower Hudson’s estuarial nature, which means the city is accessible to ships and barges without the hassle/expense/restrictions of locks, Albany is...
...something of a transload hub for bulk freight. Some of this travels to/from international destinations, but a nontrivial share ends up in NYC. Many metro area refineries and oil terminals, for example, receive product via rail to Albany and then via barge to the destination
One of the great ironies of this role is, of course, the story it tells about the trajectory of the NYS canal system. Oil from the Bakken could theoretically be transloaded onto barges as far west as Duluth — but railroads’ success at outcompeting canal operators in the 1800s...
...and the federal govts disinterest in expanding/adding infrastructure in NYS as was done in other river/canal systems in the 1900s means that potential remains unrealized.
This is probably for the better, given the multitude of efficient rail options in the Great Lakes-Hudson River corridor/the $$$ of canals, but a fun historical contingency to explore nonetheless
This tract reads like a history of NYC light/building mass laws. Got some high lot coverage new law buildings at top left w the distinctive air shafts — and across the street, a new building with less FAR and a simpler floor plan, yet still a thin horizontal section.
Also of note: the proximity of residences and industry. This is what once made these neighborhoods so attractive — thousands of working class jobs within walking distance — but is also smthg which harmed their environment/stymied industrial upgrading
In the 1940s/50s, the structure of federal urban renewal funding (to say nothing of housing politics) often encouraged integrated highway-housing projects. IINM the Millbrook Homes, pictured here, are one such example, completed in 1959 alongside the highway just south of here
Couple of cool RR things here:
- Mott Interocking, the 4 track flat junction where Hudson Line trains join Harlem/New Haven trains for the trip into Grand Central. Needless to say, this’ll have to be grade separated if we ever want regional rail
- The former site of the 138 St commuter rail station. Before cars/deindustrialization/commuter RRs’ elite pivot, commuter railroads carried nontrivial traffic to/from industrial districts in NYC. 138 St was one component of this geography, serving industry in the S. Bx


Turn-of-the-century TOD, a pollution-spewing highway, another highway-adjacent housing project, and the IRT: this tract covers many eras/foci in NYC urbanism.
Soundview generally tells important stories about NYC's demographic history, dominated as it is by African and Latin American immigrant communities. It also is notable for having been a section of the Bronx which experienced white flight but not large scale population loss.
Rel nbhds in the S. Bx, whose working class residents were disproportionately harmed by 1960s-80s deindustrialization, the E/NE Bronx had long been less exposed to industry, and had thus remained rather more economically attractive to immigrants/the (lower-)middle class. Image


The space between the 2/5 tracks as they descend towards their portal here is a hidden remnant of the once-extant connection between the White Plains Road line and the 2nd and 3rd Avenue Elevated routes. ImageImageImage
It was used until about 1946, when local svc from the 3rd Avenue El to Freeman St ended.

photos:
warofyesterday.blogspot.com/2011/02/riding…

oldnycphotos.com/collections/br…

archive.org/details/tracks…


Hunts Point Market! This facility supplies about 60% of NYC's produce and 50% of its meat -- making it one of the most important, complex, and fascinating bits of freight infrastructure in the region. A short thread:
Hunts Point can trace its roots to Lower Manhattan's Washington Terminal Market (now part of the WTC), which once was the central node in the city's wholesale food distribution system. Much like today, vendors would bring goods and retailers/restauranteurs would buy. Image
This worked okay, but by the early 1900s the facility was showing its limits. The 1930s saw a program to relieve Washington Mkt, which produced the Bronx Terminal Market, beginning the northwards migration of wholesale produce sales
30 years later, as plans for the WTC were drawn up, the city set about relocating the remaining vendors from Wash Mkt to Hunts Pt, which then was largely undeveloped
historicaerials.com/location/40.81…
Being a terminal market, Hunts Point was originally conceived as being a rail-oriented facility; the fingers were designed to allow easy train-market-truck movement. Indeed, until the mid-1970s, entire trains were dispatched from CA for here. Image
Then service got bad, trucks happened, and today, as you can see, the market generates about 130k truck trips and only 2-3k rail loads (6-12k truck equivalents). That's...quite bad for the Bronx's air quality, as well as AQ in all the places between NYC and CA.
Getting perishable loads back on the rails will likely require a newfound commitment by RRs to speed *and reliability* but given the number of ton-miles that get generated in this trade it really is an important target for rail conversion


New York's most obscure freight rail user! Tucked away behind a school along an extraordinarily busy quad-track regional rail route, and only served late at night, Tulnoy Lumber is the last of a once-sizable contingent rail-using industries in central Bx
If you zoom way in, you can see a boxcar on the siding Image
Also note Bathgate Industrial Park at right in this tract. I tweeted about the relationship this development had with the 1970s concept of 'planned shrinkage' last year towards the end of my streetview tour; I think it bears re-upping

The single family homes on the right side of this tract are the famed Charlotte Gardens development. Built where Jimmy Carter (in)famously walked on his 1977 visit to the borough, these ranch homes in some ways heralded the coming of... ImageImage
...gov't funded urban suburbia that became so prevalent under programs like HOPE VI. Pretty clear connection btwn these typological choices and the power of environmental determinism and the idea of homeowner-citizens/sweat equity in contemporary thought.
Notable here, too, is the involvement of Ed Logue; Charlotte Gardens was his last big project. In this effort, he was constrained by funding + the govt-nonprofit coalition behind the effort, but he nonetheless left his mark in the project's commitment to manufactured housing.


It's not what appears in the popular imagination of the borough, but so much of the East Bronx is dominated by this sort of low-rise urbanism comprised largely of buildings with only a few units.
The variety of forms you find therein -- single family homes next to fourplexes next to duplexes -- is made all the more interesting by the often long initial development timelines. Still was lots of vacant land in the '50s! Image


DV Tower! Curving east along the Harlem River is Metro North's line to Grand Central, while Amtrak's route to Penn continues south.
This junction has long been an important one; what is now Amtrak's route to Penn once was a key freight artery onto the island, serving yards and industries along the West Side, and connecting to the High Line
flickr.com/photos/davidel… Image
It's really remarkable how long some of that infrastructure lasted. A number of customers -- including @nytimes -- took cars at the 60 St yards until a barge damaged the swing bridge at DV in 1983! Some scenes from '81. This is now the Trump riverside park development ImageImageImage


Co-Op city's land has a relatively interesting history. The largely undeveloped marshes along the Hutch River were originally bought up as an airport site by the Curtiss company during the pre-depression airport craze. Image
Plans never moved beyond the drawing board (especially after LGA was built; the approach paths to Curtiss would have crossed LGA's), and the land was eventually sold to the developers of Co-Op city.
Also notable here: the future site of Penn Access's Co-Op City station. While close to section 5, making the stop useful for residents of the rest of the development will mean (along with fare/frequency changes) some local transit work w/ feeder buses and better ped infra. ImageImage


It is remarkable how much more stable the Bedford Park/Norwood/Fordham area's fortunes were rel the rest of the Bronx during the 60s-90s. To be sure, there was massive demographic change, but little of the large scale abandonment witnessed elsewhere.
IMO, this *to some degree* speaks to various path dependencies -- these neighborhoods' relative historic prosperity was both produced by and reinforced infrastructures (ranging from high qual subway svc to nearby colleges) that became v valuable as blue-collar work disappeared.
which in turn meant it featured disproportionately in the immigration which played a key role in the Bronx's postindustrial recovery. Note how skewed to the NE and W the geography of immigrants was in 1990. Image
Conversely, this should just further underline the struggle and (*highly* racialized) patterns of economic isolation experienced in the S/SE Bronx. Even today, the Concourse/Jerome corridor has *significantly* better jobs access--here's a map I made of low inc. jobs w/in 45 mins Image


Jerome Park Reservoir is a fun example of unfinished municipal infrastructure with some clear physical legacies. Designed to be a holding basin for the New Croton Aqueduct, only the west half of the reservoir was ever completed. Image
The eastern portion of the land lay fallow until the 30s, when the city put Lehman College, some high schools, and the second of a pair of subway yards on the land: the unfinished plans of the early 1900s are survived by the concentration of municipal infrastructure on the site ImageImage


Speaking of infrastructural legacies, check out the abandoned trackways here. This is where, until 1975, the 3rd Avenue El connected to the White Plains Road line ImageImageImageImage


Binghamton! The tract here contains the former main lines of both the DL&W and Erie railroads, and the wye which linked the DL&W's New York-Buffalo main to its Utica and Syracuse branches. ImageImage
When the Erie and DL&W merged to create the Erie Lackawanna, many savings were expected from the elimination of duplicate infrastructure. Much of the former DL&W main was abandoned west of Binghamton in favor of the parallel Erie Image
...and in Binghamton itself the new RR planned a number of new connections which would allow it to abandon track and consolidate yards. Only some of those improvements were ever built, leaving Binghamton's trackage a rather complex affair.
One other fun Binghamton RR tidbit is its use in what I consider one of the more interesting intermodal operations in the US.
To serve the fast-growing warehouse market in the Scranton-Wilkes Barre-Hazleton area, Canadian Pacific built a small intermodal facility in Scanton (Taylor Yard). When ownership of the line passed to NS, they got the terminal and have seemingly grown traffic w/ svc to Chicago. Image
Problem is, Taylor yard is not on the route of any NS intermodal train, and is not busy enough to justify its own train. So, intermodal loads from Taylor get put on a local freight to Binghamton where they're tacked onto a Massachusetts-Chicago train (and vice versa). Image
Perfecting and expanding this sort of operation, where intermodal trains carry loads for multiple markets rather than focusing only on one point-to-point corridor is gonna be critical to intermodal's growth in the coming decade(s)
America's rather decentralized industrial geography makes good service in medium-volume corridors important! I'm hopeful that PSR's (railjournal.com/in_depth/preci…) emphasis on block swapping will foster the ops competencies to facilitate this.


The Finger Lakes were formed when a southwards moving glacier pushed across river valleys, widening and deepening them, and then damming them with debris as they receded thousands of years later--all while leaving the surrounding plateau rather untouched.
The resulting lakes are narrow and extremely deep: parts of their lakebeds lie below sea level. Image
(Also note the contour plowing in the fields above the lake. Teaching the practice, which can help reduce erosion, was a centerpiece of new deal-era efforts to improve the lot of American farmers through better agronomic education)
(Though the technique itself had potential, the broader effort to maintain the relevance of the small(er) farmer eventually failed, giving way to industrialized agriculture, efforts to decentralize industry, and rural population loss)
The two parallel rail lines here are CSX’s fmr New York Central route btwn Buffalo and Cleveland, and Norfolk Southern’s fmr Nickel Plate route btwn those cities. As I discuss here (homesignalblog.wordpress.com/2021/04/09/exp…) leveraging this sort of duplication could do good for passenger rail


Like many other towns along the Hudson, Hudson grew alongside the routes of river and rail trade which followed the valley into something of a manufacturing hub. One fun former industry: the manufacture of early fire engines! Image
Hudson is much less industrial today, but its past is made all too visible most weekdays when a local freight runs up one of its streets to serve a nearby grain mill. Image


Poughkeepsie! The city was an important node on 19th and 20th century transportation networks: it's along the Hudson River and, until a 1974 fire and traffic shifts caused its abandonment, was home to the southernmost freight rail crossing of the river. ImageImage
This of course led to rather significant industrial development in the area -- most famously IBM, but also decades, whaling, brickmaking, textiles, etc.
The timeline of that development is important for understanding the town's demographic history. Industrialization in Poughkeepsie followed the Erie Canal, so when slavery was abolished in NYS in 1827, Poughkeepsie became home to an early urban northern Black community
Beyond being yet another example of how present those histories are in our current realities (the Black community grew through the 1900s and remains significant today), Poughkeepsie also exemplifies the postindustrial ecosystems of peripheral cities...
...which are becoming increasingly subsumed into the geography of suburbia. NYC has a lot of these, and it's important to keep in mind the particularities of their histories/conditions when making broad prescriptions for non-core parts of the region!


Buffalo's location at the Lake Erie end of the Erie Canal meant that it was once an important transshipment point btwn barges and lake boats. To facilitate this, Buffalo merchants invented the grain elevator in the 1840s to allow efficient bulk transfer.
Buffalo's importance as a transshipment point is much diminished in this era of rail transportation and the St. Lawrence Seaway, but the General Mills cereal plant along the water in the above tract testifies to the one-time importance of Buffalo to grain.


The abandoned station here is Buffalo Central Terminal. Built to relieve congestion downtown and to simplify the routing of trains headed towards Cleveland/Chicago, the terminal's location rather far from the Buffalo CBD meant it never really took off ImageImage
The terminal was abandoned in 1979 as passenger traffic (and Buffalo itself) declined. Though a fabulous art-deco structure, I have a hard time mourning its transpo value: it just isn't terribly well located.


The big plant at left here is the one-time home of the American Brass company, a good example of the sort of basic supplier industry the region's rather diversified concentration of consumer goods plants once captured.
The plant remains active today, and its interior is the subject of a truly amazing set of HAER photos.
loc.gov/resource/hhh.n… ImageImageImageImage
Some other things to note in this tract:
- Despite this area's (relatively) late development date, industrial and residential uses mix. Another good example of interstitial industrial urbanism!
- Note the two railroad corridors which run across the top and bottom of this tract. Buffalo was once a sufficiently busy (and constrained) interchange and industrial hub to justify *two* belt lines around downtown. The inner of the two remains in very active use today. Image
(source: railsandtrails.com/Maps/Buffalo/B…)
A college campus with its very own circumferential road network and parking crater! This area, part of U Buffalo, is on the same axis as the city’s lone LRT line, but lies beyond its end. Colleges often force decent transit, but here it’s created something more like a mall


CSX's Frontier Yard. Built by the New York Central the 1950s to relieve congestion when Buffalo was an important interchange gateway and industrial hub, the yard was one of the first computer-controlled humps that were a railroad favorite in the era. ImageImage
Its hump has been closed since '09, a victim of traffic declines, deindustrialization, reduced network complexity in the Midwest, and a general shift away from humps for sorting. Image
Ironically, the other big Buffalo yard, Bison Yard -- one which Conrail closed in favor of Frontier -- has been doing well of late, now home to NS's Buffalo yard and intermodal terminal on its former Nickel Plate-Erie route from Cleveland to the Southern Tier. Image
[gonna try to catch up a bit here]

Less well known than the plants of the Lehigh Valley but still significant to the resource geography of greater NY are the cement plants of the Hudson Valley.
Lime deposits north of the highlands (that’s the quarry above) + excellent barge connections to NYC meant growth, and though the industry is smaller than it once was, a few plants do remain active today. Image


Discussions of urban renewal in NYC often bring to mind highways, public housing projects, or Lincoln Center -- often eliding the massive amt of rebuilding that took place in Downtown Brooklyn ImageImage
Like many projects elsewhere in the US, the effort was a mix of public and private projects. It involved building a set of government buildings on superblocks along the west side of Cadman Plaza, and housing in a belt alongside. ImageImageImage
Needless to say, these quintessential "urban renewal as CBD expansion" projects displaced a large number of people. Not only were few replacement units avail during construction, but much -- though not all -- of the new housing was targeted to the (upper-)middle class.
In the 50s-60s, these plans were early flashpoints in anti-renewal crusades in NYC. First-wave gentrifiers organized against redevelopment on the west side of Cadman, using the anti-planning localist language to which we've grown all too familiar to oppose mixed income towers.
(They lost, but not before much of the proposed low income housing in the development was eliminated.) Image
What is perhaps most interesting about downtown bk's history of renewal, however, is that it continued apace well into the 1990s. Metrotech lay at the heart of Koch-era deals to revitalize NYC, and was presented explicitly as a way of halting job sprawl (see the below ad). Image
This is to say that the post-1975 growth planning state managed to coexist rather peacefully with its rather NIMBY neighbors to its south/east; traffic/shadow/congestion/local impact concerns did not win out as they did in places like San Francisco.


Excluding Howland Hook -- functionally part of the NJ port ecosystem -- Red Hook's container terminal is the last major port facility in the city of New York. The story of how that came to be is quite interesting:
As many of you likely know, NYC's waterfront once handled the vast majority of freight passing through the region. Red Hook once played a vitally important role in that ecosystem, especially through Atlantic and Erie Basins. ImageImage
Then containers (and trucking and industrial sprawl) happened, and between 1957 and 1972, NYC's portside economy all but collapsed. Displaced workers actually won a pathbreaking settlement that guaranteed full-time longshoremen income in perpetuity...
...but this neither covered part-timers, nor people indirectly employed by the port. So, the longshoremen's union set about lobbying for a container port in Red Hook.
Notably, this wasn't a case where all were in immediate agreement for this industrial preservation vision. Planning docs from just before the '75 fiscal crisis proposed high density mixed use development in the neighborhood! But the container ppl won...
...and actually convinced the city and the port auth to demolish a rather significant swath of housing and businesses on the Red Hook waterfront. Image
In 1981 the port opened, providing employment to a few hundred people -- not nothing, but a pittance compared to the former scale of employment in the area.
But of course, understanding the legacies of containerization purely through Red Hook's physical landscape misses the point. Red Hook remains a stark example of a community of color which was systematically denied access to industrial jobs when they existed... Image
...and then was isolated -- by job market discrimination, by geography, by the lack of free bus-subway transfers, etc -- in a depopulating landscape as those jobs left.
This disinvestment and isolation was seen by residents as the central challenge of the community through the 80s and 90s, prompting a coalition of early gentrifiers and public hsng tenants to work in the community board (not without some friction) to produce a revitalization plan
which suggested all sorts of measures which would firmly shift the neighborhood to a post-industrial economy and a mixed-income model of growth in pursuit of jobs/investment.
It goes without saying that we shouldn't take such a plan as having been representative of the community, but in my (rather extensive) research on it, the protest against the plan came overwhelmingly from white owners of industrial businesses/property.
Needless to say, this -- and the later fight over IKEA and Fairway which pitted more pro-dev NYCHA tenants against more anti-dev gentrifiers -- provide an interesting/important set of nuances to narratives around the politics of urban development and gentrification in NYC:
*within our deeply broken urban governance systems*, a vision for the sort of amenity-/ideas economy-led reinvestment was embraced by a postindustrial community. Instructive both towards how we understand the choice context of cities in the 1990s...
...and how important it is to provide better resources/policy frameworks/policy options for similar communities going forwards; I would hardly label what has taken place in Red Hook since the 1990s a success story in equitable development.


The Culver Viaduct! Home to NYC's highest train station (Smith-9th) and (until the early 2010s), this structure is a 100' tall concrete monument to navigational clearance regulations, and is the only elevated segment of the original IND system. ImageImageImage
Notably, until 2009, G trains terminated here. They dumped riders at Smith-9 and used the switches visible to reverse at 4th Av. In the era before countdown clocks, this made for some frustrating "Is that an F? No, it's a G heading to relay" moments on the sb platform @ 4 Av Image
One other fun fact about this structure: though 4th Avenue is elevated and the next station south -- 7th -- is underground, the tracks at 7th are actually above those at 4th, because of Park Slope's eponymous bit of topography


I promise I'll cool it w the tract tweets for a while after this, but this tract is too fun to pass up. Visible here is the west end of the D line's 9th Avenue station and NYCT's 38 St yard -- two fascinating bits of infrastructure.
9th Avenue has long been an important point on the city's transit network. Before the BMT brought all the railroads in South Brooklyn under one roof, it was the north end of the Bath Beach & Coney Island railroad, which eventually morphed into today's West End (D) line. Image
Its age meant it got investment early, specifically in the form of trackage linking the 9th Avenue terminal to the waterfront. This connection, still in use today by the D, includes a stretch of tunnel under 5 and 6 Avs. ImageImage
It's unclear to me whether the tunnel is original or was added later, but by 1903 the segment was underground. This makes it, afaik, the oldest active bit of tunnel in the subway system.
digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/64b4acd6… Image
The area remained important as the BMT network was improved with elevation/new subway. Before 1954, trains on what is now the F line below Ditmas turned west and connected with the D at 9th. And before its 1940 abandonment, the 5th Avenue el also had a branch which led here. ImageImageImage
(the F-D connector segment remained active as the culver shuttle until 1975)
nycsubway.org/perl/show?3055 Image
Anywho, fast forwards to today, and this rather overbuilt complex is home to most of the letter lines' work trains. And since track outages often begin at 10pm these days, they've become a big source of delay. Image
Every night, a massive caravan of them trundles up 4th Avenue, causing so much congestion that NYCT has permanently rerouted all D, N and R svc to the local track starting at 7:30.
While a logical decision within the system's current work paradigm, the frequency and speed reductions associated with this service change are, in my mind, emblematic of the NYC subway's struggles balancing maintenance with service.
Obviously we need to maintain/improve our infrastructure, but the massive erosion of off-pk/wknd svc levels and svc quality over the last decade seriously hinders the system's basic utility at those times -- a threat to mobility, equity, and climate.
No easy fixes, but looking at some of the choices we've made, seeking to maximize the value and productivity of outages (and minimize their svc impact), and trying to build better back-end processes to reduce outage-related cost issues will be critically imp't tasks in coming yrs


hold the presses: I forgot the toot scoot :(
Starrett City! This was among the last big greenfield developments in NYC, completed in 1974. Funded in part through the Mitchell Lama program, it was part of a much larger postwar program to create middle income housing for NYers. ImageImage
Most Mitchell Lama projects were just normal interstitial apartment buildings, but the program did notably a role in funding the era’s other giant greenfield(ish) modernist apartment project: Co Op City
One other fun fact about Starrett City: it has its own power plant. It famously was one of the few bits of NYC which kept power in the 1977 blackout.


Once the New York Post's printing plant in the Bronx closes, Favorite Plastics -- who receives the hopper cars above -- will be NYC's last freight rail-served *manufacturing* establishment
The Bay Ridge Branch between Flatbush and Fresh Pond is generally a good example of what pre-truck industrial urbanism looked like: dense strips of industry right along rail corridors, with housing -- often occupied by industrial workers -- right alongside
Note, too, the paucity of employee parking -- which enables greater density -- and the bus lanes on Utica Avenue. Motorization of the workforce was itself a major driving force behind industrial sprawl


Because so many NYCHA projects were built under the slum clearance mandate, the geography of NYC's public housing system will likely end up being one of the more lasting infrastructural legacies of NYC's industrial age. (second map cred @DataProgress) ImageImage
For any future social housing efforts, def feels worth keeping in mind today's radically different geography of employment opportunity and service access when making location decisions.


Kings Highway (as well as Linden Blvd) are some of NYC's most truly horrific and dangerous stroad-- but in both cases, segments of each also could be part of strong BRT corridors. The B82SBS got that work started, but both need more holistic redesigns
Remember, folks: transit in NYC is by far weakest in circumferential corridors. Making routes on key arterials like these work well -- and encouraging low-parking, dense development alongside them -- will be critical to decarbonizing transport in the city
That parking crater supports this insane art-deco Sears along Bedford Ave. Can't find any good old pics of it, but I imagine it was quite a sight before its storefront got bricked up.

And yes, I promise I'll stop after this
Image
(worth noting: the store is also part of a string of malls and dept stores that ran up Flatbush from Kings Plaza eventually to Atlantic Center. The latter mall is a urban renewal, but the others are testaments to the once Flatbush-biased geography of disposable $$$ in Brooklyn) Image
lmfao my tract spam has *already* lost me a follower


Prospect Park South, one of NYC's turn-of-the-century garden city developments. Less than 30 mins by subway from Midtown, it's probably among the most access-rich bits of single fam zoning in the US

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LGA_A320🚰 Profile picture
15 Jul
Some really interesting divergences in the US heavy rail space recently. Some systems -- notably PATH, NYCT and LA -- have experienced continuously rising operating costs, while others have seen flat or decreasing per-unit spending. Image
Though we should def take some of these conclusions with a grain of salt -- NTD data isn't always perfectly standardized across time/agency -- this does, in my eyes, put a fine point on the wide divergences in political context and managerial capacity among even US agencies
Especially for growing systems like LA, attempting to cultivate strong process fundamentals to allow for increased service levels/resiliency within messy funding politics seems critically important for the long term health of these networks
Read 4 tweets
LGA_A320🚰 Profile picture
15 Jul
Hell hath frozen over: Norfolk Southern is experimenting with bringing back less than carload freight service, a business railroads lost in the 50s. Trucks gather freight, which is then put into boxcars and shipped on the head end of intermodal trains.

trains.com/trn/news-revie… Image
A really interesting idea -- along with the traffic growth potential, it has the capacity to increase urban shippers' access to premium rail service, as truck-rail transload warehouses are a lot less space intensive than intermodal termini
Thinking about this some more -- I'm really hoping this is a success, because it has the potential to help a number of issues.
Read 8 tweets
LGA_A320🚰 Profile picture
15 Jul
In the spirit of good advocacy, I wanted to highlight few positive svc goals in the NEC Commission report. There's a lot wrong with it, but making sure that ppl hold agencies to these outlined visions while critiquing some of the more *interesting* capex ideas is important
There's a lot of language that at least suggests Amtrak is thinking about clockfacing their timetables in the future? These really should be, at the very worst, half hourly on the whole NEC but any clockface (+ standard stopping patterns to make clockface hold) at all is welcome. Image
SEPTA's goals are underwhelming, but hourly NJT Atlantic City service?? Yes please.

(and yes, I checked, this isn't a typo -- the current 12 trains * 1.67 = 20 trains/day, so about hourly 5A-12P, with maybe one extra peak trip) Image
Read 5 tweets
LGA_A320🚰 Profile picture
14 Jul
Not only this, but there's a lot of mediocre incrementalism in this vision! Good improvements of that variety work towards a strong eventual vision. Bad ones compromise on it, doing small things that technically fix a given problem but at a cost to the eventual service product
One example (cc @bensh__): the plan's fix for congestion in the Trenton area is to short turn some SEPTA Trenton Line trains at Cornwells Heights.
Not a necessarily bad idea, but what you're gonna end up with there is two terminals which involve disruptive flat moves across the NEC. That's fine at low frequencies, but if SEPTA ever wants to go for full S-Bahn, they're probably gonna regret not building flyover(s)
Read 7 tweets
LGA_A320🚰 Profile picture
8 Apr
Rail corridor planning 101 will tell you that connecting cities which exist along a line is really good. Cheyenne and Pueblo demarcate the north and south ends of a rel. populous corridor following the front range of the Rockies.
There are criticisms to be made of The Map, but can we please make them after we spend more than a few seconds thinking about what we're gonna type?
As others have noted, this Politico article basically boils down to "Amtrak should be investing in the NEC vs a bunch of extensions in the (Mid)west." Yet, the bill provides more money for the NEC than the rest of the country *combined*!
Read 8 tweets
LGA_A320🚰 Profile picture
6 Apr
Don't mean to pick on Jeremy here bc I really appreciate the productive engagement, but I do wanna push back on this line of logic. Though LIC did add a lot of housing, it was one of vanishingly few places in the NY region that did: we consistently rank _very_ low in hsng prod'n
New supply absolutely will not solve all housing-related crises -- renter protections and housing subsidies are critical part of the toolkit here -- we should be careful in making our analysis here.
Per research like this upjohn.org/research-highl…, it seems likely Qns's gentrification and displacement crises would have been even worse had it not been for LIC to absorb high-earners looking for housing in the region.
Read 5 tweets

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