What is Incrementalism, Anyway?
The American conversation about high-speed rail has an internal debate that greatly bothers me, about whether investments should be incremental or not. An interview with the author of a new book about the Northeast Corridor reminded me of this; this is not the focus of the interview, but there was an invocation of incremental vs. full-fat high-speed rail, which doesn’t really mean much. The problem is that the debate over incrementalism can be broken down into separate categories – infrastructure, top speed, planning paradigm, operations, marketing; for example, investment can be mostly on existing tracks or mostly on a new right-of-way, or something in between, but this is a separate questions from whether operations planning should remain similar to how it works today or be thrown away in favor of something entirely new. And what’s more, in some cases the answers to these questions have negative rather than positive correlations – for example, the most aggressively revolutionary answer for infrastructure is putting high-speed trains on dedicated tracks the entire way, including new urban approaches and tunnels at all major cities, but this also implies a deeply conservative operating paradigm with respect to commuter rail.
Instead of talking about incrementalism, it’s better to think in terms of these questions separately. As always, one must start with goals, and then move on to service planning, constraints, and budgets.
Planners who instead start with absolute political demands, like “use preexisting rights-of-way and never carve new ones through private property,” end up failing; California High-Speed Rail began with that demand, as a result of which it planned to use existing freight rail corridors that pass through unserved small towns with grade crossings; this was untenable, so eventually the High-Speed Rail Authority switched to swerving around these unserved towns through farmland, but by then it had made implicit promises to the farmers not to use eminent domain on their land, and when it had to violate the promise, it led to political controversy.
Switzerland
Instead of California’s negative example, we can look to more successful ones, none of which is in an English-speaking country. I bring up Switzerland over and over, because as far as infrastructure goes, it has an incremental intercity rail network – there are only a handful of recently-built high-speed lines and they’re both slow (usually 200 km/h, occasionally 250 km/h) and discontinuous – but its service planning is innovative. This has several features:
Infrastructure-rolling stock-timetable integration
To reduce the costs of infrastructure, Swiss planning integrates the decision of what kind of train to run into the investment plan. To avoid having to spend money on lengthening platforms, Switzerland bought double-deck trains as part of its Rail 2000 plan; double-deckers have their drawbacks, mainly in passenger egress time, but in the case of Switzerland, which has small cities with a surplus of platform tracks, double-deckers are the right choice.
California made many other errors, but its decision to get single-deck trains is correct in its use case: the high-speed trainset market is almost entirely single-deck, and the issue of platform length is not relevant to captive high-speed rail since the number of stations that need high-speed rail service is small and controllable.
Timetable integration is even more important. If the point is to build a rail network for more than just point-to-point trips connecting Zurich, Basel, Bern, and Geneva, then trains have to connect at certain nodes; already in the 1970s, SBB timetables were such that trains arrived at Zurich shortly before the hour every hour and departed on or shortly after the hour. The Rail 2000 plan expanded these timed connections, called Knoten or knots, to more cities, and prioritized speed increases that would enable trains to connect two knots in just less than an hour, to avoid wasting time for passengers and equipment. The slogan is run trains as fast as necessary, not as fast as possible: expensive investment is justifiable to get the trip times between two knots to be a little less than an hour instead of a little more than an hour, but beyond that, it isn’t worth it, because connecting passengers would not benefit.
Tunnels where necessary
The incremental approach of Rail 2000, borne out of a political need to limit construction costs, is sometimes cited by German rail advocates and NIMBYs who assume that Switzerland does not build physical infrastructure. Since the 1980s, when investment in the Zurich S-Bahn and Rail 2000 began, Switzerland has built rail tunnels with gusto, and not just across the Alpine mountain passes for freight but also in and between cities to speed up passenger trains and create more capacity. Relative to population, Switzerland has built more rail tunnel per capita than Germany since the 1980s, let alone France, excluding the trans-Alpine base tunnels.
So overall, this is a program that’s very incremental and conservative when it comes to top speed (200 km/h, rarely 250), and moderately incremental when it comes to infrastructure but does build strategic bypasses, tunnels to allow trains to run as fast as necessary, and capacity improvements. But its planning paradigm and operations are both innovative – Rail 2000 was the first national plan to integrate infrastructure improvements into a knot system, and its successes have been exported into the Netherlands, Austria, and more slowly Germany.
Incrementalism in operations versus in infrastructure
The current trip times between New York and New Haven are 1:37 on intercity trains and 2:02 to 2:08 on commuter trains depending on how many stops they skip between Stamford and New Haven. The technical capability of modern trainsets with modern timetabling is 52 minutes on intercity trains and about 1:17 on commuter trains making the stopping patterns of today’s 2:08 trains.
This requires a single deviation from the right-of-way, at Shell Interlocking just south of New Rochelle, which deviation is calibrated not to damage a historic building close to the track and may not require any building demolitions at all; the main purpose of the Shell Interlocking project is to grade-separate the junction for more capacity, not to plow a right-of-way for fast trains. The impact of this single project on the schedule is hard to quantify but large, because it simplifies timetabling to the point that late trains on one line would not delay others on connecting lines; Switzerland pads the timetable 7%, whereas the TGV network (largely on dedicated tracks, thus relatively insulated from delays) pads 11-14%, and the much more exposed German intercity rail network pads 20-30%. The extent of timetable padding in and around New York is comparable to the German level or even worse; those two-hour trip times include what appears to be about 25 minutes of padding. The related LIRR has what appears to be 32% padding on its Main Line, as of nine years ago.
So in that sense, it’s possible to be fairly conservative with infrastructure, while upending operations completely through tighter scheduling and better trainsets. This should then be reinforced through upending planning completely through providing fewer train stopping patterns, in order to, again, reduce the dependence of different train types on one another.
Is this incremental? It doesn’t involve a lot of physical construction, so in a way, the answer is yes. The equivalent of Shell on the opposite side of New York, Hunter Interlocking, is on the slate of thoroughly incremental improvement projects that New Jersey Transit wishes to invest in, and while it has not been funded yet unfortunately, it is fairly likely to be funded soon.
But it also means throwing out 70 years of how American rail agencies have thought about operations. American agencies separate commuter and intercity rail into different classes of train with price differentiation, rather than letting passengers ride intercity trains within a large metropolitan area for the same price as commuter rail so long as they don’t book a seat. They don’t run repeating timetables all day, but instead aim to provide each suburban station direct service to city center with as few stops as possible at rush hour, with little concern for the off-peak. They certainly don’t integrate infrastructure with rolling stock or timetable decisions.
Incrementalism in different parts of the corridor
The answer to questions of incrementalism does not have to be the same across the country, or even across different parts of the same line. It matters whether the line is easy to bypass, how many passengers are affected, what the cost is, and so on.
Between New York and New Haven, it’s possible to reduce trip times by 7 minutes through various bypasses requiring new rights-of-way, including some tunneling and takings of a number of houses in the low hundreds, generally in wealthy areas. My estimate for how much these bypasses should cost is around $5 billion in total. Is it worth it? Maybe. But it’s not really necessary, and there are lower-hanging fruit elsewhere. (One bypass, west of Stamford, may be desirable – it would save maybe 100 seconds for maybe $500 million, and also provide more capacity on a more constrained section, whereas the other potential bypasses are east of Stamford, where there is much less commuter traffic.)
Between New Haven and Kingston, in contrast, the same $5 billion in bypass would permit a 320 km/h line to run continuously from just east of New Haven to not far south of Providence, with no tunnels, and limited takings. The difference in trip times is 25 minutes. Is that worth it? It should be – it’s a factor of around 1.2 in the New York-Boston trip times, so close to a factor of 1.5 in the projected ridership, which means its value is comparable to spending $15 billion on the difference between this service (including the $5 billion for the bypass) and not having any trains between New York and Boston at all.
South of New York, the more Devin and I look at the infrastructure, the more convinced I am that significant deviations from the right-of-way are unnecessary. The curves on the line are just not that significant, and there are long stretches in New Jersey where the current infrastructure is good and just needs cheap fixes to signals and electrification, not tunnels. Even very tight curves that should be fixed, like Frankford Junction in Philadelphia, are justifiable on the basis of a high benefit-cost ratio but are not make-or-break decisions; getting the timetabling integration right is much more important. This could, again, be construed to mean incrementalism, but we’re also looking at New York-Philadelphia trip times of around 46 minutes where the Acela takes about 1:09 today.
Overall, this program can be described as incremental in the sense of, over than 500 km between Boston and Philadelphia, only proposing 120 km of new right-of-way, plus a handful of junction fixes, switch rebuilds, and curve modifications; curve regradings within the right-of-way can be done by a track-laying machine cheaply and quickly. But it also assumes running trains without any of the many overly conservative assumptions of service in the United States, which used to be enshrined in FRA regulations but no longer are, concerning speed on curves, signaling, rolling stock quality, etc. If the trip time between Boston and Philadelphia is reduced by a factor of 1.8, how incremental is this program, exactly?
Incrementalism in marketing and fares
Finally, there are questions about business planning, marketing, segmentation, and fares. Here, the incremental option depends on what is the prior norm. In France, after market research in advance of the TGV showed that passengers expected the new trains to charge premium fares, SNCF heavily marketed the trains as TGV pour tous, promising to charge the same fares for 260 km/h trains as for 160 km/h ones. Since then, TGV fares have been revamped to resemble airline pricing with fare buckets, but the average fares remain low, around 0.11€/km. But international trains run by companies where SNCF has majority stake, namely Thalys and Eurostar, charge premium fares, going exclusively after the business travel market.
This, too, can be done as a break from the past or as a more incremental system. The American system on the Northeast Corridor is, frankly, bad: there are Acela and Regional trains, branded separately with separate tickets, the Regionals charging around twice as much as European intercity trains per km and the Acelas more than three times as much. Incrementalism means keeping this distinction – but then again, this distinction was not traditional and was instead created for the new Acela trains as they entered into service in 2000. (California High-Speed Rail promised even lower fares than the European average in the 2000s.)
Conclusion
There’s no single meaning to incrementalism in rail investment. Systems that are recognized for avoiding flashy infrastructure can be highly innovative in other ways, as is the case for Rail 2000. At the same time, such systems often do build extensive new infrastructure, just not in ways that makes for sleek maps of high-speed rail infrastructure in the mold of Japan, France, or now China.
What’s more, the question of how much to break from the past in infrastructure, operations, or even marketing depends on both what the past is and what the local geography is. The same planner could come to different conclusions for different lines, or different sections on the same line; it leads to bad planning if the assumption is that the entire line must be turned into 300+ km/h high-speed rail at once or none of it may be, instead of different sections having different solutions. Benefit-cost analyses need to rule the day, with prioritization based on centrally planned criteria of ridership and costs, rather than demands to be incremental or to be bold.
Pedestrian Observations 
What about the Metroliners? The Acela is the direct successor for that fast extra-fare business-class service created by Penn Central and taken over and modified by Amtrak. The Metroliner did not run to Boston, New Haven being the most northern destination, where electrification ended till the late 1990s.
Metroliner
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metroliner_(train)
There was coach and parlor car. Metroliner was a parlor car upgrade. fares were complicated. And I vaguely remember there was advance purchase discount too.
http://www.timetables.org/full.php?group=19711114&item=0050
North of New Haven, correct? NYC-DC the ‘Metroliners’ were of course separate trains using dedicated equipment, separate from the other trains, which were not branded like the ‘Regionals’ are today, but various named trains and the NYC-Philly ‘Clockers’. As Acela trainsets were introduced into service, the Metroliner service was scaled down and then ended, except for the brief respite from the issues with the wheelsets that sidelined the Acela sets.
Parlor car service was an extra charge wherever parlor cars ran. And having a sleeping compartment on a train with sleeping cars was another surcharge. The New Haven changed locomotives at New Haven. Like Amtrak does today with the Vermonter. It’s how the through trains made it from Boston to D.C.
The PRR ran New York-Philadelphia expresses approximately every half hour most of the day. Non-stop between Newark and North Philadelphia. They didn’t have names. Skim off NY-Philadelphia passengers that leaves seats for through passengers. On different trains. That may or may not have made stops between North Philadelphia and Newark.
The Metroliners weren’t the first experiment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_(train)
Metroliners were an “all-parlor car” train. Your coach ticket wasn’t good on it. Just like your coach ticket wasn’t good on the Broadway Limited.
No, Metroliners as delivered had both coach and parlor seating. While I did ride Parlor on the first SB run in January 1969,thereafter, I rode coach on the Metroliners. Yes, both had a modest surcharge over previously existing trains which also offered both coach and parlor seating. I also even earlier rode Parlor service on the Congressionals–including Drawing Room Day service. (However, the greater distinction was that monthly punch (44 rides) and flash unlimited rides each month, were good on all but a few PRR LD trains–all Pullman B’way, Pittsburgher, and trains to/from points south of DC which typically also required a reserved seat charge. The flash passes were also valid on PRR commuter trains between Suburban Station, 30th, and N Philadelphia. FWIW, I bought/used NY-Philly flash passes for many months 1967-70 allowing me such conveniences as a weekday evening Muddy Waters concert in Philly and back to NY for decent sleep before work the next day.
As to the B’way, as of 3Dec 1967 when PC savaged passenger services, the real B’way (##28,29 )was axed. The former General (48,49) which carried coaches, and honored the flash passes between N Philly and NYwas renamed the B’way. In all Pullman days, B’way Ltd passengers could not ride short trips such as NY-N Philly.
Citing the August 1965 Official Guide the only trains shown skipping Trenton are the Afternoon Congressionals. and the B’way.
There was a surcharge to use the Metroliners. It’s ahistoric railfans who think all the fares where the same back in the day. Any coach ticket was good on any coach. If the car was a parlor car or the whole train was, your coach ticket wasn’t good on it. It definitely wasn’t good in a compartment.
Supposedly SEPTA still honors your Amtrak ticket to at least Suburban. On commuter trains on the upper level. Not on the Market-Frankford line, the trolley cars or buses.
It shouldn’t be worth it and indeed it isn’t – because the same $5 billion in bypass could instead build a new line somewhere else, be invested into additional trainsets/staff either here or somewhere else, be put towards intercity projects that, to quote your previous post on this particular brand of tension, “could be studied as part of the same program, if there is enough money in the budget for it” – and yes, local municipalities could fund those projects themselves if they wanted to, but they don’t and they aren’t, and there’s a pile of money here with arbitrary stipulations on how it must be spent and an assurance that it is going to be spent.
I, on the other hand, would assert that you can make any number of terrible outcomes palatable by simply first eliminating all the good outcomes and then forcing people to choose between one of several bad ones. Of course, you’d have to continually reinforce that all of the good options are impossible, unfeasable, or unviable.
And I’d also point out that 120 out of 500 km is 24% of the total right-of-way; scale down to just looking at Boston-NYC and it becomes 32%. Replacing 32% (or even 24%) of a right-of-way with a parallel line hardly sounds like an incremental project. It’s also massively out of line with every other project on the list, which is why the alternative of saving 7 minutes for that same amount of money west of New Haven is presented in the form of several more expensive spot bypasses selected to add up to that value.
And I’d finally point out that this article buries the lede. The thing about incremental improvement is that lots of little things added together equal a massive transformative change, yes, but also: you can easily cut even the bottom third of the project and still be left with a transformed rail corridor. Deleting this bypass doesn’t invalidate the rest of the project – why pin everything to its existence?
If you’re going to say the bypass is a waste of money you should name some projects you think are superior ways to spend said money for the same cost, which makes you have to say where you can get the same ridership km or greater for the equivalent cost, or handwaving away the realities of federal budgetary spending where you can find spending with a great cost-benefit ratio.
No, I don’t think it does, actually.
I think unfortunately for your premise, there’s an entire country outside of New England and New England is also much less densely populated than New York City so if your only concern is maximizing ridership then we should shut every other rail project down right now and pour all the money into the New York City subway instead.
But actually, we have a systemic problem. And the answer is to spend the $5 billion on fixing the system, which requires spending it in a lot of different places and in ways that don’t fit nearly so well into the false paradigm you’re trying to push where it has to go into a single mega-project somewhere so we can evaluate which mega-project is the best mega-project before generating a ribbon cutting.
I’m not going to engage with this idea that I “have to” suggest a specific other project, such as the North-South Rail Link, because I’d rather spend the money on 100 little projects instead and there’s far far more than 100 little things that need doing in service of better passenger rail in America, all of which are drowned out by the noise surrounding “HSR.”
NYC already has subways. Most of those people on the subway would be helped more by better service to Boston and DC than more subway service that goes places they never go anyway ( I’m limiting discussion to those who already use the subway, not people who live where there is no subway service but would live near the expansion)
No, most of those people on the subway would be helped more by universal 6 minute service, or an extension that replaces an overburdened bus route, or bus lanes that actually work and get expanded (30 miles of new lanes a year… how’s that going again, Mayor Adams?)
They’d be helped by a competent state agency competently managing the trains they already have and they’d be helped by fitting more services onto the suburban/regional corridors that already exist.
The people who are helped by this bypass are on the commuter shuttles between BOS and LGA and there aren’t nearly as many of them as there are along any given avenue in Manhattan or even on Interstate 95 in New York; it’s just that they’re moving a lot farther and there’s a much prettier ribbon waiting to be cut along the shore line. Or else, they’re in their cars.
And actually, even those people are helped more by a better New York City subway and regional rail system, because the traffic they’re sitting in complaining about for the entirety of their time passing through New York State is about 10% people who might be on Acela 2.0 if it existed and 90% people who might be on a version of Metro-North or the NYC Subway that served them better than the one whose title of “best in the US” is nothing but a damning indictment of how terrible transit is everywhere in the US that a system running multibillion dollar deficits as a matter of course and yet still actively falling apart at the seams can be considered the best at anything other than wasting money.
Sp fair enough you’re not interested in the lack of easy fungibility of federal money, but I think the idea that investing five billion piece meal around the country in 100 different projects making a lot of ridership or ridership km impact is pretty false. You’re talking then about 50 million dollars a project. That’s a few trains, or a couple a sidings, or maybe a little bit of electrification that’s really not going to add up to much because it’s just not going to buy a lot of frequency or very much competitive service. Now comparing it to some transit projects is interesting, and a much tougher question and one that’s currently left largely to Congress to arbitrarily decide.
Who benefits from the bypass is an interesting question. In theory there’s mode shift, but currently there’s so little excess Amtrak capacity between Boston and nyc that almost all the benefits accrue entirely to existing riders, or perhaps riders who shift from planes. Real benefits here require integrated incremental planning to massively boost capacity along the corridor.
You do raise three interesting points I’d like to respond to here quickly.
$5 billion isn’t enough to extend Caltrain ~2 miles to the already built Salesforce Tower train box in San Francisco. That is estimated at $8.2 billion.
There already are six rail tunnels between Manhattan and New Jersey. All of them are at capacity.
Somebody, who knew how to use Visicalc, predicted, in the 80s that there might be capacity problems as early as 2000. It was too conservative, there were capacity problems in the 90s.
$5 billion is more than enough to get that project done if costs are brought under control. Indeed, the $5 billion figure presented for the bypass in question here also assumes that costs are brought under control.
If costs are not brought under control then we go back to another point in favor of the many marginal projects, which is that it’s much easier to swallow a 300% cost overrun on a $50 million project, take the lessons learned, keep the institutional knowledge around, and then all the remaining projects don’t overrun as much. In other words, we keep on failing at low stakes until we learn how to succeed, and we use the momentum built up to snowball into bigger projects from there.
(Or we eat 300% overrun on a single big ticket item and learn “never to try another project like that again.”)
I’d like to take a moment to call out that adirondacker12800 knows perfectly well that “an additional 2 tracks for a total of 6 heading west towards New Jersey” in the context of the entire paragraph means 2 more tracks connected to Penn Station on one side and the existing NEC main line on the other side of the Hudson. He’s deliberately misconstrued the comment in order to score a “uhm well ackshually” about there being 6 tracks across the Hudson today, 4 of which are PATH tracks that haven’t had anything to do with the conversation that is actually happening here since about 1962, because adirondacker12800 isn’t interested in having an actual conversation. He’s mostly just interested in trolling with the occasional brief detours into pretending at conversation or in projecting his own mindset and goals onto others, and he’s about to respond to this comment by accusing me of being the real concern troll here.
I realized you are stunned by the glory of Midtown. That doesn’t change, last time I looked, which was before the pandemic, that the World Trade Center PATH station has almost the same number of passengers at NJTransit does at Penn Station New York. Nor does it change that the PATH trains are at capacity, or were, at rush hour. The Port Authority is spending a billion dollars or so, so the trains on the Newark-World Trade Center line can be extended to 10 cars. The Uptown PATH trains go to Midtown too. Only a block away, at Herald Square, from the amazing awe inspiring spectacle of Penn Station.
Out in the hinterlands the goal is to get everybody to Union Station. This ain’t the hinterlands. In 2080 when they are building new tunnels across the Hudson it needs to be paired up with new tunnels across the East River. Or the poor widdle trains will have to turn around, ruining railfans imagined trips to Walgreens in Woodside from Bloomfield. Unless the trains go to Grand Central. The Duane Reade in Grand Central would probably be a disappointment. The Walgreens in Woodside is probably a Duane Reade too. By 2080 Walgreens may have decided to convert the Walgreens in Bloomfield to a Duane Reade too. I digress. There’s alway CVS.
New tunnels across the Hudson should be paired up with tunnels across the East River. To Brooklyn. Long Islanders changing to downtown trains in Jamaica aren’t in Midtown. It’s a pity they will miss the gloriousness of it all but if they aren’t in Midtown other people can go to Midtown. I imagine every ten minutes on four branches on either side. Close in, where people might want to go someplace-not-Manhattan from their suburb. Express through Brooklyn and Hudson County.
Wedge in two trains an hour so that many many people in Brooklyn can cut 20, 25 minutes off their trip to someplace outside of metro New York by getting on a train to Boston or DC, in Brooklyn.
That’s exactly the shitty line that Amtrak, and Metro North, and LIRR, and Caltrain, and Metra and SEPTA, and WMATA, and … and all of the utter failure losers have been pushing for as long as I’ve been on the planet. ”State of Good Repair!” ”Fixer Upper Railroad!” ”We have to crawl before we can walk.”
“State of Good Repair” is simply a bullshit slogan for “give us unlimited money and we promise not to deliver improved service”. I mean, there are zero consequences for “give us unlimited money and we herp derp herp derp more better herp derp [10 years later] oh yeah, sorry we didn’t improve service as we promised, but you can for sure trust us this time, cross my heart, hope you die”, but sometimes you have to mix it up and go with the straight “money for nothing” pitch, you know, just for variety.
Alon has had some choice and accurate words to say over the years about US “State of Good Repair” non-accountability. It’s just another scam, run by the same scammers, forever and ever. They do apreciate the toil that “transit advocates” do maintain a State of Good Profitability, but not to the extent of actually paying them, because there’s no need to do so.
Oh, I’m well aware of this.
I’ll note here for the record: when I say we need to be spending way more on operations, I try to be very careful to say what I mean: more money needs to go into running more trains. It’s a compromise I’m willing to accept if some of that money disappears into the black hole of inefficiency because honestly I’d rather get robbed by Amtrak than by the political class if I have to pick who is stealing from me and can’t pick “not getting robbed at all,” but ideally, I am with you and I do recognize that the systemic problem we have includes the entire system and everyone employed by it.
The problem is that while we would ideally look at an organization like the MTA and fire about 50% of the people working there tomorrow morning… you know, and I know, that they could then fix their shit and nobody would actually notice that 50% of the fat got cut. Unfortunately, what would actually happen is that 67% of the service would get cut the next morning while Janno Lieber does a “so sad that we had no choice but to do this” press tour to fight for his right to keep wasting literally billions of dollars annually. In that way, we are all hostages.
I advocate for more funding anyway because I sleep easier at night knowing I’m a sucker and a mark than I would knowing that my actions/advocacy, however minor my impacts ultimately are, resulted in less rail service. If nothing else, I’d like to think that acknowledging and accepting that I’m being robbed puts me ahead of the “trust me bro this time it will be different for sure” set.
But yes. I’m aware. And I agree with you.
Switzerland small cities don’t have an excess of tracks. This why they spent 2 billion Francs expanding Zurich Hbf, opened the Prilly-Malley halt to divert 6000 daily users from the dangerously crowded Lausanne platforms, will spend 1 billion to widen Lausanne station by 10 meters, 1.6 billion to add a single track at Cornavin and will lengthen tracks 12/13 in Berne as part of Ausbauschritt 2025.
California doesn’t have either. SF Salesforce terminus has only three tracks, the longest only 235 meter. Going for single high speed deck trains doesn’t make much sense in my opinion.
The Zurich Hbf expansion was the new tunnel, right? I wouldn’t call that adding tracks, even though it did – it’s a through-tunnel, a combo of a second S-Bahn trunk with a mainline tunnel in the mold of Stuttgart 21 except at much lower costs.
Yes, I was talking about the Durchmesserlinie with the 4.8 km Weinberg tunnel, 2 new platforms at Oerlikon and four new Lowenstrasse platforms at Zurich Hbf. Unlike the revolutionary and questionable Stuttgart 21 project, Swiss incrementalism adds platforms. The next project will dig a new Riesbach tunnel and a fourth track at Zurich Stadelhofen.
SF Salesforce terminus has only three tracks, the longest only 235 meter.
Currently Salesforce Transit Center has no tracks, only an underground station box. However, the box is sized to be six tracks, three platforms, with 400m platforms.
I misspoke. The box is sized for three platforms, not three tracks, with a high level platform dedicated to HSR. While the box is 400 meter long, the S-shaped Downtown Rail Extension arrives at a 90 degree angle to the Salesforce terminal along 2nd Street. Given the turning radius of high speed trains, the longest platform will be much shorter than 400 meters.
Given the turning radius of high speed trains, the longest platform will be much shorter than 400 meters.
HSR only needs a high turning radius when moving at high speed. Since trains will not be going 300+kph (or even probably 30+kph) right as they reach the platform, you don’t need a larger turning radius than a regular railway at that point (I think 125 or 150m is planned). The Salesforce TC site is ~440m long, and the station box curves out at the train entrance so that part of the approach curve extends beyond the building footprint. Together with the platforms curving at this end is well, platform length is 400m. See this diagram: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWiU5p9wyqnfMv4tuhWR1DNKw2GlnKvWwTaDZ7pwKqUuRjFfVdNVPvL-54AVW1P-GyxB3P8bCJoGuB2zXSCRpls66YqMjXYprWv7Jy88Dk1rpAZl9lxnstr0BjzhDA2tEhfut8LAigvpBC/s1600-h/ttc_plan.jpg
Is this a terminus or through station?
The current plan is for a terminus station, with trains coming from Caltrain and CAHSR from the south. The plans above show a curved station box at the northeast end that could be used as an approach from across the Bay (at least for some of the track/platform pairs) which could make it a through station in the future. I’m not sure if the station box was built that way or squared off. I’ve heard that foundations for some the high rise development around the transit center blocked off the possibility of sending tracks east across the Bay. But the large Link 21 infrastructure plan/bond being discussed in the Bay Area continues to make reference to a second transbay tube being mainline rail to Salesforce TC, so I’m not sure of the status/ability to make it a through station.
My platform length came from a version of the same diagram with a slightly shorter box at the stub end and platforms restricted to the straight area. I suppose the image you kindly provided is the updated one. Of course high speed trains can go through a 150 m curve at low speed. What is usually impossible is having a high platform (CAHSR platforms are supposed to be 128 cm above the rail) in a such a curve.
High platforms are not impossible on such curvature, they just require wider gaps from the platform edge for clearance. With modern trains having (and requiring for disabled access) automatic gap fillers, this isn’t really an issue.
Modern trains only use finicky gap fillers when dealing with cheaply built antiquated infrastructure (e.g. Yamagata Shinkansen). Building very expensive yet antiquated infrastructure in the 21st century has a “Back to the future” vibe. The comedy flick was profitable though.
the idea that automatic gap fillers are a stupid implementation is strange when if you have a station with two tracks and services that both do and don’t stop there you will need them if you want unassisted boarding by those with wheelchairs or other mobility impairments.
Better service in the NEC benefits the rest of the US though. The better service there, the more people use it, and thus the more voters who see the train working and thus would be willing to support more transit elsewhere (that they might use). Of course we need to know where this 5 billion might be spent instead – depending on details it might or might not be better than any proposed fix to the NEC. In the end we need them all, but we cannot get them all at once so which is the high priority.
Just as a few examples of other things we might spend $5 billion on in service of creating trains that work and encourage support of more transit in the Northeast or elsewhere, in no particular order:
At $4 million per kilometer, electrification of 1250 km of track, (or the entirety of the MBTA commuter rail network without discounting the Providence Line km, plus the Metro-North Waterbury and Danbury branch lines, plus the New Haven to Springfield line, plus Worcester to Springfield, plus the MARC Camden/Brunswick Lines, plus the VRE Manassas Line, plus the main line from Washington to Richmond, with budget left over.)
At the massively inflated rates being charged by CSX for purchase of trackage right-of-way in Virginia ($525 million for a combined 621 km of right-of-way and 359 km of track), acquisition of around 5900 km of existing freight rail right-of-way and 3400 km of existing freight rail track,
Based on the VIA Rail contract for 32 Siemens Venture trainsets at about US$781.5 million, 204 Siemens Venture trainsets (and, for the sake of transparency, it could also buy another 70 Avelia Liberty trainsets at the going rate of $2 billion for 28 of those, but shouldn’t),
Brightline’s press releases tout the 273km Orlando to Miami connection project as having cost $6 billion, so about 5/6 of a Brightline-equivalent (or ~230 km),
You could employ 25000 person-years of highly skilled workers commanding $200,000 salaries, 50000 person-years at $100,000, or 83 million person-hours at $60 an hour,
…or you could save 25 minutes of travel time along the least impactful 120 km of a 500 km running route that, regardless of whether this particular $5 billion gets spent, has at least $10 billion of other projects that are going to be funded regardless.
I suppose they could continue to run diesel trains under the wires slowly turning green. At the very least you have to buy new locomotives that can use the wires you are string up.
At $4 million per kilometer, electrification of 1250 km of track,
There is a good argument to be made that all passenger train routes above 1 or 2 trains per day should be electrified before any other intercity rail investment.
Although after the last few years of inflation, even if you were as efficient as Auckland was with their electrification project, I doubt you would be able to do it for $4M/km. Also, you would need to factor in the cost of new electric locomotives/or EMUs for most routes.
Those are both fair points. I was mainly more interested in looking at each major category of “rail spending” and figuring out what $5 billion would buy in any single bucket or when compared to the most recent rail spending news item which actually opened as a “new line.”
But, yes, between inflation and American inefficiency, the cost is probably now more like $8 million per kilometer and you would realistically include things from each bucket rather than just pouring all $5 billion into something categorically.
That’s what I’ve always been saying though. I want 100 little projects instead of the bypass.
There is a good argument to be made that if you are not running at least 3 trains per hour all day, you don’t have enough demand to be worth the costs of trains at all. Sure if you have legacy track to some small town perhaps you can justify using up the existing track for a train or two per day, but it is hard to justify track maintenance so eventually you should abandon the track. Trucks and buses scale down much better than trains if you have that little demand which is why freight rail is abandoning old track that doesn’t go anywhere.
Which in turn means all rail should be electrified or abandoned. However there is a lot of the can’t justify maintenance anymore track around that since it is paid for they may as well use while it can still handle a train, and not wanting to keep a diesel engine on each of those for the few times they use the track is why the rest of freight doesn’t electrify.
As a benchmark (feel free to correct me), Caltrain has electrified (in round numbers) 100km of track for $2.4 billion, or $2400M/100 = $24 million per km.
California seems to enjoy wasting money to be fair.
calmod includes both rolling stock and a botched signaling upgrade, but yes it was not a well delivered project.
Henry to be fair it’s difficult to see the rest of the US seeing it that way.
I know, I live in Iowa, and people here are asking for Amtrak to Iowa (Amtrak goes through Iowa, but it stops in small towns an hour’s drive from what passes for a city in Iowa, they want a better route). They get mad when I explain that Amtrak doesn’t make sense here until you can get Minneapolis to Atlanta via frequent high speed rail (CAN is key: the distance makes flying the better choice, but the network should make it possible with a few transfers) When the network is that extensive we can start to talk about areas like Iowa where you need a great network in order to make network effects work out. Instead they want their train now even though it means terrible service that only train enthusiasts would use.
They get mad because you’re wrong, Henry.
They get mad because they’re not looking to go to Minneapolis or Atlanta, and as you say, if they are then they’re flying out of DSM.
They get mad because they can see that Amtrak doesn’t serve them and are asking for service that works for them and here you are lecturing them about how they need to be shown an example of HSR working in the Northeast before they can believe in trains.
They get mad because your priorities are perfectly and exactly backwards, and because you’re caught in the same trap of logical fallacy that drives every other fever dream HSR initiative, the fallacy that because regional services today are all bad to nonexistent that this must be some inherent quality of non-HSR American railroading when it’s actually the culmination of decades of terrible choices that we just can’t seem to stop making, Henry.
Des Moines doesn’t need a train to Minneapolis or Atlanta or even Iowa City. Des Moines needs more trains from one end of the city to the other one. That’s my point. That’s why I’m mad.
That’s why the past 24 years of my life has taken me from a supporter of HSR to an outright enemy of it.
I’ll agree that Des Moines needs to start a subway system now (Stockholm was about this size when their started theirs in the 1950s). Spending all our limited resources on improving local transport probably is the best bang for the buck. However that is a different discussion.
Most people in Des Monies don’t think of trains at all. They are not mad, they don’t care at all. (or if they do they are happy to drive up to Boone where they can ride a steam train for a 12 mile round trip run by a local historical society – trains as practical transport isn’t on anyone’s mind.) The Republicans who scream about waste don’t mention trains as an example boondoggle, Democrats never mention trains at all. Nobody thinks about trains.
There is one tiny exception: a few trains enthusiast who go to the various public model train events and put up posters advocating for a Amtrak route through Des Moines. (they belong to the model train club, they are not just sneaking in). They are not asking for a metro system, they are asking for Amtrak. They somehow think that Des Moines will get more than 3 trains week and it will not be a stop at 2am.
Megabus has daily trips for $50 each way, often more than once a day – but that isn’t good enough they want a train. The regional operator of the current tracks is in favor of the idea (or was last I checked, management may have changed) – but in part because they know their track alignment has a lot of sharp curves and so speed are very limited – they are hoping for federal money to fix some of that.
These are the people who yell I’m an idiot for saying Des Moines needs HSR from Minneapolis to Atlanta (not a direct route, there would be at least 2 transfers). If we don’t have full HSR the entire way for that trip, then the national rail network just isn’t good enough to generate enough riders to make the Chicago to Des Moines train (even a low speed train on existing track) worth while.
But again, I won’t disagree that local transit is a better focus. However I’m addressing if we do national trains.
Because metro Des Moines doesn’t have any congestion, there is plenty of free parking and almost everyone has a car or at least access to one.
But that’s just it – it’s not a separate discussion. Rail corridors, like interstate corridors, can be used for many different types of travel. The tracks that exist today running through Des Moines could get you from one end of it to the other just as easily as they could get you to Omaha or Chicago and the interstate highway does the same thing.
Except, when you insist on building a 300+kmph rail corridor for HSR, you’re making a deliberate choice to leave out local travel; you don’t build 300 kmph tracks for trains you intend to run at 180 tops and you don’t plan on running trains at 300 if your two terminals are under 150 apart. You might, at some point, in that everdistant “tomorrow,” add local tracks next to your express tracks and backfill in local service, which is one of the avenues that leads to the sorts of “compromise” that only ever seems to “compromise” away the local portions of any given project.
Conversely, a compromise that demands HSR die-hards give something up might be to build that regional rail line through the center of Des Moines, then start extending it until you hit Omaha, and then – after we’ve run out of higher priority corridors and built a sufficient demand for it – come back and convert your modest regional line into your stellar HSR train. I’d even be willing to compromise as far as tying the local service with its local stops to the creation of a new Amtrak Midwest corridor service between Des Moines and Omaha. The railfans can even give it another fun name like all the Chicago corridors have if they want to, I won’t get mad.
No, what will make me mad is the insistence that it’s HSR or nothing or that the “important” part of our new Amtrak Iowa service is actually that it gets people between Des Moines and Omaha so it’s fine to just have three trains or one train per day to start and to start axing all the stops in town except for one which we will manage to spend $400 million on and which will mostly just be a mall, complete with mall parking garage. Maybe we’ll even put in a rental car center!
Transit Hawk:
Actually I’d say that it is you who has themselves lost in hopeless arguments. Individually they are all logical points but also hopeless.
By the 1970s France’s national rail network was losing ridership, poorly used rural lines were closing, not surprising given their excellent autoroute system was approaching completion. They took a big gamble on building the first European HSR between Paris and Lyon. All over Europe finance ministers were derisive (and the UK where Maggie was appalled) , even though it was the rail bargain of the century. Of course it was a wild success from day one*. All the controversy only made the success more obvious to everyone and from that moment on, there was no real resistance to building out the system so that all of provincial France would be served by TGVs (and even that miserable outpost of faded empire, London!).
Building that one HSR line turned rail travel around in a rail-fan nation with ridership increasing and TGV being the only profitable part of the network. Indeed just recently a decision has been made to upgrade the rail line Toulouse to Castres, population around 42,000 and the largest town in France without direct access to a motorway. This isn’t economic but it represents another turning point in which roads lose out to a better, cleaner alternative. The A69 extension project was where Greta Thunberg, with a lot of others, confronted the police and tear-gas (Feb 2024).
………..
*It was also the correct project, linking the nation’s two largest cities and at a distance (≈450km) that really benefited from HSR. It also shows how incrementalism wouldn’t work. This line cut out Dijon (whose politicians had to be bought off) to make a more direct route but before too long the Lyon-Dijon and Dijon-Paris routes were upgraded to TGV service which didn’t involve much work–however if that had been the first thing they did, ie,. incrementalism, it is doubtful that the 2 hour fastest route Paris-Lyon would have been built. I suppose it is arguable but I doubt HSR or modern rail would have achieved the massive boost it did, such that today a rural line is getting an upgrade rather than being closed forever.
Here’s the thing. France took their big bet in the 70s and actually built a train line. Japan wanted faster trains and invented the world’s first high-speed rail in the form of the Tokaido Shinkansen. Those two examples and all the other examples of singularly transformative HSR lines, besides generally taking place in a historical context where rail was merely declining – and not as thoroughly dead as it is in 21st century USA – are all generally united by the fact that they actually got built. There was controversy, sure. It took 9 years to get a shovel into the ground in France, yes. And as you say, “All over Europe finance ministers were derisive (and the UK where Maggie was appalled) , even though it was the rail bargain of the century.”
But it got built. Once the first shovel actually went into the dirt, the line opened its “initial operating segment” equivalent within 5 years and its phase 1 service from Paris to Lyon was complete 2 years later.
In California, in 2008, the voters were sold and bought America’s equivalent of that single transformational HSR line, the Shinkansen for the west coast, our very own TGV equivalent between Los Angeles and San Francisco, which was to be up and running 12 years later; 11 years later the estimated opening date for it was a gigantic question mark due to it turning out that oops it’s actually unfunded but we do have enough to complete a self-contained sub-line between Merced and Bakersfield, mostly, if we can find just a little bit more money somewhere.
Well, they found the money, and now you can “hope” for self-contained HSR between Merced and Bakersfield… tentatively in 2030. But the relevant parts of the project are unfunded, have no clear timeline, and costs continue to balloon out of control.
I’ve made comments to the effect of 8 or 0 – an insistence that if you’re building HSR lines at the price tag applied to CAHSR or any other imagined HSR proposal then you had better damn well be filling those lines with the maximum number of trains they can operationally support. And I’ve made comments to the effect that I do agree with and believe in your premise – I believe that 8 trains per hour on a line that matches any of the world’s best HSR experiences pound for pound would have been enough to erase all doubts. I could’ve believed in CAHSR then, if that’s what it was. I spent much of the 2010s believing in that promise, actually.
You see, I can hold that earnest belief in the potential of one superlative world-beating HSR line should such a thing be built, while simultaneously being a staunch opponent of NEC HSR and every other HSR proposal to be trotted out on a regular basis, because those two positions are not contradictory. They are two halves of the same coin.
The thing about hope and dreams and believing in something is that when those dreams are crushed, when the belief is shattered, and when your trust is broken – it sucks. It feels bad. It makes you not want to try again because you’ve already been burned by this exact thing before.
Of course I’m angry and disbelieving now. I got sold something I was told was going to be the LGV Etats-Unis-Sud-Ouest but it turns out I actually bought very fast trains from the relative California equivalents of Auxerre and Le Creusot. Worse yet, I’m repeatedly lectured on how I just don’t believe enough, educated on basic HSR history or global operational standards, and offered purchase of the exact same thing on the east coast this time, complete with a similar extremely expensive greenfield HSR track alignment from two random provincial towns, which I must support or else none of the actual mainline rail improvements bracketing that useless stretch of bypass track will be validated or actually happen. I look at this like I look like at every other time I’ve been promised this time it’s different, this time for sure, just get on board, HSR will happen and all our past mistakes will surely be washed away. Meanwhile, I just want – the only thing I really want – is a subway that takes me where I want to go around the city and maybe the option to head to the next city 50 miles that way without renting a car to do it. That’s impossible, of course, but hey have I seen the latest fantasy map for the future of HSR…?
You’re damn right I’m hopeless.
This post is about incrementalism. Today HSR in Des Moines doesn’t make sense. However by Alon’s numbers in other posts a DC-Boston HSR route would pay for itself if we assume reasonable construction costs (which we cannot in the US), and thus is worth an investment. NYC also has great need for more subways which also should pay for themselves (again at reasonable construction costs which we we have no reason to think we can get).
Today a metro system in Des Moines looks like a good long term investment: the city is growing and just starting to see the traffic issues – they can still build out of them but it is becoming more difficult.
Which of the above is the best investment for out limited money is worth a debate. There are many buckets of money, and different limits to each (Boston won’t help NYC build a subway, but they will help get a HSR line there).
However any investment in longer distance rail to Des Moines isn’t a good investment today as rail wouldn’t get to enough different places. Rail transport depends on the network, so if we built the DSM to DC rail line (via Chicago and NYC most likely), and then extended the DC line to Atlanta – we would expect to see more riders in DSM even though the distance between the two cities means nobody would ride that far – but the fact that you can means people will start using the trains more. Thus to make a long distance train to DSM worth it we need a large national investment first. I’m not sure if a long distance train to DSM will ever get enough riders to be worth it, but for sure it isn’t worth it today.
What people asking for long distance rail to DSM fail to understand is they are asked for rail spread thin across the US and that isn’t useful to anybody anywhere. If invest all the little cities across the US agreed to focus efforts on the NEC, they could get the start of a system that with more expansion efforts latter actually gets to their city (though likely in 50 years for places like DSM – most will be dead by then), with service that is good enough to use even when you have other options.
I agree with you that rail spread thin across the US isn’t useful to anybody anywhere. That’s the situation we’re in today.
I also agree with you that, and have rejected my previous support of CAHSR based on the now inescapable conclusion that, it is not possible to actually deliver world-class HSR at standard prices or at tolerable levels of inflated prices (and I’d further say it may well no longer be possible to deliver CAHSR as promised at any price no matter how exorbitant.)
But again, I think these are the same conversation. I think there is actually room for compromise, it’s just a compromise that asks HSR boosters and railfans to give up a lot more of what they want which is uncomfortable for them and which provokes continued backlash in the form of further education on HSR ridership numbers and what they could be in America if only we Realized the Vision. It’s a compromise that starts with acknowledging that what we have is a broken system with a litany of present and historical systemic problems and then asks, how can we fix these?
It’s a compromise that forces Amtrak to behave more like a regional/local/commuter operator within urban contexts and on the regional corridors it’s currently wasting. It’s a compromise that, on my end, requires me to accept more expansion of those corridor services into never-before-served markets to gain valuable political buy-in, and sacrifices the subway in lots of cities that should just now be considering their first subway line to instead have an Amtrak corridor that might (someday) be made to behave like a subway, or an S-bahn, or – just maybe – something absolutely unheard of in the US, a subway that can take through-running intercity traffic.
It’s also a compromise that forces operational expenditures to go up even as capital expenditures drop, that forces rail operators into line with global standards through measurable, achievable, targeted improvements as opposed to any improvement being predicated on The Vision, that forces government to actually build the systems and processes that will control costs and retain hard-earned knowledge. It’s easy to forget everything that went wrong and continues to go wrong on CAHSR because it’s a failure and we’re never going to do that ever again. It’s a lot harder to forget anything that goes wrong in a procurement process for 5 new trains if we have another bid for 5 new trains going out pretty much immediately on the heels of the first one. Harder to forget how to electrify 100 km of track if there’s a moving target to be electrifying some km of track annually until every inch of rail in this country is either electric or defunct. Harder to forget how to lay new track if there’s a moving target of some km annually there too.
Moving targets suck for politicians. You don’t ever get to be done. You don’t get the ribbon cutting, and you can’t even point to some named train to say “I delivered that.” But moving targets are good for everyone else, and they are necessary for us to remain a going concern, and there’s far more inherent value in doing that then there is in repeatedly staking everything on One Big Swing that just keeps turning into One Big Miss.
If you want the pessimistic outlook, our incremental failures aren’t as dire as our Big Ticket Failures. If you want the cynical realistic outlook, we’re going to need to keep on failing until we learn how to succeed.
Nobody else in the world ever learned how to run a railroad flawlessly on the first try either.
I am reading the new book from the Mayors of Liverpool and Manchester. They want more infrastructure for Northern England.
If they do we have to get the infrastructure cost down to get it past the treasury.
@henry, @transit hawk
To be fair a service from New York City to Chicago that took 10-12 hours would be an improvement on the status quo and would also benefit “real America”.
And that sort of speed intercity service is how Europe started incrementally improving its rail service.
It would, yes. Even getting it to an average speed of 100 kmph (for a total trip time of 15~ hours) would be a big improvement while simultaneously being extremely achievable at low investment costs.
So too would running any of the corridors out of Chicago, which all have fun names like The Wolverine or The Missouri River Runner but which don’t have real schedules (The Hiawatha has 6 round trips daily and nobody else has more than 5), on anything approaching a usable regular basis.
Or, again, an hourly train from West Des Moines to East Des Moines, which we could put on the tracks that are already there and which isn’t predicated on the network effects of feeding into, let’s say, Chicago to Omaha HSR.
Hundreds of things we could be doing instead of pressing for 120 km of high-speed bypass of functional and already-served tracks in Connecticut.
The other thing is the Lake Shore Limited currently has 20 stops, so at 3 minutes a stop like Chiltern the speed penalty from all of them with a diesel locomotive is only an hour.
So electrifying the whole line isn’t really necessary and a diesel or hybrid locomotive is probably enough.
There’s lots of reasons to electrify a rail corridor. Lower operating costs, less reliance on diesel, and more reliable rolling stock all rank highly and should be the main drivers of a push for (ultimately, nationwide) electrification even on corridors where the stop penalty doesn’t move the needle.
The data I have seen from transit matters is that you need an hourly train to justify electrification.
Not sure routes off the NEC in the US justify that at this point. But I guess Albany-NYC or even Buffalo-NYC might well, as might lines into Chicago and Cleveland.
As Michael said, SNCF understood that incrementalism would not work. They knew because they tried. The 1971 Paris-Bordeaux TEE (584 km in 4h at 146 km/h average) was comfortable and fast considering that, 50 years later, Acelas link NYP and WAS at a 122 km/h average, but was losing patronage to Air Inter. In a competitive market, you are either in a position of strength with pricing power or you compete by selling cheaper fare and end up losing money. Like Japan with the Tokaido Shinkansen and SNCF with the LGV Sud-Est, RENFE and Ferrovie dello Stato started HSR with a hit that had other regions asking for their lines and NIMBYISM on the back foot. Incrementalism will never achieve that. Unfortunately, even the more ambitious Old Oak Commons-Curzon Street or Rancho Cucamonga-outskirts of Las Vegas will come short.
Did it really put NIMBYism on their back foot though? If anything, the wild success of the original lines showed how much surplus there was to be extracted by NIMBY protests. Tokaido Shinkansen would be the cheapest line Japan ever built, and later lines would ravaged by NIMBYism like the slow Omiya-Ueno section, and even today Kyoto NIMBYs are strongly against the Hokuriku Shinkansen Osaka extension just like they were the original Tokaido Shinkansen.
Japan has since the Tokaido built the Sanyo Shinkansen to the South, extended that to the Kyushu Shinkansen, the Tohoku all the way along the north coast, the Joetsu/Hokuriku branch across the center of the country, and two mini-Shinkansen branches. It is actively extending lines north to Sapporo in Hokkaido, and continuing the Hokuriku toward Kyoto. If that is NIMBY success who needs NIMBYs to fail.
Surplus extraction is different from NIMBYs. NIMBYs want to stop it, surplus extractors want it to be built so they get something.
Omiya-Ueno is slow because it is right through the heart of Tokyo, it is also only ~27km.
Some people in Kyoto might not like the Hokuriku extension, but it is still being built. Other people in Kyoto are actively campaigning to get the Chuo Shinkansen maglev to stop there instead of going straight to Osaka.
There are Anglosphere examples of incrementalism, the various Chiltern Evergreen updates were incremental.
Incrementalism doesn’t make a lot of sense in the US because, outside of the Northeast and a couple other corridors, there is no meaningful legacy rail service to build on. Los Angeles – Las Vegas and Dallas – Houston have HSR projects in the pipeline, but they haven’t had direct rail service for decades. Los Angeles – San Francisco at least has Amtrak service, but the Coast Starlight follows the coast, not the Central Valley route that California HSR is using.
California HSR could have taken an incremental approach if they had started with the Los Angeles – Bakersfield segment (since legacy service from Bakersfield – Oakland already exists). But no, they’re busy blowing out the budget on the easy Merced – Bakersfield segment that parallels the existing Amtrak route. I doubt the full California HSR will ever be finished.
The problem is that not having a functional nationwide rail network means incrementalism is the only thing that makes sense, actually.
Not having any meaningful rail service to speak of means you have a blank canvas on which you need to draw something: and we can either continue drawing crayon fantasies of HSR and promise unattainable visions that will rewrite history and turn America back into a rail-forward country and a paradise for fantasy cartographers, or we can get serious about delivering meaningful rail service at attainable price points to a lot of the country right now, or the closest thing to right now that government moves it.
From a certain point of view, when you have nothing, all things are equally possible. From a related point of view, when you have nothing, going from zero to one is an infinite improvement.
Buy more trains. Either get freight’s shit in order or just buy some of their tracks too for the time being. String some wires. Hire some people. Throw down some platforms. You can do a thousand little projects like that all over the country, every one an “incremental” improvement, and deliver rail service to a hundred new places whose current reality for rail service is “something they got overseas that the Washington/California fat cats occasionally use to funnel more money to their coastal elite friends, but won’t work here for normal people.”
It’s rail service that people can and will actually use, in Detroit and Chicago and Cleveland and Pittsburgh and all these other places “rail can’t work in America.”
It’s incremental improvement that’s hardly anything at all compared to the flash and the pomp and circumstance of cutting a ribbon on America’s New HSR train. There’s hardly any chance at all it will get anybody but the most extreme anti-fliers off of a plane.
And yet, at the same time, it’s everything. Because it’s going to get a whole lot of people out of their cars. And it’s going to be visible to a whole lot of people just living their lives, as an everyday option with a thousand different ordinary uses, instead of as just one more premium option available to replace the idea of a short-haul flight.
You have to do it before they all buy a car and move to the suburbs. And then all of the jobs.
People move all the time. When they move they will look for how to get around and if transit is useful have a chance to see it. People bring their cars in for service all the time, they will look to see if transit works. Once people are in a habit of driving that is hard to change, but that isn’t impossible. Just run good service for a few years and a lot of people will discover it and start using it. You won’t see results the first month, but they will come.
Not everyone will come, but most suburbs don’t have reasonable options so you can’t be surprised if people drive. You can’t talk about people who resist transit when people who wouldn’t also drive.
Make improvements now. There are a lot of places in the US where a small incremental improvement in transit would get significant numbers of people to not drive. And once you make those that enables a next round of places that previously wouldn’t get significant numbers, but now do because you get network effects from the last improvement.
Because it’s going to get a whole lot of people out of their cars.
Except it probably won’t. 50% of France’s rail network today sees only 2% of its passengers. France has the fourth highest rail mode share in Europe – but 85% of trips in France are taken by car. With the exception of Switzerland, every country will lower car use in Europe does so with high bus ridership, not high train ridership (in Denmark and Austria bus and train are basically equal). Britain has followed your example of providing wide improvement to legacy lines instead of building domestic HSR, and their car use is basically the same as France, with slightly lower train mode share. As Michael noted above, SNCF ridership was dropping before HSR, and rose after it.
People take cars for a lot of reasons. For a family four or five people taking a trip in a car is the same cost as one person, but on a train it is 4x-5x. Cars make mobility at the end of journey easier. From a non-center city origin or destination (or both) cars may be faster or more flexible. Cars always have the advantage of infinite frequency – i.e. you can leave when you want instead of scheduling around a train, no matter how frequently it comes. Providing “meaningful” service won’t change these factors, and without a major advantage over cars (i.e. HSR) people will continue to drive as the cheaper, faster, more convenient option.
Although I did agree there is an argument to be made for full electrification before speed (for a lot of reasons, cost, performance, pollution, the ability to through route onto HSR lines in the future), if you want to see ridership go up you need HSR. A few threads ago Alon gave examples about how HSR used to compete mainly with air over appropriate distances, but with more modern services and faster speeds it is capturing car mode share as well on major routes (I think Madrid-Barcelona is a prime example).
When replying to a comment below I found numbers that show the disparity is even greater than I thought. HSR in France carries 124M/yr domestically, and another 32M/yr internationally. Non-HSR domestic ridership is only 11M/yr. This suggests you could eliminate all non-HSR rail in France without meaningfully reducing French rail ridership, even if every intercitie passenger also transferred to HSR, you would only 15% of total long distance passengers.
These figures do not do much for your argument opposing HSR.
Los Angeles – San Francisco at least has Amtrak service, but the Coast Starlight
The Coast Starlight doesn’t serve San Francisco, it stops in Oakland on the other side of the Bay. The Southern Pacific used to run its version of the Coast Daylight/Starlight from actually-SF to LA, but the Amtrak services have always been Oakland-LA trains.
Difficult to imagine an org paying what it is for the Central Valley segment, figuring out how to build an entire set of tunnels through a fault zone within an attainable cost on their first project.
@Paul
Quite possibly true.
But is it really a lost cause? After all they will have built 270km of the route, and SF to SJ is being upgraded and the SF terminus has been built. Will all of this be left to turn into a white elephant? Another way of looking at it, is that history shows that these (outrageous) sunk costs will be rapidly forgotten and eventually a new set of politicians will look at how to complete the project.
Plus, all those Central Valley types will be supportive–they may even demand it if enough actually use their built section, instead of indifferent or outrightly hostile. (IMO the state should give free tickets to every Californian, the irony being they willl have to travel to it by plane, car or bus!)
Incidentally the problem with CaHSR is that its very size inevitably involved an incremental build. As I have argued here before, the LA-LV route might have been better because it is half the size and therefore could be built as one project over a reasonable timeframe, ie. with sufficient momentum to avoid it being stymied. A bit like the Channel tunnel (for Eurostar) which ran into the usual mega-project problems and would have been likely cancelled if not for being sufficiently advanced. The LV route arguably would worked the same as Paris-Lyon, in generating wide-spread interest: a lot of average Americans, include many who would never consider train travel, would have taken that train to LV (and many other Americans flying into LV might have been tempted to include a short trip to LA) and become converts to HSR … and rail travel in general.
Between New York and New Haven, it’s possible to reduce trip times by 7 minutes through various bypasses requiring new rights-of-way,
To ask again a question I brought up a few days ago, assuming that a Penn-GCT connection were built as part of Gateway (the old ARC ‘Alt G’) for commuter rail purposes, would it be beneficial to send NEC intercity trains via GCT? The route from Penn to New Rochelle including the tunnel to GCT would be 3km shorter (28km vs 31km via Sunnyside and Hell Gate) which I would think would save a few minutes at inside-NYC-speeds, at theoretically zero cost (assuming the Penn-GCT link were being done anyway for through routing of MNRR and NJT).
I keep saying no, but you’re annoying me with this question so much that I’m starting to reconsider – it’s possible that even with a forced stop at Harlem, the Grand Central route is faster for intercity trains than the Hell Gate route.
best no answer is that intercity trains have a much more dedicated track pair via the Hell Gate from New Rochelle than they do via GCT IMO.
First, I apologize if I am pestering, I thought I only asked this once before and didn’t recall seeing a reply.
Second, if my persistent but thoughtful questioning has helped you reach an improved conclusion based on an unconsidered option, you’re welcome!
Third, why would there have to be a forced stop at 125th. Is it because all MNRR trains stop there now so there is no possibility to bypass or run through? Given that a Penn-GCT connection is all theoretical at this point, and that your theoretical through-running plans involve some MNRR trains using the Empire Connection to Penn and others following the PSA route to Penn, would it be possible to lower throughput on a track pair of along Park Ave so intercity trains could double slot and avoid stopping at 125th without catching the commuter train ahead of them (i.e. 16tph MNRR and 4tph Amtrak with a :00 MNRR departure followed by a gap at :03 and Amtrak at :05).
Did I just write a 100 word non-run-on sentence?
No need to respond to the third point if the first applies. I realize taking capacity from what should be a heavily used NJ-Conn through-route commuter line for intercity trains should be a non-starter given the imbalance of how many passengers each would serve, I’m just curious as a thought exercise.
To be fair I think it’s actually good to stop at 125th as it gives people in New York’s northern suburbs a better connection.
I disagree. 125th is too close to Midtown and 125th & Park is already fully and quickly connected to GCT via subway. A better near-center stop location would be Grand Concourse and 149th in the Bronx, right before the Hudson line splits (allowing people from all northern suburbs served by MNRR to access intercity rail with minimal backtracking [mainly applicable to the Hudson and Haarlem lines]) and where there is a confluence of subway lines (providing much quicker access to people from the Bronx, as well as those on many different lines [although connections among the subway let alone interface with the MNRR station that doesn’t exist here yet are terrible])
I thought the plan was to have the intercity passengers stand in the aisle while the commuters sit in the seats in New Jersey, New York and Connecticut.
No, because it would be billions and billions of dollars so railfans from the hinterlands can be impressed. Take three deep breaths, except for people who can afford cabs in the general vicinity of Grand Central the peons other places can get to Penn Station just as easily. And the very high speed service between New England and points south should go through Long Island where there are EIGHT TIMES AS MANY PEOPLE.
Everywhere in the world where commuter rail terminals have been changed to through-running systems it has been a massive success. RER A in Paris gets more than three times as many riders (300M/yr) over ~100km of route as the LIRR got in its peak year of 2016 (90M/yr) over 513km. The Berlin S-Bahn, with its east-west Stadtbahn and North-South tunnel sees approximately double yearly passengers (478M) over 340km than all three NYC systems (LIRR, MNRR, NJT) combined in their best years (240M) over just under 2000km. The Elizabeth line was expected to get 130-170M/yr when it opened post Covid, instead it is getting 200M – one out of every seven train trip in all of the UK is being taken on that 100km line through-running across central London.
There is no reason to think that a through-running commuter system in NYC would be any less successful than these. Connecting Penn to GCT wouldn’t be billions to impress railfans, it would be billions to provide much better service and higher ridership. It’s not about taking a cab to GCT vs Penn.
There are not 8 times as many people in Long Island vs the current route. Total pop. of LI is 7.8M, pop of the Bronx, Westchester and Fairfield counties is 3.3M; LI has a little more than two times as many people. Plus, almost all of those 3.3M are in a strip along the coast within 20km or less of an existing Amtrak stop. A logical LI sound crossing (~ Lloyd Harbor to Stamford/Darien) basically doesn’t reach Suffolk County at all, while your route the last time you described it (Shoreham to New Haven) leaves lots of eastern LI farther than that from the last station (and that doesn’t count the far east arms, which are 60-90km away). Since a huge number of people living in Queens are closer to Manhattan than Jamaica, that reduces LI’s effective population benefit even more.
Then there is the fact that this route involves building ~90km of high speed track across LI, much of it greenfield, plus one of the longest overwater bridge/tunnels in the world, all at very high cost.
Then there is the additional fact that by going basically due east then due north, you end up in a longer route NY-Bos than the current one, which goes generally northeast. You give a few million people on LI a shorter trip to Bos, while saddling tens of millions of people from DC-NY with a longer one.
I disagreed with Alon that intercity service to LI isn’t warranted. Based on LI’s size it absolutely is. But geography dictates that it should be a branch off of the NEC, continuing to DC (sort of a mirror image of the Keystone Corridor). As a very long term aspiration I can see planning for a LI-CT rail link as part of a comprehensive HSR/rail plan for the NE US, but even then it wouldn’t be the very high speed/express service. If you are making plans like that then you are planning to re-build the “Air-Line” route direct from New Haven to Bos, bypassing Providence (and Hartford), to get the shortest possible distance for express trains (which wouldn’t be stopping between NH and Bos anyway).
Reality sucks. Through running was a failure in Philadephia. Reality sucks, send all of the LIRR trains ThRoUgH!!! !!! to New Jersey there is no capacity to send Metro North trains there. Alternately send all of the Metro North trains to New Jersey there is no capacity to send LIRR trains there. That sucks, doesn’t it? To send all of the Metro North trains to New Jersey need four tunnels…. it’s a pity it’s not railfan’s fantasy where all the trains go to all the stations, express. Reality sucks, people in Tarrytown aren’t stupid enough to drive to Stamford to get a train to Philadelphia. Neither are the ones in wide swaths of Westchester and the Bronx. I was going to go on but reality sucks and I’ve grown tired of explaining it.
Through running was a failure in Philadephia.
Yes, and I have frequently recommended to Akon that he address/explain this better whenever he brings up advocacy for his NYC plan or North-South link in Boston.
You obviously don’t send all MNRR or all LIRR trains to NJ. They’re going to build two new tunnels across the Hudson. If you do a tunnel Penn to GCT you can send two tracks worth of MNRR to NJ. You can then send half of LIRR trains to NJ with the other two tunnels. There are two tracks leaving Penn to the west that go up the Hudson currently only used by the Empire Service; that can take the other half of LIRR trains. Now you have whatever LIRR send through ESA terminating at GCT, plus the other half of MNRR service (unless you build Alon’s tunnel from GCT to downtown and Staten Is., which is too long). If you connect Hoboken to Atlantic terminal (which we both agree is a good idea) then LIRR has 8 tracks entering Manhattan, 6 of them through running, which is probably more capacity than it can fill – in that case MNRR can send some trains from New Haven via the Penn Station Access plan and minimize dead end trains at GCT. Alon has outlined the same or similar plans in several blog posts. The only reality intruding here is the incorrect decision, dating back to the 60’s, to have LIRR go to the east side via the 63rd St tunnel, which strands some MNRR and LIRR services into terminating at GCT instead of connecting.
people in Tarrytown aren’t stupid enough to drive to Stamford to get a train to Philadelphia.
Largely correct, although we are talking about through running commuter rail in the NYC metro, not intercity service to Philadelphia, so also irrelevant. What people in Tarrytown would do is ride the train from Tarrytown to Queens or Nassau county, if it were faster and cheaper than driving. People in Stamford would also take the train to Jersey, and people in Jersey would take a train to a job in Long Island City. People are smart and would do all of these things if the trains would let them do so easily, quickly and with as few transfers as possible.
By your – as always, flawed – logic, the A train wouldn’t exist, because who is going to ride from Far Rockaway to Inwood. Same for the M – who is going to take it from Forest Hills to Metropolitan Av? But even if those two specific trips have exactly zero passengers, those subway lines are well used because they connect many destinations to the central business district and to each other, and do so crossing the CBD to allow easy trips from one side to the other. Through running for commuter rail would work exactly the same way, at a larger scale.
If I counted correctly Alon used the word intercity seven times in the original post. Railfans are getting frothy over 15 hour trips between Chicago and New York and Henry and TransitHawk have mistaken Iowa for France and DesMoines for Paris. You may be having very naive fantasies about commuter trains to Manhattan but other people aren’t. I’m still interested in how local commuters and long distance passengers are going to sit in the same seat. Fortunately that hasn’t come up in this set of threads.
If you send half of the trains from New Jersey to Grand Central the people who want to get to Long Island will be disappointed. The people who are on Grand Central trains, who want to get to Long Island will be equally disappointed. The people on the Hudson Line will be delighted with the almost empty trains flitting up and down the line…. You views are all very very naive. Go sharpen your crayons.
@adirondacker12800
I don’t see anyone mistaking Iowa/Des Moines for France/Paris. (at least not in the comments here, in the real world people do). Instead we all seem to understand well the Iowa/Des Moines is an example of an area with a small population where what works in areas with higher population won’t work. Of course many areas like this exist in the real world and they all want big city services.
What big city services should cities like Des Moines have is up for debate. I contend that today Des Moines is big enough to build a metro and it should because as the city grows it will need it – but locals mostly don’t see this and so don’t agree. Many in Des Moines want Amtrak, but I contend that while we can get it, it will be terrible service that we don’t want, but if the US invested in HSR consistently, in 50 years the network could be extensive enough that bringing HSR to Des Moines would be worth it.
Literally the entire reason the French have higher overall train ridership than we do is the RER.
This isn’t even remotely true. SNCF had 124M riders on the high speed TGV and 11M in regular intercity service, with a population around one fifth of the US, this represents long distance train ridership per capita 23 times that of Amtrak in the US (28.5M/yr). That’s just for fully domestic service, adding SNCF international services they carried another 32M passengers.
The same goes for metro service. Lyon metro has more riders then DC Metro, Lille has about the same number of riders as Boston or Chicago, even though Lyon/Lille are much smaller metro areas.
It is true that the RER is remarkably successful, with around 782M/yr it carries more people than every subway and commuter rail system in the US combined, excluding the NYC subway.
I am not an American 😜.
The French have higher SNCF ridership than the British due to higher passenger numbers in the Paris region compared to London – presumably down to the RER being better and more mature than the Elizabeth line and Thameslink.
I am not an American
Very shortsighted assumption on my part. Your original statement is entirely correct.
Here is some more recent/accurate data on Paris-RER.
The data source is “Annexe n° 1 : consistance et caractéristiques du réseau RER” (Pax data is from 2019) in https://www.vie-publique.fr/files/rapport/pdf/291464.pdf of Oct-2023.
It is the same in the Wiki article on the RER except simplified; and distinctions between SNCF & RATP are removed, eg. km and ‘number of stations’ includes intramuros Paris.) This does not include Transilien (SNCF), tramway or bus.
The raw data is pax per day (2019); the pax per annum is obtained by multiplying it by 250 which is what Wiki uses (yeah, a bit sketchy).
So the RER carries about 1 billion pax pa. RER-A carries 350 million (the 300m figure dates from 2012!). Note that until a few minutes ago the Wiki article cited 782m but appended “citation needed”. I have just updated it because it is not even consistent with the table on the same page. Dog knows if it will hold given nit-picky Wiki editors.
FYI, the proper figures for Paris Rapid Transit: 2.5bn pax pa (Metro 1.52bn 2015; RER 983m 2019); 566 stations (Metro 308; RER 258); 895km route (Metro 308; RER 628). Note that Alexander (2020) (https://alexander.co.tz/ridership.txt) gives 3.11bn pax pa; I suspect he includes Transilien and Trams, but anyway it makes no difference to Paris being #4 after Tokyo, Hong Kong and Seoul.
MS table format:
Text format:
Line…Operator…Open….Extn..Stations…Trains…TPH….km…pax pd [2019]…pax pa* [2019]
A….RATP/SNCF..1977…1994….46………183……26…..109….1,400,000……..350,000,000
B….RATP/SNCF..1977…1981….47……….147…..20…….80…….983,000……..245,750,000
C….SNCF………..1979…2000….84……….172…..20…..187…….540,000………135,000,000
D….SNCF………..1987…1995….59……….134…..12……197…….660,000………165,000,000
E….SNCF………..1999….2003…22…………64…..22…….55……350,000………..87,500,000
Totals:……………………………….258……….700…………..628….3,933,000……..983,250,000
2.5 billion passengers per year pre-pandemic would be also at least behind Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Osaka too, and maybe also Delhi assuming you’re trying to infer post-pandemic out of pre-pandemic data. It doesn’t change that Paris is the clear leader in rail ridership in the western world though (at least if you exclude Moscow from the western world).
The hiking costs and ineffective management approach can be attributed to this obsession with incrementalism in the US. Given that the US is a low efficiency market, compared to Europe and Asia, there’s really no incentive to improve things due an already bloated and inflexible corporate structure. Whereas other nations would have taken a somewhat more logical and standardized approach to get whatever they’ve conceptualized and strategized to function without any extra changes. The low efficiency variability and reluctance to adopt global industry approaches, in the US, makes it even more difficult to get stakeholders agree on a unified set of priorities let alone reach an optimal level of running seamless operations in strategized projects and fulfilling the needed project delivery.
There’s an additional driver to speeding up trains to “as fast as necessary” beyond making connections at knots. It has to do with operations. For example, here’s a driver for increasing the San Joaquin trains in California to 90 mph:
Increasing Operating Speeds: Increasing the operating speed of the San Joaquins in key locations could reduce travel times, and improve reliability (i.e. on-time performance) in the San Joaquins Corridor. It could also help eliminate a costly crew change in Merced due to running times between Bakersfield and the Bay Area being just over six hours. In coordination with BNSF, UPRR, and Caltrans, SJJPA will work to identify locations along the San Joaquins Corridor where key track improvements (such as curve realignments) could increase speeds, potentially to 90 mph in certain locations. Any increase in speeds, especially if as high as 90 mph, should be balanced against the need for increased costs in maintenance of the tracks.
I suspect that this also applies to many commuter railroads where speeding up a local train by 15 mins enables the same crew to perform an additional run. One could also envision skipping a few stops on a local train to allow for a 2nd local or a 2nd express train.
Yes, exactly! And this is especially important if you’re running service with a low number of vehicles, that is low frequency compared with the run length, for example an American small-city bus system with an hourly pulse and each route extending only about half an hour from the center running with a single vehicle. (If there are many vehicles per route – let’s say a subway route running every 5 minutes with a one-hour one-way trip time – then nobody cares, and also with about two exceptions globally nobody cares about timed transfers either.)