Our weekly “New Starts” roundup of new and newsworthy transportation projects worldwide.

Will Transit Be Able to Get Amazon Workers Where They’re Going?

Amazon pledged that its HQ2 facility would bring upwards of 50,000 new jobs to whatever city it picked to house it. Now that the project’s been split in two, New York and Washington can each expect about half that number. But that may still be a large enough figure to give transit operators in both cities more headaches, an Associated Press report suggests.

The report notes that the new riders won’t materialize all at once, but despite the presence of New York City Subway and Washington Metro stations near the sites Amazon has chosen, scholars and analysts cited in the story say that both systems will have trouble meeting the additional demand.

Local elected officials in New York are downright critical of what Amazon is getting to cope with some of the added demand — specifically, a helipad for its new headquarters in Queens’ Long Island City section. Even though Amazon will have to limit itself to 120 landings per year, New York City Council Member Jimmy Van Bramer, a Democrat who represents Long Island City, criticized the helipad as an extravagance when the subway lines passing nearby the planned Amazon site already have trouble accommodating the riders that use it now.

“For the city and state to greenlight a helipad for the wealthiest man in the world and one of the richest corporations in the world is a slap in the face to all New Yorkers, but particularly the people in Queens who have to fight to get on the 7 train in the morning,” Van Bramer told the AP. “And furthermore, if there were 25 to 30,000 Amazon employees in Long Island City, that fight to get onto the train is going to get a lot more intense.”

In Crystal City, Va., where Amazon has been promised improvements at two Metro stations (one of which is just now beginning to be built), the Metrorail system is at capacity on several lines and still has serious maintenance issues, according to Oakland, Calif.-based transportation consultant Tom Rubin. Commutes in Washington are among the nation’s worst, and the addition of Amazon’s workforce will do nothing to make them better.

“We have an embarrassing metro system here that I hope will benefit by this relocation,” said Thomas Cooke, professor of business law at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. It will probably take more than expanding two Metro stations for that benefit to materialize, however, and whatever happens, Amazon won’t be paying for it. The taxpayers of Northern Virginia will.

Metro-North Seizes Opportunity to Buy Itself

Next year, for the first time since 1972, the organization that runs Grand Central Terminal and the regional rail lines that run into it from New York’s upstate suburbs will own both.

Railway Age reports that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority of the State of New York will purchase Grand Central and the Metro-North Railroad’s Harlem and Hudson lines from their owner, Midtown Trackage Ventures LLC, for $35 million next year.

Metro-North currently operates the three facilities under a 280-year lease it signed with American Premier Underwriters in 1994 — the company, now known as American Financial Group, had acquired a previous lease with the MTA from the bankrupt Penn Central Transportation Company. Midtown Trackage then acquired the lease in the 2000s. Under the terms, the MTA pays Midtown $2.2 million a year, but the lease includes a provision that allows the MTA to buy it out in 2019, and the MTA is taking advantage of that clause to achieve permanent savings.

“This was a no-brainer, from a financial standpoint,” MTA Chief Development Officer Janno Lieber told Railway Age. “We had to exercise the option to purchase or remain a tenant for another 270-plus years. The interest rate environment — and the $500,000 discount offered by the seller — means it’s cheaper to buy it now than to pay rent for all that time. Equally important, this transaction secures for the MTA control over development rights along the Harlem Line and Hudson Line, which will allow us to help local jurisdictions implement high-quality transit-oriented development for generations to come.”

Besides the iconic terminal building, the purchase includes the Central’s “Water Level Route” tracks along the Hudson as far as Milepost 75.8, a few miles north of Poughkeepsie, and the Harlem Line tracks as far as Dover Plains. The MTA already owns the tracks north of this point, which it built when it extended the line to Wassaic.

Area Man Trades Driving for Bus Riding, Discovers He Likes It

This sounds like a story that you would expect to read in The Onion, but this one’s real. KSN television in Wichita reported that a local resident decided to take one small step to make Kansas’ largest city a better place: in October, he decided to keep his car in the garage and get around on the city’s bus system instead.

“I took a pledge to ride public transit at least four round trips every week in October and share the experience with people,” said Wichita resident John DeCesaro.

DeCesaro decided to take the pledge in response to a call to civic action called BlackoutICT. This local program asked citizens and businesses to take concrete steps to address Wichita’s problems instead of flying the city flag as a sign of pride.

While riding around the city on local bus routes, DeCesaro shared photos of the city neighborhoods he traveled through, tales of new people he met on his travels and selfies of himself and his daughter on board via social media.

“I chose transit because I knew it was a valuable service here for the City fo Wichita, but I didn’t know a whole lot about it,” he told KSN.

His 35 October round trips have made him a permanent convert to using transit on a regular basis, and he hopes that his daughter will also pick up the habit now that bus riding is no longer an unfamiliar and scary thing.

“I hope that some people who saw those posts and those photos are curious enough to hop on a bus themselves,” he said.

The kicker? DeCesaro said he was surprised by how much money and time he saved taking the bus instead.

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