Local and Intercity Rail are Complements
An argument in my comments section is reminding me of a discussion by American transit advocates 15 years ago, I think by The Overhead Wire, about the tension between funding local transit and high-speed rail. I forget who it was – probably Jeff Wood himself – pointing out that the argument in 2008-9 about whether the priority was local transit or intercity rail didn’t make much sense. There are separate questions of how to allocate funding for intercity transportation and how to do the same for local transportation, and in both cases the same group of activists can push for a more favorable rail : car funding ratio. Jeff was talking about this in the sense of political activism; the purpose of this post is to explain the same concept from the point of view of public transportation connectivity and network effects. This is not an obvious observation, judging by how many people argue to the contrary – years ago I had a debate with Noah Smith about this, in which he said the US shouldn’t build high-speed rail like the Shinkansen before building urban rail systems like those of Japanese cities (see my side here and here).
I’ve written about related issues before, namely, in 2022 when I recommended that countries invest against type. For example, France with its TGV-centric investment strategy should invest in connecting regional lines, whereas Germany with its hourly regional train connections should invest in completing its high-speed rail network. It’s also worthwhile to reread what I wrote about Metcalfe’s law for high-speed rail in 2020, here and here. Metcalfe’s law is an abstract rule about how the value of a network with n nodes is proportional to 
The combined point is that whenever two forms of local, regional, or intercity public transportation connect, investments in one strengthen the case for investments in the other.
In some edge cases, those investments can even be the same thing. I’ve been arguing for maybe 12 years that MBTA electrification complements Northeast Corridor high-speed rail investment, because running fast electric multiple units (EMUs) on the Providence Line and its branches instead of slow diesel locomotive-hauled trains means intercity trains wouldn’t get stuck behind commuter trains. Similarly, I blogged five years ago, and have been doing much more serious analysis recently with Devin Wilkins, that coordinating commuter rail and intercity rail schedules on the New Haven Line would produce very large speed gains, on the order of 40-45 minutes, for both intercity and commuter trains.
But those are edge cases, borne of exceptionally poor management and operations by Amtrak and the commuter railroads in the Northeast. Usually, investments clearly are mostly about one thing and not another – building a subway line is not an intercity rail project, and building greenfield high-speed rail is not a local or regional rail project.
And yet, they remain complements. The time savings that better operations and maintenance can produce on the New Haven Line are also present on other commuter lines in New York, for example on the LIRR (see also here, here, and here); they don’t speed up intercity trains, but do mean that people originating in the suburbs have much faster effective trips to where they’d take intercity rail. The same is true for physical investments in concrete: the North-South Rail Link in Boston and a Penn Station-Grand Central connection in New York both make it easier for passengers to connect to intercity trains, in addition to benefits for local and regional travel, and conversely, fast intercity trains strengthen the case for these two projects since they’d connect passengers to better intercity service.
Concretely, let’s take two New York-area commuter lines, of which one will definitely never have to interface with intercity rail and one probably will not either. The definitely line is the Morristown Line: right now it enters New York via the same North River Tunnels as all other trains from points west, intercity or regional, but the plan for the Gateway Tunnel is to segregate service so that the Morris and Essex Lines use the new tunnel and the Northeast Corridor intercity and commuter trains use the old tunnel, and so in the future they are not planned to interact. The probably line is the LIRR Main Line, which currently doesn’t interface with intercity trains as I explain in my post about the LIRR and Northeast Corridor, and which should keep not interfacing, but there are Amtrak plans to send a few daily intercities onto it.
Currently, the trip time from Morristown to New York is around 1:09 off-peak, with some peak-only express trains doing it in 1:01. With better operations and maintenance, it should take 0:47. The upshot is that passengers traveling from Morristown to Boston today have to do the trip in 1:09 plus 3:42-3:49 (Acela) or 4:15-4:35 (Regional). The commuter rail improvements, which other than Gateway and about one unfunded tie-in do not involve significant investment in concrete, turn the 4:51 plus transfer time trip to 4:29 plus transfer time – say 5 hours with the transfer, since the intercities run hourly and the transfers are untimed and, given the number of different branches coming in from New Jersey, cannot be timed. High-speed rail, say doing New York-Boston in 2 hours flat (which involves an I-95 bypass from New Haven to Kingston but no other significant deviations from the right-of-way), would make it 2:47 with a transfer time capped at 10 minutes, so maximum 2:57. In effect, these two investments combine to give people from Morristown an effective 41% reduction in trip time to Boston, which increases trip generation by a factor of 2.87. Of course, far more people from Morristown are interested in traveling to New York than to Boston, but the point is that in the presence of cheap interventions to rationalize and speed up commuter rail, intercity rail looks better.
The same is true from the other direction, from the LIRR Main Line. The two busiest suburban stations in the United States are on 2000s and 10s numbers Ronkonkoma and Hicksville, each with about 10,000 weekday boardings. Ronkonkoma-Penn Station is 1:18 and Hicksville-Penn Station is 0:42 off-peak; a few peak express trains per day do the trip a few minutes faster from Ronkonkoma by skipping Hicksville, but the fastest looks like 1:15. If the schedule is rationalized, Ronkonkoma is about 0:57 from New York and Hicksville 0:31, on trains making more stops than today. I don’t have to-the-minute New York-Washington schedules with high-speed rail yet, but I suspect 1:50 plus or minus 10 minutes is about right, down from 2:53-3:01 on the Acela and 3:17-3:38 on the Regional. So the current timetable for Ronkonkoma-Washington is, with a half-hour transfer time, around 4:45 today and 2:57 in the future, which is a 38% reduction in time and a factor of 2.59 increase in the propensity to travel. From Hicksville, the corresponding reduction is from 4:09 to 2:31, a 39% reduction and a factor of 2.72 increase in trip generation. Again, Long Islanders are far more interested in traveling to Manhattan than to Washington, but a factor of 2.59-2.72 increase in trip generation is nothing to scoff at.
The issue here is that once the cheap upgrades are done, the expensive ones start making more sense – and this is true for both intercity and regional trains. The New York-Boston timetable assumes an I-95 bypass between New Haven and Kingston, saving trains around 24 minutes, at a cost of maybe $5 billion; those 24 minutes matter more when they cut the trip time from 2:24 to 2:00 than when the current trip time is about 3:45 and the capacity on the line is so limited any increase in underlying demand has to go to higher fares, not more throughput. For suburban travelers, the gains are smaller, but still, going from 5:00 to 4:36 matters less than going from 3:21 to 2:57.
Conversely, the expensive upgrades for regional trains – by which I mean multi-billion dollars tunnels, not $300 million junction grade separations like Hunter or the few tens of millions of dollars on upgrading the junction and railyard at Summit – work better in a better-operated system. Electronics before concrete, not instead of concrete – in fact, good operations (i.e. good electronics) create more demand for megaprojects.
At no point are these really in competition, not just because flashy commuter rail projects complement intercity rail through mutual feeding, but also because the benefits for non-connecting passengers are so different that different funding mechanisms make sense. The North-South Rail Link has some benefits to intercity travel, as part of the same program with high-speed rail on the Northeast Corridor, and as such, it could be studied as part of the same program, if there is enough money in the budget for it, which there is not. Conversely, it has very strong local benefits, ideal for a funding partnership between the federal government and Massachusetts; similarly, New York commuter rail improvements are ideal for a funding partnership between the federal government, New York State, New Jersey, and very occasionally Connecticut.
In contrast, intercity rail benefits people who are far away from where construction is done: extensive bypasses built in Connecticut would create a small number of jobs in Connecticut temporarily, but the bigger benefits would accrue not just to residents of the state (through better New Haven-Boston and perhaps New Haven-New York trip times) but mostly to residents of neighboring states traveling through Connecticut. This is why there’s generally more national coordination of intercity rail planning than of regional rail planning: the German federal government, too, partly funds S-Bahn projects in major German cities, but isn’t involved in planning S21 S15 or the second S-Bahn trunk in Munich, whereas it is very involved in decisions on building high-speed rail lines. The situation in France is similar – the state is involved in decisions on LGVs and on Parisian transit but not on provincial transit, though it helps fund the latter; despite the similarity in the broad outlines of the funding structure, the outcomes are different, which should mean that the differences between France and Germany do not boil down to funding mechanisms or to inherent competition between intercity rail funds and regional rail funds.
Pedestrian Observations 
Drop the I-95 bypass and suddenly the money for the North-South Rail Link is, in fact, there.
Honestly? It does leave kind of a bad taste in my mouth to be advocating for Hartford-Providence. Certainly, I’d have much less reluctance in throwing my support behind the Rail Link instead – as you say, it much more closely aligns with what I actually want.
To respond to the overall message here, I do agree that the real enemy is cars, and that we are all allies in the fight to get a better rail:car spending ratio. I do not agree that this means that advocates for local transit should hold their tongues because of concerns over infighting and I do not agree that pushing for more money to be allocated towards rail in every category requires my complicity whenever that money is spent in ways that are bad – far from it.
Spending money in Boston doesn’t improve things in Hartford.
Intra-city travel (daily commuting, shopping, etc.) always dwarfs intercity travel (look at daily boardings at Penn for Amtrak vs LIRR or NJT), so if your desire is lower overall car mode share/VMT there is an argument that projects like North-South Link should take priority over any long distance rail work.
+1
(+1000000000!)
Richard is generally far more correct than anybody has any right to be but I do want to push back or at least add some nuance to this a bit. Yes intercity trips are far fewer than intracity and urban rail networks when accompanied by a long term desire to allow and promote land use changes are the best medicine, but intercity transport really does produce dramatic vehicular mileage. Let’s use me as an example. It’s 11 miles round trip to my job (by metro, but not relevant here,) however it’s 269 miles from DC to NYC by train. That’s almost 5 weeks of round trip into office every day commuting for me done on one NYC round trip! Obviously circumstances vary enormously but if you want to shift VMT away from cars intercity transportation does have an outsized effect compared to its trip numbers.
This is where I think Alon’s complimentary thesis shines. The trip time for a long islander to dc can be shortened in many ways and even modest improvements to the LIRR can in theory massively shift the calculus for trips to Boston, Washington, Baltimore and Philadelphia away from cars and planes and to the trains. That in turn shifts a big VMT chunk to a really sustainable mode.
…and unless you’re going to NYC at least once every 10 weeks, it was the metro that reduced more VMT and not the intercity train.
More importantly, people do have other reasons to travel besides just “commuting” or “visiting another city.” Your doctor should be accessible by train. Your entertainment should be accessible by train. If you’re looking for other neighborhoods to live in, you obviously should be able to tour them by taking the train. There’s a thousand little reasons someone might want to go 20 blocks uptown or 3 miles down to the road and all these little trips on a functional transit system add up even as remote work causes work-based VMT to go down all on its own.
The nuance here really isn’t all that nuanced – we know what the medicine is for what ails us, and in so far as that shining futuristic HSR train might make the bitter pills go down a little bit easier (and why, again: I’m not necessarily against the California Tokaido Shinkansen but then you had better actually deliver something equal to or better than the Shinkansen on day 1 – and its growing more obvious they have no intention of doing so), we’re not going to be able to avoid the actual fixes forever.
Commuting tends to be almost everyone’s longest regular trip which is why I used it. The point was to illustrate that intercity travel really is a huge portion of people’s overall VMT especially richer people. (This is of course important in a future looking scenario because as people get richer this will become more and more true.) Something like the Tokaido-Sanyo Shinkansen or Paris-Marseille TGV really does remove an enormous amount of car based emissions from the road, and “local rail service is always better for the environment per dollar” is not necessarily an ironclad obvious statement.
(There are other reasons to prefer local rail: equity, economic growth via agglomeration, local air quality, safety)
224-ish from New York to DC and 228-ish to Boston. 450-ish between Boston and DC with New York City almost exactly in the middle.
Commuting might be the longest regular trip, but it is by no means the only daily trip. Intercity travel is not a huge portion of VMT, it is the daily trips to work, school, shopping, entertainment, visiting friends that make up the vast majority of all travel. Transit Hawk is correct that a regular metro users drops their VMT more than a regular HSR user.
https://hsr.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/BLA_App3.2-A_FEIREIS_Sept2021.pdf
No one is saying the commute is the only trip. But you guys really do seem to be underestimating how much vehicle and per kms/miles come from long distance travel. For example take this modeling for CAHSR (feel free to ignore the diversion that’s unimportant.) But it shows interregional VMT as being about 37 percent of intraregional VMT. I would call this a large portion of VMT. Crucially said VMT for interregional only is for the examined regions so the VMT of residents for interregional trips should be somewhat higher. You can find this in tables 2.7 and 2.8. It’s difficult to imagine something like the TGV Sud Est which captures upwards to 70 percent of the total Paris-Lyon travel market not being an enormous contributor to fewer vehicle km/mi.
But you guys really do seem to be underestimating how much vehicle and per kms/miles come from long distance travel. For example take this modeling for CAHSR (feel free to ignore the diversion that’s unimportant.) But it shows interregional VMT as being about 37 percent of intraregional VMT.
…which means, by your own post and your own citation, that the other 63 percent is purely intraregional VMT and therefore nearly 2 miles are traveled locally for every 1 that is part of a long distance trip.
There is a difference between “underestimation” and what I am doing, which is saying that I deliberately am choosing to prioritize the 63 percent of local travel over the 37 percent of long distance travel and consciously rejecting the argument that I should care more for the long distance travelers (and, implicit in the choice to characterize opposition as “underestimation,” that I would if only I considered this set of big numbers and ignored this other set of bigger numbers).
We are supposedly the world’s richest country. We can do two or maybe even three things at once.
…which means, by your own post and your own citation, that the other 63 percent is purely intraregional VMT and therefore nearly 2 miles are traveled locally for every 1 that is part of a long distance trip.
Actually the equation is even less favorable for @N. The CAHSR modeling said that interregional trips are 37% of intraregtional trips, not 37% of all trips. If short distance is 100, then long distance is 37, and long distance is only 27% of all trips (37/137).
What’s more, the CAHSR report said that it expected to capture 10% of the long distance trips by 2040. However, transit can have a greater impact than this locally. In non-transit metros (Daytona Beach, Albuquerque) cars have 90-92% mode share. In high-transit metros (SF, Bos, DC) cars have 70-75% mode share. It should be obvious that 15-20% of 100 is more than 10% of 37, so if your goal is reducing VMT, intercity travel is not the way to do it.
Pollution reduction is a beneficial side effect. The point is moving people without building more airport or highway.
@adirondacker12800
While we can do two or three things at once, we cannot do 100. Right now we cannot even do one rail project anywhere – we lack the expertise as shown by the high costs. Even if we assume reasonable costs, there is only so much we can do and so a transit project competes against things like video games for labor (video games of course need very different skill sets and probably pay more). If we can shift from highway labor to transit labor that is good, but pulling off that shift isn’t easy and even there highway labor has a lot of special machines (read sunk costs) that cannot be reused in rail.
The difference between building a highway and building a railroad is that at the very end one gets paved and the other one gets rails.
Massachusetts can fund NSRL itself if it wants; so far it’s not even willing to wire the Fairmount Line and is instead trying to fuck the chicken of battery trains.
Way back in the recesses of the MBTA archives (which the Wayback Machine has digitized from the Boston Public Library’s collection), there’s an interesting proposal from the early 1970s (yes, from a consultant, but still) – back when Southwest Corridor planning was underway – that suggested extending the existing rapid transit network up to at least the reaches of the 495 route (which made it ambiguous for what was then called the Penn Central Shore Line as to whether it would be up to the limits of the T’s jurisdiction – Sharon – or even further into Mansfield). Granted, the study only focused on peak-hour trips (as was the thing in those days, reflecting North American thinking about commuter rail), and using Blue Line-like operations on the Orange Line, at minimum, leaves one to wonder how the thinking – pre-Amtrak electrification – was for the T to think about doing that without damaging the Canton Viaduct and how they were planning for operations between Canton Junction and Mansfield (or even Attleboro) to actually work when sharing it with Amtrak and Conrail services (as at the time both Conrail and B&M ran the commuter rail services). At least someone was trying to think outside the box.
Now, I know Alon mentioned before with his talk about regional rail how that was the T’s management not understanding what hybrid commuter/rapid transit networks were like, because all they conceptualized was a simple expansion of the subway – but I’m not sure. The original conception of the South Shore Line (now the Red Line’s Braintree Branch) was meant to be a separate line with its own downtown terminal (where that would be is left up to your imagination) and, in design, to me seemed like it would be Boston’s version of PATCO. Both PATCO and the interesting case of the PATH (as a subway line legally treated as a railway) show that similar ideas, translated to US norms, could be possible – and in that thinking, plus the planned idea of a local/express split with Haymarket North (hence the much-derided third track), it leads one to wonder whether a local/express split for the Orange Line (say Needham Heights to Oak Grove local and (somewhere far south on the Attleboro/Stoughton Line without touching Rhode Island) to Reading express would have worked as “a” NSRL and not “the” NSRL (i.e. making the NSRL not a single line but, complete with a ring route around central Boston and the planned pedestrian concourses between some of the main rapid transit stations akin to the Winter Street Concourse between Park Street and Downtown Crossing, as a network of routes). So the idea was there for hybrid commuter/rapid transit service – it wouldn’t be like the Paris RER and S-Bahns that were being developed and expanded across the Atlantic, but it could.
The reason why I bring this up is that, due to the (so far postponed) planned “emergency” service changes to RIPTA’s system due to both Gov. McKee’s budget cuts and a shortage of drivers (which, among other things, would see the bus network within Pawtucket almost disappear completely outside of a few high-frequency services – the #1 and R-Line come to mind – which would be far less high-frequency as a result – which leaves me in despair as I have no other way to get to the new Pawtucket/Central Falls train station, once the cuts are in effect, for as long as South Attleboro remains temporarily closed pending reconstruction for all high-level platforms), I’m wondering if – within the existing arsenal of public transit solutions available – there’s some way to think outside the box to mitigate that problem and experiment with a few things. For example, (most of) Rhode Island could fit within the boundaries of the (by European standards, let alone American) tiny country of Luxembourg. Now, apart from being the birthplace of one of Europe’s pioneer commercial broadcasters which has since become a multinational conglomerate, there is not much that I know of about Luxembourg – except that they have a rail system that is also international by design, as it has connections to BE, DE, and France’s TER network for Lorraine and is primarily owned by SNCF and SNCB. To me, then, there’s basically no difference between local and intercity rail as they are one and the same. Whether or not any of SNCF’s bad practices have seeped over into CFL is immaterial here, as a consequence. The point is that, regarding of the state of its public transit network (and, supposedly it’s not all that great – at least from the news from when it went fare-free), but CFL exists and it somehow works, where “regional” rail is effectively national rail and hence (alongside the international routes from other countries) also simultaneously intercity.
From there, it leads me to wonder – given how RIPTA treats its express buses to the far reaches of the state’s interior much like most of the US treats commuter rail systems (as well as failing to make much more extensive use of its “flex zone” system outside of a few select areas with little to no scheduled service), could there be some lessons here for creating a Luxembourg-esque rail network to parallel/complement the express buses – and then, with the right level of cooperation between Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Gennesse and Wyoming (the owners of the P&W), and Amtrak, to extend that system further into Massachusetts (all, so far, within the existing network) – and then use that to cajole the MBTA to do something about the Providence/Stoughton and Fairmount Lines towards something like what the advocates want? It doesn’t have to be anything super fancy (after all, it’s Rhode Island – those of you who’ve used RIPTA knows what it’s like, as well as how there’s plenty of scope for improvement all over the place, not just in terms of transit but also the politics), but just something functional that gets someone from Point A to Point B and works within the existing bus network, using it as a feeder to reach where the existing rail network can reach (and, with much better system design and funding, could do far more than it is now). If something like the NSRL (even if using the Orange Line to deliver that) already existed in the drawing boards back when the T was new, showing that the idea had been floating around for a while, surely something similar probably already existed in terms of intra-state and inter-state rail service for Rhode Island, whether or not RIPTA runs it?
Rhode Island would rather effectively shut RIPTA down to avoid finding a loose $18 million in their state budget that is all that is needed to preserve even the unacceptably, comically bad current iteration of its public transit “network” and you are asking “if – within the existing arsenal of public transit solutions available – there’s some way to think outside the box to mitigate that problem and experiment with a few things.”
There isn’t. Experimenting with things costs money and worse yet requires spending money on what is definitionally an unanswered question, which Rhode Island has no appetite for. We could spend the next few weeks having a delightful back and forth over regional rail plans and proposals in Rhode Island or bus network redesigns or radical outside-the-box thinking on what transit could be out in New England’s home for, ah, “major opportunity businesses,” but that would really just be a waste of both of our times.
Rhode Island knows what the cure for what ails it is just like everywhere else that local transit is failing or nonexistent: comprehensive reforms to operations and funding, paired with dramatic intensification of existing and low-startup-cost services paid for through a combination of those reforms and redirecting money away from car infrastructure. If you can’t hire enough drivers, you should figure out why that might be and then correct the issue so that you can hire more drivers; if you have a quaint little train station whose parking lot is constantly full 10 minutes down the road from a $44 million parking garage that is constantly empty, you should maybe figure out some way to run trains on the tracks that already exist connecting those two places – especially if your threadbare, incompetently run and woefully underfunded public transit agency is currently wasting lots of its limited resources on a bus line between them. These are not creative solutions. I didn’t need to study Luxembourg to figure them out. I also didn’t have rail and public transit advocates shouting them at me for multiple decades now.
There are no creative solutions. There is only the choice between actually becoming serious about providing transit, or continuing not to be. Rhode Island has clearly indicated which choice it is making.
Running the bus every ten minutes isn’t going to make car owners abandon their cars in places like Rhode Island where there is little congestion and plenty of free parking. The places where car owners a.k.a. rich people, use the bus or the train are places where driving takes longer than transit.
I am not sure this is actually true. Plenty of people who can afford to use the public transport if it is good/cheap enough.
A frequent bus won’t make all car drivers abandon the car, but it is a great step in that direction. Some people hate to drive. Some people think of cars as a tool and so they will switch to the bus if it is convenient and fast. Some people would admit they are too old to drive if there was a useful alternative. When you have served those people well, then we can start talking about how to deal with people who like to drive, have a nice car as part of their self image, or whatever it is that motivates people to drive when a bus is otherwise as good and cheaper.
They drive because it’s faster.
A lot of people drive because there are 5 trains a day and the last one is at 8pm. Or the train is unreliable or expensive.
If you have to wait until the next morning, driving is faster.
I think the entire framing of local vs. intercity rail planning is wrong. You’ve blogged before about the lack of coordination between regional, state, and national rail transportation in the U.S. and elsewhere, but if rail transportation modes (i.e., local/regional/intercity/long-distance) are complimentary–not competitive–then not only should there not be competition for funding between these modes, but rather there should be complimentary funding. If the NSRL in Boston would speed traffic on the NEC and vice versa, then there’s every reason to fund them both more or less simultaneously, not pit them against each other.
I’m not sure if viewing the infrastructure spending competition as between modes–i.e. rail vs. road–is a particularly American problem, and there’s no denying that even a country like China which has loads of capital and lots of reasonable places for investment has to prioritize where and on what to spend, but what I often hear as an American is an opposition between road infrastructure funding and non-road transportation infrastructure, as a basket.
I’m inclined to think that this bundling of all these different levels of rail infra as if it were the same (perhaps with unarguably high-speed projects like CAHSR, Brightline West, Texas Central, and a major Acela corridor investment excepted) is demonstrative of Americans’ lack of understanding of how trains work, treating them as if they had the same narrow speed profile and small bandwidth as road infrastructure. You spend billions of dollars on a freeway widening, and within short order, maybe a decade or less in demographically-growing areas, it’s congested again, whereas e.g., the Tokaido Shinkansen has increased capacity over the years by running longer, faster, more frequent trains along more or less the same trackage as was laid down in 1964, serving metro areas on both ends which have essentially doubled in population since that time.
Trying to paint rail infrastructure projects as if they’re the same kind of zero-sum expenditure as road infrastructure often conceals how much more efficient the former can be than the latter.
The real American problem is massive voter suppression, one-dollar-one-vote, and the overwhelmingly disproportionate political influence of rural, exuban and suburban interests.
Not funding public transportation *of any type* is only one extreme of this. Another is *only* funding useless prestige projects (airport rail links, 1950s style commuter rail serving suburban freeway hellscapes, intercity whatever maybe rail, freeways that will “end congestion”) and *not* funding urban transit which is efficient, cost-effective, high-ridership, high-benefit.
It’s perfectly natural *and correct* to see “competiton between modes” as grotesque misallocation of resources and captial. If you don’t, you’re part of the problem and effectively a “useless idiot” ally of the oppressors. Most US “transit advocates” fall into the “can’t we all get alone” ranks and end up colluding in screwing over what they’d like to think are their own interests. (Words to look out for are “nuance” and “synergy” and “vision” and “compromise” … the compromises only ever go one way.)
The problem with all these theories is that here in the actual existing USA they are in fact very very very much “zero-sum”, with bad, low-benefit, low-ridership projects *always* triumphing over the good. That some urban rail project or some hypothetical suburban frequent S-Bahn type rail service *might* be “more efficient” is *exactly the problem*, and precisely why they are defunded in the very real zero-sum game we are playing here. Nobody wants efficiency!
Yes, but of course, there’s no reason this is necessarily so, and that it’s framed as such is just a way to excuse the crap situation that is things-as-they-are-now. If we “don’t have the money” for rail infra and yet there’s a blank check always at the ready for roads, there’s not really a competition, anyway; nothing but roads was ever seriously being considered.
If it wasn’t obvious, I’m of the converse, “don’t fund a single extra lane-mile of road anywhere in the U.S., ever again for the foreseeable future; put it all in rail” mindset. Not as a means of promoting competition, but as a means of sticking it to all the numbskulls who assert, against all evidence, that car-centric infrastructure is about “freedom”…and in so doing, actually enhancing efficiency
What is inefficiency but luxury by another name? /s
Until we mature out of this antediluvian mindset–not just in word, but in practice–if we ever do, there’s not much hope for things.
the overwhelmingly disproportionate political influence of rural, exurban and suburban interests.
Given that between 67-88% of the US population lives in a rural, exurban or suburban area, wouldn’t you expect them to have the largest political influence?
Lumping suburban in with rural and exurban strikes as more than a little disingenuous. You cannot be a “suburb” without an “urb” to be “sub” of; these are distinctly not areas which are independent of significant metro areas.
I’m talking strip-mall-burbs with gerrymandered voting districts expressly designed to promote policies that oppress and suppress and remove self-government from whatever pockets of relative urbanity exist.
It’s the major political dynamic in the USA, and depressingly metastatising everywhere. ”Populism” for me but for thee. The close-to-50% vote who vote Trump are voting out of hatred of people they don’t believe should have any say at all, or be allowed any nice things at all.
It’s kind of a straight line from “we outlaw the state capital from having bus lanes on any streets” to … Godwin’s law territory, frankly.
One of the better examples of this dynamic is actually with the Bay Area and CAHSR/Caltrain. Electrifying and modernizing Caltrain is a great transit project, and that program (I think?) is needed to support HSR from SJ to SF for the final leg of LA to SF.
You could hardly find yourself a worse “example of this dyanmic”!
Bringing Caltrain out of the 19th century could and should have been done decades ago. Five or more decades ago, really. And it should have been done at well under half the (adjusted-dollar) cost we’ve been taken in for this by the mafia in charge of this “modernization” disaster. This all has less than zero to do with HSR in California.
What the insane California HSR scam is doing, rather, is to completely kneecap (fictional far future, since CHSR isn’t going to happen) Caltrain service and service planning and infrastructure, by making everything beholden to the whims and “standards” of the rent-seeking scam consultants who use CHSR as a funding front. It’s all costs and hugely negative “benefits”.
There’s no “synergy” anywhere, except the one in which local tax-paying yokels get taken in to fund boondoggles at astronomical cost for marginal or negative value. So yeah, it’s great for *somebody* that Caltrain electrification has local political, no matter what the cost, and no matter how shoddy the outcome, and great for *somebody* that they can also plunder “High Speed Rail” tax funding to top up the 100% cost overage, but is it good for transit service and the people who live on the San Francisco Peninsula? Hardly. It’s just another bottomless pit of spending, and that’s *just the way we like it around here*.
Don’t know enough detail so I’m sure you’re right. I mostly used to take Caltrain to work as an intern and I’m happy to see they’ve made progress on electrification/modern rolling stock, but yeah the rest sounds about right.
I don’t think early 20th century European rail travel was anywhere near as good as Caltrain today. I saw the 1937 Norwich timetable and there were like 2 fast trains a day to London each way.
As I mentioned in the “Subway to Intercity Rail Connections” post from a week ago, Caltrain today is vastly better than the ‘Peninsula Commuter’ ever was under SP at the peak of US rail dominance, let alone the 19th century. During WWII when ridership was very high due to SF being a major shipment port from the West Coast to the Pacific Theater, the Peninsula line was running 26 trains per day, commute direction only (no trains south in the morning, none north in the afternoon), with a five hour gap midday with no trains, and the last train leaving between 6-7pm. In contrast Caltrain today runs 104 trains a day, with at least 2 tph in both directions all day (although unhelpfully not always spaced an even 30 min apart) and the last departure at between 11pm-12am.
This is a problem in the UK where electrification consistently has been marketed as a Intercity technology over it being a local transit one. The main electrification projects of the last 30 years Liverpool-Manchester, Cardiff-Paddington pointedly didn’t add any new stations even when going through densely populated areas.
That’s an institutional artefact of British Rail exiling the Southern railways experience to the margins during its founding decade post-1947, in favour the steam-then-diesel loving mainline operators. Furthermore London’s insane number of legacy quad tracks going North of the River has created bad habits about using passing loops i.e. they are set in stone in 1947 you can’t change them, better build an entire new tunnel through the Pennines*. Add in the 1947 planning system making it almost impossible to build new TOD.
*one of the problems of Outer British political and civic culture is how utterly unable to come up with ideas that don’t start in London first.
Liverpool-Manchester is only 30 miles, it is an urban line really, plus that electrification allowed the Edinburgh/Glasgow to Manchester/Liverpool trains to be electric, which reduced the time gap between them and the London-Glasgow trains I am sure.
With the Paddington-Cardiff electrification I am not sure where they should have added stops – baring in mind that in the Oxford area other improvements would be required to support the extra services.
That’s proving my point, the Liverpool-Manchester Line has places for at least 6 new station, plus a desperate need for some passing loops. And you could fund a bunch of those with developer contributions quite easily if you could keep costs in line (a big ask). Esp with all the redevelopment near Regents Retail Park west of Salford Central.
As for Cardiff-Paddington, Cardiff -Newport has 4 track urban corridor that could support 10 new stations pretty easily. Cardiff-Newport has a housing crisis so they could probably really use it. Swindon should have at least 4 more stations along the mainline.
N/b these stations must include passing loops but as I’ve said before the British rail industry thinks those are facts of geography not buildable infrastracture and would rather tunnel under mountains or 4 track to the ends of the earth.
To be fair in Wales further improvements are planned – https://tfw.wales/south-wales-mainline.
With regards to Swindon the question I have is what can be done without involving extra services from Didcot to Oxford where at the very least a new parkway terminus station is required at Oxford to the north.
I know far less about what additions could be done between Liverpool and Manchester so I will take your word for it. Certajnly in my view High Wycombe could support an additional station in the east and west of the town centre, and compared to some of the other mentioned places that is a small town.
People manage to get to and from the airport.
It’s okay to have city center stations and park-n-rides. Intermediate places like Princeton Junction need well staffed taxi stands.
As long as Amtrak continues to control dispatching on the NEC there is very little incentive for the federal level to contribute a penny towards even the “easy” grade separation projects, when they can just delay the commuter trains to their heart’s content. Hunter Flyover is still unfunded even after 8 years first proposed in NEC CIP. The NEC FUTURE plan was the only instance where a modicum of integrated operations was even considered in the 30th Street pulse-hub, but no serious timetabling effort was ever made, and the ultimate scope of improvements in Philadelphia including Zoo will not support simultaneous timed arrivals whatsoever, much less the aspirational 3-4 TPH in SEPTA’s Regional Rail master plan. The fish rots from the head.
the nordmainische S-Bahn as well as the S6-Ausbau Frankfurt-West to Friedberg is part of the Kontenprojekt Frankfurt Rheinmain Plus (a bundle of all sorts of projects including highspeed rail new main bridges and intercity tunnel) and thus planned and executed by deutsche bahn and 90% funded federally
Alon,
Noah Smith and others criticized the wrong problem. We need federal & state leaders to change our Transportation & Electric Energy funding priortiies to prevent this “False Investment Choice” of Local Transit OR Passenger Rail.
Its clear that we need to fix surfaces & bridges for Highways, not widen them to encourage more Vehicle Miles Traveled.
Its equally clear that we must reduce Regional Flights with better Intercity Passenger Rail, not add more runways that enourage sub-600-mile flight growth.
Thomas Dorsey
Yeah, exactly. The point Jeff was making 15 or so years ago was that there’s the question of which intercity transportation to fund (airport expansion vs. highway expansion vs. intercity rail) and which local transportation to funds (highway expansion vs. mass transit), and the debates need to be between modes within each trip purpose rather than between trip purposes within each mode.
a Penn Station-Grand Central connection in New York
I’m not sure if Alon is still following this thread, but if so: Were a Penn-GCT connection built, should intercity trains switch from taking the Hell Gate and entering Manhattan from Long Island with LIRR, to following Metro-North and entering Long Island from the Bronx via GCT. New Rochelle is 31km from Penn via the current route, but would be 28km via GCT including 1.3km of connecting tunnel. 3km at the slower speeds in this stretch (curves along the Hell Gate route are measured in hundreds of meters radius not thousands) should be worth, what, 2+ minutes?
The type of people headed to or from destinations around Grand Central are also the kind who know how to use to the subway. Or a taxi. Not building something costs $0 .
If there is so much demand for New Rochelle, Stamford and Bridgeport there can be separate trains that go through there while the faster trains serve 8 times as many people on Long Island.
All Amtrak trains go through New Rochelle, Stamford and Bridgeport already.
The point isn’t service to New Rochelle, it’s that cutting 3km off of the route to Boston saves I’m guessing 2 min at the slower speeds possible in and around NY (no 300 or even 200 kph through Sunnyside). That’s 2 min off of every trip from NY or south of it to all of New England. If you could save 2 min for every 30km on the NEC you would cut 49 min off of Bo’s-Wash. This isn’t reason to do a Penn-GCT tunnel, but if you do the connection for commuter rail, it’s worth asking if the E River tunnels and Hell Gate are the best intercity route out of NY.
A few Amtrak trains go through Fairfield County. they can continue to do that forever. You aren’t going to do 200 kph in Woodlawn. Or New Rochelle. Or any of the squiggles between Greenwich and New London. Just because someone thought hugging the shoreline was a good idea in 1850 doesn’t mean it’s a good idea today. There’s a nice straight, flat ROW of that serves 8 times as many people, that the government in one way or another, already owns, on Long Island.