The data that the maps are based on come from my friends at Inrix, a clever company based just outside of Seattle that measures traffic congestion using data from GPS tracking systems in commercial fleets. I’ve written about them before, and used their data in December 2008 to form the Forbes “Chirp Index,” a group of leading indicators with which we (fairly accurately) predicted that the recession would bottom out late in the summer of 2009.

After a couple of years of declining traffic congestion (due first to rising gas prices and then to rising unemployment), traffic congestion seems to be coming back. Growth in economic activity and stimulus-related road construction projects are bringing more people onto the roads and then slowing them down.

A minor tiff erupted in the comments section of my article; one commenter suggested that traffic congestion wouldn’t come back if only we invested more in public transportation. The next commenter wrote that public transportation hasn’t been proven to have any meaningful impact on traffic congestion.

Both commenters make legitimate, though incomplete, points. Public transit advocates tend not to talk of payoffs from transit investment in terms of immediate relief from congestion; after all, much of the housing and commercial space that’s been built in this country over the last 50 years is fundamentally incompatible with efficient transit schemes. The office-park worker who lives on a cul-de-sac will likely never be able to use even the most ambitious new transit system to commute–at least not as long as he lives in a housing tract and works in an office park.

That’s why transit advocates concede that new rail lines won’t immediately cut traffic on adjacent arterial roads. Rather, they say, transit systems encourage the kind of development that is compatible with transit use: walkable neighborhoods with a combination of townhouses, apartment high-rises, offices and shopping that are based around transit stations.

This kind of development is popular in places like Northern Virginia, where a well-run rail system links outlying areas to a massive job center in Washington, D.C. It takes much more patience to introduce these kinds of transit-oriented neighborhoods to cities with comparatively weak central business districts, like Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Atlanta, since people who live in them but don’t work in them may still have to drive to otherwise-inaccessible office parks.

So new transit networks in car-oriented areas constitute major investments in reorienting urban development over a period of decades, not a quick attempt to remove a few cars from highways. Traffic will come back this year–there’s no way around that–but sound investments now could mean that it will bring fewer headaches fifty years from now.

The day that I took this walk, the south sidewalk was closed, so I used the walkway on the north side of the bridge. The natural scenery up the river is just as magnificent as the man-made scenery downriver.

From the metro area that gives us such names as Hoboken, Weehawken, Hackensack*, Harsimus Cove and Throgs Neck, comes Yonkers, which sits across the city line from the Bronx. It’s visible from the bridge.

The Cloisters, part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, sits on the top of a hill in Fort Tryon Park at the very northern tip of Manhattan. Its tower pokes through the trees in this photo. Below it, just above the shoreline, is Robert Moses’s Henry Hudson Parkway. In The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s biography of Moses, the construction of the Henry Hudson Parkway was where Moses went from arrogant-but-generally-good to essentially maniacal (but there were signs earlier, of course).

The views of Midtown are as good as ever, of course. The scale of the Empire State Building is, I think, best appreciated from this distance, where it still overpowers just about everything else.

As we cross over the Manhattan shoreline on the bridge, we can see railroad tracks below us. These were originally built by the New York Central to gain access to the West Side (its Grand Central Terminal is on the East Side). Now they’re owned by Amtrak, which uses them for trains to Albany and Chicago. These tracks and the environment around them in the early 20th century inspired Robert Moses to pursue public works in the first place. When he built Riverside Park and the Henry Hudson Parkway, the tracks were the source of much of his funding, part of which came directly from the New York Central and another chunk of which came from Federal funds earmarked for the elimination of railroad grade crossings.

Upon arriving in Manhattan, we’re greeted by the sight of the George Washington Bridge Bus Terminal (in the foreground). Behind it are residential towers that are located directly on top of the Cross-Manhattan Expressway segment of I-95.

And now, a final view of the bridge.

The tour is over. The A train whisks me back downtown, and safely home to Park Slope.

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Back between Jersey City and Hoboken, the light rail trains pass this stop, which really ought to be announced by a recorded pirate voice:

After leaving Hoboken Terminal, and just as they pull out of the Lincoln Harbor station, where I disembark, the light rail trains pass beneath the “Helix”, a curved causeway that brings Route 495 off of the Palisades and down into the Lincoln Tunnel. The views from the Helix are spectacular.

Lincoln Harbor is a drab, sterile development that includes a marina, a couple of strange housing/something-else piers, and a blue office complex that includes this gem of a food court:

But at least this is where the bus stops, and it’s on time. Route 158 follows River Road up the narrow plane between the Hudson and the Palisades. Good views of the west side of Midtown are off to the right the whole way:

The road has been developed quickly over the last few years, and there’s now a great deal of expensive, low-quality housing crammed in between it and the river.

Condos start at $600,000 in “Grandview II at Riverwalk”, and the developer, K. Hovnanian, promises “an enticing shopping promenade” in the neighborhood. But the commercial options in this area are bland strip malls like this one, which turns its back on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and the tower of Riverside Church.

But not to worry. There’s something pretty neat coming up.

Continue to Mitsuwa Marketplace >>
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This photo, from the Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) at the Library of Congress, suggests the magnitude of the facility. The passenger terminal is at the bottom of the photograph, with its trainshed on the left, waiting room in the middle, and ferry terminal on the right. Off the bottom of this photograph were more large docks for unloading coal and produce.

Today, Hoboken Terminal serves several of NJ Transit’s commuter lines. The waiting room was renovated several years ago, to great effect. Photographs from the Library of Congress suggest that, until this room was renovated, its ornate Tiffany skylight sported blackout paint from the Second World War.

The exterior of the terminal is sheathed in copper. This is the main entrance; to the right is the trainshed, and to the left is the ferry terminal. Like the CRRNJ terminal featured in the Jersey City page, this terminal was built primarily to move passengers from their trains onto ferries that went to Manhattan, not to directly serve the town in which it was located, so the exit to the city is a bit awkward compared to the smooth rail-to-boat flow.

The entrance has “Lackawanna R.R.” over the door because this was built as the terminal of the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad. It merged with the Erie Railroad in 1960 to form the Erie-Lackawanna, and, following a bankruptcy declaration, the E-L was folded into the Federal Government’s Conrail. Portions of the former Lackawanna are today operated by Norfolk Southern.

From just south of the terminal, we can see what has become of the Erie Railroad’s terminal, which was abandoned in the 1960s as its functions were merged into the Lackawanna’s facility. The group of tall buildings on the right hand side of the following photograph are part of the Newport development, built from the 1980s onwards on the site of the Erie’s terminal. (The PATH station now called “Pavonia/Newport” still has ornamental “E”s on the tops of columns from when it served the Erie.) A large mall sits on the waterfront (it features all of the shopping options available elsewhere, but in more depressing surroundings). The last tall building on the left in the photograph is the Goldman Sachs building in Jersey City, and the squat tan building near the middle of the photograph is a ventilation tower for the Holland Tunnel. In the foreground is a pile field left over from one of the Lackawanna’s dismantled freight docks.

Even though Hoboken Terminal’s waiting room has been refurbished, the ferry terminal has not; it is closed to the public and has been replaced by a smaller new facility adjacent to the trainshed. The doors to the ramps leading to the ferry area were open when I was there, and I got a few pictures that hint at the enormous ferry concourse that lies beyond in disrepair.

Hoboken’s city center is very close to the terminal.

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Jersey City has been substantially redeveloped in the last decade or so. Exchange Place was the site of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s New York terminal before it built the famous Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan (predecessor to the current one). The PATH station at Exchange Place was originally built to shuttle mainline railroad passengers from the PRR’s terminal into Manhattan, but it now serves an attractive district of high-rise office buildings, including this one, built by Goldman Sachs in 2004. Rumor has it that many of its floors are empty, the result of Goldman’s staff balking at the idea of working in New Jersey. At 42 stories and 781 feet tall, it’s apparently the tallest building in the world outside of a central business district.

The PATH train has additional local interest: it’s responsible for one of the many layers of complication involved in figuring out who is responsible for rebuilding the World Trade Center. The World Trade Center was built on the site of the Hudson Terminal, an office building and train station complex owned by the Hudson & Manhattan Railroad. When the H&M began to falter financially in the 1950s, the Port Authority brought it under public ownership and the railroad became the PATH (Port Authority Trans-Hudson). The Hudson Terminal, along with many blocks around it, was demolished and replaced by the World Trade Center in the late 1960s. Through it all, the Port Authority retained ownership of the land on which the complex sat, though development rights were leased into private hands.

In front of Goldman’s building is a pleasant promenade along the river.

Jersey City’s transformation is ongoing, and there are some unexpected brownfields among the glassy office towers. Across the street from the Goldman Sachs building is a forlorn, debris-strewn lot with the famous Colgate clock that marks the former location of a toothpaste factory. The clock is a landmark and will remain through whatever redevelopment goes on here.

The clock used to sit on the roof of the factory. This photo is from the Historic American Engineering Record at the Library of Congress.

Looking downriver from the Colgate clock, three landmarks appear. On the right are the Statue of Liberty and the main building at Ellis Island. On the left is one of only two big railroad terminals that remain on the New Jersey waterfront. This one served the Central Railroad of New Jersey, and like all of the other old terminals, it had a ferry port (now demolished) that permitted passengers to walk off of their trains and onto ferries swiftly and efficiently. The head house has been renovated and is now a visitors’ center. The train shed sits derelict, and the yards leading into the station have been turned into Liberty State Park.

New Jersey has lately been at the forefront of light rail development, and the most substantial of the state’s three light rail projects connects Jersey City to Bayonne, Hoboken, Weehawken, and Union City. The lines mostly travel on abandoned or little-used freight trackage, but it runs in the street in downtown Jersey City, lending a sort of European feel to the whole thing. Everything is brand new; the first stage opened in 2000, and the line assumed its present form in February of 2006.

I leave Jersey City on the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail line and head for Hoboken.

Continue to Hoboken Terminal >>
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Well, the so-called Gold Coast is doing very well for itself. There really has been an explosion of high-end construction, and the light rail line lives up to the rumors of snazziness. There’s something deeper, too. In its transformation from heavy industry to offices and apartments, this area is an exemplar of the shift from manufacturing to high-tech services that has made the U.S. so prosperous in the last several decades.

Here, I present my attempt to come to my own understanding of a small bit of New Jersey by venturing through it myself. The journey was long. The transfers were many. But all you have to do is look at photos and read text.

Click on the map below to begin.

Begin in Jersey City >>