It’s not the Baumol Effect
The Baumol effect is an observation that wages in an economy rise based on its average productivity, and therefore the wages also rise in sectors with low or no productivity growth, increasing their real costs. The classical example is that it takes the same number of people to play an opera today as in the 19th century, but wages have to be competitive with the 21st-century economy, and therefore opera tickets cost in real terms more than they did in the 19th century. People from time to time invoke this effect to explain rising infrastructure construction costs in the United States, relating it to a broader cost disease affecting health care and education. But it’s not really a correct explanation for what’s going on at global scale. High American construction costs are not downstream of high incomes, but rather of poor governance leading to low labor efficiency, poor procurement practices, nonstandard systems, and overbuilding.
At global scale, there is no significant correlation between GDP per capita and tunneling construction costs. There’s a significant but weak correlation between GDP per capita and metro construction costs, but it comes from the fact that developing countries like India build mostly elevated systems. Adjusted for the ratio between subway and elevated cost, which is about 2 in both India and China, the correlation is reduced to insignificance.
There is extensive temporal correlation between GDP per capita and costs, in the sense that the US, UK, and France were all capable of tunneling for around $40 million/km in today’s prices in the early 1900s, and aren’t capable of doing so today. But then countries with the GDP per capita of early-1900s America, like India, build subways for maybe $400 million/km. The techniques used in the early 1900s were labor-intensive, with workers digging up streets by hand. These techniques are not used today in low-income countries, which instead use capital-intensive techniques learned from Western countries, Japan, or increasingly China, and which rarely have the mass industrial working class that characterized rich cities around 1900. That is not Baumol; that is a transition to capital-intensive techniques that are then applied where it’s inappropriate.
Nor has there been an explosion of costs since the 1970s globally. The US has gone from high to very high costs, and the UK from medium to very high ones. But German construction costs are barely higher now than then. Italian ones have if anything fallen a bit, due to anti-corruption laws in the 1990s. If anything, Germany is seeing an increase in construction costs now, with rather high NBS construction costs even without tunneling, at a time in which economic growth is weak. The weak economic growth here – Germany’s GDP per capita has been essentially constant since 2019 – combined with fast economic growth in the United States means that German elites are starting to imitate American procurement practices, with Deutsche Bahn starting to use previously unheard of design-build contracts and public-private partnerships, with the attendant costs.
In the UK, similarly, high costs interact with weak growth, in that weak growth leads to cancellation of infrastructure projects like High Speed 2 north of Birmingham, which cancellation then leads to orphaned designs. There’s been growing discourse in the UK about the problem of feast-or-famine projects, with rail electrification proceeding in waves rather than at a constant rate as at Continental European comparanda like Italy. Italy is hardly posting Polish economic growth rates, but in the UK the origin of the feast-or-famine problem is in the cycle of top-down infrastructure plans and cancellations.
In truth, while the US has had higher economic growth than nearly all of Western Europe since 2019, GDP per hour remains barely above the weighted average of the Germanic-majority Continental countries and France. This is not why the US is expensive; poor project delivery is.
Pedestrian Observations 
A significant factor in high US transit construction costs is the insanely high cost of underground utility relocation, due to each utility independently moving its pipes or wires. And the transit agency footing the bill without having any ability to control costs. This is a governance failure, but the failure occurs outside the system of transit construction.
I think you should mention that you are using PPP-adjusted costs. Normally when people cite a cost number converted to dollars without any explanation on how they converted it, it means that they are using the exchange rate. I believe there would be a strong correlation between nominal exchange-rate costs and GDP.
I agree with your other UK examples around electrification, but not this one.
HS2 north of Birmingham got even more ridiculous than south of Birmingham. South of Birmingham on the basis you needed to build new London approaches then I think US$130m/km 2023 PPP plus trains and plus maintenance is reasonable. It’s difficult to take a figure but probably it is overpriced by a factor of two to four.
While I am in favour of more stations on that section to be fair you would find it difficult to have more than two or maybe three at a push which is still somewhat limiting.
In contrast north of Birmingham (specifically Rugeley to Crewe) you have fewer trains so you could have at least two stations (Lichfield and Stone Parkway most likely) without much difficultly and even at Japanese stop spacing it would be hard to justify more. Additionally assuming you stay north of Cannock Chase AONB there are no AONBs to deal with unlike South of Birmingham with the Chilterns or with HS1 and the North Downs.
Plus there are no expensive big city approaches you need to build. Crewe is small by the standards of London, Birmingham and Manchester and ending just south of there would hardly be particularly limiting.
Additionally it is about 60km of distance. If we said US$50m/km 2023 PPP was a reasonable based off our peers for that section you’d be talking about £2bn in total. Do we really think they would have cancelled it if it had cost even £10bn? I don’t think so – especially as you should be able to do the bottom 3/4s which has the most value for proportionately less.
May I ask, what is the definition of labor efficiency? How is it measured?
I can easily understand the other three items. They are of an engineering or programmatic nature that I’m familiar with in my day job. I’m having trouble wrapping my head around low labor efficiency.
In the private sector I can see that it would be a ratio of revenue to costs per worker, or another measure of excess value generated. But that doesn’t sound like a good measure for infrastructure.
There are lots of ways to measure it. Generally you can measure output of labor with your eyes since they mostly make things you can see and thus measure in obvious ways. How many walls does someone build. How many miles of tunnel you get. Generally we measure the cost of the above (dollars, Euros…) vs what we get, though it could be how much an individual produced. Of course there is also quality measures you can add in. There are many ways to measure it, each with pros and cons.
Of course like all measures care needs to be taken. You can lie with statistics in many ways. Any metric that becomes a target becomes something people will try to “adjust” to fit their narrative. Some work is more visible than others, so it can look like labor spends months standing around doing nothing and then they finally they make progress and finish the project in a day (thus making people want to skip all the unseen work to get done sooner)
I’m looking for something more specific. This response is too general and speculative. I am interested in what measures Alon based their statement on that low labor efficiency is one of the four causes of high project expense and poor project delivery. I have no doubt they are correct, I’m just curious about the measure itself. Presumably it would need to be a more general measure than, for instance, meters of tunnel dug per worker per day. That’s not a useful measure.
In the book Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson they have an anecdote from a construction foreman about how the industry has changed over the last 30 years. The foreman noted that there are a number of mandatory practices on a job site now that would have been unheard of at the beginning of his career, including but not limited to calisthenics before work begins (but within the scope of a shift), laying out and marking of approved paths around the job site, others that I’m forgetting because the book isn’t in front of me right now…
In addition there has been a lot of reporting about union rules requiring a certain number of people on a job site without regard to what their purpose is:
“Trade unions, which have closely aligned themselves with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and other politicians, have secured deals requiring underground construction work to be staffed by as many as four times more laborers than elsewhere in the world, documents show.”
So is it excessive staffing alone that equates to low labor efficiency? Is it another measure? That’s what I’m curious about. Again – I’m not questioning the assertion. I am very interested in these types of metrics. I find them to be persuasive when speaking with interested legislators.
The claim that in 1900 NY was building subways for 40million/km, and today India is building subways for 400 million/km should be easy to look up and verify. We don’t even need to ask where the costs are going at that level: we can state just on those numbers that labor in NY was 10x more efficient in 1900 vs India today. (I expect some of this is better safety standards and so I wouldn’t want to go to NY 1900 levels, but I doubt most of it is things that are important). There may also be some counting different things, if India is counting labor not in the NY numbers that would change things, again something I can’t comment on, but I’m sure you want to know.
Alon has dug into things like trade unions in https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/01/08/meme-weeding-unions-and-construction-costs short summary – labor unions are adding a lot of extra labor, but not enough to explain the majority of high costs in the US. (I may be remembering other things they have written as well). Fixing union over staffing is something that the US should do, but there are a lot of other factors that are costing even more – they do not claim to know where all the money is going despite spending years trying to figure it out.
This is a joke, right?
Certainly all the stuff the private sector builders are now doing on health and safety is important. I don’t think they are too strict by any means.
Do not forget infant mortality in London in 1900 was higher than Afghanistan today. We have moved forward a lot.
I see you get your legal information from the back of cornflake boxes produced by the Heritage Foundation.
That’s not remotely what Sackett v. EPA was about, and you know it.
Jesus.
An Environment Protection Agency existing at all is the “administrative overreach” that people like you who pretend in bullshit cant like that pretend not to be seeking.
Well, you’ve got your way. Enjoy “moving dirt”, wherever and whenever you like, for whatever reason, no matter what the costs to others. FREEDOM! FREEDOM FROM THE NANNY WELFARE STATE.
We’re all fucking doomed.
In the book Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson they have an anecdote from a construction foreman about how the industry has changed over the last 30 years. The foreman noted that there are a number of mandatory practices on a job site now that would have been unheard of at the beginning of his career, including but not limited to calisthenics before work begins (but within the scope of a shift), laying out and marking of approved paths around the job site,
I have not read Abundance so I cannot comment on the specifics of the anecdote, but in general the things noted here have been associated with a dramatic decline in construction related injuries. Morning calisthenics (aka “stretch and flex”) lead to fewer strains or muscle pulls; the approved paths are not laid out willy nilly as make work but are integrated with the logistics plan and updated as work progresses so that workers do not pass by open excavation or pass underneath cranes where they could be injured. As this article notes the non-fatal construction injury rate has dropped ~40% in just the past 15 years let alone 30, and in several recent years the construction industry has had a lower non-fatal injury rate than private employment as a whole, which is pretty astounding given how construction has traditionally been one of the more dangerous industries: https://www.constructiondive.com/news/construction-injuries-drop-nonfatal-bls/732873/
In general I do not think safety measures like these are really driving labor inefficiency in construction. Much more likely candidates are:
Your symbol manipulator biases are showing again. Why is it “overstaffing” when it comes to formally negotiated rules but career long circle jerks by people who do a lot of typing “large teams”? I see a bunch of featherbedding leeches sucking money out NIMBY and BANANA pockets. Defending lawsuits costs money. Lots and lots of money. And judges who allow them to do it. And hope for another bite at the apple because having someone else type up the erudite opinion that boils down to “you weren’t deferential enough to my neighbors” wasn’t enough “work”. Partly because telling them their lawsuit is frivolous would be very rude. I suppose it gives them enough money to have the leisure to whine about those awful union workers making half as much. When all of them take the month of August off in addition to their other time off. Nice “work” if you can get it.
We tried doing it by leaving it in the hands of the unchallenged technocrats and decided we didn’t like it. See above about it being nice work if you can get it.
Someone with an appropriate degree got out from behind their keyboard to go, I know this is scary to some, outside. With tools, which can also be scary or inscrutable, and did things like checking what happens when clueless idiots let mud flow into streams. The people putting out hay bales fought long and hard to avoid doing that. And wanted to see the reports. And then sued because they didn’t like the results. And gnash their teeth about the enviroweenies making them stop mud from going into streams.
Unless you think someone just pulled regulations out their ass and the people arranging for the bales of hay didn’t object.
Other people like trees more than you do. Knocking them down would leave them in the way of whatever work is being done. They would have to be cut down. By arborists. Who, these days, don’t give some guys chain saws and hope for the best. Without evaluating whether or not it needs hay bales to comply with waterway regulations. That is assuming the lawsuits over the DEIS, EIS and FEIS didn’t negotiate the cheaper option of leaving the trees intact. …We tried doing it by leaving it in the hands of the unchallenged technocrats, who didn’t see a problem with bulldozing trees into the stream, and decided we didn’t like it
Why is it “overstaffing” when it comes to formally negotiated rules but career long circle jerks by people who do a lot of typing “large teams”?
I made it clear both situations create unnecessary costs and are a problem. If you want to split hairs, a negotiated rule requiring 27 people to run a TBM that needs a crew of 9 is overstaffing; if it takes 1 person to do an environmental review of 1,000 acres and you review 10,000 acres when the project affects 500, then the extra 9 people are not overstaffing, but the work is unnecessary.
And judges who allow them to do it.
The lawsuits are based in some law allowing such torts. Change the law and you remove the time and cost from projects. Don’t blame the judges for allowing a lawsuit to be filed when the law says people can file a lawsuit.
Unless you think someone just pulled regulations out their ass and the people arranging for the bales of hay didn’t object.
Yes, the companies paying for the haybales did object, however, yes many regulations are absurd. The EPA proposed a rule in Washington State limiting PCBs to 7 parts per quadrillion – only problem, this is below the background level of PCBs, which means if you took a cup of the cleanest water you could find and poured it into Puget Sound you would be guilty of pollution. Well, not the only problem, it turns out ppq is so small there is no technology that can measure it, which means no one could find out if they met the standard even if they wanted to. (https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2023-12/wa-hhc-afpa-complaint-12.4.23.pdf)
One of the most significant recent court cases on water pollution involved the EPA trying to fine a couple – not for causing pollution by dirt getting into a lake, but because they moved dirt on their property without getting a permit. The bureaucratic process was more important to the agency than actually preventing pollution. Incidentally this led to a Supreme Court case which scaled back the Clean Water Act due to the EPA overreach, which means actual pollution is now more likely….
Other people like trees more than you do…the lawsuits over the DEIS, EIS and FEIS didn’t negotiate the cheaper option of leaving the trees intact
I like trees quite a lot. There are people who like trees more than me, but there are also people who like subways more. The question was not ‘are subways better than trees’, the question was ‘does the mitigation required by many environmental laws lead to less efficiency and greater cost’. The answer is unequivocably yes. Leaving the trees in my example is not the cheaper option. The cost to cut down and remove trees (professional tree cutters are not expensive arborists just as people who pour concrete are not structural engineers) is a fraction of the cost of two smaller cranes working longer than a single crane (two operators vs one, more time paying them to move things, more time spent on the people installing what the cranes lift, etc.). There are many other situations where cutting down some trees is quicker and cheaper than working around them.
We tried doing it by leaving it in the hands of the unchallenged technocrats and decided we didn’t like it. We have tried leaving it in the hands of courts and DEIS, etc. process and a lot of people have decided they don’t like that either. Many environmental lawsuits are not protecting the environment. One case involved a CEQA protest against building a grocery store on a parking lot – it was filed by a union representing workers at the only grocery store in town to blocking competition; there were no negative environmental effects to building a grocery store on a patch of asphalt, but would have been community benefits if a second grocery store were built. One of the most likely groups to file CEQA protests are construction unions – they extort developers into signing project labor agreements requiring the use of their union and then magically the protests are withdrawn, even though nothing about the project has been mitigated. This works because the process and mitigations are so expensive. It is entirely reasonable to ask if this is the best use of the legal system or if the environmental process has an appropriate cost-benefit balance.
Do you get paid the word, by the post or do you do this for free?
18 excess sandhogs earning $500,000 a year, with benefits, overtime, overhead – including the suits typing emails to their managers who forward it to the executive in charge of circlejerks, watching it all, is $9,000,000 a year. Over a ten year project like East Side Access that’s $90,000,000. Where did the other $9,910,000 go? People who type for living just love to screech about people who actually do things. And rarely if ever talk about the executive in charge of circlejerks or his underlings. Because pointing at nice white collar peers would be rude.
Somebody somewhere spent a tiny amount of money to determine if it warranted a Major Investment Study. Both of them may include people going outside. Most of the work involves a lot of typing. Some of it, it’s is terribly working class mention this, billable hours. The MIS or Draft Environmental Study would define the 500 acres and the other 9,500 acres would be outside of the scope.
I’m going to freely and openly blame judges who are afraid of upsetting their neighbors and won’t tell them “It’s too late to file lawsuits. Perhaps maybe if there was some material defect in the process it could be reopened. Your cockmamie whining isn’t that” and let them file frivolous lawsuits anyway. And the appellate judges who rarely say “It not material and anyway it’s too late”
It’s fabulous for people who get paid by the hour. Keep in mind high priced lawyers who file frivolous lawsuits get paid by the hour. So do the contractors who have to stop work while the frivolous lawsuit gets careful consideration. From judges who didn’t tell those nice rich people they are too late.
If that doesn’t work, whackjobs like IRUM can stir up enough shit to delay projects like East Side Access. It’s a pity the link to report the MTA had to commission to respond to him has gone dead. It was quite …. polite. Expensive too. Even though it mostly involved, I suspect, cutting and pasting from the MIS, DEIS, EIS and FEIS. Or similar documents. Makes me wonder if any of them use keyboard shortcuts for the cutting and pasting or use the mouse. Unlikely any middle button clicking. Which can be quite useful. I digress.
That’s the way it works. The regulatory agency files paperwork. How are they going to prevent pollution? Put on a pair of ruby slippers and click the heels three times? Telepathically communicate with you to cast a spell on them?
No it’s not. And if you think it is costing too much money you are free to comment. Before the filing deadlines. After them it’s just too bad the people who like trees more than you got their way….. There are trees on 111th Street? East of Second Ave? that have Alon pissed off.
You can commiserate with your bank statements. Though perhaps like Scrooge McDuck you have a pool of gold coins to bathe in. We tried having the technocrats doing it cheaply and didn’t like it.
I’m sorry you are disappointed that the EPA isn’t as perfect as you are. And sometimes make mistakes. People looked at the ridiculous rule and filed the paperwork to stop it. Why they didn’t do that during the comment period is an interesting question. Insert a very innocent look here. While I contemplate billable hours. And donations to places like the Heritage Foundation.
There ya go screeching about the the way blue collar workers game the system. Just like white collar workers do to get things like bike lanes and smaller cranes to preserve trees. And file lawsuits after the comment period so work stops. Get the work to stop for a long enough period of time they can sue that conditions have changed so much the FEIS is obsolete!! And the process has to start all over.
The trick is to have the process never end. And nothing gets done. But it’s lots and lots of billable hours!!! That barely involve things that require little if any typing.
1 CEO at 3 million, 5 CXX aids at 1 million : 8/million per year. That is less than the 18 sandhogs. But the total of the two still insignificant as part of the budget. Class warfare isn’t helping anything here. There is a lot of waste someplace as proved by other places in the world that can build similar projects for much less. However where is really hard to figure out and most people are not willing to look at the details, this just want to point a finger at whatever their pet out thing is.
Some of it is building more than we need to. Stations that are built to be palaces instead of enough to be functional (with maybe a little extra to ensure they are not completely ugly). However it isn’t clear where most of the money is going – but the fact is projects in the US cost far more than other countries and this difference isn’t explained by anything obvious. I suspect that a lot of it is just little things, and it will be a lot of work to eliminate them one by one – but nobody cares to because corruption pays more than savings would to those in charge.
So it’s okay to complain perennially and extensively about blue collar featherbedding but if anybody examines anything those nice white collar people do it’s class warfare?
When you are using “What about ism” to distract attention without finding an issue that is any more significant then it is just class warfare and no you can’t say anything. If you put in a good faith effort to find something that is more significant then you can call that something to put forth first. Or you can list all the factors to work on.
Featherbedding is featherbedding whether it’s construction workers or people typing at each other. Apologists for rich people call it class warfare and see what-about-ism when there isn’t any. Lawyers and construction workers get paid by the hour. It’s rare if anyone questions why the lawyer charges so much. Maybe it’s the air conditioned office that makes them immune.
I wanted to ask about the Transit Matters report “The Right Route to Rail Decarbonization is Electrification”. It says that “BEMUs have around a 100% cost premium over conventional EMUs”. It cites these two Alstom Coradia orders as evidence:
https://www.alstom.com/press-releases-news/2020/2/alstom-signs-first-contract-battery-electric-regional-trains-germany
https://www.railwaypro.com/wp/alstom-to-supply-32-emus-for-hesse-subnetwork/
However, in the case of the battery Coradias, the contract also covers Alstom maintaining them, which does not seem to be the case for the non-battery Coradias. This, along with the fact that the non-battery order is larger, could at least partially account for the cost difference.
Have you taken these factors into account? Are there other examples for the cost of battery vs. non-battery EMUs you can cite?
This is similar to the errors with the HS2 costings which include maintenance and the trains.
Just as an aside, separating out “BEMU” from “EMU” is likely to become increasingly tricky as 99%-electric-traction vehicles are increasingly procured with traction-capable auxiliary batteries for non-revenue yard movements and for emergency power-out just-get-to-the-next-station revenue movement. As far as I’m aware trolleybuses are 100% there already; it will be interesting to see how the tram and mainline EMU markets develop on this front.
And then there are things like Stalder’s “EUR9000” freight locomotives“, where the batteries can be for off-catenary “last mile” freight yard movement, or for bridging small mainline electrification gaps in UK-style intermittent electrification proposals, or for supplementing deliverable power when running under wimpy 1.5kv/3kv overhead, or even for arbitraging brake regenerated power to be returned externally versus stored on-board. In a way they sort-of seem like gigantic batteries on wheels (Co’Co’, many wheels), with a super-powerful charging system on top.
Nailing down a precise cost differential is also missing the point, in my opinion.
BEMUs have a long list of disadvantages. They’re heavier, they’re range-constrained, and they take time to recharge, which increases dwell at terminals or requires acquisition of additional sets to maintain service levels; and the batteries perform worse in cold weather, which I’m especially sensitive to in the Northeast US. An EMU with an auxiliary battery for yards and emergencies is great. Wiring up yards costs a lot, so if you can forego that add a contingency capability, wonderful.
With all that in mind, I’m not sure why cold-weather transit agencies like Metra and MBTA are fixated on batteries – the CT legislator I’ve been speaking with reached out for some fact-finding to MassDOT and the feedback he got was they thought catenary caused pollution (what the actual fuck) and that it was “outdated technology” (what the even more actual fuck)
With friends like these, who needs enemies?
Batteries get warm when they discharge. Batteries get warm when they charge too. They have thermal management systems. The very very clever people designing the thermal management system and the very very clever people designing the charging system will coordinate with the very very clever people designing the batteries to assure the batteries are toasty warm. I bet they will even check with the operator to see how much electricity the electric trains in the area use on cold days. Compared to mild days. Compared to very hot days. And put in enough batteries to have it all work out. Like it does for electric cars.
You keep responding to me like I or anyone else gives a shit what you think. We don’t. Begone, troll.
J.G.
You’ve said this multiple times but it is not for you to police who can or cannot comment on this site. Or least of all Mlynarik who also tries (despite AFAIK the only one who has been banned from multiple websites for unacceptable behaviour). Adirondacker may have certain less than perfect mannerisms (as judged by us who are perfect in all ways …) but it is not true that no one cares nor declines to read him. And to have a bit of grit in the system is not always a bad thing; sometimes produces a pearl.
In any case it is up to the site’s creator not you.
I’m sorry you are offended by reality.
Battery chemistry mattes, but it is common for batteries to need temperature in a specific range to charge while maintaining maximum life. Yes engineers ensure this happens (except Nissan is famous for not doing this in the leaf – to long term poor results), but this all costs energy which in turn costs even more money above the cost of that thermo system – which isn’t going to be cheap for a large battery (though a rounding error in the cost of a train, it is still a lot of money)
I am pretty sure you need lithium titanate batteries for trains and Lithium iron phosphate batteries are unlikely to be suitable as buses and HGVs will only be charged once a day whereas trains could be charged half a dozen times
…The internal combustion engines have thermal management systems too. That aren’t cheap. That hasn’t stopped people from using them. In cold weather!!
and they take time to recharge, which increases dwell at terminals or requires acquisition of additional sets to maintain service levels;
Over at Caltrain HSR Compatibility Blog there was a discussion about electrifying or using BEMUs for service south of San Jose, and I was surprised to learn that the plan for a test BEMU to the end of the line had it able to run a 45 km route with recharging just while covering the 3km section between San Jose and Tamien plus the normal layover time at Gilroy. 25kV overhead is pretty powerful, and can very quickly charge BEMU trainsets while in motion in very reasonable distances/times. They are useful for much more than just yard movements, there is now a reasonable question if many branch lines or extensions need to receive overhead power if there is an electrified main line a BEMU can charge from before taking the un-electrified route.
The reason those agencies like batteries is because stringing overhead wire is a capital construction cost and the transit infrastructure process in the US is broken, as this blog has noted many times. Stringing wire takes years of reviews and approvals and will be much more expensive than it needs to be; new trains can just be bought and put into service.
reviews and approval time is a valid concern.
However for any track in frequent use the overhead wire will pay for itself in just a few decades. Passengers don’t like one train per hour service, and you still have to maintain track even if rarely used. Which is to say for passenger service I don’t think the numbers can work out over 20 years except running 25kv overhead wire (third rail sometimes is needed for tunnels) – either wire saves money long term; or your use of the rail is so low the whole doesn’t make sense and you should run a bus in mixed traffic (signal priority allowed).
I don’t know how to verify this, but I’ve been told that in the US freight rail would save money electrifying over 20 years despite the cost on the main lines. However the lines where it wouldn’t pay off are enough the overall it doesn’t work out. (anyone know where to find a source for this – they supposedly have studied this) Freight also makes low use rail work out because they can run trains at slower than walking speed and save money on maintenance – this would not be acceptable in passenger service.
@henrymiller74
The study you may be referring to is summarized in this presentation: https://railtec.illinois.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2024_11_08-Hay-Seminar_Tyler-Dick_compressed.pdf
I’m on mobile so I can’t get to the paper itself presently. Will post a follow up. The paper is much more extensive.
The mainline case examined here is the BNSF Southern Transcon.
I too am surprised that the batteries can charge that quickly, @Onux. I have an EV and have driven several types. The charging speed is limited by the battery and software, and the rate slows down considerably toward full charge. But these are not lithium-titanate batteries as @Matthew Hutton pointed out.
It does appear that several other cases for BEMU usage (of the non-yard/emergency variety), e.g. the Siemens Mireo B in Baden-Wurttemberg, AGC in France, BEC819 on the JR Kyushu Wakamatsu Line, are of a similar implementation where they run under the wire and then run on battery in unelectrified territory.
This is fundamentally different though from the Metra and MBTA cases, where there is no electrification on the proposed lines. Those are intended to fully replace diesel traction.
@henrymiller74 and others interested:
https://railroads.fra.dot.gov/sites/fra.dot.gov/files/2025-01/CB%20Framework%20Rail%20Electrification%20Options.pdf
As I wrote earlier I believe this is the full paper.
Then it shouldn’t be surprising that large batteries have thermal management systems. And that the large batteries work in cold weather. The much smaller batteries in internal combustion vehicles have aftermarket cold weather …. thermal management systems… too..
@J.G. The charging speed is limited by the battery and software
Actually the charging speed is regulated by the power output of the charger, power being energy divided by time. Higher power means moving the same amount of energy in a shorter amount of time. As a practical matter charging speed is a factor of voltage, since the total current is limited by the size of wires (power is voltage times current). Ordinary voltage in a house is 120V, sometimes 240V. Tesla Superchargers use 400V or 800V, and they are moving to 1,000V in the most recent models for higher power and for the Megacharger to support semi-trucks. The overhead electrification of most mainline rail in the US is 25,000V, which explains why the BEMUs can charge so fast.
If you have an EV it is worth checking with an electrician about the cost to install a 240V outlet instead of plugging into a regular outlet. It makes a big difference in reducing charging time.
Hi @Onux,
I’m afraid you’re mistaken as this isn’t universally true. Maybe it’s true in some newer EVs (mine are ’24). Mine charge at a max of 150 kW on a Level 3 DC fast charger even if the charger is rated for higher. I have plugged into 250 kW and 350 kW commercial chargers, both Tesla and non-Tesla. The software will also limit the rate over the course of the charging session to prolong the life of the battery, in addition to the soft % limit you impose in the vehicle or on the app (usually pursuant to a recommendation for maximum battery life not to charge to 100%). Above ~70% battery charge, your charging rate will start dropping. Battery chemistry. That’s why the “time to charge” marketing is almost always “time to charge from 10% to 80%”.
I have a wall charger (hilariously named a JuiceBox) on a 240 V 50 amp circuit. The software limits charging speed to about 11 kW – again, that’s the max; it drops the closer it gets to the soft limit of 90%.
Fun fact, I was advised by our electrician that directly plugging an EV into a 240 V wall outlet (like for a dryer) as opposed to using a J1772 wall charger would likely cause the breaker to trip repeatedly, at the worst times (like in the middle of the night, when people typically charge EVs). That’s why we got the JuiceBox.
I’ve never charged off 120V. Complete waste of time.
Now, with respect to BEMUs – it appears from my reading about lithium-titanate batteries for railway applications, that the trade-off was fast charging and long life, but lower capacity (i.e. lower energy density). Which makes sense for a BEMU running partially under the wire, charging fast, but not covering much unelectrified territory. Again coming back to the use case being a line that is only intermittently electrified, but not a replacement for 100% diesel traction.
Capabilities of the supply and the car. There is a negotiation between the car and supply. They come to an agreement or relays/contactors don’t operate, charging doesn’t start and the little lamps don’t light.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAE_J1772
It is the nature of most batteries to charge slower as they approach fully charged. Or the battery’s thermal management system has decided the battery is getting too warm. Or the inverter is getting too warm. The high powered DC chargers have cooling systems in the “cable”. Things will slow down if that gets too hot. Lots of magic.
Typical North American 15 amp. circuit is limited to 12.5 amps/1500 watts – if the load can be connected for more than a hour. It’s why things like space heaters and electric frying pans rarely go over 1500 watts. Even if the magic is set for 10 amps that’s 1200 watts and 1200 watts is better than no watts. I’ll leave it up to you to figure out how many miles that is after a ten hour overnight charging session puts 12 kilowatts into the car. It’s a “short commute”. Current electrical codes are that each stall in a residential garage have a dedicated 20 amp circuit. Which is limited to 16 amps if the load can be connected for more than an hour. Almost 2 kilowatts an hour. Which is “long commute”. Assuming it’s a separate piece of cable from the circuit breaker panel to each receptacle, that can be easily converted to 240 volts which is almost 4 kilowatts an hour. Which is enough to charge most cars, overnight. If I remember correctly the Ford F-150 with the humomgous battery that can cope with 100 mile drive to the job site, running all the tools all day and 100 mile drive back has a 9600 watt inverter. Which is the capacity for a load connected more than an hour – on 50 amp circuits. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to charge faster than that, at home. … 4 kilowatts on a 20 amp circuit is good enough… It’s even one of the selections in my charge guesstimator.
@Michael
I have no patience for those who defend trolls either. If you present your opinions to me with decorum, however contradictory, I will engage with you. I have in the past with others and will continue to do so in the future. @Onux believes the future of American commuter transit is autonomous vehicles. I couldn’t disagree more, but they made a well argued point and it was an interesting discussion. I even learned something from them – how to use the Census OnTheMap tool. For that, I am grateful. The same way I am grateful to Alon Levy for taking time out of their day, year in and year out, to produce interesting and tremendously educational commentary, all for free.
I am not grateful for, nor am I obligated to engage with, dingbat internet trolls. Good day to you.