We Gave a Talk About New York Commuter Rail Modernization
Blair Lorenzo and I gave the talk yesterday, as advertised. The slide deck was much more in her style than in mine – more pictures, fewer words – so it may not be exactly clear what we said.
Beyond the written report itself (now up in web form, not just a PDF), we talked about some low-hanging fruit. What we’re asking for is not a lot of money – the total capital cost of electrification and high platforms everywhere and the surface bottlenecks we talk about like Hunter Junction is around $6 billion, of which $800 million for Portal Bridge need to happen regardless of anything else; Penn Reconstruction is $7 billion and the eminently cancelable Penn Expansion is $17 billion. However, it is a lot of coordination, of different agencies, of capital and operations, and so on. So it’s useful to talk about how to, in a way, fail gracefully – that is, how to propose something that, if it’s reduced to a pilot program, will still be useful.
The absolute wrong thing to do in a pilot program situation is to just do small things all over, like adding a few midday trains. That would achieve little. There is already alternation between hourly and half-hourly commuter trains in most of the New York region; this doesn’t do much when the subway or a subway + suburban bus combination runs every 10-12 minutes (and should be running every six). The same can be said for CityTicket, which incrementally reduces fares on commuter rail within New York City but doesn’t integrate fares with the subway and therefore produces little ridership increase.
Instead, the right thing to do is focus on one strong corridor. We propose this for phase 1, turning New Brunswick-Stamford or New Brunswick-New Rochelle into a through-line running every 10 minutes all day, as soon as Penn Station Access opens. But there are other alternatives that I think fall into the low-hanging fruit category.
One is the junction fixes, like Hunter as mentioned above (estimated at $300 million), or similar-complexity Shell in New Rochelle, which is most likely necessary for any decent intercity rail upgrade on the Northeast Corridor. It costs money, but not a lot of it by the standards of what’s being funded through federal grants, including BIL money for the Northeast Corridor, which is relevant to both Hunter and Shell.
The other is Queens bus redesign. I hope that as our program at Marron grows, we’ll be able to work on a Queens bus redesign that assumes that it’s possible to connect to the LIRR with fare integration and high frequency; buses would not need to all divert to Flushing or Jamaica, but could run straight north-south, leaving the east-west Manhattan-bound traffic to faster, more efficient trains.
Pedestrian Observations 
Off the cuff, before reading the document, is that running 10 minute frequencies out of New Brunswick is not feasible until the Delco Loop is finally built. Either the trains would relay at County, in which case the eastbound moves would block the Northeast Corridor for several minutes while they cross over, or the equipment would have to deadhead to or from Morrisville, in which case the service might as well originate at Trenton.
I enjoyed reading your report, and I think that it covers all of the issues. One thing, though, is that level boarding is important, but it has to be done properly. At many of NJT’s high platform stations, in order for a wheelchair passenger to board, a crew member must place a bridge plate over the gap between the train and the platform. I assume that those gaps are present at some stations to allow for freight service, but they are present at stations that don’t have freight service. In particular, Metro-Park comes to mind. It is built on a curve, and the gaps there on track 4 are truly alarming to the point that I am uncomfortable crossing them.
Also, someone is going to have to get NJT to give up its love of locomotive-hauled trains.
Ramps can be good and surprisingly quick if a station is appropriately staffed.
The appropriate level of staffing for a nearly every railway station is zero.
(Yes, we all know the UK is Special.)
No one feels safe at such a station.
Also if the US is serious about expanding rail usage the US probably needs much stronger levels of good quality customer-facing staff than other countries as Americans are much less familiar with using the train.
Approximately all tram stops and the large majority of subway/metro/underground stops (stations?) are unstaffed. Why would commuter train stops be different?
Also, while/because I’m talking from a “fish doesn’t have a concept for water” position here: quite what knowledge or skills are you talking about, that would be necessary to use trains (or any other form of public transit — or for that matter, in contrast to other forms of transit, if that is what you meant) that Americans lack? Knowing that the line exists and can take them to where they are going is a possible issue, but staffing up doesn’t help with it (advertising does).
Firstly I am pretty sure pretty much all subway/metro stations are staffed. They may not have ticket offices – but I am pretty sure they are pretty much all staffed.
That said walking, getting a taxi, getting another bus or getting a lift are much more viable options for replacing a non-functioning tram or bus or subway train compared to a non-functioning commuter or long distance train.
With regards to why the Americans need more staff. Well I was chatting to the man at Seat61 and he said the Americans who wrote to him had much more basic questions about trains than anyone else.
Certainly in the Thames Valley or Chilterns a 30 minute service with 100mph top speed is enough to get very respectable traffic out of the city.
So if in the New York suburbs people are struggling perhaps they need more staff – just a hypothesis really.
At a stop on the surface, shallowly subsurface (stairs not escalators, and nowadays one elevator per platform) or elevated, what do station staff do that requires their presence? In the context of ticket vending machines existing, that is.
There are indeed more transportation alternatives inside a city than outside. I don’t see how this bears on the question(s) at hand.
Unfortunately I can’t read your mind. How, in what ways, are Americans “struggling” with using trains? What sort of unusually basic questions did they have, what “train-taking skills” do they lack?
Ticket vending machines have a pretty high user failure rate – so yes you need staff to help customers. The same applies to ticket barriers.
Furthermore you have any kind of security incident. You need to be able to close the station to stop the platforms overloading if there isn’t a train for a while or is some kind of incident on the platform.
For the local who lives in the city zero staff “should” be needed (should because crimes like rape happen in this type of station – I’m not an expert here but I think it is important to acknowledge this issue) . They already know how to get a ticket, which train/bus to get on and all that. The only exception is the severely disabled who should just be on paratransit. Most disabled should be able to use your transit without staff help, they need some small accommodations like automatic gap fillers, bumps to guide their cane but with just a little basic effort can use your system without help – and they make the system easier to use for older people who are not disabled, but their body is tending that way.
However tourists are different. They don’t know the stations or the city. They don’t know which ticket to buy. They don’t know which direction they want to go (sometimes the best route is go opposite of your destination and transfer). I’ve been stuck in line to buy my ticket behind a group of tourists who had no clue what ticket to buy and were trying to figure out the ticket machine and had no clue what the zone question was about – with no explanation at the station. I’ve seen tourists standing at the top of the stairs trying to figure out which platform / train they want. Getting way finding that works for someone who doesn’t know your city is difficult – maybe impossible (either it is too much text to understand, or you assume they know which station and route they want which they don’t). Google maps does not work very well for transit in general, and that is what tourists are likely to know (if they normally drive). Thus where you expect tourists help can be useful.
Irregular users of the system are also “tourists”.
You also have to be able to handle special cases. For example over recent weeks there has been flooding in the UK. Station staff are very useful to help passengers on longer (and more lucrative) journeys to allow them to complete them. Fundamentally offering bespoke emergency help at the station in an emergency is less bad than any other way of offering it really – as you force people to prioritise more effectively.
I’d like to point out that accessibility isn’t just for people in wheelchairs. I’ve been pushing baby strollers for a few years now, and man what a difference a lift makes, or not having steps to enter a train, or having it easy to help a small kid enter the train/bus/metro with one hand while you climb in the stroller with the other hand. The lifts in the metro stations in my city are going up and down almost non stop with old people who can walk but with some trouble, people with baby strollers, people carrying heavy stuff with shopping trolleys, etc… It’s easy to underestimate how many people can’t take public transport when there is bad accessibility.
Another lesson of pushing a stroller in public transport is that you need to know that you’ll also have accessibility at the end of your journey. Metro in my city has +90% accessible stations, but some the few that aren’t accessible are important line interchanges and I avoid them if I’m pushing a stroller. If you depend on a guy physically putting a ramp for you to climb down the train, how do you know that he will see you inside the train? How do you know that his working hours include the time of your train if you’re coming back late? Even if you need security at the stations (either manned or through video surveillance), depending on people is quite less reliable than just having a design that lets you do it.
Another stupid problem that gets underestimated is the train that has only one or two accessible doors, the platform is 200m long, and you can’t know where the accessible door will be. And you have to find it while the train stops, and run towards it while people is leaving the train and becoming obstacles in the platform.
So each train stations needs a cadre full-time personnel — why stop at one or two? … just as each train needs a pilot, a co-pilot, a conductor, an assistant conductor, a flight deck engineer, baggage handlers, and at least one lounge attendant per passenger carriage … just as each bus needs a ticket collector … just as each building elevator needs an elevator attendant … because … because … America? Tourists? Touch screens are unfamilar? Everything is an airport rail link and every airport rail link is used once, by large family groups who are unfamilar with the local alphabet, who barter sea shells for transactions, struggle with pictograms, and will leave your station a shockingly bad Yelp review if the staff are insufficiently obsequious? Because it’s 1940? Because machines are not yet — not YET — our inerrant onmiscient overlords and resistance starts NOW!? America? Hypothetical who don’t ever actually ever use transit and never will? Butwhatabout? Because this is all a Thomas the Tank Engine episode?
Why would you need a cadre of staff? A couple of staff at a time can probably cover all the things they need to do at a smallish station.
@Matthew Hutton
“So if in the New York suburbs people are struggling perhaps they need more staff”
No, what the NY suburbs need is that 30 min all day frequency with 100mph top speed, something that hardly exists is US regional/commuter rail, if anywhere. You are confusing cause and effect-British stations can be staffed because they get good ridership from good service, they staffing doesn’t cause ridership.
To the original issue, there is an argument to staff reasonably busy stations at a central location for help with ticketing, way finding, security, occasional cleanup, etc. But to appropriately staff a station to deploy ramps with any schedule reliability means an agent available on each platform, which is hugely wasteful (in cost to the agency for salary, in time for the agents who mostly do nothing). This is completely unnecessary when the technology of level platforms with gap fillers exists.
Thank you for the answers. I would list them as: wayfinding, fare system, security, crowd control, accessibility.
Wayfinding: I don’t know how it is elsewhere, but in Budapest all metro stops and some of the higher-traffic tram stops have large transit maps of the city, mounted on a wall parallel to passenger flow. (Usually at any entrance(s). For hub/gateway stations, there’s also one either on the back wall of the side platform or lengthwise in the middle of the island platform.) If the environment of the stop is complex enough to justify it, there are smaller placards showing the immediate vicinity (<1km diameter) with "you are here within the station or adjoining pedestrian underpass". Elsewhere (probably in Austria) I've also seen some municipal agency established a visitor center at/in the Hauptbahnhof, with the primary service being racks of tourist-oriented paper maps of the city. I think that zero-staff wayfinding was basically solved at least half a century ago, possibly before 1900, for agencies that are competent.
Fare system (and its related machines): simpler is better. Probably London in particular should significantly cut the number of zones it has. There is also a case for "free is magic": for the user, there is nothing that could be simpler; for the agency, it no longer needs the effort to enforce its fare system. (If you squint: an effortful-to-collect poll tax gets replaced by a slight increase in some existing, flat or progressive tax.) Failing simplification, at least good UI design (commercially available commodity service) should ameliorate the problem to the degree that it doesn't need staff even in hubs. Separately, to the extent there is a throughput problem, just build more ticket vending machines.
Speaking of enforcement, security. Since the transit agency is in many ways subject to the same pressures as the municipal police, in the few cities that let crime run rampant, it's implausible that the transit agency's security guards could solve the problem within their domain. Everywhere else… it's 2023, the cameras are already installed, having security guards would neither be able to prevent the very little that still happens, nor add much to the response by the normal police (which adequately takes care of the problem). To the extent American society wants to buy some security theater, just ask the municipal police to incorporate transit into their existing foot patrolling.
Crowd control: the loudspeakers are already there, and are already wired to the “command center”. Staff is only required for planned large events (e.g. sports events), lasting a few hours, happening less than once a month.
Accessibility: partly, it is known how to solve the problem, it’s just a matter of implementation. Partly, for sympathetic people needing help, usually their fellow passengers lend a hand. Admittedly, I’m saying this not as someone who needs help and thus can speak of its reliability, but as someone who offers it. (For that matter, as far as I’ve had opportunity to observe, overhead luggage racks work just fine even for people who cannot personally lift their luggage into it.)
Overall, I think subway and commuter rail stops have no need of permanent staff on location. The most significant few (hubs and “gateways”) probably should have a tourist-helper kiosk or something, presumably staffed not by the transit agency but by whichever agency this task does belong to.
What station are we talking about here? There is a big difference between grand central, penn, and all the other large stations in the world where dozens of lines and buses all come together and a typical suburban station where one train and 10 buses meet every 15 minutes. The first will find enough people need staff that it is worth keeping several on hand for all the different things that come up. The later could use staff, but so rarely it isn’t cost effective, just have cleaners come through every few hours. An airport station probably should have staff for tourists, but otherwise probably doesn’t have enough people traveling through to need it.
Of course a large part of this is about design. A bad design needs staff to work around the flaws. If someone needs to put out the wheelchair ramp, then you need staff constantly, but we know how to make stations with level boarding and then don’t need that. If you don’t have elevators than you should have “strong men” (could be women) trained to carry wheelchairs up the stairs (at this point we should stop giving any station that hasn’t added them a pass). If the disabled don’t know where the disabled car will be, then we need staff to direct them, but we know how to make cars where all doors are disabled, and trains that always stop at exactly the same place are normal technology. We know how to build platform screen doors to ensure people can’t get pushed on the tracks thus ensuring we don’t need security guards for that. We know how to design ticket machines for cities where you have a single price all city day pass, but if you have a complex zone system then you need staff to explain how it works to tourists (My background is in human machine interaction – I have no confidence a tourist can figure some cities zones without help).
Technology cannot solve everything. There are security and cleaning issues that I cannot solve with current technology. However most of the objections people are raising are things that we can solve with a different design.
Agreed, but the problem is how things got that way to begin with and how much it will now cost to fix them.
Swiss stations (except major ones in big cities) are unstaffed while having legendarily complicated zone systems; German stations, same right up until the introduction of the 49€ monthly.
The break even in Britain with 16% of revenue and 12% of tickets going through the ticket offices (as per an FOI I did) and with a 1/3rd loss of revenue from those journeys if you shut the ticket offices with journeys at the UK average of £7.50/ticket office trip would need around 400k passengers to justify its existence. Obviously this is as per revenue so for urban stations you would need somewhat higher passenger numbers to justify a ticket office and for rural stations likely somewhat lower – and is probably significantly higher for stations within London where you can use contactless.
This also excludes any help the ticket office staff provide to people using the ticket machines and any help they provide as a reasonable adjustment for disabled passengers and any help they bring to make passengers feel safer which obviously somewhat reduce those numbers.
With regards to Switzerland. Well perhaps the Swiss have got it wrong – no-one else has a great track record frankly. That said they do have them in places with lots of tourists like Wengen. Also perhaps they have guards on board the train you can buy tickets from – which is always an option.
Switzerland also has very low crime and is the sort of place the police might come round if you cut your grass on a Sunday – so security issues are somewhat less likely.
We also have to remember staffing a small station might cost £250k a year (I am assuming half that for the ticket office). So if it cost £25m to fix the platforms so they are fully level rather than using ramps then that isn’t a great tradeoff financially. Normally you would want to see a return on investment within 10-15 years at the very most to justify capital investment.
I don’t think Germany and France (which also has unstaffed suburban stations) are that much safer than the UK? Bild stokes similar levels of moral panic about crime as the Daily Mail, blaming the same groups of people as the Daily Mail.
Fixing the platforms doesn’t cost £25 million except in very constrained circumstances. NJT does it for $25 million, and this is with long trains; ditto the MBTA. The Berlin S-Bahn is 10 million €, with somewhat shorter trains. But then you gain more benefits from level boarding – not only is it more accessible (wheelchair users hate having to be helped by others), but also it’s faster, for everyone. At Mansfield, MA, which has only one car length’s worth of high platform for minimal accessibility, and has around 2,000 daily boardings, one train had to wait 4 minutes at rush hour to ensure everyone would have time to get on with some margin of safety. With level boarding, it’s 30 seconds.
I mean my argument doesn’t fall apart unless the capital cost of upgrading a station to fully level platforms is less than £4m. And that has to include all the rail replacement buses and any fare losses.
No, it completely falls apart because of the combination of schedule risk and extra rolling stock costs – when a low platform is 8″ above top of rail, the only way a high-floor train can serve it is with trapdoors and those cost extra and in all American cases require a conductor to manually operate the doors.
Then there’s the issue that a station agent at New York City Transit averaged $69,000/year in 2020 in pay, with overtime but no benefits; with benefits, it’s likely around $130,000/person. So a staffed station during opening hours, say 18/7, has to get around four FTEs, making it more like $500,000/year to keep. The station agent would not be able to help more than one passenger at a time, and in any environment with crime, the agent would retreat behind a glass wall and demand that other people handle customer interactions.
But those only apply if your platforms are low rather than merely not having a level gap between the train and platform. Those things are different.
Also in terms of growing revenue the sorts of journeys where you can grow revenue without massive infrastructure investments – such as getting more passengers to go from the Thames Valley to Cornwall – are also relatively complex trips. And also you are going to be attracting customers who at best haven’t attempted that trip before by rail and who would typically drive in their car or go by air so will need more assistance.
I should point out that I live in a high cost off labor country as I think most reading this do. There are low cost of labor countries where it is valid to say we will save money buy hiring people do manually do things high cost of labor countries do with techology.
Even in those countries they should build the space for the elevator – shafts, equipment rooms, pipes for the power – this is cheap to do with current labor and if you ever advance to where labor is expensive you just install an elevator then. There are many other such things they should look to expensive labor countries to ask what they should do now and what to put off.
@Matthew Hutton
“Well perhaps the Swiss have got it wrong”
Switzerland has a rail mode share of ~16%, when no other European country is higher than 12% and the Euro average is ~8% (2018 figures). Geography plays a role how high this is (rail works best in linear corridors, and Switzerland is a series of valleys, to include the Geneva-Zurich axis where everyone lives, between the Alps and the Jura), but whatever you say about Switzerland you cannot say they are doing it wrong.
@Onux just because the Swiss have a very high ridership share doesn’t mean they got everything right – just that they got a lot right.
Germany is #2 but cant run a long distance train on time. Britain and France both are about the same but can’t build a high speed line or sensibly serve journeys outside the capital city respectively.
@MatthewHutton
“We also have to remember staffing a small station might cost £250k a year (I am assuming half that for the ticket office).”
Alon touched on this a bit, but it’s important to break this down properly to show how your argument falls apart.
If you are spending 250k per year, with half to the ticket office, then you are assuming two employees (one ticketing and one platform assistance) so 125k per employee per year.
If you spend 125k per employee, then their salary is only 62.5k, because half the cost of employment goes to benefits, retirement, etc.
If you are staffing the station all the time it is open, you are staffing it 110-130 hrs per week (6 days at 16hr/day plus one day at 14hr for the former, 5 days at 18 hr/day plus two days at 20hr/day for the later – this is equivalent to reduced Sun service or extra service Fri/Sat nights respectively). Since an employee works 40hr/wk, this is 2.75 or 3.25 employees. Accounting for vacation, sick days, training, etc. at 15-25% of paid hours means 3.25 to 4 employees on the payroll per position.
62.5k salary dived by 3.25 to 4 people is 15.6k to 19.25k salary. Minimum wage in the UK is 10.42/hr, which at 2080 hrs/year is 21.67k. It is legally impossible to staff a station during normal transit hours with two employees at 250k/yr.
At median UK wages of 38k/year, your two person station would cost 494-608k/yr. If raising platforms is 9M (equivalent to Berlin’s 10M euro), then you achieve ROI in 15-18 years, just like you want. That is before accounting for the increased ridership than comes from easier boarding for the disabled, elderly, strollers, and the increased ridership from faster service since each train stops for a shorter amount of time with everyone getting on an off quicker.
“Germany is #2”
Actually Austria is #2 in rail mode share, followed by Hungary and Denmark. France is at 9.5%, Britain at just 8%.
The double salary to cover benefits is a rule of thumb that includes holiday and sickness cover. So you can’t account for it twice!
And yeah in the public sector you might go somewhat higher to cover the very generous pensions – but on the other hands there are no business rates or office rents to cover against salary here as you have to pay them anyway.
£60k of cost per employee with 80 hours of ticket office opening sounds sensible – and would give them a salary of £30-35k. Perhaps you would have 3 other employees to allow you to have 120 hours a week of station opening and to cover breaks etc. That would mean a total running cost might be £300k per year for a small station – somewhat higher than my initial estimate.
In terms of passenger numbers pre-Covid Britain did 1750m journeys a year by rail vs ~1300m journeys a year in France.
Per capita pre-Covid we were below Switzerland, Luxembourg, Denmark, Germany and Austria and were approximately level with Sweden and above France.
For 2021/22 and 2021 respectively it was 990m and ~900m respectively. So our rail usage still higher as well. Hopefully there will be newer data soon.
Data from:
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Railway_passenger_transport_statistics_-_quarterly_and_annual_data
Click to access passenger-rail-usage-jan-mar-2023.pdf
“The double salary to cover benefits is a rule of thumb that includes holiday and sickness cover. So you can’t account for it twice!”
No, cost to employ does not cover holiday/sickness replacement because:
1) TCOE applies to white collar workers who do not work shift work and do not have a dedicated replacement when they are off.
2) You are in fact paying people twice during sickness and holiday, you are paying the person on leave and the person substituting for them. And for each hour worked the substitute is earning health benefits and retirement, just like the worker on leave. If your TCOE already accounted for the salary and benefits of the replacement, then you’re saying the cost of benefits for a worker is actually just 66% of salary (the remainder of the one employee’s COE is the salary and COE of the replacement). But no one will say that COE is that low compared to salary, certainly not in public work.
If you re-design your pitch to “not-actually-two-attendants” and a 30k salary, then you are looking at 360-375k staffing cost for a small station.
“In terms of passenger numbers pre-Covid Britain did 1750m journeys a year”
I have consistently referred to mode share, rather than total passenger journeys, which is a better way to measure rail uptake since it isn’t dependent on population or differences in total trips per capita.
https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/daviz/passenger-transport-modal-split-2#tab-chart_1_filters=%7B%22rowFilters%22%3A%7B%7D%3B%22columnFilters%22%3A%7B%7D%3B%22sortFilter%22%3A%5B%22Train%22%5D%7D
Working out mode share isn’t easy. I don’t think anyone has any real idea how many car journeys or journeys by foot/bicycle there are.
Working out mode share of trips to work seems viable – that feels like a question you can ask and get a reasonable answer to – but overall trips seems very challenging.
I think the 1.3 billion figure for France might exclude RATP-run RER lines? The general problem with counting passengers on a national network is that you’re really counting what’s bigger, London or Paris.
I had a quick look and that definitely is true. The RER alone had 1.8 billion rides in 2018 – https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Réseau_Express_Régional
That said it kinda sorta proves my point too. Britain is clearly doing a heck of a lot better for the non Paris/London journeys. Only half our rail trips involve London at all – difficult to imagine with the data we have that the French are achieving that.
It is also certain that France’s rail journeys including the whole RER network is larger than Britains.
Actually looking at another Wikipedia page with actual sources and it looks like the 1.8bn rides on the RER isn’t true and that there were roughly 1.7bn rides per year in France pre-Covid – so roughly the same as Britain – https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transport_in_France
The solution to this problem is train-mounted extenders, a common sight at Central European commuter rail stations. The FRA was considering mandating it in 2020 (link) after seeing it in action on Brightline; I don’t know what’s happened with it since.
How much extra do they cost?
It’s invisible in rolling stock procurement costs.
Theres no extra cost on the rolling stock even though it’s a ramp that has to go down slightly to rest on the platform to cope with the fact that not all rolling stock is exactly the same height?
@Matthew Hutton
“even though it’s a ramp that has to go down slightly to rest on the platform ”
It’s not a ramp that goes down, it’s a plate that folds up or slides out to fill the gap between the ltrain and the platform edge. Because trains are dynamic, there is usually a few hundred mm between the platform for safe passage; the gap filler reduces that to about 75mm, narrow enough for wheelchairs and strollers.
If you do level boarding your platforms have to be the same height as your train floor (at least at the vestibule). This isn’t a big concern since there are only a few standard platform heights (550/750mm in Europe, 1220mm in the US, 1250mm Japan). There can be a slight vertical distance due to the load of the train (with more passengers it rides lower on its suspension) but wheelchair boarding can still be achieved with a 10-20mm vertical gap, and modern trains with air suspension can regulate height in response to load to eliminate even this.
The gap filler mechanisms are simple, they just swing up/down or out/in every time a door opens or closes. Thus in the scheme of a rail car that costs millions cost is ignorable. There is actual cost versus installing nothing, but it’s like asking the cost of automatic doors on a train. Clearly they cost more than hand operated doors but every modern train has automatic doors without it being considered an “added” cost. Think of gap fillers the same way.
Note if you have a captive system with all rolling stock the same width and all straight platforms you can have an accessible gap without a gap filler – both UIC and AAR plates are exactly 75mm less than minimum platform offsets. I believe that the “Great Society Subways” (DC, SF, Atlanta) all achieve this due to activist work in the 60’s even before ADA.
Looks like HS2 is using a non standard platform height of 1115mm in order to have true level access to its trains. Even with 1115mm or 1110mm on the Heathrow express I am not convinced you can guarantee that any train you buy with any manufacturer will be truly level with the platform at that height. I also think because they did this it means that it isn’t generally possible to buy trains that match the standard British height of 915mm without spending extra money – and it probably isn’t possible at all.
I certainly don’t believe that platforms matching the European standard of 550/760mm can provide a truly level access to any train made by any manufacturer.
More thinking (any thinking!), more investigating, less endless typing. Please.
What do people get out just typing endlessly?
Ok I went on Seat61 and looked at the disability advice for Europe – https://www.seat61.com/european-train-travel-with-special-needs.htm. There is no evidence of anywhere you can travel as a disabled person in a wheelchair without ramps and pre-booking assistance.
Basically it is exactly the same as Britain at best.
“Fog in the channel. Continent cut off.”
Actually it looks like the Americans did better than Europe as their high platforms are high enough for it to “just work” but whatever.
“I am not convinced you can guarantee that any train you buy with any manufacturer will be truly level with the platform at that height.”
I am. You tell the manufacturer that is the height you want the floor. They will design the train accordingly. All rolling stock is made to order, they can put the floor at 1110, 1115, 1220, or 1250 as the customer requires.
“I certainly don’t believe that platforms matching the European standard of 550/760mm can provide a truly level access to any train made by any manufacturer.”
They certainly can to the entry vestibules. From there you can have stairs to the main seating area. People in wheelchairs don’t use the regular seats, and wheelchair spaces are usually provided in the vestibules anyway.
Right so 1110 or higher provides a good experience for the disabled on board and lower can be done but the on board experience is compromised as they aren’t in the carriage with the rest of the passengers.
Just look at the pictures on the Wikipedia page of the Stadler FLIRT, please. This layout is far from unique; almost all single-deck modern regional MUs (Siemens Desiro, Bombardier Talent, Alstom LINT) look fairly similar in layout. The main seating area is at platform level, with only the connections between carbodies requiring either steps or a ramp. Double-deck regional EMUs (Bombardier Twindexx, Stadler KISS) likewise have a large seating area at entry level, with stairs up to the intermediate and top floors. All of these at 550 or 760 mm entry height.
If the infrastructure company bothered to make all platforms the standard height (i.e. anywhere west of the former Iron Curtain), wheelchair users don’t need assistance or pre-booking any more than people with prams, bicycles, or large amounts of luggage.
Looks good for regional trains. However probably not long distance or services in the largest cities where it is more important for people to be able to move around the carriages unimpeded.
Yes, they look very good indeed for regional trains.
They also look good for, let’s say, DB’s IC2 long-distance trains. Or for Westbahn’s. Or for SBB’s (everything from the Traverso through double-deckers to the high-speed Giruno).
For a metro-like service, a platform height of 550 or 760 is indeed a relatively poor choice, because the bogies interfere with door placement, and unless you lift some innovations from low-floor trams (notably, discontinuous axles), it’s difficult to use the space above them for passengers.
You are compromising the ability to move around the train if you have to go up and down over the bogies on a long distance train – and you make it harder to offer food and drink with trolley service.
And with a longer journey and seat reservations being able to easily move around the train is much more important.
And especially in first class being able to have a wide enough corridor to move a wheelchair along on a long distance train would actually be pretty good.
And the end of the day in terms of stations it is probably a 75% solution or something – which is definitely a lot better than I initially thought.
I think the elephant in the loading gauge is a discrete optimization problem.
If your loading gauge is large enough that you can have double-deckers, then you will use them in some “trunk” or “core” part of the system. By necessity, operating practices will develop around the facts dictated by their nature. Catering will take the form of buffets or vending machines, platforms will be divided into marked segments so that passengers with reserved seats can board into the correct carriage on the first try, the carriage with the toilet and the most ample provision of multi-use spaces will be conspicuously marked on the outside with wheelchair symbols. Intermediate-level boarding arrangements are much more awkward than lower-floor boarding, therefore platform height will be low. And once you have these practices, it will be straightforward to roll them out over the rest of the network, even the parts that never see a double-decker.
By contrast, if your loading gauge is too small for double-deckers to be feasible, it does make sense to standardize on a platform height where the train floor is flat throughout, building a different set of operating practices on a different set of assumptions. Given that all corridors have to be wider, perhaps fewer seats fit given some fixed standard of how wide a seat can be called “business” or “first” class with a straight face.
If your gauge is so gargantuan that you can have a full second deck above a full-length flat one, sure, go ahead and do that.
If your gauge is so tiny that passengers cannot pass over bogies at all, accept that the vehicle will have separate passenger compartments.
@Basil Marte many would argue that double deckers are enough of a negative compromise that you should never have them. The nature of double deckers is they take longer to load, both because there are less doors, and also people getting on need to get up the stairs once on the train. And those stairs take space at well, and so you don’t get a lot more people on a double decker train so it probably isn’t worth it.
For inter city service where people will be on the train for several hours maybe that compromise is acceptable. However for intra city service: door to door time counts and so that compromise is never worth it!
Yes I know a lot of transit systems run double decker trains and buses. However just because you can make it work doesn’t mean you should.
Yeah, that’s why we talk about the Mid-Line Loop for $500 million as an important priority.
I’d have to find the latest iteration. I’m sure the $500 million is a new Jersey Avenue station, a new North Brunswick station and probably expanding storage etc. …. parking… improved highway access….
All the references are in the report. NJT costs come from Appendix B here; Mid-Line is pp. 149-150, Hunter is pp. 151-153.
Jersey Ave has it’s own page and they are proposing a quarter of a billion. For, apparently, two side platforms. North Brunswick, for some odd and peculiar reason, has two side platforms and island for 100 million less. And 646 million for expanding “County” yard.
….. 2 billlllion dollars to bring trolley cars to Englewood? 4 billion dollars on Hoboken? Four tracking from Newark to Cranford on the Raritan Valley line is probably a good idea.
Costs in this area in general are out of control. I’m not sure why Jersey Avenue is so expensive.
The Delco Loop project includes a new eastbound platform at Jersey Ave. Currently, there are only two platforms at Jersey Ave., one on the Millstone Running Track and one on track 4. Thus, eastbound trains originating at Morrisville cannot stop there. My understanding is that the plan for the Delco Loop is for originating trains to depart to the west and use the loop to reach a new platform on track 1. This will allow greatly increased service because eastbound trains from Morrisville will be able to stop there.
turning New Brunswick-Stamford or New Brunswick-New Rochelle into a through-line running every 10 minutes all day, as soon as Penn Station Access opens.
They are building the flyover south/west of the future station in North Brunswick.
Every ten minutes at the suburban stations would likely be too frequent. Something like a Stamford-North Brunswick local, every 20 minutes and a New Haven-Trenton express every 20 would be more useful.
decent intercity rail upgrade on the Northeast Corridor.
Define that.
If the high speed services are using Long Island, Bridgeport, Stamford and New Rochelle need every half hour-ish.
I define that as something approximating high-speed rail on the NEC (not via Long Island, that tunnel is insane). We’re about to start poking at coordinated timetables on New York-New Haven to see what can be done with different investment levels; I think some bypasses totaling mid-single digit billions get this down to 43 minutes for intercities, but I’m not certain about curve radii on the Hell Gate Line, and on the margin some bypasses may not be worth it.
There are or could be cheaply, four tracks between New Haven and New Rochelle. Put the slow trains on the local tracks and the fast trains on the express tracks. Any rearrangement needs an evaluation of the electrical infrastructure.
Which tunnel? Railfans seem to think Long Island Sound is unbridgeable. Long Island Sound could be bridges like the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel is, without the tunnels. Manhattan to Farmingdale is roughly the same distance as Manhattan to White Plains Airport. Long Island is a big pile of sand, gravel and boulders, cut and cover would be a lot cheaper than tunnel boring machines. And ventilation and emergency egress.
… Reconfigure Nassau and Suffolk LIRR services. Northeast of New Haven has demand for 5 perhaps 6 trains an hour? It would leave enough capacity to have half hourly Suffolk County expresses on the Main Line and the Montauk branch, east of Farmingdale.
Four tracks but three speed classes – local, express-commuter, and intercity. And the tunnel I’m questioning is in Bridgeport, to bypass some tight curves in the city at high cost.
IF you bypass Bridgeport….. you’ve bypassed Bridgeport…
Has anyone ever overlaid Sunnyside Yard with an airport terminal? If people are capable of transferring between planes by walking a significant distance in a climate controlled building or using moveable walkways to make their airplane transfers, shouldn’t trains replicate this to move people instead of trains?
Sunnyside already has 3 of the 4 passenger rail services and the LI boroughs and counties have a population similar to a small, transit-oriented European country. If MN used the IBX route instead of Brooklyn LR, then all of the rail operators that service the inner core of metropolitan NY would be near each other.
Didn’t Manhattan function as a passenger inter-modal hub with multiple train services, bus terminals, and airport transfer centers? Before gridlock, the Manhattan grid was highly functional with scheduled shuttle buses between train stations and intra-NJ bus routes closed in favor of making PABT a transfer hub. Sunnyside seems to be the easiest place to add infrastructure to move passengers and to connect to many modes of transit. Some may always need buses, such as LaGuardia, so maybe a service road for emergency vehicles and buses could connect to many transit options near Sunnyside (ferry, bridge bike riders, subways, and commuter rail. To connect rail services for the different operators, perhaps an elevated airport terminal with multiple wings could handle higher levels of passenger transfers. Finally, I wonder if greater use of aerial tramways can move passengers between high density transit modes if viewed as long escalators that can go over rail yards, highways, rivers, etc to position people in convenient location for next mode of transit.
Ooh, good question! We should do it, some of the big hubs have, what, 800 meters of walking from entrance to gate?
If you are half a continent away from home you don’t have a choice but to take a hike across a terminal. With a layover your airline scheduled you for. Google maps says it’s half a mile/900 meters from Grand Central to Times Square. and takes 12 minutes. Railfans might get all woozy with whatever you have in mind for Sunnyside but normal people won’t.
The question is whether Sunnyside can position stations for each commuter railroad so that can be interlinked with service roads and walkways; similar to an multi terminal airport is. For service roads, Secaucus is an example as they built the aerial turnpike exit to minimize interfering with a freight yard and the very active passenger rail lines. For a walkway, Sea-Tac has a 780 foot aerial walkway that allows planes to go under to taxi to their gates.
The road network for the inner core of metropolitan area hasn’t changed much in a 100 years when the population of Queens started to grow rapidly from less than 1/2 million. The opportunity for rail is to carry more passengers through Manhattan as traffic and tolls have impacted flow of people within the core. To use as an example, could NJTransit trains make a stop to connect to LIRR for Jamaica bound service and to the IBX for MN Westchester service. Both of these locations could support airport services, where it may make more sense for luggage wielding passengers to make their transfer in less busy Sunnyside.
Finally, bringing passengers to Sunnyside includes tying into the street grid as that is what the Manhattan terminals used to provide. Taking the tubes included shuttle buses to GCT for New England connections. Greyhound passengers could arrive to Manhattan and continue on rail for points east and south.
The main point of putting people on a train is that they don’t use automobiles.
People from New Jersey and beyond have been able to change to a train to Long Island, in Manhattan, since 1910. They’ll be able to change to New Haven line trains there soon. And Hudson line trains someday. They can go to Jamaica now and take Airtrain to get to JFK. Woodside is closer to LaGuardia than Sunnyside is…. you are imagining things most people wouldn’t do.
“you are imagining things most people wouldn’t do.” You are likely right.
I’m reacting to a few things. Manhattan seems to be transformed into the famous New Yorker cover. It’s created time and money barriers that are impacting the bridge and tunnel people. Rail hasn’t replaced the pass-through from 6 mid & lower Manhattan bridges and tunnels that funnel through 2 tunnels to access other parts of the metro area or beyond with close proximity to Rt 95 & 80. Instead, vehicle traffic goes around Manhattan overwhelming these areas with traffic.
Some of the plans highlight college cities quite far apart. NYC has had high interaction between people just outside Manhattan. This included commuting college students from northern NJ that would go to the NY college as many were closer, including Hofstra was a similar drive as a Rutgers commute. This activity likely led to these students evolving into Manhattan office workers and living in commuting towns. European rail benefits as most students need to commute into large cities to attend a university. There should be a comparable plan with shorter, more commuting trip distance that attracts and moves younger passengers.
Highly centralized Penn Station plans discuss moving MSG. Shouldn’t their activity be group with evening & weekend passengers they attract? I cannot envision any other company committing the dollars that MSG does to bring people to their events. Therefore, the risk of impacting these passengers seems like something that can/should bog down plans to expand Penn Station.
Reacting to the above, my thoughts move to a decentralized approach to make improvements with train facilities. Stamford achieves higher passenger numbers as the station is essentially connected to RT 95 and has enough room for buses to pick and move passengers to nearby commercial zones. To achieve many Stamfords, there seems to be a missing solution for when a station is 1/2-1 mile away and 1-2 miles away from highway or some bus transfer in order to have corresponding capacity to accomodate trains with 1,500 passengers.
Thanks for your response. I lack any detailed knowledge for any realistic solution. For items that seem off to me, I’ve been highlighting things with a different approach that may have value or not. I look forward to reading more about how plans for Penn Station evolve.
People on trains are blissfully unconcerned about automobile traffic, where to park or the cost of gasoline or tolls or insurance or repairs or registration…
If someone wants to get from New Jersey to Long Island or vice versa, by train, they can do that now. They have been able to do that since 1910. And that the train happens to pass by Sunnyside is a tidbit railfans are interested in.
If either of them, Long Islanders or New Jerseyans, want to go to Madison Square Garden or Radio City Music Hall or anyplace else in Manhattan they don’t have to stop in Queens to do it. Or have the train run through to either.
Could be farther, Denver’s central midfield concourse is ~1km long so 500m walk to end gates AFTER you reach the concourse.
But airplanes take you at 80% the speed of sound over mountains and oceans, which trains can’t do, certainly no train at Sunnyside. Airplanes are used for journeys of 4-12+ hours, which makes the walking time a marginal consideration. Commuter rail trips are usually an hour or less, for which the 10-15min to walk 800m is a significant penalty. And while airports have these long connections, they are universally disliked, with every ticket website offering a “non-stop only” button despite higher prices, and airports put significant resources into improving the experience for connecting passengers.
Finally the nature of airplanes is that they are wide (wings!) which limits gate spacing and drives up walking distance. The nature of trains is that they are narrow and one can easily follow another. Thus the objective for train transfers shouldn’t be 800m but 8m – i.e. cross-platform.
NY has already failed at cross platform transfers twice: at Secaucus (where the Erie lines should have been re-routed to come parallel with the NEC in a Penn-plat-Hoboken-plat-Penn arrangement) and Jamaica (where the opening of ESA should have been coupled with a Manhattan-plat-Atlantic Term.-plat-Manhattan layout so passengers from any branch could reach Penn, GCT, or Brooklyn without using escalators).
Don’t bother doing Sandcastle’s suggested overlay, it’s not a worthwhile idea.
Secaucus should have been designed so people are able to go directly from Hoboken platform level to NYC platform level instead of having to going up and down an extra flight to transfer through the mezzanine level, but I can’t fault NJ Transit for not having parallel platforms when the lines are fully perpendicular.
You may be viewing this too much from an airline service and long distance. Perhaps, replace the movement of people within a large tract of land from airport to a mall or stadium. Both of these handle high volumes of people where most park or are pick-up nearest to the road network they use due to the high mobility of individuals within these structures.
Air & rail have some similarities as both need to keep their passengers separate from their field/yards. An airport without sufficient runways will need added time for take-offs and landings. Since rail transfers would benefit from the frequency of high capacity trains, could a rail yard long straightaways be an effective place for this occur to minimize impact on Manhattan bound passengers. It’s the unused capacity and incremental use of train and its crew to make 1 or 2 stops into another commuter rail’s territory that seems to have some unrealized value. Secaucus Loop would need to be built to support corresponding service by LIRR & MN, whereas access to their rail networks seems significant for a state continues west and north of the city.
NYS has unique circumstances that impacts traffic patterns. Cornell runs daily bus service to to their NYC campuses, where the bus has to transverse the midtown gridlock. With in-state tuition, residency requirements for large number of jobs, other NYS-specific programs etc, bringing rail to a location with effective highway access for such buses could add train passengers for the typical lightly loaded return legs.
My background is telecommunication and a parallel I sense is rail advocates are pushing for voice-only telephone switch architecture. The Manhattan grid was the ‘switch’ for most of its history as it efficiently moved people and goods E, W, & N. Internet is a decentralized architecture that saves time when not having to travel to a centralized facility. Commuter rail is the backbone with the highest capacity to move volumes of people. If it moves passengers 80-90% of the way, shouldn’t that be considered successful in an age when people have smart devices that tell them when to detour or if they should wait for a bus, walk, or take an Uber? Hence, the need is to make large rail facilities more accessible to many forms of access technologies to serve a larger percentage of the population.
The success of the Manhattan grid was copied by its neighborhoods E & W of the island. Secaucus Junction is studying adding a busline over the Boonton line while the Turnpike exit looks as if it’s pending a connection to Manhattan Ave with the overpass solution implemented a mile north at Secaucus Road. These neighborhoods as well as those in Eastern Queens, and NW Brooklyn are more likely have people reside that may need to go to New Brunswick frequently and Hempstead occasionally or vice versa.
minimize impact on Manhattan bound passengers.
Having them stop one more time in Queens impacts them. People can already change trains in Manhattan.
Malls and stadiums are destinations where people are planning to spend an hour or many hours, so the 10-15 min walk from parking lot isn’t as much as a factor. Even then the distance from the edge of the farthest parking lot to the Mall of American is only 500m, and the vast majority of the parking is withing 150m. Adding 10-15 min in walking time to the middle of a trip is entirely different.
“incremental use of train and its crew to make 1 or 2 stops into another commuter rail’s territory”
Here is your fundamental flaw. There should be no such thing as “another commuter rail’s territory.” If your goal is to get Jersey commuters into Long Is. or vice versa, the way to do it is how Alon wants to, by introducing through running so passengers do not need a transfer at all, let alone a transfer that requires walking hundreds of meters. As Adirondacker said, if you are going to transfer, no reason not to do it in Manhattan, where the train is stopping anyway, to serve actual passenger destinations, not just connections, and will be stopping longest due to passenger load, making connections easier while not making most people’s journey’s longer.
“My background is telecommunication”
If you are applying anything about telecoms to transit you need to stop. The fundamentals of telecoms (signal/noise ratio and entropy) have no equivalent in transportation; people and goods are discrete physical quantities that are either moved or not, there is no “noise” effect by which a train just doesn’t arrive to deposit its passengers, nor any sort of Huffman/Shannon coding by which three people getting off a train can become five people on the platform. Telecoms can achieve multiplexing via techniques like polarization that have no way of being realized in transportation; a rail line (or a road lane, or a runway) is inherently a singlechannel medium and always will be.
There are nine branches on either side of Penn Station, ten if you add in Metro North. 90 percent of people will be changing trains because the train at their suburban station doesn’t go to the suburban station you imagine they want to go to.
“There are nine branches . . . 90 percent of people will be changing”
No, because demand is not evenly spread across all stations. The likelihood of someone in Jersey to go to Mattituck is low, the likelihood to want to go to Jamaica (with subway connections all over east NYC) or Mineola, or Babylon, or Valley Stream, is much higher, which is why these stations have ridership 10-100x other smaller stations. Each of these major stations is also served by multiple branches (all nine in the case of Jamaica, Woodside, etc.) which means it is much more likely that a given passenger will board a line that through-routes to where they want to be. Will some people have to change, yes, but not as many as you think.
Same in the other direction, Newark, Hoboken, etc. are vastly larger destinations that the tails of the NJT rail system and see many trains from all over. If you through-route a Long Island to Hoboken passenger only has to change once at Secaucus, instead of changing at Penn to a train so they can get to and change at Secaucus again.
You can’t have cross platform transfers between three destinations.
It’s hazy what NJTransit has in mind for Secaucus. Someday in the future there will be cross platform transfers from Hoboken trains and Penn Station trains on the lower level of Secaucus. Or could be, it’s hazy what NJTransit has in mind.
“You can’t have cross platform transfers between three destinations.”
Sure you can. You can have trains to A & B serve the left side of the platform and to C serve the right; an A-B “cross” platform transfer doesn’t actually go all of the way across, you get right back on the train that was behind the one you got off.
Or in my Penn-platform-Atlantic Branch-platform-Grand Central example for Jamaica, a passenger on a Penn bound train wanting to go to GCT waits for an Atlantic Branch train to arrive, and then walks across it to the platform where the GCT train will pull up to. If your frequencies are high or your connections timed it involves effectively no extra time to walk across an extra 11m of train and platform while all three trains are waiting with open doors for people to make connections.
If you schedule the Grand Central train and the Penn Station train to arrive at the same time at the same island platform they can walk across the platform without waiting. Without jogging down the platform to where the much shorter train to Brooklyn is berthed. Pesky reality intruding. the platforms at Brooklyn are shorter than the 10 and 12 car trains going to Manhattan.
Ridership is much lower than it was before the pandemic. Someday, in the future, there will be tooooooo many trains to have trains to Brooklyn loitering around on the Spanish solution track.
But people don’t only want to go to GCT & Penn. Some of them want to go to Brooklyn. Brooklyn trains are not that much shorter, and if they berth center of platforms then at worst people at the far end of the Manhattan trains only walk a few cars, no jogging required. Except if you make that connection you soon learn to board the middle cars at your origin and have no extra walk at all.
With my arrangement (not truly Spanish solution) everyone gets to walk across a platform or two without waiting, not just the GCT to Penn connections. Everyone getting an easy walk is better than some getting an easy walk.
Jamaica currently has 12 tracks (with 4 more yard like tracks to the side) but there are 4 tracks to Penn, 2 to GCT and 2 to Brooklyn. It doesn’t matter how busy you get, you will never have more trains stopping at Jamaica than the terminals can handle, so there will always be room for a Brooklyn shuttle to meet other trains cross platform. Plus if you are that busy there will be enough passenger load to Brooklyn that the trains will come and go frequently, no loitering required.
If you have trains to and froing from Brooklyn frequently they can’t to and fro to Manhattan on that track. What part of “too many trains” is difficult to understand?
Be careful about airports. They have some good ideas for transit, but they also have some bad ideas. Do not take the bad ideas just because there are good ones. Transit should be show up, buy a ticket, and go. People should regularly plan their trip from home to the station so that the doors are opening as they get to the platform. Running to catch you train should be a thing – it lets people spend an extra 30 seconds at home. (of course not everyone can run). That would be insane on an airplane. People plan to wait half an hour once they get past security at the gate, and often wait 5 hours in an airport when switching planes – I hope we make trains transfers better. An airplane needs to run full (or nearly full) to make money. Trains have different economics and we should start adding more trains anytime one gets 70% full. As such train stations should not have large waiting rooms and thus there is less distance to walk even though they serve more people.
Still, moving sidewalks and trams could be useful in large stations. However stations generally shouldn’t get that large in the first place.
I believe the minimum commercial justification for an extra train assuming spare capacity is much lower than 70% full unless we are talking a 2 car train.
Very US East Coast centric which is great but there’s hardly anything about the West Coast on this site. I’d really like to get your take on two big projects out here; San Jose BART extension and the Caltrain/HSR extension to Downtown San Francisco dubbed “The Portal”. One is costing 12 billion and the other clocks in at over 8 billion! It would be interesting to read why Northern California is so expensive while they’re able to build the Purple Line extension in LA for under half of these prices per mile. I’d also like to understand how it’s possible that the HSR project can ever expect to complete tunneling at anything remotely approaching reasonable costs when these two projects are coming in at over $2 Billion a mile. Seems completely unsustainable to me and the whole edifice should come down. Just generally understanding how San Jose decided that 48 foot diameter tunnels would be a good thing would be tremendously interesting.
I outsource my takes on the Bay Area to Clem Tillier and Richard Mlynarik. As I understand it, BART to San Jose is bad all around, and DTX is the right idea (“send Caltrain to Downtown SF”) executed extremely poorly.
The costs in LA don’t seem lower than in SF to me? They’re lower in residential neighborhoods of LA than in Downtown SF, but that doesn’t mean much. LA more broadly has a problem of building the wrong projects more than the Bay Area, which to its credit didn’t build BART to Livermore and is electrifying Caltrain (at extremely high cost).
I just read today that LA Metro was finalizing the Sepulveda Pass options with the heavy rail options for 14 miles of tunneling at $10.8B. Still a chunk of change but less than the San Jose VTA BART debacle with a third the tunneling. It seems like there’s a real disconnect with the two parts of the state. I still can’t believe that BART made the right choice with respect to Livermore even though someone else has taken up the torch on that idiocy.
US West Coast report here: Everything is terrible and everything getting far worse.
Good news is that industrial civilization is unlikely to survive more than a handful more decades.
Bad news is that we’re taking nearly all life on the planet with us.
A $12 billion BART line to disused industrial site in Santa Clara is symptomatic of why. Humans just aren’t rational enough, and seemingly unlimited (seemingly!) resources are incinerated as quickly as possible by the very worst sort of humans for the very worst reasons. We blew it.
Would you be willing to elaborate on the good and bad news (or link to a write-up)? Whether you mean that the West Coast contributes to the events in some disproportionate way, or that developed civilization is foreseeably doomed in general (and thus the USWC being put out of its misery is in some sense incidental), this sounds interesting.