The Modernizing Rail (Un)Conference happened last Sunday. We’re still gathering all the materials, but here are video uploads, including the keynote by Michael Schabas.

We will also have slides as given by presenters who used them. But for now, here are the slides used by the keynote. You may notice that the recording does not begin on the first slide; we missed Schabas’s introduction and some remarks on his background, detailing his 40 years of experience designing public transit systems in a number of countries, mainly Britain and Canada but also elsewhere in the developed world.

My session on construction costs was slide-free (and was not recorded), since I mostly just showed people around our under-construction cost dataset and answered a lot of questions. Some of those questions were annoying, by which I mean they questioned my thinking or brought up a point I haven’t considered before. I am not talking too much about it partly because I was mostly (mostly) repeating things I’ve said here, and the full database should be out later this summer, with all the mistakes I’ve made in currency conversion rates and in not updating for cost overruns fixed.

After my breakout, I was uncertain between which of two sessions to attend – one on HSR-legacy rail compatibility by María Álvarez, and one on equity issues in rail planning, by Grecia White and Ben She. I ended up going to the latter, which featured interesting discussions of inclusion of low-income people and minorities, both as riders (that is, serving people who are not middle-class whites better on regional rail) and as workers (that is, diversifying planning and engineering departments).

It went well in that there was no monopolization of discussion by people who have more a comment than a question, or any open racism or sexism; but it was somewhat frustrating in that while there was a lot of productive discussion of racial equality in rail planning, there was very little of gender equality even though we did intend to talk about both; Grecia was specifically interested in discussing these, for example women’s perceptions of public safety. This is in line with conference demographics – the organizing team and the breakout presenters were each one-third people of color, in line with US demographics; but the organizing team had 2/18 active women and the presenters 3/15. TransitMatters is similar in that regard – racial diversity is comparable to that of the Boston region, and the proportion of regulars who are queer is enormous, but there are very few women.

Finally, I hosted a session on how to set up a transport association, a.k.a. Verkehrsverbund. Christof Spieler did the most talking, and German attendees explained a lot about the difference between a transport association and agency amalgamation. But for the most part that session felt like an ersatz conclusion to the entire conference; it technically lasted an hour, but once the hour had lapsed, people from other sessions came to the room and the conversation continued naturally, talking a bit about different transit planning issues in Germany and a bit about applicability to rail reform in the Northeastern US.