Lackawanna Cutoff Passenger Service Restoration

EuroStar wrote:Looks like NJTransit is moving ahead with the purchase of 3.53 acres of wetlands mitigation credits from two different banks for a total amount of $1,384,038. The line item was in the agenda for the March 09 board meeting and unless something unexpected happened in the last moment it should have been approved (we can confirm this once the minutes of the meeting become public).

Other interesting information from the background section of the agenda document:
1. The parking lot at Andover will be able to accommodate 55 cars.
2. The design/build contract for the Roseville Tunnel is expected to go out for bids some time this year.
3. The design of the station is 90% complete and is expected to go out for bids this year too.
4. They expect 8 revenue trains each way plus 4 non-revenue moves in each direction per day. Service is expected to run between 5am and 10:30pm on weekdays only and be close to hourly during peak hour/direction and bi-hourly during the rest of the time. The cost of the service is pegged at $2,100,000 per year. This seems very ambitious to me.
5. The project is currently expected to be completed in October 2018.

Once again, the source of all this is NJTransit itself, so no speculations here (even though who knows whether they can deliver on time relative to their own predictions).

i'm really happy to see this moving forward, but i cannot understand the bang for the buck here at all. 2.1 million per year for 55 cars? is anything within walking distance of this station?

lensovet wrote:i'm really happy to see this moving forward, but i cannot understand the bang for the buck here at all. 2.1 million per year for 55 cars? is anything within walking distance of this station?

This was never meant to be a one station branch. Even though there are people who will question the usefulness of the whole thing up to Scranton, the goal has always been to get the trains beyond the state border. The fact that NJTransit has not given up should make transit advocates happy given how badly they have been treated by the governor in terms of money allocated to capital projects. If this project survives the current administration, better days may come ( or may not come, who am I to know?) when the Feds get involved and the line reaches Pennsylvania. The extension to Andover by itself is totally useless. There is nothing capable of providing meaningful ridership close to the station. Maybe one day they can built a transit oriented development, but for now there is nothing to provide meaningful number of riders.

There are a few trains that do not start at Hackettstown which can be extended to start at Andover, but I really do not know where they are going to get the rest to make them 8. With the recent cuts I do not see them adding more round trips to Hoboken given the tiny ridership west of Dover. The only way to get somewhat better ridership is to express through Montclair in order to become time competitive with driving, but I do not expect that to happen.

EuroStar wrote:This was never meant to be a one station branch. Even though there are people who will question the usefulness of the whole thing up to Scranton, the goal has always been to get the trains beyond the state border. The fact that NJTransit has not given up should make transit advocates happy given how badly they have been treated by the governor in terms of money allocated to capital projects. If this project survives the current administration, better days may come ( or may not come, who am I to know?) when the Feds get involved and the line reaches Pennsylvania. The extension to Andover by itself is totally useless. There is nothing capable of providing meaningful ridership close to the station. Maybe one day they can built a transit oriented development, but for now there is nothing to provide meaningful number of riders.

To draw an analogy, seems a similar situation to the extension of the MBTA Providence Line to Wickford Junction RIDOT negotiated; it's part of a larger, long-term effort for Rhode Island to get their own commuter service through South County to Westerly, but as-of-now it's had an underwhelming impact with only about 175 daily riders. It's all about gradual roll-out and forward planning of suspected desire/need for service, and to make what would be a much larger project easier to swallow.

i get that, but wouldn't you be better off stashing away 2 mil/year for ~10 years and then actually using it to build something instead of running useless trains?

Here is a very negative article about the extension: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/ ... r-commuter. Fair quote:

Seven months after New Jersey Transit raised fares and cut routes to close a budget gap, the railroad is laying track to link dairy-country commuters with Manhattan, at a cost of about $474,000 per rider.
The seven-mile (11.3-kilometer) line between Port Morris and Andover in northwest New Jersey will add but a ridership blip to the nation’s second-busiest commuter railroad. By 2030, just 130 daily passengers are expected to board. One multilevel rail car could haul the whole crowd, with a dozen seats to spare.

Even though not perfect the article is relatively well written and informed compared to the usual lack of understanding about the issues related to rail by the general media.


As to answer the previous poster: the plan was to have this segment operational while the rest of the line was being built. It was expected that the segment will be operated by itself only for a few years, probably 2-3, not decades, after which the full line would be operational. The plan was never to commit to wasting $2 million a year for the foreseeable future. The extension to Andover remains likely to happen anyway given that there is federal money which was used for it and the Fed rarely agree to changes in projects they have funded (the ARC was the obvious exception).

lensovet wrote:i get that, but wouldn't you be better off stashing away 2 mil/year for ~10 years and then actually using it to build something instead of running useless trains?

Maybe, but then you get the "use it or lose it" arguments, not to mention managers needing to raid the funds for something else. The faster you use a pot of money, the less likely someone else is to make it disappear - much like that other kind of pot

In my opinion, once gas prices rise again, as they surely will, people will be screaming why can't they ride the train and why can't I catch it in PA!

The problem now is that people are moving out of the East Stroudsburg area at an incredible rate. So many vacant homes and others you could get for incredible prices but still no one wants them. The boom out there has turned to bust. People are moving back to closer suburbs with shorter commutes. In 10 years, you might wonder why there was ever a plan to build a route to the Poconos in the first place.

Just another reason they will use not to extend the line...

Western NJ is also going through a population decrease. It's been averaging 1-2 percent per year. Even larger businesses, like BASF in Mount Olive, NJ moved back east to Florham Park into a much smaller, more compact building. The planners I work with in NJ feel that population and work centers west of the Route 287 corridor will continue to decrease for the foreseeable future. But there is no definitive answer as to when that would change. On the upside it has been a great time for the cities and larger towns east of Route 287.

Yeah. Ten years ago, everyone was still moving outward. Exurbs were trendy and (relatively) cheap, and because of the housing bubble, people who really didn't have the funds felt secure buying massive houses. We all know what happened next. During and in the years after the recession, gas prices shot up, people realized what a pain commuting for 3+ hours a day was, and developers wanted to work in proven markets again. This all colluded to create a miraculous process of reurbanization, where people who had left the inner rings of the metro area moved back into them, or even into the city. Developers started realizing that because cities had regained their hipness, their conventional, car centric, un walkable suburban developments just wouldn't make the cut, and companies like Toll Brothers began building dense developments, with multi-family buildings and a lot of times, close proximity to public transportation. These same builders stared building in cities too; one of Toll Brothers largest projects is their apartment complex in Brooklyn Bridge Park. All of this led to people fleeing the outer rings, and I hate to say it, but it's for the better.
You all should read The End of the Suburbs by Leigh Gallagher. It really is pertinent to this topic.
Ok, I'll stop now.

Mr. 503, your thoughts are indeed relevant.

Simply because I have no desire to live in a city, I have relatives who wouldn't think of living anywhere else and are astounded that I don't want same.

Nevertheless, long ago I presented material at this topic describing the life of commuting from Monroe County PA; no thanks:

viewtopic.php?f=69&t=1580&p=546239#p546239" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

With only 8 trains each way, Peak Hourly and Off-Peak Bi-Hourly is not attainable from 5:00am to 10:30pm.

If you wish to do some light reading on the subject of the shifting population in the NY Metropolitan area you can check out this interesting report from the folks at the Bloustein School https://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/ru ... 255/PDF/1/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; . The population trends do indeed seem to be reversing themselves. It is a limited sample of data covering only a short time period but it is a striking change. There are a number of factors that account for the shift in growth that I won't get into here, but the net takeaway is that you have correctly identified this change in conditions.

Now there still may be value in restoring service despite the trends because, even with the population reduction, there will still be a significant number of people in eastern Pennsylvania that will potentially use the service (Route 80 is still heavily used for commuting in this corridor). Staging the major investments required in steps (Roseville Tunnel, Hainseburg Viaduct & Delaware River Bridge) as funds become available makes sense, especially since NJ Transit is capable of doing the track and signal work in-house. Plus there is always value in giving people transportation alternatives.

Without getting too deeply into the question of whether infrastructure chases population or infrastructure guides population, it's not unreasonable to question the efficacy of restoring this line. The target of this first leg of the project is clearly not to serve the thriving metropolis of Andover, it's to get one step closer to eastern Pennsylvania. There's probably some social & planning value to re-connecting places like Stroudsburg and Scranton to the rail system. There is also a long-term value to restoring this rail corridor for redundancy and resiliency reasons. Are they sufficient reasons to warrant the investment? I don't know. We'll see how things play out. However, things are most definitely changing.

Gilbert B Norman wrote:
April 11, 2004

April 12, 2004

Sad stories. But they only hint at the federal government's part in pressuring banks to make loans to people who couldn't repay them.

Yeah, that was one of the largest economic SNAFUs ever. The signs of trouble were there, they were just ignored. People were making $$$$$$$$$$ and that blinded them. I wish some heads had rolled on the Street after that. Alas, there was never really closure to that whole mess.
Back on topic.
How bad is the condition of the Delaware River Viaduct? It looks quite chipped, cracked and overgrown.