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| Re: Staten Island Railway (489962) | |||
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Re: Staten Island Railway |
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Posted by WillD on Fri Sep 14 02:00:11 2007, in response to Re: Staten Island Railway, posted by (SIR) North Shore Line on Fri Sep 14 01:11:03 2007. A small amount of hyperbole on my part, yes. But then the average speed for the NYCTA subway is around 15mph, and that'd make for a travel time of exactly 20 minutes, so that figure at least has to be included as a conservative estimate. Yes it'd be a crossing of a body of water, but it would be totally unlike the other crossings NYCTA has of the East River. Since it's fairly likely they'd do an immersed tube there wouldn't be a steep downgrade where NYCTA's anemic cars could pick up any sort of speed. It wouldn't surprise me if the trains barely managed a top speed of 30mph over the length of the tunnel.Being able to transfer to a frequent subway line, without a doubt allows for a better commute than transferring to a ferry line that runs at minimum..every 15 minutes, with a 30 minute ride following after that. Except that that would result in a lot of wasted vehicle hours as half full 1 trains ran to SI. Right now figure four 5000 passenger boats, the average of two 6000 passenger Barbieri and two 4000 passenger Molinari boats operate at peak hour. That's 20000 people per hour per direction. The 1 line operating with a 3 to 4 minute headway at peak hours has a capacity of between 30 and 40 thousand people. Either way you cut it running the 1 train to Staten Island would be a massive mismatch in capacity, with trains quite likely running half empty for the 10 miles to and from SI. You can't cut headways on the 1 because the folks north of 96th need the 1 train, so you have to run more trains which are underutilized for more than a quarter of their round trip. Not only have you spent upwards of 5 billion dollars on a subway line that will be lucky to break 150,000 riders per day, but you've increased the cost of operating the 1 train by a very large factor. One only has to look at the effect Midtown Direct had on traffic into Hoboken to see the impact a one-seat ride could have on the operation. It's quite likely that with the St George transfer maintained you'd attract the SI Ferry passengers and few others. OTOH a one seat ride would likely attract passengers from the Express buses and even more than a few folks who drive. Here you have otherwise compatible operations, yet you don't want to join them after you've built your 5 billion dollar boondoggle tunnel? It's somewhat a moot point, why would you dig a tunnel past the underserved population in Red Hook and extreme western Brooklyn when that could provide much needed turnover, ridership, and connectivity that a tunnel under the bay would not provide? With a tunnel under the bay you get the SI to Manhattan market. But by building a tunnel under the Narrows and a new subway built under say a rebuilt Gowanus highway including maybe three to six intermediate stops then you get the SI to Brooklyn market as well as the SI to Manhattan market. There is no way those potential 6 stops could in no any way increase trip times to the point that they'd make riders opt for other routes. |
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