How To Repair Public Transit In The U.S. | CNBC Marathon

The U.S. government haslong favored cars over public transportation. We're spending far more,hundreds of billions more on road improvement andinfrastructure than we are on transit. New Yorkers are on edge asviolent crime throughout the city's subway systemreaches new highs. I would say,unfortunately, crime has been a deterrent for somepeople to return.

The number of overallpublic transit commuters has also droppedsignificantly since before the pandemic. Onealternative, which could be faster than busses butless expensive and complex than the subway system,is autonomous rapid transit or ART. 17 minutes. That's how long Americanshad to wait on average to get on public transit in2022.

Transit in the U.S. is awful, with fewexceptions and a few places it's infrequent. It's not all day. It's unreliable. Meanwhile, 45% ofAmericans have no access to public transportationat all. The real problem in theU.S. is what I would call transit deserts, right?.

I mean, these are justplaces where it is just complete and totalnightmare to try to get anywhere on transit,whether to work or, you know, to play, to pick upyour kids. You just can't depend onit. The U.S. spent $79 billionon public transit in 2019, yet most public transitacross the nation is finding itself in afiscal crisis. In 2021, the U.S.

Was $176 billion behindin updating the poor conditions of publictransit. That backlog is expectedto grow to $250 billion by the year 2029. Ultimately, it's theriders who are paying for the deficit. The pandemic money isgoing to run out, and so there will be I thinkthere will be fare increases. But even more,I think because of the.

Politics of it, therewill be service reduction and in many places havepredicted that. So just how did publictransit in the U.S. get so awful and can itbe improved? The U.S. government haslong favored cars over public transportation. When we talk about moneyfor transit, we talk about funding. But when we talkabout the same public money for roads, we oftenhear the word investment.

We're spending far more,hundreds of billions more on road improvement andinfrastructure than we are on transit. For example, U.S. railways combiningcommuter, heavy and light rail grew by 945 milesbetween 2010 and 2020. During the same period,highways were expanded by over 100,000 miles. In transportation, we veryoften have no choices if.

We're talking about localor area transportation, it's very often onlydriving. History plays a big rolein this discrepancy. There was a time when theU.S. boasted a public transitsystem that was the envy of the world. Prior to 1920s, we had avery good streetcar system in our cities. These were trams that wererunning typically in the.

Middle of the street. Youwould board them at your convenience. They wereoften so frequent that you didn't have to planahead. During its peak in the1920s, Americans living in cities averaged more than250 streetcar trips per year, but the electricstreetcar business was far from profitable. Inflation drove up theoperating costs, but businesses were unable toraise fares accordingly,.

And services quicklybegan to deteriorate as a result. When the streetcarcompanies, which were private, went to thegovernment and so forth and said, please help us,city governments, state governments and ofcourse, the federal government wasn'tinvolved at all in this period, basically turneda blind eye. By the end of World WarOne, a third of transit.

Companies were already inbankruptcy and America had found its newestobsession: cars. People who wanted to sellmore cars reframed the car as an all-purposetransport necessity instead of a specialpurpose mobility tool. And when they turned itinto that, you know, they really convinced a lot ofpeople that you need this to go everywhere and thatyou're not living in a modern, progressive cityuntil it's a city that.

Lets you driveeverywhere. And with the influx ofmoney and aid from policies, cities began toquickly transform around cars. They forced privatetransit companies, whenever possible, tostrip out the streetcar lines. They they createdall these one way streets to speed up automobiles. They built parkways, theybuilt highways.

And when people said, waita minute, is this really the right way to do it? The answer was, oh, it'sjust supply and demand. It's a free market. Drivers are voting withtheir gas pedals, and we need to build the roadsand streets for the people who are paying for them. There is a kind of a timelag between public investment in highwayinfrastructure versus.

Transit infrastructure inour nation. There was at least 40 to50 years of lag, and the federal government didnot get into public transportation fundingprograms until late 1960s. Today, that disparity ismore evident through Partizan differences. The ratio in whichfunding is distributed between highways andpublic transit became the main point of contentionover the 2021.

Infrastructure bill. Democrats wanted just 20%of the budget to go towards mass transit,while Republicans pushed for less. Democratseventually compromised to pass the bill through theSenate. We have identified theautomobile with personal individual liberty. We also associatedriving, particularly with suburban and ruralAmerica, while public.

Transit we associate withurban America. Those correlations thenbleed into political correlations of similarkinds, where fostering more driving tends to besomething that's favored in more conservative,more Republican, more rural areas. A study from 2021 revealedthat 77% of liberal respondents believe thattransport policy should shift more trips towardspublic transit, walking.

And bicycling. While 53% ofconservatives believe that transport policy shouldmake it easier for most people to drive. The discrepancy was evenhigher with very liberal or conservativerespondents. It's very hard politicallyto get that kind of momentum. Cities are alittle bit easier, but states very hard to getthat suburban voter who is.

Very powerful in almostevery state legislature, very hard to get federalofficials behind this because, again, thepayoff politically, because it's a relativelysmall number of users, very small. It can be 1%,2%, 3% in most cities. That's not the loudvoices. The loud voices are goingto be the drivers. Funding is one of the mainreasons behind the poor state of public transitin the U.S.

Right now, the federalmoney that goes to transit services is largelylimited to the capital costs. That means, youknow, building the infrastructure or buyingthe vehicles. But the operating costsare where the transit services are reallypinched. Public transit reliesheavily on subsidies because it's still farfrom a profitable business. Take the MTA,the nation's largest.

Public transit, forexample. In 2022, less than a quarter of theMTA's revenue came from rider fares. Bycomparison, revenue from dedicated taxes andsubsidies from local governments made up 40%of its total revenue. The cost of living, thecost of operations, the cost of construction, allof that over the last 40, 50 years has far exceededwhat is collected in fares.

Current subsidies simplyaren't enough to cover the costs. The MTA's financeswere hit hard by the pandemic, resulting intemporary aid from the federal government, yetit still reported a budget deficit of $1.9 billionin 2022. This problem extendsbeyond New York City. Philadelphia's Septapredicts it will see a deficit of almost $269million by 2027. Chicago's RTA predicts abudget gap of $730 million.

By 2026, while LA Metro'sbudget gap expects to reach $1 billion by theend of 2026. These financial deficitslead directly to deteriorating services. If a transit systemdoesn't have enough money, we can limit the hours ofservice. We can limit thefrequency of service, we can limit the extent ofthe network. But all of those thingsalso deter ridership and.

Encourage people todepend on their car. In a 2022 survey onincentives around public transit, Americans choseaccurate and reliable arrival times as thesecond biggest reason that would encourage them touse public transit more often, right behind lowerfares. Public transportation isso expensive to run in the United States is becauseof the lack of usage. Mass transit need mass tobe successful.

Ridership has continuouslydeclined since 2015, and after seeing a steep dropduring the pandemic, ridership has failed torecover to its previous levels. It's a vicious cycle,right? If we have less users,less riders, it's difficult to justifysignificant public investment in thatsystem, and therefore it's become more difficult toprovide quality service.

And because you have alack of quality of service, you willcontinue to have a lack of users and riders. If the riders are eitherinsufficient in number or, and or do not provide afare right that covers those costs, you have tomake up that money in public subsidies. And inthe United States, the structure of funding forpublic transit is insufficient to basicallyreally make up for that.

Missing enormous chunk ofmoney to fund operations and capital. But a thriving publictransit system is beneficial for allAmericans. The American PublicTransportation Association estimates that 87% oftrips on transit directly benefit the localeconomy, with nearly $42 billion in transitspending going directly to the private sector.

A dollar invested inpublic transit is believed to generate $5 ineconomic returns. I mean, look what happenedwith Amazon. Where did Amazon locatenew headquarters, right? Right where one of thebetter, you know, mass transit systems operate. Transit is really greatfor an employer because it gives them more options,right? In terms of labor.

We can connect people toemployment opportunities, including people whocan't necessarily afford an automobile, which is avery expensive thing, both to buy and to operate andmaintain. When you don't havetransportation, everything else becomes a dominoeffect. You may end up with notable to connect with your family and friends, notable to go to a doctor appointments and, youknow, not able to have a.

Good income to sustainyour house. And in the end, it caneven benefit the drivers themselves. The more we attract peopleinto rail or busses or other forms of publictransit, the fewer people are driving on the roads. And that makes drivingbetter for people who want to drive. Ultimately, the future ofpublic transit relies on.

Whether it can receivethe proper investment needed to improveservices. To break the viciouscycle, we need a significant investmentfrom the federal government. I mean, Idon't think just waste local innovation so wecan solve this problem of this magnitude. We'd have to spend a lotof money up front in order to get a to get systemsthat cost a lot less to.

Operate because you'dhave more robust ridership. Cities can also bereimagined and redesigned to better serve publictransit. The kind of density levelsthat most American suburbs have very difficult toserve effectively by transit, even busses, youhave to create more dense neighborhoods, andparticularly this is really important.

You have to change thezoning and the density around transit. I conceptualize the publictransportation as a public space. If you think aboutin a city how much space we have really helppeople with different backgrounds cometogether. There is a diminishingnumber of places that we have in our city. If we have good publictransportation system,.

It's like the core spacesfor people with different backgrounds, differentclass, different gender, race, ethnicity tointeract and to encounter. And I think that's veryimportant for the future of our society. The average number ofweekday riders on New York City subways in 2019 wasnearly 5.5 million. By June 2023, paidweekday subway ridership was 3.6 million, down 34%from that 2019 level.

The MetropolitanTransportation Authority, the operator of more than6400 subway cars, more than 5,700 busses, two ofthe country's busiest commuter trains, andmultiple bridges and tunnels saw fareboxrevenue in 2022 plummet 37% from its 2019 levels. If you're looking at aroughly $20 billion annual operating budget beforeCovid, about half of that came from fare revenues.

When you're still missinga big chunk of your fare revenues and you have toprovide the same level of service, that obviouslycreates a big hole in the budget. Remote work is blamed formuch of that decline. Compared to their 2019levels, Manhattan office workers were at theirdesks on average 68% of the time during the midweek and just 37% on Fridays. Fears aboutpublic safety and crime.

Have also impacted thecity's round the clock subway service. New Yorkers are on edge asviolent crime throughout the city's subway systemreaches new highs. Three subway murders havebeen recorded in the past two weeks alone. Now to the search for theman who police say might have left a subway riderpartially paralyzed, he's accused of pushing thatunidentified victim.

Headfirst into the sideof a train. I would say,unfortunately, crime has been a deterrent for somepeople to return. I think that folksbelieve that there is a safety in numbers. A surge in people notpaying their fares has impacted revenue, too. Fare evaders cost the MTA$690 million in 2022 across its network, 38%more than the previous.

Year. People are less rulefollowing than they used to, and that includessubway fare evasion. Also, TikTok young peoplesee young influencers jumping turnstiles invarious creative fashions, and it makes it feel moresocially acceptable when you're seeing it modeledby very popular figures in social media. To stem those losses, theMTA is looking to replace.

Its fleet of subwayturnstiles. CNBC got a behind thescenes look at a new high tech barrier that theagency might be considering. In the old days, you had alocking mechanism, and when you paid your fare,the lock would open and you push through theturnstile. Very simple, very old school. What we've done is a bigdeparture from that.

We're leveraging not justsensor technology, but also a completelydifferent mechanical design, a much moreformidable barrier. Fare revenue is a criticalcomponent of the MTA's budget. So when will NewYork City Subway riders return, and what can theMTA do to respond to fare evaders? The New YorkCity subway got its start in 1904, and wasinitially operated by private companies withgovernment oversight.

The first route was builtout from City Hall by the Interborough RapidTransit Company, with fares of just $0.05 aride. The line is credited withtransforming Times Square and unleashing a housingboom. The original two privatecompanies are called the Brooklyn and ManhattanTransit Corporation. They made what we nowthink of as the lettered lines, or the B Divisionand the Interborough Rapid.

Transit Company, whichdoes what we now call the numbered lines with the Adivision. By 1940, New York hadthree competing subway systems. In June of thatyear, the trio were consolidated, creatingone of the largest transit systems in the world withnearly 1,200 miles of tracks. From the early 20thcentury up until right before World War Two, tobe rough about it, the.

City was focused onbuilding and expanding, and maintaining subways. Seemed like mass transitwas the way that people would get away a densecity. But in the '50s, supportfor mass transit waned, with successiveadministrations betting on a future of roads andhighways with a focus on the car. The subwaybecame a symbol of urban decay in the 1970s, withrampant crime and trains.

Covered in graffiti. This subway station is theend of the line in more ways than one. At this hour. Bodies rollin sleeping or drunk or on drugs, or just because asubway bench is the most convenient bed. On an average day in 1981,325 trains were canceled. A third of all subway cardoors were broken and trains caught on fire2,500 times a year.

Crime was abundant. Subway vigilante BernhardGoetz shot four teens who allegedly threatened himin the 1980s. It's about time somebodyprotect themselves. Nobody's protecting us onthe subway. But as the crisisdeepened, political consensus to rebuild thesystem grew. We're not going to have aNew York City left unless we rebuild the subways.

So early 1980s, statelegislature enacted a half a dozen taxes to fundsubway and commuter rail system and began torebuild the physical assets, get rid of thegraffiti. New York City PoliceDepartment, a decade later, started to controlthe crime on the subway. In addition to thatfunding, the MTA proposed a 10-year, $14 billioncapital investment program to restore the system andensure its long tum.

Survival. Between 1980and 2015, subway ridership increased roughly 70%,from about a billion to almost 1.7 billionriders. But by 2017, overcrowdedtrains combined with deferred maintenance orstraining the system again leading New York GovernorAndrew Cuomo to declare a state of emergency. We know the system isdecaying rapidly. I think of it as a heartattack.

You basically see a seriesof every 10 or 20 years. The MTA faces a newfiscal crisis, and then we figure out a new set ofsupports. The eve of the pandemic,subway is basically a success story. You know,not to say that they were perfect, but only 1 or 2murders a year on the subways with ridership of2 billion was the lowest you were ever going toget it. Well-funded, you had halfthe revenue coming from.

Fares and tolls, theother half coming from these tax subsidies. And the infrastructurewas in reasonably good condition. But the pandemic changedeverything. As ridership plummeted tohistorical lows and new problems arose. The MTA handles about athird of the nation's mass transit users, about 2.6billion riders in 2019.

Alone. More than 13% ofNew York City subway riders didn't paytheir fare in the fourth quarter of 2022, up fromjust 3% during roughly the same period in 2018. On an average weekday,that translates to 400,000 fare evaders, enough tofill Yankee Stadium eight times over. The problemgot even worse in the first quarter of 2023. Fare evaders cost the MTA$690 million in 2022,.

Including $285 million onits subways, $315 million on busses, $44 million oncommuter rails, and $46 million on bridges andtunnels. While enforcement is up,policing the subway is notoriously difficult. It's extremely hard toenforce. I would estimate thereare about 1,000 entrances to the subway system. To curb unlawful behavior,the MTA is looking to.

Replace turnstiles. As I step into the aislehere. The cameras are sensingme, and if you look up at the screen, you see thatthere's a big red blob, the big red blob hereabove me. That's me conduit, whichprovides services like electronic tollcollection work with France's national railnetwork, SNCF, to design this system.

You think about thecameras and the detection systems that go into thatsolution are are quite advanced to be able todetect children from parents, from luggage,from animals and prevent unwanted individuals ordevices from coming through. Tall plexiglass doors makeclimbing over or under more difficult. Flashing lights and analarm signals a fare.

Evader is trying toenter. The MTA has not yet decided which tech itwill use, but conduit, along with other vendors,showcased its 3D faregate at a public MTA meetingin May. This is not yourgrandfather's approach to fare evasion. It's fresh. It's different. It'scomprehensive. It can also detect ifsomeone is trying to piggyback or cheat thesystem.

If I pay my fare andsomeone comes in right behind me and doesn't paytheirs, the system will determine that theyhaven't paid and they'll get busted. In New York, the majorityof subway fare evasions happen when someoneleaves the emergency gate open. About 20% of peoplejump the turnstile, about 16% slip through the gap,and 12% duck under. Most offenses occurbetween 3 and 4 p.m.

Roughly the same timeschools dismiss. Inflation could beanother reason people are not paying their fares. A lot of it has to do withthe economy. It's one more cost thatpeople feel like they have to incur when they'realready seeing increased costs for rent andgroceries and all of their other expenses. And often they see therisk of jumping the.

Turnstiles as worthwhilefor the potential $100 ticket. While low-income residentscan apply for a 50% discount on subways andbusses, only about a third of eligible New Yorkers,or about 300,000 people, have enrolled in theprogram. 1 in 4 low-income New Yorkers can't affordto use public transportation. In the MTA's case, if welost fare revenue, we.

Would have we'd havemassive service cuts. And so it's well worth afunctioning fare collection system thatkeeps fare evasion low and stable is the importantpart. While fewer straphangershave been a drain on the MTA's revenue, systems inother U.S. cities have been hit evenharder. Riders on Chicago's Ltrain in March 2023 were at 50% of theirpre-pandemic levels.

At the same time,Washington, D. C. S Metro saw a similardrop in 2022. The MTA's operatingbudget was $19.3 billion. While majority of thatmoney it receives comes from taxes and subsidies,about 23%, or roughly $4 billion, came from fares. By contrast, fare revenuefrom subways, busses and commuter trains in 2019made up about $6.3 billion, or 38% of theMTA's total operating.

Revenue. To make up forthat loss, the MTA received billions infederal pandemic aid. It is also increased itsbase fare $0.15 for subways and busses, to$2.90, and has been promised an infusion ofstate money, including over $1 billion annually,in the form of an increase in the New York Statepayroll mobility tax. Congestion pricing,designed to shift people to mass transit, willalso collect $1 billion.

Annually and benefit theMTA by charging drivers more to enter Manhattanbelow 60th Street. But why do New York Citysubways lag behind their European counterparts? For starters, New Yorktransit projects are notoriously expensive tobuild. Our cost of buildingsubway assets is five times at the upper end. What it costs to build aglobal subway assets.

So it's not so much thatthe projects are the wrong projects, although thatdoesn't help. But it's that even whenthey're the right projects, like buildingthe Second Avenue subway, digitizing the subwaysignals so you can run these trains morequickly, the projects cost much more than they wouldanywhere else in the world. Phase one of the SecondAvenue Subway, for.

Example. AlongManhattan's Upper East Side opened in 2017 at acost of $4.4 billion. Phase two of the project,extending the line from 96th Street to 125thStreet, not expected to open until 2030, willcost $6.3 billion. Greater Paris. The RATP,it's called, has the same capital budget as theMTA. It's about €50 billion or $55 billion,and they're building hundreds of kilometers ofnew rail.

We're not doing that. We're going to get alittle extension and a Second Avenue subway andthen hopefully repair some broken stuff. New York City's strictregulations, as well as high labor andconstruction costs, have been blamed for much ofthose budget increases. If you think of worldcities like London, Paris, Singapore, there ismassive federal investment.

In their mass transitsystem. Here in the UnitedStates, it's far less of a focus. Public transitgets very little funding compared to our highwaysand bridges and tunnels outside of the transitsystem. This country reallyfavors motorists. Large debt payments arealso a burden. While more than half ofthe MTA's 19 billion 2023 expense budget went toNew York City subways and.

The Staten Island Rail,about 16% went to paying back debt. The remainderwent to the Long Island Railroad, Metro Northrail busses, bridges, and tunnels. A debt paymentof $3 billion, for example, is enough to runthe Washington, DC metro system for an entireyear. The MTA has to be in thisconstant state of begging for state assistance andfederal assistance. This was happening longbefore the Covid 19.

Pandemic. Every couple ofyears, the MTA has to reach out with its handsout because there isn't a fully committed line offunding that really ensures the ability ofthe MTA to provide operations and capitalimprovements on a regular, consistent basis. And that trend couldcontinue as work from home and hybrid policiesbecome further entrenched. It could take yearsbefore fare revenue and.

Subway ridership returnto their pre-pandemic levels. Where is the transitsystem ten years from now? Ideally, you've gotridership back to 100%, or at least 95% of where itwas pre-COVID. Your commuter rail systemis much cheaper. It's more like a Europeancommuter rail system, where the price is notsignificantly higher than a subway ticket, and thesystem is as safe as it.

Was in 2019. I don't believe that we'llget above 75% until people are required to be in theoffice or in school five days a week, as theypreviously were, and I don't know if we'll getto that point. Stand clear of the closingdoors, please. Only about 2% of Americanscommute with mass rapid transit like subways orelevated railways. Ideally, it's fast,efficient, smooth, and can.

Carry a lot of people,but it also requires a lot of funding, legislativeapproval, and can essentially only be foundin large cities in the U.S. The most recentmetro line in New York is the Second Avenue Subway. Only the first phase ofthis line is complete, but if it's fully funded, itwould span eight miles in 16 stations from Harlemdown to the Lower East Side, carrying anestimated 560,000 riders a.

Day. But projects likethese are a massive undertaking. Whencomplete, the estimated cost would be upwards of$17 billion. Not to mention, the firstphase was completed in 2017, and construction onthe second phase hasn't even started, largelybecause of funding. It wasn't until a recent$23 billion investment from the U.S. Departmentof Transportation, when the city started makingactual plans to move.

Forward with phase two. But the most obvious andwidely used alternative to a subway system is a bus,which about 2.3% of U.S. commuters use. Because busses sway, theyjump, they buck. There's a lot of shudderand shake. And that's the bigproblem, the ride quality in busses. It's why manypeople don't like to ride them.

And that might be why thebusses in New York see half the amount ofridership as the subway system, despite the factthat there's over 200 bus routes compared to just28 rail service lines. The number of overallpublic transit commuters has also droppedsignificantly since before the pandemic. Onealternative, which could be faster than busses butless expensive and complex than the subway system,is autonomous rapid.

Transit, or ART, which isclassified as a mid-tier transportation system. It's a fully electrictrain bus hybrid invented by CRRC, a mass transitmanufacturer in China. It's been deployed inthree Chinese cities and is being considered in amyriad of cities across the world to connectlarger train or metro systems in a suburb or onthe outskirts of a city. The first ART systemopened in Guizhou, China.

In 2017, which isconnected to much of the country via high speedrail, but previously lacked a proper masstransit system for its 4 million residents. And they had the samerationale as we did that metro systems across thecity were working well, but how to get to them,how to go across to those rail systems, how to joinup the city to connect it. That meant going downmain roads.

But when they came tobuild light rail as CRRC were trying, they foundthey couldn't. It was too disruptive. So they inventedsomething from high speed rail which they wereproducing, which took the technology and put it ina bus and transformed it. But because it doesn't runon a proper rail system and instead runs withrubber wheels on a virtual track painted on roads,it's been called a.

Glorified bus. I went there thinking,this is going to be something hiding like abus. It'll look like a lightrail, but it is in fact a bus. But when I rode it,it was dramatically different. I could findmyself feeling like I was on a train. The reason being,trackless trams are autonomously guided andare equipped with sensors,.

Cameras and stabilizingtechnology like controlled acceleration and activesuspension systems, giving it a smoother ride. While it can be takenover by a driver and run on any road like a bus,it's generally supposed to follow a predeterminedvirtual track. Right now, it's used inGuizhou, Yibin and Harbin, China, as well as inIsrael. And Newman says Crrc is sending a coupleof the locomotives to.

Perth, Australia, laterthis year. He plans to invite citydevelopers and urban planners from across theworld to watch them in action once they arrive. We've been working inBrisbane, in Sydney, in Melbourne and in Perthmostly, and in each of these places, the localgovernments have worked out where they wanted togo and where they would have development thatwould help pay for it and.

Bring in the urbanregeneration that they want as well. And where these trams cango is partly what makes them unique. Thesemi-autonomous system follows distinct paintedlines on the road, so routes can be changedmuch easier than with light rail. The ARTvehicle itself costs about $2.2 million, and isestimated to cost around one fifth the price of atraditional tram system.

Per mile. Having a trackless tram assomething that does what a light rail does and yetcosts the same as a bus, that's the greatattraction. And I think having acheap option is is going to make it veryattractive. But as with every form oftransportation, it's only as good as theinfrastructure that supports it. Similar tobus rapid transit and.

Other mid-tier transitsystems, operating on a road can come withsignificant challenges. So for these transitsystems to operate efficiently, they need tohave consistent traffic flow or designated lanesand be given priority over cars. But where you need it tobe, have priority is where you're getting close to astation and where you need to get into that stationin a way that has.

Priority. No other carscan get in there, and it's walkable for people toget to that station. New York City has thefastest metro system in the United States, but ascertain areas are rejuvenated, it's becomea bit outdated. Now, areas that havebecome popular to live in, like Fort Greene andClinton Hill, are famously disconnected from themass transit system, and train lines outside ofManhattan connect to each.

Other notoriouslyinfrequently. For example, if you're living inWestern Brooklyn and trying to get to easternBrooklyn, it's faster to go into Manhattan andback down to the other side as opposed tocutting straight across, largely because there areso few interborough lines and the bus routes areinefficient. Efforts to change this have not seena lot of success, though. The BQX or BrooklynQueens Connector was.

Proposed in 2016 as awaterfront streetcar that would stretch 11 milesfrom Red Hook, Brooklyn, all the way to Astoria,Queens. We are in Brooklyn BridgePark at the corner of Atlantic Avenue andColumbia Street, and this is where the proposed BQXline would go. You know, most peoplesort of think the proposal is dead in the waterbecause the cost of light rail is just very, veryhigh.

Cities all over the worldhave proposed light rail systems that either getgreatly reduced or don't happen at all because ofthe expense of putting rail in the roadbed. It's highly disruptive tolike the business community to forresidents, it's very expensive. Lisa Chamberlain has beenpushing for New York to consider trackless tramas a new transit option as.

A streetcar route. TheBCC was estimated to cost roughly $1.7 billion. But I think that there isan alternative to this, which is known astrackless tram, and depending on theestimates, it can be anywhere from one tenthto one third of the cost of light rail. So an ART system in placeof a streetcar along the proposed BQX line wouldbe a cost-effective and.

Efficient alternative ifgiven priority lanes, as it can travel up to 43 mph, but it would likely cut into street parkingalong the line. So the big obstacle to mymind in New York City is the fight over streetspace. Putting aside adedicated, protected right of way for trackless tramis the only way it works. And if we can't musterthe political courage in New York City to do that,we won't ever be able to.

Experience it. While autonomous rapidtransit is still in a relatively early stage ofdevelopment, it's been established indisconnected portions of Chinese cities since2017. And if the U.S. begins to prioritizepublic transportation infrastructure,technology like this could help growing Americancities.

Sharing is caring!