One- and Two-Dimensional Rail Networks
As people on social media compare the German and American rail networks, I’m going to share two graphics from the upcoming Northeast Corridor report, made by Kara Fischer. They are schematic so it’s not possible to speak of scale, but the line widths and colors are the same in both; both depict only lines branded as Amtrak or ICE, so Berlin-Dresden, where the direct trains are branded IC or EuroCity, is not shown, and neither are long-range commuter lines even if they are longer than New Haven-Springfield.
The Northeastern United States has smaller population than that of Germany but not by much (74 million including Virginia compared with 84 million), on a similar land area. Their rail networks should be, to first order, comparable. Of course they aren’t – the map above shows just how much denser the German rail network is than the American one, not to mention faster. But the map also shows something deeper about rail planning in these two places: Germany is two-dimensional, whereas the Northeastern US is one-dimensional. It’s not just that the graph of the Northeastern rail network is acyclic today, excluding once-a-day night trains. More investment in intercity rail would produce cycles in the Northeastern network, through a Boston-Albany line for one. But the cycles would be peripheral to the network, since Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington are collinear on the Northeast Corridor, and the smallest of these four metro areas, Philadelphia, is larger than all those on the branches depicted above, combined.
The most important effect on network planning is that it turns the Northeast Corridor into easy mode. We would not be able to come up with a coherent timetable for Germany on the budget that our program at Marron had. In the Northeast, we did, because it’s a single line, the main difficulty being overtakes of commuter trains that run along subsections.
This, in turn, has two different implications, one for each place.
The one-dimensionality of the Northeast
In the Northeast, the focus has to be on compatibility between intercity and commuter trains. Total segregation of tracks requires infrastructure projects that shouldn’t make the top 50 priorities in the Northeast, especially at the throats of Penn Station, South Station, and Washington Union Station. Total segregation of tracks not counting those throats requires projects that are probably in the top 50 but not top 20. Instead, it’s obligatory to plan everything as a single system, with all of the following features:
- Timed overtakes, with infrastructure planning integrated into timetable design so that the places with overtakes, and only the places with overtakes, get extra tracks as necessary.
- Simpler commuter rail timetabling, so that the overtakes can be made consistent, and so that trains can substitute for each other as much as possible in case of train delays or cancellation.
- Higher-performance commuter rail rolling stock, to reduce the speed difference between commuter and intercity trains; the trains in question are completely routine in German regional service, where they cost about as much as unpowered coaches do in the United States, but they are alien to the American planning world, which does not attend InnoTrans, does not know how to write an RFP that European vendors will respect, and does not know what the capabilities of the technology are.
- Branch pruning on commuter rail, which comes at a cost for some potential through-running pairs – trains from New Jersey, if they run through to points east of Penn Station, should be going to the New Haven Line and Port Washington Branch, and probably not to Jamaica; Newark-Jamaica service is desirable, but it would force dependency between the LIRR and intercity trains, which may lead to too many delays.
In effect, even an intercity rail investment plan would be mostly commuter rail by spending. The projects mentioned in this post are, by spending, almost half commuter rail, but they come on top of projects that are already funded that are commuter rail-centric, of which the biggest is the Hudson Tunnel Project of the Gateway Program. This is unavoidable, given the amount of right-of-way sharing between intercity trains and the busiest commuter rail lines in the United States. The same one-dimensionality that makes intercity rail planning easier also means that commuter rail must use the same non-redundant infrastructure that intercity rail does, especially around Penn Station.
The two-dimensionality of Germany
A two-dimensional network cannot hope to put all of the major cities on one line, by definition. Germany’s largest metro areas are not at all collinear. In theory, the Rhine-Ruhr, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, and Munich are collinear. In practice, not only does this still exclude Berlin and Hamburg, which is not at all like how Northeastern US collinearity works, but also the Rhine-Ruhr is a two-dimensional polycentric region, and Frankfurt is a terminal station oriented in such a way that a Stuttgart 21-style through-running project would allow for through-service from Stuttgart or from Cologne to points east but not from Stuttgart to Cologne. There’s also a tail of regions in the 1-1.5 million population range – Leipzig, Dresden, Nuremberg, Hanover, Karlsruhe – that are collectively larger than the largest single-core region (Berlin), even if they’re still smaller collectively than the eight-core Rhine-Ruhr region. The highest-demand link, Frankfurt-Mannheim, is a bottleneck between many city pairs, and is not at all dominant over other links in frequency or demand.
This makes for a network that is, by necessity, atypically complex. Train delays between Frankfurt and Mannheim can cascade as far as Berlin and Hamburg. There are timed connections, timed overtakes of slower regional trains on shared links (more or less everything in yellow on the map), and bypasses around terminal stations including Frankfurt and Leipzig as well as around Cologne, which is a through-station oriented east-west permitting through-service from Belgium and Aachen to the rest of Germany but not between Frankfurt and Dusseldorf.
Not for nothing, Deutsche Bahn has not really been able to make all of this work. The timetable padding is around 25%, compared with 10-13% on the TGV, and even so, delays are common and the padding is evidently not enough to recover from them.
The solution has to be reducing the extent of track sharing. The yellow lines on the map should not be yellow; they should be red, with dedicated passenger-only service, turning Germany into a smaller version of China. The current paradigm pretends Germany can be a larger version of Switzerland instead. But Switzerland builds tunnels galore to go around strategic bottlenecks, and even then makes severe compromises on train speeds – the average speeds between Zurich, Basel, and Bern are around 100 km/h, which works for a country the size of Switzerland but not for one the size of Germany, in which even the current 130-150 km/h average speeds are enough to get rail advocates to never take any other mode but not enough to get other people to switch.
In effect, the speed vs. reliability tradeoff that German rail advocates think in terms of is fictional. The two-dimensionality of Germany means that the only way to run reliably is not to have high frequency of both fast and slow trains on the same tracks between Berlin and Halle, between Munich and Ingolstadt, between Hanover and Hamburg, etc. Eliminating the regional trains is a nonstarter, so this means the intercity trains need to go on passenger-dedicated tracks.
In contrast, careful timetabling of intercity and regional trains on the same line has limited value in Germany. The regional trains in question have low ridership – the core of German commuter rail is S-Bahn systems that run in dedicated city center tunnels and have limited track sharing with the rest of the network, much less with the ICEs. If there’s high regional traffic on a particular link, it comes from combining hourly trains on many origin-destination pairs, in which case trains cannot possibly substitute for one another during traffic disturbances, and timetabling with low padding is unlikely to work.
Like Takt-based planning for Americans, building a separate intercity rail network for Germans comes off as weird and foreign. France and Southern Europe do it, and Germans look down on France and Southern Europe almost to the same extent that Americans look down on Europe. But it’s the only path forward. If anything, this combination of speed with reliability means that completing an all-high-speed connection on a major trunk line, like Berlin-Munich or Cologne-Munich, would permit cutting the timetable padding to more reasonable levels, which would save time on top of what is saved by the higher top speed. Germany could have TGV average speeds as part of this system, if it realized that these average speeds are both necessary and useful for passengers.
Pedestrian Observations 
To go back to our discussion about cross-border France-Germany trains given this map it’s tough to accept that Germany shouldn’t be paying to upgrade Karlsruhe to Frankfurt to 250-300km/h based on domestic service requirements.
And if you had that sort of top speed you could trim off another 30 minutes from the ~6 hour Paris-Berlin journey time that should be possible with Frankfurt-Berlin upgraded to take 2 hours.
I dont see why time table maximization or minimizing padding is such a central goal for high speed rail, that it totally should reorient infrastructure investment.
For city transit it increase frequency which has positive dynamic effects across the entire system, and really is worth maximizing, as interchanges are so central, as is just showing up to a station.
But for HSR such effects are minor. Ridership is probably mostly determined by prices and capacity (where high padding have modest negative effect, but investment in longer trains and similar probably is much more cost-effective) and location of stations. Integrating HSR better at a regional level is I suspect much more important than dedicated tracks (though it helps with general reliability which is of course very important).
If dedicated tracks are at the expense of regional systems i think it would Germany less well functioning. If it is additional investment parallel to existing tracks across the entire country it sounds very very expensive, and simply not realistic for a shrinking nation.
This kind of interchange oriented Takt system is also not how any international HSR acctually works, even high ridership systems in East Asia, including China that has the most network like map.
The papers I’ve seen (i.e. Börjesson and Cascetta-Coppola) both have a much higher ridership elasticity with respect to speed than price. Speed matters; that’s why I’m saying taking Berlin-Munich from 4 hours to 2.5 is likely to raise ridership by a factor of 2-2.5.
The dedicated tracks are never at the expense of regional systems. The slow tracks aren’t being abandoned. To the contrary, the slow tracks can get better regional service. For example, on the Stadtbahn in Berlin, if DB manages to remove all intercity trains, sending them to Hbf via the North-South Main Line instead, then the Stadtbahn’s fast tracks will be available for the exclusive use of regional service, which can then run on a regular 10-minute Takt, instead of in bursts between intercity trains making fewer stops.
I agree with higher elasticities for speed at distances above 500 km or so, and I agree it would gain ridership for this reason. I am also sympathetic for arguments of reliability. I just dont see it as a reasonable trade-off.
I dont see the reasonable value for money though at the frequency of trains that are discussed. Separate tracks both within and outside cities would be very very expensive. It is essentially a new chinese HSR networks on top of existing tracks. And Japan/China/Taiwan HSR have been unable to build downtown stations, as the costs explode.
I think investments in rail transit in urban areas would be much better value for money, at least that is how I evaluate nordic HSR plans.
I also suspect intracity transit has a brighter future, than intercity rail travels with autonomous cars/busses. Dense cities will always face geometric physical constraints, while i think price/convenience advantages of autonomous end-end point intercity travel will be very hard to compete with (even if slower), as it avoids (at least) two interchanges.
Autonomous cars and buses will face issues with people in the countryside due to noise. While main roads are fairly noisy in the daytime they are at least quiet at night.
There’s also the cost, it is difficult to imagine all the sensors needed for autonomous driving will ever be cheaper than the human controls we have today meaning it will be at least as expensive as owning a car in a lot of cases.
Cascetta-Coppola find high elasticities even for short trips. The difference between an hour and two hours matters for trip spontaneity, and also for competing with cars. The importance of speed is also why there is no competition from autonomous cars at this scale – at the end of the day, the car today would get me to Munich in 5.5 hours, the train does in 4 hours, and a train at TGV speeds would do it in 2.5 hours. The price advantage would be nil because drivers already spend 0€ on their own driving labor, and do not consider their own driving labor to be so onerous as to discourage driving when it takes the same amount of time as the train.
Japanese and Taiwanese stations are in or very close to city centers. Chinese ones are not, but that’s not because of the dedicated tracks, but rather because of the security theater and oversize stations it results in under CRH’s paradigm; within Europe, the one country that has security theater, Spain, builds city center stations just fine, even with a different gauge from the classical network.
“within Europe, the one country that has security theater, Spain, builds city center stations just fine, even with a different gauge from the classical network”
Actually the security theater doesn’t take much space, it just makes the passenger experience more uncomfortable (because you have to account for a queue of unknown length when timing to go to the station, plus afterwards you have to stay waiting in a limited space inside the station). Madrid Atocha expanded to accommodate high speed before there was security theater, and Barcelona Sants didn’t need to expand premises to accommodate high speed plus security.
On building in the city just fine and not affecting conventional rail, there are a few noisy exceptions. High Speed took spaces between Sants and El Prat that impacted the local train capacity, and the disruption for the high speed works triggered such a crisis that not until this year, with widespread free passes, Rodalies has reached the amount of passengers of 2006. The construction of Sagrera station is a notorious boondoggle with jokes whether it will be finished before or after Sagrada Família, and there’s a whole generation of madrileños who have only seen Chamartín under construction.
You are attaching too much science to Chinese HSR.
China is only concerned with fast implementation – it doesn’t care about implementing well – or implementing well from Day 1. The west agitates over making sure onward transit connectivity is adequately sized before approving major rail projects. China doesn’t care – you can hail an unlicenced taxi. Things do eventually get sorted but China doesn’t want to wait for day-1 perfection.
The old stations didn’t have the track capacity for handling the high-speed trains without some very disruptive work. In hindsight there is probably some merit to China’s ordering of things
So about a decade on from the HSLs and parkway stations being completed, we now have
Jordi is right – security theatre is annoying but it’s a trivial factor in deciding whether to build or expand central stations.
Ideally there are cheap combinations of high-speed and urban rail construction, transforming the four-track Rhein Ruhr rail axis from ICE&RRX (joint tracks) and S-Bahn to ICE and RRX (own tracks) while removing S-Bahn from mainline rail and as a replacement building new U-Stadtbahn lines (e.g. Duisburg-Mülheim, Essen-Bochum-Dortmund) in east-western direction.
On some rural lines like Eisenach-Bad Hersfeld however, regional traffic is not relevant, so it is actually labeled with 0 in the Deutschlandtakt demand data.
I also think lines should be more separated, but sometimes the pragmatic way especially in shrinking areas of Germany has to be the usage of a legacy line for long-distance rail, with regional demand either non-existant or transferrable to urban rail.
Berlin’s specific issue isn’t as straightforward as segregation by speed, at least not within the urban area. Most of the main lines come in as mixed use 2-track railways, but that’s mostly OK because the State of Brandenburg has a low settlement density which don’t support more than 2-4tph of regional services.
More relevant is pairing by route. Berlin’s biggest issue is at Spandau the way the Hamburg and Hannover lines go into the two Hbf approaches (Stadtbahn or via Jungfernheide). Correct for that asymmetry then the pairing becomes quite obvious:
Even Hamburg – Dresden and Gesundbrunen – Leipzig/Halle pairings are a bit lop-sided in terms of demand, so inevitably there will have to be some crossing between the lines, but as no line is expected to operate at absolutely maximum capacity one can live with it.
The four-track formation between Hbf and Sudkreuz won’t be sorted perfectly into fasts and slows, but since there’s only Potsdamerplatz we are not talking a huge journey time differential to deal with.
Berlin has more to its west than to its east. It makes sense for ex-Hannover trains to terminate in Berlin and the most logical operational practice is terminating in Osbahnhof and turning around in Rummelsberg depot. The inter-city market to the east is 2tph to Poland and turning those around somewhere west isn’t the end of the world. There only needs to be 2tph Magdburg – Frankfurt Oder as RE services plus 2tph to serve the Michendorf direction (so a grand total of 4tph via Wannsee). German commentators seem confident in the happening of the Stammbahn, so slower services at Potsdam can all go via the Stammbahn.
Then you could have Hamburg – Dresden ‘ICE Sprinter’ 2tph and Hamburg – Leipzig ICE semifast at 2tph (yes, ‘violates’ my pairing). I then have up to 6tph Sprinter type services going south west – 2tph Munich, 2tph Frankfurt, 1tph Stuttgart and 1tp2h Basel (latter 2 services not going into Frankfurt Hbf). Most of these 5.5 tph will start and terminate at Gesundbrunen as Rostock and Stralsund can’t possibly absorb all 5.5.
Then you are left with the regional services:
Probably not terrible to also do 1tp2h to Paris not calling at Frankfurt Hbf opposite the Basel train.
Good point. There’s the 6tph towards Halle/Leipzig then.
Alon is right. Elasticity is higher wrt journey time than to price. Journey time is the product you offer and the price is simply what the market can bear. The European experience is people will pay for quality – the rail systems with the highest per-capita ridership – the Swiss and Dutch ones – are also the most expensive ones.
This is plain wrong. Germany’s problem is too many trains of different speed profiles sharing the same tracks. Move the fastest trains onto the new tracks, then the existing lines can support much more frequent and reliable regional services all travelling at the same speed.
Location of stations is generally not relevant in Germany. Germany’s is ‘node rich plain line poor’ – main stations in cities tend to be generously sized and can handle a high throughput of trains as long as the trains can be sorted into an efficient structure. High-speed lines is how you deliver that structure.
You need to improve regional rail frequency to gain modal switch from the autobahn. You can’t improve regional rail frequency without kicking ICEs out.
You need to improve ICE speeds, frequency and reliability to shrink Germany’s bloated domestic aviation – the only way to do that is with dedicated high-speed tracks.
It’s a no brainer.
Well writen!
Speed difference kills capacity, separation of long distance, high speed layer to own track will improve local services and also freight rail.
Price is much more significant factor in less wealthy coutries, I believe that Switzerland has different elasticity to price than Poland, for example. But higher speed means quicker turnaround and better productivity of trains and crew. Increasing speed can sometimes lower the costs and a price.
High speed rail is preparing for a high-income future (Central European nations are all heading there), and Germany (and most countries where HSR is a relevant topic) is already a high-income nation, so the planning of a country’s (or Europe’s) future rail network should be based on a ‘pay for quality’ mindset.
Great post.
How would you characterize Israel’s rail network? At first glance, it appears to be a one- dimensional network, where the Tel Aviv-Haifa line serves as the main line , while the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv and Be’er Sheva-Tel Aviv lines function as branches (obviously, there are more tracks, but these are the primary ones).
However, by 2030, when the Eastern rail and 431 rail open (and eventually in the future, the Menashe rail, which will connect the eastern track to the Jezreel Valley rail), one could argue that it will transform into a two- dimensional system.
Or maybe this paradigm doesn’t fit Israel’s rail network at all?
Israel is completely one-dimensional, which is enforced by its geography. The Eastern Railway is not useful for passenger service; I can’t tell why it’s even happening, beyond “Regev likes the idea of a Tel Aviv bypass to own the libs.”
Presumably it’s mostly to get freight trains out of the Tel Aviv tracks.
the eastern railway and 431 are for suburban services and eliminating frieght trains through tel aviv, it won’t be used for haifa-beersheva/jerusalem connections bypassing tel aviv because there’s no reason to have those
Well illustrated. Shows how ridiculous that the red stops halfway between Nuremberg and Munich, and all the other examples. Fulda – Wurzburg would be a lot more than 1tph if they finished the job with Wurzburg – Nuremberg. There needs to be a thick red going north east from Rhine-Ruhr (and within too – Cologne-Dortmund takes far too long).
If Texas built a passenger rail network, Should it follow the two dimensional approach you suggested for Germany with knots and dedicated high speed lines (not a turnkey Shinkansen)?
Texas is debatable. I would call Texas a one dimensional loop – Dallas – Fort Worth – Waco – Austin – San Antonio – Huston and back to Dallas is a good line that hits all the major cities and every part of that should have enough ridership to justify itself (and likely stops in some other small city none of us have heard of because it is on the way). Just like the north east you would branch to College station, and perhaps a few other cities that far enough away from a main line to not justify rerouting (because the additional trip time for most), but big enough to justify a short branch. Maybe you would do longer branches down places Monterrey, Corpus Christi , or Oklahoma City… – but these are low value branches that you would only build after the circle is complete and only make sense if you can easially reach them from the main circle.
Rather than a loop, I suggest Texas HSR would be best in more of a one-dimensional T form.
The three legs would have Dallas/Fort Worth, Houston and Austin/San Antonio at each end, meeting at a central point or a small triangle. This would require fewer route miles of construction than a full loop or following the existing triangle freeways (I-10/35/45).
Service on each of the legs would look like Alon’s one-dimensional model, as each of the three regions could certainly support robust regional rail in parallel.
That is a reasonable option. However that the existence of those loop freeways implies there should be enough demand as to make it worth building the loop. Remember, transportation only makes sense as part of the network though, so perhaps you would build the T today and then in 30 years (after all the other branches are in place) build the loop and remove the T (or maybe use it only at night while you do maintenance on the main lines?)
Everybody gets a longer ride. Half the population of Texas lives in Dallas-Fort Worth or Houston. Give half the population a faster ride that frees up airport capacity for the flights from the small places.
”Frankfurt is a terminal station oriented in such a way that a Stuttgart 21-style through-running project would allow for through-service from Stuttgart or from Cologne to points east but not from Stuttgart to Cologne.”
Not exactly. From Mannheim Hbf take the Western Approach railway to just south of Gernsheim, then build 10km of tracks to cut over to the Main-Neckar railway just north of Bickenbach. That line enters Frankfurt Hbf from the East allowing through service to Koln. Or since the HSR line ends in Mannheim right now, leave the Western Approach line at Worms and build 30-40km new track to Darmstadt (or as far as you want of dedicated high speed tracks until you reach the approaches to the Main bridge in the vicinity of Frankfurt-Louisa station.
please familiarize urself with the Frankfurt Fernbahntunnel project there’s no possible way that a train coming from the Riedbahn or the Main-Neckarbahn can run through the future Hbf underground station towards the Cologne NBS or the rhine valley without a huge detour via the Rhein-Mainbahn and Babenhausen. To turn in Frankfurt coming and going from Stadion is creating less conflicts in HBF as coming via the Neckar-Bahnbridge and leaving towards Stadion.
On that same quote: Trains between Stuttgart and Cologne stop at Frankfurt Airport rather than the main station. That’s perfectly fine as the airport is only a 10 min. train ride away.
Regarding stations, it is not true at all for Taiwan. Taichung and Kaohsiung are both very var from city centre (2nd and 3rd largest city), as is many smaller city stops, even though Taipei is okay (but even here Banqiao and Nangang was very non-central before HSR).
In Japan the centrality is a bit of an illusion, it is the result of the city evolving around what was originally not very central locations (e.g. Osaka and Yokohama).
For shorter trips, good regional connectivity will dominate minor speed increases.
Shin-Osaka is still a 3 minute train ride from Osaka train station. Shin-Yokohama is a bit further away from the original Yokohama station, but Yokohama is only part of the Tokyo Metro area, and the Tokaido Shinkansen does terminate at Tokyo Station itself.
In big cities there is so much going on that things have to happen somewhere other than Union Station.
This is a map of Osaka, in 1956, before Shin-osaka and Shinkansen.
It is in the farmland to the north of the map.
https://www.historicpictoric.com/products/historic-map-osaka-city-japan-1956-vintage-decor
It is extreme transit oriented CBD development, the centrality is an illusion.
The pink on the map is built up area, correct? If so I don’t see any “farmland” to the north of the river where Shin Osaka is. Osaka metro population was 8.9 M in 1956 with 2.5-3M in the city proper. Do you really think in a city of 3-9M that being less than 4km outside of the historic CBD makes it not “central”?
Osaka-Umeda itself was on the northern fringe of the city proper, even though the city had slowly began to reorient itself northwards, due to the station and commuter raild itself.
Shin-Osaka was 6 km away from the heart of historic Osaka (say halfway between Namba and Umeda), which certainly is a very considerable distance in a 1950s city.
Similar to Tokyos drift westward, Osaka has also drifted northwards after the growing importance of Osaka-Umeda and Shin-Osaka, that is reverse causality though.
In no way can the area around Shin-Osaka be described as central in 1960.
it’s just awful the Japanese had an economic miracle like the Europeans and rebuilt their cities after the war. Terrible.
In big cities there is so much going on that things have to happen somewhere other than Union Station. Grand Central is 5-ish kilometers away from the Brooklyn Bridge and all the commuters coming across it on the elevated lines. That didn’t stop Times Square or Herald Square from becoming destinations. Or Rockefeller Center. “Wall Street” had a few rough years but has come back. It’s terrible, awful, the way cities aren’t frozen in amber at particular time forever and ever and ever, isn’t it?
@adirondacker12800, Japan rebuilt its cities after World War Two because the Americans firebombed pretty much all of them into the ground.
Just like the Germans did. And other Europeans.
It’s just too too tooo tooo bad that they didn’t decide it was forever and ever going to be like it was in 1924 and keep it that way. And none of that stops Grand Central from being five kilometers from the Brooklyn Bridge and Rockefeller Center not being near either of them.
It’s just toooo toooo bad that clueless railfans think everything has to be at Union Station too. It doesn’t.
The decision to get Shinkansen built as fast as possible and accept peripheral stations bypassing major cities, and avoiding terminus stations, was almost certainly the right one, as was the Asian (in contrast to European) willingness to let the city evolve location wise.
It was brought up though to highlight the extreme difficulty in duplicating an existing railroad network, with a new infrastructure with dedicated tracks. Nearly every HSR country has seen it as to expensive, or invasive in the old urban fabric.
Thia difficulty will be harder in Germany that is unlikely to see much economic or demographic growth.
@adirondacker12800, the Germans didn’t damage British cities to anywhere near the degree the US destroyed Japanese cities. And the only German city we firebombed was Dresden.
Hamburg and Cologne were destroyed in bombings too…
Doesn’t really matter if conventional, incendiary or nuclear weapons level your city. It’s still leveled. And it still doesn’t change that Grand Central Station is five kilometers from the Brooklyn Bridge.
Excellent, as usual. One quibble, why would US rail authorities “write an RFP that European vendors will respect”? With the Buy American requirements, they are not going to buy European.
While downtown long distance stations are preferable, I never was bothered by the distance between Shin-Osaka station and “central” Osaka. I would be taking a short taxi or subway ride to me hotel in any event. Still much better than a trip to/from an airport.
If the high costs of transit are because of federal requirements (this is debatable) then a city could do their transit entirely with local funds thus ignoring buy America requirements since they are not getting federal grants. If NY could build for Spanish prices their contribution would cover the costs of building more subway without federal grants thus not needing federal grants. (I’m not clear on where the non federal funding comes from so I said NY and not NYC though I suspect the city alone could fund this alone if they could build. I’m sure someone here knows the funding offhand and will correct me)
Of course a city government competent in building seems unlikely. Much as I hate on federal regulations, I suspect they are reigning in the city and so things would be even worse for cities trying to go alone despite that allowing them to ignore buy American laws.
Buy American is mostly a non issue. transporting completed trains is not cost effective. Any foreign manufacture who wants to compete in the US should be setting up a factory in North America anyway. (though the factory could be in Canada or Mexico). Setting up a factory is expensive but once you make that investment you can undercut others from overseas. (American manufacturing relied on that increase prices without modernization until they couldn’t compete – though with the lack of transit investment from 1940-1990 that might have been the right choice even though on hindsight it killed them) The only question is how many factories in North America will the market bear – too many and the investment won’t pay off.
You are so wrong, so self-assuredly self-assertingly wrong, on every point, nearly every time. there’s no place to even start.
FYI local US agencies LOVE “federalizing” projects. PROJECT BUDGET TOTAL IS THE ONLY THING THAT MATTERS. Nobody anywhere gives one single shit about project cost-effectiveness or project service effectiveness.
Buying Stadler trains from Utah at at 60+% cost premium (“once you make that investment you can undercut others” hah hah hah hah hah hah hah) is a great and wonderful thing, because now your budget is 70% higher and your consultant and agency management overheads are 60% higher, and you need extra consultants to manage the Unique Local Domestic Requirements, and wow, you have all this sweet federal grant money, that actually doesn’t cover the 60% cost premium from federalizing grant sources, but THAT’S NOT THE POINT — the point is LARGER PROJECT BUDGET.
Bigger grants mean more money. “Buy American” means bigger costs = bigger grants. (And less project, and less service, but nobody, literally nobody cares.) Nobody’s trying to “undercut” anybody on project budget size anywhere in the USA. Nobody.
I should have put many should’s in there. North American (including Mexico and Canada) should need enough new trains that a local factory can undercut anyone overseas. This means enough scale (and in turn automation) to be worth the local factory.
You are absolutely right that in reality the more anyone spends on a project the better. Nobody cares about cost effective. They only care about jobs (union or political donors consultants) to build the thing, and maybe the art they can get out of it.
It shouldn’t be that way. I’m trying to work to a better world, but of course it isn’t the one we live in.
“Non-American” sourcing is considered a plus for the unionized civil servants and politicians. When the rebuild of the Eastern Span of the Bay Bridge (SF/Oakland, $7 billion for a 10000 foot bridge) used Chinese steel, that meant travel to Asia on the taxpayers dime for both civil servants and politicians. When Alameda County Transit (Oakland, California) bought VanHool buses, the “inspection trips” to Belgium were a perk, not a problem [and, oh the irony, Gillig Bus headquarters and manufacturing is in Livermore, California and Parts and Service is in Hayward, California, both cities are in Alameda County].
Why do do feel the need to type utter unmitigated bullshit?
Name ONE “unionized civil servant” or ONE US politician who goes to bat for non-American procurement. Name ONE. You can’t. The problem we have — the reason the US has shit buses from the 1960s and shit trains from the 1970s and construction and overhead costs from the 2060s is that you can’t.
Oh “the taxpayers dime” dog-whistle. Niiiiice.
Anyway, I knew the Caltrans manager who was brought it to deal with that fucking disaster project. I promise you that neither he now or any his coworkers relished exotic travel to Chinese steel fabrication yards.
AND IF THEY DID, THEN SO FUCKING WHAT? They got to enjoy seeing Chinese steel fabrications yards. (Hey, I’d probably pay to see such things!) The “taxpayer dime” got some structural steel that the USA WAS UNABLE TO PRODUCE OR FABRICATE. “Comparative advantage”! Win-win! Synergy!
I knew the AC Transit directors who were the primary advocates for BUYING THE ONLY VAGUELY MODERN TRANSIT BUSES THAT NORTH AMERICA HAS EVER SEEN.
They wanted modern buses, with low floors, with maintainability, with adequate doors per side, ready for proof-of-payment all-door boarding, that didn’t rattle and fall apart and break down like something you’d see in some Deep South Civil Rights protest documentary. They got them, on “the taxpayers dime”.
And then miserable shits like you WENT TO WAR with the agency about “Van Hell” buses, how low floors were some communist European plot against the elderly, the disabled and the bus drivers union, it went on and on.
We never got proof of payment, because “Van Hell” and “Yurrup”.
What we have is worse service and higher costs than two decades ago, declining ridership, out of control costs, just a spiral of shit.
(Hey, we also got back systematic voter disenfranchisement to go with awful domestic trsnsit buses for the poors.)
And what a FUCKING COINCIDENCE that AC Transit now, by Empire Strikes Back policy, only buys shit throwback US buses from local mafia operations. We’re back to safely not having any even vaguely contemporary transit buses anywhere in North America. WHAT A COINCIDENCE. The agencies fucking hate their riders. The manufacturers hate competition.
You got what you want. You even got to get it on “the taxpayers dime” — because somehow payola to domestic mafiosi is more moral than a few nights in a hotel next to an industrial park in goddamed suburbs of Belgium. Belgium, for Christ’s sake.
Congratulations. Enjoy your shit domestic buses. You’ve earned them.
Everyone hates business travel, everyone.
The only reason it’s vaguely worthwhile to even some people is the airline points, getting to stay in nice hotels and getting to tack on holidays to nice places and getting work to pay for the flights.
Organisations throw in a bunch of perks for foreign travel because you have to to get people to do it.
Does the one dimensional nature of the NEC make the effective population density higher, or are you only counting population close enough to the track that they are likely to consider it.
Alon, I suggest revising population data for your demand models and curious how this would affect the result.
Branch cities outside of Bos-Wash collinearity (as shown on map) have combined populations greater than Philadelphia, when measured by Metropolitan or Combined Statistical Area or Urban Area.
Accounting for natural endpoints of those branches (Hampton Roads VA, Buffalo NY and Portland ME, not mapped), the combined populations are 1.5x Philly’s.
Source for all stats: US Census Bureau via Wikipedia.
I wasn’t counting Richmond, is where the Philly > all rest combined point comes from.
Very roughly half the people in the U.S. live in the Eastern Time Zone. Things get complicated because it’s……. complicated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_center_of_the_United_States_population
Philadelphia’s MSA has almost exactly the same population as Washington D.C.’s with Baltimore’s MSA between them. Or the Washington-Baltimore CSA is roughly as big as the three southern New England states. Or there are as many people in Ohio as there are in either with Detroit just across the border. Ohio and Detriot are within HSR range of Eastern Seaboard.
Or north of Manahattan is upstate New York, New England, Quebec and Ontario. South of Manhattan is the rest of the continent. And while burrowing from Boston to Utica will be very expensive it makes more sense than burrowing from Denver across great big empty spaces to the extra wide place in the road that is Salt Lake CIty. Or not burrowing to get from Omaha to Denver.
Also curious whether any network effects can be assumed from building 300-350+ km/h HSR on the DC-Richmond-Raleigh-Charlotte-Atlanta corridor.
Yes, absolutely; you’ve seen my Metcalfe’s law posts, linked in the main post, right?
@Alon, are there any potential corridors in the U.S. that fall into the two-dimensional network category? A few commenters have mentioned Texas – maybe the Midwest network qualifies as well.
If so, how would you apply these principles to the relevant networks (dedicated tracks across the Midwest, hourly takt with key transfer stations towards Chicago, etc.)?
A corridor is by definition one-dimensional.
If you want a two-dimensional US network, then look at what happens if the US builds not just the NEC and branches but also a complete network to the Midwest and South. This map has a two-dimensional main component; the NEC is still the highest-traffic part of the network, but the expected traffic on both of the Northeast-Midwest routes is high and the timetable has to take cycles into account.
It’s a passenger railroad. That’s where the passengers are.
For the umpteenth time
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_center_of_the_United_States_population
I wonder WHY any of this is the way it is?
Not that it makes things radically different, but the German map is missing the 230 km/h-section between Augsburg and short of Munich.