The LIRR is spending $40 million to upgrade one station that carries 6,000 passengers a day on 59 trains, which means a capital expenditure of $6,666 per rider (assuming it comes in on budget)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnUW3Jc7z0I
The monthly fare is $276 for the roughly 1 hour ride into Manhattan.
Typically when transit people want to inflate numbers, they’ll count the trip into town and back as two “customers”
So if the station was the only expense for providing the service, that makes the payback period (not including interest if they float bonds) of 24 months.
A “pocket track” is a holding area in between the two existing tracks. This will allow them to hold a train that ends at this station while trains that continue down the line to go by. Most likely the trains that run further will make this their last stop before the Jamaica station, skipping 8 stations. Once the express train goes by, the local pulls out from the pocket track and follows the express, but stopping at every stop, reducing the crush of people getting on closer to the city.
I’m not arguing that it isn’t needed, but that it should come out of the LIRR operating revenues, not New York or Federal money. You just know a big chunk of this is going to have artwork funded and minority set asides and of course all done by union labor.
The East Side Access Project alluded to is the $9 billion tunnel under the East River connecting to the Grand Central Station at 42nd and Park Avenue. That will allow LIRR customers to ride to midtown without having to change to a NYC subway and have to smell the little people by 2019 – which assumes those jobs haven’t fled Manhattan by then
The estimate is it will serve 160,000 passengers a day, which comes out to $53,750 per passenger. That’s a lot of $276s per month, which of course we already spent to give the station heated platforms
Art, you get get that Obamacare math past readers of this blog- that is not 160,000 new passengers, new passengers would come from new jobs (more or less). Assuming the 160,000 figure is correct, it is almost entirely people that are making the commute today across the river on existing tracks. Without them taking their existing lines, those existing lines will need a bigger taxpayer subsidy.
Reminds me of Debbie Blabberman Schultz on interviewed by Maria Bartoromo on CNBC. Debbie kept telling the interviewer that Obamacare will reduce the nation’s healthcare costs. Maria finally said, “Are you saying that it will put some doctors out of a job so that we will be spending less?” and Blabberman looked like a deer in the headlights, then finally said more people will be covered and be able to get procedures they can not afford now. At that point, Maria was as confused as the viewers.
The 160k is people who won’t have to switch from LIRR to get to midtown. But not every LIRR train will move to Grand Central, so they’ll still have to switch trains.
Today, they have the choice of riding to Penn Station around 32nd and catching a subway or bus to go the mile+ North or walk for 15 minutes.
The main advantage of getting the LIRR out of Penn Station is it will create additional opportunities to get Amtrak and NJ Transit trains in there.
And then of course there is the 2nd street subway finally being built
Of course, if the city hadn’t imposed rent control and generally made it impossible to be a landlord, many more people would have housing on Manhattan and not have to cross a river to get to work
Many people in Manhattan are chronically unemployed and even on food stamps. To qualify for assistence, why not offer them housing in a climate that requires less heating and improve their greenhouse gas foot print while making room for new upscale homes so that the employed don’t need to commute using additional fossil fuels?
$9 billion tunnel buys a lot of trailers in Arkansas.
Oh wait, you say that would mean fewer voting Democrats in Manhattan? Nevermind.
One of the tensions in New York is that gentrification of Harlem is happening (“there goes the neighborhood – white people are moving in”). WOR’s former host Joey Reynolds made a big deal about the fact he lived in an apartment in Harlem.
In the “good old days”, there were reasons businesses had to be in New York -stock brokers had to physically exchange stock certificates, book publishers needed to be near national media outlets.
Not everyone who lives in Manhattan can be middle class the same way not everyone needs a college education. The City needs a lot of people to wash dishes, cut hair, sell coffee… What it doesn’t need is “homeless” people living in “hotels” with the government picking up the tab
My sister lives in Western New York State in an area where all the industry has been chased away and real estate prices are low. The State of New York is aggressively relocating people from New York City to her town, bringing along the gangs and drug related crime.
Mexico is the place to send ’em. Good, hard working southerners don’t want a bunch more chronically unemployed freeloaders. We like our lower tax burden, and that’s why folks choose to retire in southern states.