Secaucus is where the infrastructure is. Pointless to talk about where the office jobs are moving when it's illegal to build high-density office buildings near Secaucus Junction due to zoning. Move the railyards and the storage facilities somewhere that's not as close to Manhattan by transit and build it up. Ideally you'd want to eventually map streets connecting to the residential part of Secaucus today; there are a few km in between, mostly far from the station, but at least part of that in between area is still near the NEC and they could open another station there serving local traffic; the cost of four-tracking everything up to the tunnel portal to avoid conflicts with intercity trains is by ARC standards a rounding error.
Or the region could spend $13 billion on avoiding Secaucus. Why not? |
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As for 4 tracking , that would come with the Gateway Project , and is needed....in the morning Amtrak and everyone crawls....with 4 tracking Amtrak would speed through although Secaucus's weird design might make that hard...but still faster then today. They already started clearing a path for the new ROW.... 4 tracking along with an upgraded Kearny JCT which was never fully built , will allow for more M&E trains to enter the NEC without messy up the schedule. In the Morning if your on the M&E you have to wait for NEC trains to clear , although this applies to any time of day. Sometimes takes up to 10 mins before you can merge onto the NEC. All the plans call for using current ROW through Secaucus not around it...unless i read wrong.... High Rise Proposals http://galaxyrising.com/ee/images/ph...ecaucus/01.jpg http://galaxyrising.com/index.php?/t...n_in_secaucus/ TOD... http://policy.rutgers.edu/vtc/tod/ne...ecaucusMAP.pdf |
Those towers look like one of the TODs around the lesser-used SkyTrain stations here. Sorry. Around the more heavily used stations, this is possible with a town center created from scratch at the same time SkyTrain opened. Only Secaucus should plan on doing this on larger scale, first because New York is bigger than Vancouver, and second because New York has very few places where this TOD intensity can be done without needing to spend tons of money on one tunnel.
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I can't see Secaucus Junction getting any kind of development until there is some sort of all-day frequent transit service, even if the zoning allowed it.
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Even if that were true, it's hardly "frequent". It's not quite true though. Scheduled mid-day weekday headways reach as high as 34 minutes to NYC, and as high as 56 minutes to Hoboken.
Anyways, when I saw frequent I'm talking no more than 12-15 minutes at the VERY MOST to NYC. That's the kind of frequency that attracts dense TODs. |
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Even if there was demand, where is there room to build a walkable TOD (walkable meaning not only within the TOD itself, but to/from the train station):
https://maps.google.com/maps?q=Secau...ew+Jersey&z=16 The station is hemmed in by a freeway, freeway ramps, and marshland https://maps.google.com/maps?q=Secau...ew+Jersey&z=18 That parking lot is the only obvious place. |
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Ridership on hourly off-peak trains isn't a good gauge of ridership on usable trains. There's no development there. Might as well tell me that there's no off-peak service on the West Coast Express at all, so why bother investing in slower rapid transit to Port Moody and Coquitlam? And yet once the trains are usable by people who aren't suburban peak-hour commuters, they're more usable, and ridership projections say the slower Evergreen Line will get 70,000 daily passengers vs. 11,000 on the (longer, faster) West Coast Express. Frequency means everything, everywhere. Stamford and White Plains are getting a trickle compared to what Brooklyn is getting, and don't even compare well with secondary rapid transit-oriented centers in Vancouver. Again, look at Metrotown. |
Who cares about train headways? The real question is why would want to live or work in Secaucus?
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As for Stamford, White Plains, etc., those are the downtowns of good sized cities on their own right, and are their own regional draws. That is not what the term "TOD" is usually used to describe. That's like calling Lower Manhattan a "TOD". |
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Secaucus, meanwhile, is not 10-20 miles outside the city. It's 5 miles. It's the same distance to Manhattan as central Queens, where riders abandoned the LIRR's hourly service in favor of the subway in the 1920s, forcing station closures. |
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Secaucus has stereotypes and now a flooding haze hanging over them , which aside from the one TOD and apartments near Route building any large scale TOD is going to be a tough sell. Its isolation and lack of "Live , work , play" attraction also plays into its shrinking future. Which is why after this TOD is completed , I don't see others coming along. This is different then the Vancouver Metro or Toronto Metro which are booming everywhere , growth is generally happening in either in the Core Cities or Satilite cities. Everywhere in between has had a few successes and mostly failure even with great transit.... |
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But why such emphasis on Secaucus which I don't think will last nor survive....its dying....even the new developments are dead....aside from being occupied by commuter couples without children. We should be focusing on Newark , Paterson , and Elizabeth along with Bridgeport areas with enormous amounts of land , yet no one touches it due to old stereotypes....same with Secaucus and now its even worse due to Sandy. If you fight the stereotypes then you'll see more construction and the region will balance it self out. Its not really the legality , its the culture of the region and the stereotypes... Thats slowly changing the NJ Gold Coast has boomed over the last 15 years , Newark is just starting to blossom but has a long way to go. Theres also the slow decontamination process of parts of the region , it take 10-15 years before certain areas are completely cleaned up and ready to build on in Urban Jersey and the Outer Borough's. |
2-3 tph is not decent for an urban neighborhood. It's the kind of schedule that makes people continue to take the subway and ignore commuter rail.
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