Quick Note: Heavy Touch and Control
There’s a distinction between light- and heavy-touch forms of management and control. Light-touch systems try to stay out of the details as far as they can; heavy-touch systems do the opposite. American business culture considers light touch to be superior, and I think this is especially prominent in the public sector, which has some ready-made examples of how the light touch approach works better – for example, in the military, it’s called mission command and is repeatedly shown to work better than more centralized command-and-control. Unfortunately, the same does not work for rail infrastructure. Why?
Heavy touch in infrastructure
In practice, a heavy-touch system in infrastructure construction, for example the way Germany, France, and Southern Europe work, has the following features:
- The state agency maintains control of designs, and even when it outsources something to consultants, it owns the product and may tweak it or assume that future contractors will tweak it. There is little privatization of planning.
- There is reluctance to devolve decisions to local governments; if SNCF or RENFE lets a regional government get involved in a rail plan, it’s because it’s an unprofitable regional line and the national railroad would rather not know it exists, and even DB happily unloads these same unprofitable regional lines on Land governments while focusing on intercity rail.
- Regulators are technical and make specific decisions.
This is not the only way to organize things, but it’s the only way that works. The Nordic countries have been moving away from this system in the last generation, influenced by British governing ideology; the sources I reference in the Stockholm case study repeatedly treat privatization as self-evidently good and exhort Nordic agencies to be more like the UK and less like Germany and Switzerland, and meanwhile, in the last 20 years Nordic costs have exploded while German ones have been fairly stable.
I’ve talked about the issue of privatization of the state to consultants many times, most recently a month ago. This post is about something different: it’s about how regulators work, an issue on which Sweden appears little different from Germany to me, and profoundly different from the United States and its can’t-do government.
American light touch elements
To understand how American regulations work, we need to look at the regulators and grant funders, that is, the Federal Transit Administration and Federal Railroad Administration, henceforth abbreviated FTA and FRA. How do they work?
- The chief regulators are never especially technical. The most sought after background, equivalent to a French grande école degree, is as far as I can tell a law degree from Yale. Engineers and planners always have to have a non-technical generalist watching over their shoulder, and this is the most prominent for the most politically sensitive projects.
- FTA/FRA reviewers are in some cases not even allowed to probe into the funding package they are to decide on. One of the biggest projects relevant to what we’ve studied at the Transit Costs Project and what I’ve written on this blog has a multi-billion dollar package, one that will almost certainly be only partially funded due to competing priorities, but the regulators are not allowed to see any itemized breakdown to see what partial funding would even do. Nor are regulators allowed to say which priorities to build first if there’s only partial funding.
- The higher regulators themselves believe that light-touch approaches are better and are reluctant to engage in any direct management – if they’d like to be more involved but are prohibited from doing so by the law or by constitutional interpretations, they have not said so.
- There is little churn between operations and regulations – in fact, this separation is treated as sacrosanct, even as in all other aspects the governing ideology calls for breaking down silos (and thereby disempowering specialists in favor of generalists). The contrast here is with Sweden, where state planners who worked on Citybanan, a state project, have since moved on to work for Stockholm County on the county-led Nya Tunnelbanan.
None of this works. The people who make the big decisions on funding in this system do not have the ability to make professional judgments, only political ones, and agencies know this and don’t bother with technical soundness.
Heavy touch and expertise
The connection between heavy touch and expertise is, you can’t manage things directly if you don’t have a lot of subject matter knowledge. In this sense, light touch may not necessarily be by itself bad, but rather, like design-build project delivery, it is in practice used to mask incompetence at the top level. The non-technical boss, who is in all but name a political commissar, can make vague proclamations, not get into details, and not feel like they’re out of their league and must defer to the engineer in the room.
Pedestrian Observations 
Are you perhaps confusing the roles of railway regulators and infrastructure managers here? As I understand it, the Federal Railway Administration and Federal Transit Authority have missions closer to the Federal Railway Authority (Eisenbahn-Bundesamt), Office of Rail Regulation or Transportstyrelsen, rather than DB Netz, Network Rail or Trafikverket.
It seems to me what you’re really calling for is greater executive capacity for the infrastructure managers, which have a comparatively weak position in the US, probably due to their 19th century origin as robber baron enterprises.
The forerunner of Trafikverket in the 1950s was modeled on the forerunner of the FHWA.
I think the evolution over time in the Nordics seems broadly correctly described, though fundamental choices and central planning for the largest projects is still done in-house in all countries I think.
How would private railroads, most notably in Japan, fit into this broader picture?
I think you’re under-rating the influence of politics in the US. The FHWA bureaucracy, which only wants to move cars and spend money on moving more cars, is immune from outside control because it is protected by the Congressional highway lobby. FHWA in turn protects the state highway agencies in their desire to do the same. Latest example is the failure to confirm Stephanie Pollack as FHWA Administrator & the revocation of her memo that very mildly asked states to prioritize maintenance & safety improvements on existing highways over capacity increases.
Politicians from pro-transit states are fighting each other over the crumbs allocated to transit construction and are reluctant to weaken their case by admitting to weaknesses in their projects.
Party government in northern Europe, compared to individual political entrepreneurship in the US, incentivizes politicians to cooperate to maximize the value of what is built rather than fight over the pie.
I was too tired to blog about why fix-it-first is a scam and should do so in the next few days, pegging it to a new MTA presentation. But, in brief, it’s a means for spending a lot of money without having anything to show for it. In rail, this is how Amtrak demands tens of billions of dollars for things that do not improve speed, reliability, capacity, or anything else that is relevant to passengers, because this way it doesn’t need to promise anything that can (and given Amtrak probably will) visibly fail.
Things wear out while they are waiting for Real Americans(tm)’s Senators to fund things. It’s difficult to get things done if you are contending with people who say, out loud, that trains are a Socialist PLOT!!! to turn everyone into CommMmMmNists! Real Americans(tm)’s Senators love to schmooze and fund raise in Manhattan, that evil cesspit of sin and depravity, I don’t understand why they wouldn’t love a 90 minute train ride from D.C.
In the early 80s, someone who knew how to use Visicalc came up with “we need more capacity in Penn Station New York by 2005 or so”. That might get done by 2040. They even managed to build a whole block of tunnel for it, between 10th and 11th Avenue in Manhattan. Trains between “Albany” and Manhattan are faster than they were in the heyday. Not as fast as the Turboliners but faster than in the heyday.
They manage to do minor things now and then. They electrified to Boston. Acela trains were …disappointing… but they were able to gain market share with them. The half billionish dollars they spent in New Jersey will improve reliably and speed. They might get something else done by 2070 when that needs a major overhaul. … the 2015 accident in Philadelphia wouldn’t have happened if they had installed modern signalling sooner. They supposedly have modern signalling all along the NEC and the commuter systems that connect to it. That’s progress. They’ve managed to extend the Ethan Allen to Burlington, Vermont. Mildly annoying to me because the train is scheduled later. Michigan services are marginally better. So is Chicago to St. Louis… They manage minor things now and then.
Amtrak could just follow European safety standards for trains for example.
I cannot see any scenario where any meaningful number of swing voters would care.
The trains in London or Paris or the Amalfi coast or wherever Americans go in Europe wipe the floor with the trains in most of America. That’s if they even thought about it at all.
Most of America is run by people who think trains are a plot to turn us all into Communists.
They don’t think that.
If they did the unprofitable cross country trains would have been cancelled long ago.
They can be shamed into maintaining vestigial service. For the unfortunates that can’t manage to drive everywhere like Real Americans(tm). It’s vestigal, you have to be desperate or a railfan.
A Boston-New York-Washington DC line would be the most profitable in the world. It’s by far the densest place that doesn’t have a high speed line and it’s by far the richest.
If they can continue to market Acela at high fares, perhaps. They’ve been promising faster than flying since 1965, which before Amtrak. It might happen by 2050.
For the three Americans who give a shit, maybe. For the rest using the train is because your a loser without a car and who cares what the trains are like, that’s leftie wokeism and should be stamped out and all that right of way could usefully be blacktopped over to provide more space for fossil fuels subsidies…..
This is absolutely and incontrovertibly the case for US public transportation, where tens of billions can (and does, and continues) to disappear without a single trace, and the cycle repeats. (Note that my pet hate, Caltrain, has gone two decades without any service improvement of any type — in fact it’s gotten worse over that 19 years while tens of billions of public dollars have simply evaporated, leaving nothing.)
But for freeways and local roads, any traveller anywhere in the country, no matter how affluent, can see with their own eyes that pavement is in shocking condition and major structures look decrepit, meanwhile endless limitless freeway widenings (to “relieve bottlenecks” or more often to completely “solve congestion”) and arterial and freeway extensions (fundamentally massive greenfield real estate development subsidies) continue without end.
The question is whether new construction would be better.
I can foresee the Americans spending HS2 amounts of money on high speed rail and then running 2tph on it with weird service gaps.
You don’t half talk some utter and complete bollocks sometimes. Your comments about what regulators can see etc. is somewhat wide of the mark. I remember after the last financial meltdown in 2008 and MTA was struggling to issue bonds to finance its Capital Plan, Albany only approved 3 years of funding for the Capital Plan. At that point decisions had to be made as to which parts of ESA and the other capital projects would be funded. There was significant oversight by the regulators to understand why decisions were being made to fund certain elements of the projects and not fund other parts of the projects.
Yeah, some projects have itemized elements, and some don’t, and the one I’m channeling here specifically doesn’t even though the funding constraints are such that partial funding is almost certain.