For Walkability and Good Transit, and Against Boondoggles and Pollution
More on American Incuriosity, New York Regional Rail Edition, Part 1: European History
The Regional Plan Association ran an event 2.5 days ago about New York commuter rail improvements and Penn Station, defending the $16.7 billion Penn Station Expansion proposal as necessary for capacity. The presentation is available online, mirrored here, and I recommend people look at the slides to understand the depth of the ignorance and incuriosity of area decisionmakers about best practices displayed in the first half of the presentation; the second half, by Foster Nichols, is more debatable. I hope to make this a series of two or perhaps three posts, focusing on different aspects of why this is so bad. But for now, I’d like to just talk about what the presentation gets wrong about the history of commuter rail improvement in Europe, on pages 17-19. Suffice is to say, the extent of error that can be crammed into a single slide with little text astounded me. With such incuriosity about best practices, it’s not surprising that regional power brokers are trying to will the unnecessary Penn Expansion project into being, never mind that it has no transportation benefits despite its extravagant cost.
The rub is that the presentation on pp. 18-19 says that commuter rail through-running is really hard. Here is page 18:
Regional metro systems comprise a targeted portion of regional rail networks centers of population, employment, business or major attractions like airports that support frequent, fast service
Regional metro systems typically do not operate within original historic train sheds
They operate in new tunnels, shoulder stations adjacent to existing major stations, and separate, simpler interlockings that facilitate frequent service
Then, page 19 shows maps of the RER, Munich S-Bahn, Elizabeth line, and Thameslink, quoting the length it took to build them as, respectively, “30 years,” “46 years,” “2001-2022,” and “1970s-80s, 2009-2020.” The conclusion is “Systems take decades to implement, usually in stages.”
And all of this is a pack of lies.
In fact, commuter rail through-running systems routinely reuse legacy stations, even fairly major ones: both Berlin and Munich Ostbahnhof were incorporated into their respective S-Bahns, and several Parisian train stations were reused for the RER, for example Gare d’Invalides or Luxembourg, with varying levels of modification. New stations are built from scratch underneath surface stub-end terminals like Gare du Nord and Gare de Lyon as depicted in the presentation, but if the station already has through-tracks then it can be used as-is, like Munich Ostbahnhof, and in some cases even stub-end stations are at such grade that their infrastructure can be used. If Boston chooses to build the North-South Rail Link, then, since North and South Stations are both large at-grade terminals, the link will have to include new underground platforms at both stations. But Penn Station is an existing through-station below grade; Amtrak already runs through, and so could commuter rail, without adding platforms.
And as for the lines about the systems having taken 30 and 46 years to build, this is so painfully wrong that it is perhaps best to go over their actual histories. The actual length of time it took depends on one’s definitions, especially for Paris, but the maximum one can support for Paris is 16 years; for Munich, it is seven years.
The history of the RER
The RER and Transilien are, together, the largest commuter rail network in Europe by ridership, with around 1.1 billion annual riders. Globally, only four systems surpass them: Tokyo, Seoul, Osaka, Mumbai; the first two are integrated metro-commuter rail networks to the point that it’s hard to distinguish which mode they are, Osaka is several competing companies none with the ridership of the combined Paris system, Mumbai runs with practically no metro accompanying it. The RER’s history, as I will shortly explain, also makes it a good prototype for modern commuter rail operations, of the same type that is called S-Bahn in Germany. New Yorkers would do especially well to understand this history, which has some parallels to the administrative situation in New York today.
The topline of this is that since the 1960s, Paris has connected its legacy commuter and intercity rail terminals with new through-tunnels, called the RER, or Réseau Express Régional. There are five lines, dubbed A through E. Métro operator RATP runs most of the RER A, and the RER B south of Gare du Nord; national railway SNCF runs the rest plus commuter train networks stub-ending at most of the historic terminals, called Transilien, signed with letters from H to R.
But the history of the RER goes back further – and none of it can be said to have taken 30 years. In short: the Métro was built, starting in the 1890s and opening in 1900, to be totally incompatible with mainline rail – for one, where mainline trains in France run on the left, the Métro runs on the right. This was on purpose: city residents in the Belle Epoque already looked down on the suburbs and worried that if the Métro were compatible with the mainlines, then it might be used to connect to the suburbs and bring suburbanites to their city. The stop spacing, separately, was very tight, even tighter than on New York local subway trains, let alone the London Underground. By the time the system reached the inner suburbs in the 1930s, it was clear that it could not by itself connect the growing suburbs to the city, it would be too slow.
Various proposals for investment in commuter rail go back to the 1920s, but little happened, with one exception: the Ligne de Sceaux, shown as the blue line on the first image entering the city from the south, was acquired by the forerunner of RATP, CMP, in 1938, as the rest of the French mainline network was nationalized. CMP was attracted to the line because of its atypically good penetration into the center of Paris – the other lines terminated farther from the historic center, for example at Gare du Nord or Gare de Lyon. The line was also not useful for SNCF as it was being formed, due to its isolation from the rest of the network. The line was electrified as it was acquired, and run as a regional line, still isolated from all others.
More serious plans for commuter rail through-running began in the 1950s, as postwar growth and suburbanization put more pressure on the system. Gare Saint-Lazare was especially under pressure, first because of growth in the western suburbs, and second because the Paris CBD had been creeping west, making its location more attractive for commuters. In 1956, Marc Langevin proposed an eight-line network; in 1959, RATP and SNCF began collaborating, planning east-west and north-south lines. As late as 1966, there were still plans for two separate north-south lines (for example, see here, p. 244), of which only one has been built and the other is no longer seriously proposed.
In the 1960s, the plans got more serious. Construction began in 1961, starting with the east-west axis, still with an uncertain alignment. Eventually, RATP would take over the Ligne de Vincennes (the eastern red line in the before map) in 1969 and the Ligne de Saint-Germain-en-Laye (the southernmost of the western red lines) in 1972, and connect them with a new tunnel, opening in 1977. Over the 1960s, the plans still had to be refined: it was only in 1963 that it was confirmed that the Ligne de Vincennes’ Paris terminal, Bastille, was too small to be used for this system, and therefore the new tunnels would have to begin farther east, to Nation, which opened in 1969 and is thus already depicted on the before map.
The Ligne de Vincennes was simultaneously modernized, starting in 1966. The entire systems had to be redone, including new platforms and electrification. Nation had to be built underground, starting 1965, complete in 1967 and opening with the rest of the line in 1969.
On the west, the cornerstone was laid in 1971, and construction began shortly later, starting with La Défense. Shuttle trains run by RATP opened between La Défense and Etoile in 1970, and extended to Auber in 1971. In 1972 the line was connected to the Ligne de Saint-Germain-en-Laye.
At the same time, deepening SNCF-RATP integration meant that the planned alignment within the city would need to change to connect to SNCF’s train stations better. Originally, the east-west axis was supposed to run as an express version of Métro Line 1, stopping at Etoile, Concorde, and Châtelet; this was modified to have it swerve north, replacing Concorde with Auber, which is connected to Saint-Lazare. East of Châtelet-Les Halles, the alignment swerves south to connect to Gare de Lyon instead of Bastille.
In 1977, the Nation-Auber section opened, finally offering through-service; the appellation RER A dates only from then. Simultaneously, the north-south axis that was actually built half-opened, connecting the Ligne de Sceaux onward to Les Halles, with cross-platform transfers from the south to the west. On the same date that the central section opened, RATP also inaugurated an entirely greenfield branch of the RER A to the east, initially to Noisy-le-Grand, eventually (by 1992) to the new Marne-la-Vallée development, where Eurodisney was built. Contemporary media reports called Les Halles the biggest metro station in the world, and President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing (center-right) spoke of public transport for everyone, not just the poor. The cost of this scheme was enormous: it cost 5 billion francs (update 8-9: see Alain Dumas’s comment below – it’s 5 billion FRF for the entire RER A, not just the Nation-Auber section), which would make it about $1 billion/km $350 million in 2023 prices, inflation since then more or less canceling out the franc:USD exchange rate. The RER B cost 400 million francs between Luxembourg and Les Halles, a distance of 2.3 km, and 1.6 billion to get to Gare du Nord and connect to the SNCF network to the north (opened 1981), a distance of 3.5 km.
The RER C then opened in 1979, as a second east-west line, on the Left Bank. Missing all of the main centers within Paris, it has always had far lower ridership than the RER A; it was also much easier and cheaper to build – all that was required was a short tunnel connecting Invalides on the west, previously a subsidiary commuter rail-only stop on the same lines to Montparnasse and Saint-Lazare, and Gare d’Orsay on the east, a commuter rail-only extension of the line to Austerlitz. This was built quickly – the decision was made in 1973, and the line opened within six years. This required a total rebuild of Gare d’Orsay with new underground platforms; Invalides required reconstruction as well, but could use the same station and track structures.
Subsequently, the system has added new lines and branches – the RER D opened from the north to new Gare de Nord platforms in 1982, was extended in 1987 along the same tracks used by the RER B to Les Halles but serving dedicated platforms at both stations, and was extended along a new tunnel to and beyond Gare de Lyon in 1995; the RER A acquired new western branches in 1988 to be operated by SNCF, requiring dual-voltage trains since those branches use 25 kV 50 Hz AC and not 1.5 kV DC like the RATP lines; the RER C acquired a new branch also in 1988 taking over part of the Petite Ceinture; the RER E was opened as a stub-end extension of lines from the Gare de l’Est network to a new underground station at Saint-Lazare in 1999, and was finally extended to the west with some through-service this year.
So in a sense, it’s taken 63 years to build the RER, starting 1961, and the work is not yet done. But the core through-running service opened in 1977, within 16 years, with some decisions made midway through the works. The total required work greatly exceeded anything New York needs to do – just what opened through 1977 includes 16 km of double-track central tunnel on the RER A, 3 km on the new branch to Noisy plus 6 km of new above-ground line, 2 km of tunnel on the RER B, and around one km of tunnel on the RER C, inaugurating eight new underground stations, all on the RER A. The RER A’s ridership reached 1.4 million per workday by 2019, and the RER B’s reached 983,000 – and a great majority of the work on both was done by 1981.
The history of the Munich S-Bahn
The Munich S-Bahn is not the oldest or busiest S-Bahn system in Germany; Berlin and Hamburg both have prewar systems, and Berlin’s ridership is considerably higher than Munich’s. Nonetheless, precisely because Berlin and Hamburg built so much of their infrastructure in the steam era, some lessons do not port well to cities today. In contrast, Munich’s entire system has been built after the war – in fact, the construction of the S-Bahn took place over just seven years, from the decision of 1965 to opening in 1972, timed with the Olympics.
As in Paris and many other cities, the history of proposals for rapid urban mainline rail in Munich stretches back decades before the decision was made. The first proposal was made in 1928, and there was more serious planning in Nazi Germany, as the Nazi Party had been founded in Munich and was interested in investing in the city due to that history; by 1941, there were plans for a three-line system, comprising a north-south, an east-west, and a circular tunnel. But little was built, and during the war, the resources of Germany toward rail were prioritized in a different direction.
After the war, Munich grew rapidly. It was not much of an industrial city in the early 20th century; early industrialization in Germany was mostly in the Ruhr and Saxony, while the professional services economy was centered on Berlin, whose metropolitan area in the 1930s was of comparable size to that of Paris. After the war, things changed, at least in the West: the Ruhr’s coal and steel economy stagnated, while southern Germany grew around new manufacturing of cars and chemicals; decentralization dispersed the professional services economy, and while most went to Frankfurt and Hamburg, a share went to Munich (for example, Siemens’ headquarters moved there from Berlin right after the war). The city’s wartime peak population was 835,000; it would surpass 1 million in 1957 and is 1.5 million today. The region, Oberbayern, comprising essentially the metro areas of Munich and Ingolstadt, would grow from 2 million at the beginning of the war to 2.8 million by 1960 and 4.8 million today, and is the richest region in the EU at this scale, with per capita income from work approaching that of New York.
This small size of Munich in 1900 means that it never had as extensive a rail network as Paris or Berlin. It had just two major urban stations: Hauptbahnhof, a terminal with a station throat leading to points west, and Ostbahnhof, a through-station with tracks leading east, south, and the west, the western tracks looping back south of city center to reach Hauptbahnhof. To this day, area railfans would like this loop to be incorporated into a regional S-Bahn system avoiding city center – but Munich is still a rather monocentric city. There was no U-Bahn, unlike in Berlin or Hamburg.
By 1961, the number of suburban commuters into Munich reached 114,000. The undersize rail network relative to the city’s current importance and the rapid growth in wealth meant that car ownership was high, leading to traffic congestion. The trams were slowed down by traffic, to the point of not running faster than walking in city center.
To resolve these problems, both an U-Bahn network and an S-Bahn network were planned. Early planning began in the 1950s, with the federal government taking over the wartime plans in 1956, but as in Paris, the extent of the system to be planned was up in the air: both an east-west axis and a north-south line were desired, and only in 1963 was the decision finalized that the north-south axis should be a municipal U-Bahn tunnel and not an S-Bahn. The study period began in 1961, with the plan approved in 1965 for the construction of a single east-west S-Bahn tunnel between Hauptbahnhof and Ostbahnhof, and a separate U-Bahn system with three branched trunk lines.
Construction was done on a tight timeline, since Munich was awarded the 1972 Olympics in 1966, and delays were not considered acceptable; the first U-Bahn line, U3/U6 running north-south, opened 1971, and the S-Bahn opened 1972, in what is described as a “record time.”
During the seven years of construction, other projects had to be done in parallel. Commuter rail lines had to be extensively upgraded: the project included 143 km of electrification, and 115 stations outfitted with new high platforms at a level of 760 mm mostly 210 meters long. Simultaneously, most of what has become the standard for good timetabling was invented, out of necessity on a network that had to share tracks and systems with other trains on its outer margin, most importantly the clockface schedule – the system was designed around a 20-minute Takt on each branch from the outset, with outer tails running every 40 minutes.
The central tunnel itself, the Stammstrecke, comprises six stations from Hauptbahnhof to Ostbahnhof of which all except Ostbahnhof are underground, and three have Spanish platforms. Ostbahnhof itself is used as a pinch point for some trains, reversing direction depending on branch. The Stammstrecke in total was built for 900 million DM, or $2.8 billion in 2023 PPPs; the overall line included 4.1 km of tunnel and about 7.3 more km of above-ground connections. (Update 8-9: cost fixed – I originally stated it to be 900 DM.)
There has been further investment adding new branches and upgrading the system. The new signal system LZB was installed in the central section experimentally when it opened in 1972, but it was not used on all trains, and was taken out of service in 1983, only returning in 2004 when its capacity was needed, boosting throughput from 24 trains per hour to 30. However, as in Paris, the core of the system’s high ridership, now about 900,000 per workday, comes from infrastructure that was there from the start, and thus it’s most correct to say that the system took not 46 years to build but seven.
Some lessons for New York
By the standards of Paris and Munich, New York has practically everything it needs to run through-service. The electrification systems on its three commuter railroads are not compatible, but multivoltage trains not only are routine, but also already present in New York; the current configurations all have one problem or another, but fundamentally, ordering multivoltage trains is a solved problem. Only a handful of outer branches need to be electrified, and all can be deferred, running with forced transfers until they are wired as is current practice on the Raritan Valley Line and for the most part also the outer Port Jefferson Branch. The LIRR and Metro-North are entirely high-platform and New Jersey Transit’s Manhattan-facing lines only have 68 low-platform stations of which 26 are already funded for high platform conversions.
By far the biggest missing element for New York by cost is the Gateway Program and its Hudson Tunnel Project, which is budgeted at $16 billion and is funded and beginning construction, with the New Jersey land tunnel contract just awarded. Even before the new tunnel opens, it can run some through-service after Penn Station Access opens from the Hell Gate Line, pairing it with some New Jersey Northeast Corridor trains.
On top of that, some surface improvements are prudent, such as some grade separations of rail junctions, the most expensive costing on the order of hundreds of millions (Hunter is $300 million on the budget, maybe $400 million by now); much of that is already getting funds from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law or likely to get them in the near future, since the infrastructure is also used by Northeast Corridor intercity trains.
But it does not need to do anything that area railroaders have convinced themselves they need, especially not new tracks at Penn Station. Nor are decades of prep work needed – rapid installation of high platforms is completely feasible, as was done not just in Munich in the 1960s and 70s but also in suburban New York in the same period and in the 1980s and 90s, converting the LIRR and Metro-North to full high-platform operations and doing the same on the Northeast Corridor in New Jersey.
All that is needed is a modicum of curiosity about the world, curiosity that is not seen in the presentation with its whoppers about the timelines of the RER and Munich S-Bahn, or its belief that new underground tracks are always required as if Penn Station is the same as the surface Gare du Nord. I find myself having to explain to journalists who interview me that all of this can be done, but the people in charge of the railroads around New York cannot do it.
In the early 1990s, absolutely stunned and appalled by the insane regional transportation projects that were going ahead and being proposed in the San Francisco region to which I’d moved, and all fired up by recent first-hand experience of Japanese and Central European “this just works it’s all so obvious” competence, I reasoned that if only the locals were made aware that far better things were possible more cheaply and more quickly, things of which they were, through no fault of their own, somehow unaware, then of course they’d freely choose to correct their misapprehensions, adjusting their opinions in the light of fresh information. Education, that’s the ticket! Just let them know that better things can be done and they’ll just right on it!
Anyway, here we are, in 2024, with 425.55 ppm CO2, which means nothing matters anyway.
Not invented here–thus not valid. When Triboro X (now IBX) was first proposed it was dismissed because it came from outside the MTA IINM. Only when the accidental Governor became convinced has there been any chance of seeing actual service. Current unwillingness to follow “alien” best practices is no surprise, just stupid–and protective of overpricing of projects in order to increase profits for the ‘connected’
Ueno-Tokyo Line is probably a more comparable project to Penn Station through running than the big mid-20th century tunneling projects like RER. Very little actual construction work, though what work did happen needed to avoid disrupting one of the busiest transport corridors in the world.
I’d say being a project from (barely) within the last decade also makes it even more comparable.
The context of it being in what was already the largest regional metro system in the world is obviously very different, but the actual project itself is pretty similar. Comparing Penn Station through running to RER makes it seem like a much larger undertaking than it actually is.
Both Ueno-Tokyo Line and Penn Station through running involve city center terminal operations pretty much ready for through running, a suburban station network ready for urban/suburban EMUs, no new city center stations, and no city center tunneling.
By Japanese definition, Ueno-Tokyo Line is regional rail (列车线) rather than regional metro (电车线). It carries transilien-style services rather than RER-style ones.
I cannot find any Japanese sources using the terms 列车线 or 电车线. The term I usually see used to distinguish lines such as the Ueno-Tokyo Line from lines such as the Keihin-Tohoku Line is that the former uses 近郊形車両 (suburban trains) while the latter uses 通勤形車両 (commuter trains).
With regards to regional rail, if one is using its proper definition instead of the American one of “good commuter/suburban rail”, then the equivalent terms in Japanese are 地方鉄道 or ローカル線.
Ah – thanks for that. It turns out 電車線 and 列車線 seem to only refer to cases where you have a quadruple-track line with “local” tracks and “express” tracks running side-by-side – e.g. the Keihin-Tohoku and Tokaido lines.
Sassy
I don’t think translating those terms as regional rail and regional metro is accurate at all. It’s just JNR/JR jargon for express tracks and local tracks, mostly internally nowadays with almost all public facing usage gone.
In day to day conversation, everything is a 電車. If people talk specifically express and local tracks, it’s typically 急行線/快速線 and 緩行線.
Being that I am currently on holiday in Kansai, allow me a mention of the JR West Tozai Line- a cross-city commuter line connecting the Katamachi/Gakkentoshi Line with the Fukuchiyama Line (and connection with the JR West Kobe Line at Amagasaki)- 12.5km long, planning started 1988 with full operation in 1997.
Regional metro systems typically do not operate within original historic train sheds
I want to find the person who wrote this and bash their head into Tokaido mainline in Japan which does this for not 1, not 2 but three megacities (admittedly they did need consistent upgrading).
The 5 directions strategy that separated the Yamanote and Tohoku lines, plus pushing quadtracks deep into the suburbs as far Omiya/Odawara etc had a construction phase 1966-1973. And that was just JNR. Add in the Asakusa which had a three stage process of 1960, 1964, and 1968 before through-running either side was complete after approval in 1957.
And ignoring the London Underground (which streched well beyond the London County area/Middlesex by 1939 and not just with Metropolitan line). The first tunnel connectors for regional rail service is Meitetsu with its underground Spanish solution station in 1954 or you could add the Kobe Kosoku connector between Sanyo and Hanshin/Hankyu, which was built 1962-68.
Alon do you have any reading recommendations for the RER and Transilien, other than your own stuff, which is necessarily compact?
I can’t find any book about the Transilien but old issues of rail magazines are available at “boutiquedelaviedurail.com”. About the RER, eBay.fr has a couple of interesting books:
La saga du RER by Christian Gerondeau. He was an advisor to the prime minister Chaban when the decisions were taken.
Gilet Vert SNCF, written by a regulator on the RER D, if you want to plunge into the daily difficulties of the RER D with its huge network and congested Gare du Nord-Chatelet segment.
For English language reading on the RER, my best recommendation would be the “Paris RER Handbook” written by Brian Patton, published by Capital Transport (British) in 2001. While it is now 23 years old and out of print you can find it on eBay and could still be considered fairly current as it has everything up to Line E’s initial opening in 1999.
I have “La saga du RER” by Christian Gerondeau, referenced above by dralaindumas, and while that book has some general history of the RER’s development, it’s more of an advocacy for his alternative proposal of extending RER E to the southwest. At the time of its publication in 2003 work on extending RER E had been frozen due to increasing costs and controversy / indecision over which way to go.
Gerondeau was in favor of taking over one branch of Line C, and some of the legacy lines which currently terminate at Gare Montparnasse. Obviously this did not come to pass, as can be seen in the most recently opened extension. Line E has always been envisioned as a relief line for RER A, so when it reaches Mantes La Jolie in 2025 it will have finally realized its objective.
Interestingly, there was once a Line F contemplated to link Saint Lazare and Montparnasse and take over the same SW lines favored by Gerondeau, but that seems very unlikely now, obviated by the Grand Paris network currently underway.
The RER F’s terminal problem was that Montparnasse and Saint-Lazare’s networks both head in the same direction, west, sometimes reaching the same branches. They were historically owned by the same railroad, and were used as a reverse-branch, to give service to both banks of Paris; this is why some suburban stations have Rive gauche or Rive droite in their names, for example Versailles – they reflect which Paris terminal they are connected to, rather than which bank of the river they are located in.
And yeah, in retrospect I think it would have been better to send the RER E southwest, and if more relief to La Défense was needed, then they could have built an RER line along a different east-west alignment, for example to Les Halles taking over the RER D to points southeast, deeding the Nord-Les Halles tunnel to just the RER B.
I would think the answer now would be to send the southeast branch of RER D to St. Lazare, and have the tracks north of Les Halles connected to Montparnasse. This would give you three main axis across Paris:
In French, passengers travelling through Paris are called traversants. Traversants may not be numerous on the RER F since the St Lazare and Montparnasse banlieues somewhat overlap but the issue is far from terminal. Only 3% of RER A & B and 1% of RER C & D passengers are traversants. They are hardly relevant.
The right word in your statement is relief. The RER A relieved metro line 1, Gares de Lyon and St Lazare. Gare de Lyon was later helped by the RER D and transferring Auvergne and Bourgogne trains to Gare de Bercy. The RER offered better options than trying to get into a crowded metro at a mainline station and in turn became overloaded. RER E and metro 14 were then built to relieve RER A.
The RER F would create space in St Lazare, Montparnasse and the metros 12 and 13 linking them but is not urgently needed. M12 is not overloaded. The overloaded M13 lost passengers after the 2020 northern extension of M14, and its full automatization around 2035 should help. The 2026 extension of the RER E to Mantes will divert traffic from St Lazare. New LGV lines in the South West and Normandy may revive the issue but for the time being only exist on paper.
What’s your source on only 3% of RER A and B passengers being traversants? I presume this does not include eastern suburb to La Défense trips, but only trips from east of the city to west of Nanterre?
dralaindumas
I have dozens of pages of data in my computer where I note whatever seems interesting. It came from one of the inquiries launched by either IdF Mobilite or the Assemblee Nationale because the RER is such a big ticket item that results are closely monitored but I did not write the exact reference. The same note says that passengers staying on one banlieue secteur known as caboteurs represent 47% of the ridership on RER A, 25% on C, D and E, 12% on B. I suppose the 47% include commuters to La Defense from the West and the traversants only include those coming from the East and travelling beyond La Defense. I suppose these numbers will change as the Grand Paris Express will offer other options to reach La Defense from the banlieues.
I presume this 3% figure is also why the plan for the RER E is to run in two sections without through-service?
And yeah, 47% must include west-to-La-Défense ridership given job patterns on the line…
dralaindumas
Yes, this is one of the reasons for the turnaround at Rosa Park. The other one is that, on these RER lines totaling over 100 km, an incident on one branch has repercussions far away. Regularity and cancellations are monitored by the financing agency and intermediate turnarounds are one of the tools expected to improve the stats.
My numbers came from the testimony of Jean Pierre Orfeuil, a Paris Est-Creteil University professor to the Assemblee Nationale (Assemblee-Nationale.fr rapport # 4458). The numbers are at page 169, under the heading “Adapter le RER aux usages des voyageurs” but there are no further explanations. It looks like the 500 pages long report is only a summary of the inquiry. Elsewhere, Orfeuil suggested the introduction of intermediate turnarounds.
Onux
If the 47% caboteurs includes west suburb to La Defense commutes, but the 3% traversants only includes commutes from east suburbs to beyond La Defense then something is off – La Defense would be considered part of Paris when coming from the east but not from the west. I think we need to see your data source.
Perhaps La Defense is Schrodinger’s business district – simultaneously inside Paris and inside the western suburbs until someone travels to it.
dralaindumas
Yes. La Defense is simultaneously in zone 2 and 3 until you decide to pay a visit. It then becomes zone 2 if you use the metro, zone 3 if you take the RER, tramway, Transilien or bus.
adirondacker12800
Traveling is Newtonian experience. Traveling long distances takes time and costs more.
I beginning to suspect that railfans lead very sheltered lives and imagine that buildings with elevators are filled with people making lots of money in high powered jobs. They aren’t.
They are filled with people with job titles like bookkeeper, paralegal, administrative assistant, network technician. And likely a higher than median amount of things like accountant or lawyer. You can network technician for the same pay east of the Eiffel Tower as you can west of it. Or keep books or lawyer or accountant. Or on any side of Herald Square in Manhattan or any side of the Loop in Chicago. Or…
… the reason why a … stenographer… from New Carrollton Maryland didn’t take a job in Falls Church Virginia is because she didn’t even apply for it. Because there are stenographer jobs closer to home. Even though there is a one seat ride on Metro. Which would take a long time and cost a lot of money.
dralaindumas
Commuting patterns indeed follow Newton’s third law: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The trips we are discussing here and the infrastructure build up in Paris during the last 60 years are the reaction to the concentration of jobs and expensive real estate on the West side and cheaper accommodations at a distance.
The Navigo pass allowing the most extreme commuting, from a zone 5 suburb to Paris or any other suburb, will cost you 950 Euros/year. Multiply this by three to account for the subsidies received by SNCF and RATP, add the cost this travelling takes on your stamina and the total will more or less cover the price differential between your current apartment and one near your work place. Residents in Paris beaux quartiers, Neuilly, St Germain, Versailles and other leafy western suburbs don’t want cheap high density housing built in their neighborhoods. They prefer subsidizing the RER and Grand Paris Express construction and operations.
adirondacker12800
cheaper accommodations at a distance.
The way it works almost every place else in the world. With some exceptions like Detroit and Pyongyang.
dralaindumas
Yes, around the world, people commute in search of better work opportunities and cheaper accommodations. This travelling is organized in very distinct ways in Paris, Houston, New York, Jakarta, Seoul, Lagos, etc… And that is the topic of this blog, how cities can learn from each other.
adirondacker12800
And around the world people searching for better work opportunities take the one, that is similar to other ones, with the shorter commute. I have a hope that railfans will someday understand that. And that most jobs aren’t Executive Vice President of Extra Special at Exquisitely Unique, on the other side of the metro. Most of them are the kind of jobs that can be found closer to home.
Quick reminder: nobody is <i>obliged<i> to feed tasty replies to reply-guy trolls.
Michael
Thanks for that. Just bought the only “cheap” copy on Abe. The RER is one of those things that made me go native. Because I lived at Cité Universtaire during my first year in Paris in the early 80s, RER-B at Parc Montsouris was my transit line and umbilical cord to the whole Metro system, and even to connections out of France via Gare du Nord and CDG. In fact at every place I lived in Paris, including Ile St Louis and later the 10e, I was always within easy walking distance of RER-B.
Here is another addition to the literature, by two engineers/managers with long careers at SNCF and Eurotunnel etc.
Japan Railway & Transport Review No. 23 (pp.36–41) March, 2000.
Feature: Evolution of Urban Railways How Tokyo’s Subways Inspired the Paris RER (Interconnection with SNCF Suburban Lines) Louis Sato and Philippe Essig
Introduction Each time a new idea prevails, the initial difficulties are forgotten fairly quickly. In town planning and transportation, it is always difficult to design and execute a project that alters long-established practices. However, during the last 30 years, many metropolises worldwide have seen revolutions in the fields of transportation and urban traffic. This article recalls the situation 30 years ago when a study of the Tokyo subway guided the design of the central station of the Paris RER.
Having said that, the operational difficulties of Line C could be lessened if it lost a branch or two. Last year’s opening of Tram Line 12, and the introduction of Transilien Line V, is a step in the right directions, something that could have saved generations of confused tourists who have gone the wrong (and LONG) way around to reach Versailles.
There are other out of print books on Line A and Line C in French, eBay may surprise you. The Ligne de Sceaux (Line B) was given good treatment last year by French rail book publisher La Vie du Rail (an update of a book from 35 years ago). An all encompassing, thorough tome of the current RER needs to be written and I hear rumors it is underway. I hope it comes to fruition. A new updated history of the Metro will be out this fall, celebrating 120 years of the system, published by La Vie du Rail.
I’ll keep my eye out for those books. Might buy the 1982 version of Ligne de Sceaux (Daniel Schiff) as it is available. Of course another reason why someone like me could have a fondness for RER-B, is that I shared my commuting to my lab with Marie Curie (about a century earlier) who used it to commute to her lab after relocating to the suburb of Sceaux; the terminus at Luxembourg is a short walk to her lab, now the Curie Institute on rue d’Ulm. She probably moved to Sceaux for the Lycée Lakanal; Frédéric Joliot-Curie is one of two students who won the Nobel, and a whole clutch of other high-achiever alumni from the illustrious school. It was one of the public schools created by Jules Ferry to make schooling universally available and free of the church.
For something completely different:
Roissy Express: A Journey Through the Paris Suburbs Maspero, Francois Published by Verso, 1994
This is a sociological study of the areas bordering the northern section of RER-B. Of current relevance in that it is entirely contained within St-Denis the Olympics venue. Thirty years later parts are transforming. But funny enough I just discovered an error: in the map it omits the Cité Universitaire stop!
From the blurb:
Accompanied by photographer Anaïk Frantz, ex-publisher and novelist Francois Master embarked on a journey of discovery into a terrain vague with ten million inhabitants, a radical past–the ‘red suburbs’–and a tense present. the result is this unusual and fascinating book, a vivid mixture of diary, ethnology, history and politics. … Maspero’s aim is to put this world back on the map, and he does so with self-effacing humour, genial erudition and unwavering solidarity, helped by Frantz’s rare ability to take photos which are both candid and respectful. This is an inspiring record, proof that a month on the RER can teach one more about la France profonde than a year in Provence.
Your first reference is wrong. Giscard d’Estaing, then finance minister, was horrified by the 5 billion francs (in 1971 value) cost of the RER system he had to partially finance which included the 4.8 km Defense-Etoile and 2.45 km Etoile-Auber tunnels. The 5.6 km Auber-Nation core and its underground stations only cost 1150 million francs because the Chatelet and Gare de Lyon RER stations were built cut and cover. This is confirmed by your second reference : “la jonction centrale est evaluee a plus d’un milliard” and by a cost per km (203 million Fr) similar to the cost per km of the 2.3 or 2,6 km Luxembourg-Chatelet link.
Ah, yeah, I was worried that the 5 billion FRF figure was for a lot more than 5.6 km given how nothing else in that system cost that much per km. Thanks for the correction.
Sadly, it comes down to the notion that a super-regional transit system for NJ-NY-CN is simply impossible due to the current political dynamic of the relationship between the states. No (or certainly not the majority of) power brokers want to yield authority for the common good of the region. And no one of greater authority is willing to force the responsible parties to do the right thing.
This is all frustrating because here in Philadelphia, not only do we have the tunnel, but SEPTA seems committed to actually turning the Regional Rail system into something better resembling S-Bahns. I can’t find it right now, but in their planning document to increase frequency, they effectively said “If Munich can do it with 2 tracks, we can do it with 4.” Unfortunately, this is all contingent on our legislature, which is uninterested in funding SEPTA even to the bare minimum.
SEPTA published a report for its ‘Reimagining Regional Rail‘ initiative almost three years ago that was prepared by Huit-Zollars. I think that it was originally published as one report, but now is available as separate State of the System and Peer Review files. Notably, their file names designate them at, “02,” and, “03;” I would suppose that, “01,” is the executive summary for a larger report that they will be integrated into with subsequent parts explaining something about the actual plan. I cannot recall SEPTA saying anything substantive, or even much vaporous, about the initiative since then.
There is a $ 4 million Regional Rail Master Plan Implementation project listed among the Planning Studies on page 17 of the 2024 Northeast Corridor Project Inventory, which suggests that they haven’t given up on it, but the long silence suggests that it might have met stubborn resistance from within or is being picked apart by ‘stakeholders’ and perhaps that that will be more expensive than they had hoped.
Right, and the Peer Review actually does look at other systems like Munich, Auckland, and Barcelona, and while it’s pretty surface level, this suggests that at the least they understand that international practices are worth learning from.
The fact that you use the NY Post as a credible source for what MTA are apparently planning for Penn Station despite the fact that AMTRAK owns it is slightly worrying. The Murdoch owned rag is not exactly renowned for its accuracy.
Unless I’m missing something, based on the AMTRAK presentation it appears that what is being proposed is a restructuring of the tri state commuter rail networks, and a rebuild of Penn Station which is certainly well overdue as while the concourse is better than it used to be the train shed is an absolute death trap. See how long it takes to clear Tracks 1 through about 10 in the mornings when NJ Transit trains are arriving during rush hour…….
What really should happen is MSG and all the overbuild should be removed and the existing NY Penn rebuilt from 19C standards to 21st Century standards and restructured to accommodate the through running that really should exist. Lets face it you have one through running entity AMTRAK and in the near future three terminal entities NJT, LIRR and MNR. If I recall a few years ago there were issues with under and overrunning 3rd rail connector shoes between MNR and LIRR although I guess that’s not an insurmountable issue? Combine the three commuter railroads into a single entity and have a tri state funding mechanism and run an integrated commuter rail systems for the tri state area. As long as the State vs State BS continues any grown up sensible approach to managing the areas transportation needs is doomed to fail, irrespective of any incuriosity or not.
Oh and Elizabeth Line or Crossrail was first identified as a specific line from Paddington to Liverpool St in 1974, so it did take the best part of 50 years to build. I remember when I was working on the original Channel Tunnel High Speed Rail link back in 1989/90 that was to pass through South London and have a station at Kings Cross before linking up to the main lines to the north, that we had to take the protected corridor for it into account when developing the vertical profile from the Thames up to KX.
1. It’s Nolan Hicks, who isn’t even at the Post anymore. Otherwise I’d look for an NYDN reference – Michael Aronson is even more negative about Gateway as it’s being planned, especially Penn Expansion – but NYDN isn’t GDPR-compliant so it’s harder for me to find articles there.
2. Penn Reconstruction and Penn Expansion are separate projects. I have quibbles with Penn Reconstruction’s scope and project delivery (they’re trying to legalize progressive design-build for it), but it’s a positive transportation value project. Penn Expansion is the useless one, and the one the presentation is defending.
3. Removing the overbuild is really good and makes the column removal for redoing the platforms much easier, yeah.
4. The Elizabeth line was planned as an idea for a long time, but then again, New York through-running has a long history already at the level of where Crossrail was in the 1990s or where the RER and Munich S-Bahn were in the 1950s.
Reading the NYPost can hurt your brain. However, when commenting on the non-sense and corruption endemic in the regional rail services, they usually do a better job than other NY based news organizations.
And people who don’t click through are going to know this by osmosis from the emanations of the universe? Since there are Amtrak logos splattered all over it, it’s Amtrak presentation. Amtrak has been making presentations about how they will need more capacity for decades.
None, I think. Philadelphia is much more auto-oriented and did it, at least for a while; Boston keeps pushing it as a long-term goal, it just requires extensive new infrastructure, not much smaller in scale than the Munich S-Bahn. Rather, it’s agency turf battles.
Note also what arguments are being made against the through-running plans. Adirondacker argues against it by mocking the idea of cross-regional commuting, using lines like “why would a Long Islander take a train to South Orange for town center retail like CVS that’s identical to what’s available at Rockville Centre and Huntington?”. But that’s not the main argument being made by the agencies or by the RPA, which stresses the technical difficulties of interoperability between the agencies, rather than the weak market. It’s an excuse, but they’re making this excuse rather than going with what Adi is saying.
Philadelphia still technically through runs most lines, but SEPTA post 2010 decided to downplay said feature by reverting the lines to their old pre-Center City Commuter Connection names and putting their line pair as a footnote on the schedule.
Not all the trains and not always the same branch. For instance one train a day goes from West Trenton to Wawa. The rest of them terminate at 30th Street or go to other branches.
Matthew Hutton
Pre-Thameslink if you wanted to go from Bedford to Brighton you would just drive.
Pre-Elizabeth line if you wanted to go from Slough to Brentwood you would just drive.
isn’t the irony of the particular Elizabeth line trip you mention that it’s at its faster if you take national rail to pasddington, transfer to the Elizabeth line, take national rail to shenfield. Like though the Elizabeth line services both destinations the terminating express services are a good deal faster.
This is part of why the Elizabeth line’s frequency and reliability underperform. Too much interlining with remaining stopping GWR services, Heathrow express. It should go all the way to Didcot and Southend, build another 6 passing loops, and have a simple timetable of 30-27 tph* in rush hour then moving down to around 22 with a bunch being expresses for Didcot-Southend connection.
Instead people propose interlining with the WCML.
*If Meitetsu 100km network with 100’s of level crossings, a two track bottleneck plus a Spanish solution at its busiest station (250,000 unique riders per day at Nagoya, about 1 million network wide) with 5-7 branches each side can manage 27tph, the Liz line should aim higher.
I certainly think there is a reasonable argument that the Elizabeth line should run as 3-4tph as far as High Wycombe and certainly replace the local services to Didcot.
Replacing the local services to Didcot and the Heathrow express would also allow 3tph to Bristol, 3tph to Cardiff, 3tph to Oxford and hopefully 2tph to Cheltenham.
Matthew Hutton
Probably a decent argument that the Elizabeth line should have 3pth to Swindon via Wantage, Milton Park and Steventon and 2tph to Oxford or better still Kidlington with perhaps a new station at Redbridge Park and Ride.
The Zürich S-Bahn network was built pretty late, the budget was voted for in 1981 and the system went into service in 1990. Excepts for S4 and S10 (historical local line) and the S18 (different gauge), all trains share most of the infrastructure, tracks in the stations with the regular train network – I think there separate tracks between Zürich and Dietikon.
Generally, measuring the time to complete a network makes no sense, the only moment a network is finished is when it is dismantled.
Part of the challenge of CAHSR is that LA Union Station is a terminal, with no through running. Building good HSR between LA and San Diego (the two largest cities in California) is harder than building viaducts in the Central Valley.
Frankfurt Hbf and Munich Hbf don’t have through running for longer distance trains. The trains turn round.
Now Frankfurt in particular appears to be notoriously unreliable. But turning round a handful of trains per hour is fine. Probably costs you 5-10 minutes.
Part of the challenge of CAHSR is that LA Union Station is a terminal, with no through running.
The A Line runs through to allow a service from Long Beach to Glendora. If Union Station were to have south-running tracks, it would have to take over those industrial parcels across from US-101. There’s a giant parking garage, a yard for the DASH buses, a strip club and a marijuana dispensary.
When it was the Gold Line, it was done in a way to not need to take property. It took the sidewalk along the east side of Alameda, then a serpentine viaduct over US-101 into Union Station’s 1 and 2 tracks.
It’s not ignorance. It’s irrelevance. MTA isn’t interested in efficiency. It’s interested in becoming politically unassailable. If it has enough money and can spread it around far enough in the region, it won’t have to worry about efficiency. No one who’s doing business with MTA is going to question it. No politician is going to question MTA when it has financial relationships to so many interests. You misunderstand the logic entirely.
The MTA is trying to be politically unassailable. The MTA is a governmental, and therefore political, entity. It’s insulating itself from any particular interests or party that might threaten its power.
The number or platforms of parties is irrelevant. MTA will make sure to build alliances with all of them. No one is campaigning against the MTA. That’s a sign of the success of the MTA strategy. Your understanding of the politics of the MTA simply makes no sense to me at all. MTA isn’t a partisan political issue for any candidate or party.
Matthew Hutton
OK so if a coherent third party ran on a “we want the MTA to work like TfL” platform and won how would the MTA co-opt that?
Bearing in mind that right now New York City is a one-party state.
The MTA can’t be a bunch of bumbling incompetents incapable of doing much of anything and at the same time an evil conspiracy that will co-opt any party. That is so clever only you can see it.
Matt
You seem to misunderstand how public agencies and heavily regulated private organizations operate in the US. It’s sometimes called ‘regulatory ” or “organizational capture” when a public agency controls those who are theoretically meant to control it. Any large public or regulated private body pursues this approach in the US, large hospital groups, wall street banks, large public school districts, Amtrak, the Post Office, large public universities, etc. When an organization can’t measure its success in profits, it measures its success in the extent of its influence. How did you think MTA operated? If you want efficiency in the US, you need to introduce private capital and private property interests. There is no other way.
Matthew Hutton
The US is definitely worse at this stuff than Europe even though it has a much more dynamic private sector.
The big way the US is worse is that elections are a lot less competitive. Unhappy with Labour? Vote Lib Dem or Green. Unhappy with the Conservatives? Vote UKIP or Reform.
Unhappy with the Democratic Party? 🤷
adirondacker12800
There is life west of Ninth Ave. Where Republican Governors are busy signing into law all sorts of …. regressive…. legislation passed by Republican legislatures. It’s not the Democrats fault the Republcans have turned into theocratic authoritarians.
Matt
The US is definitely worse at this stuff than Europe BECAUSE it has a much more dynamic private sector. Brightline is the way. Amtrak isn’t.
adirondacker12800
Socialize the risks and privatize the costs always works well for the private interests.
adirondacker12800
…privatize the profit…
Matthew Hutton
Wake me up when Brightline west terminates anywhere close to the city centre.
The Las Vegas stop is literally further out than the airport, and that is the better of the two.
And yes the British private railways did fix a bunch of easy problems like running more trains where there was capacity and restoring/slightly improving a high quality steam railway through the Chilterns. But when it came to the hard shit like electrifying lines or grade separating junctions the private companies didn’t add much if any value.
dralaindumas
Experience shows that your concerns about Brightline West station location and Matt’s ones about an inefficient railway operator are overblown WHEN YOU HAVE A GOOD HIGH SPEED LINE. From a Cannes suburb you can plan a 30 minute trip to Cannes station and then between 2h05 and 2h30 to get to Aix-TGV or you can drive 150 km to Aix-TGV in 1h30 and choose from a larger number of trains going to northern France and Germany. Satellite pictures and patronage numbers (more passengers board the TGV there than the Acela at all NEC stations combined) demonstrate that many drive there. Poor termini are fixable. The Joetsu Shinkansen went from Omiya in 1982 to Ueno in 1985 and Tokyo in 1991.
The L.A.-Las Vegas HSR should have been the easiest built on the planet but it will be a poor one. The semi-desert has enough vegetation to hold the ground and avoid the drifting sand covering the Haramain tracks. There are no buildings to avoid besides the I-15 they decided to follow. Following the highway median will complicate the builders work and the operations. US standards for a 75 mph/121 km/h design speed highway are 3330 ft/1015 m curve radius, going down to 2215 ft/675 m in difficult stretches. These radii are below the ones expected in a 130 km/h French railroad (2000 m standard, never below 800 m). On a 250 km/h AVE line, rayo minimo normal will be 3500 m, exceptional 3100 m. In summary, the trains will be relatively slow (351 km in 2 hours when the 1983 TGV Sud-Est was covering 428 km in the same period of time), uncomfortable because the travelers will be subjected to high Jerk numbers, and costly because running faster than suggested by the curvature will wear down tracks and wheels.
Matthew Hutton
Fair point. But to be fair most of the other TGV/ICE/British Intercity/Shinkansen stations are and always were centrally located.
So yeah the examples you mention are out of town. As are Shin Osaka, Shin Yokohama and arguably Hakata. But most of the stops are at their original locations.
So for sure if Brightline west was as is but did 50mph into LA Union that would be pretty good IMO.
dralaindumas
You are right. My point is not that green field stations are better but that they work as long as they offer compelling speed in comparison with the highway, and, unlike their airport competitors, a centrally located station at the other end of the trip. Close to 60 000 km of HSR tracks have been laid over the world and I can’t think of a single project built in a highway median. There is an alternative here. Either the rest of the world is populated by unimaginative idiots, or the US is, as Elon suggested above, unable to learn from others. Time will tell which is the correct one.
Wake me up when Amtrak achieves the efficiencies you’re demanding.
Matthew Hutton
The big challenge is whether Americans can accept Europe is better at elections without unlimited money so you can elect better representatives and whether they can accept Europe is better at running public transport.
If you can accept that then you can make a go of it.
I did look at Brightline Florida and like look its “private”. But no more so than Chiltern or Virgin West coast was in the 2000s. The new construction is federally funded.
Difficult to judge the ridership as it is new. But broadly it looks respectable enough – although probably roughly half British levels given the service level. Perhaps with an extension to Tampa and the theme parks you might get British level ridership.
Matt
The real challenge is accepting societies as they are and working with then instead of against them. Passenger trains will only work in the US if private capital and profits are involved. This isn’t about ideology, it’s about how America actually works, like it or not.
aquaticko
Isn’t the argument being made by Alon (not to put words in their mouth) that America doesn’t work as it is? We can’t build anything, or run efficient transportation systems–which must be efficient at transportation; saying “but we don’t operate our transportation systems for transportation efficiency” is explanatory, not exculpatory.
If the only thing that America does well is generate profit, then we can’t work with it as-is and expect it to do anything else. Your sentiment feels like that negative American exceptionalism Alon’s blogged about before. Saying “America (or the Anglosphere, whatever) is different” increasingly just feels like excusing it being worse than almost every other developed country at almost everything you expect a developed country to do.
Matthew Hutton
@aquaticko, @Matt – Brightline is also unique.
The line it is based on runs a couple of rock trains a day and intermodal freight – the latter of which can go quickly so is compatible with intercity passenger service. The line is also dead flat and pretty straight which helps a lot. Because of its geographical location it is possible to aggressively keep trains to time without customers getting upset.
These guys won an election in Oxford – https://independentoxfordalliance.org – against the strongest local party campaign team in the country due to some bad local policies.
The idea that some sort of independent movement of the Democratic Party couldn’t win in New York City is ridiculous.
And frankly at a state level they could take enough seats to hold the balance of power.
Private vs public is an interesting debate but, when it comes to Brightline, it is also physical. Since the operations started in 2017, there have been about 100 fatalities along the route. The slow freight line is now used by faster trains and not much was done to isolate the private right of way from public space. I don’t know what should be done and who should pay for grade separation but can’t help noticing that this re-opening to passenger traffic on the cheap would have been illegal in France.
The non grandfathered rules in Britain are that grade separation is required on lines being sped up to sub 70mph.
That the ridgeway, a NATIONAL TRAIL and a 2000+ YEAR OLD PATH goes across an 85mph railway and there have been no (presumably accidental) fatalities is another question.
Matthew Hutton
To be absolutely clear the ridgeway should be fucking grade separated because if there was a fatality there would be huge drama. That said other railway lines should certainly be able to do 60mph/100km/h without grade separation. And the fact that they have got away with it on the ridgeway for so long with ~4-5tph off peak means that really really it isn’t a big issue.
Matthew Hutton
Also to be fair if there have been 100+ fatalities in Florida and ~0 on the ridgeway then people living in Florida are either really stupid or the railway isn’t following best practices for level grade crossings.
adirondacker12800
MInor quibble, the path that was there before the Romans arrived, is crossed by the railroad.
We have railroad regulations in the U.S. I’m sure Florida East Coast is following them. Since Brightline is a high profile project, if they weren’t there would have been lawsuits. And long long long discussions on railroad.net. It’s Darwin Award competitors. The flashing lights, clanging bells, lowering/lowered cross arms, they are going to argue with a locomotive and win. some of the crossings don’t have clanging bells. I think they need four quadrant gates/arms if they want to eliminate the bells. Award competitors find a way.
Unless you want to isolate the system from Darwin Award competitors, whatever the system is, there will always be Award winners.
dralaindumas
Several rules would have applied to Brightline: no new railroad crossings, and 160 km/h train speed limit unless the crossings are manned. The LGVs are completely enclosed because animal crossings could also be dangerous. There is also something akin to the “three strikes and you are out” baseball rule where problematic crossings are addressed.
Brightline rejected specific Federal Railroad Administration recommandations unless federal subsidies were provided. In the end, nothing was done besides public awareness campaigns. Erin Marquis spoke of Brightline’s “abysmal safety record” on Jalopnik.com in 2022. In summary, the Florida East Coast right of way was already dangerous but numbers went up. In metric units, Brightline early fatalities have been estimated as 1 per 60 000 train-km, well above the previous US record, 1 fatality for 170 000 train-km on Caltrain. It will be interesting to see how numbers evolve with Floridians getting used to the new trains. To put these numbers in perspective, average is 1 about fatality for 16 million SNCF/RATP train-km. In all of these locations, suicides represent the majority of the fatalities.
Matthew Hutton
Also regardless of situation ~20 fatalities a year on a line of that length with hourly service in each direction is a lot. And frankly outside South Asia no railway country wouldn’t grade separate such a line.
Reading my post I realize a typo. The average for France is about 1 fatality for 1.6 million train-km, not 16 million. Most of these deaths are suicides, about 1 a day for SNCF, 2 or 3 a month for RATP. They are reported through euphemisms to the delayed passengers, and are not publicized in the press to prevent copycat events.
adirondacker12800
It wasn’t particularly slow before passenger service was reintroduced. The Darwin Award competitors are just as likely to win when it’s a 60 mph/100 kph intermodal as when it’s 79 mph passenger train.
I think for profit rail is laudable and Brightline has put some of his money in this difficult endeavor. Brightline and FEC have a different approach to safety than the Europeans or Japanese. Floridians give more responsibility to whoever wants to cross the tracks instead of offering safer but more costly passages. I don’t blame them. On the other side of the Atlantic, Matthew Hutton provided UK numbers. I don’t know whether the Victorian or modern engineers or the British drivers are the best but railroad crossings fatalities (excluding suicides) down to 5 a year on a busy network are not a given. France, with a comparable population, is seriously working on the issue and only recently managed to go below 20 a year.
Pedestrian Observations 
It’s exhausting, isn’t it?
In the early 1990s, absolutely stunned and appalled by the insane regional transportation projects that were going ahead and being proposed in the San Francisco region to which I’d moved, and all fired up by recent first-hand experience of Japanese and Central European “this just works it’s all so obvious” competence, I reasoned that if only the locals were made aware that far better things were possible more cheaply and more quickly, things of which they were, through no fault of their own, somehow unaware, then of course they’d freely choose to correct their misapprehensions, adjusting their opinions in the light of fresh information. Education, that’s the ticket! Just let them know that better things can be done and they’ll just right on it!
Anyway, here we are, in 2024, with 425.55 ppm CO2, which means nothing matters anyway.
Not invented here–thus not valid. When Triboro X (now IBX) was first proposed it was dismissed because it came from outside the MTA IINM. Only when the accidental Governor became convinced has there been any chance of seeing actual service. Current unwillingness to follow “alien” best practices is no surprise, just stupid–and protective of overpricing of projects in order to increase profits for the ‘connected’
“Only when the accidental Governor became convinced has there been any chance of seeing actual service.”
Well then, all we need to do is to convince the governor (this one or a future one) of some other things.
Ueno-Tokyo Line is probably a more comparable project to Penn Station through running than the big mid-20th century tunneling projects like RER. Very little actual construction work, though what work did happen needed to avoid disrupting one of the busiest transport corridors in the world.
That’s a relatively late addition to Tokyo’s regional metro system.
I’d say being a project from (barely) within the last decade also makes it even more comparable.
The context of it being in what was already the largest regional metro system in the world is obviously very different, but the actual project itself is pretty similar. Comparing Penn Station through running to RER makes it seem like a much larger undertaking than it actually is.
Both Ueno-Tokyo Line and Penn Station through running involve city center terminal operations pretty much ready for through running, a suburban station network ready for urban/suburban EMUs, no new city center stations, and no city center tunneling.
By Japanese definition, Ueno-Tokyo Line is regional rail (列车线) rather than regional metro (电车线). It carries transilien-style services rather than RER-style ones.
I cannot find any Japanese sources using the terms 列车线 or 电车线. The term I usually see used to distinguish lines such as the Ueno-Tokyo Line from lines such as the Keihin-Tohoku Line is that the former uses 近郊形車両 (suburban trains) while the latter uses 通勤形車両 (commuter trains).
With regards to regional rail, if one is using its proper definition instead of the American one of “good commuter/suburban rail”, then the equivalent terms in Japanese are 地方鉄道 or ローカル線.
that might be because 车 is only used in Simplified Chinese, and 車 would be the Japanese equivalent
Ah – thanks for that. It turns out 電車線 and 列車線 seem to only refer to cases where you have a quadruple-track line with “local” tracks and “express” tracks running side-by-side – e.g. the Keihin-Tohoku and Tokaido lines.
I don’t think translating those terms as regional rail and regional metro is accurate at all. It’s just JNR/JR jargon for express tracks and local tracks, mostly internally nowadays with almost all public facing usage gone.
In day to day conversation, everything is a 電車. If people talk specifically express and local tracks, it’s typically 急行線/快速線 and 緩行線.
Also, wrong type of Chinese character.
Being that I am currently on holiday in Kansai, allow me a mention of the JR West Tozai Line- a cross-city commuter line connecting the Katamachi/Gakkentoshi Line with the Fukuchiyama Line (and connection with the JR West Kobe Line at Amagasaki)- 12.5km long, planning started 1988 with full operation in 1997.
I want to find the person who wrote this and bash their head into Tokaido mainline in Japan which does this for not 1, not 2 but three megacities (admittedly they did need consistent upgrading).
The 5 directions strategy that separated the Yamanote and Tohoku lines, plus pushing quadtracks deep into the suburbs as far Omiya/Odawara etc had a construction phase 1966-1973. And that was just JNR. Add in the Asakusa which had a three stage process of 1960, 1964, and 1968 before through-running either side was complete after approval in 1957.
And ignoring the London Underground (which streched well beyond the London County area/Middlesex by 1939 and not just with Metropolitan line). The first tunnel connectors for regional rail service is Meitetsu with its underground Spanish solution station in 1954 or you could add the Kobe Kosoku connector between Sanyo and Hanshin/Hankyu, which was built 1962-68.
Alon do you have any reading recommendations for the RER and Transilien, other than your own stuff, which is necessarily compact?
I believe the first regional service was the snow hill tunnel from 1866?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Hill_tunnel_(London)
I can’t find any book about the Transilien but old issues of rail magazines are available at “boutiquedelaviedurail.com”. About the RER, eBay.fr has a couple of interesting books:
For English language reading on the RER, my best recommendation would be the “Paris RER Handbook” written by Brian Patton, published by Capital Transport (British) in 2001. While it is now 23 years old and out of print you can find it on eBay and could still be considered fairly current as it has everything up to Line E’s initial opening in 1999.
I have “La saga du RER” by Christian Gerondeau, referenced above by dralaindumas, and while that book has some general history of the RER’s development, it’s more of an advocacy for his alternative proposal of extending RER E to the southwest. At the time of its publication in 2003 work on extending RER E had been frozen due to increasing costs and controversy / indecision over which way to go.
Gerondeau was in favor of taking over one branch of Line C, and some of the legacy lines which currently terminate at Gare Montparnasse. Obviously this did not come to pass, as can be seen in the most recently opened extension. Line E has always been envisioned as a relief line for RER A, so when it reaches Mantes La Jolie in 2025 it will have finally realized its objective.
Interestingly, there was once a Line F contemplated to link Saint Lazare and Montparnasse and take over the same SW lines favored by Gerondeau, but that seems very unlikely now, obviated by the Grand Paris network currently underway.
The RER F’s terminal problem was that Montparnasse and Saint-Lazare’s networks both head in the same direction, west, sometimes reaching the same branches. They were historically owned by the same railroad, and were used as a reverse-branch, to give service to both banks of Paris; this is why some suburban stations have Rive gauche or Rive droite in their names, for example Versailles – they reflect which Paris terminal they are connected to, rather than which bank of the river they are located in.
And yeah, in retrospect I think it would have been better to send the RER E southwest, and if more relief to La Défense was needed, then they could have built an RER line along a different east-west alignment, for example to Les Halles taking over the RER D to points southeast, deeding the Nord-Les Halles tunnel to just the RER B.
I would think the answer now would be to send the southeast branch of RER D to St. Lazare, and have the tracks north of Les Halles connected to Montparnasse. This would give you three main axis across Paris:
East-West / RER A-E
NE-SW / RER B / Gare du Nord-Montparnasse
NW-SE / RER D / St Lazare-Gare de Lyon
In French, passengers travelling through Paris are called traversants. Traversants may not be numerous on the RER F since the St Lazare and Montparnasse banlieues somewhat overlap but the issue is far from terminal. Only 3% of RER A & B and 1% of RER C & D passengers are traversants. They are hardly relevant.
The right word in your statement is relief. The RER A relieved metro line 1, Gares de Lyon and St Lazare. Gare de Lyon was later helped by the RER D and transferring Auvergne and Bourgogne trains to Gare de Bercy. The RER offered better options than trying to get into a crowded metro at a mainline station and in turn became overloaded. RER E and metro 14 were then built to relieve RER A.
The RER F would create space in St Lazare, Montparnasse and the metros 12 and 13 linking them but is not urgently needed. M12 is not overloaded. The overloaded M13 lost passengers after the 2020 northern extension of M14, and its full automatization around 2035 should help. The 2026 extension of the RER E to Mantes will divert traffic from St Lazare. New LGV lines in the South West and Normandy may revive the issue but for the time being only exist on paper.
What’s your source on only 3% of RER A and B passengers being traversants? I presume this does not include eastern suburb to La Défense trips, but only trips from east of the city to west of Nanterre?
I have dozens of pages of data in my computer where I note whatever seems interesting. It came from one of the inquiries launched by either IdF Mobilite or the Assemblee Nationale because the RER is such a big ticket item that results are closely monitored but I did not write the exact reference. The same note says that passengers staying on one banlieue secteur known as caboteurs represent 47% of the ridership on RER A, 25% on C, D and E, 12% on B. I suppose the 47% include commuters to La Defense from the West and the traversants only include those coming from the East and travelling beyond La Defense. I suppose these numbers will change as the Grand Paris Express will offer other options to reach La Defense from the banlieues.
I presume this 3% figure is also why the plan for the RER E is to run in two sections without through-service?
And yeah, 47% must include west-to-La-Défense ridership given job patterns on the line…
Yes, this is one of the reasons for the turnaround at Rosa Park. The other one is that, on these RER lines totaling over 100 km, an incident on one branch has repercussions far away. Regularity and cancellations are monitored by the financing agency and intermediate turnarounds are one of the tools expected to improve the stats.
My numbers came from the testimony of Jean Pierre Orfeuil, a Paris Est-Creteil University professor to the Assemblee Nationale (Assemblee-Nationale.fr rapport # 4458). The numbers are at page 169, under the heading “Adapter le RER aux usages des voyageurs” but there are no further explanations. It looks like the 500 pages long report is only a summary of the inquiry. Elsewhere, Orfeuil suggested the introduction of intermediate turnarounds.
If the 47% caboteurs includes west suburb to La Defense commutes, but the 3% traversants only includes commutes from east suburbs to beyond La Defense then something is off – La Defense would be considered part of Paris when coming from the east but not from the west. I think we need to see your data source.
Perhaps La Defense is Schrodinger’s business district – simultaneously inside Paris and inside the western suburbs until someone travels to it.
Yes. La Defense is simultaneously in zone 2 and 3 until you decide to pay a visit. It then becomes zone 2 if you use the metro, zone 3 if you take the RER, tramway, Transilien or bus.
Traveling is Newtonian experience. Traveling long distances takes time and costs more.
I beginning to suspect that railfans lead very sheltered lives and imagine that buildings with elevators are filled with people making lots of money in high powered jobs. They aren’t.
They are filled with people with job titles like bookkeeper, paralegal, administrative assistant, network technician. And likely a higher than median amount of things like accountant or lawyer. You can network technician for the same pay east of the Eiffel Tower as you can west of it. Or keep books or lawyer or accountant. Or on any side of Herald Square in Manhattan or any side of the Loop in Chicago. Or…
… the reason why a … stenographer… from New Carrollton Maryland didn’t take a job in Falls Church Virginia is because she didn’t even apply for it. Because there are stenographer jobs closer to home. Even though there is a one seat ride on Metro. Which would take a long time and cost a lot of money.
Commuting patterns indeed follow Newton’s third law: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The trips we are discussing here and the infrastructure build up in Paris during the last 60 years are the reaction to the concentration of jobs and expensive real estate on the West side and cheaper accommodations at a distance.
The Navigo pass allowing the most extreme commuting, from a zone 5 suburb to Paris or any other suburb, will cost you 950 Euros/year. Multiply this by three to account for the subsidies received by SNCF and RATP, add the cost this travelling takes on your stamina and the total will more or less cover the price differential between your current apartment and one near your work place. Residents in Paris beaux quartiers, Neuilly, St Germain, Versailles and other leafy western suburbs don’t want cheap high density housing built in their neighborhoods. They prefer subsidizing the RER and Grand Paris Express construction and operations.
The way it works almost every place else in the world. With some exceptions like Detroit and Pyongyang.
Yes, around the world, people commute in search of better work opportunities and cheaper accommodations. This travelling is organized in very distinct ways in Paris, Houston, New York, Jakarta, Seoul, Lagos, etc… And that is the topic of this blog, how cities can learn from each other.
And around the world people searching for better work opportunities take the one, that is similar to other ones, with the shorter commute. I have a hope that railfans will someday understand that. And that most jobs aren’t Executive Vice President of Extra Special at Exquisitely Unique, on the other side of the metro. Most of them are the kind of jobs that can be found closer to home.
Quick reminder: nobody is <i>obliged<i> to feed tasty replies to reply-guy trolls.
Thanks for that. Just bought the only “cheap” copy on Abe. The RER is one of those things that made me go native. Because I lived at Cité Universtaire during my first year in Paris in the early 80s, RER-B at Parc Montsouris was my transit line and umbilical cord to the whole Metro system, and even to connections out of France via Gare du Nord and CDG. In fact at every place I lived in Paris, including Ile St Louis and later the 10e, I was always within easy walking distance of RER-B.
Here is another addition to the literature, by two engineers/managers with long careers at SNCF and Eurotunnel etc.
Having said that, the operational difficulties of Line C could be lessened if it lost a branch or two. Last year’s opening of Tram Line 12, and the introduction of Transilien Line V, is a step in the right directions, something that could have saved generations of confused tourists who have gone the wrong (and LONG) way around to reach Versailles.
There are other out of print books on Line A and Line C in French, eBay may surprise you. The Ligne de Sceaux (Line B) was given good treatment last year by French rail book publisher La Vie du Rail (an update of a book from 35 years ago). An all encompassing, thorough tome of the current RER needs to be written and I hear rumors it is underway. I hope it comes to fruition. A new updated history of the Metro will be out this fall, celebrating 120 years of the system, published by La Vie du Rail.
I’ll keep my eye out for those books. Might buy the 1982 version of Ligne de Sceaux (Daniel Schiff) as it is available. Of course another reason why someone like me could have a fondness for RER-B, is that I shared my commuting to my lab with Marie Curie (about a century earlier) who used it to commute to her lab after relocating to the suburb of Sceaux; the terminus at Luxembourg is a short walk to her lab, now the Curie Institute on rue d’Ulm. She probably moved to Sceaux for the Lycée Lakanal; Frédéric Joliot-Curie is one of two students who won the Nobel, and a whole clutch of other high-achiever alumni from the illustrious school. It was one of the public schools created by Jules Ferry to make schooling universally available and free of the church.
For something completely different:
This is a sociological study of the areas bordering the northern section of RER-B. Of current relevance in that it is entirely contained within St-Denis the Olympics venue. Thirty years later parts are transforming. But funny enough I just discovered an error: in the map it omits the Cité Universitaire stop!
From the blurb:
Your first reference is wrong. Giscard d’Estaing, then finance minister, was horrified by the 5 billion francs (in 1971 value) cost of the RER system he had to partially finance which included the 4.8 km Defense-Etoile and 2.45 km Etoile-Auber tunnels. The 5.6 km Auber-Nation core and its underground stations only cost 1150 million francs because the Chatelet and Gare de Lyon RER stations were built cut and cover. This is confirmed by your second reference : “la jonction centrale est evaluee a plus d’un milliard” and by a cost per km (203 million Fr) similar to the cost per km of the 2.3 or 2,6 km Luxembourg-Chatelet link.
Ah, yeah, I was worried that the 5 billion FRF figure was for a lot more than 5.6 km given how nothing else in that system cost that much per km. Thanks for the correction.
Sadly, it comes down to the notion that a super-regional transit system for NJ-NY-CN is simply impossible due to the current political dynamic of the relationship between the states. No (or certainly not the majority of) power brokers want to yield authority for the common good of the region. And no one of greater authority is willing to force the responsible parties to do the right thing.
This is all frustrating because here in Philadelphia, not only do we have the tunnel, but SEPTA seems committed to actually turning the Regional Rail system into something better resembling S-Bahns. I can’t find it right now, but in their planning document to increase frequency, they effectively said “If Munich can do it with 2 tracks, we can do it with 4.” Unfortunately, this is all contingent on our legislature, which is uninterested in funding SEPTA even to the bare minimum.
SEPTA published a report for its ‘Reimagining Regional Rail‘ initiative almost three years ago that was prepared by Huit-Zollars. I think that it was originally published as one report, but now is available as separate State of the System and Peer Review files. Notably, their file names designate them at, “02,” and, “03;” I would suppose that, “01,” is the executive summary for a larger report that they will be integrated into with subsequent parts explaining something about the actual plan. I cannot recall SEPTA saying anything substantive, or even much vaporous, about the initiative since then.
There is a $ 4 million Regional Rail Master Plan Implementation project listed among the Planning Studies on page 17 of the 2024 Northeast Corridor Project Inventory, which suggests that they haven’t given up on it, but the long silence suggests that it might have met stubborn resistance from within or is being picked apart by ‘stakeholders’ and perhaps that that will be more expensive than they had hoped.
Right, and the Peer Review actually does look at other systems like Munich, Auckland, and Barcelona, and while it’s pretty surface level, this suggests that at the least they understand that international practices are worth learning from.
The fact that you use the NY Post as a credible source for what MTA are apparently planning for Penn Station despite the fact that AMTRAK owns it is slightly worrying. The Murdoch owned rag is not exactly renowned for its accuracy.
Unless I’m missing something, based on the AMTRAK presentation it appears that what is being proposed is a restructuring of the tri state commuter rail networks, and a rebuild of Penn Station which is certainly well overdue as while the concourse is better than it used to be the train shed is an absolute death trap. See how long it takes to clear Tracks 1 through about 10 in the mornings when NJ Transit trains are arriving during rush hour…….
What really should happen is MSG and all the overbuild should be removed and the existing NY Penn rebuilt from 19C standards to 21st Century standards and restructured to accommodate the through running that really should exist. Lets face it you have one through running entity AMTRAK and in the near future three terminal entities NJT, LIRR and MNR. If I recall a few years ago there were issues with under and overrunning 3rd rail connector shoes between MNR and LIRR although I guess that’s not an insurmountable issue? Combine the three commuter railroads into a single entity and have a tri state funding mechanism and run an integrated commuter rail systems for the tri state area. As long as the State vs State BS continues any grown up sensible approach to managing the areas transportation needs is doomed to fail, irrespective of any incuriosity or not.
Oh and Elizabeth Line or Crossrail was first identified as a specific line from Paddington to Liverpool St in 1974, so it did take the best part of 50 years to build. I remember when I was working on the original Channel Tunnel High Speed Rail link back in 1989/90 that was to pass through South London and have a station at Kings Cross before linking up to the main lines to the north, that we had to take the protected corridor for it into account when developing the vertical profile from the Thames up to KX.
Crossrail was first proposed in 1941 according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Crossrail_project
1. It’s Nolan Hicks, who isn’t even at the Post anymore. Otherwise I’d look for an NYDN reference – Michael Aronson is even more negative about Gateway as it’s being planned, especially Penn Expansion – but NYDN isn’t GDPR-compliant so it’s harder for me to find articles there.
2. Penn Reconstruction and Penn Expansion are separate projects. I have quibbles with Penn Reconstruction’s scope and project delivery (they’re trying to legalize progressive design-build for it), but it’s a positive transportation value project. Penn Expansion is the useless one, and the one the presentation is defending.
3. Removing the overbuild is really good and makes the column removal for redoing the platforms much easier, yeah.
4. The Elizabeth line was planned as an idea for a long time, but then again, New York through-running has a long history already at the level of where Crossrail was in the 1990s or where the RER and Munich S-Bahn were in the 1950s.
Reading the NYPost can hurt your brain. However, when commenting on the non-sense and corruption endemic in the regional rail services, they usually do a better job than other NY based news organizations.
The only decision the RPA makes is what brand of crayons to use.
Right, but that part of the presentation wasn’t made by the RPA but by WSP, which does have decisionmaking power.
And people who don’t click through are going to know this by osmosis from the emanations of the universe? Since there are Amtrak logos splattered all over it, it’s Amtrak presentation. Amtrak has been making presentations about how they will need more capacity for decades.
How much of the lack of through running is because Americans just assumed if you were going from Nassau County to Northern NJ, you would just drive?
None, I think. Philadelphia is much more auto-oriented and did it, at least for a while; Boston keeps pushing it as a long-term goal, it just requires extensive new infrastructure, not much smaller in scale than the Munich S-Bahn. Rather, it’s agency turf battles.
Note also what arguments are being made against the through-running plans. Adirondacker argues against it by mocking the idea of cross-regional commuting, using lines like “why would a Long Islander take a train to South Orange for town center retail like CVS that’s identical to what’s available at Rockville Centre and Huntington?”. But that’s not the main argument being made by the agencies or by the RPA, which stresses the technical difficulties of interoperability between the agencies, rather than the weak market. It’s an excuse, but they’re making this excuse rather than going with what Adi is saying.
Philadelphia did it for decades and even though railfans clapped reallllly really really hard… even they didn’t use it.
Philadelphia still technically through runs most lines, but SEPTA post 2010 decided to downplay said feature by reverting the lines to their old pre-Center City Commuter Connection names and putting their line pair as a footnote on the schedule.
Not all the trains and not always the same branch. For instance one train a day goes from West Trenton to Wawa. The rest of them terminate at 30th Street or go to other branches.
Pre-Thameslink if you wanted to go from Bedford to Brighton you would just drive.
Pre-Elizabeth line if you wanted to go from Slough to Brentwood you would just drive.
It’s no different here.
isn’t the irony of the particular Elizabeth line trip you mention that it’s at its faster if you take national rail to pasddington, transfer to the Elizabeth line, take national rail to shenfield. Like though the Elizabeth line services both destinations the terminating express services are a good deal faster.
Almost certainly Reading-Shenfeld (i.e end to end) would be faster changing twice. Slough-Brentwood is more arguable.
This is part of why the Elizabeth line’s frequency and reliability underperform. Too much interlining with remaining stopping GWR services, Heathrow express. It should go all the way to Didcot and Southend, build another 6 passing loops, and have a simple timetable of 30-27 tph* in rush hour then moving down to around 22 with a bunch being expresses for Didcot-Southend connection.
Instead people propose interlining with the WCML.
*If Meitetsu 100km network with 100’s of level crossings, a two track bottleneck plus a Spanish solution at its busiest station (250,000 unique riders per day at Nagoya, about 1 million network wide) with 5-7 branches each side can manage 27tph, the Liz line should aim higher.
https://www.meitetsu.co.jp/eng/train/route/map/index.html
I certainly think there is a reasonable argument that the Elizabeth line should run as 3-4tph as far as High Wycombe and certainly replace the local services to Didcot.
Replacing the local services to Didcot and the Heathrow express would also allow 3tph to Bristol, 3tph to Cardiff, 3tph to Oxford and hopefully 2tph to Cheltenham.
Probably a decent argument that the Elizabeth line should have 3pth to Swindon via Wantage, Milton Park and Steventon and 2tph to Oxford or better still Kidlington with perhaps a new station at Redbridge Park and Ride.
So? The Elizabeth line is not primarily for people travelling from Reading to Shenfield.
I’m sure the railfan froth would be interesting to the people who do want to travel between Reading and Shenfield. Both of them.
Typo: “was built for 900 DM” should be “was built for 900 million DM“.
The Zürich S-Bahn network was built pretty late, the budget was voted for in 1981 and the system went into service in 1990. Excepts for S4 and S10 (historical local line) and the S18 (different gauge), all trains share most of the infrastructure, tracks in the stations with the regular train network – I think there separate tracks between Zürich and Dietikon.
Generally, measuring the time to complete a network makes no sense, the only moment a network is finished is when it is dismantled.
Part of the challenge of CAHSR is that LA Union Station is a terminal, with no through running. Building good HSR between LA and San Diego (the two largest cities in California) is harder than building viaducts in the Central Valley.
Well, through-running tracks are actively under construction with Union Station.
Frankfurt Hbf and Munich Hbf don’t have through running for longer distance trains. The trains turn round.
Now Frankfurt in particular appears to be notoriously unreliable. But turning round a handful of trains per hour is fine. Probably costs you 5-10 minutes.
The A Line runs through to allow a service from Long Beach to Glendora. If Union Station were to have south-running tracks, it would have to take over those industrial parcels across from US-101. There’s a giant parking garage, a yard for the DASH buses, a strip club and a marijuana dispensary.
When it was the Gold Line, it was done in a way to not need to take property. It took the sidewalk along the east side of Alameda, then a serpentine viaduct over US-101 into Union Station’s 1 and 2 tracks.
It’s not ignorance. It’s irrelevance. MTA isn’t interested in efficiency. It’s interested in becoming politically unassailable. If it has enough money and can spread it around far enough in the region, it won’t have to worry about efficiency. No one who’s doing business with MTA is going to question it. No politician is going to question MTA when it has financial relationships to so many interests. You misunderstand the logic entirely.
[insert astronaut “Always has been” meme here. Endlessly.]
Well, not quite endlessly. The seas are rising far faster than the humans at NYMTA can adapt.
How are they politically unassailable?
The Democratic Party at a local level in New York City is extremely beatable.
The MTA is trying to be politically unassailable. The MTA is a governmental, and therefore political, entity. It’s insulating itself from any particular interests or party that might threaten its power.
So if a third party won a majority on the city council and held the balance of power in the state government what then?
Bearing it mind that the Democratic Party in New York City is extremely unpopular at a local level which you can tell from the super low turnout.
Turnout here is roughly 60-65% in national elections and maybe 30% in local ones.
In New York State it appears to be 65-70% in national elections – wasn’t the turnout like 10% in the last city council election?
If they were unpopular people would come out to for other candidates.
There is usually quite a few of them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_Is_Too_Damn_High_Party
I assume the other candidates are terrible and don’t run a serious campaign.
I assume they are much less serious than https://independentoxfordalliance.org are for example.
The number or platforms of parties is irrelevant. MTA will make sure to build alliances with all of them. No one is campaigning against the MTA. That’s a sign of the success of the MTA strategy. Your understanding of the politics of the MTA simply makes no sense to me at all. MTA isn’t a partisan political issue for any candidate or party.
OK so if a coherent third party ran on a “we want the MTA to work like TfL” platform and won how would the MTA co-opt that?
Bearing in mind that right now New York City is a one-party state.
And going “it can’t be done” well https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Mid_Bedfordshire_by-election was done with a handful of paid organisers, a whole bunch of volunteers and a maximum budget of £100k.
The MTA can’t be a bunch of bumbling incompetents incapable of doing much of anything and at the same time an evil conspiracy that will co-opt any party. That is so clever only you can see it.
You seem to misunderstand how public agencies and heavily regulated private organizations operate in the US. It’s sometimes called ‘regulatory ” or “organizational capture” when a public agency controls those who are theoretically meant to control it. Any large public or regulated private body pursues this approach in the US, large hospital groups, wall street banks, large public school districts, Amtrak, the Post Office, large public universities, etc. When an organization can’t measure its success in profits, it measures its success in the extent of its influence. How did you think MTA operated? If you want efficiency in the US, you need to introduce private capital and private property interests. There is no other way.
The US is definitely worse at this stuff than Europe even though it has a much more dynamic private sector.
The big way the US is worse is that elections are a lot less competitive. Unhappy with Labour? Vote Lib Dem or Green. Unhappy with the Conservatives? Vote UKIP or Reform.
Unhappy with the Democratic Party? 🤷
There is life west of Ninth Ave. Where Republican Governors are busy signing into law all sorts of …. regressive…. legislation passed by Republican legislatures. It’s not the Democrats fault the Republcans have turned into theocratic authoritarians.
The US is definitely worse at this stuff than Europe BECAUSE it has a much more dynamic private sector. Brightline is the way. Amtrak isn’t.
Socialize the risks and privatize the costs always works well for the private interests.
…privatize the profit…
Wake me up when Brightline west terminates anywhere close to the city centre.
The Las Vegas stop is literally further out than the airport, and that is the better of the two.
And yes the British private railways did fix a bunch of easy problems like running more trains where there was capacity and restoring/slightly improving a high quality steam railway through the Chilterns. But when it came to the hard shit like electrifying lines or grade separating junctions the private companies didn’t add much if any value.
Experience shows that your concerns about Brightline West station location and Matt’s ones about an inefficient railway operator are overblown WHEN YOU HAVE A GOOD HIGH SPEED LINE. From a Cannes suburb you can plan a 30 minute trip to Cannes station and then between 2h05 and 2h30 to get to Aix-TGV or you can drive 150 km to Aix-TGV in 1h30 and choose from a larger number of trains going to northern France and Germany. Satellite pictures and patronage numbers (more passengers board the TGV there than the Acela at all NEC stations combined) demonstrate that many drive there. Poor termini are fixable. The Joetsu Shinkansen went from Omiya in 1982 to Ueno in 1985 and Tokyo in 1991.
The L.A.-Las Vegas HSR should have been the easiest built on the planet but it will be a poor one. The semi-desert has enough vegetation to hold the ground and avoid the drifting sand covering the Haramain tracks. There are no buildings to avoid besides the I-15 they decided to follow. Following the highway median will complicate the builders work and the operations. US standards for a 75 mph/121 km/h design speed highway are 3330 ft/1015 m curve radius, going down to 2215 ft/675 m in difficult stretches. These radii are below the ones expected in a 130 km/h French railroad (2000 m standard, never below 800 m). On a 250 km/h AVE line, rayo minimo normal will be 3500 m, exceptional 3100 m. In summary, the trains will be relatively slow (351 km in 2 hours when the 1983 TGV Sud-Est was covering 428 km in the same period of time), uncomfortable because the travelers will be subjected to high Jerk numbers, and costly because running faster than suggested by the curvature will wear down tracks and wheels.
Fair point. But to be fair most of the other TGV/ICE/British Intercity/Shinkansen stations are and always were centrally located.
So yeah the examples you mention are out of town. As are Shin Osaka, Shin Yokohama and arguably Hakata. But most of the stops are at their original locations.
So for sure if Brightline west was as is but did 50mph into LA Union that would be pretty good IMO.
You are right. My point is not that green field stations are better but that they work as long as they offer compelling speed in comparison with the highway, and, unlike their airport competitors, a centrally located station at the other end of the trip. Close to 60 000 km of HSR tracks have been laid over the world and I can’t think of a single project built in a highway median. There is an alternative here. Either the rest of the world is populated by unimaginative idiots, or the US is, as Elon suggested above, unable to learn from others. Time will tell which is the correct one.
…Elon?
Sincere apologies, I meant Alon.
Wake me up when Amtrak achieves the efficiencies you’re demanding.
The big challenge is whether Americans can accept Europe is better at elections without unlimited money so you can elect better representatives and whether they can accept Europe is better at running public transport.
If you can accept that then you can make a go of it.
I did look at Brightline Florida and like look its “private”. But no more so than Chiltern or Virgin West coast was in the 2000s. The new construction is federally funded.
Difficult to judge the ridership as it is new. But broadly it looks respectable enough – although probably roughly half British levels given the service level. Perhaps with an extension to Tampa and the theme parks you might get British level ridership.
The real challenge is accepting societies as they are and working with then instead of against them. Passenger trains will only work in the US if private capital and profits are involved. This isn’t about ideology, it’s about how America actually works, like it or not.
Isn’t the argument being made by Alon (not to put words in their mouth) that America doesn’t work as it is? We can’t build anything, or run efficient transportation systems–which must be efficient at transportation; saying “but we don’t operate our transportation systems for transportation efficiency” is explanatory, not exculpatory.
If the only thing that America does well is generate profit, then we can’t work with it as-is and expect it to do anything else. Your sentiment feels like that negative American exceptionalism Alon’s blogged about before. Saying “America (or the Anglosphere, whatever) is different” increasingly just feels like excusing it being worse than almost every other developed country at almost everything you expect a developed country to do.
@aquaticko, @Matt – Brightline is also unique.
The line it is based on runs a couple of rock trains a day and intermodal freight – the latter of which can go quickly so is compatible with intercity passenger service. The line is also dead flat and pretty straight which helps a lot. Because of its geographical location it is possible to aggressively keep trains to time without customers getting upset.
It’s not even the MTA that’s pushing Penn Expansion, in the same manner that it’s not BART that’s pushing the San Jose subway but VTA.
Alon, the metastatizing parasite doesn’t care whether the host body is labelled “VTA” or “NYMTA”.
It just seeks out the nutrients.
It literally Does Not Care. There will be other nutrient-rich host bodies.
These guys won an election in Oxford – https://independentoxfordalliance.org – against the strongest local party campaign team in the country due to some bad local policies.
The idea that some sort of independent movement of the Democratic Party couldn’t win in New York City is ridiculous.
And frankly at a state level they could take enough seats to hold the balance of power.
privatise all transit in USA is the answer to all problems?
and the florida line truly outpreforms all those communist european HSL:s – we all know the future is dieselpowered!
thanks for enlighten me…
Yes, including expressways. Make all forms of transportation cover their costs.
Private vs public is an interesting debate but, when it comes to Brightline, it is also physical. Since the operations started in 2017, there have been about 100 fatalities along the route. The slow freight line is now used by faster trains and not much was done to isolate the private right of way from public space. I don’t know what should be done and who should pay for grade separation but can’t help noticing that this re-opening to passenger traffic on the cheap would have been illegal in France.
What are the rules in France for grade separation?
The non grandfathered rules in Britain are that grade separation is required on lines being sped up to sub 70mph.
That the ridgeway, a NATIONAL TRAIL and a 2000+ YEAR OLD PATH goes across an 85mph railway and there have been no (presumably accidental) fatalities is another question.
To be absolutely clear the ridgeway should be fucking grade separated because if there was a fatality there would be huge drama. That said other railway lines should certainly be able to do 60mph/100km/h without grade separation. And the fact that they have got away with it on the ridgeway for so long with ~4-5tph off peak means that really really it isn’t a big issue.
Also to be fair if there have been 100+ fatalities in Florida and ~0 on the ridgeway then people living in Florida are either really stupid or the railway isn’t following best practices for level grade crossings.
MInor quibble, the path that was there before the Romans arrived, is crossed by the railroad.
We have railroad regulations in the U.S. I’m sure Florida East Coast is following them. Since Brightline is a high profile project, if they weren’t there would have been lawsuits. And long long long discussions on railroad.net. It’s Darwin Award competitors. The flashing lights, clanging bells, lowering/lowered cross arms, they are going to argue with a locomotive and win. some of the crossings don’t have clanging bells. I think they need four quadrant gates/arms if they want to eliminate the bells. Award competitors find a way.
There are no stupid users, only stupid systems.
Unless you want to isolate the system from Darwin Award competitors, whatever the system is, there will always be Award winners.
Several rules would have applied to Brightline: no new railroad crossings, and 160 km/h train speed limit unless the crossings are manned. The LGVs are completely enclosed because animal crossings could also be dangerous. There is also something akin to the “three strikes and you are out” baseball rule where problematic crossings are addressed.
Brightline rejected specific Federal Railroad Administration recommandations unless federal subsidies were provided. In the end, nothing was done besides public awareness campaigns. Erin Marquis spoke of Brightline’s “abysmal safety record” on Jalopnik.com in 2022. In summary, the Florida East Coast right of way was already dangerous but numbers went up. In metric units, Brightline early fatalities have been estimated as 1 per 60 000 train-km, well above the previous US record, 1 fatality for 170 000 train-km on Caltrain. It will be interesting to see how numbers evolve with Floridians getting used to the new trains. To put these numbers in perspective, average is 1 about fatality for 16 million SNCF/RATP train-km. In all of these locations, suicides represent the majority of the fatalities.
Also regardless of situation ~20 fatalities a year on a line of that length with hourly service in each direction is a lot. And frankly outside South Asia no railway country wouldn’t grade separate such a line.
Apparently we have 5 fatalities a year on all of our level crossings combined – https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn0dkg559ywo
Reading my post I realize a typo. The average for France is about 1 fatality for 1.6 million train-km, not 16 million. Most of these deaths are suicides, about 1 a day for SNCF, 2 or 3 a month for RATP. They are reported through euphemisms to the delayed passengers, and are not publicized in the press to prevent copycat events.
It wasn’t particularly slow before passenger service was reintroduced. The Darwin Award competitors are just as likely to win when it’s a 60 mph/100 kph intermodal as when it’s 79 mph passenger train.
So, now your attacking Brightline’s safety because you oppose for-profit passenger rail?! You’re part of the problem, not the solution.
I think for profit rail is laudable and Brightline has put some of his money in this difficult endeavor. Brightline and FEC have a different approach to safety than the Europeans or Japanese. Floridians give more responsibility to whoever wants to cross the tracks instead of offering safer but more costly passages. I don’t blame them. On the other side of the Atlantic, Matthew Hutton provided UK numbers. I don’t know whether the Victorian or modern engineers or the British drivers are the best but railroad crossings fatalities (excluding suicides) down to 5 a year on a busy network are not a given. France, with a comparable population, is seriously working on the issue and only recently managed to go below 20 a year.