Meme Weeding: Regular Funding
American and British discourses on public transportation are too obsessed with getting regular funding. In the United States, it’s a commonplace among advocates that what the mode really needs is a regular source of funding protected from the usual political process. American thinktanks trying to talk about construction costs, such as Eno, even spoke with fascination about the bipartisan consensus in favor of expanding the Madrid Metro, in contrast with the American situation. In the United Kingdom, it’s specialized to some aspects and their construction costs, but the “feast or famine” line on electrification is particularly common. In truth, there’s quite a lot of funding regularity and political consensus in parts of the United States and United Kingdom that nonetheless cannot build anything, and conversely, some of the most prolific, lowest-cost builders in the world do so in an environment of funding uncertainty, especially when we consider the effect of the Great Recession.
Spain in the 21st century
The very low-cost metro construction program in Madrid under Manuel Melis Maynar in 1995-2003 is well-known to both academic researchers and advocates, and Melis’s own writeup on how this was achieved is a starting point for the entire discourse. This program, going back earlier in the 1990s and continuing right up until the 2008 financial crisis and the onset of the Great Recession, was marked by political competition between the left and the right over who could deliver more metro construction, and consistent commitment to building more infrastructure across Spain. At national scale the later part of this period is characterized by rapid, low-cost construction of high-speed rail building upon the success of the Madrid-Seville line (opened 1992). This was not a purely rail-based system – airports were expanded rapidly in the 2000s to accommodate the growing economy and growing international travel market.
And then all of this crashed after 2008. Some lines were still built if funded before – close to half of Spanish high-speed rail by funding is lines that opened post-2008, nearly all well underway when the recession set in. Other lines were canceled, some of which have not been restored, such as Madrid-Lisbon. Barcelona kept building L9 and L10, the most expensive in Spain, but Madrid’s construction program broadly wrapped up. I encourage readers to go to Alexander Rapp’s visualization and compare the rapid growth in 1995-2010 with the almost total lack of new lines in 2010-2025. If there’s one place that meets the definition of feast-or-famine, it must be Spain.
And downstream of the famine, construction costs are still very low. The high-speed rail built through the famine is more expensive, but only because it’s the Basque Y, majority in tunnel due to topography. The metro lines Madrid has built recently are still cheap: the Line 11 extension to Conde de Casal to open next year costs 84 million €/km, only mildly more than the Melis-era program in real terms, the difference largely attributable to the fully-underground character of the extension whereas the Melis-era program was only 73% underground. Feast-or-famine hasn’t dented Madrid’s ability to build cheaply, and so the plan as the economy is finally recovering from the crisis is to resume building rapidly, the entire 33.5 km Line 11 plan budgeted at the same low cost.
Italy and the reset button
Italy’s period of regular construction in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s was initially characterized by low costs for the first Milan lines from the 1950s and early 60s, but these grew quickly, and by 1970 they were if anything higher than in Britain and not much lower than Germany’s, due to the extensive corruption of the First Italian Republic. The 1990s process of mani pulite was such a transformative change that people periodize Italy since then as the Second Italian Republic, with rather different politics from the First, with far less corruption and far more left-right polarization.
In the interim, there was a famine in metro construction as rules were changed to require more transparency. The system that emerged from the famine had lower real costs than that of the 1980s with its corruption. A second famine occurred, to some extent, in the Great Recession, albeit nothing as drastic as in Spain; the Spanish economy was characterized by high growth with a housing bubble in the years leading up to the Great Recession, where Italy in the 1990s and 2000s up to 2008 already had the weakest economic growth in Europe, so in effect there weren’t such massive infrastructure projects to be canceled. The famine is over, and the Italian economy has exceeded its 2007 peak and returned to healthy growth, with further construction of metro lines. Costs broadly remain low – Turin’s Line 2 has a high projected cost by Italian standards, but the extensions in Milan don’t appear any more expensive than the ones built 15 years ago.
Nordic costs
Stockholm built its three-line metro from the 1950s to the 1990s, with most construction complete by 1978. That feast, driving up Stockholm’s modal split by the 2000s and 10s to Parisian levels despite not being a particularly large city, was followed by famine, with only two short extensions opened thereafter, in 1985 and 1994. Since then, only one urban rail tunnel has opened, Citybanan, opening in 2017. Nya Tunnelbanan has proceeded, with the 19 km extension to open in stages beginning next year.
Swedish costs are sharply up. The original T-bana was among the cheapest metro systems built in history, not much more expensive than lines built in the 1900s-10s in New York, Paris, and London. Relative to Sweden’s GDP per capita, it is, I believe, unsurpassed in its low costs. Madrid’s costs were higher than this. Citybanan is harder to compare, as a commuter rail tunnel with mined stations beneath older T-bana stations, on two levels in the case of Stockholm City/T-Centralen. But Nya Tunnelbanan is definitively more expensive, its costs still below the global average but no longer so Earth-shatteringly cheap.
And yet, this is not too different from the evolution of construction costs in Norway and Finland, where construction has been more gradual. We know why Stockholm’s costs have risen, a combination of mid-project regulatory changes that led to cost overruns and a general increase in real Nordic costs due to the adoption of more privatized project delivery and loss of state capacity. Copenhagen, which built its metro based on these more privatized ideas from the start since it only started building in the 1990s when those ideas were in vogue, has had these higher costs from the start (again, meaning “somewhat lower than 2020s global average” as opposed to “setting world records for GDP per capita divided by per-km metro costs”).
On the narrow matter of electrification, it’s notable also that the Danish program, a concentrated feast rather than a gradual multi-generational program as in Italy, is not particularly expensive. As it is recent and intensive, I if anything encourage English-speaking countries to study it and benchmark their programs to it, precisely because it gives us a snapshot of electrification of many different main lines. (This is also true of Israel.) In contrast, the more gradual rolling electrification programs of Italy and France are harder to benchmark to, because at this point the lines being wired are selective, for a combination of low traffic (the higher-traffic lines having been wired generations ago) but also ease of electrification (the more difficult lines being deferred due to failing a cost-benefit analysis).
Consensus in the United Kingdom
In Madrid, PP and PSOE both politically supported metro expansion and made that an election theme. The same can be said of a number of Continental European comparanda, such as Paris. However, London (on rail in general) and the UK (on High Speed 2 and electrification) are no different. HS2 and Crossrail were both matters of bipartisan consensus in the 2010 election, just as Grand Paris Express was a point of consensus in 2012. If anything, HS2 and Crossrail were thus less politicized than GPE, on which the Socialists and Republicans differed on which exact lines to build within the concept of inner-suburban Paris orbitals; a closer British comparison to GPE is the electrification program, which too was a point of agreement between Labour and the New Tories but then after the 2010 election the Coalition modified the program to prioritize secondary-city commuter lines over the Midland and Great Western Main Lines.
Moreover, physical construction in London, unlike British rail electrification, has shown remarkable consistency. The current period after the opening of Crossrail might be the first famine in a generation. However, the famine is not the cause of high costs but rather is caused by them: Crossrail 2 was being planned in the 2010s, but canceled due to outrageously high costs, and yet it is likely a scaled down version of it will go back to the planning board and be approved soon. An extension of the Bakerloo line to Lewisham is in the pipeline as well, at much higher per-km costs than those of the Northern line extension to Battersea and the Jubilee line extension, and the question of whether to build it at all is again downstream of the high costs, not upstream of them.
Despite relative consistency in funding and politics, British projects do not have any consistent planning regime. Every project is delivered as a single purpose vehicle (SPV/SPDV; D stands for delivery). The Jubilee line extension was in theory designed in-house, but because it was clear the model was giving way to privatized project delivery, the in-house team was treated as an SPDV and its expertise withered away after the line opened. The same has happened with subsequent megaprojects, the lessons of Crossrail now existing only as a Learning Legacy report; in contrast, GPE, initially planned as an SPDV under British influence, is transitioning to a permanent bureaucracy for building metro and commuter rail tunnels across France.
Consensus in New York and California
The United States since 2010-11 has been characterized by almost total unwillingness by the Republican Party to assent to major public transportation and intercity rail projects. Chris Christie set the stage by canceling the ARC tunnel between New Jersey and New York without replacement; as the project has high benefits matching its outrageous costs, it was rebooted by Amtrak, at even higher costs. Subsequently, governors elected in the 2010 wave returned federal money for intercity rail, in Ohio, Wisconsin, and Florida.
And yet beneath this national picture, one finds remarkable consistency in funding in New York and California. In New York, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has planned its capital spending in five-year cycles going back to reforms in the 1980s under Richard Ravitch to discourage maintenance deferral, with regular funding in these cycles and little partisan controversy thereover. Expansion projects used to be a matter of bipartisan deals, with Republicans like Governor George Pataki (r. 1995-2006) dealing with Democrats like Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (r. 1994-2015) to agree on funding for their constituencies, respectively the suburbs and the city. The more recent Republican Party has been less convivial, but also far less electable, and the state is by now run by a single party, with consistent funding and a regular cursus honorum for the political appointees overseeing the MTA. There’s no feast-famine cycle, nor is there any siege mentality over what if the Republicans will defund the MTA, because the state money for the MTA is still there and nothing electable in the state is canceling that.
California is largely the same. California Republicans do not have the same history of bipartisan moderation as New York Republicans, but the state moved on from them a generation ago already. In this century, the only Republican who was even mildly competitive in a statewide election, Arnold Schwarzenegger, was already in the 2003 election noted as atypically moderate, and after winning pursued a broad consensus in transportation and supported California High-Speed Rail. Below the statewide level, the form of mandatory referendums in the state has led to rather consistent funding with specific sales taxes deeded to transportation, to the point that the Los Angeles County MTA has capital funding projections through 2060 with a list of priorities to be funded in each period telegraphed decades in advance.
And neither New York nor California is capable of building. Consistency in funding has not led to the formation of a consistent civil service. Single party dominance, with the Republicans choosing to nominate sacrificial lambs like Larry Elder rather than to moderate enough to win the median voter in a wave election, means that there is no need for political appointments, as professionals know in advance what the state’s ideological direction is going to be, and yet agency upper echelons are stacked with politicals and expect subject matter experts to be silent when the politicals and their staff are in the room. Costs in California are not only high but meteorically rising, in San Francisco, in San Jose, and in Los Angeles. In New York, despite real savings from our advocacy for shrinking station size, the projected costs of IBX are unreal and those of the 125th Street extension are full of lard, the savings wasted on deeper stations and ever higher soft cost charges.
American activists keep talking about the need for consistent funding. But where funding in the United States is the most consistent, outcomes are consistently bad, just as they are in the parts of the United States that are one election away from cancellation. This is not just a bad inheritance – the MTA let its in-house expertise go in favor of a consultant-centric system, and MTA CEO Janno Lieber takes credit for having implemented the globally-failed design-build system locally, with essentially all discourse that isn’t coming from us at the Transit Costs Project backing further privatization and SPDVization of project delivery out of a false belief that London and the knowledge of global English-only consultants are worth imitating.
This way, the MTA, with a capital budget of $13 billion a year and no real fear of large cuts, delivers subway extensions at a rate of about one new underground station per 5 years, 9 stations equipped with elevator access per year, and sporadic commuter rail interventions that never actually improve speed or convenience. Consistent funding is not going to make it better, because its funding is already consistent and yet it is run by politicals who look down on subject matter experts and who have New York solipsism and react acerbically to being told they need to learn, and so it can’t build, only manage its own decline.
Pedestrian Observations 
What problem were Nordic countries trying to solve by privatizing project delivery and by losing their state capacity to do it themselves?
I wonder if there isn’t an effect, whether justified or not, of feast-and-famine funding that results in loss of in-house expertise as a short-term political and politicised measure, that of course has awful fiscal and outcomes long term. Are there any examples of where lost in-house (government) expertise has been rebuilt, or does it depressingly conform to “once lost, it is lost forever”?
Alon said:
It’s probably not that, but simple political convergence, to preserve the money-making to large corporates who, being in near-total control of a project get to dictate costs. And that in turn dictates timetables–you can’t extract £100bn unless you stretch it over stupid amounts of time. Depressingly, the fuss kicked up by the latest outrageous cost of finishing HS2 has caused a lot of son-et-lumiere (see Simon Jenkins!) but almost no productive discussion on why this happens in Blighty.
What is wrong with you? Seriously offensive. Sick and nasty. You need to stop with the vicious, unwarranted and anonymous insults about racism, (especially towards Asians! I have no idea where you get it from –except maybe your own subconscious? Deflection?) Ridiculous, unfounded and libellous. Do you think you’re Musk? You should spew that toxic shit on X and not on here.
b. If you paid any attention to my complaints about the UK you’d know it is not with your sheeple but with the elites who run the place. For all I know, and what you sound like at times, you may be one of them. At times I’ve thought you might be an Oxford PPE. Or maybe a Balliol History major (like Boris!). Nothing wrong in principle with either … except they are very prominent in what has screwed the UK over the post-war period, so yes in my view always an initial bit suss.
We can agree on one thing: I am completely without consequence; in a way it is curious that you waste your powerful intellect on insulting me. If my challenges are so worthless why go so OTT? Do you seriously think you can win an argument with invective and personal insults? By bullying me? (which I note as a strong Oxford trait.) However it’s not even clear what you are objecting to. But actually your wild personalised rant seems like, sad to say, something has seriously deranged you. You should deal with it privately instead of spewing it out here.
Finally Alon should not allow it on his blog. I can’t find anything on WP but most sites (except X of course, surely not your model?) have guidelines about this kind of thing (“racism, sexism, homophobia or other forms of hate-speech” and “personal attacks (against authors or other users), persistent trolling and mindless abuse”). It’s not acceptable.
The Guardian, a hard right reactionary newspaper? what the absolute f*** are you talking about. Simon Jenkins may be many things, wrong being the most common one, but hard right?????????? I mean its not as liberal as it used to be when it was the Manchester Guardian but its still considered by most of the rest of the world as being centre left……..
“Britain Remade in particular has started to actually make progress”Have they? They don’t seem good at anything beyond making invective-riddled tweets and talking past their opponents to me. They display the traditional political issue of pretending counterarguments to their points don’t exist. And they don’t seem to get much attention, judging from things like their Tweet metrics.
? TWAO devolution to the Mayors is Ben Hopkinson’s idea (he’s moved to another thinktank since), and its apparently been adopted by the UK government.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/pm-meets-mayors-in-drive-to-get-britain-building-and-take-on-blockers
You’re confusing them with Looking for Growth.
If – and this is a big if – an international consultant can find work elsewhere when you are in a famine phase they can keep the experts employed and thus experts meaning when you again are ready to build they know what you are doing. If you are not building it doesn’t matter if you still have the experts on staff, they are stagnating and forgetting what they used to know and so just keeping the people isn’t enough. Of course the real world shows that it rarely works that way in practice, but the idea seems to make sense and probably has a lot of truths despite the problems.
In theory consultants with an international reach can do that, but its not always that easy. Working for one of those consultants one of the challenges is that when you relocate staff they come with fixed ideas of whats best and it takes a while to deprogram them and make them understand that theres more than one way to do things. Then theres the fact that qualifications are less than transferrable, for example a UK, HK, Aus, NZ C.Eng is not easy to reciprocate with being a PE in the US. But certainly the idea of retaining staff in famine areas and have them work on projects in feast areas is something we attempt to do, both within a country (US, OZ) and globally. Its alot easier these days with the advances in data sharing and comms to work like this, although scheduling a meeting between LA, NY and HK can still be challenging…..plus the differences in design standards, codes etc. is not really that great, concrete is concrete, structural steel is structural steel and there are physical laws that don’t change, gravity sucks wherever you are, so the actual engineering is not that difficult to coordinate. What does change are the local requirements for systems operations usually driven by the agency and historical precedent, together with the procurement/contractual framework, legal environment, insurance, liability, bonding/surety limits, funding sources etc.
Of course governement agencies dont have this luxury, if there are no immediate projects on the horizon then staff who worked on the recently completed one will either be moved elsewhere or released to “cut governemnt spending”.
Either way the retained knowledge in the famine area is diluted in both the client and consultants organizations and has to be rebuilt when the feast comes along.
Which of those differences are things that should be different? Concrete is concrete, why should different agencies be allowed to have different codes around concrete – either it is strong enough (with a good margin of safety) or it shouldn’t be used anywhere. Sure Japan scraps their trains after 15 years, while the rest of the world keeps them for 40 (numbers from memory, might be off a bit), but should we allow that? Some things must be different, some things it doesn’t matter, and some things we should make the same. There should be no reason an engineer with the correct credentials elsewhere doesn’t count as a PE in the US as well.
Henry, concrete is concrete but what slump? What admixture of what trace chemicals? Theoretically you would consider different concrete for different e.g. humidity.
That said, I am generally much more in favor of standards than not. It just means a lot of development work is needed to craft good ones, and in some cases a series of standards is needed.
It’s not about private industry retaining its experts and expertise. Indeed those and other arguments put here, are put by the privateers as to why the whole thing needs to be outside of government. It’s about the watchmen who will watch the watchmen, ie. government who in the rest of the world are at the top of such large civil projects looking after the government’s/people’s interests. It’s why for some projects it needs to be “continuous build” eg. in most big defence items especially big ships and submarines. In transit it should be a lot easier because there really is a need for continuous adding to, and upgrading existing systems. It may be a big factor in why Japan gives its trains only a 15 year life (and its housing stock 30y?). I am sure that the project to provide every French city of over 250k population with a tramway was in part to support Alstom continuously over the long-term–and it works. In the UK the same strategy is a no brainer in that, as everyone who compares to the rest of Europe knows, provincial cities are woefully short on rail-based transit and should get it, and should have had it decades ago–and is why the Brits no longer have a serious train industry. Or why it was at real risk of losing its half century expertise in civil nuclear power; Hinkley Point came just in time, it being ≈3 decades since it last built one, and of course Hinkley is being built by the French but doubtless also rebuilding UK capacity. However it is not clear there is any building up of oversight capacity where it counts.
Australia is certainly about to lose any capacity to build submarines as successive governments have delayed making decisions on the Collins-class replacement over the past 3 decades. Now we’re stuck with the AUKUS fantasy that won’t replace them at all, even with the absurd idea of refurbed Virginia ones never mind new designs from the British who can’t keep up with their own needs because they too allowed the program to lapse.
As the maxim goes, the fish rots from the head and that’s clearly the case in the UK and most of the Anglosphere. It’s that which needs fixing, not private contractors.
Regarding “15 year lifespans” (or so) of rolling stock in Japan, it comes from a misconception- for tax purposes rolling stock is pegged with a 13 year depreciation cycle. Rarely are vehicles scrapped when depreciated- most are refurbished to go on for 20, 30 or more years. The only types that are typically scrapped after 13 years are shinkansen stock due to the long distance, high intensity nature of their use. On the other hand, some rolling stock in Kansai used by the major private railways are over fifty years old and still used on mainline services- notably on the Hankyu and Nankai railways, thanks to impeccable maintenance. Their interiors with mohair seating are spotless as if they had just rolled off the assembly line in 2026, not 1970.
The French central government had a crucial influence in programs like nuclear submarines, Rafale, Airbus or nuclear energy. In tramways, not so much. The 1975 recommendation to study a tramway revival sent by Transport Secretary Cavaillé to the Bordeaux, Grenoble, Nancy, Nice, Rouen, Strasbourg, Toulon, and Toulouse mayors was not particularly well received. Grenoble had evaluated the issue in 1971, because this fast growing city located in an Alpine valley was particularly affected by road traffic and pollution. Nothing came out of it because, in a city oriented towards modern technology, the progressive administration leaned towards innovative solutions/gadgetbahns.
Nantes, which was not included in the Cavaillé mailing list, was the first one to proceed in 1978, after having for a while favored Lille VAL technology. The issue remained controversial and the socialist mayor, who launched the project, lost the 1983 election. However, it was too late to stop the project. Its managers had done their homework going to Dortmund to learn about modern track laying, Bielefeld for its maintenance center, Brussels for crew training, Basel, Utrecht and Zurich for operations advice. The 1985 launch was successful and the new conservative mayor, who had made a career of denigrating the tram, was pushed aside as an embarrassing dinosaur.
In Grenoble, the conservative candidate won the 1983 election. He favored a tramway but could not convince the council. He organized a referendum in which 53% of the voters favored the tram. Grenoble then asked Alsthom to develop a low floor section. Paris communist northern suburbs and Strasbourg were next with the striking Swiss/Italian Eurotram selected by Strasbourg doing much to convince left and right that trams were cool. After that it was an avalanche.
In summary, the French became good at building tramways because they did it right in the first place, not because of the central government. If steady work provided by central planning was key, we would all be riding KTM-5 or Tatras T3. A few hotly contested mayoral elections in French provincial cities resulted in tram revival in the French speaking world and maybe beyond. According to Soichiro Minami at the EHESS Fondation France-Japon, “The most important innovation of LRT is the low floor vehicle for barrier-free transportation. The epoch-making case was Grenoble (1987). In 1994, Strasbourg introduced the 100% low-floor Eurotram vehicle. Following Grenoble and Strasbourg, low-floor vehicles have become the standard for LRT. The impact of the Grenoble tram was huge ; the vehicle standard of not only tramways but city buses changed. The market for vehicles for urban public transportation has changed dramatically. Only enterprises with low-floor technology can survive.”
Right. Very interesting. But that is the early history of the tram renaissance. I was thinking more of Macron’s plan to extend tramways much more widely to smaller cities in France. Probably more about regional development and decongesting town centres of cars/electrification of transport rather than boosting Alstom. I forget how many extra towns are to get them. Your list is of the early adopters and trend-setters. Anyway I looked at the Wiki on Ile de France tramways and it has grown amazingly since I last looked, now with 15 lines and 197km and almost 400m riders pa. Of course it doesn’t compare to the 1,111km in 1925. T1 was built in 1992 when I lived in Paris–this shows the point about steadily building out. Before too long you have an amazing network.
I seem to recall Alon arguing that Grenoble should build a TransRapide:-).
Michael, are you alluding to Macron’s talk about improving frequencies on TER services in provincial towns in order to turn them into mini RER ? He doesn’t have any plan for tramways and that’s probably for the best. With 400 million annual tramway riders, Île de France and RATP have the busiest tram network in the world. This equals the combined ridership of US Light Rail and wasn’t planned.
RATP was initially lukewarm on the T1 project supported by communist mayors north of Paris. T2 on the contrary was pushed by RATP and obstructed by Puteaux’s mayor. Both lines were more popular than expected with platform length an issue. The SNCF line followed by T2 used to pick up cars at a Renault plant. When the factory was running, the Puteaux-Issy Plaine line was also served by EMU carrying about 5000 daily passengers. With more frequent tramway service, 24 000 were expected. T2 quickly got 80 000, and after extension towards and beyond La Défense, the 18 km line nows carry about 230 000 on week days.
In the 1980’s, most prominently in Nantes, Strasbourg, Bordeaux, Rennes, Toulouse and Rouen, electors had to choose between two unknowns, modern trams or the VAL. Nowadays, trams are present in most provincial towns. People have seen the benefits as well as the damage tram construction can inflict on their streets. Launching a new line has become a hyperlocal issue with mayors looking at potential opposition along the route. Modern trams can fail as demonstrated by Metro Ligero Oeste in Madrid. These two tram branches carry less than 8000 daily riders on their combined 22 km network. One is much slower than the bus it was supposed to replace. You just can’t build a tram line because it is cool to have one.
By the way, on a recent trip I used the Institut Gustave Roussy M14 station. The escalators are spectacular but take about 8 minutes to carry you upstairs because, for some mysterious reason, M14 runs 35 m below the surface in this location. M15 will be even deeper. I suppose that after using the escalators a couple of times for fun, the Institut’s employees will switch to the elevators. The place was empty on a Saturday afternoon. The multiple commercial spaces didn’t find any takers. The station may win an architectural prize, is certainly an improvement to no station at all, but did not convince me. M14 took me to Gare de Lyon and the TGV to Lyon itself. The last time I used it, 30 years ago, Lyon métro looked like Marseille’s, in a different color. This time I was blown away. Late on a Saturday afternoon, trains came every 3 minutes. I think Lyon’s combination of shallow stations served by short and frequent automated trains in the absence of platform screen doors is hard to beat. The M14 platform screen doors have their benefits but make one feel like waiting for another elevator.
It has convinced me, without even seeing it. That’s where I worked initially in ‘Paris’. The IGR was (is?) the largest cancer hospital in Europe and has lots of research institutes within and around it there. Thousands of workers in hospital and institutes, not to mention patients and their visitors. [Plus the national HQ of Credit Lyonnais–no, scratch that, it is right on top of M7.] You had to walk maybe 1.5km east to the Villejuif-PVC station of M7 (and if you noticed the clock a bit late, chances are you missed the last train of the day!)
I don’t think the depth is mysterious: IGR is on one of the highest points in the suburbs. You can see the main IGR building from almost everywhere within central Paris if you look south. Of course it helps that the building is hi-rise but it is on a hill.
I think you will have to wait several more years to see how it develops. And check it on a weekday! M15 should make an impact and I reckon it is merely a matter of time before those commercial spaces are occupied. It is true that most people who work there don’t live in Paris (I was the only one in my lab) and most people drove, but then that is what M15 might change. As long-term planning I don’t think it can be faulted.
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You made me worry I had hallucinated about Macron and tramways and maybe it is a PR beat up, but:
I can’t find a good summary now (G search is overwhelmed by TGV and RER plans) but remember thinking it was a good plan, ie. to put a tramway from the outskirts of these towns into the centre, with Park&Ride stations at the termini. You know how many towns have one major road thru them which gets pretty congested etc.
You are right. The IGR is near the edge of a plateau. To stay underground while going towards Cachan, M15 must start the descent before passing the IGR station at around – 50m. I think the Grand Paris Express had more flexibility with M14. It could have passed closer to the surface but the predictions are around 10 000 entry and exits and 90 000 transfers. It therefore makes sense to shorten the M14-M15 transfer at the cost of the long exit I experienced.
Development has already started. The place doesn’t look anymore like the picture on Google Earth where one can see the round hole with the underground M14 bridge. I remember at least two towers with about 12 floors just south of the IGR main building. These are hotels or short term residences but it is only the beginning. The project is called Campus Grand Park. It should include 3100 apartments and multiple research laboratories. The renderings show a dense cluster of relatively high buildings east and west of the IGR station.
Re Macron and Tramways. The only thing I can find dates from 2021. Macron presented a “Marseille en Grand” plan, or Marseille on a Grand Scale since everything has to be Grand nowadays. This 5 billion Euro plan with 1 billion coming from the State included the Marseille T3 and Aubagne Val’Tram extensions, already planned years before Macron’s first declaration. Works had already started on the T3 extensions whose first segments were inaugurated this January. State contribution to the 350 million Euro budget was 77 million.
Aubagne’s tram is everything but grand. In this 47000 inhabitants town 20 km east of Marseille, budgetary pressures cut the first line short. Only a small 2.8 km segment was open. The Val’Tram extends the first line from the train station to the town center then moves to an old single track SNCF right of way others wanted to turn into a cycle path. It serves a few villages in a valley where the only road can be congested. There should be a tram every 20′ at peak times in the valley, not a lot but much better than the 4 daily trains run by SNCF until the 1939 closure. The Val’Tram turns back the clock to the pre-war era when France had extensive but lightly used tram networks (Paris tram lines totaled 1111 km but only 720 million users in 1925, the modern trams 400 million on a 188 km network). Whether it is going to work and who will pay for it is unknown. Opening is expected in 2027.
Makes sense. Space is a serious issue at most research institutes and hospitals inside Paris. In the early 90s our small institute (CEPH) was very suddenly thrown into major expansion as early steps in the Human Genome Project and a lot of it ended up waaaay out at Evry. A businessman philanthropist donated one of his vacant industrial sites for the project; it was previously the Electrolux factory. That project grew and grew and now is a Genpole. But I doubt many people appreciate it being located so far out, even if on the RER. I doubt many actually live in Evry but commute (mostly drive) to other banlieu. Of course the largest agglomeration of researchers is almost equally far out at the Saclay site and one of the rationales for M18. The post-war institutes created out there in physics, electronics, agriculture, medicine & biology were the first attempt to solve the space problem of Paris. That and even wider devolution to the provinces!
Anyway, at Villejuif the IGR and other institutes are just a bit far from M7 while the M14 link and M15 I believe will accelerate a TOD. And I’d rather work there than Evry or Saclay (where, I’ve just remembered, our host Alon commuted when he lived in Paris! I suspect he wrote half his blogs while on the RER.).
1. They, not he. Come on.
2. I didn’t usually get a seat for long enough to blog on the RER. I blogged at home.
The Hello Kitty Shinkansen is being scrapped now, being part of the 500 series that was introduced in 1997, almost 30 years on the rails. I think Shinkansen scrapping has more to do with the high operational requirements of the most congested parts of the network rather than the long distance and high intensity of use. There are still 700 series in operations, but those will also be withdrawn soon with them being replaced by shortened N700.
The main driver to withdrawal seems to be the need to optimise the Tokaido Shinkansen timetable to allow 285km/h operations and 17 trains per hour, and since the Sanyo-Kyushu Shinkansen have lower ridership and need a smaller dedicated rolling stock pool, the result is that a lot of rolling stock gets scrapped early.
Similarly the E3 is just now being withdrawn, being replaced by the E8. The E3 is of similar age to the 700 Series.
@draliandumas
This is very good.
Industry consolidation means there isn’t enough competition among Nordic construction firms. (Of note, this problem does not exist in 1.5th-world low-cost builders like Turkey and Chile – the construction industry in such countries tends to be economically dual and have a very large number of firms.) This means that international firms are required to maintain a competitive bidding environment, and in turn this means giving them an easier time coming in: larger contract sizing so that they get a 300M€ contract for the trouble of learning Nordic law rather than a 50M€ contract, and also more early contractor involvement based on their own requests. This interacts with the common belief that private is better than public (and Nordic governance is atypically subcontracted and privatized, in some cases more than the UK, let alone France or Germany).
The reason this hasn’t led to Dutch costs is that all of this is done in an environment that aims to maintain state capacity – for example, Sweden’s privatization of rail infrastructure maintenance specifically left a few segments unprivatized so that the state would retain some expertise in doing it on its own and be able to benchmark the private bids. This decade there have been complaints that the privatization of planning to design-build consortia has overly centered the role of large contractors at the expense of the needs of the public.
Shouldn’t there be some local subcontractor or governmental agency that can handle issues of localisation (within reason)? I have similar questions WRT how Grand Paris Express works. This also gets into the questions of devolution and standardisation. A unified set of EU rail standards would decrease such overhead, so it makes sense for the EU to arrogate such power to itself.
And, why exactly is it that Turkiye has so many contractors? I assume there is a feedback loop of small-medium contracts existing and therefore small-medium contractors existing.
Turkiye is an interesting country from a construction company perspective. There has been limited pentration by the large conglomorates like Group ACS, Vinci, Skanska etc. Maybe its the peculiaraties of Turkish Law, maybe its the perception of what it takes to win work there, who knows but you dont see too many non Turkish players in the market. Also some of the large Turkish Contractor’s like Ronesans, Limak, Kalyon, ENKA, STFA, Yapi Merkezi are busy around the region as they have in the last 20 years built a lot of new stuff in Turkiye and have the expertise to build in other parts of the region. Within the country itself the relentless pace of new road build, high speed rail, Istanbul metro, and generally playing catch up to provide the facilities needed to support the growth targets means that the contractors have generally been involved in a wide variety of work from manufacturing facilities through hosptals, to water and waterwater facilities. So with the amount of work there is available your going to need a lot of companies to service that. Add in Kentsel Donustum or urban renewal which is a government backed approach to basically replacing the housing stock in the country to replace ageing and deteriorating housing also provides a contnous conveyor belt of work. As does adding new housing and supporting infrsatructure for the ever increasing population.
The local subcontractor is probably already bought up by one of the majors; any more than that requires a fixed cost in entering a market with its own set of expectations and laws.
1.5th-world countries tend to have a lot of contractors because the construction industry is usually local, so it tends to stay in the traditional sector for longer than industry and natural resource exports, and consolidates from SMEs to more efficient big businesses late in the development process. In theory this means their construction sectors should also be less efficient, and this is certainly true for poorer countries with not-great costs, but by the development level of a Turkey or Chile, it means the construction industry is modern enough for productivity to be on a par with wages, and because it’s less consolidated there’s more competition for government contracts. The profit rate for contractors for Istanbul Metro construction is brutally low, on the order of 2% give or take.
Tunnelvision — interesting points, thank you. Worth contrasting with PRC, which has a continuous stream of work and, on the private side, a lot of contractors building housing compared to AFAIK typically state owned companies doing transit on a MTR-like basis (subcontracting as needed). Not sure the typical size of those subcontractors, I imagine they range from small to CRRC.
Alon — if the local subs are bought out, then move on to the parent company on project completion, are they a reliable source of expertise for future construction in that locality?
It does make sense that the local nature of construction provides more gravity keeping mergers down. Efficiencies gained by mergers may be much less than in more scalable industries such as (extreme end) SAAS.
I’d really encourage you to take a look at NICTD in Northwest Indiana. It seems that they have managed to build at low costs, and obtain the money by obtaining support from both Republicans and Democrats, and money from both local (including municipal) and state budgets. They also are very aggressive with lowering their costs; they rebid one of their key contracts when all the bids were too high and bought the materials themselves while waiting for the new bids. They managed to keep costs down in both design-build and design-bid-build. But they are too aggressive about value engineering — they made the transfer at Hammond Gateway require crossing active tracks at grade after descending a stairwell or escalator, they downscoped the railyard in Hammond after demolishing multiple blocks to build it, and built high-level platforms on only one track during their double-tracking project.
Not to mention the Monon corridor Hammond Gateway platform was descoped to 2 car length, so direct monon trains cannot service the station on their way to Chicago, only shuttles can.
The NWI duplication project was actually delivered at low cost, and construction bidding was done separately on different contracts. They also acquired the material themselves instead of relying on contractors, allowing the public sector to absorb risk, which is all positive.
Unfortunately, it is not clear that the Monon corridor itself had actually good costs, rather than medium-high costs, costing 1 Billion for 4 stations and 14km of single electrified track. The construction and design was packaged in one contract, which like you said, was slightly descoped from the original. I looked at the EIS plans, and they still use 2% grades on the viaducts, when higher grades could be possible due to all-emu configuration.
In the US, I really think it’s important to keep projects simple, because the construction management skill is lacking for complex projects. The head of NICTD has previous (private) railroading experience, so he had experience on more simple projects, such as track duplication and what reasonable costs were. However, I think full projects like the full Monon corridor complete with more complex viaduct structures is more difficult to manage, and above the organization’s direct oversight capacity. The one design build contract was valued at around 1 Billion, still high but not outrageous. It probably could have been cheaper if it was split up to allow for more competitive bidding.
On more about the simple=cheap, the new Hammond station was recently bid on, with a construction cost of roughly 8.5 million, with a design fee in the range of 250k, including an elevator, and on a partially elevated, embankment location. Local contractors were most competitive in terms of price.
I saw the new Utrecht underground tramway plan on your timeline. Digging into the documents, the preferred alternative is 70% cut and cover, 30% trench (of which the last part a ramp to the existing Nieuwegein line). The line is 3.5km long. At the central station, they’ll (partially) demolish the Beatrix Theater building to make room for a ~15-20m deep 4 track stub end terminus, with the station hall under the bus station but not touching the railway part of the station. This budget includes 3 further underground stations under wide streets with 75m long low platforms. The underground is sand without the especially high water table of Amsterdam, but of course still not low. There will be one canal crossing.
How bad is the €1,477 mln. (in January 2025 euros) price tag, or €422 mln per km? Do we have fully Anglosphere costs now?
It’s 2010s Anglosphere; unfortunately the 2020s Anglosphere is yet more expensive than this.
Why do they need a 4 track terminus in such a small city? The Victoria line does 36tph with a two track terminus.
There’s no justification in the documents, so I will ask about it in the consultation.
There will be no tail tracks so that they don’t have to build under the railway station, but even then it seems excessive. The expected future frequency is 24tph, splitting into 3 branches. I guess someone said “this will be challenging to operate, give us more tracks”, and then you might as well go for 4 instead of 3 because it’s the same number of platforms.
Is this a reaction to Gareth Dennis video about why “boom and bust” construction is a problem? He seems to be doing some good points in there.
Intuitively, it feels like being able to plan and deliver long term should be a good thing, shouldn’t it?
Pedantic L9 Barcelona point: Half of the line was defunded to the point that construction was stopped from 2011 to 2022, and when they wanted to resume it one of the two tunneling machines was unrecoverable. The other half was sold to construction companies on a ruinous concession system so that the construction companies became banks lending money to the catalan goverment at arguably-usury rates. Counting the soft cost of these concession contracts is (I think) the biggest multiplicator exploding the cost of the line.
Dennis is merely representing industry consensus albeit in his Scotch Eco-Strasserite form. Its all “Long term plan” and “MMT gives me all the money so I can pay off my mortgage in the 2nd most exclusive city in Northern England York. He doesn’t know what a competent rail construction system is and refuses to learn because learning from countries that don’t speak English is beneath his racial dignity (sarcasm).
If you look consultation submissions by UK rail industry to the GB Rail bill or recent Transport Committee stuff the pipeline issue is constantly asserted. Its not false, there were teething issues with Great Western Electrification happening quite suddenly, after 2 decades with modest electrification* and Scotrail has managed lower but still elevated costs. But its massively overreading the problem. And the reality that Network Rail just isn’t very good at…anything (although its better than SPVs for sure).
*Figures often ignore HS1/Tram systems, 1994-2004 has far too little electrification, but not quite as little as people pretend. Plus West Coast Mainline Modernisation included some OLE upgrades.
If you want to sort UK construction costs you need to deal with state capacity issues plus the nimby-planning policy-tax incentive nexus and behind all of that the anti-democratic nature of the UK central and local government towards England (i.e. most local councils and the “national governments” are elected with 30% of the vote on low turnout). All of which would destroy Scotland and York’s land-tax arbitrage economy in favour of evil Southern England.
We also need a transport minister who can open a railway that has been ready to be opened for 18 months.
I mean yeah, the refusal to get tough with Unions is part of it, which she can be blamed.
But that’s according to my sources 1/2 the problem, the other half is East-West Rail’s assurance paper trails was….not very good.
Borners, the issue is she’s playing hardball with the unions.
The correct play is to cave. We are talking about 12 members of staff minus the fact that you end up not having to staff Winslow station.
No, it’s not. It’s a reaction to American discourse about why they just need more federal funding without politics, something that doesn’t exist anywhere else. (Germany has long-term capital plans for transport but they change after every election, Ampel moving money from roads to rail and the new GroKo doing the opposite.)
On L9: in 2011 the cost was already three times the original budget – I remember collating cost/km data in 2010 and early 2011 before starting this blog and seeing the cost overrun in L9.
On L9, I wonder which of all was the original budget. From the catalan wikipedia page:
https://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%ADnia_9_del_metro_de_Barcelona
2003 – They started construction with an expected cost of 1947 million
2004 – Expected cost is 3000 million
2008 – After all the changes in scope and regulations (change path, change depth, nice station designs…), the new budget is 6500 million. At this point they decide to make the concessions. They sell part of the line to two construction companies for 1620 million, and the companies will build and operate the rest.
2011 – The budget amounted to 6927 million (I don’t know if this accounts for the 1620 selling to the construction companies), plus 9692 million that the concessions will cost.
It’s all confusing to calculate, because the 9692 will include some operating costs (which?), and I’m not sure if the 6927 is the total construction cost, the cost to public government, a mixed conflation of both, or what it is. Journalists like the biggest number so much that it’s hard to get the data sometimes.
And as much as I think the metro line is going to be useful, I do appreciate that my doctors and teachers got paid their salaries back in 2008-2012 when there was no public money.
Speaking of American funding without political involvement, isn’t this essentially what the US Highway Trust Fund was supposed to do? Only to then be massively overspent and need political rescue. Similarly, one can look to the various public transit sales tax initiatives in the US.
The Highway Trust Fund is just a bucket of money financed by the federal gasoline excise tax.
Congress still has to allocate payments to the states from the fund for both the highway account and the mass transit account through surface transport reauthorizations, which are wholly dependent on the political majority and the whims of the committee chairs. The projects they choose to fund are based on political priorities. This is the way it’s always been. And that is before you get to authorized spending being illegally impounded or slow-walked by the authoritarian reptile in charge of OMB, uncontested by the cowards in his own party.
The fund is overspent primarily because Congress has chosen not to raise the gas tax since, I want to say 1993? That’s why transportation legislation also includes general fund appropriations for specific projects or programs not funded by the Trust Fund, like CRISI. Until that bucket of money runs out, as is happening this year with the expiration of IIJA. The next surface transpo bill is dramatically weighted toward highway spending, as the Rail Passengers Association likes to remind me via email every week, before pleading for a donation.
The bottom line is that there are no non-political funding sources in American transportation, and even if there was, it doesn’t fix the actual problem: organizational and cultural failure. Congress could choose to fund mass transit consistently for years. We would still have state DOTs, interstate compacts, joint powers authorities, transit authorities, whatever, afflicted by the cost and competence disease.
Good points. How would a truly apolitical fund work? Is it even really plausible? One could imagine an inflation adjusted tax, and a board of technocrats with fairly strict project viability criteria. But not sure how you would select those technocrats apolitically, or appropriate land apolitically as the decision matrices would be truly enormous.
There is no such thing as apolitical government spending in the United States. Secondarily, even spending authorized by the legislative branch faces bureaucratic and legal obstacles: unless specifically allocated and programmed to a project, funds run through a selection gauntlet, then face challenges during rulemaking and/or program execution. This is politics even though we may not call it that.
And there is a history of chief executive meddling in obviously beneficial projects because they didn’t benefit that individual’s political prospects. The real story of Access to the Region’s Core was that Christie’s fertile brain schemed to illegally repurpose railway money for roads to fulfill a campaign pledge to avoid raising the gas tax. He was sued by USDOT and he fought them to the point that USDOT settled rather than carry on an expensive legal battle. In other words, he broke the law and got away with it. You would be hard pressed to find a New York Times article speaking the truth plainly about this matter, though.
The closest to “apolitical fund” I can think of worldwide is the sovereign wealth funds of some petrostates, subject to numerous qualifiers:
1) “politics” in these states amounts to the whims of a single individual
2) “maximize returns” being the typical raison d’etre of these money blobs is nevertheless subjective
3) they can and do get raided for other purposes like funding the welfare state in the absence of a social contract which trades voting for access to the savings of society (thank you, undergrad military history professor)
4) they only exist in creditor nations, which the US is….not
Other SWFs like Norway’s are constrained in their behavior by statute (e.g. restrictions on types of investments, risk profiles, and market sectors) and subject to political control by the legislature.
I find technocrats suspicious anyway. Because they assume that the decisions are purely about optimizing some outcome. And, while it is clear that too often the political prejudices or tacticism override good data-based decisions, we should also understand that “what is the outcome to optimize for” is an inherently political decision.
JG, I would also add that the choice of investments is inherently political, again the decision space is so massive that some kind of heuristics have to be applied which are political to a greater or lesser extent. Debtor nations can operate SWFs — Canada is starting one (sort of), and Japan basically operates as a hedge fund with more assets than their 200% of GDP debt.
Jordi, I agree that all powerful actors require close scrutiny. Further, data can generally be interpreted many ways and are of varying quality.
After thinking that, given his resume, I would learn something about Britain or railway engineering by watching Gareth Dennis videos I agree with Borners.
Having chosen medicine because I did not want to work in a field exposed to economic cycles, I sympathize with the construction industry asking for a steady flow of work. However, arguing that such a flow will result in lower costs as experience is acquired is mainly self serving. Basic elements like shoveling, digging, tunneling may become slightly cheaper over time as the tools and techniques improve but the overall costs tend to go up. Even adjusting for inflation, Japan, Italy, France, Spain and the UK never built a cheaper high speed rail line than the first one. The next ones tend to aim for a higher technical or aesthetic standard, a more stringent protection of the workers and environment. Soft “white collar” costs also tend to go up. Consultants and lawyers who may not produce anything of value learned how to play the game and want to milk the next project.
“After thinking that, given his resume, I would learn something about Britain or railway engineering by watching Gareth Dennis videos I agree with Borners.”
And what, precisely, do you mean by this?
I agree with what Borners said about G Dennis on 5/29 at 5:54. Dennis doesn’t seem curious about what happens on the continent and I did not find him insightful when discussing HS2 difficulties.
You will learn some things from his youtube channel, like he’s a rail engineer, my training is in Urban Planning and now transport policy. I’m sure he does the day job fine.
As policy person he’s a combination of industry slop, left wing slop, railfan slop, garnished with a hefty dose of Scottish-British Ultra-nationalism.
See also Christian Wolmar.
Yeah but four of those countries managed to build ones cheaper than HS1. And one of them didn’t.
Also its possible to reduce the construction state fluctuations, but that requires on the UK part very major reforms.
HS1 was always going to be more expensive than our peers due to the London tunnelling.
But also his general comment isn’t true in the case of Japan where the Sanyo line was cheaper than Tokaido line (and this may even be significant if the quoted Tokaido cost doesn’t include the pre-world war 2 work).
Also part of why the subsequent lines were more expensive is that the spec was higher – and its only really in the case of the UK where that is pointless gold plating.
@Borners, I also took a look at the data for all the countries and it wasn’t true that the first line was cheapest in Belgium, Spain or Korea either.
Matthew, In 2022 Euros, the average km of the Madrid-Sevilla line cost less than 12 million. against more than 15 million on the Madrid-Valencia/Alicante corridor, more than 18 million between Cordoba and Málaga, or Madrid and Barcelona. Out of Chamartin, the Madrid-Valladolid trunk cost 30 million, the 418 km Corredor Atlántico between Olmedo and Galicia 24 million, Valladolid-Leon-Asturias 21 million.
In Japan, South Korea and Belgium, you are looking at front loading. Cost per km on the Sanyo was slightly lower because the Tokaido Shinkansen had already financed the development of an innovative rolling stock. Later Shinkansen lines were somewhat more expensive. In regard to higher standards, I was thinking of the 132 workers who lost their lives during the Tokaido Shinkansen construction, a death toll unthinkable in later Japan, as well as the Chuo Shinkansen under construction.
The first phase of Korea HSR, between Seoul and Daegu was more costly than its extensions because the bill included purchasing the rolling stock as well as electrification of 418 km of conventional lines. This electrification was required because otherwise the coastal cities would have lost single seat rides to Seoul. Remove all this and the first KTX segment has the lowest cost/km. Slab track on the second phase is an example of aiming for higher standards, although they may have missed since there were quality-control issues. Regardless of this detail, KTX construction costs remain under control and its operations are very successful.
Belgium saw her LGVs as an extension of France’s LN3 with the same financing out of ticket sales. The Belgian government lowered the return on investment requirement to 6%, against France’s 8%, but there was a problem. A continuous stretch of high speed rail to Paris and a smooth connection to London via the Chunnel gave the LGV 1 or Ouest much better commercial prospects than the next ones. Ticket sales were expected to cover all costs including adaptation of the Forrest workshops and the 17 km entry into Brussels along a quadrupled line 96. The 96N works, which included the elimination of all level crossings and rebuilding Hal station above tracks put in a trench cost about 395 million Euros, a large chunk of the 1.42 billion bill for the entire 90 km project. The LGVs towards Germany and the Netherlands were on the contrary unloaded as much as possible to protect SNCB finances. The 36 km Schaerbeek-Louvain quadrupling and the bulk of the through line under Antwerpen were financed by the State. Contributions were asked from German (without success), Dutch and EU administrations.
The argument that countries where costs are out of control just need to acquire more experience is not supported by evidence. Countries who kept costs under control did so the first time of asking. Their giant builders won contracts with HS2 and CAHSR but costs keep going up. They do so because no-one wants to apologize for bad choices, because of counterproductive laws, because the workers hanging around these projects don’t want to endanger their employment. Some are gaining experience in gaming the system.
@draliandumas, I think both of our first two high speed lines were reasonable value -the Selby diversion was reasonable for sure – do not forget our second high speed line, high speed one was geographically constrained and also had to have tunnelled urban approaches which isn’t like the lines in continental Europe.
I agree. I may also add that BR was installing catenary without breaking the bank, the DLR was built on a shoe-string budget and that, as discussed recently, London Underground operating costs are remarkably low.
Crossrail opened late and over budget but not horribly or uniquely so. NY East Side Access, RER E And Stuttgart 21 are in the same situation. The amount of time saved by the 600 000 daily Crossrail or RER E passengers justify the multibillion investments. Cost per passenger is much higher on the East Side Access whose daily ridership of 70 to 80 is less than half the 162 000 predicted by MTA in 2018. However, the infrastructure will be most useful if LIRR needs to lower its footprint during NY Penn rebuilding.
HS2 is a different story. Mistakes were made.
There’s a lot of things you could do with HS2 that would be good and cheap that Dennis hasn’t supported.
If you did a junction onto the Tamworth line where it crosses you’d improve service to Sheffield and Derby by around 30 minutes and provide equivalent service to Leeds as today into Kings Cross, and Dennis hasn’t backed that. Even at ludicrous British costs you’d be looking at £1-2 billion for maybe 5+ million passengers and the ability to have an extra 1-2tph on the East Coast mainline to somewhere else other than Leeds which would add even more passengers.
A station at Stone Staffordshire in particular would be very strong with a massive catchment.
Also even the original Y in full doesn’t speed up service on the most important service to speed up which is London-Edinburgh. Plus you are unable to provide service to any secondary destinations like North Wales and Chester, Shrewsbury, Hull, Bradford or Sunderland.
A separate east coast line into Alexandra Palace would give you the capacity to do those things – and there’s clearly space at Kings Cross to provide it with 6tph regional or something that could be delivered with 3 platforms leaving 8 platforms and maybe 12tph out of them for the long distance service. And yes that would perhaps be more aggressive than elsewhere in Britain – but only because some of the trip times are longer than out of St Pancras that does it today – but it’s not exactly Tokyo either.
Even just a 70 mile high speed line from Alexandra Palace to Fletton Junction just south of Peterborough would take 15 minutes off trip times assuming 10% padding and a 300km/h top speed – as well as clearing the section shared with London commuter services completely. That’s as much as HS2 was planned to save off the status quo without Goulborne I think. You do the next 70 miles and you save the same time again and reduce trip times more than would ever have been possible with HS2.
The other in general HS2 criticism at this point is why on earth are they using 200m trains to almost everywhere rather than 270m ones that can fit in Liverpool lime street and Manchester Piccadilly, when the only fully HS2 link is London-Birmingham and which isn’t realistically going to be that busy anyway.
The other other problem with the Y is it required you to get more train throughput than the Tokaido Shinkansen with lots of train splitting and lots of shared legacy services.