Heh - I used to live in Greenpoint and would reverse commute up to Queens Plaza to avoid the "G to the L to the BDFQ" into midtown...
On the contrary, Hoboken - where I now live - has a wealth of options to commute into both midtown and downtown NYC. Within a few blocks of my apartment: a subway trip of less than 20 mins to either Wall Street or 32nd (Midtown); ferry (a very pleasant 40 min trip to my office in the 40s); bus about 30 mins to midtown depending upon traffic. I love the ferry - it is the least efficient and most expensive option. I take it about 30% of the time to enjoy the river in the morning or evening.
This kind of access to NYC has made Hoboken (and downtown Jersey City) a much more desirable location than other small cities in the area. And I have more options than many of my colleagues in Brooklyn or Queens - and a quicker commute than some colleagues in the Upper West side of Manhattan.
Go a few miles further into NJ and commuting becomes a mess. The first time I googlemapped our new datacenter in the Meadowlands of NJ - I was pleasantly surprised that it was ~5 miles from NYC office and roughly the same from my Hoboken apartment. And ~1 mile from a transit stop.
Thought I could ride my bike but the trip is through MadMax NJ wasteland, unmaintained roads on which semis rule and on which there are no sidewalks. I am not brave enough. Even the wildlife is scary - a giant groundhog grumpily rules the front gate area of the datacenter. And those 8 foot tall reeds are everywhere - I can just imagine full of rats and albino sewer alligators of immense size. I take a $15 cab from the nearest light rail stop.
Same here, I live on the Jersey City waterfront and love the ferry commute. Hoboken and Jersey City are excellent places to live for a Manhattan job. We get to take advantage of the market inefficiency created by the "eww Jersey" popular image. Bonus, we dodge the NYC income tax which runs over 3% of income.
Fun fact: the NY state + NY city income taxes pretty much equal the entire California state income tax rate. It's not a huge loss given comparable living options.
I live in the NJ Path area as well (JC/Hoboken) ... but I personally do NOT think that this area is inexpensive ... definitely less expensive than Manhattan, and less taxes ... but you can find some awesome apartments in Queens/Brooklyn that would cost a fortune in JC/Hoboken.
> I used to live in Greenpoint and would reverse commute up to Queens Plaza to avoid the "G to the L to the BDFQ" into midtown...
I used to live in Greenpoint too! I lived close to the Bedford Ave station. From there, it only took 10 minutes (5 stops on the L) to get to the 14 St station.
I guess you lived closer to the Greenpoint Ave station?
Yup, Kent Street about a block from the water. I was there 1991-1993. And I was misremembering the subway routine - it was to go up to Queens Plaza to hit the N/R back to Manhattan.
Also in the category of boroughs hard to reach from Brooklyn without a car or undue delay: Staten Island. Today, three of its four bridges prohibit pedestrians and none have subway connections. One of those bridges (to NJ) used to have a pedestrian and cycle way, but a few years after the Streetcar Scandal it was removed as part of an expansion (!) orchestrated by Robert Moses. Look him up to find out more about the bizarre history of mass transit in mid-20th century NYC.
The history isn't that bizarre. Robert Moses simply despised anyone that wasn't rich, and spent his entire career trying to make the city even more miserable than it already was for the poor. If you're rich, you don't bike to Staten Island, plain and simple -- you drive a glorious automocar.
It's ironic because now all the rich people want to bury his highways underground.
> The history isn't that bizarre. Robert Moses simply despised anyone that wasn't rich, and spent his entire career trying to make the city even more miserable than it already was for the poor.
Robert Moses is a great example of the problems of unchecked power and hubris, even if ostensibly well-intentioned. But he absolutely democratized Long Island, which was an idyllic enclave of gigantic estates and private beaches before he built the LIE, Northern and Southern State Parkways, Jones Beach, etc.
I do not buy that all. They say that streetcars were on their way out anyway because buses were more efficient. There is a significant hole in this reasoning because:
(a) GM is not in the business of owning street car lines;
(b) GM spent considerable money to buy out the street car lines, nevertheless.
If the street car lines were on their way out anyways why did GM spend so much money on something very much out of their usual line business? It may not be true that GM was the sole reason streetcars went away there may have been other factors, but it is hard to deny that GM played a role and a very significant role as they were the party that did the actual physical destruction.
And, by the way, the only reason buses seemed cheaper at the time was subsidies. Street cars had to pay for the building and upkeep of their rails, while buses used the streets, and the city paid for upkeep of the streets. One usually does not consider the damage buses do on the streets, but it is pretty significant because heavy vehicles do disproportionate amount of damage to asphalt. When all costs are added up, light rail is usually much more efficient than buses and that is before you even consider environmental costs.
It is quite possible that as citizens started worrying over their tax bills they would require bus companies to pay for the use of city streets. Interstate truckers, for example, are taxed for use of the highways. In that case, street cars would again become cheaper to operate than buses.
I haven't read that article yet, but in Western Europe (at least the Netherlands), streetcars (and regional trams and trains) were in decline in the same period, although the larger cities kept them. But you may be right that it was actually implicit subsidies that made the difference.
As a Queens native, I'm much more inclined to think that the reason Greenwald hints at the end of the article ("As white flight and urban decline escalated in the late 1960s, Queens identified more and more with Long Island, isolating Brooklyn further still.") was to blame. Though one side of my family didn't completely leave Brooklyn until the early 70s, the other side actually got out in the early 50s. This is probably related to the parts of Brooklyn they lived in.
That said, the changes in transit almost definitely had an impact, and i would guess that the two phenomena had a sympathetic effect on each other.
There is a delightful movie called Who Framed Roger Rabbit in which the villain is attempting just this: buying trolley lines to build "highways, as far as the eye can see".
I'll also note that the (excellent) film was based on the novel Who Censored Roger Rabbit?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Censored_Roger_Rabbit%3F
, but the streetcar/ highway plot elements are invented for the movie completely absent in the book.
I second the recommendation for anyone who hasn't seen this movie. It was marketed as a kids movie, but has a lot of stuff in it that adults can appreciate.
It was also one of the first movies to combine significant CGI with real-world interaction.
I last saw that film about twenty years ago, I think I should catch it again. Back to the Future had some great lines in it as well, but as yet I haven't caught Used Cars.
This story is one of the big reasons LA (despite the weather) is not a great place to live. It has been unwalkable with a few exceptions. Though public transit is being slowly rebuilt from destruction, talk to most Angelenos and they don't even know there is a subway, much less use it.
Also, there is a certain segment of the population that fights denser development that would encourage transit improvements. I don't really understand why such a person would live in Hollywood, for example.
> Also, there is a certain segment of the population that fights denser development that would encourage transit improvements. I don't really understand why such a person would live in Hollywood, for example.
Walkscore.com gives Hollywood a Walk Score of 97, which is described as a "Walker's Paradise" which means that daily errands do not require a car, or it gives it an 87, which means most daily errands do not require a car. (It gives different scores depending on how you search for it--I think the 97 is if it centers the map on Santa Monica Boulevard, and the 87 if it centers it farther north).
So maybe you find people living in Hollywood who are not worried about transit improvements because their neighborhood is fine without transit?
I don't think this is really a contradiction. I took GP to be complaining about Hollywood residents who want to force everyone to drive. These creatures do exist, and they deserve our scorn, at least partially for the hypocrisy inherent in their preference.
I'm not familiar with Walkscore.com, but somehow I wonder if they base any of the score on ease of commuting to work.
Hmm, there's a lot unsaid in the thread and details that cloud the discussion if we dug in. The example I was thinking of was in Hollywood, but I don't know how many of the negative commenters were actually residents.
While Hollywood does have the metro and is largely walkable, other vast areas of it are used solely as surface parking lots that look like urban blight to most folks. Expanding to the rest of LA, I see the same complaints over and over, as if turning asphalt jungle into homes and businesses were a bad thing.
The point of that paragraph was that if a person wants to live in suburbia they should not reside in the center of a mega-city.
As a tramway lover that photo of stacked, decommissioned streetcars made me cry a little on the inside. Just a couple of hours ago, as I was preparing to enter a tramway in my (East-European) city, I saw a 4-year old pointing to the two tramways that were waiting in the station and telling his grandma how great that was. Streetcars (and trains) are just magical.
When I was a kid, that might have worked -- the G stopped at Queens Plaza (with local service all the way to Continental Ave.), so you could take an E or F down Queens Boulevard, make a quick transfer, and be on your way. Sadly, the MTA seems to have it in for the G; the line now terminates at Court Sq., the trains are shorter than before (which was already shorter than other lines), and some of the stations are in very poor shape.
Also worth mentioning is the J, which is mostly a Brooklyn/Queens train.
The J barely goes into Queens, only at the very end does it have half a dozen stops in Woodhaven and Jamaica. Someone below mentions the L which as far as I know has no Queens stops, and the the M which does actually serve Middle village directly from Brooklyn but otherwise requires a giant loop through Manhattan.
This issue is near and dear to my heart, I live in Woodside but I have close friends in Park Slope. By car it's a straight shot down the BQE -- 20 - 30 minutes depending on traffic. When all the subways are running, I can take the 7 to the G and it's an hour and fifteen minute trip. But both the 7 and the G have terrible weekend schedules so if I wanted to go right now, I'd have to take the 7 to the Q and go through all of Manhattan and it'd take more like an hour and a half. Or I could take three buses and hope that scheduled connections actually happen.
If the timing works out it can sometimes make sense to take commuter rail from Woodside-Jamaica-Atlantic Terminal though that's more expensive and you have to buy a ticket at the counter because the machines can't figure it out.
As an interim measure they should put a couple of express buses going north south -- one could go from the 74th Jackson Heights station down the BQE to the Lorimer stop on the L and then continue on to the Atlantic Terminal. Another could link the Middle village terminus of the M to the M (and R, F, E) at Queens Blvd with a second stop along the 7. The long term solution is more lines. We should be doing that instead of spending billions on silly prestige projects like the new Penn Station they want to build.
BTW last time I took the rail from Jamaica to Atlantic terminal (this summer) I bought a ticket from one of the machines without much complication. Did they somehow break it?
Jamaica to Atlantic is fine it's when you want to go from Woodside to Atlantic via Jamaica (i.e. east to go west) that the ticket machines have a problem.
They're trying to change things around. The G has been getting attention lately due to the population explosion in Williamsburg/Greenpoint. You'll have to ask someone that rides it every day, though. The J connects, but through Manhattan. Another mention is the East River Ferry which connects Dumbo, Williamsburg, Greenpoint and LIC. Still a far cry from connecting the rest of the boroughs, though.
Not really related, but your comment reminds me of a fantastic exchange from a Seinfeld ep, with Kramer advising Jerry on how to get to Coney Island.
Kramer: Ok, you can take the B or the F and switch for the N at Broadway Lafayette, or you can go over the bridge to DeKalb and catch the Q to Atlantic Avenue, then switch to the IRT 2, 3, 4 or 5.
But don't get on the G. See, that's very tempting, but you'll wind up on Smith and 9th, then you've got to get on the R.
Elaine: ... Couldn't he just take the D straight to Coney Island?
I've had relationships fall apart because of the four mile G problem. To round it up, Court Square to the Park Slope areas is easily an hour when waiting for trains to arrive. Two hours round trip is why I left the Bay Area transit wasteland for cripessake.
Honest reply: at that time, I lived two houses down from the Court Square E/M/G/7 station and 0.3 miles away from an N/Q stop (and another 0.2 miles away from an E/M/R), so everything was pretty much right there.
Checking in to say that I rode the G once from park slope to Williamsburg for a "quick dinner." The ride took over an hour each way. That's when I decided to never ride it again.
1. Why were privately owned mass transit systems the norm in the first half of the 20th century, and why is that now considered "impossible" today?
2. Why is it OK for government to "monopolize mass transit", which they have done almost everywhere, but a criminal "conspiracy" when four private entities try to do it?
It was hardly paradise. The systems of the various companies had separate fare collection and few interconnections, and the maps from those days look thoroughly incomprehensible.
After the consolidation, it took a major project to provide the modest amount of interconnection we have today, via the Chrystie Street Connection [1], and that only united 2 of the 3 legacy systems. We're still left with bizarre redundancies in some parts of the system and lack of service in others, and two entirely separate systems (known as the A-divsion and B-division) that will likely never be fully consolidated.
Today, as much as I can find plenty to criticize about the system, after many decades of public stewardship, NYC's mass transit system is by far the best of any city I've ever been to.
On point 2, presumably the government has no vested interest in any particular form of mass transit and thus would choose the most efficient one, while the private companies (in this case) are accused of using buses to prop up other businesses (cars, tires, and oil).
They may or may not have a vested interest in buses vs. trolleys. But I think that they most definitely have an interest in monopolizing something like mass transit because it provides a huge opportunity for patronage jobs, ghost employment, union/pension shenanigans, contracting kickbacks, and vote-buying. Just off the top of my head.
I wish I lived in the idyllic world which your sentence describes.
It always puzzles me when people presume that governments or public offices act more virtuously, free from vested interests, agendas, prejudices, etc. I would understand it if governments imported their staff from angels. In reality, they have to hire the same human beings that private corporations hire.
Actually, I'd say it really comes down to rails and tires. Streetcars can be given the same rights-of-way as buses and would perform similarly, except: the streetcar is a smoother ride. I can grab breakfast and eat it on a streetcar knowing there's only one direction of motion to worry about. On a bus, however, you can never tell which way you'll be jerked around. It really is much less pleasant, even if it's faster without the right of way. (Due to left turning cars)
Can someone who's taken the new MTA Select Bus Service busses comment on whether they are smoother than regular busses? I took an MTA bus today for the first time in a long while and it was uncomfortably bumpy.
I haven't taken them very often, but I have had a couple really great experiences with the M15 1st/2nd Ave SBS. Due to cascading traffic lights, efficient boarding, and wide spacing between stops, it's almost as nice as taking the subway.
Still they don't/can't break as abruptly as buses and the ride is a lot less bumpy in general. And buses are notoriously crammed, even when the next bus would supposedly be there in 2 minutes, people will squeeze into the one that's there now, with trams you can just attach another cart, and carts can be larger to begin with.
Ah, at least in Toronto, we tend to see our trams as streetcars rather than trains, so they fall victim to the same "next bus" problem you quote above. More so, as trains can't hop over one another to pick up passengers at alternating stops, a practice common with the busiest of routes. That said, streetcar drivers are often much calmer than bus drivers. There's just a different kind of expectation...
They call them 'the metro' usually to sound more modern.
I use one twice a week, but it only runs on actual roads for a small part of the journey (Birmingham to Wolverhampton) so it is more of a light railway really. The extension at the Birmingham end will bring the trams back onto main city streets.
Though I've never personally experienced it, perhaps due to following the advice, I've been repeatedly advised when trying to get around NYC to always get in the taxi before telling them my destination is in Brooklyn.
This could be wrong, but the stated reason is that drivers don't want fares to Brooklyn (typically lower, and harder to get another fare who wants to go Brooklyn to someplace else for the return trip), and so will refuse the fare if told the destination before you get in the taxi (and apparently they're not allowed to refuse you based on destination once you're inside).
That sure doesn't stop them from doing it though. I've threatened to report them before and although you can threaten them it sucks to have to do it. I'd rather just let them roll and wait for another cab in all but the most dire circumstances.
Not the medallion which is generally not owned by the driver and worth mid six to low seven figures, but the driver's hack license is endangered by multiple violation of TLC's rules.
The guy who maimed that tourist is back on the road, so if you don't lose your license by running over someone on the sidewalk, you're not going to lose your license by not taking someone to Brooklyn.
That's good advice. If I'm not in a super huge rush I'll ask the first cab if he wants to go to Queens/Brooklyn/wherever before getting in. It has a ~80% failure rate.
They're not allowed to refuse a destination in the 5 boroughs full stop but if you're not inside the cost of refusing is trivial (just driving away).
That's not much of an issue if you are going between Brooklyn and Queens. With a few small exceptions you won't see a yellow cab in those boros anyway and black cars or the new green taxis are a lot more flexible.
This is good advice, but it's never worked for me. I've never hailed a cab in which they didn't have the doors locked until you tell them where you want to go. I even had one cab speed off while I was still holding the door handle when I told him I just wanted to go five blocks south (in Chelsea, in the snow), I figured he though I was going to change my mind when I got in.
I must be understanding what you're saying. I've taken thousands of cabs in NYC and only a hand full of times have I been required to tell them where I'm going before they've allowed me in the cab. Or perhaps it's a racial minority thing? I'm an upstanding looking white guy.
Black guy here. I don't think I've ever been locked out of a cab that stopped in front of me until I stated my destination or had a cabbie refuse to take me home to Brooklyn or anywhere else. I do always make a point to get in the cab first.
However, I've had plenty of cabs mysteriously go "off duty" as they approach me. That's probably a much less risky way to avoid a trip that presumably leads to a less profitable/more dangerous destination statistically, due to my ethnicity.
Queens and Brooklyn are both enormous and border each other, so that price depends on where you're traveling to/from. e.g. a car from Bushwick, Brooklyn to Ridgewood, Queens might cost you $10. Also, taking the J train from Crescent St (Brooklyn) to Woodhaven Blvd (Queens) would be 5-10 minutes on the train.
Thank you for saying this. I live in Long Island City, Queens and I visit friends in Williamsburg, Brooklyn all the time. It's easy to take the G train and get there within 20 some minutes.
Another possibility would be to build all the planned subway extensions in Queens; Brooklyn already has good subway service, and a few more lines connecting the two boroughs would not hurt:
Build it? With whose money? The city's finances have been a disaster since 2008 and they've only been scraping by with a series of unsustainable tricks. The next mayor will almost certainly be Bill de Blasio, whose top agenda item is basically to spending a lot more money on the city's unionized labor. (His next agenda item is to revive rent control, because the War Emergency Tenant Protection Act apparently hasn't done enough to run the city into the ground yet. (And yes, that war emergency is WWII.))
Have you ever wondered why we can't have nice things? :P
The MTA is a state agency, so really you need to look at the state's budget, not the city's. I also have little sympathy for the argument that the MTA is too short on cash -- they have been wasting enormous amounts of tax dollars on failed projects for decades.
Not that that should give us any hope for an expanded subway system.
The tolls on the new Tappen Zee bridge are expected to be $15, and even that might not be enough to fund it after the hole Coumo blew in the transportation budget after deciding to pillage a general fund instead of raising tolls for commercial vehicles last year.
As I said, I am not saying that we should have much hope for expanding the subway system even if the state budget was perfect. The MTA's main area of expertise is wasting money.
In my earlier comment I mentioned the Rockaway Beach Branch. That right-of-way would require only a bit of cleanup, some maintenance on a few bridges, and switches to connect to the A line and hundred feet of tunnel in Rego Park, and we would have a new subway line in Queens with access to JFK. We are talking maybe a hundred million dollars, assuming competent engineers and contractors are hired -- a fraction of what the MTA has been spending trying to get the Rail Control Center online.
Realistically, when building a public works project in the Northeast USA, one must hire union labor. I guess I'm not understanding which you personally care about more, improving public transit or balancing public budgets. My point was just that a mayor who likes unions will likely support public transit projects, which is kind of what betterunix was talking about.
That's an important point overlooked by those who are wistful for trolleys. Buses at least can change routes. Trolleys were from a time when few had cars and spending lots of money on a fixed route was efficient. Now it's not.
So perhaps the actual blame lies not with the change from trolleys to buses, but rather the change from light traffic to heavy traffic, as the automobile industry took off.
> Ever try to get from Brooklyn to Queens, two of the most populated boroughs of New York City? Without a car, it's nearly impossible, as most subway lines require one to go through Manhattan first.
Could someone explain this to those of us who have never been to New York and whose only knowledge of its subways comes from TV and movies?
The impression I get from subway travel as depicted on TV and in movies is that trains run frequently enough that trips requiring changing trains aren't a big deal. So what's the problem is you have to go to Manhattan then change trains to go to Queens?
To add on to DrJokepu, while trains depart frequently it can take quite a long time to get from the middle of Brooklyn/Queens, loop through Manhattan, and then go back out to the middle of the other, especially if it's a local train that stops at every station (versus express trains which only stop at select stations).
As someone who had no idea how huge New York really is until I visited for my first time, Google Maps shows the center of Queens and center of Brooklyn being a 12.7 mile drive apart. If you have to loop through Manhattan that turns into a nearly 30 mile loop.
On the contrary, Hoboken - where I now live - has a wealth of options to commute into both midtown and downtown NYC. Within a few blocks of my apartment: a subway trip of less than 20 mins to either Wall Street or 32nd (Midtown); ferry (a very pleasant 40 min trip to my office in the 40s); bus about 30 mins to midtown depending upon traffic. I love the ferry - it is the least efficient and most expensive option. I take it about 30% of the time to enjoy the river in the morning or evening.
This kind of access to NYC has made Hoboken (and downtown Jersey City) a much more desirable location than other small cities in the area. And I have more options than many of my colleagues in Brooklyn or Queens - and a quicker commute than some colleagues in the Upper West side of Manhattan.
Go a few miles further into NJ and commuting becomes a mess. The first time I googlemapped our new datacenter in the Meadowlands of NJ - I was pleasantly surprised that it was ~5 miles from NYC office and roughly the same from my Hoboken apartment. And ~1 mile from a transit stop.
Thought I could ride my bike but the trip is through MadMax NJ wasteland, unmaintained roads on which semis rule and on which there are no sidewalks. I am not brave enough. Even the wildlife is scary - a giant groundhog grumpily rules the front gate area of the datacenter. And those 8 foot tall reeds are everywhere - I can just imagine full of rats and albino sewer alligators of immense size. I take a $15 cab from the nearest light rail stop.