The Meaning of Construction Costs Per Rider
I’ve written a lot about urban rail construction costs per kilometer, but from time to time, my colleagues and I have been asked about what happens if we compare costs, not per kilometer, but per rider. There’s an intuition among people in transportation advocacy (including anti-transit activists who prefer cars) that the construction costs of urban rail lines per rider are a meaningful measure of cost-effectiveness. This intuition is true, and yet, it must be interpreted delicately.
First, modes of transit with different operating cost structures should tolerate different levels of capital costs; in particular, the current practice in which subways are built at higher cost per rider than light rail, which in turn is built at higher cost than bus lanes, reflects real differences in operating costs and does not mean there is overinvestment in subways and underinvestment in buses. And second, costs per rider can be too low, in a sense – if a city’s construction costs per rider are very low, indicating a very high benefit-cost ratio, then it shouldn’t be lauded for its fiscal prudence but scolded for not having built these lines long ago and for not building more today. In truth, places with healthy decisionmaking about infrastructure expand their networks to the limit of cost-effectiveness, which means that costs per rider averaged over an entire region vary less than costs per kilometer, and this just reflects that cities build what they can, so low-cost cities can afford to build lines to lower-ridership areas, which higher-cost cities would reject as too expensive for the benefit. This way, costs per rider are not too different in New York and in cities that build for an order of magnitude lower cost per km than New York.
The meaning of cost per rider
In the remainder of this post, the meaning of “cost per rider” is “cost divided by the ridership on a working day.” In Europe, workers get around six weeks of paid vacation, and tend to take them in the summer, leading to depressed ridership around July or August, depending on the city; daily counts usually avoid this period, so for example Stockholm specifies that daily ridership figures are taken in winter. This, as I will explain shortly, does not unduly make European lines look more cost-effective than they actually are.
The cost per rider is best understood as a cost-benefit measurement. All benefits of public transportation scale with ridership, generally linearly: higher ridership indicates tighter economic and social ties if it comes from more travel, and better environmental outcomes if it is at the expense of car travel. What’s more, raw ridership measured in trips is better at capturing these benefits than passenger-km. The issue is that focusing on p-km overrates the success of extremely suburban systems, which have low environmental benefits for their p-km (the users are typically park-and-riders and therefore drive extensively, just not to their city center jobs) and usually also high net operating costs since they are peaky and tend to charge low per-p-km fares. Conversely, the short-hop trip is a net profit to the system – even subways with distance-based fares charge degressive rather than linear fares – and comes from dense networks that cut out car-based travel entirely. These effects roughly cancel out to the point that ridership is a good proxy for actual benefits.
That said, all outcomes need to be scaled to regional or even national incomes. Economic benefits are usually measured relative to worker wages anyway; in some business case analyses, such as that of the United Kingdom, the economic benefit is even scaled to rider income rather than regional or national income, which favors lines built to rich neighborhoods over lines built to poor ones, and isn’t really how cities need to think about their public transit networks. Social benefits are usually taken on a willingness-to-pay basis, and the same is true of health benefits including reduced air and noise pollution from cars and reduced car accidents.
The next step is then to compare the cost per rider with GDP per capita, which is not perfect but is good enough as a proxy for incomes. This also takes care of the issue of Europe’s synchronized summer troughs in local travel: those six weeks of paid vacation are visible in reduced GDP per capita, so the apparent bonus to the European system of using cost per daily trip where “day” means “workday outside the summer vacation season” rather than cost per annual trip cancels out with reduced annual GDP per capita.
The rough rule of thumb I use is that the absolute limit of cost-effectiveness for a subway or commuter rail line is when the cost per rider is equal to GDP per capita. This is a coincidence: a one-time cost has no reason to be equal to an annual income – this just follows from Börjesson-Jonsson-Lundberg’s estimate of the Stockholm Metro’s benefit-cost ratio compared with its cost per rider relative to the GDP per capita of 1960s’ Sweden. In practice, infrastructure is never built down to a benefit-cost ratio of 1, due to construction risks; in countries that make decisions based on benefit-cost analyses, the minimum is usually 1.2 or 1.3. In this schema, the United States can afford to build up to an envelope of $85,373/1.3 to $85,373, which is $65,000-70,000/rider in 2024 prices. The frontier lines, like the Interborough Express, are fairly close to this limit already; in practice, there’s a range, with some lines in the same city built well over the limit for political reasons (often airport connectors) and others built far below it.
Cost per rider by mode
The above analysis works for subways and commuter rail. It does not work for trams or buses. The reason is that surface transit never achieves the same low operating costs as metros, so in practice, the total cost to be truly comparable needs to be incremented by the additional operating costs.
To be clear, this is just a rule of thumb. There are different metro lines, even with the exact same technology in the same city, with different projected operating cost profiles; for example, in Vancouver, the Broadway extension of SkyTrain toward UBC was projected in the 2010s to reduce net operating costs as many buses would be replaced by fewer, larger trains, but the outward extension of the same system deeper into Surrey and Langley is projected to increase net operating costs. There are different ways to interpret this – for example, the Surrey extension is in a more auto-oriented area, with more likely car-to-train switchers (this is still much denser than an American park-and-ride); on net, though, I think the differences are not huge and could to an extent even be folded into the notion of cost per rider, which is substantially better on Broadway than in Surrey and Langley.
That said, metros consistently have much lower operating costs than light rail and buses in the same city; here are American cost profiles. As far as I can tell from CoMET data, most European and Asian metros cluster toward the bottom end of the American cost profile (such as the Chicago L; the New York City Subway is the top end among the big systems); bus operating costs are more or less proportional to driver wages times operating hours throughout the developed world. Here we need to briefly switch to cost per p-km, since mature urban rail networks use buses as short-hop feeders – the counterfactual to a bus-based network for New York isn’t people riding the same bus routes as today but at higher intensity, but people riding longer bus routes, so the cost would roughly scale to cost per p-km, not per passenger.
In rich Asia, metros are profitable. In Europe, it depends – the London Underground operationally broke even in the early 2010s, and the Berlin U-Bahn was said to do the same in the late 2010s. In healthy European systems, it’s never reported directly, since there’s fare integration across the region, so financial data are reported at metropolitan scale without much breakdown between the modes, but the farebox operating ratios in at least Germany and Scandinavia, and probably also Paris (which has much higher ridership density than London or Berlin, comparable costs per car-km, and higher fares than pre-2022 Berlin), suggest that metros and the inner sections of commuter rail systems can break even, and then the subsidies go to the buses and to suburban extensions.
Individual bus systems can be profitable, but never at metropolitan scale, not in the first-world cities I’m aware of. In New York, the buses between New Jersey and Manhattan are profitable and run by private companies, but that’s one specific section of the system, and on net the bus system in New Jersey, including not just these cross-tunnel buses but also internal buses within the state, loses money, covered by New Jersey Transit subsidies, and the financial performance of buses within New York is, frankly, terrible.
One potential complication is that BRT infrastructure is usually installed on the highest-performing individual routes, and those can have rather low operating costs. But then, the operating costs of the buses on Broadway in Vancouver are extraordinarily low, and still the projections are for the SkyTrain extension that would replace them to, on net, reduce systemwide operating subsidies. If your city has a bus corridor so strong that ordinary BRT would be profitable, the corridor has high enough ridership for a subway.
Light rail is essentially a via media between metros and buses: higher operating costs than metros, in theory lower ones than buses. I say in theory, because in the United States, light rail as a mode comprises different things, some behaving like lower-efficiency subways with shorter cars like the Boston Green Lines, and others running as mostly grade-separated urban rail in cities like the Los Angeles and Portland cities with extremely low ridership and high resulting operating costs. But a light rail system with serious ridership should comfortably obtain better operating outcomes than buses, if worse ones than metros.
Costs per rider can be too low
In New York, as mentioned above, the current urban rail extensions under construction (Second Avenue Subway Phase 2) or discussion (Interborough Express) have costs not far from the frontier relative to American incomes. In Berlin, the extensions instead are far cheaper; U8 to Märkisches Viertel was projected to cost 13,160€ per daily rider in 2021, which is a fraction of Germany’s GDP per capita.
This does not mean Berlin builds cost-effectively. It means Berlin builds too little. A line that costs less than one third the country’s GDP per capita should have been built when the GDP per capita was one third what it is now. If there are a lot of such possibilities in the city, it means there was a crisis it’s only now recovering from or there has been too much austerity, or both, in the case of Berlin.
Healthy construction environments – that is, not Germany, which has normal costs per kilometer and chooses to barely build intercity or urban rail – will instead build to the frontier of what’s cost-effective. In New York, it’s Second Avenue Subway; in Madrid, it’s extensions into deep suburbia making the system almost as long as that of New York, on one third the metro area population. Rational yes/no decisions on whether to build at all can coexist with good construction practices or with deeply irrational ones.
Pedestrian Observations 
1) How good a measure is cost per rider if you’re simply diverting riders from one transit mode to another one? For example, Second Avenue Subway essentially duplicates the Lexington subway which runs just 300m away, and most of it riders will come from there, rather than being new transit riders. So the actual benefits per rider would seem to be much lower. Once upon a time the Lexington was overcrowded so a new line seemed necessary, but post covid and the opening of SAS phase 1 that is no longer the case.
2) It would be nice if you could provide some sort of calculation of what amount of ongoing operating costs is financially equivalent to a certain amount of up-front construction costs. Probably has to depend on interest rate expectations and the like.
The current SAS is mostly duplicative (it does allow for easier access to West midtown), but the full SAS to the Bronx or across 125th (the better option IMO), and to the bump in east downtown would be less so.
In Taipei and Hong Kong, public busses are run on a concession where a private company pays the government for the privilege to manage the bus system and collect revenue.
One should also be careful with comparing European style cost-benefit analyses with profitability, as most of the “gain” is hypothetical shadow costs of time gained. The actual revenue can often be only 10% in a project with a cost-benefit of around 1 (while the costs are very real).
But if the new line allows new development which provides real estate taxes, that can mean a lot more revenue, even over 100%.
I’d love to see a dynamic map of NYC (as the highest cost city) where you could use a slider for the cost frontier, based on past expansion plans. Collab with vanshnookenragen?
Park-and-riders inherently represent a very small share of the passengers transported by successful suburban systems.
Even near the end of successful suburban lines, most riders are not park-and-riders, e.g., at Himemiya on the Tobu Skytree Line a <5 minute walk away from rice paddies, there’s like 50 parking spots next to the station (many of which belonging to nearby homes and businesses) with a daily ridership of over 5000. Kita-Kasukabe has a comparatively massive parking lot, but it’s still like a couple hundred parking spots for a daily ridership of over 10000.
A successful suburban line inherently has to move mostly not park and riders. Surface parking isn’t dense enough to support a busy suburban train station, and structure parking is extremely expensive per rider.
I’m willing to believe that passenger is better than passenger kilometer for evaluating costs per rider, but “the users are typically park-and-riders” is a very weak argument.
Alon was making the point that passenger K will be measuring journey distances so low density suburban systems will outperform the same ridership on a short-distance high density system in terms of P-km. The whole post was attacking cope narratives about American transit.
And US has so little suburban TOD you need a car to get to the train. Suburban megacity Japan doesn’t usually have that problem. Furthermore Japanese parking minimums are basically zero outside the full commercial zones so they generally have to be able to attract users to justify not selling up. Very different circumstances
There are places with too much parking, but those tend to state-led new towns like Tsukuba, Chiba New Town or Tama New Town where soft-budgets led to overbuilding of roads per square meter of residential development. The suburbs developed the private railways generally have much less road and parking because 1. It was cheaper. 2. They wanted people to use their train.
Japan has done a pretty good integration of bus with rail, which probably explains low level of park-and-ride.
Adrian Shooter who ran the highest growth railway in Europe put in Warwick Parkway and Oxford Parkway and expanded the car parking significantly elsewhere.
A sensibly sized car park with reasonable of peak ridership might give you 700 annual rides per parking space. So a 1000 space car park would support 700k annual riders and for an individual suburban/rural station that really isn’t bad.
Individual park-and-rides look really great, because they cannibalize ridership from elsewhere. But then you compare park-and-ride-oriented railways (like American commuter railways or some suburban metro branches like the Washington Silver Line) and railways oriented around town centers and urban ridership, and the latter do so much better.
But if the purpose of your railway is to shift mode and you’re in a heavily decentralized car-based paradigm already, doesn’t that sort of pose the policy solution of park-and-ride railways as preferable, at least insofar as policies of centralization and pedestrian/cycling-oriented urbanization in car-centric areas tend to elicit a lot of “but where will people park” questions?
The latter may ultimately be better for restructuring a city around peds/bikes/trains, but I do often hear park-and-rides framed as a first step in that direction.
Vancouver’s modal split is rising healthily under a paradigm of aggressive TOD, especially downtown commercial TOD, while American cities that use park-and-rides are in the 3-5% modal split range.
Theres also a service frequency issue. How many US cities have an off peak frequency of a train every half an hour? And how many American regional trains run at the average speeds of the Chiltern Mainline?
Plus while I don’t fully agree with Henry he does have a point that Americans car ownership levels and road quality probably means you should be looking at a train every 15-20 minutes off peak.
Once somebody owns a car the incremental costs of an additional trip is low. Thus they will push their company to build offices in a suburban location with free parking and no traffic so you can just drive to work. Park and ride is a poor compromise – you still need the expensive car, but you don’t get the advantages of a car ready when you want to go since it is a distance parking lot. People do use park and ride, but you can get good bus ridership in most suburbs just be providing good bus service, which in the case of a train means your bus routes are designed around a short trip to the train. That good bus ridership will help families go down to just one car (while some will go car free it is much easier to sell you still have a car) which not only saves them money it also means they have reason to use your transit service off-peak and this will greatly enhance your system.
I contend that most suburbs are dense enough to support good transit – that is frequent service (I believe that other parts of the world have data, but I don’t know how to find it). However the low density means that if you don’t provide good service people will just drive. Cities make it easier to provide good service and the traffic means people will put up with worse service.
I think park and ride is important, but it should be at the edge stations of the city for farmers (including wanna-be hobby farmers who pay for their farming habit with a city job) to use in the city. If some suburban people use it okay, but your focus should be on making the transit stations a place locals can easially get to via transit, and also a place they normally go (because that is where the stores/restaurants/gym they use is located)
The point where driving is super cheap is a relatively narrow window of car ownership (8000-12000 miles a year). Much lower than that and not owning a car at all is more compelling. Higher than that and you are spending money for each extra mile that you drive.
Also driving it big cities is hateful and worth avoiding if possible.
under a paradigm of aggressive TOD, especially downtown commercial TOD,
Yes, but downtown TOD isn’t relevant to a park-and-ride discussion since even US downtowns riddled with surface parking do not plan whatever transit stations they have there as park-and-ride, P-a-R is a suburban phenomenon. Skytrain to this point has largely been an urban system (mostly within 15-20km of downtown) although we’ll see how the Surrey-Langley extension goes which is beginning to imitate the (unsuccessful) model of BART or DC Silver line. Has Vancouver been pushing TOD on West Coast Express?
My thought has always been that if your average S-Bahn/Commuter spacing is 2-3km, then outside of your metro/subway coverage this should be applied as three stations with 1-1.5km spacing between them, following by 3-4km on either side of a P-a-R station. This creates a series of urban nodes 3-4km in length entirely within a station walkshed, with the node compact enough to be walkable/bikeable (the center of the three stations would be zoned/designed as a local commercial district; they would also be rail nodes for takt and service planning, where trains from both directions and where applicable passing trains would meet at the same time for connections). If the line passes an airport or crosses a highway it should be structured as one of the P-a-R stations. The last station on the line should be a satellite city that is a stop on Regional/Intercity service to facilitate long distance travelers accessing suburban areas with a connection (just as the last metro stop should always be at an S-Bahn/commuter station so suburban commuters can access non-CBD areas of the city).
The series of nodes in a row approximates the “finger plan” of Copenhagen (where developed areas are linear strips following S-tog lines out of the ‘palm’ of Copenhagen proper) while the P-a-R stations in between service the remaining suburban area. This way you can get central city commuters off of the roads while also developing high general transit use along the way.
I do recognize my plan might be a bit prescriptive, geography and pre-existing development usually do not allow for such exact patterns, but that is my thought.
@Onux, I am not sure where does that split in reality as you say.
The only place I am aware of is Reading. But the flaw with Reading is that you still pay the full peak fare even when going away from London. And the trains you ideally want to catch leave London at peak times even though it is all leisure travel 🤪.
@Matthew Hutton
The point where driving is super cheap is a relatively narrow window of car ownership (8000-12000miles a year).
Unfortunately for transit activists, the average American drives ~13,500 miles per year, right around this window, which means for most people the car is the cheapest option (or at least best value for money, if you factor in that transit incurs some time and convenience penalties from waiting time, slower travel time, and transfers.)
13500 is definitely bigger than the sweet spot.
If a car lasts 200k miles that would point to it lasting less than 15 years which is pretty short really.
And if that is the average half of people do more.
Not that much bigger, 1500 mi over a range you gave of 4000 mi. And even then, you gave 8-12k as the “super cheap” range, which implies that it should still be cheap (or at least not expensive) a little bit to either side of it.
I saw the 13,500 mi figure given as an average, not a median, so it does not mean that half of people drive more. It could be 90% drive 11k per year and 10% drive 36k (although average and median get confused so often that I can’t guarantee 13,500 mi isn’t the median.
13500 is still pretty much guaranteed to take a car to the scrapheap on distance not age though.
Probably even 12k miles is a bit on the high side.
The average car in the US is around 12 years old according to https://www.bts.gov/content/average-age-automobiles-and-trucks-operation-united-states. Cars these days often last more than 200k miles. there are a lot of people who wouldn’t be caught in a car more than 3 years old and so they are buying new cars, but there are also a lot of people who are a good mechanic (themselves) keeping their current car on the road for many years. Those two groups will have very different cost profiles. And of course a lot of middle ground with different cost profiles as well.
13500 miles/year is 15 years to get to 200k miles and 22 years to get to 300k miles. Which fits well with the idea that the average car will go a bit over 300k miles in its life (I claim that often, but most internet commentators disagree with me – probably because internet commentators lean to those who can afford to a newer car and so won’t put up with the small annoyances and so trade their cars in early)
Of course affordability is only rarely a concern of people in cars. Sure the car costs a lot of money but most never count that in their budget. They see a car as a must and so they pay whatever price. If something most go from their life it isn’t the car. I like to make the cost argument, but I know in the end it isn’t going to resonate with many people as they refuse to consider the cost of a car on their life.
One reason that cost per unit length is not a perfect measure on its own is that lines with high expected ridership can reasonably be expected to be more expensive to build.
Longer platforms, more escalators/elevators, larger entrances, larger mezzanines, etc.
Alon, Please consider costs of automated (driverless) systems as compared with conventional, vehicles with a driver (operator).
I should blog it sometime, but Madrid is automating Line 6, at the usual very low cost we’ve grown to expect of the city.
Compare:
Hitachi Rail awarded Philadelphia metro train contract: $724.3M for 200 cars. $3.622M/car. https://www.railwaygazette.com/metros/hitachi-rail-awarded-philadelphia-metro-train-contract/67000.article
Madrid: “In June, CAF was awarded a €400m contract to supply 40 six-car trainsets for lines 6 and 8.” (240 cars).€1.667M/car = $1.8M/car. https://www.railwaygazette.com/metros/madrid-metro-line-6-to-go-driverless/66912.article
Presumably, the Madrid cars will be driverless for line 6.
Justification using expected capital cost per expected rider provides an incentive to overestimate expected ridership and underestimate expected capital cost. Afterwards, it’s a lot harder to hide the actual operating/maintenance cost per actual rider, or the actual capital cost per actual rider.
Give government regulators some credit for requiring solid bases for ridership estimation. Even the FTA can do that.
To me it seems that this would strangely say that almost entirely privately funded and operated systems like Hyderabad Metro would be overspending even though the government has spent almost nothing on the system because construction costs per rider are greater than GDP per capita, especially at the time it was built. An important factor is future GDP per capita and ridership. A rail line outside the major cities of Japan might get good ridership now, but will likely have much less ridership in the future due to depopulation. Similarly, a country with high GDP growth will need infrastructure that will meet future needs.
An issue is that a lot of ridership projections are unrealistic, and assume that people will take public transit anyways in places where peak-hour car/motorcycle commuting would still be faster and CBD employment is low. Goodhart’s law could become an issue with people overestimating ridership in order to justify projects. Or in other places they underestimate in order to save money on costs and build smaller stations. They might also not correctly assume the amount of YIMBY/NIMBYism that will happen next to transit.
Another important factor is if what is built can adequately scale with future ridership growth or decline. Subway lines with platforms accommodating longer trains and good signalling or certain well-designed BRT systems might be able to accommodate substantially higher future ridership. Automated systems running half-size off-peak trains can often have high frequencies even with low off-peak ridership. Also this ignores financing which is often an important factor especially in developing countries. Often the world bank or a country like Japan is willing to finance a certain type of project for low interest rates. Even in the developed world Italy has to borrow for higher interest rates than Germany.
Alternatives like widening train stations to accommodate longer trains or improving signalling could be a more cost-effective alternative to new rail transit lines.
The flip side is that high growth raises the natural rate of interest. In the 19th century, the United States built railroads to lower standards than the United Kingdom – tighter curves, grade crossings, street running, single rather than double track – because its faster population growth meant higher interest rates.
The US was probably like that because it was worse governed.
The frustrating thing is that the Western Canadian and US light rail networks plus SkyTrain all have the same origin, but there’s a clean cleave in the sense that the worst Western Canadian city, Edmonton, has higher modal split (12% in 2016) than the best new-build American city, Seattle (10.7% at MSA level, 9.7% at CSA level, both as of 2019). Edmonton even beats San Francisco if the latter is counted at CSA level (11.2%) and not just MSA level (18.9%).
Probably the Canadians are better at learning from the UK. And the UK is up there with the best in terms of operations on existing infrastructure.
They weren’t learning from the UK – for one, the UK builds very little housing, like the US and not at all like Canada.
the worst Western Canadian city, Edmonton, has higher modal split (12% in 2016) than the best new-build American city
This seems to almost entirely be a land use issue rather than a transit issue though. Both cities are much more compact than sprawling US areas. Edmonton’s urban area is almost perfectly symmetrical and contained within the 216 ring, while Calgary’s urban area is almost fully contained within city limits proper (to the point in some areas where if the city limit runs down a road one side is built up while the other is open fields, the transition can be that abrupt). This concentrates employment in the CBD and keeps people within accessible distance of the light rail.
Using the SF CSA is not really great, because of how the Census structures CSA/MSA around counties: “San Francisco” by this measure stretches ~350km north to south through mostly rural parts of the Coast Range, which is farther than the distance from Calgary to Edmonton.
Alon, while Britain doesn’t build a lot of housing we are certainly very respectable on train speed and very respectable on service frequency. And those two things matter.
True, but my point is that Western Canadian light rail doesn’t look at all like what Britain’s been doing. Canada follows US practice of total separation of urban rail and mainline rail; light rail lines can go in disused rail mainlines or next to active ones, but they don’t share tracks and are not planned jointly.
Many Canadian cities seem to have less freeways directly to the CBD, less CBD parking, and more job concentration in the CBD rather than suburban office parks.
Car ownership is higher in the U.S. Maybe cultural differences, such as owning a car “feeling American” and bringing social status are also factors. Also higher immigration in Canada might mean there’s a larger population who hasn’t learned how to drive on Canadian roads and needs to use public transit.
The effect is there independently of governance quality. (Though, to be sure, for example in Britain from 1846 legislation enforced the use of one-and-a-half standardized gauges, whereas in the US, for decades afterward legislation enforced multiple deliberate breaks of gauge.)
Partly, at that time the US was an outlier in terms of natural resource per capita, thus simple Baumol-y concerns apply. If you want to take a man and his shovel to build a railway, it matters whether the alternative would have been to dig gold.
Partly, growth is in itself a factor. If, for the sake of simplicity, you already have “everything else” for the population and industry (housing, canals, Macadamised roads for postcoaches, workshops and tooling) and you only need the construction capacity to add one new infrastructure network (railways), that’s a very different situation from having to also build housing and canals and a postal network and workshops for an increasing population at the same time as also building the railway network.
The global economy can to a limited extent compensate and pull together the natural rate of interest between regions, but there is a limit. British gentry can invest into an American railroad and some of that money can be used to buy shovels from Britain. Yet it will be the case that the American railroads need to show higher dividends, thus they will in general be built to a shoddier standard.
This was true historically for the western U.S. because of barriers to investment from outside the region. This isn’t really applicable today as anyone can go and buy Italian government bonds or buy stock in a private foreign transit operator.
For example, as an U.S. citizen with a form of permanent residency in India, I can freely work in India and buy almost any property besides certain agricultural lands. Yet I have none of my assets in India, and most fellow Indian Americans invest little in India and have almost all of their assets in the U.S. despite the higher growth rate. If India actually had a higher natural interest rate, our behavior would be foolish.
The savings rates in India and other high growth countries are also coincidentally higher than the developed world, so they don’t necessarily have a lot of net foreign investment. Some high growth countries like China actually end up buying a lot of U.S. treasuries.
“These disparities were the result of legal limitations on the development of interstate banking in the United States, which made it difficult for capital to flow from Europe or the eastern United States to the West.” – A Farewell to Alms by Gregory Clark pg. 333
Improving existing lines makes sense if density of riders is also increasing, mot always a given in Western cities with work from home going strong and NIMBYism. Can also increase rider density with e.g. more bikes, bus connections, congestion pricing, removing parking, culture shifts. Though without residential density along the line, I suspect that those other shifts will be smaller in magnitude than WFH.
The lines into London can be full and standing on the weekend and at Christmas.
Make the service good and people will use the train for leisure too.
I don’t think planning for holidays is really a good idea beyond — if there is extra capacity, use it; but not on the level of line planning. Weekends on the other hand, if that is consistently an issue then that could possibly justify more capacity and/or some methods of spreading the load (e.g. make sure West End shows don’t all let out at the same time, give some people a reason to stay in the neighborhood a bit longer after a concert, coordinate with mapping apps to recommend alternate routes — the kind of thing Paris has been doing for the Olympics).
The more important point is don’t shutdown service on holidays. I know most of Europe goes on vacation in summer, but you still need to run good service for those who don’t, and also for those who are coming to your city for the holiday. The rest of the world doesn’t even has as long a vacation season.
What is a “holiday”? Do you mean a public holiday (i.e Christmas Day, New Years Day etc) or do you mean August?
Because most agree with the latter but with the former it is difficult.
Also even for the latter you can get a lot done with a 1 week/two weekend closure – e.g bridge replacement.
Mean both summer vacation season and christmas. I know you have to do something about maintenance, but there are still people who need to get around while you do it and so you have to provide an alternate.
Henry, Matthew — summer holidays, public holidays, etc. Use the capacity if it’s helpful, so yes there should be at least decent holiday service if not even better than normal service where poasible, which is what I was trying to get at. I want to more explicitly distinguish between planning for line capacity and service; I agree there that having service is important, and it should even be more service than usual if necessary on holidays, but again I don’t think it makes sense to be building capacity for rare rush crowds. Don’t plan the line around exceptional peaks. I’m not even particularly convinced that the Chinese govt needs to be planning for the Chinese new year migration as much as it does in terms of capacity, though I understand that’s a cultural issue.
Going to a theatre matinee show, I took a southbound MTA Hudson Line 10am train from Poughkeepsie on a Saturday. By the time we got to Croton-Harmon, halfway to Manhattan, it was standing-room-only. The MTA added an empty carriage to the end, with an announcement that moving to the back of the train was a good idea.. There was a 1pm Yankees home game and probably a third of the passengers got off in the Bronx.
Coming back from a weekday evening show, I got on at Grand Central northbound at 11pm. The Yankees played a night home game against the Mets that day. The train got a good bit fuller in the Bronx, with some of the heated rivalry conversation by both men and women invigorated by earlier consumption of adult beverages.
Sounds like New York is doing well with off peak now 😀
out of curiosity I did the calculation for current projects around the rhine-main area
Lichtwiesenbahn (Darmstadt): 8,700 daily passengers, €27 million – €3100 per rider
Citybahn Wiesbaden: 125,000 daily passengers, €416 million – €3400 per rider
Lückenschluss DII Campusvariante (Frankfurt) 71,000- 100,000 passengers €300-400 million -€3,000-5600 per rider
Regionaltangente West: 30,000 passengers €1.1 billion – €37,000 per rider
U5 Europaviertel: €515 million (don’t have the number for passengers on hand bu i remember it was something between 20-30,000 passengers so 20,000 to 25,000 euros per rider.
A few other Euro costs per rider: Tramway T10 Ile-de-France 15600, Paris Metro 11 to Rosny 15300, Lyon T9 tram 7632, Lyon Metro B to St Genis 16000, Le Havre 2027 tram extensions 12000 ; Lausanne Metro M3 6000.
In the US: San Juan Puerto Rico Metro $ 162 000 ; NYC 2nd Ave extension $ 38 220 given the 2019 ridership ; Seattle LRV Lynnwood link $ 50 000 ; BART to Milpitas and Berryessa about $ 1 million.
WMATA Silver Line Phase II: ~$3 billion
Breaking out the daily ridership of the 6 stations in a few different ways:
Total in the timespan (2022-11-11 to 2024-07-27 or 624 days): 5308. Cost/rider: $565k
Past year (2023-07-28 to 2024-07-27 or 366 days): 5985. Cost/rider: $501k
Total timespan excluding weekends and holidays (2022-11-14 to 2024-07-26 or 426 days): 5765. Cost/rider: $520k
Past year excluding weekends and holidays (2023-07-25 to 2024-07-26 or 253 days): 6519. Cost/rider: $460k
…which suggests that at current costs, the DMV counts as vastly overbuilt(???)
I have a hard time calling a line linking Washington D.C., Tysons Corner and Dulles Airport vastly overbuilt but it is certainly underused. Predictions were for twenty thousand daily metro users at Dulles. The Silver Line ridership is currently lower than pre-pandemic, before the opening of the second phase, while the Airport sees record traffic around 69 000 per day. Something went wrong.
Airport lines generally under perform predictions. It is easy to see all the airline passengers and make predictions that x% will ride transit if they could – often just assume the people business travelers who ride transit to work will ride it to the airport (and of course many of those arriving have no way to get a car so you can stop them from renting a car) . However in reality people who fly have enough luggage that they don’t want to try to get it on transit (and it takes enough time that you don’t want them on anyway), and so even if they are normally transit advocates they will take a taxi (or drive) to the airport, and use the hotel shuttle to get to the hotel. (in transit cities the airport is likely a hub so a significant number of those passengers are transferring planes and won’t leave the airport)
Airport connectors often have poor service to the areas around the airport. Airports tend to be located far from your city center (they need a lot of space and make a lot of noise) but they have a lot of traveler focused business around them. You get hotels, and the like, that have poor access to transit since the transit connector goes downtown. Meaning that even if you like transit and are in a transit city, as a traveler the transit available to you isn’t useful. Of course airports are low density almost by definition (they have to impose a height limit on everything nearby) so serving the area around the airport is hard.
Airport connectors also need great 24×7 service. A flight leaving at 6am will reach a destination city in time for a morning business meeting, which means your system needs to be running well all night long. Someone who needs to arrive at the airport by 5am to be an hour early is leaving home at 4:15 am. Someone who needs to work at the airport for those flights needs to be at work by 4:00am and so is leaving at 3:15am. The return flight won’t arrive until 9-10pm so there are people who can’t get off work until near midnight. (and if the airport is international it may have flights arriving at any time)
Running an airport connector that is useful is not like running downtown service that is useful. Many transit systems are most focused on getting people to their job downtown (particularity in the US, but even if you try elsewhere jobs downtown are still the only reason a lot of people ride). These are the easiest to service – a lot of people heading in the same direction at the same time – you can get a lot of riders with just one trip in the morning and a return in the afternoon. However an airport
I’ve been forced to get a cab of some sort due to a lack of 24h airport service in 3 different continents, but to be honest there’s just not a lot of people taking flights that early or that late, and of those people a lot will take a cab anyways for the reasons you said. Usually most of the service workers don’t need 1h-5h transit either, night shifts shouldn’t usually start or end during that time.
The reasons you mention explain the relatively low average of 1 train rider for 5 flying passengers (20%) seen in air-rail links around the globe. They are not an explanation for Dulles station disappointing numbers (2.7% of air traffic) which are not average at all.