Boston Meetup and Consultants Supervising Consultants
The meetup was a lot less formal than expected; people who showed up included loyal blog readers (thank you for reading and showing up!), social media followers (same), and some people involved in politics or the industry. I don’t have any presentation to show – I talked a bit about the TransitMatters Regional Rail program and then people asked questions. Rather, I want to talk about something I’ve said on social media but not here, which I delivered a long rant about to the last people who stayed there.
The issue at hand is that the only way that seems to work to deliver complex infrastructure projects is with close in-house supervision. This is true even in places where the public-sector supervisors, frankly, suck – which they frequently do in the United States. It’s fine to outsource some capabilities to consultants, but if it happens, then the supervision must remain in the public sector, which requires hiring more in-house people, at competitive salaries.
Why?
The reason is that public-sector projects always involve some public-sector elements. This is true even in the emergent norm in the English-speaking world and in many other countries that take cues from it, in which not only is most work done by consultants, but also the consultants are usually supervised by other consultants. The remains of the public sector think they’re committed to light-touch supervision, but because they, by their own admission, don’t know how to do things themselves or even how to supervise consultants, they do a bad job at it.
The most dreaded request is “study everything.” It’s so easy to just add more scenarios, more possibilities, more caveats. It’s the bane of collaborative documents (ask me how I know). In the Northeast Corridor timetabling project I’m doing with Devin Wilkins, I could study everything and look at every possible scenario, with respect to electrification, which projects are undertaken, rolling stock performance profile, and so on. It would not be doable with just me and her in a year or so; I would need to hire a larger team and take several years, and probably break it down so that one person just does Boston, another just does Philadelphia, a third just does Washington and Baltimore, several do New York (by far the hardest case), and one (or more) assists me in stapling everything together. The result might be better than what we’re doing now, thanks to the greater detail; or it might be worse, due to slight inconsistencies between different people’s workflows, in which case a dedicated office manager would be needed to sort this out, at additional expense. But at least I’d study everything.
Because I’m doing this project for Marron and not for an American public-sector client, I can prune the search tree, and do it at relatively reasonable expense. That’s partly because I’m the lead, but also partly because I know what I’m doing, to an extent, and am not going to tell anyone “study everything” and then dismiss most scenarios after three months of no contact.
The behavior I’m contrasting myself with is, unfortunately, rife in the American public sector. And it’s the most common among exactly the set of very senior bureaucrats, often (not always) ones who are there by virtue of political appointment rather than the civil service process, who swear that consultants do things better than the public sector. There’s no real supervision, and no real narrowing of the process. This looks like an alternative to micromanagement, but is not, because the client at the end does say “no, not like this”; there’s a reason the consultants always feel the need to study everything rather than picking just a few alternatives and hoping the client trusts them to do it right.
It’s telling that the consultants and contractors we speak to don’t really seem happy with how they’re treated by the public-sector client in those situations. They’re happy when interfacing with other private actors, usually. I imagine that if I hired a larger team (which we don’t have the budget for) and gave each person a separate task, they’d be really happy to have come up with all those different scenarios for how to run trains in the Baltimore-Washington area, interfacing with other equally dedicated people doing other tasks of this size. When consultants are supervised by other consultants, only the top-level consultant interfaces with the remains of the civil service, hollowed out by hiring freezes, uncompetitive salaries, and political scourging; the others don’t and think things work really smoothly. This, I think, is why opaque design-build setups are so popular with the private consultants who are involved in them: by the time a country or region fully privatizes its supervision to a design-build consultant, its public sector has been hollowed so much that the consultants prefer to be supervised privately, even if the results are worse.
In contrast, the only way forward is a bigger civil service. This means hiring more people, in-house, and paying them on a par with what they would be earning in the private sector given their experience. As I said at the bar a few hours ago, I’m imagining someone whose CV is four years at the MTA, then five at a consultant, then four at the MBTA, and then six at a consultant; with these 19 years of experience, they could get hired at a senior engineer or project manager position, for which the market rate in Boston as I understand is in the high $100,000s. For some things, like commuter rail electrification, there are unlikely to be any suitable candidates from within the US, and so agencies would have to hire a European or Asian engineer.
With competitive salaries, people would move between different employers in the same industry, as is normal in American and European industries. They could move between public and private employers, because the wages and benefits should be similar. They’d pick up experience. An agency like the MBTA, with its five to six in-house design review engineers, could staff up appropriately to be able to supervise not just small projects like infill commuter rail station, which it built at reasonable cost on the Fairmount Line, but also large ones like the Green Line Extension and South Coast Rail, which it builds at outrageously high costs.
Pedestrian Observations 
could anyone provide a link to a previous post on design-build, its faults and its alternatives? i see it mentioned a lot on this blog but i haven’t been able to find a clear explanation on what it is
I think at this point the best explanation is in our executive summary here: https://transitcosts.com/cases/
Look for the section on project delivery and procurement.
Thank you again for your insight.
I would like to suggest that we also need to construct a robust Civil Service education infrastructure.
I believe that other advanced countries… along with providing an education in a particular technical or management expertise, also prepare their Civil Service professionals for that purpose in service to the public sector.
The problem isn’t exactly civil service education. The US has a lot of masters programs for that, which reliably put out dedicated, informed people, who are then scolded into doing nothing by their superiors until they either quit or mentally check out and go into punch-clock-until-you-can-retire-with-a-pension mode.
If they don’t study everything someone will sue because they didn’t study everything.
Then why they study didn’t study putting a subway between two random rural towns out west (each population ~500). It would for sure cost a lot less. Of course the answer is obvious: it wouldn’t do anything useful to solving Boston’s transport needs. However that logic can be applied to a lot of things that are studied as well: it generally obvious to anyone who knows transport engineering and a city which routes are worth looking at. Someone who is competent to oversee work can quickly say which things are even worth doing a study on.
To a large extent studies aren’t even useful. If streets A and B run parallel and are close: you can pick one at random and get most of the benefit to the other street there isn’t much need to do study on alternatives unless while studying A you discover something big and then you look at B in that area to see if it is better. If you are close to the start then you start over checking B, otherwise you just big a jog over to B and continue down B. If the streets are not parallel or not close, then it becomes obvious to an expert you want to do both eventually so again you pick one at random and are close enough to ideal. We don’t need to get the perfect alignment, we just need need good enough. Good enough is often a lot faster and usually nearly as cheap. In the end what counts a running transit.
The above are things that someone with expertise can quickly make a decision on and keep the project moving. While people will sue about everything, lawyers should be able to shut it down, that is their job. Note that an expert should also know the types of things a lawyer cannot shut down – thus they may wait on the A or B decision until they check ethnic or disabled populations (or whatever) – but this isn’t a full A or B study it is just will A or B make a difference in just those small things.
Then why they study didn’t study putting a subway between two random rural towns out west
Because the two rural towns are outside of the scope of a study for the MBTA?
The Census Bureau keeps all sorts of interesting statistics, beyond population numbers. Even if everybody in East Village was employed in West Village and everybody in West Village was employed in East Village, that would be 2,000 trips a day?
How do they know A is better than B? Ask some foamer on the internet or have people actually go out and count thing?
Alon’s point is you don’t need to study to figure that out. There should be experts who already have a good idea of what the correct route is before doing any study. They should never compare two routes in detail because the Civil Service professionals already know the general route just based on simple numbers they already have. So they draw lines on a map and then study that.
Once in a while they need to study something, but it isn’t everything. So you study minorities/poor/disabled who live in the area and where they want to go before placing the rough lines on the map. Or you study if the hospital or big office 1 mile away will better generate traffic. Once you have the lines on the map you only study that route, unless something major comes up (is the hospital enough better than the office to be worth destroying the ancient burial grounds you just discovered?)
This is not everything, and should not be. The US spends far too much time and $$$ putting together studies that are then put on a shelf. Often called analysis paralysis. We need to take a complete study and build it – even if the study was bad, at least it is done, so stop doing more study in the area until that thing is built. Studies are good when they are limited to finding things that we didn’t know, but when they verify things an expert already knows they are not of much use (now granted experts are not always right and so we do need some study to verify, but not nearly as much study, we should be using statistical samples to choose what to study).
Operations before electrification before concrete is not an excuse to not put in concrete or build electrification because operations are not perfect.
It’s not at all defensive against lawsuits; they do this even for internal things for which there’s no possibility of lawsuit.
Certainly in the UK I would say they don’t consider different options enough. I think that’s one reason HS2 has gone so wrong.
Or was it they didn’t get experts to ensure the right options were considered?
Maybe you need more experts who are able to think outside the box to consider more options.
But even so definitely not enough options were considered.
I do feel this point is a bit unexpanded.
Here are some reasonable HS2 options north of Birmingham with the considered ones starred. Some aren’t compatible with each other.
Just HS2 phase one*
HS2 extended to just north of Stafford
A high speed Stafford bypass bypassing the two track section of the West Coast Mainline
Extending existing major stations such as Stafford, Stoke, Macclesfield etc to 400m platforms
Purchasing FLIRT or similar trains for the Stoke-Manchester local services
Passing places at existing major stations
A four track section between Macclesfield and Stockport
HS2 extended to Crewe*
HS2 extended to Stockport
HS2 extended to south of Manchester Airport
HS2 extended to central Manchester*
Grade separating the junction between the Manchester airport and main Manchester-Stockport lines
Grade separating the east-west trains at Manchester Piccadilly
A Piccadilly-Victoria tunnel for local service
A Piccadilly-Victoria tunnel for high speed service*
A Piccadilly-Victoria tunnel for express service
Grade separating the junctions on the existing surface tracks around central Manchester
Passing tracks and/or more platforms at Deansgate
4 through platforms at Manchester Piccadilly
Extending enough existing terminal platforms at Manchester Piccadilly to 400m for high speed service
The “Borners” plan of not running all the trains in the world to Manchester airport and running 4tph all stations to 1-2 destinations north/east/west of Manchester city centre.
Spend £1m investigating each, and you’ve only spent £20m, it’s not massive in the scale of things. What 1km of high speed track at normal costs?
Certainly in the UK I would say they don’t consider different options enough. I think that’s one reason HS2 has gone so wrong.
Wildly off topic question for Alon, if he has the time for it.
An advantage of takt is “knots” or “nodes” where trains from both directions arrive at the same time, allowing efficient (for operators) and convenient (for customers) connecting services – a bus arriving at a knot station can drop off passengers getting on a train to either direction and pick up passengers getting off a trains from either direction, without any passenger waiting. If the connecting line is another rail (or well run bus) line perpendicular to the first, making the station a knot for the second line means four trains arriving at once, and wait-free connections to any line.
Knots exist at half the frequency, so if trains depart every 30 minutes, there is a knot every 15 min down the line.
However, I have heard that in takt systems like the Swiss, a “30 min” travel time is actually scheduled to take 28 min, and 60 min travel times are 56 min. I believe (but am not certain) this is exclusive of pad. Instead this time is to provide time to turn the train around at the end of the line, so that the “3pm arrival” and the “3pm departure” can be the same train (because having left the other end of the line at 2:30, it pulls into the station at 2:58 and then departs again at 3:00).
The question becomes, how does the 28min “railway half hour” allow for knots on longer lines? If Imagine a line with 30 min headway and a 90min nominal schedule. There would be seven stations with knots, call them A, B, C, D, E, F, G. The 2:00 eastbound from A nominally arrives at F at 3:15 to meet the 3:00 westbound from G. But if the trains cover a nominal half hour in 28 min, then the eastbound train arrives at F at 3:10, while the westbound arrives at 3:14. This may not seem like a lot, but it defeats a lot of purpose of the knot if a bus with 30-60 min total trip has to arrive at 3:09 and depart at 3:15; it means 10-20% of your service time is spent waiting at one spot. If the connection is a through line also trying to maintain takt it’s worse: the northbound and southbound might both arrive at 3:13, meaning passengers from G might not connect to them (the N/S trains will be pulling away as the westbound from G pulls in), nor can north/south passengers catch a connection to G (the train from A will have left at 3:10).
This is obviously only an issue with longer lines (the minute or so difference can probably be ignored on lines with 30 min endpoints) but with the push to takt whole nations and Intercity/RegioExpress/Regio lines with multi-hour run time how is it supposed to work?
I don’t think you generally have through buses at train stations. So the bus would arrive at the terminus at 3:10 and depart again at 3:20. That seems reasonable to me.
Even in a scenario where you terminate in the city centre after the train station you could have the bus arrive at 3:10, then get to the city centre for 3:13, leave the city centre at 3:17 and return to the station for 3:20.
That is not acceptable lag unless the route as 5 minute headways and so it drops people off, goes elsewhere to park, and a different bus comes to pick people up. (If you have this elsewhere to park close this is a great time to give drivers a much need bio break – but most central stations don’t have that space). People who transfer do not want to sit around waiting – sure those who have the longest walk may need the extra time, but that is time robbed from those who have a short walk who really want to get home (or are worried about whatever they have going on at work that day or…)
5 minutes to change from bus to train is pretty tight.
20 minutes for someone who just needs to get on the bus that happens to park right next to the bus they arrive on isn’t reasonable either. Transfers need to be the heart and soul of a good transit system. I understand what you are saying, but I still cannot call it acceptable. We need better transfers at stations.
A train for a half hour knot needs to take 28 minutes to make the trip for several reasons not related to turn around time.
The big one is passengers cannot teleport instantly off of one train to the next. You need to allow enough time for everyone to get off the current train, walk to the next platform (often involving elevators or stairs!) and get on the next train. You need to assume “the little old lady with a walker” is last to get off the train, and “she” needs to make it to “her” connection on time. 28 minutes trip time doesn’t give you very long in a station, it works in a small station where there is only one train (because the local buses can stop longer), but in a larger station that isn’t enough time. Which as I wrote elsewhere is itself a problem as time spent waiting in a station is time robbed from others who are on the train and really want to get someplace else.
The 28 minute trip time also needs to allow time for problems. What if a train is running late – 28 minutes should be the worst case allowed, while 26 minutes might be your goal time, and 23 minutes a possible time if you run at the max safe speed for the entire trip (max safe speed costs more energy and so you wouldn’t want to do that). The numbers here are made up of course, max possible time is a function of the trains and tracks, while the goal time is a factor of how long you want to spend stopped at stations, combined with the knot.
Modern automated EMUs can turn around instantly. For non-automated EMUs the limit is how long it takes the driver to walk to the other end (or how long the bio-break you give the driver). Locomotives are far more complex to turn around since you have to uncouple it, move it to the other and and reconnect it – one of several reasons passenger trains should never have locomotives (it is possible to have locomotives at the front and back and thus not need to uncouple, this typically doesn’t make sense).
“Cab cars” / “driving trailers” / etc. are used in almost all locomotive-hauled frequent passenger trains (including even US commuter railroads), thus they operate exactly the same way as EMUs, just with slightly worse acceleration.
It’s a lot worse than “slightly” worse. The initial acceleration of these sets is something like 0.3 m/s^2; regional single-deck EMUs get 1.2-1.3.
A well paid, competent, civil servant – pick two.
Are you saying that hiring a competent person into the civil service with a competitive pay offer somehow makes them no longer a civil servant or no longer competent?