I Gave a Followup Talk at TransitCon

Hayden Clarkin’s online conference TransitCon just happened, and I was drafted at the last minute to give a talk about construction costs. Here are the slides; for the most part, they’re a compressed version of slides that regular readers have seen before, except done in Beamer rather than Google Slides.

Cognizant of the fact that most people at TransitCon would have heard of me and our research and many would have read the reports or at least seen me, Eric, Marco, or Elif talk about them, I rushed through the description of our report. Instead of just going over trodden ground, I added slides at the end describing new issues we’d learned about since writing the synthesis, which was in a fairly advanced draft in late summer 2022 already. This fell into two categories: new obstacles, and reactions of people in power.

The new obstacles slide talks about the issue of last-minute squeaking (in the “squeaky wheel gets the grease” aphorism, which can and should be changed to “squeaky wheel gets replaced”). The most glaring examples of gross surplus extraction for Second Avenue Subway and the Green Line Extension all happened fairly early in the process.

In contrast, since then, Eric has spent so much time working in Seattle he could given time make an entire case out of its ongoing problems, and there, some of the extraction has been late in the project: one suburb’s fire department demanded construction in excess of the normal fire codes or else it wouldn’t certify the stations in its jurisdiction as fire-safe. In Dallas, the city itself is grabbing surplus: it’s demanding betterments and holding up the DART Silver Line until it gets them, adding $150,000 a day to the cost of the project. These two examples are both late in the process, after the Full Funding Grant Agreement has been signed; but once there is a political commitment, a local actor can still hope to grab surplus by demanding unreasonable changes.

But it’s really better to view this issue as one of top-level cowardice and unwillingness to take responsibility. The solution in Seattle is not hard: dissolve the department and have it taken over by the state or by Seattle proper. But whoever does that in effect takes ownership of every single fire in the suburb, and this requires taking more responsibility than American politicians and their appointees are used to.

The reaction of people in power plays to how they treat obstacles. I wrote a title for that slide, The Self-Hating State, and then deleted it and replaced it with the less toothy Public Officials and Consultants. But in effect what we see when we present the results to sympathetic federal and state officials who want to do better (i.e. not the MTA) is that most government officials don’t like the government very much. Their eyes glaze over the sort of technical and economic points that their counterparts here talk about, and instead they talk about how consultants have more long-term experience, when most of what the consultants know is how poorly-managed projects are built and where they do have positive knowledge (like the standardization of construction in Copenhagen) they’re not listened to.

Even more frustrating is their reaction to red tape. They take it as a given that the government must involve red tape; the same red tape in the private sector is invisible to them, such as when Seattle-area construction involves multiple jurisdictions each with its own consultants. But more fundamentally, these are people who can rewrite regulations, formally or informally, to make things easier; they just consider a government that works unthinkable.

Meme Weeding: Polarization

I’ve heard some people, including some in decently powerful government positions, excuse poor American public transportation performance by saying that it’s hard to work in a politically polarized environment. This is related to excuses made in the early 2010s, blaming the failure of high-speed rail in the United States on Republican governors who canceled programs after winning the 2010 midterm, never mind that all-Democratic California has not been able to build it either. But the complaints about polarization are not just specious. They also betray deep ignorance and incuriosity about the rest of the world, including specific countries that we at the Transit Costs Project have referenced repeatedly.

What is polarization, anyway?

Political polarization generally refers to a system in which there are two blocs, roughly evenly matched, each characterized by hating the other to the point of not fully (or at all) accepting its legitimacy. The blocs can alternate in power, as in the United States today, or one can usually prevail over the other, as in the Second and Third Party Systems in American history.

Usually this also includes large left-right ideological differences, which in the 20th century could even take the characteristic of support for communism versus fascism, as in multiple Latin American systems. However, systems in which the differences in ideology are more rhetorical than practical, as in 1980s-1990s Greece, can also be characterized as polarized. In fact, polarization (that is, delegitimization of the other side) is often a strategy employed by populist politicians to maintain mass support as a substitute for concrete action.

By most accounts, the United States is seeing high and growing party polarization. This contrasts with depolarized systems like those of Belgium and the Netherlands, which are historically tri- rather than bipolar and therefore have long traditions of shifting coalitions and consensus, or Germany and Austria, which have two blocs but still have a lot of cross-aisle cooperation and many grand coalitions.

Polarization in low-cost countries

While American political practitioners usually contrast the American situation today with that of the elite consensus of the postwar era, we should be more comparative and look at how polarization varies over space and not just time. And by that standard, most of the low-construction cost countries are obviously polarized: Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Turkey, South Korea. Even the Nordic countries are more polarized than Americans give them credit for, leaving Switzerland as the only truly depolarized low-construction cost country.

In Italy, moreover, polarization has grown even as construction costs have fallen. The First Italian Republic was depolarized: Democrazia Cristiana won every election and governed by choice of which coalition partners to work with, which could include the Socialists (a situation called “integral left”) or not; bringing in the Communists was unthinkable. It was also legendarily corrupt, to the point that DC should be thought of as a corruption party more than a center-right party like CDU here or VVD in the Netherlands. The corruption led metro construction costs to explode in the 1970s as contracts were given based on bribery rather than any objective criteria. It’s moreover this explosion in costs that led to the investigations that brought down the system, mani pulite.

The Second Italian Republic, birthed by those corruption investigations, has high levels of left-right polarization. The main policy plank of the right is that it hates the left; thus, the right’s leader until recently, Berlusconi, did not engage in any of the neoliberal reforms of good governance that his Northern European and French allies hoped he would. The left has been more neoliberal but it’s explicitly very moderate, governing in coalition with various populists who can be swayed over. The system trended toward two blocs. And now Italy can build infrastructure more affordably, due to the same good-government anti-corruption reforms that passed in the wake of mani pulite.

Turkey is even more polarized, to the point that the main political question in the election in two weeks is not exactly a left-right issue like the role of Islam in society or any socioeconomic issue, but whether Turkey should be a democracy or an autocracy governed by Erdoğan; the candidate of the democracy camp (“Nation Alliance”), Kılıçdaroğlu, has surrounded himself with disaffected former Erdoğan allies and with an entirely right-wing party, İyi, alongside his traditional center-left allies.

What’s more, Erdoğan has not let opposition cities just build infrastructure. Izmir has long been governed by CHP; the state lightly fudged numbers to make its subway construction costs look slightly higher than they are, using pessimistic cost projections. CHP won the elections in Istanbul and Ankara recently, and in Istanbul, the state stopped letting the city use state-owned parks for city-built subway lines and even denied funding for some future lines; Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu got these lines financed through loans from the European Investment Bank, which hates Erdoğan to the point that Istanbul borrows money internationally at lower interest rates than the state. Despite gross politicization, costs have remained low, and the civil service has functioned through this (and Elif’s interviews in Turkey included both AKP and CHP supporters).

Corruption and dominant parties

The situation of DC in Italy, in which its domination of the First Republic even with coalition partners led to corruption, generalizes.

In the United States, regional differences in voting and lack of regional differences in party ideology have made many states safe for one party or another. In those states, there is no polarization, since one party governs everything and has little to nothing to fear from the opposition: California, Texas, New York, Illinois, and increasingly Florida and Ohio all fall into this camp.

The result is that the dominant party in all of these states is a corruption party. It’s easy to be corrupt when you know in advance who you need to buy off, and when it’s not really possible for anyone to run for governor and polarize against you and your bribery of elected officials. In red states there’s occasionally an ideological sop to movement conservatism, usually exclusively the annual culture war topic (in 2023 it’s trans athletes), but nothing really about any of the broader agenda of the economists at right-wing think tanks; in blue states there’s not even a sop.

Why are they like this?

Polarization doesn’t raise construction costs. It’s most likely neutral, and the dominant-party alternative is worse. So why do Americans blame it? I suspect that, like when left-wing Americans try to make high costs a matter of health care, it’s about reducing a complex issue to an American feature that all middlebrow American politicos know to hate. Truthiness trumps knowledge here.

Quick Note: New Jersey Highway Widening Alternatives

The Effective Transit Alliance just put out a proposal for how New Jersey can better spend the $10 billion that it is currently planning on spending on highway widening.

The highway widening in question is a simple project, and yet it costs $10.7 billion for around 13 km. I’m unaware of European road tunnels that are this expensive, and yet the widening is entirely above-ground. It’s not even good as a road project – it doesn’t resolve the real bottleneck across the Hudson, which requires rail anyway. It turns out that even at costs that New Jersey Transit thinks it can deliver, there’s a lot that can be done for $10.7 billion:

Source: Robert Hale at ETA

I contributed to this project, but not much, just some sanity checks on costs; other ETA members who I will credit on request did the heavy pulling of coming up with a good project list and prioritizing them even at New Jersey costs, which are a large multiple of normal costs for rail as well as for highways. I encourage everyone to read and share the full report, linked above; we worked on it in conjunction with some other New Jersey environmental organizations, which supplied some priorities for things we are less familiar with than public transit technicalities like bike lane priorities.

More on Consultants

We’ve gotten a lot of criticism from various quarters about our analysis and conclusions at the Transit Costs Project. The focus for this post is a criticism that isn’t usually made in public but looks like the biggest one among people in power in the American federal government: the issue of consultants. Writing in Slate about our report, Henry Grabar identified consultants as the ultimate reason the United States can’t build. This should be nuanced in that consultants are one of a few primary reasons, but the broad outline of the complaint is right: the overuse of consultants is a serious problem and must be replaced with large in-house bureaucracies in explicit rejection of the privatization of the state. And yet, there’s pushback. Why, and why is it wrong?

The current situation

In the English-speaking world today, the dominant view of infrastructure is that private companies are inherently more efficient than the state. In service of this ideology, large state organizations were left to rot and then privatized. The historic sequence is generally that as efficiency levels fall, political interest in investing in organizational capacity declines, and in-house organizations take the blame.

American and British societies both believe that specialist experts are inherently suspect and must always lower their gaze in the presence of a generalist who is paid and otherwise treated as a master of the universe, and thus those organizations would receive overclass appointees (US version) or generalist civil servants (UK version) who constantly belittle them and also have little ability to reform them from the inside. It’s remarkable how non-technical the members of the American overclass Eric and I have talked to are; one of them asked us straight out why we didn’t talk to more lawyers in our report where we talked to engineers, planners, procurement experts, and other specialists.

The result of this sequence is that usually at the time of privatization – say, when New York’s MTA let go of its 1,600 strong capital construction department in the early 2000s and downsized by about an order of magnitude – what is left is a hulk, easy pickings for the privatizer. What is left of that is even more of a hulk. The upshot is that in places that rely on consultants in lieu of in-house expertise, the quality of current public-sector leadership (that is, the various state political appointees, most federal political appointees, and even some permanent staff with pure management background) is low. The consultants are individually more competent than them, and this is readily apparent to anyone who’s talked with both sets of people; even the political appointees themselves get it and think their expertise is in managing the consultants.

What the consultants know

When the state doesn’t really like itself and privatizes key functions to consultants, the consultants look more competent. One federal official – not a political appointee, to be clear – told us straight out that the consultants have experience since they work on so many projects, domestically and internationally.

The problem is that what the consultants know is how things work on projects that use consultants. This is how an experienced consultant can say something as obviously wrong as “The standard approach to construction in most of Europe outside Russia is design-build.” Is this even remotely true? No. Parts of Europe are transitioning to design-build under British influence, universally seeing cost increases as they do so, but even in the Nordic countries and France this process is in its infancy, and in nearly all of the rest of Western Europe it’s not done at all. The upshot is that the US/UK consultant sphere is an expert on how to build public transportation in the failed US/UK way, and its international experience is largely (not entirely) US/UK-style badness.

But Americans are an incurious people. Even the ones who are aware of European and rich-Asian success in infrastructure and urbanism only really interact with it as tourists. So they can’t distinguish a government-built program like the TGV or nearly every European subway system from the few that are more consultant-driven like the Copenhagen Metro (at the time of its construction, Scandinavia’s highest-cost metro – though the rest of the Nordic world is catching up in both privatization and costs).

What’s more, the American preference for generalist knowledge means that what they see of the Copenhagen Metro is much more its use of unconventional financing than its use of driverless trains at very high frequency or its standardization of station components. Thus, looking at a metro that for all its expense by its regional standards was also cheaper than anything in the US going back to the 1970s, they take notes and imitate all the bad and none of the good.

The interaction between consultants

Okay, so in theory, if consultants’ recommendations are followed exactly and a turnkey system is built, in theory it should still be possible to imitate the medium costs of Denmark.

But in practice, the hallmark of consultants is private competition. This means there are different firms, and even though they are all broadly similar, they compete and each has a slightly different way of doing things and may have different recommendations for a specific project. And then each government agency in the United States hires a different consultant and the consultants clash and there is no way to resolve the conflict.

Seattle’s cost explosion in the last 10 years, going from semi-reasonable costs for U-Link to a world record for a majority-above-ground project for Ballard-West Seattle, comes from a somewhat different place from what we’ve seen in New York and Boston. For example, New York and Boston both have ample surplus extraction by local actors, but the extraction there happened before the plans were finalized and the Full Funding Grant Agreement was made; in the Seattle suburbs, one municipal fire department has demanded changes even after the FFGA and threatened not to certify the project. The issue of consultants there is likewise a new problem: a complex project – I think the Pacific Northwest intercity rail program but I forget – requires intergovernmental coordination and the different agencies hired different consultants, leading to substantial inter-contractor contention. The argument for privatizing state planning to large design-build contracts is that they avoid this contention, but here it’s recreated by the very presence of competition.

Nor is replacing competition with a single private consultant going to solve the situation. The private sector’s norms of how to deliver value depend on competition; all benchmarks used for how to successfully deliver to the customer are honed based on how to beat or at least match other firms that could get the contract if the firm fails. A private monopolist combines the worst aspects of the public sector (no competition) with those of the private sector (fundamentally adversarial relationship with the customer). As soon as a project is large enough that multiple agencies are involved, forcing them to all use the same consultant, even if the initial choice does feature competition between WSP, AECOM, Arup, and other such firms, means that for the duration of the project there’s such lock-in it has the same problems as a literal monopoly.

The way forward

If it’s not possible to successfully deliver infrastructure megaprojects through competition among private consultants or through a private monopoly, it follows that delivery must be done through the public sector. This means a public sector that is staffed up with thousands of permanent professional hires. Small cities can use big cities’ agencies or a federal agency as a public-sector consultant; in all cases, this must be domestic rather than international, since the social mission that makes many public monopolists good vanishes at the border and turns into predatory monopolistic behavior (for example, by SNCF toward other national railways).

Metropolitana Milanese, the infrastructure builder that also provides public-sector consulting services for the rest of Italy, has around 1,300 employees. The Anglo world can imitate that – never literally import the firm, but set up a similar construct, with advice by MM, RATP, and other public-sector engineering firms about how to do so and even some early hires. This needs to be done publicly and ostentatiously, to make it clear what’s going on for the sake of transparency and to lock in good changes. Instead of regulators who nudge, the state needs people who do; there is no alternative.

More Sanity Checks on My High-Speed Rail Model

Writing my Eastern Europe high-speed rail post meant I needed to go back to my ridership projection model for high-speed trains. This model aims to analyze large networks like the entire Shinkansen or TGV and project traffic for extensions of these systems, for upgrade of partially-built networks like that of Germany, and for entirely new systems like any proposal for the United States. To compensate for the relative paucity of training data, the model has as few variables as possible – just four:

\mbox{Ridership} = 75000\cdot\mbox{Pop}_{A}^{0.8}\cdot\mbox{Pop}_{B}^{0.8}/\max{d, 500}^{2}

The populations of metro areas A and B are in millions, distance is in kilometers, and ridership is in millions for year. The four constants – 75,000, 0.8, 500, and 2 – are roughly motivated by Shinkansen data, with some European sanity-checks; the 0.8 exponent is also motivated by some practical attempts to subdivide metropolitan areas into pieces, some on the line and some off it. But is this right?

And as it turns out, the model nails trips from Tokyo to most metropolitan areas in Honshu. Defining Tokyo as the prefecture plus Kanagawa, Chiba, and Saitama Prefectures (#15-18 in the spreadsheet), the spreadsheet says there are 2,742,200 annual JR trips between there and Aomori Prefecture (#6); the spreadsheet predicts 2.59 million trips between Tokyo and the prefecture’s two cities, Aomori and Hachinohe.

Two years ago already, I made a spreadsheet with the model’s predictions for ridership between each pair of metro areas on the Shinkansen network. This can be compared with actual numbers of prefecture-to-prefecture trips by mode (except cars). For most long-distance trips, the numbers in the second sheet matter, comprising all Japan Railways trips; for interregional ones for which slow lines maybe an alternative, it is perhaps better to use the fourth sheet, which excludes season passes used by regular commuters. The numbers in the spreadsheet are directional, so cells should be added to the ones diagonally across.

The problem is that the model severely overpredicts inter-island trips. Tokyo-Fukuoka is 4.61 million per the model; the actual count per the spreadsheet (Fukuoka is #44) is 1,203,600. Tokyo-Hakodate (#4) is likewise 954,000 in the model and 378,200 in reality. Osaka-Fukuoka fares better but still notably underperforms: the model says 10.2 million, whereas the spreadsheet, defining Osaka as Osaka, Kyoto, and Hyogo Prefectures (#30-32), gives 7,162,900, even though the distance is similar to that of Tokyo-Osaka.

Another category that the model overpredicts is trips through Tokyo. Those are less convenient by Shinkansen as they require a transfer, and the transfers are not timed, though the frequency on the Tokaido Shinkansen is such that untimed transfers are not the end of the world. The model predicts Osaka-Sendai at 2.21 million and Nagoya-Sendai at 1.97 million; the spreadsheet says metro Osaka-Miyagi Prefecture (#8) is 194,500 trips, and from metro Nagoya (Aichi Prefecture, #27) it’s 234,300. It’s not even quite a matter of distance: Osaka-Sendai is 840 km, about the same as Tokyo-Hiroshima, which the model gets correctly. It’s just a through-Tokyo effect, like the inter-island effect.

Fortunately both categories can be corrected by taking plane trips into account, listed on the last sheet. Tokyo-Fukuoka by both air and rail is not 1,203,600 trips but 12,313,300; this is a five-hour trip, at which point in Europe the modal split is fairly even, for example on Paris-Nice (p. 3) or more generally in France (source, p. 33). If we include air trips, Osaka-Fukuoka is 8,199,900, Tokyo-Hakodate is 1,482,200, Osaka-Sendai is 1,624,000, Nagoya-Sendai is 445,100. If we take the combined air-rail market and apply more common European modal splits, there is no inter-island penalty, just a bit of a penalty for Osaka-Sendai and a big penalty for Nagoya-Sendai.

Finally, the model chokes on short-distance ridership, generally underpredicting it. It’s hard to exactly count between two relatively close provincial cities, since very short regional trips are included and not just intercity ones. But even excluding season passes, Miyagi-Aomori is 1,140,400 trips a year, where my model says 446,000.

The dicier situation is that of Tokyo-Shizuoka (#26). My model predicts 14.1 million annual trips between Tokyo and the combination of Shizuoka and Hamamatsu, the two largest cities between Tokyo and Nagoya. The spreadsheet gives the number at 37,264,700, or 26,458,300 excluding passes. Even that likely includes some legacy rail trips: there are 9,382,000 non-pass trips between Shizuoka and Kanagawa Prefectures and 15,646,300 between Shizuoka and Tokyo itself, where from Nagoya and Osaka the ratio is more like 1:4; Shin-Yokohama is located in a less central place than Yokohama Station, and I suspect most of the 9.4 million figure rides the Tokaido Main Line.

To complicate things further, while my model underpredicts trips of around 150-200 km, it doesn’t do so to Tokyo-Sendai (10.5 million predicted, 10,924,000 actual), Tokyo-Nagoya (32.4 million predicted, 28,391,100 actual), or Tokyo-Niigata (11.1 million counting Nagaoka and Sanjo, 10,436,600 actual), and it actually overpredicts Nagoya-Osaka (19.2 million; the actual is 13,026,800). Thus, I am still reluctant to change the 500 km minimum in the denominator below which distance is deemed to no longer matter, even if I include a fudge factor for Nagoya’s repeated underperformance.

The one snag that may be worth addressing is the scale issue inherent in the 0.8 exponent. The exponent seems broadly correct from Japanese data. Moreover, when I break metro areas like New York into smaller constituents and compute their individual trip times to other places to apply the formula to each, the exponent seems correct: large metropolitan areas are so big that many of those smaller pieces are far from the train (for example, Long Island) and have additional trip time to consider, reducing overall ridership.

However, the 0.8 exponent also means that as the area of study grows, the model expects per capita trips to rise. Doubling the population of every metro area increases overall ridership by a factor of about three, which may be correct at small scale (it probably means those regions get stronger connecting lines and better train frequency), but should fail at large scale. Evidently, Taiwan overperforms the model by a factor of about three. Just shrinking the exponent to 0.5 wouldn’t work – it would lead to massive underprediction of Tokyo-Osaka ridership and overprediction of Tokyo-Sendai, Tokyo-Hiroshima, and Nagoya-anywhere. There may need to be a fudge factor for systemwide population.

Best I can say is that you should trust the model in the range of system sizes between Spain and Japan, so around 45 to 120 million. It may be possible to go above 120 million in geographically larger regions, like the Eastern United States (around 190 million) or even the entirety of the EU from Warsaw westward (around 370 million), if the large geographic extent means that in practice the network has its own diseconomies of scale from the long end-to-end distance. In other words, the pure 0.8 exponent is obviously false if we double the population of each metro area – but if we instead double the size of the area of study by including more cities in it, then the average distance grows and then the exponent of 2 in the denominator countermands the effect.

Eastern European High-Speed Rail

Last night, I poked around my ridership model for intercity rail in the context of what could be done in Eastern Europe. This is the same model I’ve used for the United States for three years, but here I am more confident in its predictions, at least at overall level if not at the level of specific city pairs.

The model is, to be clear, primitive. I project that the ridership between two metropolitan area pairs A and B, with populations in millions and distance d in kilometers, is

75,000\cdot\mbox{Pop}_{A}^{0.8}\cdot\mbox{Pop}_{B}^{0.8}/\max\{d, 500\}^{2}

The gravity model is trained on some Shinkansen, TGV, and AVE city pairs; it is not perfect even in Japan, overrating inter-island and through-Tokyo ridership, and underrates Taiwanese ridership. But in the range of distances typical of the workhorse TGV and Shinkansen connections it does fit; the 0.8 exponent represents diseconomies of scale, as larger metropolitan areas have a longer distance between the average home or destination and the train station, and empirically the exponent holds up when I break big metro areas into pieces with different distances to other areas.

With that in mind, here’s the network to be tested:

A full-resolution image, with most cities labeled via the OpenStreetMap layer, can be found here.

In short, the point of the network is to connect the main and secondary cities of the four Visegrád Group countries, which are the densest in Eastern Europe and the closest to preexisting Western European networks. Berlin-Dresden becomes a full high-speed line, with an onward connection to Prague, Brno, Olomouc, and Ostrava, which conveniently lie on a single line. From Brno, trains go south to Vienna or Bratislava and thence Budapest. From Ostrava, trains either go into Katowice or via an upgrade of an existing bypass line to Kraków; Kraków gets a connection to Lviv via the collinear cities of Tarnów, Dębica, and Rzeszów. Poland gets a series of Y-shaped lines connecting Berlin, Warsaw, and Katowice via Łódź, while the Berlin-Łódź section itself is two legs of a Y with Gdańsk and the Tricity area. A faster alternate route from Poznań to Katowice via Wrocław and Opole rounds up the network.

The spreadsheet with metro populations, approximate distances, and ridership projections can be found here. Metro area populations are taken from a variety of sources, such as Eurostat; I don’t have a good feel for Polish numbers, so I sanity-checked them with Wikipedia’s multi-source list. The network as proposed is 2,770 km in the spreadsheet not counting Berlin-Dresden, but could be a few tens of km off. This is similar in size to the French LGV network, in a region of similar overall population, and the model says there would be 103 million trips generating 48 billion passenger-km, neither figure counting internal German travel; the domestic TGVs had 51.6 billion passenger-km in 2019 (source, p. 46).

Domestic networks

The network provides a fairly complete coverage of Czechia, and a reasonable one of Poland. Slovakia is too small for such a network, and Hungary’s secondary cities are small and never collinear with Budapest, and therefore these two countries only get international service.

Czechia here benefits from a linear population distribution, and the biggest miss, Plzeň, is collinear with the rest of Czechia as well and could potentially get a heavily-tunneled onward route to Bavaria with a connection to Munich, Nuremberg, or both. Czechia also benefits from atypically strong connecting urban rail – Prague may have Europe’s highest rail ridership per capita depending on metro area definitions, and Brno, with a metro area that on the widest reasonable definition has about a million people, had 195 million tram trips in 2019 (source, PDF-p. 36).

The main challenge for Czech high-speed rail construction is that costs would be high. Prague Metro construction costs have exploded in the last decade, for which I have only an inkling of an explanation; more to the point, the hilly topography north of Prague and the difficulty of finding fast approaches would force extensive tunneling. In fact, current plans assume even more tunneling: the Dresden-Prague planning is for a long base tunnel for the dual use of passenger and freight rail, instead of a steep-grade passenger-only route with little tunneling so that the classical line can be given over to freight trains and tourist passenger trains up Saxon Switzerland.

In Poland, the urban geography is more spread out. There is little collinearity, and the positions of the main cities are such that any network of lines would involve significant detours. Łódź is so far south that it forces Warsaw-Gdańsk to detour (as on this map) or go directly with little useful service from Gdańsk to Germany and western Poland (as on a map I made in 2020). Wrocław is at an awkward spot unless there’s a line directly to Dresden. Eastern Polish cities are never at sufficient scale to justify lines by themselves, orphaning Białystok and, unless there’s a Warsaw-Lviv line, Lublin. Warsaw itself is remarkably undersize: in a country almost as large as Spain, it is less than half the metro area population of Madrid. Thankfully, construction is straightforward, and there are enough cities at sufficient density, generally with decent tram connections (and a metro in Warsaw), that it can work.

International trips and Metcalfe’s law

While the internal networks in Czechia and Poland can expect reasonable traffic density, there is no hope of building them by themselves. Too much traffic relies on international connections. The busiest station on the network as depicted above would be Berlin, as it is by far the largest city. Progress in this direction requires international cooperation to build physical high-speed lines, and not just Alpine base tunnels, which are not appropriate for the Germany-Czechia case.

Metcalfe’s law rears its head again, in that every end of the network contributes a greater share of passenger-km to the system than its share of the length. For example, the most peripheral node, Gdańsk and Bydgoszcz, requires 230 km from the pivot of the Y with Poznań and Łódź, or 8.3% – but Gdańsk and Bydgoszcz contribute 11.8 million passengers (11.5% of total) and 6.4 billion passenger-km (13.3% of total). The only place where this is not true is Wrocław and Opole, since there is an alternate route from Berlin to Katowice that’s only somewhat longer; even there, this route adds 350 km (12.6%) and contributes around 5,000 p-km (10.4%) taking into account reduced ridership from longer Berlin-Katowice trips, hardly a laggard.

In practice, the only way to build such a network incrementally is to start from the strongest link, such as Paris-Lyon in France. But no such link exists in Eastern Europe, where the four largest metro regions combined – Warsaw, Kyiv, Budapest, Prague – are about the same size as Ile-de-France. Instead, the network should accrete from already existing lines in Germany and Austria. The spreadsheet omits ridership coming from onward connections to West German cities like Hamburg or Hanover, both fairly close to Berlin by rail, a list that grows every time Germany opens another high-speed line. Thus, a Czech network integrated with Germany and Austria could succeed on its own, leading up to Poland.

But this can’t work in a haphazard way. Czechia generally knows what it needs, but more international cooperation with a stronger EU role is required to make sure everything falls into place – to make sure cross-border rail infrastructure is seamless enough people actually take the train. This just isn’t the kind of network that can accrete bottom-up.

Doing Projects Right and Doing the Right Project

I’d like to develop a distinction between two modes of success or failure in infrastructure projects, which I’ve mentioned in brief in past post. An infrastructure project may be done right or wrong – that is, it could be built at a reasonable lifecycle cost and offer high quality of service or it could fail to do this, typically through very high upfront construction costs with no future benefit. But it could also be the right project to build or the wrong one – that is it could be the right priority for the region that builds it based on expected usage and future development or it could be a low priority, typically due to politicization of engineering and planning. Those are distinct judgments, and I’m not even sure they are strongly correlated.

The right project, done wrong

I’ve mentioned in a few past posts as well as videos that New York is for the most part building the right projects right now. Based on any reasonable cost per rider calculation, the highest priorities in the region excluding mainline rail are Second Avenue Subway phases 1 and 2, an extension of phase 2 under 125th Street, subway extensions under Nostrand and Utica Avenues, an orbital line following the Bay Ridge Branch toward Jackson Heights and Yankee Stadium, and a subway extension to LaGuardia Airport. Phase 1 has been built, and the current priorities are phase 2 and the orbital line under the moniker IBX, the latter giving the governor’s personal imprimatur to this important project. The only lower-priority extension built ahead of these is the 7 extension to Hudson Yards, which is a small fraction of the good projects by total cost.

In mainline rail, on the New Jersey side, the biggest priority is the Gateway tunnel and this is indeed what the state and Port Authority are most invested in. Even on the New York side, mainline rail is invested in in roughly the right priority order, especially if one fixes the assumption of bad present-day operations; the only real problem is that due to politics from the late 1990s, the MTA overinvested in New York-side mainline rail (that is, East Side Access) to secure suburban Republican support for Second Avenue Subway phase 1.

The problem for New York is that every single project it touches is executed in almost the worst way possible. It can’t build, and to an extent it doesn’t even want to build. The $50 billion in New York-side capital investment every five years are a large multiple of what peer cities spend, and what this buys is a few kilometers of subway every decade, escalating maintenance costs, and a vague promise to not quite finish making the subway accessible in the 2050s. But the little it does build is, for the most part, the right project.

New York is not the only city in this situation. The prioritization in Toronto seems fine to me, including the Downtown Relief Line rebranded as the Ontario Line, electrification and general modernization of commuter rail as part of the RER project, and rail on Eglinton. London, likewise, seems to be building projects in the right priority order, but it lost its ability to build in the 1980s and 90s so that its urban rail growth rate is roughly one new line per monarch and its step-free access program is proceeding at a slower pace than that of any peer except New York (which can’t build anything) and Paris (which can and does but doesn’t believe in accessibility).

Wrong projects

In contrast with the example of New York or Toronto, there are places where the prioritization is completely out of whack. The best example I can give of is Los Angeles. Like New York and other English-speaking cities, Los Angeles can’t build; unlike New York, it clearly wants to build, and has a large expansion program based on two separate sales tax referenda, with lines programmed through the 2060s due to the extreme construction costs. However, the capital prioritization is just wrong, in several ways:

  • The priority list puts low-usage extensions to the suburbs, like the Foothills Extension of the Gold Line and the West Santa Ana Branch, above core lines replacing high-usage buses like South Vermont and connectivity projects like linking Burbank and Pasadena directly.
  • The suburban extensions often use the wrong mode or alignment – Los Angeles loves freeway medians for light rail rights-of-way, is building some lines parallel to or even in the right-of-way of commuter rail in lieu of improving Metrolink, and was starting to run into capacity problems on the shared street-running section of the Expo and Blue Lines before corona even on an otherwise low-intensity system.
  • There is no transit-oriented development plan – the region is likely the NIMBY capital of the United States, and perhaps the developed world, with large swaths of valuable near-center land that’s about to get subway stations that’s still zoned single-family; in the state legislature, YIMBY bills increasing housing production typically get a large majority of the votes of politicians representing the Bay Area and a small minority of those representing the Los Angeles region.
  • Much of the referendum money is not even rail expansion, but road programs, including new freeway lanes.

The upshot is that while New York builds the right projects wrong, Los Angeles builds the wrong projects, besides its issue of very high construction costs.

In reality, most places are on a spectrum, or even evolve from one to the other based on political changes. San Francisco built the almost totally useless Central Subway due to demands by people in Chinatown who don’t even ride public transportation; the line is so short and deep that even ignoring its construction costs, its trip time benefit over the buses it’s replacing is maybe 30 seconds. However, the future projects it wants to build but can’t due to high costs – the Downtown Extension tunnel taking Caltrain from its present near-center terminus to the actual city center and a second BART tube across the Bay with an extension under Geary – are exactly the right priorities, and would have long been built anywhere that could tunnel for $250 million/km and not $1 billion/km.

Boston, likewise, is building the right priorities at the level of what lines are visible on the map, but it has the second of Los Angeles’s four problems in droves. The Green Line Extension should have been commuter rail; the commuter rail electrification project should be all-catenary and not the current plan of a combination of catenary and experimental battery technology; the deelectrification of the trolleybuses was just embarrassing. But the actual alignments – the Green Line Extension, the planned Red-Blue Connector, and the Regional Rail project – are the right priorities, at least.

The wrong project, done right

So far I’ve given American examples of poor construction practices. But there are also examples of places that build effectively but have poor prioritization. My own city, Berlin, is the best example I can think of: its construction costs are pretty average – higher than in Southern Europe, lower than anywhere that uses international English-dominant consultants – but its project prioritization is terrible.

The obviously lowest-cost-per-rider extension, that of U8 to Märkisches Viertel (see some references linked here), has been deprioritized due to bad politicking. The Green Party and the heir to the East German communist party, Die Linke, both oppose subway construction on ideological grounds and prefer trams, the Greens because they associate subway construction with making room on the surface for cars and Die Linke for a combination of being used to East German trams and general wrecker politics. In the outgoing coalition, the pro-subway Social Democrats pushed for the lines that were the most important for its own priorities and those happen to be in Spandau and at the airport rather than Märkisches Viertel; thus, the U8 extension was placed behind those.

As with the American examples in the previous two sections, here we must qualify judgment in that it’s rather common for cities to be on a spectrum. Even Berlin has better project prioritization than Los Angeles: for one, it is not as NIMBY, and the U7 airport extension does come with a transit-oriented development plan.

A more typical example is perhaps Paris. Paris’s project prioritization raises some questions, but there is no obviously low-hanging fruit like U8 that remains unbuilt due to East Germany and 1970s New Left dead-enders. The current expansion plans underrate core capacity, by which I mean separating the RER B and D tunnels, currently shared between Gare du Nord and Châtelet-Les Halles; but such a project would be disruptive if highly beneficial, and another core capacity project, namely the expansion of the RER E through the city to La Défense and western suburbs, is proceeding. The outward expansion of the Métro seems to be largely in line with what the most important priorities are; Grand Paris Express is a mix of good lines, that is Métro Lines 14, 15, and 16, and bad that is Line 17 to the airport and Line 18 linking two rich suburbs with little density in-between.

Moreover, the Paris suburbs, where practically all expansion is done, are fairly YIMBY. Francilien housing production in the late 2010s was 80,000-90,000 a year (in 2019 it was 82,000, or 6.7/1,000 people), with virtually no construction in the city proper – and moreover, the housing built in the suburbs tends to be infill replacing disused industrial land, or else it’s on top of planned Grand Paris Express or RER stations.

Why?

The poor project prioritization in the cities I’ve given the most attention to – Los Angeles but also Berlin and San Francisco and glimpses of Paris and New York – is entirely about politics. As the worst city of the bunch, Los Angeles has illuminating features that we can use to judge the others.

In Southern California, the most significant misfeature is the statewide requirement that all tax increases be approved in a referendum by a two-thirds majority. In San Francisco, the electorate is so left-wing that this hurdle is not hard to clear, and agencies can plan as always. In Los Angeles and San Diego, it is not, and to secure enough votes, agencies have to essentially bribe clientelistic actors with specific lines on a map that those actors will never use but still take credit for. This leads to all of the following misfeatures:

  • Ballot propositions that include not just expansion of the rail network but also subsidies to reduced fares for people with local New Left politics who identify politically against state planning, road expansion money for local notables who don’t mind rail expansion but think it’s too political to prioritize rail over cars, and long-term maintenance for unambitious bureaucrats who love spending that isn’t expected to produce concrete results.
  • An expansion program that gives each subregion its own line – in Los Angeles, this is the Orange Line BRT for the Valley, the Gold Line for San Gabriel Valley, and so on; the core is a subregion in its own right and can get a project too, like the Regional Connector subway, but it can’t be expected to get too many projects, and interregional connections are less important since the regions they serve already have their lines.
  • The planning is haphazard and avoids paradigmatic changes like modernizing the commuter rail system – Los Angeles has some advocates pushing for electrification, like Paul Dyson, and long-term plans to actually do it, but those plans are far behind what Caltrain electrification in the Bay Area (a perfect example of the right project done wrong) and what technical advocates are doing in Philadelphia and Boston.

In effect, a constitutional change intended to prevent California from wasting taxpayer money has had the opposite effect: the two-thirds majority requirement for tax hikes ensures that in Southern California, every petty actor is a veto point and therefore can get extra money. The New Left may comprise 1970s dead-enders trying and failing to reconcile their NIMBYism with the challenges of the 21st century, but it’s the New Right that destroyed the ability of the state to build anything.

With this in mind, we can look at the deviations in Berlin, San Francisco, and New York through the same lens. Berlin lacks any kind of New Right veto point system for investment; a majority in the Abgeordnetenhaus is sufficient, and its typical party of government, SPD, has decently developmental and YIMBY views, hobbled just now by an atypically bad leader and federal headwinds. However, the coalitions it’s in require it to provide sops to either NIMBYs (that is, the Greens) or drivers (that is, CDU). The outgoing all-left coalition deprioritized the U-Bahn to build trams, while the incoming CDU-SPD coalition wants U-Bahns but with park-and-rides and cessation of road diet programs. The difference is that the system in Los Angeles requires agencies to offer sops to both groups at once in addition to others.

One of the other actors, not present in Berlin beyond their influence on CDU, is the local notables. These are typically business owners, who as a constituency drive and overestimate the share of their customers who drive. In the United States (but not France or Germany) they may also trade on an ethnically marked identity, which is usually local and pro-car again since the (say) Chinese-Californians who take the train are usually Downtown San Francisco workers who socialize outside the neighborhood. The Central Subway was specifically a demand of such interests from Chinatown, who had opposed the removal of the Embarcadero Freeway and demanded something that would look like a replacement, and in a way is, in the sense that neither the freeway nor the Central Subway is of any use for urban travel. Here, the difference with drivers as an interest is that drivers want more car infrastructure that feels to them like it makes their trips more convenient, whereas local notables want to be seen extracting money from the city or state to prove to their clients that they are powerful; for the notables, the cost is itself the benefit.

Excessive empowerment of local notables – that is, any empowerment – leads to both poor project prioritization and high costs. I don’t think there’s a high correlation between the two judgments, but it’s telling that the best example I know of of bad prioritization is high-cost Los Angeles, while medium-cost Berlin is much less bad. The other political mechanisms seem independent of costs: a system in which the state and developmental interests are hobbled by NIMBYism or by actors who want to annoy Greta Thunberg will underbuild or build the wrong things, but NIMBYs rarely manage to meaningfully raise costs and were entirely absent from any of the mechanisms we’ve found for high costs in our New York and Boston reports.

President Navalny Announces Metro Expansion to Accommodate Migrants From Viipuri and Královec

President Alexei Navalny (RB) has been beset by political instability since taking office three months ago, in the wake of the collapse of the Russian Armed Forces in face of a Ukrainian offensive with two divisions’ worth of Leopard 2s and 10 squadrons’ worth of F-16s. The loss of Královec in particular has generated a movement of nearly a million refugees, most of them headed to Moscow. Simultaneously, an estimated 400,000 Russians who left last year are returning, most of them, too, headed to Moscow or Saint Petersburg.

Navalny promises to react to this crisis through construction of housing and infrastructure, in the capital as well as in secondary cities. He says that the reduction in military spending and removal of sources of corruption will be enough to pay for this program, and says that while the loss of what he calls Vyborg and Kaliningrad is regrettable, at least no reparation payments were imposed. Analysts from the United States suggest that this early focus on material goods and growth is intended to increase popular support for the new regime and suggest continuity with the apolitical aspects of the prewar Russian state.

The focus on migrants from Viipuri and the larger Královec comes as interest groups speaking for those migrants are the most strident revanchists, calling for rearmament and saying that protesters and urban interests stabbed the Russian Armed Forces in the back. Russia Budushchego is rooted in Moscow and Saint Petersburg more than in the provinces, and Navalny is, according to analysts from Kazan and Chelyabinsk, trying to fold such migrants into big city society, hoping that they would integrate into what he views as the new Russia.

The proposed spending levels for the rail construction program bear out those analysts. The program includes 200 km of new rail in and around Moscow and another 90 in Saint Petersburg. All other cities combined are to get about 250 km, including restarting metro construction in Omsk, Krasnoyarsk, and Chelyabinsk; expanding the existing systems of Kazan, Nizhny Novgorod, Novosibirsk, Samara, and Yekaterinburg; and building new systems in Volgograd, Krasnodar, Ufa, Perm, Voronezh, and Rostov-on-Don.

Nonetheless, this program represents a quadrupling of the length of metro in Russia outside Moscow and Saint Petersburg; Navalny himself has personally visited Rostov-on-Don, the third largest destination for Russian refugees, mostly people expelled from Crimea and the Donbas for collaboration, and promised that democratic Russia would take care of all Russians, and repeated the line about quadrupling metro length outside the two main cities.

Navalny also pledged that housing construction would accelerate from a prewar average of 80 million square meters a year to 150 million. Here the new administration is open about focusing construction in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, where demand is the strongest and rents are the highest; in Moscow, the government promises that incentives to private builders would create high-quality, high-density housing on top of existing and planned metro stations.

Generational Investment and Politicized Delay

Investments that are pitched as once in a generation tend not to work very well. They’re delayed, they’re expensive in both absolute and relative terms, they’re compromised by competing demands that are rarely about good service. Looking at both the ongoing situation in the United States and Germany, I’m seeing parallels; one of my motivations for writing this post is New York-area problems, but the other is response by German tram advocates to my post about the Berlin U-Bahn expansion plan. In short: there’s nothing inherently easier about lower-intensity infrastructure like trams or legacy rail than about high-intensity alternatives like subways and high-speed rail.

There is an artifact of politicization there. At the end of the day, every generational investment is vulnerable to political micromanagement. If you build an U-Bahn, the streetcars will not be politicized; if you don’t and instead make the streetcars your urban rail centerpiece, they will be politicized instead. If your city has a problem with construction costs or with timelines, it’s likely political and therefore will attach to whatever mode you choose; downgrading to a lower-intensity mode will just make that mode as expensive as the higher-intensity mode used to be.

The issue of political micromanagement

There are countries that are capable of building infrastructure efficiently. All of them do so in a remarkable depoliticized manner, even extremely polarized Turkey, where AKP’s attempt to choke metro funding to Istanbul after the opposition won the election under Ekrem İmamoğlu failed and İmamoğlu got funding from the European Investment Bank. The engineers and planners choose the alignments and construction methods; the politicians say yes or no and have little or ideally no further input.

The upshot is that this is the most politically sustainable in an environment of regular ongoing construction. Setting up this system in a country that can’t build is hard and requires a lot of public breaking of implicit promises to political actors who think they matter but don’t. But if this preexists, then this is sustained through regular construction in which politicians show up twice, once for the groundbreaking and once for the opening, and never again. The civil service runs technical matters under the aegis of technical experts.

As soon as major politicians make more decisions than the most general ones, things go awry. This is for two reasons.

The first reason is that the politicians want to show that they are important and therefore like overruling or changing previous plans just because. Such changes are by themselves neutral: usually the changes are relative to a plan that was itself developed with political input (for example, changes in the alignment of Grand Paris Express in the early 2010s). However, they introduce delays, which raise costs, permit more cruft to accumulate, and lead to projects that solve yesterday’s problems.

The second reason is that petty actors are likelier to find audience with politicians, who don’t want to annoy them, than with civil servants. Those petty actors can include NIMBYs who demand more expensive methods to avoid real or perceived negative local impact, but also their opposite number, local groups that want a diversion of service to reach them or bigger construction to act as a signature piece. In the United States, there is a lot of preemptive surrender to such groups (“good neighbor policy”). Other groups just send input for its own sake. Others hog other people’s money (OPM), such as when the New York Parks Department and got $15 million to permit staging subway construction in a playground, or when an American municipal department insists on building more than the federal and state fire code requires. This happens regardless of the project, but politicians want to please and will not generally back the civil service against the petty actors, and if the politicians are involved, it’s also a signal that there’s plenty of OPM.

Of note, neither of these mechanisms depends on the technical details of the project. All that matters is that the project is perceived as big enough to merit political attention.

Also of note, local environmental organizations generally cause more environmental problems than they solve through their praxis of making it harder to govern. In Brussels, the construction of Métro Line 3 is delayed due to complaints by local NIMBYs, signal-boosted by Ecolo/Groen, that staging construction in a park hurts the neighborhood; this is then held up by the same green NIMBYs as evidence that subways take too long to build and decarbonization has to be done by 2030. The praxis of such organizations is deliberately adversarial and disruptive – whatever the city decides is its primary form of transport investment will be opposed.

Downgrades don’t solve the problem

There are German anti-subway NIMBYs who think that trams are literally as good as subways; one person on Reddit reacting to my post said that the Berlin average speeds I posted (streetcars 17.6 km/h, U-Bahn 30.5 km/h), sourced to BVG, are just an opinion. People like that are obviously risible. The more common anti-U-Bahn take recognizes that metro trains provide better service than trams, but questions whether it’s worth the higher cost. This is in places reasonable: cities don’t literally build a subway on every street, and there’s a growing system of using peripheral trams to feed metro trunks.

However, this analysis is only true at the relative level. If a city that builds subways also builds trams, the trams will look easier, precisely because they’re beneath the notice of politicians, who care about the highest-end projects. As soon as the city decides to forgo the subway and focus only on trams, the problem of political micromanagement instead attaches itself to the tram system.

This is also true of downgrades in quantity and not quality. A large metro expansion project, like Grand Paris Express or the Istanbul Metro investment program, is a flashy project that attracts political attention and sometimes includes weak lines, such as Métro Lines 17 and 18 in Paris. If there’s political controversy over the project, it will likely center the weakest lines, as these are the easiest to rally against, while often the critics will acknowledge that the strongest lines should still be built. The downgrade in quantity occurs when, in anticipation of future controversy over the program, it is decided to only build a small program comprising the strongest lines or even just a single line. The strongest line is genuinely strong, but if the problem comes from politicization, then this strong line will have many interests demanding tie-ins and OPM and often this line will then be more marginal just from the extra costs.

This is not hypothetical: this exact problem has happened in the United States in the last 45 years. Subway construction costs exploded in the 1970s: the Washington Metro’s per-km tunneling costs were in today’s money on the order of $300 million, continuing at this level through the 1990s (source; old costs are on PDF-p. 4 and 1990s costs are taken from segment 3 on PDF-p. 11). This was seen as too expensive for most cities, so they instead built light rail.

The early light rail program in the United States looked successful; its Canadian equivalent, of the same provenance, actually was successful. One of the planners involved, R. W. Rynerson, occasionally comments here, and points out that it was developed by American veterans who had been stationed in Germany and were intentionally adapting the German Stadtbahn concept to the North American context. The cities involved in this were all Western, because this system was ideal for cities that did not have preexisting urban rail and Western cities were newer; early examples include Edmonton, San Diego, Calgary, Portland, Denver, and Sacramento, with Los Angeles building a mix of light rail and subway and Seattle building a different mix.

This bought those cities maybe 15 years of reprieve. Subsequently, costs exploded. Once light rail was not just a simple way to plan future growth, under the aegis of trusted engineers, but rather a political program, the same politicization that made New York incapable of building beyond its Depression-era plan (that is, the IND) and Washington and San Francisco incapable of building beyond their Great Society-era plans (that is, the initial Metro and BART networks) now made those newer cities incapable of building. Portland opened the at-grade Orange Line of its light rail system in 2015 for $160 million/km in 2022 dollars. Minneapolis is taking forever to build its Southwest light rail line, with plenty of politicization of where and how to go. Boston built the Green Line Extension for $370 million/km in 2022 dollars, a higher real cost than that of tunnels in densely built-up parts of Washington in the 1990s – and it had severe politicization problems at all levels, even eclipsing the problem of insufficient project management capacity. Canada has had the same problem: Calgary’s light rail-centric investment was extraordinarily cheap in the late 20th century, but starting with the West LRT, costs have exploded so much that the city lost its ability to build and its modal split is stagnating around 16%.

Of note, American environmental and local-left organizations have not made light rail expansion easy. The first iteration of the Boston Green Line Expansion plan included $100 million, maybe $130 million in today’s money, for a short bike path, based on the demands of Somerville. In Los Angeles, left-NIMBYs oppose rail construction and have complained about transit-oriented gentrification. American left-NIMBYs have grown enamored of the idea of transit-oriented gentrification that they make demands of any city that builds light rail that it should pair it with spending on affordable housing and oppose any program that doesn’t include such additional funds, for example in Nashville in alliance with the anti-spending right. Any German readers who have any notions that such advocacy couldn’t happen here are invited to see the rhetoric that Green Party officials deploy against Tempelhofer Feld redevelopment.

If you can build, then build

The construction costs report we put out at the Transit Costs Project are pitched to an American audience, or very occasionally a Canadian or possibly British one, those countries sharing the American problem of poor project delivery and high soft costs. However, there are a lot of conclusions that can be drawn for the case of a medium-cost country that manifestly can build, like France or Germany. Such a country must look carefully at what goes on in the United States and to an extent the United Kingdom, as an example to avoid.

In particular, under no circumstances should cities downgrade, shrink, or slow down construction as a means of dealing with high project costs. The political problems are going to happen to the primary program no matter whether it is pitched as a metro- or tram-centric system.

Next to politics, the second most important thing to avoid is problems with project delivery. Here, I’m happy to report that Germany doesn’t seem to have such problems, except perhaps on the Munich S-Bahn, which has an even bigger political problem (namely, it’s a generational project for CSU politicians and was not properly overseen when CSU also controlled the federal transport ministry). Tellingly, other than the Munich S-Bahn, I’m not seeing substantial cost increases in actual (not projected) costs from the 1970s to the present in Germany. If an expansion program is larger than the city has recently had, it should staff up the civil service, hiring in-house to ensure the civil service retains lessons learned, and avoiding relying on private consultants or British-style Special Purpose Delivery Vehicles (SPDVs).

And if you can build, you should. Germany is a growing country with demand for further growth, especially in and next to its largest cities, such as Berlin. It should expand its U- and S-Bahn networks, using trams as a subsidiary feeder; that the trams look easier doesn’t make them so, not when they are turned into the centerpiece of the urban rail program – the same petty actors who induce delays to whatever the biggest project in town is do it no matter what the biggest project is.

New York’s MTA Hates Transparency

The New York Post just published its piece, by Nolan Hicks, doing some construction cost comparisons. Nolan spoke to me multiple times on the subject of finding proper comparisons to New York’s subway station construction; he settled on the single most difficult Roman station, at the Colosseum, as well as a more prosaic station at Grand Paris Express and one on the Battersea extension in London. The goal was to look at the issue of New York’s overbuilt stations, with their full-length mezzanines and excessive back office space; New York’s stations turn out to be three to four times too expensive in his analysis.

So far, so good. But then there’s the official response to the story, which tells me that MTA head Janno Lieber is bad at his job – presuming that he views his job as about delivering good service, rather than stonewalling and kissing ass.

The Post quotes Lieber as saying, “you have to be careful with that subculture” and “those people get a lot of their cost information from the internet.” This is not too different from what he said when asked about our report by Jose Martinez: he got aggressive, said that we “group sourced” our data, and disclaimed responsibility for things that happened long ago, in the 2000s (Lieber at the time worked on the new World Trade Center).

People on Twitter are roasting Lieber about the phrases “that subculture” and “those people,” but I mind those appellations a lot less than what they are about. Lieber is in effect complaining that we use public sources for costs, which we access via the Internet, the same way we talk to other people in 2023. Using the Internet, for example, I can poke around for Swedish construction contracts, which are transparent with published lists of bidders and the winning bid, or I can look for historic German construction costs as reported in official channels and reputable media, and Marco can look for the same in Italy including publicly itemized costs, and Elif can look for the same in Turkey. What Lieber means when he says “information from the Internet” is really “articles in trade media and newspapers of record and detailed government reports, calibrated with some in-depth case studies to ensure we didn’t miss anything important.”

It jars him, perhaps because he’s used to secrecy. The idea that a report about the cost overruns of Grand Paris Express would just be out there, while the project was still going on, available to the public to review, may confuse Americans who are used to their country’s much lower level of transparency. In the US, everything requires affirmatively filing a freedom of information request that agencies can and often will deny on flimsy grounds. In Sweden, everything is online and I’ve been able to learn exactly how things work there from talking to not many people thanks to the wealth of public information about procurement strategy and individual contracts. The same is true of the issue of back office space and overbuilt station boxes – the MTA has not released blueprints, whereas in Sweden they’re available to the public in 3D.

Perhaps this is why Lieber talks to reporters with aggression and derision that fit would-be autocrats trying to put democratic media in its place. The idea that people would put all this information out there, voluntarily, seems weird to both, in the same way that a politician in an autocracy might find it jarring that politicians in democracies are subject to free media scrutiny.

This culture of secrecy cascades to itemized contracts. In our work, we’ve found that low-construction cost countries itemize their most complex rail infrastructure contracts, and the items are public. In the United States, contracts are fixed-price, and when agencies have itemized estimates as private benchmarks, they keep them from the public as a trade secret. MTA Construction and Development head Jamie Torres-Springer defended this system in November, saying that if the MTA revealed the numbers, contractors might use them as a floor.

Torres-Springer clearly stated a doctrine of the institutional culture that he and Lieber know. We can rate, overall, whether this culture is worth retaining, through seeing whether New York can build. It, of course, cannot. Lieber takes credit for delivering some projects for less than the budgeted amount, but the budget was inflated with large contingency figures; when someone promises to build something for $70 million and delivers it for $65 million, you don’t give credit for going under budget when other systems deliver it for $12 million. (These are all rough costs of making a subway station that is not a transfer wheelchair-accessible using three elevators in New York and some comparison cases respectively.)

Meanwhile, other systems, outside the high-cost Anglosphere (update 3-28: here is Ontario engaging in the same repulsive behavior toward Global News on the costs of the Ontario Line), can deliver. Germany doesn’t want to build much infrastructure unfortunately, but when it wants, it gets it done at reasonable if not low costs – and those costs are barely higher now in real terms than they were in the 1970s, having inched from maybe 150 million euros per km of subway to 200. Paris is building 200 km of mostly underground driverless metro, for about the same cost as one five-year MTA capital plan. Istanbul builds many metro lines all at once and may be the world’s top city in total route-length built this decade if Chinese investment slows down – Turkey is not a rich country but it has figured out how to build cheaply so that it can afford it. Seoul is expanding so rapidly, using so many different networks, that I can’t even track how much it builds. Italy not only can keep building infrastructure despite not having much money, but also managed to cut its real costs by adopting transparency as a core principle in the 1990s; contra Torres-Springer, contractors use published itemized costs as an anchor and not a floor.

But New York is the city that can’t, in the state that can’t. It treats a three-station subway expansion as a generational project. It clings to its way of doing things in face of obvious evidence that this way does not work; when it wants to do something different, it privatizes the state to consultants and huge design-build contractors, which has consistently raised costs wherever it is implemented. It’s not even aware of how success looks. Its leadership is rather like a Russian general who, seeing the army throw countless soldiers to take individual blocks of Bakhmut, population 70,000, insists things are going great and there is no need for anyone to learn anything about NATO standards, before ordering another wave of assault.

The press is ahead of the curve on this, since it does not need to kiss ass. I’ve been a source for New York media and for US-wide wonk networks for years, and the great majority of journalists I’ve spoken with, veterans and newcomers, generalists and specialists, have been curious and intelligent and could tell me important things I didn’t know before, including, in particular, reporters on this beat at all major city papers, such as Nolan. I sadly cannot say the same of MTA management: the career civil servants are good below the managerial level, the managers are hit-or-miss, and the political appointees are more miss than hit. The way the latter try to pull rank on good journalists like Martinez and Nolan is supercilious, authoritarian, and just plain nasty.

And if New York wants to avoid looking as ridiculous as that Russian general, it had better learn how successful cities do it, and invite in people who are intimately familiar with these cities to take in-house leadership jobs to implement the required reforms. This means, among other things, fostering a culture of openness and transparency. No more putdowns of journalists who ask hard questions, no more hiding behind NDAs and trade secrets, no more black boxes with no itemization beyond “this contract is $1 billion.” It’s easier than for Russia – the American field-grade officers who could do every Russian general’s job better don’t at all have Russia’s interests at heart, whereas the Continental European and East Asian transit managers who New York can bring it can be hired to have the MTA’s interests at heart, just as Andy Byford was. Learn from the best and face the reality that right now New York is the worst.