All posts by inthesaltcity

Who are jobs for?

Community

In an opinion piece that the Post-Standard printed on May 13, Mitchell Patterson predicted that in the next few years, companies in and around Syracuse will be hiring for tens of thousands of jobs. This, he says, is a problem:

Having too many jobs sounds like a good problem to have. But not having the people – or the people with the right skills – to fill them is holding us back.

Who’s this “us,” and who’s a part of the “we” that worries elsewhere in the piece about how “we have a job glut,” and “we can’t even fill the current surplus of jobs that exist.”

That “us” certainly doesn’t include the 17,000 people who are looking for work right now. If it did, then several thousand new jobs would not be a problem, but an opportunity to improve several thousand people’s lives. When you include those people in the “us” that has a stake in Syracuse’s future, the problem instead becomes turning that opportunity into a reality for the people with the direst need.

To tackle that problem, Syracuse needs relevant educational opportunities for adult learners, and it needs useful transportation options for people who don’t own a car.

So many of these new jobs are going to require some kind of diploma, and that’s a barrier for a lot of people who are looking for work. Public educational institutions like OCC and BOCES serve adults who need to get new training so that they can earn those diplomas. These schools already do a lot of this good work, and they could do even more with larger staffs and more locations.

Those educational opportunities are no use, though, if people can’t reach them. It’s too difficult to take a class at OCC if you have to get there on the bus. It can be even more difficult to keep a job when day in and day out you’re relying on this bus system to get you to work on time. Organizations like Providence Services can help, but what the City really needs is to renew its commitment to public transportation as a tool of individual empowerment. The Syracuse Metropolitan Transportation Council’s SMART1 recommendations will make it possible for more people to get to OCC and to more of the jobs available in the community. Centro needs support and pressure to act on those recommendations, and the SMTC needs to finish the job it started by planning all the other service improvements suggested in the Syracuse Transit System Analysis.

17,000 people are out looking for work. That’s more people than live in all of Geddes. They have to be a part of the conversation when we’re talking about the future of work in Syracuse. When they’re included, the the community’s obvious overriding imperative is to make sure that they benefit from these changes that are coming, these new jobs that will open up. Once we’ve taken care of that basic business, then let’s talk about whether or not there are too many jobs and not enough workers in this community.

Finding the Money For Better Bus Service

Transportation

Late last year, the Syracuse Metropolitan Transportation Council suggested that Centro run buses every ten minutes between Syracuse University and the Train Station, and between Eastwood and OCC. That’s a good idea, and there should be more good ideas like it on the way. City Hall has already asked the SMTC to look at how Centro can offer similar service on Erie Boulevard.

The problem is that it will cost money. The SMTC has estimated that it’ll cost $2.8 million to run the buses between the University and the Train Station, and it will cost $3.6 million to run the buses between Eastwood and OCC.

Normally when Centro talks about money, it’s talking about how it doesn’t even have enough to pay for the service it runs now. It wasn’t that long ago that Centro thought it would have to cut all late night and Sunday service in for lack of money. This year Centro is only planning to get an extra $450,000 from the State this year. That’s chump change for an organization with a $117,785,000 budget.

If Centro’s not going to get the money to run this service from out of thin air, then it’ll need to find the money in the budget it’s already got. The easiest way to do that is to take the drivers and vehicles from existing bus routes and move them to these new lines. There are opportunities for Centro to run its buses more efficiently so that it can free up drivers and vehicles to do just that without seriously cutting back on the service it already provides.

Take the 254 and 410 buses. Those buses run, for the most-part, within a couple blocks of each other, so a lot of people can catch either bus depending on when they need to ride. That’s good when the buses run at different times, because it offers better service for people who can get to either line. But when those buses run at the same time, it means that Centro is paying for two drivers and two vehicles to provide the service when it could just pay one instead.

254410

If Centro cut all of the 254 buses that run at exactly the same time as a 410 bus, it would free up an extra bus and driver for 64 hours and 40 minutes a week, or 3372 hours a year. That’s 12% of what the SMTC thinks it’ll take to run the new bus service between the University and the Train Station–not enough to pay for the whole thing, but not nothing either.

There are lots of other situations like this because Centro times its routes to arrive and depart from the Hub all at once. That’s good for people trying to make transfers to get across town, but a lot of the time it means that more than one bus from the same side of town end up lining up together. Whenever that happens, there’s an opportunity for Centro to move one of those drivers to another route to provide better service.

There are some tradeoffs. Some people are going to have to walk farther to catch the bus, and that’s a lot to ask if you’re talking about a person for whom walking is difficult because of age, physical disability, or injury. The 254 bus also runs down a stretch of Valley Drive that’s not within easy walking distance of the 410 bus, and the 254 bus makes a special stop at the Bernadine Apartments that the 410 bus does not.

But this bus service is worth those tradeoffs. It’s a simple, reliable, effective way for people to get across town. It runs through neighborhoods where a lot of people are poor and a lot of people don’t have cars. It connects those neighborhoods to the three places in Syracuse where there are the most jobs, and it also connects them to the colleges where people can improve themselves and their opportunities for employment. That’s what the bus needs to do in this City.

Preserving Housing Opportunity in Syracuse’s Neighborhoods

Planning

On City Hall’s new color-coded zoning map, strictly residential neighborhoods are shades of yellow while neighborhoods with housing, businesses, and other institutions are different shades of blue. So far, City Hall has published three new drafts of this map, and each one has less blue and more yellow.

The change has been driven by community concerns about corner stores. In an interview with WAER, Assistant Zoning Director Heather Lamendola said “a lot of concerns stemmed around what has been dubbed a ‘corner store,’ and the adverse effects that the activity there might have on the adjacent residential neighborhoods.” In an interview with the Post-Standard, Mayor Walsh specifically mentioned “a corner store going in down the street from you” as something that concerns him.

People living in many of Syracuse’s neighborhoods have good reason to be wary of corner stores, and it’s good that people in power are listening to those concerns, but City Hall’s particular response goes too far, and it threatens to limit housing opportunity in Syracuse’s neighborhoods.

That particular response has been to take a lot of properties that were originally zoned as part of the light blue MX-1 district, and to switch them to the yellow R-2 district. City Hall has made this switch in several neighborhoods.

Draft #1 (February 2017)
Draft #1 (February 2017)
Draft #2 (June 2017)
Draft #2 (June 2017)
Draft #3 (March 2018)
Draft #3 (March 2018)
Draft #1 (February 2017)
Draft #1 (February 2017)
Draft #2 (June 2017)
Draft #2 (June 2017)
Draft #3 (March 2018)
Draft #3 (March 2018)
Draft #1 (February 2017)
Draft #1 (February 2017)
Draft #2 (June 2017)
Draft #2 (June 2017)
Draft #3 (March 2018)
Draft #3 (March 2018)

Changing all of those properties from MX-1 to R-2 will keep out corner stores, but it will also restricts a lot of other activity. Here’s the table of allowable uses for those two zoning districts:

MX-1 R-2
Residential Uses 1 Family Allowed Allowed
2 Family Allowed Allowed
Multi-Family Allowed with permit
Live/Work Allowed
Boarding House Allowed with permit
Public Uses Assembly Hall Allowed Allowed
Civic Building Allowed
Cultural Institution Allowed
Public Safety Facility Allowed Allowed
School Allowed Allowed
Park Allowed Allowed
Community Garden Allowed Allowed
Commercial Uses Private Club Allowed with permit
Beverage Cafe Allowed
Restaurant Allowed
Bed and Breakfast Allowed Allowed with permit
Office Allowed
Retail Allowed

Of all the differences between MX-1 and R-2, the most important have to do with housing. On MX-1 properties, you can have single family homes, two family homes, three- four- and five- family homes, apartment buildings, live/work homes, and boarding houses. R-2 properties on the other hand, only allow for one and two family homes. The switch from MX-1 to R-2 limits the variety of housing types in these neighborhoods, and that makes it harder for a variety of people to find a place to live.

Fortunately, there’s a simple way for City Hall to keep out corner stores without limiting people’s housing options. Here’s that same table of allowable uses with the R-4 and R-5 Districts included:

MX-1 R-2 R-4 R-5
Residential Uses 1 Family Allowed Allowed Allowed Allowed
2 Family Allowed Allowed Allowed Allowed
Multi-Family Allowed with permit Allowed Allowed
Live/Work Allowed Allowed Allowed
Boarding House Allowed with permit Allowed
Public Uses Assembly Hall Allowed Allowed Allowed Allowed
Civic Building Allowed Allowed
Cultural Institution Allowed
Public Safety Facility Allowed Allowed Allowed Allowed
School Allowed Allowed Allowed Allowed
Park Allowed Allowed Allowed Allowed
Community Garden Allowed Allowed Allowed Allowed
Commercial Uses Private Club Allowed with permit Allowed with permit Allowed with permit
Beverage Cafe Allowed
Restaurant Allowed
Bed and Breakfast Allowed Allowed with permit Allowed with permit Allowed with permit
Office Allowed Allowed with permit
Retail Allowed

Like R-2, zoning districts R-4 and R-5 do not allow corner stores. Like MX-1, zoning districts R-4 and R-5 allow multi-family housing, and district R-5 allows boarding houses. If City Hall is really committed to keeping corner stores out of the neighborhood by banning retail, it could at least let people provide themselves with all of the different kinds of housing allowable in the MX-1 district by zoning these lots as R-4 or R-5. It’s done just that in Hawley Green, where several blocks of Green and Gertrude Streets have been changed from MX-1 to R-4 as City Hall has revised its zoning maps:

Draft #1 (February 2017)
Draft #1 (February 2017)
Draft #2 (June 2017)
Draft #2 (June 2017)
Draft #3 (March 2018)
Draft #3 (March 2018)

Corner stores will not be able to move into these parts of the neighborhood, but at the same time, people will still have many different opportunities to find a place to live.

The zoning ordinance should allow for growth and flexibility. A landlord should be able to turn a two-family home into a three-family home if there’s enough people looking for housing to justify the cost of making that change. When individual people can make small adjustments like those, Syracuse will be able to respond to inevitable and unpredictable changes in population, income, demographics, and community needs in the coming decades. That’s what will make Syracuse a welcoming and resilient community.

Getting Around on Urban Trails

Transportation

On April 3, the Urban Phoenix tweeted a map of Rochester’s El Camino trail done up to look like a subway line and asked “What if we looked at our urban trails like transit?”

elcaminotrail

A lot of times, urban trails get treated like city parks. They’re destinations for leisure and exercise. When the Onondaga Creekwalk opened up, Sean Kirst wrote about how it was a great way to experience Syracuse’s history, and how Downtown office workers could jog along it during their lunch breaks.

But these trails have the potential to be something more. They are public rights of way where people can walk or bike, so they’re perfect for getting around the city without using a car. Seen that way, urban trails can be another important tool–like public transit–for lifting up life without a car in our cities.

In order to fulfill that potential, urban trails need to do two things.

First, they need to connect relevant destinations, like residential neighborhoods and centers of employment. The Schuylkill River Trail in Philadelphia, PA does this by connecting many neighborhoods with Center City more directly than the City’s street grid does. A lot of other trails just follow whatever right of way the city was able to buy for cheap, even if that right of way doesn’t connect any two places worth going.

Second, urban trails need to prioritize cyclists and pedestrians whenever crossing the path of an ordinary city street. The Northwest Corridor Linear Park in Lancaster, PA and the Green Area in Syracuse’s Bayberry suburb do this by going underneath existing streets. Another option is to put in a signalized crosswalk like the one that connects the Onondaga Creekwalk to Syracuse’s Near Westside. If an urban trail doesn’t consistently prioritize cyclists and pedestrians, then it’s no more useful to them than a normal sidewalk.

northwestcorridorlinearpark

 

There are good precedents for building urban trails this way. Copenhagen and Berlin have built elevated “bike highways,” Baltimore, MD’s Jones Falls Trail uses an obsolete road to link several neighborhoods with downtown, and locally, as far back as 1897, Syracuse built specially dedicated bike paths through the City.

Unfortunately, a lot of the newer urban trails in Upstate don’t live up to these standards. Onondaga County wants to connect its Loop-the-Lake trail to a parking lot, but still hasn’t linked it to any Syracuse neighborhood. Likewise, Syracuse’s Creekwalk connects the Destiny Mall, Franklin Square, and Downtown, but no one seems interested in extending it south into the City’s poorer neighborhoods.

All that said, it’s important to remember that urban trails can’t replace transit for the simple reason that a bicycle is different than a bus. Bikes are more physically demanding than buses, and that’s important in cities like Syracuse and Rochester where so much poverty is concentrated in certain city neighborhoods, and so many opportunities for employment are scattered in outer suburbs. A lot of people have to commute further than they can realistically walk or bike, and in those situations the bus is still necessary.

People who don’t own cars have to piece together a bunch of different transportation options just to get around. Sometimes it makes sense to get a ride from a friend, sometimes it’s best to catch the bus, sometimes a cab is necessary. Urban trails can help people solve that puzzle by making it easier to get around town on foot and by bike. To provide that help, though, we’ll need to start looking at our urban trails like transit.

Bus Stops and Parking Spaces in ReZone

Planning, Transportation,

In April 2017, City Hall published a draft of the new zoning ordinance that allowed for buildings near to “any type of bus stop, regardless of service level” to build 30% fewer parking spaces than buildings without easy access to transit. That’s was a good idea because it costs money to provide off-street parking, and that’s an unnecessary expense when the people using a building don’t travel by car. When City Hall imposes that expense on a property owner by requiring that a building have more parking than is necessary, that amounts to a tax on pedestrians, cyclists, and bus riders.

In March of 2018, the City Hall backed away from that good idea. Instead of reducing parking minimums for buildings within a quarter mile of “stations served by transit,” the new draft ordinance published that month talks about buildings within a quarter mile of “transportation terminals.” It’s not obvious what a transportation terminal would be in Syracuse (the Centro Hub, the RTC, the terminal stop for each bus line?), but it’s clear from the explanatory footnote that a transportation terminal is not a bus stop:

transitfootnote

It’s as if City Hall didn’t know that Centro is a viable transportation option in just about every neighborhood in the City, and now they’re trying to limit the benefits that bus service can provide.

In fact, Centro’s pervasive service is a good reason to take the opposite tack and allow greater density at the corner properties on each intersection where a bus stops. Elevating the properties at each bus stop by one zoning district (from R-2 to R-3, say, or from MX-1 to MX-2) would increase the City’s capacity to house people who do not own cars, and that’s right in line with the City’s Land Use & Development Plan:

“This capacity should be preserved by maintaining zoning for density levels in line with the existing built environment, so that over the long-term the City may market its ability to cost-effectively absorb regional population growth—based on existing infrastructure and an urban land-use pattern that lends itself to walkable neighborhoods, local commercial and business services, and efficient transit service.” Land Use & Development Plan, pg 12

Luckily, the City Hall is hosting three information sessions about the new zoning ordinance this week. The first will be on Monday at 6:30 at Nottingham High School, the second will be on Tuesday at 6:30 at Corcoran High School, and the third will be on Wednesday at 6:30 at Henninger High School. Check these info sessions out, learn more about the new ordinance, and ask why City Hall wants make it harder for people without cars to find an affordable apartment in the City.

Congressman Katko’s Local Partisanship

Power

For ten years, the City of Syracuse sent a different representative to Congress every time it had the chance. Until Congressman John Katko beat Colleen Deacon in 2016, the City hadn’t elected an incumbent since Jim Walsh–the current Mayor’s father. It’s a difficult seat to hold onto, and Katko managed to do it by positioning himself as a moderate who could appeal across party lines. This last year, though, has made that a difficult position to maintain–Katko refused to say who he intended to vote for in the 2016 presidential election, and he has hemmed and hawed every time someone has asked about national politics since then.

If only the Congressman would be so boring when it came to local politics. In June, when then-Mayor Stephanie Miner thought about running for his seat, Katko responded by saying that Syracuse suffers from a “plague” of “systematic poverty, record murder rates, crumbling infrastructure, failed schools.” In November when Mayor Miner called out his vote on the tax bill, he talked about Syracuse’s “economic malaise” and it’s “stunning rate of local poverty.” Just this past week, in response to a question about I-81 during a Facebook event with Tim Knauss, the Congressman said, “It’s not just a decision for the City of Syracuse. It’s a decision for the region” and then went on to talk about all of the problems that Dewitt and Skaneateles might have without ever mentioning what the project might mean in the City.

All of this talk has one thing in common–it divides the people that Katko represents between those who live in the City and those who live outside of it. Take his sparing with Miner. She won both her terms with huge majorities and remains popular among city residents, so he can’t actually be appealing to those people when he says she turned the City into a hell hole. He’s playing on the fears of suburban people who are afraid of the City, who believe that it’s a hell hole, and who wouldn’t want anything to do with anyone from there.

He’s doing the same thing with I-81. It’s not a city-suburb issue. Suburban legislators like Al Stirpe and Karin Rigney want the highway out of the City, while some City politicians like Bill Magnarelli and John DeFrancisco want to keep it as a tunnel. Katko ignored all that, though, and talked like everyone’s real concern should be that the City not be allowed to impose any kind of decision on the suburbs.

The Congressman is in a tough spot. He can’t say anything substantive about national politics without appearing partisan and alienating half the district. His solution has been to turn partisan on local issues, betting that he can appeal to the 80% of the district that lives outside the City by making them fear the 20% that live in it. That’s a small thing to do, and we all have to call him out on it and say so.

Uniting Communities through Transit

Power, Transportation

Back in 2017 when the community was still seriously debating the merits of Consensus’ plan to merge the City of Syracuse with Onondaga County, Centerstate CEO Rob Simpson liked to talk about how a combined city-county would be the second biggest city in New York State. That wasn’t really a very compelling argument since it compared apples to oranges, but it did get at something important: communities with larger populations enjoy political and economic benefits over those with smaller populations, and cities like Syracuse, Cortland, and Ithaca suffer both politically and economically because they each have so many fewer people than other communities in New York State.

An intercity transit service connecting Syracuse, Cortland, and Ithaca would fix this problem by uniting those three cities and their metropolitan areas into a single region large enough to give its residents political and economic advantages that they do not currently enjoy.

Uniting these communities will benefit both businesses and workers. Easier commutes between cities will enable workers from any community in the region to work for businesses in any other community. This will create a single regional labor market that can support growing local businesses and that can also attract large businesses to move into the region. The other side of this coin is that workers will be able to apply for jobs outside of their individual communities, increasing economic opportunity for people living in each community.

That economic integration will also make the region stronger politically. It will mean that good things happening in one community are good for people living in communities across the region, allowing residents and elected officials to advocate with a single voice in State politics. So if Syracuse needs the State legislature to amend its charter to deal with the City’s impending fiscal crisis, Bill Magnarelli and Pam Hunter will be able to count on support from Al Stirpe, Barbara Lifton, and Gary Finch in the State Assembly to make that happen. If we go through something like the Upstate Revitalization Initiative again, the Central New York and Southern Tier Regional Economic Development Councils can work together to submit bids that will benefit the entire region.

By making daily travel between Syracuse, Cortland, and Ithaca easy and routine, an intercity transit service would unite those cities and their metropolitan areas as a single region with a single labor market and a unified political voice. This kind of transformation won’t happen overnight, and it will require cooperation between regional transportation authorities, county governments, other municipalities, and private institutions, but the potential benefits are worth the effort.

This is part of a series about a potential transit service serving Syracuse, Cortland and Ithaca. Here are links to the rest of the series:
Transit Service Between the Airport, Syracuse, Cortland, and Ithaca
Learning from OnTrack
University Students and Public Transportation

University Students and Public Transportation

Power, Transportation

In 2015 when Centro thought it would have to cut late-night and weekend service, plenty of people turned out for a Syracuse Common Council meeting to tell about how those changes would make their lives harder. The people who got up to speak at that meeting talked about things like working the third shift at hospitals and nursing homes, relying on the bus to overcome physical disability, greenhouse gases, and getting to church on the South Side. Those people represented the political coalition between workers, the disabled, environmentalists, and the poor that supports public transportation in Syracuse today.

University students would be natural members of that coalition. Nationally, students make of 24% of all transit users in urban areas with populations between 200,000 and 999,999. In Syracuse, people living in student neighborhoods like University Hill and the Near Eastside are less likely to own a car and more likely to commute by bus or by foot than people living in other Syracuse neighborhoods of comparable wealth. Syracuse University students ride Centro in huge numbers, particularly to get between South Campus, University Hill, and Downtown. Despite all that, no students got up at that meeting to voice their support for Centro.

Even though no students spoke, the University was a topic of discussion at the meeting. Councilor Khalid Bey asked Centro’s CEO, Frank Kobliski, whether or not Syracuse University paid Centro enough money to cover the operating costs of all those buses that run between University Hill and South Campus. That question got a lot of people grumbling, and one person shouted out, “they have more money than god!” Once Mr. Kobliski had the opportunity to respond, though, he surprised everyone by letting them know that the University overpays for the bus service it gets from Centro.

Syracuse University overpays for its buses because it treats Centro not as a public service, but as a charter bus company. It contracts with Centro to provide free service to its students as they travel between South Campus, University Hill, and Downtown. This means that students ride Centro buses in huge numbers, but they’re not riding truly public transportation.

This dampens student support for Centro. When reporting on Centro, the Daily Orange always distinguishes those special student buses from Centro’s public service. So in 2015 when Centro was considering those late-night and weekend service cuts, the Daily Orange wrote “the direct effect on SU students would remain small,” and no students turned out to advocate on Centro’s behalf. Later that year, when Congress voted to cut Centro’s funding by $12 million, the Daily Orange made the students’ position even more explicit:

“If the mass budget cuts currently facing Centro continue and affect on-campus busing, Syracuse University must take a firm stance to oppose the cuts and defend transportation resources for the university community… However, the university should only offer its support if cuts would directly impact bus service on the SU campus. The university’s priority should be to ensure these resources remain available to those on campus, and it does not have a financial responsibility nor obligation to ensure the bill prevents wide-scale change, affecting the city of Syracuse.”

That’s Centro’s political problem. As long as Syracuse University students receive specialized bus service from the University, they will think of it as a private good to be secured by paying tuition. That stance divides students from the majority of Centro riders who use the bus as a public good that must be secured by political action and advocacy. These opposing stances divide Centro’s natural base of political support and keep a large and powerful bloc of people who rely on transit in Syracuse from acting collectively on its behalf.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Bus riders in Syracuse don’t need to resent University students, and students don’t have to think of their interests as separate from the Syracuse community. Both groups rely on public services like Centro buses, and if they could be a potent political force in Upstate New York if they acted cooperatively.

Intercity transit service could change that status quo by providing a service that’s highly beneficial to Syracuse University and its students, but impossible for the University to build or pay for all on its own. A truly public transportation service connecting Hancock International Airport, the Regional Transportation Center, Centro’s Bus Hub, Syracuse University, Cortland, Cornell University, and Ithaca would benefit both students and transit riders, it would put them both in the same vehicle, and it would give them common cause to advocate for that service.

Both Centro riders and Syracuse University students depend on the presence of public or quasi-public services in a region where the middle and upper classes pride themselves on being entirely independent of such services. The travesty is that the University provides its students with those services at high but hidden cost, and that by segregating those services, the University divides what should be a natural alliance and kills support for truly public services. It will take a lot of work to overcome the institutional barriers that segregate students from City residents, but Chancellor Nancy Cantor took a first step with the Connective Corridor and her Scholarship In Action philosophy. Chancellor Kent Syverud plans to go further by moving student housing from South Campus to the City’s center. A truly public intercity transit service can do more of that same work, strengthening the whole City by aligning the interests of the people who live in it.

This is part of a series about a potential transit service serving Syracuse, Cortland and Ithaca. Here are links to the rest of the series:
Transit Service Between the Airport, Syracuse, Cortland, and Ithaca
Learning from OnTrack
Uniting Communities through Transit

Learning from OnTrack

Transportation

Last week, this website published a proposal for a new transit service connecting Ithaca, Cortland, and Syracuse. Anyone familiar with the recent history of transit in Syracuse will recognize parts of this proposal from OnTrack, the rail line that ran from the Destiny Mall to Syracuse University during the nineties and thousands. OnTrack was a debacle, poorly planned and poorly implemented, but it was also an encouraging act of faith in the power of transit to improve life in Syracuse. This proposal attempts to learn the lessons of OnTrack in order to avoid its failures while still capitalizing on the potential that made it attractive in the first place.

That potential is the New York, Susquehanna, & Western right-of-way. It’s an elevated rail line that runs through Downtown on its way from Syracuse University past Destiny Mall to the William F. Walsh Regional Transportation Center. At first glance, it looks like a great way to get heavy rail transit for almost no money. Just start running trains on what’s already there, and you’ve got Chicago’s El on a Syracuse scale.

OnTrack didn’t live up to that promise. It never got enough riders to justify its operating costs, and after a few years it stopped running. A lot of people have taken the time to point out all of the problems that kept OnTrack from succeeding–it didn’t run frequently enough, it didn’t run fast enough, and it didn’t run through enough neighborhoods. Without fixing those problems, no transit service running on those train tracks could do what OnTrack tried to do.

Unfortunately, those problems are neither easy, simple, nor cheap to fix. They are the result of real practical constraints.

First, frequency. Most of the right-of-way is single-tracked, so trains running in opposite directions can’t pass each other. That means that only one train can run at a time. It would take that single train about 20 minutes to run between Syracuse University and the Regional Transportation Center or 40 minutes to make the full round trip. That’s no more frequent that Centro’s existing bus service, and it’s much less frequent than the Bus Rapid Transit service that the Syracuse Metropolitan Transportation Council recently recommended for a similar route.

Second, speed. Even though OnTrack only made a couple stops and didn’t have to deal with traffic or stop signs, it took a long looping 4 mile route to get from Downtown to the Mall and the Regional Transportation Center. A Centro bus gets from Downtown to the Regional Transportation Center in less than 3 miles, and so even though it might travel at a lower speed with more stops, its trip wouldn’t take any more time.

That all leads into the third problem, that OnTrack didn’t service residential neighborhoods. The existing track doesn’t run through the densely populated neighborhoods that already support frequent transit in Syracuse, so the only way for passengers from those neighborhoods to get to the train tracks is on a Centro bus. The tracks run within a block of Centro’s hub, so it wouldn’t be hard for people to make the transfer, but since a train running between Downtown Syracuse and the Regional Transportation Center would be neither faster nor more frequent than a bus serving the same destinations, there’s not much reason for a person to walk that block to make the transfer.

Using the existing right-of-way as part of a much larger intercity transit service avoids these problems. First, because its riders will be travelling to destinations not served by existing Centro bus routes, riders have a good reason to transfer from the bus to the train, meaning that the service does not need to pass through densely populated residential neighborhoods to pick up passengers. Second, because a train can make the 65 mile run between Ithaca and Syracuse so much faster than a bus can, it doesn’t matter that they’d run even over the 4 miles between Downtown Syracuse and the Regional Transportation Center. Third, because intercity service doesn’t need to run all that frequently to succeed, a single train running on a single track could provide the service effectively.

Old railroad rights-of-way are precious resources. New political and economic forces make it difficult to build anything like them anymore, so cities like Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Camden have taken their old underused rights-of-way and built new mass transit lines. The New York, Susquehanna, & Western right-of-way could be that kind of asset for Syracuse. OnTrack already showed us what won’t work, so let’s try something new.

 

This is part of a series about a potential transit service serving Syracuse, Cortland and Ithaca. Here are links to the rest of the series:
Transit Service Between the Airport, Syracuse, Cortland, and Ithaca
University Students and Public Transportation
Uniting Communities through Transit

The New I-81 Tunnel Options are not Compromises

Planning

On January 11, syracuse.com published a letter from State Senator John DeFrancisco. In it, Senator DeFrancisco again pushed what he calls the “hybrid option” as a compromise between those who want to get rid of the “unsightly viaducts” and those who want to maintain “efficient movement of interstate traffic.” According to him, that compromise means “tearing down the viaducts and creating a community grid” and then adding “a short tunnel to keep interstate traffic flowing efficiently through the city.”

The Senator has been banging this drum for more than a year, but this is the first time he’s written to the Post-Standard since WSP Parsons Brinckerhoff released its independent report on the feasibility of building a tunnel under Downtown Syracuse. That report was supposed to show exactly how a tunnel+grid design could compromise between the interests of businesses located along I-81’s current path, city resident groups, suburban politicians, and University Hill all while meeting NYSDOT’s standards for the project. That’s a pretty tall order, and this report didn’t fill it.

For city resident groups, the point of removing the viaduct is to encourage property development and raise property tax revenues on the east side of Downtown. The viaduct discourages development there because it covers up some land and makes adjacent land unattractive. This is a problem along the viaduct’s entire length, but it’s worst where the viaduct’s curving interchange’s ramps cover multiple full city blocks near the intersection of Almond and Fayette Streets.

All four of the recommended tunnel designs include off-on ramps for a new I-690 exit at Almond Street that recreate this exact problem:

“Providing a direct local-to-interstate connection would be critical to maintaining acceptable levels of service in downtown Syracuse. To provide this connection from the north end of Almond Street, on- and off-ramps would begin and end in a wide center median at the intersection of Almond Street with Fayette Street, and ascend north and west toward over Washington Street, Water Street, and Erie Street, ultimately tying in to I-690 EB and WB. This would necessitate the closure of Washington Street and Water Street due to vertical clearance requirements.”

The report claims that the switch from a highway interchange to highway off ramps “would provide a substantial amount of residual state-owned land for potential disposal north of Fayette Street between McBride Street and Almond Street,” but it’s hard to believe that any developers would be willing to buy that land since the 2nd and 3rd stories of any building built on it would be just yards away from heavy traffic travelling at forty miles an hour.

It’s strange, really, that WSP Parsons Brinckerhoff would include these ramps in all of its designs when NYSDOT didn’t think an exit from I-690 at Almond Street was necessary “to maintain acceptable levels of service in downtown Syracuse.” NYSDOT’s Community Grid plan instead included new exits at Irving and Crouse Avenues, and it kept the on-off ramps parallel to I-690 to leave as much land open for development as possible. The result is more land that’s more attractive for development and more likely to yield more property taxes to fund city services.

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Senator DeFrancisco can keep trying to say that he wants a compromise, but he’s going to need to start actually respecting what people would want out of a compromise. It’s not enough to just say the words “hybrid option” and “community grid.” He’s got to actually advocate for a design that benefits the City in the way that NYSDOT’s community grid design can.