High Costs are not About Precarity
I’ve seen people who I think highly of argue that high construction costs in the United States are an artifact of precarity. The argument goes that the political support for public transportation there is so flimsy that agencies are forced to buy political support by spending more money than they need. This may include giving in to NIMBY pressure to use costlier but less impactful (or apparently less impactful) techniques, to spread money around with other government agencies and avoid fighting back, to build extravagant and fancier-looking but less standardized stations, and so on. The solution, per this theory, is to politically support public transportation construction more so that transit agencies will have more backing.
This argument also happens to be completely false, and the solution suggested is counterproductive. In fact, the worst cost blowouts are for the politically most certain projects; Second Avenue Subway enjoyed unanimous support in New York politics.
Cost-effectiveness under precarity
Three projects relevant to our work at the Transit Costs Project have been done exceptionally cost-effectively in an environment of political uncertainty: the T-bana, the LGV Sud-Est, and Bahn 2000.
T-bana
The original construction of the T-bana was done at exceptionally low cost. We go over this in the Sweden report to some extent, but, in short, between the 1950s and 70s, the total cost of the system’s construction was 5 billion kronor in 1975 prices, which built around 100 km, of which 57% are underground. In PPP 2022 dollars, this is $3.6 billion, or $35 million/km, not entirely but mostly underground. This was low for the time: for example, in London, the Victoria line was $122 million/km and the Jubilee line was $172 million/km (source, p. 78), and Italian costs in the 1960s and 70s were similar, averaging $129 million/km before 1970.
The era of Social Democrat dominance in Swedish politics on hindsight looks like one of consensus in favor of big public projects. But the T-bana itself was controversial. When the decision was made to build it in the 1940s, Stockholm County had about 1 million people; at the time, metros were present in much larger cities, like New York, London, Paris, Berlin, and Tokyo, and it was uncertain that a city the size of Stockholm would need such a system. Its closest analog, Copenhagen, did not build such a system until the 1990s, when it was a metro region of 2 million. It was uncertain that Stockholm should need rapid transit, and there were arguments for and against it in the city. Nor was there any transit-first policy in postwar Sweden: urban planning was the same modernist combination of urban renewal, automobile scale, and tower-in-a-park housing, and outside Stockholm County, the Million Program projects were thoroughly car-oriented.
Construction costs in Sweden are a lot higher now than they were in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. Nya Tunnelbanan is $230 million/km, compared with a post-1990s Italian average of $220 million; British costs have exploded in tandem, so that now the Underground extensions clock at $600 million/km. Our best explanation is that the UK adopted what we call the globalized system of procurement, privatizing planning functions to consultants and privatizing risk to contractors, which creates more conflict; the UK also has an unusually high soft cost factor. From American data (and not just New York) and some British data, I believe that the roughly 2.5 cost premium of the UK over Italy is entirely reducible to such soft costs, procurement conflict, risk compensation, and excessive contingency. And yet, Sweden itself, with some elements of the same globalized system, maintains a roughly Italian cost level, albeit trending the wrong way.
And today, too, the politics of rail expansion in Sweden are uncertain. There was controversy over both Citybanan and Nya Tunnelbanan, neither of which passed a cost-benefit analysis (for reasons that I believe impugn the cost-benefit analysis more than those projects); it was uncertain that either would be funded. Controversy remained over plans to build high-speed rail connecting Stockholm with Gothenburg and Malmö, and the newly-elected right-wing government just canceled them in order to prioritize investment in roads. Swedish rail projects today remain precarious, and have to justify themselves on cost and efficiency grounds.
LGV Sud-Est
Like nearly all other rich countries, France was hit hard by the 1973 oil crisis; economic growth there and in the US, Japan, and most of the rest of Western Europe would never be as high as it was between the end of WW2 and the 1970s (“Trente Glorieuses“). On hindsight, France’s response to the crisis models can-go governance, with an energy saving ad declaring “in France we don’t have oil, but we have ideas.” The French state built nuclear power plants with gusto, peaking around 90% of national electricity use – and even today’s reduced share, around 70%, is by a large margin the highest in the world. At the same time, it built a high-speed rail network, connecting Paris with most other provincial cities at some of the highest average speeds outside China between major cities, reaching about 230 km/h between Paris and Marseille and 245 km/h between Paris and Bordeaux; usage per capita is one of the highest in Europe and, measured in passenger-km, not too bad by East Asian standards.
But in fact, the first LGV, the LGV Sud-Est, was deeply controversial. At the time, the only high-speed rail network in operation was the Shinkansen, and while France learned more from Japan than any other European country (for example, the RER was influenced by Tokyo rail operations), the circumstances for intercity were completely different. SNCF had benefited from having done many of its own experiments with high-speed technology, but the business case was murky. SNCF had to innovate in running an open system, with extensive through-running to cities off the line, which Japan would only introduce in the 1990s with the Mini-Shinkansen.
Within the French state, the project was controversial. Anthony Perl’s New Departures details how there were people within the government who wanted to cancel it entirely as it was unaffordable. At the end, the French state didn’t finance the line, and required SNCF to find private loans on the international market, though it did guarantee those loans. It also delayed the line’s opening: instead of opening the entire line from Paris to Lyon in one go, it opened two-thirds of it on the Lyon side in 1981 and the last third into Paris in 1983, requiring trains to run on the classical line at low speed between Paris and Saint-Florentin for two years; in that era, phased opening was uncommon, and lines generally opened to the end at once, such as between Tokyo and Shin-Osaka.
Construction was extraordinarily inexpensive. In PPP 2022 dollars, it cost $8.4 million/km. This is, by a margin, the lowest-cost high-speed rail line ever built that I know about. The Tokaido Shinkansen cost 380 billion yen, or in PPP 2022 dollars $40 million/km, representing a factor of two cost overrun that forced JNR’s head to resign. Spain has unusually low construction costs, and even there, Madrid-Seville was $15.7 million/km. SNCF innovated in every way possible to save money. Realizing that high-speed trains could climb steeper grades, it built the LGV Sud-Est with a ruling grade of 3.5%, which has since become a norm in and around Europe, compared with the Shinkansen’s 1.5-2%; the line has no tunnels, unlike the classical Paris-Lyon line. It built the line on the ground rather than on viaducts, and balanced cut and fill locally so that material cut to grade the line could be used for nearby fill. Thanks to the line’s low costs and high ridership, the financial return on investment for SNCF has been 15%, and social return on investment has been 30% (source, pp. 11-12).
This cost-effectiveness would never recur. The line’s success ensured that LGV construction would enjoy total political backing. The core features of LGV construction are still there – earthworks rather than viaducts, 3.5% grades, limited tunneling, overcompensation of landowners by about 30% with land swap deals to defuse the possibility of farmer riots. But the next few lines cost about $20 million/km or slightly less, and this cost has since crept up to about $30 million/km or even more. This remains low by international standards (but not by Spanish ones), but the trend is negative.
SNCF is coasting on its success from a generation ago, secure that funding for LGVs and state support in political contention is forthcoming, and the routing decisions have grown worse. In response to NIMBYism in Provence, the French state assented to a tunnel-heavy route, including a conversion of Marseille from an at-grade terminal to an underground through-station, akin to Stuttgart 21, which has not been done before in France, and the resulting high costs have led to delays on the project. Operations have grown ever more airline-style, experimenting with low-cost airline imitation to the point of reducing fare receipts without any increase in ridership. One of the French consultants we’ve spoken with said that their company’s third-party design costs are 7-8% of the hard costs, which figure is similar to what we’ve seen in Italy and to the in-house rate in Spain – but the same consultant told us that there is so much bloat at SNCF that when it designs its own projects, the costs are not 7% but 25%, a figure in line with American rates.
Bahn 2000
Switzerland has Europe’s strongest passenger rail network by all measures: highest traffic measured by passenger-km per capita, highest modal split for passenger-km, highest traffic density. Its success is well-known in surrounding countries, which are gradually either imitate its methods or, in the case of Germany, pretending to do so. It has achieved its success through continuous improvement over the generations, but the most notable element of this system was implemented in the 1990s as part of the Bahn 2000 project.
The current system is based on a national-scale clockface system (“Takt”) with trains repeating hourly, with the strongest links, like the Zurich-Bern-Basel triangle, running every half hour. Connections are timed in those three cities and several others, called knots, so that trains enter each station a few minutes before the connection time (usually the hour) and depart a few minutes after, permitting passengers to get between most pairs of Swiss cities with short transfers. Reliability is high, thanks to targeted investments designed to ensure that trains could make those connections in practice and not just in theory. Further planning centers adding more knots and expanding this system to the periphery of Switzerland.
Switzerland is famous for its consensus governance system – its plural executive is drawn from the four largest parties in proportion to their votes, with no coalition vs. opposition politics. But the process that led to the decision to adopt Bahn 2000 was not at all one of unanimity. There had been plans to build high-speed rail, as there were nearly everywhere else in Western Europe. But they were criticized for their high costs, and there was extensive center-right pressure to cut the budget. Bahn 2000 was thus conceived in an environment of austerity. Many of its features were explicitly about saving money:
- The knot system is connected with running trains as fast as necessary, not as fast as possible. Investments in speed are pursued only insofar as they permit trains to make their connections; higher speeds are considered gratuitous.
- Bilevel trains are an alternative to lengthening the platforms.
- Timed overtakes and meets are an alternative to more extensive multi-tracking of lines.
- Investment in better timetabling and systems (the electronics side of the electronics-before-concrete slogan) is cheaper than adding tunnels and viaducts.
Swiss megaprojects have to go to referendum, and sometimes the referendums return a no; this happened with the Zurich U-Bahn twice, leading to the construction of the S-Bahn instead. All Swiss planners know in a country this small and this fiscally conservative, any extravagance will lead to rejection. The result is that they’ve instead optimized construction at all levels, and even their unit costs of tunneling are low; thanks to such optimization, Switzerland has been able to build a fairly extensive medium-speed rail system, with more tunneling per capita than Germany (let alone France), and with two S-Bahn trunk tunnels in Zurich, where no German city today has more than one.
The American situation
The worst offenders in the United States are not at all politically precarious. There is practically unanimous consensus in New York about the necessity of Second Avenue Subway. At no point was the project under any threat. There is an ideological right in the city, rooted less in party politics and more in the New York Post and the Manhattan Institute, with a law-and-order agenda and hostility to unions and to large government programs, but at no point did they call for cancellation; the Manhattan Institute’s Nicole Gelinas has proposed pension cuts for workers and rule changes reducing certain benefits, but not canceling Second Avenue Subway.
At intercity scale, the same is true of Northeast Corridor investment. The libertarian and conservative pundits who say passenger rail is a waste of money tend to except the Northeast Corridor, or at least its southern half. When the Republicans won the 2010 midterm election, the new chair of the House of Representatives Transportation Committee, John Mica (R-FL), proposed a bill to seek private concessionaires to run intercity rail on the corridor. He did not propose canceling train service, even though in the wake of the same election, multiple conservative governors canceled intercity rail investments in their state, both high-speed (Florida) and low-speed (Wisconsin, Ohio).
In fact, both programs – New York subway expansion and the Northeast Corridor – are characterized by continuity across partisan shifts, as in more established consensus governance systems. The Northeast Corridor is especially notable for how little role ideological or partisan politics has played so far. New York has micromanagement by politicians – Andrew Cuomo had his pet projects in Penn Station Access and the backward-facing LaGuardia air train, and now Kathy Hochul has hers in the Interborough Express – but Second Avenue Subway was internal, and besides, political micromanagement is a different problem from political precarity.
And neither of these programs has engaged in any cost control. To the contrary, both are run as if money is infinite. The MTA would surrender to NIMBYs (“good neighbor policy”) and to city agencies looking to extract money from it. It built oversize stations. It spent money protecting buildings from excessive settlement that have been subsequently demolished for redevelopment at higher density.
The various agencies involved in the Northeast Corridor, likewise, are profligate, and not for lack of political support. Connecticut is full of NIMBYs; one of the consultants working on the plan a few years ago told me there was informal pressure not to ruffle feathers and not to touch anything in the wealthiest suburbs in the state, those of Fairfield County. In fact, high-speed rail construction would require significant house demolitions in the state’s second wealthiest town, Darien – but Darien is so infamously exclusive (“Darien rhymes with Aryan,” say other suburbanites in the area) that the rest of the region feels little solidarity with it.
NIMBYs aside, there has not been any effort at coordinating the different agencies in the Northeast along anything resembling the Swiss Takt system. This is not about precarity, because this is not a precarious project; this is about total ignorance and incuriosity about best practices, which emanate from a place that doesn’t natively speak English and doesn’t trade in American political references.
The Green Line Extension
Boston’s GLX is a fascinating example of cost blowouts without precarity. The history of the project is that its first iteration was pushed by Governor Deval Patrick (D), with the support of groups that sued the state for its delays in planning the project in the 1990s, as a court-mandated mitigation for the extra car traffic induced by the construction of the Big Dig. Patrick instituted a good neighbor policy, in which everything a community group wanted, it would get. Thus, stations were to become neighborhood signatures, and the project was laden with unrelated investments, called betterments, like a $100 million 3 km bike lane called the Somerville Community Path.
At no point in the eight years Patrick was in power was there a political threat to the project. It was court-mandated, and the extractive local groups that live off of suing the government favored it. The Obama administration was generous with federal stimulus funding, and the designs were rushed in order to use stimulus funding to pay for the project’s design, which would be done by consultants rather than with an expansion of in-house hiring. It’s in this atmosphere of profligacy that the project’s cost exploded to, in today’s money, around $3.5 billion, for 7 km of light rail in existing rights-of-way (albeit ones requiring overpass reconstruction).
The project did fall under political threat, after Charlie Baker (R) won the 2014 election. Baker’s impact on Massachusetts governance is fascinating, in that he unambiguously cut its budget significantly in the short run, but also had both before (as budget director in the 1990s) and during (through his actions as governor) wrecked the state’s long-term ability to execute infrastructure, setting up a machine intended to privatize the state and avoiding any in-house hiring. Nonetheless, the direct impact of precarity on GLX was to reduce scope: the betterments were removed and the stations were changed from too big to too small. The final cost was $2.3 billion, or around $2.8 billion in 2022 dollars, and half of that was sunk cot from the previous iteration.
There was no expectation that the project would be canceled – indeed, it was not. A Republican victory was unexpected in a state this left-wing. Then, as Baker was taking office, past governors from both parties expressed optimism that he would get not just GLX done but also the much more complex North-South Rail Link tunnel. Nor did contractors have their contracts yanked unexpectedly, which would get them to bid higher for risk compensation. Baker cold-shouldered not jut NSRL but also much smaller investments in commuter rail, but at no point was anyone stiffed in the process. No: the Patrick-era project was just poorly managed.
Project selection
As one caveat, I want to point out a place where precarity does lead to poor project cost-effectiveness: the project selection stage, in the context of tax referendums, especially in Southern California. None of this leads to high per-kilometer costs – Los Angeles’s are exactly as bad as in the rest of the United States – but it does lead to poor project selection, as an unintended consequence of anti-tax New Right politics.
The California-specific issue is that raising taxes requires a referendum, with a two-thirds vote. Swiss referendums are by simple majority, or at most double majority – but in practice most referendums that have a popular vote majority, even a small one, also have a double majority when needed, and in the last 15 years I believe the only two times they didn’t had the double majority veto overturning a 1.5% margin and a 9% margin.
California’s requirement of a two-thirds majority was intended to stop wasteful spending and taxation, but has had the opposite effect. In and around San Francisco, the voters are sufficiently left-wing that two-thirds majorities for social policy are not hard to obtain. But in Southern California, they are not; to build public transportation infrastructure, Los Angeles and San Diego County governments cannot rely on ideology, but instead cut deals with local, non-ideological actors through promising them a piece of the package. Los Angeles measures for transit expansion are, by share of money committed, largely not about transit expansion but operations, new buses, or leakage to roads and bridges; then, what does go to transit expansion is divvied by region, with each region getting something, no matter how cost-ineffective, while core improvements are neglected and so are cross-regional connections (since the local extractive actors aren’t going to ride the trains and can’t tell a circumferential project is useful for them).
This is not a US-wide phenomenon. It’s not even California-wide: this problem is absent from the Bay Area, where BART decided against an expansion to Livermore that was unpopular among technically-oriented advocates, and would like to build more core capacity if it could do so for much less than a billion dollars per km. New York does not have it at all (for one, it doesn’t require two-thirds majorities for budgeting).
At intercity scale, this precarity does cause Amtrak to maximize how many states and congressional districts it runs money-losing daily trains in. But wasting money on night trains and on peripheral regions is hardly a US-only problem – Japan National Railways did that until well past privatization, when its successors spun off money-losing branch lines to prefecture-subsidized third sector railways. This is not at all why there is no plan for Northeastern intercity rail that is worth its weight in dirt: Northeastern rail improvements have been amply funded relative to objective need (if not relative to American costs), and solid investments in the core coexist with wastes of money on the periphery of the network in many countries.
The issue of politicization
The precarious, low-cost examples all had to cut costs because of fiscal pressure. However, in all three, the pressure did not include any politicization of engineering questions. Sweden was setting up a civil service modeled on the American Bureau of Public Roads, currently the Federal Highway Administration, which in the middle of the 20th century was a model of depoliticized governance. France and Switzerland have strong civil service bureaucracies – if anything SNCF is too self-contained and needs reorganization, just not if it’s led by the usual French elites or by people from the airline industry.
Importantly, low-cost countries with more clientelism and politicization of the state tend to be more deferential to the expertise of engineers. Greece has a far worse problem of overreliance on political appointees than the United States, let alone the other European democracies; but engineering is somewhat of an exception. Hispanic and Portuguese-speaking cultures put great prestige on engineering, reducing the extent of political micromanagement, even in countries without strong apolitical civil service bureaucracies. Even in Turkey, the politicization of public transportation is entirely at macro level: AKP promises to prioritize investment in areas that vote for it and has denied financing to the Istanbul Metro since the city flipped to the opposition (the city instead borrows money from the European Investment Bank), but below that level there is no micromanagement.
The American examples, in contrast, show much more political micromanagement. This is part of the same package as the privatization of state planning in the globalized system; in the United States often there was never the depoliticization that most of the rest of the developed and middle-income world had, but on top of that, the tendency has been to shut down in-house planning departments or radically shrink them and replace them with consultants. The consultants are then supervised by political appointees with no real qualifications to head capital programs, and the remaining civil servants are browbeaten not to disagree with the political appointees’ proclamations.
Those political appointees rarely measure themselves by any criteria of infrastructure utility. Even in New York they and the managers don’t consistently use the system; in Los Angeles, they use it about as often as the executive director of a well-endowed charity eats at a soup kitchen. To them, the cost is itself a measure of success – and this is true of other agencies, which treat obtaining other people’s money as a mark of achievement and as testament to their power. This behavior then cascades to local advocacy groups, which try to push solutions that maximize outside funding and are at bet indifferent and at worst actively hostile to any attempt at efficiency.
Just giving more support to agencies in their current configuration is not going to help. To the contrary, it only confirms that profligacy gets rewarded. A program of depoliticization of the state is required in tandem with expanding in-house hiring and reversing the globalized system, and the political appointees and the managers and political advocates who are used to dealing with them don’t belong in this program.
Pedestrian Observations 
While LGV Sud Est may have been *party politically* controversial it’s difficult to imagine it being *locally politically* controversial. There’s no places of any size along the route so it’s difficult for local people to object, and given the low population density it’s likely the impact was small as well.
HS2 is clearly very expensive and is definitely over engineered. However it’s difficult to imagine that SNCF or Renfe would have handled the local political issues caused by building a railway through the densely populated “rural” south east any better than HS2 Ltd has. And all that density means there is a lot of *local political* controversy for HS2 even if the parties in Westminster all support the project.
Part of the reason Provence is more expensive is the higher population density of that region compared to elsewhere in France.
It is a preferred place; housing is more expensive than in other places of the province.
Concerning les LGVs, also keep in mind that vineyards are very expensive (and have been so for centuries). That’s why the LGV crosses the Rhône twice north of Avignon (to bypass the vineyards of Chateauneuf-du-Pape…
Farmers, the SNCF in the end bought them out by overpaying them for acquired land and doing land swaps. Perhaps the CHSRA could have learned a lesson from the Sud-Est LGV?
In the U.S. It’s illegal to pay people more than what the property is worth.
Ha-ha! They need to change that law for California High Speed Rail!
It’s not so simple. Overpaying for eminent domain can be a form of corruption and can also allow extortion by landowners.
If you don’t overpay for property you’re not compensating people fairly. You’ve got to cover the inconvenience too – especially for small commercial owners and residential property owners. And you’ve got to pay enough for residential owners to redo their houses how they like. Even when it has no or little market value.
@Eric2: As if there is no way for landowners right now to extort money from public infrastructure projects.
In my opinion, overpaying for eminent domain is more efficient because this gets the landowners (ex-landowners) out of the picture permanently. It will be even more convenient when we get to ancillary projects for the rail line, like local transit or transit-oriented development.
Genuine question: who determines how much the property is worth? A bank? A law court?
Well, it’s already assessed for property tax purposes…
My impression is that property is often under-assessed for tax purposes due to various reasons, which benefits landowners in normal times. But if you want to buy land using the assessed value, good luck.
Yeah, that’s why in France it’s assessed on sales value. The French state has certain problems, but it does occasionally try to be social.
In France it’s structured as two payments: a payment at actual value, and an additional payment of damages due to the inconvenience of having to move. This is kept separate because property taxes are levied based on actual sales prices of similar properties, so if the overcompensation system is fed into the actual sales price then it will raise everyone else’s property taxes and the farmers will be unhappy.
It’s more complicated than just population density, since Rhône-Alpes is almost as dense as PACA. It’s a few things combined:
1. Provence specifically has a lot of romanticism – historic Parisian artists would go there to paint.
2. In the 2010s, LGV construction was unanimously supported by the French political elites; the parties opposed to this program, like EELV, have no power to block it. This is the best possible situation for surplus-extracting actors – they’re trying to extract surplus, not get the project canceled so that there’s no surplus to extract.
3. Provence has mountainous terrain, which limits the ability of the railway to maneuver around NIMBYs.
4. Simultaneously, Marseille-area actors demanded additional scope in the form of the conversion of Saint-Charles to an underground through-station – normally this wouldn’t be done since the operating paradigm through it is not at all the French way of direct nonstops from everywhere to Paris, but because of reason #2 this was approved.
HS2 (and the Toronto RER, and the Northeast Corridor) has the problem of being built too late. The correct time to build it was in the 1970s and 80s, at which time British costs had no premium over the Continent. It was not a sure bet then, as the LGV Sud-Est was not, but on hindsight it would have generated even greater benefits since it would serve larger metropolitan areas than Lyon and Marseille. At this point, part of the issue, besides the hollowing out of British state capacity under and immediately after Thatcher, is that the benefits of a high-speed line between London and Lancashire are so immense that on the one hand surplus-extracting actors like the Home Counties landowners have a field day, and on the other hand there’s no interest in any kind of value engineering save not building the line all the way to Scotland.
In the areas of the Home Counties where HS2 is being built theres the inconvenience of construction and there’s the visual impact. But in terms of benefits they are really pretty limited to non-existent.
You’d clearly drive or use the classic railway to Birmingham. I guess from Aylesbury and further south you get 45 minutes off their journey times by rail to the northern cities. But you’d probably still drive to be honest.
Sure, but the benefits to the UK as a whole are very large; the Home Counties are wealthy because of their access to the London economy, not because the land there is inherently good or the people there are inherently productive.
You could probably build a station at Kenilworth, Calvert, South Aylesbury and North Wycombe and all of them would get half a million rides if not significantly more each year.
Now sure there are project reasons not to do that. But it’s a very different animal fron rural France where you’d realistically struggle to get 50,000 annual riders for most or all of the villages. And the far fewer places that might attract half a million annual riders or more get stations on the TGV because that’s a sensible thing to do.
It gets the intercity trains off the existing tracks so they can have MOAR trains to London.
HS2 is being built between the two lines that go into Marylebone. They won’t see any increase in their number of trains into London.
How do trains from the north get to London now? Teleportation?
The trains to the North West currently go on the West Coast Mainline which goes through Milton Keynes. The trains to the North East go on the East Coast Mainline which goes through Stevenage.
Both of those are in completely different places from Aylesbury and the other places on the HS2 route.
HS2 has a bunch of hard problems because it goes through a densely populated politically powerful part of the world. Fix the problems of HS2 in a sensible politically viable way and then you can tackle a lot of the problems facing rail projects elsewhere.
It doesn’t matter where the new trains are. It matters where the old trains were. If the old trains aren’t there any more, new trains can use the “slots” they vacate.
Yes they can. But none of those new trains will go to the places affected by the construction of HS2.
If you want to mitigate HS2 you have to improve the lines into Marylebone.
I agree that tracks that don’t have intercity trains on them now won’t be affected by moving intercity trains off tracks someplace else. The new tracks have to go somewhere, it’s too bad they don’t go everywhere.
We all come here for this quality content. Nobody’s ever disappointed.
Dear God, please please please bring back kill files, as with usenet news three decades years ago. 🙏
Can’t you write a browser script for that?
Come to Mastodon, there’s not just the usual mute/block tool system but also instance-blocking and defederation.
The Chiltern/Aylesbury lines aren’t the capacity reason for HS2 its that the West Coast mainline and ECML are considered at capacity (n/b this is not actually true). Its being built parallel to the Marylebone lines because there is a spare set of tracks next to the the central line’s Ruslip branch/Chiltern line and that modern building allows a more direct route than the 19th century WCML.
The Chiltern Railway system is pretty much everything that is wrong with 20th century British rail. A railway that goes through the richest parts of England (London-SE-South Midlands), that was so badly run that it was almost closed. It should have been electrified with infill station and real estate development to turn it in to a commuter rail system for London and Birmingham, an inter-city to Stratford-Upon-Avon/Warwick/Oxford and a 2ndary LDN-Brum system. My ideal would be Kintetsu’s “Osaka Line” which goes between Osaka and Nagoya and everything in between, offering a lower cost rival to the Shinkansen plus access to places where the Shinkansen doesn’t go (Nara and Mie).
Chiltern Railways is now the best run railway in the UK after TFL by a country mile. The only railway to have consistent improvement of services in frequency, no. of stations served etc despite having an unelectrified network. If there is a place where a Japanese style railway corporation could work in the UK it would be there.
It’s too bad the new tracks don’t go everywhere. They could have two projects at a time. Maybe even three!
Not when HS2 costs the same as the combined total of all French and German high-speed lines built to date.
Only if you’ve bought into the right wing “we don’t have no munny” meme.
https://data.oecd.org/transport/infrastructure-investment.htm
UK is only outspent by Japan and the PRC at the moment when it comes to rail infrastracture. And we getting very little for it
Make it cost 90% less the people who boast about it being one of the richest countries in the world, out of one side of their mouth, will claim we ain’t go not munny for it, anyway, out of the other side Then show up at a ribbon cutting where they give a speech about waste, fraud, abuse and how we ain’t got no munnnnny. While smiling for the photo op showing how they bring home the bacon. Funded from legislation they voted against.
“On the Fast Track: French Railway Modernization and the Origins of the TGV, 1944-1983” by Jacob Meunier is a great book on the long and controversial development of the TGV Sud-Est from the WW2 “Battle of the Railways” and Post-War modernization to the Aérotrain hover-train and finally the opening of the Sud-Est LGV in the early 1980s. “On the Right Lines?: The Limits of Technological Innovation” by Stephen Potter is another great book covering British Rail’s development of the APT and Intercity 125 HST, in the context of high speed rail developments overseas.
Benjamin, do you consider Meunier’s book ‘worth it’? I have always wanted to read it but it’s a fairly expensive and hard-to-find volume. The price of niche academic books these days and a local library that won’t do inter-library loans…..
I wonder how much of it is survivorship bias.
Projects with a high cost are projects that actually get built. Projects which suffer from much political opposition will not get built and will have a construction cost of nil.
Very little. The survivorship bias tends to mean projects that get built are more cost-effective than ones that don’t, since the main rationale for cancellation is “too expensive” or “not beneficial enough.” (This is why we purge canceled projects from our construction costs database.) The frontier of cost per rider depends on politics, so for example Northern Europe builds lower-cost-per-rider projects because austerity keeps the $30,000/rider cases unfunded. But the impact on cost per km isn’t really there – places with lower costs per km can afford to build more tunnels to a given cost-per-rider frontier.
> A Republican victory was unexpected in a state this left-wing.
Massachusetts regularly elects Republican governors (indeed, 6 of the past 9 gubernatorial elections have gone Republican), despite being solidly left-wing, and Baker’s election wasn’t a shock to anyone who’d been watching the polls since the summer of 2014, by which point he and Coakley were effectively tied.
All of the decisions that blew up the costs were years earlier than that. And remember that when Baker actually took office, the first instinct of both Weld and Dukakis was “he can get NSRL done,” not “he’s going to threaten to pull the plug on GLX” (and as it is, he didn’t actually pull the plug).
About Switzerland, a few comments:
• The platform length for InterCity/InterRegio trains is 400 m, and trains may be that long, and bi-level (or tilting). Platform length for RegioExpress etc. may be 300 m long, and some services using bi-levels are using this length to its fullest. That said, bi-levels were a choice, but not in order to keep the platforms short. In fact, a bi-level train may be 2 to 3 minutes faster than a single level train of the same capacity, because slowdowns are passed faster.
• The “as fast as necessary” did not just apply to “concrete”… in order to avoid too much “concrete” SBB has for one a fleet of tilting trains, as well as they tried to implement other technical solutions. In the TWINDEXX bi-level EMUs for Intercity services, they planned to use an active suspension system which would have kept the floor of the vehicle parallel to the track plane. Bombardier could not provide a satisfactory solution, and this system got dropped. At least, those trains are “spurtstark” (high powered, so that they can accelerate well), and with that, they can hold the same schedules as the tilting trains between Winterthur and St. Gallen (for example).
• Even the “plains” (aka Mitelland) has hills (thanks to the prehistoric glaciers), which means that tunnelling is necessary. As stated, the efficiency is high, and, despite some geological challenges (in one case, they rebuilt the head of the TBM in the middle of the tunnel, to adjust to a different soil), the tunnels are worth it.
• The public transit system has a very wide political support; a certain party often tries to sabotage projects, but they usually pass with a 2:1 ratio.
• The fact that the City and Canton of Zürich did not approve the Tiefbahn and U-Bahn projects, turned out to be a boon. Otherwise, the ZVV would not be such a success.
• One of the trunk tunnels in Zürich is also used by IC/IR services (about half and half S-Bahn), because it avoids the change of direction at Zürich HB.
• FWIW, when a train is delayed too much, it loses its path, and gets the lowest priority, in order to keep the system on time.
• FWIW2: in some places (such as Zürich or Basel), there is a train on standby, with driver on board. This train can replace any defective or seriously delayed train, within less than 5 minutes.
Great points, Max. Further to Alon’s statements about Switzerland:
> “two S-Bahn trunk tunnels in Zurich”
Not really. One of the tunnels is just a general rail tunnel with only 50% S-Bahn traffic, as Max points out. Both tunnels feature only a single underground station (main station). Of the five underground train stations in Zurich, three are at the main station. One of those is a terminus and that’s the only one connecting to another underground stop. This does not compare to actual S-Bahn trunk tunnels which typically pass at least a handful of underground stations before resurfacing.
Everything is political, so “depoliticization” is a bad term.
I think what you mean is some combination of “professionalization” — respecting the actual experts and letting them do the engineering designs appropriately — and a focus on competence and efficiency.
The Swiss seem to like politicians who hire competent people who are expert at their jobs, and then listen to them.
New York City seems to like to elect blowhards who know nothing about anything but are good at lying and stealing.
Frankly, the “sewer socialists” of the 19th century US were a lot more like the Swiss. Sure, they were politicians, they were political, they had agendas — this city needs a sewer system! — but they wanted to hire the most competent people, get them to do the most competent design, and then show off that it came in under budget. Their agenda was “a working sewer system for the whole city”, not “we spent a lot of money on one line of sewer”.
How do we get politicians with the right *attitude*?
(The sewer socialists were early 20c, not 19c.)
And no, not everything is political, is the point. The US road builders notably weren’t until the 1950s, and even in the 1950s it took a while to turn the system into today’s DOTs. There have been systems with a depoliticized civil service, in which the state is seen as distinct from the political government, and politicians don’t micromanage. (Much of populism is a demand to repoliticize the state more than anything, or, in the US at the state level, to keep it politicized.)
I think we’re dealing with two definitions of the word:
(i) ‘Political’ in the sense of partisan contention and power plays by elected officeholders, which Alon is alluding to vis-a-vis the independence and impartiality of a civil service
(ii) ‘Political’ as a general descriptor for the making of decisions and policies within the framework of a state, in which case Nathanael’s assertion that ‘everything is political’ holds, and ‘depoliticized civil service’ is an oxymoron
Yes, I’m using the second definition.
Everything is political, so “depoliticization” is a nonsense word in this context.
What you mean is more like “professionalization”, perhaps.
In Switzerland, they like to elect politicians who will hire actual experts (professionals), have the experts make an actually-good design, and then cost-effectively implement it.
This is also how the “sewer socialist” politicians of the late 19th century behaved. They wanted a sewer system covering the whole city, which worked. Not one gold-plated sewer line to show off how much money they’d spent.
But now we have politicians who seem to lack any real interest in cost-effectiveness, or even in implementation effectiveness. They want a Pyramid they can show off. Not the functioning sewer system.
How do we elect politicians with the right attitude?
Could there be some sort of state level explicit law/regulation passed that would in effect end political micromanagement and normalize/require in-house design?
I don’t know what such a law would look like but in any case I just feel that I couldn’t see any state having the impetus to fix this themselves. Large factions of both the left and the right take advantage of political micromanagement as a means to further their own interests of stopping or changing certain projects, for both railways, roads, and building developments alike
It’s not really left and right – the sort of politicians who do this the most are not especially ideological, like the hacks running New York (city and state).
If the state micromanagement issues are about airport extensions I suspect they are built for two reasons.
Firstly they are popular with political donors as they are rich and fly a lot.
Secondly they are popular with the unions. In the UK in the slough Labour Party Heathrow airport is very popular as it produces lots of fairly well paid blue collar unionised jobs.
Airport extensions aren’t really what I think of when I talk about micromanagement. The yes/no decision on what to build is macro, not micro. Micromanagement is about way pettier things, such as when Cuomo decided the LaGuardia air train must go to Willets Point.
That sounds dumb.
Transportation Committee, John Mica (R-FL), proposed a bill to seek private concessionaires to run intercity rail on the corridor.
They have a designated bipartisan. Who proposes something different. Which they can all say is a bad idea too. Page 23 of the NIMBY/BANANA playbook. I’m sure some of them were mumbling about maglev. Today they mumble about Hyyyyyyyyyyperloooooooooop.
Hillarycare, proposed in the 90s, was going to turn us all into Communists facing death panels. But that backed them into a corner. So they proposed more or less the same plan Richard Nixon had proposed decades earlier. Greatest thing since sliced bread when Republican Governor Mitt Romney implemented it in Massachusetts. Commonly referred to as Romneycare. When it passed nationally it was going to turn us all into Communists facing death panels. Mitt Romney has moved onto the U.S. Senate where he votes to repeal the national version of Romneycare.
Just a small think – in the sentence “The Tokaido Shinkansen cost 380 billion yen, or in PPP 2022 dollars $40 million/km, representing a factor of two cost overrun that forced JNR’s head to resign.” the link gives a 404 error message.
Fixed, thanks.
The crucial distinction here is that there are several forms of precarity: financial, political and administrative.
This post discussed why financial and political precarity don’t matter, but that just highlights how much administrative precarity matters. If the system enables someone to hold a project everyone wants hostage, it will be taken to the cleaners. The anglosphere vetocracy is especially conductive to this sort of ransoming because most anything is subject to litigation.
Who is appointed to lead the project is thus a function of what the primary challenge is. If you need to be good at placating special interests, you appoint someone adept at political maneuvering and avoiding lawsuits. A technical project manager, on the other hand, is better, if it is critical is to get the project in under budget and you don’t need to appease rent-seekers.
In the latter, some political and financial precarity is even beneficial, because projects will be nixed if they go over budget.
–>Those political appointees rarely measure themselves by any criteria of infrastructure utility.<–
I think this is the real problem. If you have political appointees who actually care about the system, you don't face the same problem — and as you say, if they *respect* engineers and actually *respect* infrastructure design for its own sake (and not merely for "monument building"), you don't face the same problem.
I guess you need someone who uses the subway, who cares whether the sewer and water systems work, etc.
There’s almost by definition no such thing as a competent system of political appointees. There can be a competent appointee embedded in a system of professional appointees, like Elisabeth Borne, but this depends on nearly all their peers being professionals, who are judged by professional criteria.
I think Patrick is right that having people who understand the need to placate special interests is important. And that’s pure politics really.
The failure to deal with special interests well is a big part of why HS2 is over budget, or why there is opposition to the Lyon-Turin high speed line.
I think maybe the Greek situation, which you mentioned, is informative: many political appointees but heavy *respect* for engineers.
In some sense, it isn’t about how the appointee is appointed; it’s about how they’re *evaluated*. Respect for professional expertise is the key here.
It’s quite possible to complete fill a “professional” civil service with garbage appointees if there’s no respect for the profession or the professionals, and the priority is… something else. I can think of examples in the US.
Corrupt police departments are obvious examples: they are not judged by professional criteria, despite being “professionals” rather than political appointees.
I can think of examples other than police though. The Minerals Management Service of the Department of the Interior in the US, for decades, didn’t do what it was supposed to and was horrendously mismanaged, despite being formally staffed by civil servants rather than political appointees: because it was not evaluated by professional criteria, but rather evaluated by (to oversimplify) ability to please mining & fossil fuel company CEOs.
If the *agenda* is hostile to professional standards, you can have an entire civil service of “professional appointees” who aren’t professional because that’s not the criteria by which they’re evaluated. I think when transit agencies promote maximum number of “jobs”, that’s an example, though not as toxic an example as corrupt police departments or fossil fuel stooges.
I’m sure the extraction companies had professional standards of some sort. They were paying for mineral rights by crystal ball gazing and consulting Ouija boards.
Any thoughts/comments about the Southwest LRT (14 miles, in Minneapolis)?
Depending on when you begin keeping track, it is 10 years late and $1 billion over budget.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_LRT