Public Transit Subsidies and Efficiency
A few days ago, Streetsblog covered a new study about the impact of transit subsidies on efficiency. Transportation economics research is skeptical of operating subsidies to public transit, arguing that it incentivizes waste. In contrast, the new study argues, the opposite is the case: systems with more subsidies are more efficient. In reality, this is a bad study – trivially and uninterestingly wrong. The real question of interest is not whether it is saying something – it isn’t – but why it is getting any positive press among transit advocates. The context here is important: non-technical advocates, having given up on building good transit, instead just want more subsidies for operations, as the costs rise (bus service being labor-intensive), with scant interest in outcomes like ridership.
What’s in the study?
The study, by Funk, Higgins, and Newmark, is a regression among the top 15 American metro areas, using data from 2016-9. Among those regions, higher subsidies to public transit correlate with higher efficiency. Efficiency is measured as average vehicle occupancy, regardless of whether the vehicle is a train or bus (but trains are calculated on a per-car basis, following NTD norms). Subsidies are measured per capita.
By Funk-Higgins-Newmark, New York has by far the most transit subsidies in the United States: the region subsidized public transit operations across all agencies by $444.50/capita in 2019 dollars. In contrast, regions that have rounding-error ridership were stingier: Dallas averaged $124.20/capita, and Phoenix $97.20. New York has much higher efficiency measured by vehicle occupancy, and secondary transit cities like Boston and San Francisco have lower efficiency than New York and higher than the no-transit Sunbelt cities.
Except that all they’re proving is that cities with higher transit ridership have both higher vehicle occupancy (partly due to higher crowding, partly due to real efficiency, because they run more trains and not just buses) and higher subsidies per capita. To switch to raw 2019 NTD data just because it’s easier to explain: the MTA, across all sub-agencies recorded in the NTD’s top 50 database linked above, spent $12.381 billion on operations in 2019 and earned just $6.359 billion from fares, which works out to somewhat more than $400 per capita in the MTA service region – but those $6 billion of subsidies covered something like 30 billion p-km and 4.6 billion unlinked trips, working out to $1.3 per trip. Even taking into account that unlinked trips are fake news (they double-count people who transfer between subway lines, even within the system), the subsidy per ride is on the on the order of $2/trip. Dallas, in contrast, spent $568 million on operations, got $66 million in fare revenue, and carried 69 million unlinked trips and 706 million p-km. Far from stingy, Dallas spent $7.28 on subsidizing each unlinked bus or rail trip. Houston likewise spent $5.65/trip and Phoenix (buses only) $4.33.
At no point does the study try to establish that if Dallas quadruples its transit subsidies, it will be able to raise its transit ridership by the factor of 67 required to match New York per capita. A snapshot regression of 15 metro areas has no chance of having enough statistical power to establish anything on the margin. The literature review is negative on transit subsidies, finding that they are associated with higher labor spending (for example, through reluctance to innovate in labor-saving technology) and with spreading service-hours too thinly at too low a frequency. To the contrary, all available research suggests that an increase in Dallas’s transit subsidy to match New York will just get wasted; ridership will increase, but so far below the increase in subsidy that the per trip subsidy will skyrocket even more.
In other words, the higher subsidy in New York per capita just showcases that a larger share of people in the New York region ride public transit, and therefore even a relatively low per-rider subsidy can amount to a hefty subsidy per resident. This is not at all surprising; by the same token, polities with larger numbers of schoolchildren spend a larger proportion of their economy on education, which says nothing about how well-funded the schools are (for example, Israel has a rather high education spending as a percentage of GDP, but low spending per student). Thus the study is not just wrong but also boringly so.
So why is it getting any positive press?
American advocacy and subsidies
For years, American transit advocates have been looking into the idea of federal subsidies to transit operations. Traditionally, these are not allowed, except in very small cities with even less relevant public transit than the systems of Dallas or Phoenix; instead, federal funding only goes to capital construction. In the Streetsblog piece, Kea Wilson writes about this connection to advocacy for federal subsidies; I’ve seen it from talking to advocates, who kept complaining, essentially, that federal subsidies require some clear piece of infrastructure to be built and that’s too constraining.
As corona hit, these efforts grew dramatically, since in an emergency it was valuable to inject cash into the systems to prevent long-term closures; then, as ridership hasn’t quite returned (it looks like 70% of pre-pandemic levels as of late 2023; in Berlin, with large reductions in fares, it was 95%), advocates started agitating for more subsidies, without much of a clear goal, certainly nothing related to outcomes. Instead, the demand is to have buses and trains run just so that cities can say that they’re running them. When such advocates say what they’d like to do with the money, it’s, in my experience, always about inputs, never outputs; one said that light rail trains should have a second crew member working as a train attendant just to make passengers feel safer.
In contrast, when I see advocates demand subsidies for concrete ridership-related improvements, it’s not really connected to any demand for federal subsidies. I don’t know what Riders Alliance thinks about federal subsidies to operations, but in its Six-Minute Service campaign, which in its opinion requires some additional state subsidies (and in mine and in that of ETA pays for itself on the subway), it talks about how it’s such a small increase in subsidy relative to existing ones, and doesn’t directly ask for federal subsidies. When it’s for something this specific, advocacy organizations feel confident asking for money directly.
So the belief that subsidies to operations help efficiency, based on a boringly wrong regression, is there in support of something different – in support of wanting subsidies with no clear goal, other than “fund transit.” It’s not really about frequent service, the most valid use of additional operating funds. It’s certainly not about capital extensions that reduce future operating costs, which are favored under the current regime. It’s about spending for its own sake.
Pedestrian Observations 
Thank you for bringing this efficiency topic to my attention. I’ve wondered though whether raising taxes and fees on motorists–parking, bridge tolls, licensing, fuel tax–with direct transfer to train, bus, and station improvements and operational expenses can raise ridership to help system also better pay for itself. Also, where is effort at improved train and bus operations thru coach and bus WiFi and TV monitor of social media advertising of type FB and Google use to raise their billions of dollars?
That’s pretty much exactly what NYC’s upcoming congestion charge does – tax motorists and transfer directly to transit. It’ll provide a natural experiment to answer that (at least for a place that has good transit).
I believe the bridge and tunnel tolls into Manhattan have cross subsidised transit for years.
Yes – this is the origin story of the MTA: previously the bridge and tunnel agency was independent (and run by Robert Moses) and spent the surplus tolls on more construction, but in the 1960s, with growing elite distaste for Moses and with public transit operating costs rising to the point that subsidies looked absolutely necessary, the state created the MTA, to use the toll revenue to subsidize the subway and buses.
Advertising revenue is a rounding error for transit agencies, and can on the margin make service worse if the entire bus is wrapped in an ad so less light from outside gets into the bus.
As per https://content.tfl.gov.uk/annual-report-and-statement-of-accounts-2022-23-acc.pdf rents and advertising is 5% of fares revenue. It’s small, and certainly if you are detracting from the ridership experience it is bad, but I wouldn’t call it a rounding error.
Advertising is broken out on its own further down in the report so advertising is 3% of fares revenue.
how much overhead is there on ads? Sales isn’t free. Nor is the time to put ads up and take them down.
I know what you mean by advertising on outside of bus. I forgot about that. What I’m referring to is free WiFi service in the bus or train coach, and ads on monitors that may also display basic train progress information. Having WiFi on train is very convenient, and contrasts dramatically with inconvenienced solo commuter driver stuck in heavy traffic with hands gripping a steering wheel. Perks help sell service. Airline industry knows this trick well.
I think the flaw in this article is that it doesn’t differentiate between fixed and variable cost aspects to running public transport.
For train based public transport this would be the trains themselves, the staff on board the trains, the maintenance of the trains, the diesel and electricity used to run the trains and any other costs directly related to running an extra marginal train.
In some cases the variable costs are even lower than that – for example it appears based on timing that the TGV from Paris to Barcelona goes back over the border to Perpignan in the evening and back to Barcelona in the morning, so for those runs the marginal cost would merely be the difference between going straight to the Perpignan deport and going first to Perpignan station as well as any staffing that doesn’t apply to a train running without passengers. In that case if that TGV averaged a dozen or even fewer passengers that would be more than enough to justify an early/late in service run from Barcelona to Perpignan.
On the other hand there are a bunch of fixed costs related to keeping a given railway line open at all and fixing any time or weather based wear and tear to the track and signalling etc.
In the UK aside from the sleepers I would have thought pretty much all trains cover their variable running costs but outside the express trains and the London commuter services they typically don’t cover all of the fixed running costs.
If in some city in the US there is a rail corridor with a half hourly peak service and little enough freight that that could be extended all day from a timetabling perspective then the induced ridership would be high enough to cover the marginal costs of running those extra services in the medium term.
The American talk about federal subsidies to operations is never about intercity rail (which is siloed away in American planning and regulations – for one, it does get subsidies) but about buses and occasionally light rail in auto-oriented cities. I have seen some advocates who push for federal subsidies complain that the federal government subsidies the construction of light rail lines that are then run every 12 minutes off-peak, but fundamentally, the main problem with (say) DART is not frequency but everything else about it, like land use around the stations.
12 minutes off peak is decent service.
If I was in charge I would like to improve branch line and urban service, and if you could get it to 12 minutes off peak I would consider that good enough in almost all cases.
12 minutes off peak for a bus service in the single family suburbs is decent service that is good enough. If you are in something denser than that you should be running better service. Any transit on dedicated right of way (all trains, bus lanes…) should have service every 5 minutes all day, and every 30 minutes at night when doing maintenance (designing dedicated lanes so you have keep them operating while doing maintenance is tricky).
Service every 10 minutes means you can get rid of the spare car, but unless you are poor the “bread winners” will drive (unless traffic or parking is a problem). That might be good someone who hates transit or really wants to show their are “green”, but most people consider their time valuable and hate waits. Transit needs to be brought to ever 7 minutes or less wherever possible – that is the level where people will start to choose it even if they can afford a car. Saying anything less is just hostile to people and feeds those who oppose transit.
Of course running frequent service is expensive. I understand why it often cannot be afforded even though it is needed.
There’s plenty of bus routes in London or Singapore that are only roughly every 10 minutes.
Normally what happens at that point is that you get two routes serving a stop that go to different destinations.
@Matthew Hutton there are a lot of bus routes in the world running at 10 minutes or more. Running a transit is expensive and costs generally scale with frequency and so most transit agencies simply do not have the budget to run more frequent service. This is often the best compromise they can make: it allows running service to more places that riders might want to go which is an important consideration.
I would not call such service decent though. Everyone riding a bus/train that comes that rarely has had the experience of getting to their stop/station just as the bus/train is leaving and so they have a long wait for the next. (often extra stressful as they have promised to be someplace on time and now they know they are late). Everyone in that situations dreams of a world where they can just drive their car – things like: no traffic, plenty of free parking, enough money to afford a car, pollution free cars, self driving cars (not everyone has the same considerations of why they take transit so the above is pick and choose what applies and I likely have missed something)
For a train it is even worse – you have paid for tracks and are paying for track maintenance, yet you are not even using them. If you don’t have enough demand to run 5 minute service all day, then just run a bus in mixed traffic on a regular road. (most roads do not have heavy traffic, where you do separated bus lanes or trains make sense – but then you should also have enough demand to run 5 minute headways all day)
For metro systems we have the technology to run trains fully automated and it has been proven to work in the real world for more than 20 years. This greatly decreases the costs of operating trains with high headway. It needs investment in infrastructure to pull off.
Many regional rail lines are only run once every hour. But bustituting them would all but eliminate ridership because buses do not have a top speed of 160 km/h as many rail lines do.
If we take your approach, single track rail lines should not exist at all – and yet they do, including in places like Switzerland that know how to run a railway…
Many cities are stuck with stupidity in their system because someone in the past did something that we now know is wrong. (sometimes they should have known, sometimes they didn’t know what we know now). If your city is stuck with such things, then you need to do the best you can until upgrading that to modern standards becomes the highest need.
Regional lines should run much more often than every hour. People sometimes get calls that their kid is sick and they need to get home now. People sometimes get caught in a conversation while they are leaving and miss the train. Get them home when they want to get home. Or if they are running late some morning let them be 5 mintues late instead of 50 hour late.
If you are running a long distance intercity train then you get by with hourly trains. For long trips people are already making lots of plans and so this isn’t a very spontanious trip, even if it is they will accept a long wait since the total trip is long. However if you do the math you discover that with reasonable lenght trains you don’t get enough ROI to build the line unless you have enough demand to run 3 trains per hour. This 3 train per hour long distance train is the only place where you should even think about running single track, 3 trains per hour only has a positive ROI assuming extreem cost control and so timed overtakes make sense.
For every intracity train do not build single track lines. Build two tracks with pre-planned schemes so that every section of track (including in a station) can be closed for overnight maintencance while the you operate reduced service for whoever happens to be working late.
Again, many cities are stuck with something different. You have to deal with the world as it is not as it should be. However for anything new don’t build something stupid. If you can justify the costs of a train then you can justify doing to with enough frequency to be just as good as a car (and for longer trips better because of speed)
A service every 20-30 minutes is “much better” than hourly service – which is of itself much better than 2 hourly service.
Looking at the rail finance data for the last year in the UK, one operator (east anglia) was profitable, and 3 (Chiltern, Avanti West Coast and LNER) had a 10% subsidy or less.
Mostly those operators are serving each destination with a train every 20-30 minutes – with peripheral routes seeing less service.
Out of them east anglia is probably profitable as it has new FLIRT trains and a largely overhead electrified network.
I bet Chiltern is held back by its London local trains that it has to run but can only run hourly with its current stock, if the line was electrified even just to High Wycombe that would be enough to turn the tables into profitability.
Data is from https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/statistics/finance/rail-industry-finance/table-7223-franchised-passenger-train-operator-finances-by-franchise-latest-year/
Nuremberg U-Bahn built a single track section between Ziegelstein and the Airport. Which limits frequency to ~ 6 tph and reduces schedule legibility a lot.
In fact, in the past they felt the need to give the trains terminating short of the airport a different line number from those going all the way (U2 vs U21).
But the city was in a budget crunch back then and felt the need to cut cost. As a matter of fact the airport (half owned by the city anyway) paid what would otherwise have been the city’s share of the construction cost to get that section built at all… And while usually all new sections of track go a significant distance beyond the station to allow space to store trains, the wall at the end of the tracks comes almost immediately after the platform, which means the trains have to be extra slow coming into the platform.
But still way better overall than having a bus instead.
On the other hand, up until 1996 (when they shut down the tram to Ziegelstein) they could’ve just extended the tram instead, but then 10 minutes is the usual headway of the tram (in theory, with the new lines introduced in December it’s often a five minute headway in practice) https://www.vag.de/presse/aktuelle/fahrplanwechsel-am-10-dezember-neue-strassenbahnlinien-10-und-11-der-vag-nehmen-betrieb-auf
@Herbert
why is a train way better than a bus? Trains are a little nicer to ride on, but that isn’t about train vs bus, but acceleration, roadway maintenance and other factors that are not actually about the vehicle even if they correlate strongly.
@Matthew Hutton
Service every half hour is what I consider minimum acceptable for intercity service. It sucks for a user – the only sane way to handle it is watch the clock and where the vehicle is then make sure you are at the stop/station 5-10 minutes early (the more reliable the vehicle is to your stop/station the less padding you need) if you need to arrive on time. This is a large waste of time, but you can make it work, and it might still be better than your car for getting to work – but for most other tasks it will not be acceptable so you will need a car.
As for profitability, did any of those systems need to buy land and build the track? I’m not up on how the UK franchised service, but I know at least most of those tracks existed before privatization and I doubt the costs are a factor in profitability. (the tracks may well be nearing 200 years old, and so the question isn’t relevant until you want to expand). That you can run bad service and still make a profit isn’t a surprise if you don’t have to honestly account for the capital costs (and the line may not work out at all if you had to account for todays costs to build it no matter what service you run)
Remember, if you have an existing system you have much different constraints than something you are building new. There are a lot of systems that I’d consider a bad design, but they are not worth the cost to make right and since they exist they are useful to run. This is a sunk cost in economics: they exist all over and are full of fallacies if you try to consider them.
I remain convinced that for new intracity trains, if you will not run 5 minute all days, and 30 minutes all night, then you don’t have enough demand to pay for the costs to build it.
@henry – the Bicester-Oxford line was completely rebuilt using passenger fare income to run a service only every 30 minutes.
People bought cars in the first place because there were 4 trains a day on rural branch lines and the bus service was run for the benefit of the drivers not the passengers.
And they now go by car because journey times are half that by public transport.
But DART (to follow up on that example) *does* have a frequency problem – the current peak headway for each line is every 15 minutes, and 20 minutes off peak. Interlining helps a bit as you get into the core, but there are long stretches with just one service in operation.
I agree with you in that this study is garbage.
I do not agree with your assertion that “fund transit” is not a clear goal, considering the ongoing wave of “fiscal cliffs” throughout US transit agencies and considering that historical underfunding is a large component of transit’s long legacy of failure in the US. The nation’s capital has a transit agency which has never been funded and thus spends half of its time reporting comical amounts of deficit and begging for funding infusions to avert disaster, which it gets every other year in the form of bailouts that are always purported to be “one-time.” It has its own problems with how it chooses to spend money, to the point that abolishing it completely was a legitimate position to take for several years in the late 2010s, but even the successor organization that would have been chartered to replace it would have required more funding to come from somewhere.
It’s easy to categorize closing a deficit as “spending for its own sake,” and indeed, an organization like the New York MTA which loses $4.60 for every dollar it takes in should not unconditionally get the $3 billion annually it’s asking for and should be forced to get serious about controlling its awe-inspiring levels of inefficiency and waste. However, even though there’s likely $2 billion annually worth of fat to trim off of the MTA, that still leaves them in a position of needing $1 billion that would not produce any tangible improvements and yet is still very much necessary.
The point is that federal funding is not going to make any of these agencies more efficient. To the contrary, the money will be wasted, just as every regular source of subsidy to the MTA going back to the formation of the agency in the 1960s has been. If the agencies want to be efficient, they can ask for capital funding that will permit them to run more efficiently – things like driverless operations, or (more on mainline rail) buying track geometry machines to speed up maintenance. They choose not to, and advocates instead push for more funding without a clear goal in sight.
I see the current push for operations funding in car-centric US cities (eg the San Francisco Bay Area) as a path dependency thing.
Certainly, the right thing to do would be to increase housing near transit heavily to refill the spare capacity there and in the offices, and to change road priorities by turning more vehicle lanes into bus lanes. Though those things are happening slowly, they’ll be a lot harder to make happen if there isn’t existing service and ridership to demand them. I’ve already heard “why are we putting bus lanes on that avenue if the bus is only going to run every 15 minutes?” and “If you cut the hills bus we should cancel the TOD at the rail station; you studied *increasing* buses to justify this and people will have no choice but to park.” If there’s no additional funding there will be no bus ready when people say “ok you’ve done all this upzoning and traffic is awful; it’s time to widen the road.”
Yes, the place we’re at with transit ridership and subsidy in the US is pathetic, but that’s more a result of the greater attractiveness of driving than high marginal operations cost. That won’t change without a stronger consistency. For now, we may have a chance of successfully asking for regional/state funding, to start to match the high priority we give to roads for cars.
Outside of NYC you see ridership and transit subsidies often being dominated by buses. This is particularly true in places in America like LA and Texas where there isn’t a strong legacy rail transit system from the era before widespread car ownership. Generally the people who can’t afford to buy a car can’t afford to live in walking distance to rail transit either, and don’t have jobs downtown. So they take the bus. The dense housing near stations where it exists often has many lifestyle “greens” who tend to be people in their 20s, often enjoy transit to go drinking or to events, and appreciate the aesthetics of transit rather than particularly needing it for their daily commute.
In other parts of the world, buses need less subsidy because they are packed with many standing passengers, but this is rarely the case in the U.S. Since American transit buses tend to have mostly empty seats and are quite labor-intensive, you often have fares covering maybe 10% of operating costs in many transit systems. Though private sector intercity buses are doing better than ever, with more competition keeping fares reasonable without any subsidies. It’s usually much more cheaper than Amtrak, particularly for the Northeast corridor. Since they can run full double deckers, they can earn money more easily than transit buses.
To be fair if you are saying a bus costs $20/ticket to transport someone a couple of miles then your bus costs are out of control.
In the UK outside London we have had fully private buses – and while they haven’t been super successful a subsidy of 1/3 to maybe 1/2 would be more than sufficient to make most of them work commercially.
U.K. buses probably run more full than U.S. buses on average. The US on average has more car ownership and use as well as lower density. Some of our transit systems might be able to further optimize procurement, maintenance, signal priority, bus lanes, stops, and other things. But many of our bus systems that are on the lower end of cost per mile/hour also have fares covering around 10% of operating costs because the buses run mostly empty.
In many parts of the NYC metro area you have private-sector “dollar vans” and “minibuses”. Unsubsidized private sector buses can work even in the U.S. where there is sufficient demand.
https://projects.newyorker.com/story/nyc-dollar-vans/
Regardless of efficiency, without more subsidies transit will disappear in most American cities or become a barebones lifeline for the poorest residents. What exactly will Alon recommend to prevent transit from collapsing entirely across the country?
And more broadly, the goal of running a transit system isn’t to maximize expenses. It’s to get the most people moved around in the most efficient way. (Well, also safe/comfortable/etc., but you get the idea).
I’m from Toronto, and one of the reasons I really like our system is that it works well enough that it doesn’t need all that many subsidies, compared to most other comparable systems on this continent. Pre-pandemic, we funded like 70% of it from fares, and only 30% from general revenues of the government. That’s something like half the subsidy ratio of the New York system, which is especially impressive given that we’re not just much smaller, but also less dense and have a less established subway network.
This is not a reason why the TTC is worse than the MTA, like you might think if you treated subsidies as your goal – it’s a reason why the TTC is *better*.
The original sin of American cities is not a lack of transit funding (or spending) but a lack of density around the existing transit. If American cities embraced building significantly more dense commercial + residential spaces along the existing transit funding issues would be significantly better. But instead, the country is frozen in a stasis of zoning and conservatism.
No, it is an issue of funding and an issue of spending. American cities have no problem building and in many cases overbuilding whenever they choose to, even in places dominated by surface parking lots, and these buildings come packaged with infrastructure improvements for the automobile user. Transit, though it is certainly wasteful, is no more wasteful than any other part of American policy.
However, transit is unique in that its sins are magnified, amplified, and wielded in efforts to cut bone and muscle in the name of “trimming the fat” to where, though I agree with a lot of Alon’s criticisms and put forth that funding the MTA unconditionally is a mistake, refusing to fund it and demanding operational fixes make up the deficit is not going to result in six minute service, advancement in technology, or any other kind of improvement. It’s going to result in the MTA cutting itself while loudly lamenting that it had no choice because its ransom demands were not met.
Am I happy to be negotiating with hostage takers? Will I celebrate throwing another $3 billion into a black hole? No, not really. I’ll still advocate for giving them more money inspite of how personally dirty it makes me feel because not only have they taken themselves hostage, but when half the mainstream political landscape talks about transit reforms, they don’t mean efficiencies that would allow more transit to be delivered for less, they just mean cutting it to minimum viability. And unless you’re willing to grab both keys and unlock the glass case covering the giant red danger button labeled “terminate absolutely everybody” then there is no other option but to capitulate now and hope to install improvements later.
And to be clear, I was in the camp of people living through 2010s WMATA and calling for the federal government to hit the button, burn the charter, fire Wiedefeld and install an FTA overseer whose first action was “fire everyone else all the way down to the night shift janitors.” I am not there yet with Lieber and the MTA. But if you wanted to make the case that I should be, that’s the only other realistic path forward besides giving them more money.
The flaw with Alon’s thinking sometimes is that they aren’t always great at taking complexity into account.
I think given the low complexity of the second avenue subway where there are is only one interchange station in phase 1 and 2 and passenger numbers are respectable but not massive that it really is very very expensive compared to its peers.
I suspect if Labour in the UK wins the next election and wants to increase state capacity that some civil servants will need to be forced to take early retirement because they aren’t good enough – and I think that New York is very much in a worse position than that.
Well, as I said, I agree with a lot of their points – just not this one.
And I don’t think it’s necessarily about complexities so much as it is about addressing the fact that nothing exists in a vacuum – certainly, I’d prefer for transit not to be wasteful or for it to at least be far less wasteful than it is in 2024 USA, but the reality of the situation is that organization before electronics before concrete requires both a willingness to invest in all three of those things (or at least, the two of those things that don’t end in ribbon cuttings) – and a landscape that won’t permit (and in particularly backwards thinking regions like the deep south actively encourage) organization to shoot its own kneecaps out in response to threats that it might otherwise be made to run better.
Given the choice between getting the 2024 MTA for $7 billion of annual subsidy or $10 billion of annual subsidy, of course I would choose the option that costs less. And given the choice of spending $3 billion to completely overhaul signaling or $3 billion to extend a lavish and overwrought subway further along 125th Street, of course I am picking signaling.
But given the choice between wasting $3 billion or losing 30% of what service exists, I’ unfortunately going to have to pick wasting the money, and the reality is that no amount of press about how 30% cuts aren’t necessary if X Standards or Y Modernizations or Z Marginal Improvements happen is going to actually cause XYZ to happen and a 30% cut to be averted. The only thing that can avert that cut is giving them at least $1 billion (which can, should, and must be pared with a contingency that they find $1 billion of operational savings without cutting a single trip from the schedules) – or taking the whole thing down and starting nearly from scratch with just a single FTA Overseer and the seized assets of what once was the MTA.
I don’t think the problem is with the civil servants being bad so much as with there not being enough of them to plan things in-house. TfL has a large in-house staff to oversee operations and they do a very good job, but there isn’t a large enough body of permanent professional engineers, planners, and architects to be able to oversee consultants properly (note: they use consultants to assist even in Spain, but the public-sector engineers are in charge).
With the various UK projects the issues around gold-plating the stations, the excessive speed on HS2 and the lack of sensible community relations with HS2 and other non-London projects are all things that a small but good team could easily tackle. Now sure the civil servants moving on every 2 years and their cultural aversion to quid-pro-quos make those issues worse. But I don’t feel you need a lot more staff to solve them.
I do think that if you want to move beyond the point where I consider costs to be “good enough” towards the sorts of costs that you desire then almost certainly a larger in house team would be needed as you would be looking at making lots of 1% gains.
Speaking of non-London projects, do these ever use TfL as a public-sector consultant?
Probably not as it’s London. And London is the enemy 😜.
But seriously a lot of the London projects are high traffic and complex so there aren’t necessarily learnings for the rest of the country – and if you don’t have good people locally then you won’t be able to differentiate what is useful to learn from London.
Also the London projects that are more similar to the rest of the country, like the Barking Riverside extension, seem to be pretty costly for what they are. That is £325m which seems pretty damn high for a 1.5km new line with 4tph and some adjustments to 4km of line with 2-4tph plus freight on it.
Honestly much better for the provincial cities to learn from provincial France such as Lille.
People in provincial France hate Paris, but still use RATP as a public-sector consultant for metro construction.
There is a difference that the French have built a lot more suburban extensions to the metro since world war 2 than the London Undergound that has basically built none.
That said the rest of the country could learn from the DLR, London Overground and for more rural services the Chiltern main line perfectly legitimately – and they haven’t done so enough.
And the riverside extension isn’t even good. It should be underground so you can go under the river with a further extension.
Is there anything stopping them from building a bridge over the river to extend the line further? I.e. is there significant and relevant boat traffic and how high are clearances on that river generally?
A swing bridge might be an option. But otherwise it would need to be pretty high.
Don’t know how high however.
As high as this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartford_Crossing#Queen_Elizabeth_II_Bridge ?
Certainly at worst as high as that. Perhaps lower clearance.
There is other public transit than rail and buses.
When San Francisco reintroduced ferry service in 2013 from Oakland to SF, the estimate was “…for every $14 round-trip ticket sold, the public will be kicking in a subsidy of nearly $100.”
A new investment is now to try to operate green, electric ferries (SF is getting federal $22 million for this. About $16 million for the ferries and $6 million to update the docks.).
Tangentially: are you aware of any useful collections of subsidy / farebox recovery data for European systems? Especially ones that also describe what is included in the calculations.
For example we (Helsinki region) include all rolling stock and depot costs, also capital, in operating costs. For our subsidy percentage we also include 50% of infrastructure capital investments and all infrastructure maintenance, which I consider a bad idea, but is hard to change.
I’ve seen some German numbers but never in a format that lets me exactly compare. Zurich and Paris both have public data with these numbers, which I think include depreciation.
My notes from Zurich from 2015 first say approximately 40% subsidy with costs including rolling stock and infrastructure maintenance, but not new build projects. And then another person said for the whole ZVV that income covers 58,7% and within the city of Zurich 74%.
For the Helsinki region (HSL) current subsidy is about 41% for operations and overheads including rolling stock and depot capital costs, but no infrastructure costs.
I prefer not to treat infrastructure as a subsidy when we don’t treat infrastructure for other traffic modes as a subsidy. We also have no direct user charging for other modes at the moment.
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