What are the Strong Tramway Corridors?

2016-07-20

Note on definitions: for the purposes of this post, a tramway is a light rail line that runs predominantly on streets, interfacing with cross-traffic even if it has signal priority. It can be a legacy streetcar in mixed traffic, or a newer light rail line running on dedicated lanes. It is distinguished from lines that have substantial grade-separated segments, including subway-surface lines, where these segments are in city center while the suburban segments are in tramway mode, and tram-trains and most North American light rail lines, where these segments are in the suburbs while the city-center segments are in tramway mode.

Intermediate in capacity between the surface bus and the rapid transit train is the tram. Running on the street, perhaps with signal priority but without the absolute priority that mainline trains have at grade crossings, trams are still surface transit, but feature better ride quality, generally higher capacity in terms of vehicles per hour, and generally bigger vehicles. A number of cities have been building such transit in recent years, most notably Paris, which has been making the rounds on the Transit Center for having almost a million daily riders on its system. The Transit Center gives various recommendations based on Paris’s success, but those recommendations – frequency, fare integration, good transfers – say very little about where a city should be building tramway lines. In this post, I am going to sketch features of good corridors for tramways.

1. Tramways are surface transit

There are various features that make for good surface transit routes. Jarrett Walker, who has extensive experience in bus network redesigns, outlined some of them in a network design document he collaborated on for TransLink. These include high density along the route, relatively balanced demand in both directions, and the potential for a strong everywhere-to-everywhere grid. Additional important features of strong bus routes: a single street with few twists, since turns slow down surface vehicles a lot, and swerving to reach major destinations is often cumbersome; and a wide street, since in practice few cities will give transit dedicated lanes if there’s not enough room for cars as well. These rules do not apply to subways, which can zigzag between different streets or carve a new alignment. However, they do apply to tramways.

2. The strongest bus corridors are in most need of investment

In a city where the buses that can support high frequency already are frequent, the highest potential for extra ridership is on routes that are already strong. Imagine a bus that averages 15 km/h: replacing it with a 20 km/h tram that provides a smoother and more reliable ride has benefits in rough proportion to existing bus ridership. Since both buses and trams are surface transit and follow the same rules, it’s unlikely that there are routes that would make good trams but poor buses. This is in stark contrast with subways, where a potentially strong corridor may not have a continuous surface right-of-way for high bus ridership. On the surface, this corridor could not succeed as either a bus or a tram. This is a specification of the BMT’s all four concept (bus, trolleybus, tramway, subway), in which the four modes work in complement, and the busiest routes in each category are upgraded to the next based on a tradeoff between construction costs and operating costs.

3. In a city with subways, the tramways should be placed on routes that would make poor subway corridors

It goes without saying that tramways should not duplicate subways. But more than that, if a bus route is so strong that it’s a potential subway extension, it should not be turned into a tram. At first pass, this may look like the best bus routes to be turned into trams are not quite the busiest, but the next tier of busier buses. However, this has to do not just with ridership, but also layout relative to the subway system. The subway is almost invariably radial, so strong buses that make easy radials or branches of radials would be strong subway routes, while circumferential buses would not. A radial bus may also turn out to be a poor subway route, if it happens to point in a direction where a subway wouldn’t be a good fit, but this is less likely.

4. A connected network is beneficial, but not required

Ideally, all light rail routes – not just tramways, but also subway-surface routes and tram-trains if they exist – should form a connected graph, with track connections, to enable maximum flexibility in yard placement and reduce the required spare ratio. However, this is not a requirement. Large, busy systems in particular may economically have a yard serving just 1-2 lines, in which case the value of connectedness decreases. In conjunction with point #3, cities with large radial subway networks may have disconnected circumferential tramways, including Paris.

5. When there’s a choice between several tramways and a subway, tramways work better when there’s no dominant route

The construction cost of a subway, in developed countries that are not the US, is $100-300 million per km, with outliers outside the range in both directions. The construction cost of a tramway in the same countries is $15-50 million per km, again, with outliers. The choice of whether to build one subway or six tramways depends on how busy the strongest route is relative to the next five routes. If two strong bus routes are closely parallel, then both should be reckoned together for subway ridership estimates (and to some extent also for tram ridership), since people walk longer to better service, in this case a fast subway rather than a slow bus. Another consideration, more about construction costs than ridership, is whether there exists a good right-of-way for the subway, perhaps an abandoned or low-ridership commuter line that can be converted, that would make it possible to limit tunneling.

Examples

Boston has few long, wide roads; Massachusetts Avenue is one of very few exceptions. Downtown Boston and the surrounding neighborhoods have very narrow streets, which is why the Boston bus network is sparse downtown – the buses feed outlying subway stations, or stop at the edge of the central business district at Haymarket, and almost never enter the downtown core. Because of the Green Line, some strong radial routes, such as the Washington Street half of the Silver Line, and the 23 bus on Blue Hill Avenue, are naturally good extensions of the subway-surface network; they’d make good light rail, but not all-surface tramways.

In strongly gridded cities, including Chicago, Vancouver, Toronto, and Los Angeles, it doesn’t make too much sense to build individual tramways; instead, the entire frequent bus grid could be so upgraded, or possibly just the lines that are perpendicular to the rapid transit system in Chicago and Toronto. Unfortunately, this runs into high construction costs, which leads to questions of priorities: build an expansive light rail network, or extend a few subway lines.

I believe Los Angeles and Vancouver are doing right in choosing to prioritize subways on their strongest corridors. Vancouver in particular is an extreme example of point #5 pointing toward a subway, with 80,000 weekday riders on Broadway and another 40,000 on the routes interlining on 4th Avenue 500 meters away (not all on 4th, as two of the four 4th Avenue routes have substantial tails elsewhere), compared with 110,000 on the next five routes combined; Vancouver also seems to have an unusually low subway-to-tram cost ratio, only about 2.7 rather than 6. Los Angeles has a less extreme version of point #5, but Wilshire and very close-by routes dominate east-west traffic, and can also easily feed into the existing subway.

In Chicago, the circumferential nature of the top bus routes – north-south west of the Loop, east-west north and south of it – makes an L extension infeasible, so from point #3, any solution has to involve surface transit. The current plan is dedicated bus lanes. In Toronto this decision is more difficult, and acrid debates between a mostly-surface option and an all-underground option led to the latter choice, influenced by Rob Ford’s unwillingness to take road lanes from cars; right now Toronto is building one subway line (update: it’s mixed subway-surface), under Eglinton, and one tramway, on Finch West.

New York

In New York, Bill de Blasio proposed a tram route near the Brooklyn and Queens waterfront earlier this year; see background articles here and here. This route is ill-suited for the technology proposed, or for any significant investment. The buses along the waterfront are all quite weak. In both Brooklyn and Queens, the busiest buses are in the interior, some going perpendicular to the subway, such as the Q44 on Main Street and B35 on Church, and some serving radial routes that have long been planned to be subway extensions, namely the B46 on Utica and B44 on Nostrand. Select Bus Service investments have targeted these routes, and now the Q44, B44, and most recently the B46 all have SBS features.

Another weakness of the proposed route is that it subtly combines circumferential and radial service; see here for why this is poor practice. While the line is for the most part straight, the north-south segment in Queens is essentially radial, going from Astoria to Long Island City, parallel to the N/Q subways, before switching to circumferential between Long Island City and Downtown Brooklyn. South of Downtown Brooklyn it becomes radial again, connecting to Red Hook and Sunset Park. Riders in Astoria going south are mostly interested in continuing toward Manhattan and not toward Brooklyn; riders in Sunset Park and Red Hook going north would first of all follow different routes (Sunset Park already has the N and R subways and has no use for a detour through Red Hook), and second of all be more interested in going to Manhattan than to Williamsburg and points north.

While de Blasio’s proposal is bad transit, there are routes in New York that could make strong tramways. None of them is on the city’s redevelopment agenda, based on the principle that US cities almost never invest in low- and lower-middle-income neighborhoods except when they are about to gentrify, but the bus ridership there is solid, even though the buses crawl.

The busiest routes in New York are the M15 on 1st and 2nd Avenues in Manhattan, the B46, and the Bx12 on Fordham Road; each has been the single busiest in one of the last few years, but usually the M15 is first. The first two are strong subway routes: the first phase of Second Avenue Subway will soon open, and the rest will be built when the city can find multiple billions per kilometer for them; Utica is also a strong route, and de Blasio proposed it last year before abandoning the idea. But Fordham satisfies point #4 perfectly: it is circumferential, and can only realistically extend the A train, already the system’s longest route, with a mismatch in potential ridership between the core radial segment and what a Fordham subway would get. The Bx12 was the first route to be turned into SBS, and is either the strongest potential tramway in the city, or one of the few strongest.

Going further down the list, we should eliminate the strong Brooklyn routes, except the B41 on Flatbush. The B44 is also a potential subway extension, and the three busiest circumferentials – the B6, B35, and B82 – all parallel the Triboro right-of-way, which by point #5 is a superior project to building multiple light rail lines. The busiest bus in Queens, the Q58, has a long segment between Queens and Brooklyn, about half its total length, that would be obviated by Triboro as well.

The B41 could be a tramway going between City Hall and Kings Plaza, using two dedicated lanes of the Brooklyn Bridge. In that case, the line would effectively act as subway-surface, or more accurately elevated-surface: a surface segment in Brooklyn, a grade-separated segment between Manhattan and Brooklyn. Subway-surface lines should branch, as all current examples do (e.g. Boston Green Line, Muni Metro, Frankfurt U-Bahn), because the subway component has much higher capacity than the surface components. This suggests one or two additional routes in Brooklyn, which do not have strong buses, but may turn into strong tramways because of the fast connection across the river to Manhattan. The first is toward Red Hook, which is not served by the subway and cut off from the rest of the city by the Gowanus Expressway. Unfortunately, there is no really strong corridor for it – the streets are not very wide, and the best for intermediate ridership in Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens require additional twists to get into the core of Red Hook. Court Street might be the best compromise, but is annoyingly a block away from the F/G trains, almost but not quite meeting for a transfer. The second possible route is along Flushing Avenue toward the Navy Yard; it’s not a strong bus by itself, but the possibility of direct service to Manhattan, if a Flatbush tramway preexists, may justify it.

In the Bronx and Queens, a more conventional network is called for. The Bronx in particular has several strong bus lines forming a good grid, in addition to the Bx12. The east-west routes cannot possibly be made into subway extensions, while the north-south ones have nowhere to go to in Manhattan except possibly a Second Avenue Subway extension, and even that is doubtful (if there’s money to extend Second Avenue Subway north, it should instead go west under 125th Street). A light rail grid could consist of the Bx12 as outlined above, a Tremont line acting as a compromise between the Bx36 and Bx40/42 feeding into Manhattan on 181st Street, a 161st/163rd Street route going into Manhattan on 155th Street replacing the Bx6, a Southern/Manhattan 145th Street route along the Bx19, a Third Avenue route along the Bx15, and a Grand Concourse route along the Bx1/2. Grand Concourse has a subway, but the Bx1/2 nonetheless currently ranks 5th in the city in weekday ridership, and the street is so wide that it’s a good candidate for light rail. Update: a Webster Avenue route along the Bx41 is also feasible, I just forgot it when writing this post.

In Queens, there’s less room for a grid. Main Street is a strong route, connecting to Tremont in the Bronx via the Whitestone Bridge, as the Q44 SBS already does today. A second route between Flushing and Jamaica, on Kissena and Parsons, could also get a tramway. These two routes are uniquely bad subways, since they connect two busy subway lines, both of which could be extended past their termini outward. The main route on Kissena, the Q25, and another route slightly farther east, the Q65, rank 3rd and 2nd among the MTA buses, separate from the New York City Transit buses, with about 20,000 weekday riders each; they also continue north to College Point, which could get a tramway, or perhaps even a subway extension of the 7, depending on whether there are plans to redevelop the Flushing Airport site.

If there is not enough ridership on both Kissena and Main, then only Main should be turned into light rail. More potential corridors include the Q46 on Union Turnpike and the Q10 on Lefferts going to JFK (the busiest MTA bus). Unfortunately, Queens buses tend to be on the long side, e.g. the Q27, the borough’s number 3 bus after the Q58 and Q46, is 15 km long; in the Bronx the longest, Tremont, would be 13 km, cobbled out of busier buses, and most are about 10 km. The Q44 is even longer, at 20 km; light rail is only justified there because of extra local ridership coming from the Q20 local and from the fact that the Queens-Bronx segment over the bridge would be rapid transit. Even then, the tramway may only be justified from Flushing south.

I don’t want to make recommendations for priorities and an exact fantasy map in New York, as those depend on construction costs and the available budget. Fordham and Main Street are most likely the two strongest initial choices. Judging by the cost estimate for de Blasio’s waterfront proposal, tramways in New York are about $60-70 million per km, which in an inverse of the situation in Vancouver leads to an unusually high subway : tram cost ratio, 25 if we take the Manhattan subway extensions (Second Avenue and the 7 extension) as our examples, probably less but not much less if we look at a hypothetical Utica subway. This should bias New York rail extensions toward surface transit.

De Blasio proposed $1.5 billion for about 25 km of tramway on the waterfront. The waterfront idea is bad, and money can and should go elsewhere; 25 km is slightly longer than the combined length of the Bx12 and the Q44 from Flushing south. Those two together could be the start of a program to bring surface rail back to New York, using the same routing reasoning that made Paris’s program so successful. Using ridership on the existing buses and adjusting upward for rail bias, initial ridership on those two lines combined should be higher than 100,000 per day, and with more lines and a bigger network, fast multiplication of overall traffic can be expected.

Written by Alon Levy Posted in New York, Transportation, Urban Transit, Vancouver