Transit Advocacy and (Lack of) Ideology in New York
I wrote recently about ideology in transit advocacy and in advocacy in general. The gist is that New York lacks any ideological politics, and as a result, transit advocacy either is genuinely non-ideological, or sweeps ideology under the rug; dedicated ideological advocates tend to either be subsumed in this sphere or go to places that don’t really connect with transit as it is and propose increasingly unhinged ideas. The ideological mainstream in the city is not bad, but the lack of choice makes it incapable of delivering results, and the governments at both the city and state levels are exceptionally clientelist, due to the lack of political competition. I’m not optimistic about political competition at the level of advocacy, but it would be useful to try introducing some in order to create more surface area for solutions to come through, and to make it harder for lobbyists to buy interest groups.
Political divides in New York
The political mainstream in New York is broadly left-liberal. New York voters consistently vote for federal politicians who promise to avoid tax cuts on high-income earners and corporations and even increase taxes on this group, and in exchange increase spending on health care, with some high-profile area politicians pushing for nationwide universal health care. They vote for more stringent regulations on businesses, for labor-friendlier administrative actions during major strikes, and for more hawkish solutions to climate change.
And none of that is really visible in state or city politics. Moreover, there isn’t really any political faction that voters can pick to support any of these positions, or to oppose them (except the Republicans, who are well to the right of the median state voter). The Working Families Party exists to cross-endorse Democrats via a different line; there is no fear by a Democrat that if they are too centrist for the district voters will replace them with a WFP representative, or that if they are too left-wing they will replace them with a non-WFP representative. There was a primary bloodbath in 2018, but it came from people running for the State Senate as party Democrats opposed to the Cuomo-endorsed Independent Democratic Conference, which broke from the party to caucus with Republicans.
The political divides that do exist, especially at the city level, break down as machine vs. reform candidates. But even that is not always clear, even as Eric Adams is unambiguously machine. The 2013 Democratic mayoral primary did not feature a clear machine candidate facing a clear reform candidate: Bill de Blasio ran on an ideologically progressive agenda, and implemented one small element of it in universal half-day pre-kindergarten for 3- and 4-year-olds, but he ingratiated himself with the Brooklyn machine, to the point of steering endorsements in the 2021 primary toward Adams, and against the reform candidate, his own appointee Kathryn Garcia.
Political divides and advocacy
The mainstream of political opinion in New York ranges from center to mainline-left. But within that mainstream, there is no ideological competition, not just in politics, but also in advocacy. Transit advocacy, in particular, is not divided into more centrist and more left-wing groups.
The main transit advocacy groups in New York are instead distinguished by focus and praxis, roughly in the following way:
- The Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee to the MTA (PCAC) is on the inside track of advocacy, proposing small changes within the range of opinions on the MTA board.
- Riders Alliance (RA) is on the outside track, focusing on public transit, with praxis that includes rallies, joint proposals with large numbers of general or neighborhood-scale advocacy groups, and some support for lawfare (they are part of the lawsuit against Kathy Hochul’s cancellation of congestion pricing).
- Transportation Alternatives (TransAlt) focuses on street-level changes including pedestrian and bike advocacy, using the same tools of praxis as RA.
- Streetsblog is advocacy-oriented media.
- Straphangers Campaign is subway-focused, and uses reports and media outreach as its praxis, like the Pokey Awards for the slowest bus routes.
- Charlie Komanoff (of the Carbon Tax Center) focuses on producing research that other advocacy groups can use, for example about the benefits of congestion pricing.
The group I’m involved in, the Effective Transit Alliance, is distinguished by doing technical analysis that other groups can use, for example on RA’s Six-Minute Service campaign (statement 1, statement 2), or other-city groups pushing rail electrification; it is in the middle between outside and inside strategies.
Of note, none of these is distinguished by ideology. There is no specifically left-wing transit advocacy group, focusing on issues like supporting the TWU and ATU in disputes with management, getting cops off the subway, and investing in environmental justice initiatives like bus depot electrification to reduce local diesel pollution.
Neither is there a specifically neoliberal transit advocacy group. There are plenty of general advocacy groups with that background, like Abundance New York, but they’re never specific to transit, and much of their agenda, like expansion of renewable power, would not offend ideological socialists. YIMBY as a movement has neoliberal roots, going back to the original New York YIMBY publication, but these days is better viewed as a reform movement fighting the reformers of the last quarter of the 20th century, with the machine adjudicating between the two sides (City of Yes is an Adams proposal; the machine was historically pro-developer).
Instead, all advocacy groups end up arguing using a combination of median-New Yorker ideological language and technocratic proposals (again, Six-Minute Service). Taking sides in labor versus management disputes is viewed as the domain of the unions and managers, not outside groups. RA’s statement on cops on the subway is telling: it uses left-wing NGO language like “people experiencing homelessness,” but of its four policy proposals, only the last, investing in supportive housing for the homeless, is ideologically left-wing, and the first and third, respectively six-minute service and means-tested fare reductions for the poor, would find considerable support in the growing neoliberal community.
The consequences to the extremes
If the mainstream in New York ranges from dead center to center-left, both the general right and the radical left end up on the extremes. These have their own general advocacy groups: the Manhattan Institute (MI) on the right, and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and its allies on the radical left. MI has recently moved to the right on national culture war issues, especially under Reihan Salam as he hired Christopher Rufo, but on local governance issues it’s not at all radical, and highlights center-right concerns with crime and with waste, fraud, and abuse in the public sector. DSA intends to take the most radical left position on issues that is available within the United States.
And both, as organizations, are pretty bad on this issue. MI, in particular, uses SeeThroughNY, the applet for public-sector worker salaries, not for analysis, but for shaming. I’ve had to complain to MI members on Twitter just to get the search function on job titles to work better, and even after they did some UI improvements, it’s harder to find the average salaries and headcounts by position to figure out things like maintenance worker productivity or white-collar overhead rates, than to find the highest-paid workers in a given year and write articles in the New York Post to shame them for racking so much overtime.
Then there is the proposal, I think by Nicole Gelinas, to stop paying subway crew for their commutes. This is not possible under current crew scheduling: train operators and conductors pick their shifts in seniority order, and low-seniority workers have no control over which of the railyards located at the fringes of the city they will have to report to. A business can reasonably expect a worker to relocate if the place the worker reports to will stay the same for the next few years; but if the schedules change every six months and even within this period they send workers to inconsistent railyards, it is not reasonable and the employer must pay for the commute, which in this circumstance is within private-sector norms.
DSA, to the extent it has a dedicated platform on public transit, is for free transit, and failing that, for effectively decriminalizing fare beating. More informed transit advocates, even very left-wing ones, persistently beg DSA to understand that for any given subsidy level, it’s better to increase service than to reduce fares, with exceptions only for places with extremely low ridership, low average rider incomes, and near-zero farebox recovery ratios. In Boston, Michelle Wu was even elected mayor on this agenda; her agenda otherwise is good, but MBTA farebox recovery ratios are sufficient that the revenue loss would bite, and as a result, all the city has been able to fund is some pilot projects on a few bus routes, breaking fare integration in the process since there is no way the subway is going fare-free.
In both cases, what is happening is that the ideological advocacy groups are distinct from the transit advocacy groups, and people are rarely well-respected in both – at most, they can be on the edge in both (like Gelinas). The result is that DSA will come up with ideas that are untethered from the reality of transit, and that every left-wing idea that could work would rapidly be taken up by groups that are not ideologically close to DSA, giving it a neoliberal reputation; symmetrically, this is true of the entire right, including MI.
The limits of the lack of ideology
The lack of ideology is not a good thing. With no ideological competition, voters have no clear way of picking politicians, which results in dynasties and handpicked successors. Lobbyists know who they need to curry favor with, making it cheaper to buy the government than to improve productivity; once it’s cheap to buy the government, the tax system ends up falling on whoever has been worst at buying influence, leading to high levels of distortion even with tax rates that, by Western European standards, are not high.
The quality of government in this situation is not good; corruption parties are not good when they govern entire countries, like the LDP in Japan or Democrazia Cristiana in Cold War Italy, and they’re definitely not good at the subnational level, where there is less media oversight. On education, for example, New York City pays starting teachers with a master’s degree $72,832/year in 2024, which compares with a German range for A13 starting teachers (in most states covering all teachers, in some only academic secondary teachers) of 50,668€/year in Rhineland-Pfalz to 57,288€/year in Bavaria; the PPP rate these days is 1€ = $1.45, so German teachers earn 1-14% more than their New York counterparts, while the average income from work ranges from 5% higher in New York than in Bavaria to 68% higher than Saxony-Anhalt. This stinginess with teacher salaries does not go to a higher teacher-to-student ratios, both New York and Germany averaging about 1:13, or to savings on the education budget, New York spending around twice as much as Germany. The waste is not talked about in the open, and even the concept that teachers deserve a raise, independently of budgetary efficiency, does not exist in city politics; it’s viewed as the sole domain of the unions to demand salary increases, and the idea that people can elect more pro-labor politicians who run on explicit platforms of salary increases is unthinkable.
In transit, I don’t have a good comparison of New York. But I do suspect that the single-party rule of CSU in Bavaria is responsible for the evident corruption levels in the party and the high costs of the urban rail projects that CSU cares about, namely the Munich S-Bahn second trunk line, which is setting Continental European records for its high costs. Likewise, in Italy, the era of DC domination was also called the Tangentopoli, and bribes for contracts were common, raising costs; the destruction of that party system under mani pulite and its replacement with alternation of power between left and right coalitions since has coincided with strong anti-corruption laws and real reductions in costs from the levels of the 1980s.
We haven’t found corruption in New York when researching the Second Avenue Subway case. But we have found extreme levels of intellectual laziness at the top, by political appointees who are under pressure not to innovate rather than to showcase success.
And likewise, at ETA, I’m seeing an advocacy sphere that is constrained by court politics. It’s considered uncouth to say that the governor is a total failure and so are all of her and her predecessor’s political appointees until proven otherwise. There’s no party or faction system that has incentives to find and publicize their failures; as it is, the people trying to replace Adams as mayor are barely even factional, and name recognition is so important that Andrew Cuomo is thinking of making a comeback, perhaps to kill another few tens of thousands of city residents that he missed in 2020. Any advocacy subject to these constraints will fail to break the hierarchy that resists change, and reduce itself to flattering failed leaders in vain hopes that they might one day implement one good idea, take credit for it, and use the credit to legitimize their other failures.
Is there a way out?
I’m pessimistic; there’s a reason I chose not to live in New York despite, effectively, working there. Alternation of parties at the state or even city level is not useful. The Republicans are a permanent minority party in New York, at least in federal votes, and so a Republican who wants to win needs to not just moderate ideologically, which is not enough by itself, but also buy off non-ideological actors, leading to comparable levels of clientelism to those of the Democratic machine.
For example, Mike Bloomberg ran on his own technocratic competence, but lacking a party to work with in City Council, he failed on issues that today are considered core neoliberal priorities, namely housing. Housing permitting in 2002-13, when the city was economically booming, averaged 20,276/year, or around 2.5/1,000 people, rising slightly to 25,222/year, or around 3/1,000, during Bill de Blasio’s eight years; every European country builds more except economic basket cases, and the major cities and metro areas typically build more than the national average. The system of councilmanic privilege, in which City Council defers to the opinions of the member representing the district each proposed development, is a natural outgrowth of the lack of ideological competition, and blocks housing production; the technocrat Bloomberg was less capable of striking deals to build housing than the political hack de Blasio. And Bloomberg is a best-case scenario; George Pataki as governor was not at all a reformer, he just had somewhat different (mostly Long Island) clientelist interests.
David Schleicher proposes state parties as a solution to the system of single-party domination and councilmanic privilege. But in practice, there’s little reason for such parties to thrive. If two New York parties aim for the median state voter, then one will comprise Republicans and the rightmost 20% of Democrats and the other will comprise the remaining Democrats, and Democrats from the former party will be required to defend so many Republican policies for coalitional reasons. There’s no neat separation of state and federal priorities that would permit such Democrats to compartmentalize, and not enough specifically in-state media that would cover them in such a way rather than based on national labels; in practice, then, any such Democrat will be unable to win federal office as a Democrat, and as ambitious Democrats stick with the all-Democratic party, the 62-38 pattern of today will reassert itself.
In the city, two Democratic factions are in theory possible, a centrist one and a leftist one. A left-wing solution is in theory favored by most of the city, which is happy to vote for federal politicians who promise universal health care, free university tuition, universal daycare, or more support for teachers, which more or less exist in Germany with a much less left-wing electorate. In practice, none of these is even semi-seriously attempted city- or statewide, and the machine views its role as, partly, gatekeeping left-wing organizations, which in turn have little competence to implement these, and often get sidetracked with other priorities (like teacher union opposition to phonics, or extracting more money from developers for neighborhood priorities).
Public transit is, in effect, caught in a crossfire of political incompetence. I think advocacy would be better if there were a persistently left-wing advocacy org and a persistently neoliberal one, but in practice, machine domination is such that the socialists and neoliberals often agree on a lot of reforms (for example, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has become fairly YIMBY).
But even then, advocacy organizations should be using their outside voice more and avoiding flattering people who don’t deserve it. People in New York know that they are governed by failures. The lack of ideology means that the Republican nearly 40% of the state thinks they are governed by left-wing failures while the Democratic base thinks they are governed by centrist and Republicratic failures, but there’s widespread understanding that the government is inefficient. Advocates do not need to debase themselves in front of people who cost the region millions of dollars every day that they get up in the morning, go to work, and make bad decisions on transit investment and operations. There’s a long line of people who do flattery better than any advocate and will get listened to first by the hierarchy; the advocates’ advantage is not in flattery but in knowing the system better than the political appointees to the point of being able to make good proposals that the hierarchy is too incompetent to come up with or implement on its own.
Pedestrian Observations 
I agree that there is little democratic accountability in the US. The only pressures governments feel is from the flow of capital and people away from their area of jurisdiction to other areas under other governments. The reduction in tax income for local and state governments is one of the few genuine levers of power that local governments fell in the US. Local ‘consultation’ or ‘community engagement’ don’t do anything in the US. It’s just a way to blow off steam and distract those naive enough to think that functional local democracy exists in the US. The only way Americans can exercise meaningful political pressure on local or state government is by moving their money and/or themselves to other political jurisdictions. The combination of extreme individualism and federalism created this situation. Openly admitting this would support movements toward local and state deregulation, privatization, and competition that might actually be able to increase governmental efficiency; something that formal political programs will never be able to do in the US.
As a Canadian recently moved to the US, I tend to think that the big issue is the two party system not allowing enough flexibility for political competition to emerge, especially when even local races are often imbued with meaning based on national political fault lines. We don’t have liberal or conservative mayors in Canada, and in every province there is a viable electable opposition that occasionally wins, except Saskatchewan.
Yes, the US does not have a parliamentary system. It has a winner take all constituency system that creates an enormous challenge for third party candidates. The centrality of constitutional offices to the system creates challenges also. At the same time, the US is experiencing it’s latest reorganization of its party system, at least the seventh since the US was created. If there is a time for a third party, it is now.
The UK has first-past-the-post constituencies too, and a less rigid two-party system. Canada is even less rigid, even ignoring Quebec.
Yes, but the UK has 640 members of commons for a population of 68M, while Canada has 443 members of parliament for a population of 41M. Compared to the US at 535 members of Congress for 334M, it is a lot easier to get a majority for a third or fourth party in a smaller district.
So? This isn’t scale-dependent, and US gerrymandering makes districts deliberately different from the average, namely, black-majority districts are required by the VRA, which are a lot more different from the rest of the country than the sort of districts that vote LibDem in the UK.
In the US minor parties aren’t even winning state or city seats. Some of those are pretty small.
If you just have FPTP for legislatures, 3rd parties will exist. The US is super-binary because of the governors, Senators, and the electoral college for President all push binaries*. Historically also generally the two parties were ideological big-tents with factions and strong regionalism. The collapse of Dixiecrats and Northeastern WASP Republicans in the 1980-90’s has led to a strong ideological sorting (with Ross Perot’s brief 3rd party as a transition event).
I disagree that the US system is ripe for a 3rd party challenge. Both parties are adding and losing voters symmetrically. And unlike early Ante-bellum or even the Progressive Era, there isn’t a set of issues that the main two parties are suppressing jointly. The closest thing to that is the Republican Plutocracy’s refusal to acknowledge their voters want Social Security and Medicare, which means they have to lean into ever more radical culture war, but because underlying social structures are moving away (esp secularisation) despite all their efforts that leading to more radical and authoritarian rage.
*Its not accident that the next most binary advanced democracies are Korea and Taiwan where you have mostly FPTP legislatures with minor party representation but they are all effectively aligned with the two Presidential coalitions.
Except it is scale dependent. If you have a district that is 25% Green, 60% Democrat and 15% Republican, then the Democrat will win every time. If you split that into three districts with respective makeups of 20/13/0, 5/23/5, and 0/24/10, then you get one Green Party member and two Democrats in office.
Smaller parties do win at the lower levels. The Democratic Socialists of America have 58 members in state legislatures and 149 local office holders. The Green Party has 143 office holders and the Libertarians 177. The national domination of the two main parties clearly suppresses local alternate party performance, however, if San Francisco had 7-8 members of Congress instead of just Nancy Pelosi it is highly likely a few of them would be Socialists or Green, which would in turn make it more likely that local candidates around the Bay Area would declare the same given the support of a national party and the opportunity for political advancement. Same if Montana had 10-11 Representatives instead of 2 it is likely some of them would be Libertarian or Constitution Party.
Gerrymandering is a better candidate for supporting the political duopoly rather than a reason it shouldn’t exist. VRA minority districts tend to vote overwhelmingly Democratic due to US politics, which leaves remaining areas more likely to vote Republican. Heterogeneous districts should be more likely to produce third party candidates than the homogeneous ones produced by the VRA: a district that is 35% Dem/35% Rep/30% Ind/undecided is would be more likely to be captured by a third party candidate the way Perot almost did than a district that is solidly D or R.
And then of course in many areas the party who holds power in the state just plain old gerrymanders to maximize their safe seats regardless of race. Once again I think district size is an issue. The Massachusetts congressional delegation is 100% Democrat even though a third of the state voted Republican in 2020. An anti-gerrymandering group did a study and found that with just 9 congressional seats there was no possibly way to get a Republican in office even with the most extreme Gerrymander given the distribution of state political preference. With more districts there would be some areas that are naturally Republican or at least more evenly split giving the possibility of other party candidates.
It’s really first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting that kills third parties and political diversity. Even with alternatives such as ranked-choice (aka preference, or instant-runoff) or proportional many voters can’t grasp the way it works and still vote as if it was FPTP. This suppresses votes for third parties because people worry about inadvertently letting their opposition sneak in, and in the UK this is very true. This is why in fraught elections third party vote share often falls off–defeating the ‘enemy’ takes priority. It takes very high disenchantment with the major parties for 3rd parties to pick up significantly. This happened in the UK election of 1983 in which:
So the SDP (today’s Lib-Dems) won 26.4% of the vote but only 2.5% of seats. Voters get disenchanted with this manifestly unfair outcome so that they often revert to major parties next time (to ‘make their vote count’) or stop voting. Sure enough the SDP fell back a lot the next time. In 2019 it took around 38,000 votes to elect a Conservative MP. For Labour it was 51,000, for the Lib Dems 334,000 and for the Greens’ it was 865,000. This time disenchantment was huge so the LibDems didn’t do too badly with 12% of votes and 11% of seats, and probably winning many Con seats for Labour as Con voters turned to LibDems. The winner, Labour, still had a grossly unfair share, gaining 64% of seats from only 34% of votes. This was a huge swing from the 2019 Con sweep and shows the absurdity of FPTP. If Labour continue as it has begun (awfully, the honeymoon didn’t even get to start) then it is not silly to imagine yet another giant swing next time. Keir Starmer used to talk about bringing in PR but when a party wins this big with FPTP they won’t change a thing.
In this US election it could be true too if Jill Stein gets too many votes: Trump just in the last few days said how he loves Jill Stein because 100% of her voters come from the Dems; the Dems have made it into an advert. If this election is as close as 2020 then Stein’s votes in places like Michigan and the other marginals could be critical.
I’m not sure but isn’t the reason why more independents and third parties win in US local elections because PR or ranked-choice is used more at that level? Of course it is also that those elections aren’t perceived as high-stakes compared to the national level. Even the mayoralty of NYC is now ranked-choice though it will probably take ages to overcome the inertia and advantages of the Dem machine. Like with the gang-of-five who broke away from Labour in 1983 to form the SDP it could take prominent defections of the likes of AOC (who actually may be a bad example). Adams is making his contribution, as is Hochul!
The US Green Party has no seats in a state legislature or above.
In Britain the England and Wales Green Party has 813 council seats (which admittedly is arguably a lower level than state legislature), 3 seats on the London assembly and 6 seats between the two Houses of Parliament.
I didn’t argue that the US is ripe for a third party success. I said this is as likely a moment as any in the last 60 years for one.
Local elections are small enough that a third party can convince the locals they have enough support to win and so it isn’t throwing away your vote to vote for them.
Or just identities. People don’t realise that the UK has only had FPTP since 1885 (its an American import), and only got rid of the remaining multi-member districts in the 1920’s. Interwar years had a 3 party system which then collapsed into coalitions with divided left parities. The 2-party monopoly is basically just 1945-74. UK has had multi-party politics ever since. With 3 minority administrations (Wilson-Callaghan, Major, May-Johnson I) and one coalition (Con-LD). And that before we get to the Celtic fringe’s devolved administrations. But the system requires asserting there is a norm because without FPTP in England playing keep-away in political options, the Union collapses, and so do all the existing parties from the Hard Left to the Hard Right.
None of these privatization schemes at the US state level increases efficiency. For example, the MTA shed the vast majority of its capital planning workforce and replaced it with consultants, and is steadily privatizing project delivery with design-build and now trying to do it even more with progressive design-build. The problem is that the people overseeing the consultants at the end are the same failed political appointees, who mismanage the contractors. Privatization is a government policy; if you’re doing it because the government is incompetent, then it too will be done incompetently.
Where privatization does work is when a competent government uses it to bind itself in the future, as a counter-lobbying mechanism. For example, a state may enter a free trade agreement with investor-state dispute resolution mechanisms that make it difficult for it to back out in the future; this is when the state is in effect saying “we’re for free trade, but we’re worried that in the future we won’t be able to resist internal lobbying to favor politically connected industries, so we’re ceding a bit of sovereignty to signal to lobbyists that they will not be able to buy us in the future.” It may privatize a service with the intent of making it easier for the private concessionaire to lay off workers, if it feels less politically capable of doing so itself; but then again, JNR’s layoffs happened before the breakup and privatization for the most part, and American left-wing NGOs constantly use whatever political power they have to force even private companies into project labor agreements.
Yes, privatization ‘schemes’ have to be binding over time or private investors won’t take them seriously. They also have to introduce genuine and sustained competition. Privatizing a monopoly won’t improve anything.
Yes, but public transit doesn’t lend itself well to competition; Tokyo gets away with it because it is by far the largest network in the world, so there can be competition between JR East and a private railway on most corridors, and even then there’s extensive state coordination via Tokyo Metro and Toei through-running.
Anything that occurs outside of a competitive framework in the US, doesn’t work. The US’s ultra competitive retail sector and astoundingly bad health care prove this. Nothing will change that, short of a revolution and the establishment of an entirely new republic.
I don’t understand why Brightline can’t compete with Amtrak. Why can’t a new operator compete with Metro North? This would all take years and a lot of political work but it’s the only thing that even stands a chance of improving passenger rail in the US. It wouldn’t even have to be for profit, to make a difference. It would just have to be fully and truly privately owned. Competition greatly increased rail passenger travel in the UK in the 2000s and 2010s. Open access has increase passenger volume on TGV lines within France. It has to be a central part of the equation or passenger rail will continue to be only for those who have no other choice in the US.
I am coming round to the view that open access is a useful tool. And it definitely works well for medium-long distance trips.
But I don’t think it works for peak short distance trips where the line is largely at capacity.
@Matthew Hutton:
Please give an example of where open access has actually brought such change. I don’t mean just in places where there is in principle open access but where it has created competition. The only one I can think that may partly fit the bill is Rome-Milan but I have read arguments that it has nothing to do with that (and did it owe anything to EU law?). Open Access may have provoked SNCF into creating its own competition in Ouigo etc but again I don’t count that. Most of the international routes involve sharing by public national railways, as it should. Except those new night trains which the public railways don’t want to run, and their viability is so fragile it is doubtful competition will arise. I thought Open Access might have improved Eurostar, especially in the early days where it was too expensive with that irritating Brit-inspired structure & availability, but the high costs are partly or largely because of the huge track charges by the entity that owns Eurotunnel with its high debt (due to Thatcher’s intransigence on it being entirely privately funded). The Brits long sold out their interests in both the tunnel and Eurostar but the big debt remains inescapable even if ownership of both is now dominated by SNCF (why should the French or Belgium governments pay down a debt for something that mostly serves the Brits; it is unsolvable).
As to Matt’s claim that privatisation increased usage in the UK, that is not true or certainly unprovable. Ridership increased during the period of privatisation but it had nothing to do with privatisation. It did not introduce any real competitive element as almost all the franchises were geographically defined and involved monopoly by a single company. Indeed it was a classic case of privatising a public natural monopoly as a private monopoly, an obvious recipe for malfience which duly eventuated. Even then it was run so inefficiently and ineptly, if not corruptly, that it was not sustainable. All it did was cost a lot more (both higher subsidies from the state and higher fares for poorer service*) and set back the network by several decades. The reason pre-privatisation BR was considered awful (probably worse than it really was) was not because of incompetence etc as Matt and his ilk might believe, but simple chronic underfunding over decades. Clearly that wasn’t fixed by privatisation as Thatcher’s hugely naive philosophy believed, or more likely she simply didn’t care because she abhorred public transit of any kind.
Open Access is a flawed concept when applied to natural monopolies like rail. Theoretically neo-libs or extreme market fundamentalists might fondly imagine all kinds of benign outcomes but it clearly doesn’t work. I don’t want to stir up the wasp’s nest of Tokyo but any concept it ‘works’ because of competition or non-state players is absurd. If it could really work why wouldn’t the Swiss do it (and the private railways for non-core rural/ski routes do not engage in competition). Plus on fundamental grounds it is unjust. Private companies very rarely have built passenger rail networks and maintained them into the modern era, and it is ridiculous to think a nation that has put huge resources into building and maintaining its rail system should hand it over to for-profit private operators to cherrypick a few good routes to cream off profits. The UK is the main (only?) European case of that kind of operation–though it doesn’t fill any measure of competition in the Open Access terms–and it has the most expensive fares and one of the worst operation in Europe; and the rail network part of it collapsed very quickly and urgently needed to be taken back into public control. Of course now all of it is sliding back into public control because the private entities exhausted the exploitation model of feeding capital from loans into dividends to shareholders.
…………
*The paradox is that perhaps it might have had a better chance of working if Thatcher had still been in charge because she surely would not have allowed the absurd state subsidies, incredibly actually a lot more than when in public ownership, that fed the private companies’ exploitative tendencies. Of course they would either have collapsed very quickly or never attempted to run the show, like network rail where nothing could hide the inability of the private sector to run the core functions of the system. Also it is surreal that Brightline represents some kind of alternative; anyone in a nation with real pax rail would consider it a joke. Like competition on the NEC is irrelevant; what is required is its own (public) ROW independent of private interests so it could run the service they way it should be run.
Actually the positive effect of competition is clear at several levels. Hiroshima has the best transit system of the 3rd tier system because it has Hiroden’s tram system which fought on the basis of property rights to stop anybody taking it over for road space as they did everywhere else. That created a constituency to build the Astram line and push for JR west to build an s-bahn “urban network” for Hiroshima (they added more 10 stations since privatisation). A real contrast to Okayama or Sendai.
Its competition not privatisation because Meitetsu was allowed to run wild during the last 2 decades of JNR and go off on wacko adventures in aerospace and Fukui, while refusing to support through running to Sakae because it worried about hurting its department store at Nagoya station. Then JR Central comes in and rips its business model to pieces in the 1990’s by running its section of the Tokaido mainline competently and building a station that literally towers over Meitetsu’s.
And the Tokyo Metro vs Toei balance (the former was originally private then nationalised, the latter a prefectural creation) actually is important for why Tokyo avoided Osaka/Kobe style “Monroe doctrine” politics i.e. a refusal of the Metro to integrate with the above ground systems. Which is why Tokyo outperforms them so much.
That being said, if the state is controlling your road system, it will need to be equally involved in trains, if only to maintain a level playing field. In conservative/populist/anti-transit Greens politics socialism-for-cars is sacred.
Rule of thumb (I’ve said this here before).
If you want privatised rail, privatise parking provision.
Privatised passenger rail can’t work in the US because it will be facing a road/land use mix that subsidies private cars soo much. US too socialist.
@Borners
I have no idea how most of what you said is meant to relate to “competition”.
@michael, with regards to privatisation between 1993/4 and 2013/4 rail usage more than double from 740 million rides a year to 1583 million rides a year. If you don’t attribute that to privatisation and the improved service levels that bought I am not sure what you attribute it to.
Now sure privatisation has a bunch of downsides, most obviously that the ridership doubled but the subsidy increased as well – which for an industry with largely fixed costs is pretty bad. But let’s not pretend there was no upside.
There is also a pretty strong argument that the vast majority of the genuinely spare capacity has been used to run more trains now anyway, so unless there are service cuts under state ownership we should be able to have our cake and eat it.
With regards to open access, sure there hasn’t been masses of genuine competition, but open access has certainly given Hull, Bradford and Sunderland much better rail service. And there is genuine competition from London to Edinburgh.
And Hull, which has very little tourism, has a much stronger service level to London than Paris to any foreign city thanks to open access. And that service is stronger than pretty much any non Paris city pair in France.
Matthew Hutton:
It’s an association based on coincidental timing. It is silly to assume it is a cause-effect relationship. It may be one hypothesis as a starting point but otherwise completely unscientific. Lots of other things were happening in that time period, huge changes in demographics, family, qualifications, work and workforce etc. For one thing the roads were becoming horrible, city parking ditto and more expensive. The nature of work and the workforce were changing and more people than ever were commuting and with longer and longer commutes. London was becoming unaffordable for lots more (white-collar) workers who chose to live in regional cities and commute. There was lots of that in Brighton and Oxford and indeed it was helping drive those property markets towards London’s! If anything, the companies were reacting to the increased demand not the other way around, and in the case of the south (Southern) failing to meet it (overfull trains, people left on platforms, people standing all the way to London, cancelled trains).
I’m not following your logic on any of this. You keep repeating it, and I may well be ignorant, but why is it due to open access? (Privatisation does not equal open access.) I think we must be talking about something else. Unless you are saying more than one rail company was running trains on that line to Hull? And I also don’t quite know what you mean by better “service level”; I mean were there more rail pax (normalised to whatever) or just more trains for whatever reason (like, it is on the ECML or other cities on same line etc). I think comparisons with France, a much bigger country, (or “Paris to any foreign city”*) are specious, at least on service levels. I don’t know what that is supposed to demonstrate. Or what it has to do with the EU’s directive on open access.
*Also I’m not sure I believe you. More than Paris to Brussels? And if it is, it begs the question why, when Hull is hardly Brussels. Perhaps it is extravagant and why the system is financially unsustainable? SNCF actually makes money off its TGV network and I’m not aware of people complaining about it. (Smaller regional towns another matter.) Paris-Lyon has trains at 3-4m intervals at peak and still doesn’t meet demand, hence the talk of a new route thru the centre (Orleans and Clermont-Ferrand).
Privatisation allowed a big one time increase in productivity by downsizing the workforce during the privatisation period. Thatcher-Major period saw the highest improvement in productivity of any decade according to Molyneux and Thompson. A lot of that was pre-privatisation because the Unions realised that the government was tougher than its predecessors. After all it was slaughtering Zombie public firms left and right.
That said I don’t think the main reason for the rapid growth of rail travel was privatisation. London’s economic revival is key as Thatcher dismantled some of the 1947 system’s massive distortions of Britain labour and capital markets across space. London had been quite deliberately depopulated and deindustrialised for the sake Outer Britain. That wrecked a rail system based on…..London. The massive (and arguably unfair) electricatioin of both Anglia mainlines, Thameslink (which did increase electrification on the Midland Mainline) reinforced by Jubilee/DLR.
Also increasingly inability to build infrastracture in general helped the railways which inherited rights of way from before 1947 system whereas road expansion has slowed down considerably in the face of Nimbyism (the M25 was the last truly big road project). The tourism and student booms helped as well.
My comments area about the US. The experiences of England or France have limited value in understanding the US and the experiences of Japan bear almost no relevance to the vastly different US. Societies create rail systems. Rail systems don’t create societies.
Then why did you write this:
And as I said, competition (nor open access) had nothing to do with it. I don’t think privatisation had anything to do with it either which is perhaps what you meant.
Sorry
Hiroden competes with JR West for East-West through traffic in Hiroshima esp to Itsukushima. Furthmore Hiroden’s investments are centred in the traditional core whereas JR West is focused on building up Hiroshima station as the main downtown for the city. They also co-operate because there are lots of journeys where you use both. And Hiroden runs most of local bus services.
This very different from Okayama where a smol legacy street car just connects around the city centre to the JR West hub station or Sendai where the subway service different corridors to JR East’s above ground network. As a result both JR don’t run their local services like an s-bahn even though they have the infrastracture to do it especially in Sendai. Instead they run them like semi-frequent regional trains. Again they similar are meh with cities like Niigata or urban Shizuoka.
And this pattern replicates, JR services are best where they have rivals. The only exception is Sapporo where JR Hokkaido has put together an s-bahn system because it has no other way to make money given Hokkaido has so few people outside Greater Sapporo.
I wrote that “competition greatly increased rail passenger travel in the UK in the 2000s and 2010s” because I think it is true. Competition works in all sorts of ways. Advertising against competitors reminds people that train travel is a choice. Choice creates incentives to treat passengers better. (I still can’t believe the insults and mockery I’ve received from Amtrak staff) The more people travel by train, the more people travel by train, that is, the network effect grows for all operators even if only one of them attempts to distinguish its services in some way. All of this happened in Britain in the 2000s and 2010s . Brightline in Florida is a perfect, if still modest, example of this.
@Michael, happy to accept your point on overall traffic numbers. However to be fair I do think that the British long distance services did see service improvements due to privatisation and that that is a big part of why we have more long distance passengers than the French.
The reason for picking Hull is that it a low prestige destination and it is low prestige destinations where the state run operators are traditionally pretty weak at running good service. And even so Hull – London gets a broadly similar service to Paris-Geneva when Geneva has CERN, the UN and lots of tourism whereas Hull lacks all of those things.
And yeah the Eurostar/Thalys service is better than London-Hull, but firstly it is a bit of a separate operator and secondly Paris-London and Paris-Brussels are extremely high profile routes. Certainly Paris-Brussels-Amsterdam has more potential traffic than say London-Bristol – but also many fewer trains.
You see this in the US too. Brightline is running a relatively low prestige, relatively low potential traffic service in Florida, and yet it runs a better service than the government run Acela which serves destinations with much, much higher potential traffic.
I do accept that open access isn’t a magic wand – and that if you can get the state operator to take risks and run a decent service without private competition that that is the ideal answer – but very often that doesn’t happen – especially for low prestige destinations.
I was looking at the UK tourism figures earlier this week and currently 42,000 people from Britain go to Spain by train every year.
Do we really think a direct service from Brussels and Lille to Barcelona and Madrid wouldn’t attract enough passengers to justify its existence if it was actually run as a service to connect with the 9am London-Lille Eurostar and the 9:30pm Lille-London Eurostar for the return journey?
According to Wikipedia the Northeast Corridor had a bit over 12 million Amtrak passengers in 2023 and Brightline had a bit over 2 million. It’s once an hour, the Northeast Corridor is at least twice an hour with certain periods of the day having four trains between New York and Philadelphia.
I want to know how once an hour and frequently delayed because of accidents at grade crossings is “better”.
@adiron, I was comparing Brightline to just Acela, but fair enough to compare to the full service. That said if you assume the “soft” August figures are annualised that would be 2.5 million over the year. That is 1/5th of the North East Corridor which truly isn’t bad – and passenger numbers are expected to continue to grow.
Acela is for people who want to brag about how much money they pissed away without saying it explicitly. Though I’m sure there are people who make sure whoever they are talking to know that they pissed away a lot of money on Acela. People who don’t want to pay business class fares for coach seats take the other trains, the Regionals or the Keystones. Very frugal masochists construct trips involving multiple commuter trains.
According to Wikipedia the Northeast Corridor had a bit over 12 million Amtrak passengers in 2023 and Brightline had a bit over 2 million.
@Adirondacker
Amtrak runs four trains per day between Orlando and Miami, two per direction, two of which take 5.5 hr and the other two 8 hr due to a double-back to Tampa. Less than 668k people per year ride it (the 668k is total Amtrak ridership in Florida minus the AutoTrain, some of which comes from north of Orlando).
Brightline runs 32 trains per day Orlando-Miami at a convenient once per hour (on a clockface schedule!) taking 3.5 hr. 2 million people a year ride it.
Brightline is most definitively running better service than the government in south Florida.
Onux:
Isn’t it entirely because Brightline or their master company own the tracks ROW because it is a huge rail freight company. Probably still shares the same track with freight. If Amtrak tried the same it would be denied by the freight companies or messed around just like, or worse, than on the NEC. Matt fervently believes that is only right and proper in America, where everyone except billionaires is the whim and mercy of big corporates. And remember that Brightline are really doing it not to make a successful pax railway per se but rather for the property development at the terminals. Pretty much a private version of what HK-MTRC does, or some of the Tokyo Metro companies. Imagine if Amtrak tried to do the same. Then Adirondacker’s comment would be a certainty, there would be accusations that it is communist and un-American. And that is why you will never have good things like fast & efficient rail. Or Metro/subway.
Brightline is doing better than Amtrak in Florida. Matthew wasn’t comparing it to other Florida services, he was comparing it to Acela. Florida is filled with Real Americans who think trains are a Commmmmmmmmmunist plot to sap and impurify their precious bodily fluids. That their train service is shitty isn’t surprising.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_High-Speed_Corridor
Isn’t it entirely because Brightline or their master company own the tracks ROW
Nice try, but unfortunately for your argument the former CSX right of way used by Amtrak and Tri-Rail between West Palm Beach and Miami has been owned by the State of Florida since 1989, and CSX lost dispatching rights in 2015 (three years before Brightline began service) so no, Amtrak’s failure to provide decent service in S. Florida is not due to interference by a freight ROW owner.
Also, while Brightline has the same parent company as the Florida East Coast railway and uses its route along the coast, Brightline built a brand new set of 200kph passenger tracks to reach Orlando from Cocoa, using ROW along a state toll road and opening last year. They also largely rebuilt existing route along the coast (restored double track, PTC/signal upgrades, upgraded crossings and quiet zones, etc.). Nothing was stopping Amtrak or some other government operator from doing any of this a decade or two ago on the ROW they own, so no, Brightine’s service is not entirely due to it getting a free ride from the track owner.
As an aside, Florida East Coast is one of the most professional rail lines in the US. It has had full PTC since 1987, uses 66kg continuously welded rail on concrete ties, and at least some of its freight operations use takt (!!!) – trains will leave Miami and Jacksonville scheduled to meet at a middle point where crews swap and thus end their day back home instead of incurring deadhead or overnight time and cost.
Brightline offers a British speed, French reliability, hourly all day service between non-core destinations. Very few state run operators actually offer better service than that frankly.
JR Kyushu’s Shinkansen from Fukuoka to Kagoshima perhaps?
It’s caused by Real Americans ™ and their elected officials refusing money being offered. They can sit in traffic on the Turnpike. Who had to keep their mouths mostly shut because the valiant owners of the Florida East Coast are stalwart private company owners who know best. I’m sure the places that turned down stations screeched about Queensification etc.
@MatthewHutton: in what world are Brightline and the Kyushu Shinkansen even remotely comparable? It’s more or less double the service with more or less double the speed.
Brightline’s level of service/average speed is absolutely standard across Europe and Japan and suchlike.
@Petitoiseau, which European mid-long distance services have an 88-90% on time rating, average 70mph/110km/h or more and run at least hourly? There really aren’t many.
And of those that there are the vast majority are to/from the capital city.
British and German trains do the speed and frequency but not the reliability, French trains don’t do the frequency, probably the Belgian/Dutch/Swiss trains don’t generally do the speed.
Matthew Hutton. 42000 rail journeys between UK and Spain or a daily average of 115 is quite a large number when nothing is done to facilitate these trips. Advertise the service in Belgium and pick up more passengers from Northern France in Lille and Marne-la-Vallee, and a rail operator may fill most seats on a high speed train. However one may not be able to do it profitably. The Beijing-Shanghai HST are doing great on a distance of about 1340 km but that’s a 360 km/h PDL. French and Spanish HSR speeds are lower and there are long sections of conventional rail along the route.
Anyway, high speed rail sweet spot ends well below the 1500 km range. On a 3h30 or shorter trip high speed rail is seen by most as more convenient than flying and rail operators have some pricing power. Conversely, the airlines have high costs. They must pay the same airport fees as in longer fights and a large percentage of the trip takes place in conditions where the jet engines are either particularly inefficient (taxiing) or thirsty (climbing to cruise altitude). On a medium-haul journey between England and Spain, planes become more economical and significantly faster than high speed rail, and now have pricing power. This is why Eurostar canceled the planned north of London services. I suspect this is why SNCF is not doing anything to promote the liaisons between Northern Europe and Spain.
It’s overdetermined why Eurostar canceled north-of-London services (loading gauge incompatibility, frequency splitting, security theater, etc.). Same thing with SNCF and Spain – SNCF generally doesn’t care about international services except for the business traveler market, and views its core mission as providing domestic intercity travel.
You may well be right about Spain. It seems SNCF sees France and Spain as two domestic markets and doesn’t mind leaving the connections over the Pyrénées to RENFE. As to the North of London market, I don’t think it was predetermined. SNCF wanted to serve it and ordered the rolling stock. They did not expect the launch of low cost direct air services and changed their mind once Ryanair was successful. Some of the idle trains were lightly used on domestic services, others were sold to VIA Rail, and Eurotunnel went bankrupt because rail traffic was below expectations.
@Matthew Hutton: You’re right, I didn’t think much about reliability.
I can’t judge for Great Britain, how unreliable are intercity trains there? I certainly agree about the issues that DB/SNCF have, though. It still isn’t a great sign for Brightline that even these companies (with their very frequently on this blog discussed issues) come close to its performance, and not just on one route, but on every route.
Even considering reliability: I didn’t check many routes, but Trenitalia and SJ both fit all your criteria (even on upgraded legacy lines like Venezia-Bari or Göteborg-Malmö)! But for example PKP does not. I also think you underestimate the average speed of SBB/NS/SNCB, check out any part-upgraded IC route and it will have >100km/h average speed. Examples: Geneva-Zurich, Amsterdam-Groningen. Also do keep in mind that Orlando and Miami are much larger than most (even capital) cities in Europe.
@Petitoiseau, fair point about those Dutch and Swiss examples.
Still I guess it depends on how you look at it. Is hitting maybe 75-80th percentile in Europe a good result for a US railway company? Is it fair to describe the US as a continent in this context or not given how few passenger rail users there are?
FWIW the UK PPM rates 77% of long distance trains as on time which means within 10 minutes of the scheduled arrival time.
The bus depot has been electrified since the horsecars were replaced with electric trolleys. Do you mean battery electric buses? Trackless trolleys? Electric streetcars?
New York voters consistently vote for federal politicians who promise to avoid tax cuts on high-income earners
Not exactly, New York politicians strongly opposed the Trump tax reform that limited deduction of state taxes from your federal tax return. The impact was entirely on high income earners in states with a high income tax (NY, CA, etc.) Yet NY politicians opposed eliminating this tax cut for the rich when it impacted their rich donors.
The UK doesn’t have a federal system of divided powers.
There are places that did worse. They are west of Ninth Ave.
In 2020, the highest excess death toll in the US per capita was in New York and New Jersey. By the second wave, New York was no longer the worst, but the first wave was so horrific, with morgues running out of room for bodies, that the 2020-1 excess death rates in New York and New Jersey are still close to the top among US states, I think both in the top 10. The US, itself, did more or less the worst in the developed world (here are excess deaths through the beginning of May 2021, as a percentage of the usual death rate; nowhere in rich Asia, not included in the post, were the numbers significantly different from zero). There’s a pretty strong case to be made that Cuomo was the single worst person in the entire pandemic who was not the leader of a sovereign state, even worse than Tegnell and Tedros.
Because you can’t see past Ninth Ave. Or aren’t looking.
Because you can’t see past Ninth Ave. Or aren’t looking.
Alon literally identified how NY/NJ were the two worst states in the entire country for excess deaths in 2020, and top 10 for 2020-21. That is the very definition of looking beyond Ninth Ave because the comparison is to the whole country.
I verified that CNN still has the web page I’ve been referring to whenever Alon screeches about how bad it looked from Fifth Ave. There are places that did worse. Have been since the screeching starting. Through I’m sure anyone who wants to make the governor of New York look bad can cherry pick all sorts of things. I have no idea which nether region the cherry picking was done from. Killing city residents in 2020 doesn’t make the excess death count change in 2021. Which is a different goalpost. Goalposts move a lot around here.
I don’t know if it is that people in flyover country are invisible or that they don’t count. They are just as dead as city residents. And people who died in 2022 or 2023 are just as dead as the people who died in 2020 or 2021.
Just a few headlines:
CBS News July 29, 2020. South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem disparages face mask requirements for students
Associated Press March 2 2022. Florida Gov DeSantis berates students for wearing masks
Lets not forget the circus at the White House.
From the BBC April 24, 2020. Coronavirus: Outcry after Trump suggests injecting disinfectant as treatment
How ’bout?
Trump campaign rallies led to more than 30,000 coronavirus cases, Stanford researchers say
From CNBC Oct. 31, 2020. … and 700 deaths.
there are lots of other things, west of Ninth Ave or north of Harlem that were worse.