# What Berlin Should Be Building

A week and a half ago, I crayoned Berlin U- and S-Bahn expansion on video. With some tweaks, here is the final product:

Here is the full-size version. (I know I’ve been asked to provide lighter JPGs, but my attempt at JPG compression turned 86 MB to 37 MB, hardly a coup de grâce.)

This is based on ongoing U-Bahn expansion plans plus the 2030 S-Bahn plan.

S-Bahn

The most significant variation is that the dashed S-Bahn line from Gesundbrunnen to Hauptbahnhof and Potsdamer Platz, dubbed S21, is turned into a northwest-southeast trunk line in my plan, following a proposal by Felix Thoma in Zukunft Mobilität. The plan for S21 today is to stay north-south and link with Südkreuz and Schöneberg, beefing up frequency on the north-south S-Bahn.

I believe my routing to be superior, due to traffic on the Görlitzer Bahn, seen below (source, p. 6):

Currently, peak traffic on both the Stadtbahn and the North-South Tunnel is 18 trains per hour in each direction. This is low; Munich achieves 30 tph with very short signal blocks and more branching than Berlin has, splitting into seven branches on each direction rather than three or four. 30 is a limit value, but 24 is more common, and would substantially simplify operations.

The North-South Tunnel splits into a western branch, currently carrying S1 via Schöneberg to Wannsee every 10 minutes, and an eastern, carrying S2/S25/S26 via Südkreuz every 10/20/20 minutes; since the two branches have roughly equal ridership, each should run every 5 minutes, unlike today, where only Südkreuz gets such service. To the north, each of the two main branches can run every 5 minutes as well.

The Stadtbahn is asymmetric. Only 12 out of 18 tph continue west of Westkreuz: Spandau and Potsdam get 10-minute service, and in addition S5, turning at Westkreuz, runs every 10 minutes. As such, all growth in traffic on the western branches should be encouraged. This is thankfully already done, with expansion plans west of Spandau. To the east, traffic is the most overloaded, and will remain so even with the opening of the U5 extension last year. Going up from 18 to 24 maximum tph means 10-minute service on each of the four branches – S3 to Erkner, S5 to Strausberg-Nord, S7 to Ahrensfelde, S75 to Wartenberg (proposed to be extended into a loop going northwest). Today, S3 runs every 20 minutes, and S75 doesn’t run through but rather only runs from Warschauer Strasse east, and conversely, S9 curves from the Stadtbahn to the Görlitzer Bahn to the airport.

Rerouting S21 to connect to the Görlitzer Bahn means that trunk, currently carrying 18 trains per hour, can all run through to city center, and then either go to the Siemensbahn or loop from Hauptbahnhof to Gesundbrunnen. Such service also removes reverse-branching from the rest of the system, allowing all services to run more regularly and reliably since each of the four trunks, including the Ring, would run independently of the others, and delays wouldn’t propagate.

U-Bahn

U-Bahn expansion in Berlin is mostly mothballed. The city prefers trams, even where they are inappropriate due to low speed over long stretches or forced transfers. Plans for U-Bahn expansion to Märkisches Viertel are uncertain, unfortunately. Plans for expansion to Tegel along a branch of U6 look dead, hence my resurrection of an older unbranched U5 extension; the current plan is to connect the Urban Tech Republic complex with the rest of the city via tram. Trams are cheaper but you get what you pay for; the ideal use of a tram is for cross-city routes, not primary routes to the center.

Hence various extensions that I think should be built. U7 to the airport looks like a done deal, and U7 to Staaken is favorable too, as is the low-cost, low-ridership one-stop extension of U3 to Mexikoplatz. U9 to Pankow and U2 to Pankow-Kirche are much-discussed, as is U8 to Märkisches Viertel, whose current cost/rider projection is favorable by international standards.

My additions are U1 extensions at both ends, the U5 extension to Tegel and then looping to intersect U6 and U8 in Reinickendorf, and the resurrection of the U10 plan as a U3 link (and not as a line to Steglitz, which gets extra S-Bahn service either way). The U1 extension to the west is forced to use cut-and-cover since the U1 tunnel under Kurfürstendamm is 1900s cut-and-cover, which is disruptive but cheaper than bored tunnel. The other two lines are long-term desires of the city and have been safeguarded for decades, with intersecting stations built to accommodate them.

Whether lines run in this configuration or another is up for debate. At Wittenbergplatz it’s easiest to link the new U10 system to U1 to Uhlandstrasse and then connect U3 to Krumme Linke with the existing Warschauer Strasse terminus. This would be an awkward system of U1, U2, and U3 in which the line going farthest north going east also goes farthest north going west and the line going farthest south to the east goes farthest south also to the west. If there’s a way to flip the situation, pairing U10 with present-day U1-west, U2-east with U3-west, and U3-east with U2-west, it should be done; this system in general has undergone many such changes over the generations.

# Leisure Travel by Public Transit

I’ve written before about tourism by rail, but only in an intercity context, and it’s worthwhile talking about leisure travel by rail at more local and regional scale too. Most travel is local, and this includes leisure travel.

Local neighborhood travel

A trip to dinner in a neighborhood well-known for a specific kind of cuisine is a type of local leisure trip. Ethnic enclaves abound in diverse cities and people routinely go to other neighborhoods to enjoy food; this kind of trip is so common that it’s not even treated as a leisure trip, just as ordinary consumption.

This can be done by car or by public transportation. The advantage of cars is that such trips tend to happen outside rush hour, when there’s less traffic; that of public transport is that usually ethnic business districts are in busy areas, where there’s more traffic, even if they’re not at city center. The best example of a diverse auto-oriented city is Los Angeles, where getting from one region to another takes too long even off-peak, making it cumbersome for a Westsider to have Chinese food in San Gabriel Valley or Vietnamese food in Orange County regularly. New York and London do a lot better on access to such amenities, thanks to their greater centralization of destinations and public transport networks.

Regional travel

Regional travel starts including things people conceive of as leisure trips more regularly. These can include any of the following:

• Museums, galleries, and other cultural amenities
• Concerts, sports games, conventions, and other special events
• Beaches
• Non-urban outdoor recreation such as hiking and biking trails
• Historic towns that have fallen into the orbit of a larger city

It is striking, in retrospect, how local such travel is. For example, when I LARPed at Intercon, in 2012-6, I was almost the only person flying in from another country, and a large majority of the attendees were local to the Boston area rather than flying in from far away – and the top locations people were coming in from otherwise were New York and Albany, not Chicago or California. This is equally true of conventions in general, except for a handful of international and national ones like Worldcon or Comic Con.

These are all regional rather than local destinations. If they’re not tethered to a geographic feature like a beach or a mountain, they try to locate based on the transportation network as far as possible, so that the biggest and richest conventions are in city center. New York Comic Con is on the Far West Side, but Dexcon is in Morristown. The upshot is that such events want to be close to public transportation and the issue is then about providing both good transit and sufficient event space in central areas.

The issue of TOD

Transit-oriented development is usually thought of as permitting more residential and commercial buildings near public transport. But this is equally true of leisure destinations. The term TOD did not exist then, but early urban renewal involved building event spaces in or near city centers, for example Lincoln Center.

This is equally true of outdoor places. Of course, TOD can’t create a beach or a suitable hilly region for hiking. But it can promote growth at particular places. Historically, New York had excursion railways to Coney Island, which then became much of the subway in Southern Brooklyn, and the same companies that owned the early railways also developed beachfront hotels. Later, amusement parks developed in the area, back when the main uses of other city waterfront were industrial.

Trails, too, can be served by public transportation if it is there. Germany has patches of forest, rehabilitated in the last 200 years, and some of these patches are near train stations so that people can walk through. The Appalachian Trail has segments accessible by commuter rail from New York, even if the weekend frequency leaves a lot to be desired.

Good transit practices

Leisure travel practically never takes place during commute hours. It peaks on weekends, to the point that in areas close to regional leisure destinations, like the Museum of Natural History or Yankee Stadium or Coney Island, trains have as many riders on weekends as on weekdays or even more.

The point of running regional rail on an all-day, everyday takt is that it facilitates such travel, and not just commuter travel. The same timetable can be used for work trips, errand trips, school trips, intercity trips, and leisure trips, each peaking at a different time. Some trains from Berlin to leisure destinations like the trolleyferry are filled with commuters, others with tourists; either way, they run every 20 minus to Strausberg.

This remains best practice even if there aren’t obvious leisure destinations nearby. A transit city like New York is full of transit users, and providing better suburban service is likely to gradually create transit-oriented leisure in the suburbs catering to these millions of carless city residents. Those can be beaches near convenient train stations, or hiking trails, or historic and cultural places like Sleepy Hollow. But the transit has to be there for any such development to happen.

# The Leakage Problem

I’ve spent more than ten years talking about the cost of construction of physical infrastructure, starting with subways and then branching on to other things, most.

And yet there’s a problem of comparable size when discussing infrastructure waste, which, lacking any better term for it, I am going to call leakage. The definition of leakage is any project that is bundled into an infrastructure package that is not useful to the project under discussion and is not costed together with it. A package, in turn, is any program that considers multiple projects together, such as a stimulus bill, a regular transport investment budget, or a referendum. The motivation for the term leakage is that money deeded to megaprojects leaks to unrelated or semi-related priorities. This often occurs for political reasons but apolitical examples exist as well.

Before going over some examples, I want to clarify that the distinction between leakage and high costs is not ironclad. Sometimes, high costs come from bundled projects that are costed together with the project at hand; in the US they’re called betterments, for example the $100 million 3 km bike lane called the Somerville Community Path for the first, aborted iteration of the Green Line Extension in Boston. This blur is endemic to general improvement projects, such as rail electrification, and also to Northeast Corridor high-speed rail plans, but elsewhere, the distinction is clearer. Finally, while normally I focus on construction costs for public transport, leakage is a big problem in the United States for highway investment, for political reasons. As I will explain below, I believe that nearly all highway investment in the US is waste thanks to leakage, even ignoring the elevated costs of urban road tunnels. State of good repair A month ago, I uploaded a video about the state of good repair grift in the United States. The grift is that SOGR is maintenance spending funded out of other people’s money – namely, a multiyear capital budget – and therefore the agency can spend it with little public oversight. The construction of an expansion may be overly expensive, but at the end of the day, the line opens and the public can verify that it works, even for a legendarily delayed project like Second Avenue Subway, the Berlin-Brandenburg Airport, or the soon-to-open Tel Aviv Subway. It’s a crude mechanism, since the public can’t verify safety or efficiency, but it’s impossible to fake: if nothing opens, it embarrasses all involved publicly, as is the case for California High-Speed Rail. No such mechanism exists for maintenance, and therefore, incompetent agencies have free reins to spend money with nothing to show for it. I recently gave an example of unusually high track renewal costs in Connecticut. The connection with leakage is that capital plans include renewal and long-term repairs and not just expansion. Thus, SOGR is leakage, and when its costs go out of control, they displace funding that could be used for expansion. The NEC Commission proposal for high-speed rail on the Northeast Corridor calls for a budget of$117 billion in 2020 dollars, but there is extensive leakage to SOGR in the New York area, especially the aforementioned Connecticut plan, and thus for such a high budget the target average speed is about 140 km/h, in line with the upgraded legacy trains that high-speed lines in Europe replace.

Regionally, too, the monetary bonfire that is SOGR sucks the oxygen out of the room. The vast majority of the funds for MTA capital plans in New York is either normal replacement or SOGR, a neverending program whose backlog never shrinks despite billions of dollars in annual funding. The MTA wants to spend $50 billion in the next 5 years on capital improvements; visible expansion, such as Second Avenue Subway phase 2, moving block signaling on more lines, and wheelchair accessibility upgrades at a few stations, consists of only a few billion dollars of this package. This is not purely an American issue. Germany’s federal plan for transport investment calls for 269.6 billion euros in project capital funding from 2016 to 2030, including a small proportion for projects planned now to be completed after 2031; as detailed on page 14, about half of the funds for both road and rail are to go to maintenance and renewal and only 40% to expansion. But 40% for expansion is still substantially less leakage than seen in American plans like that for New York. Betterments and other irrelevant projects Betterments straddle the boundary between high costs and leakage. They can be bundled with the cost of a project, as is the case for the Somerville Community Path for original GLX (but not the current version, from which it was dropped). Or they can be costed separately. The ideal project breakdown will have an explicit itemization letting us tell how much money leaked to betterments; for example, for the first Nice tramway line, the answer is about 30%, going to streetscaping and other such improvements. Betterments fall into several categories. Some are pure NIMBYism – a selfish community demands something as a precondition of not publicly opposing the project, and the state caves instead of fighting back. In Israel, Haifa demanded that the state pay for trenching portions of the railroad through the southern part of the city as part of the national rail electrification project, making specious claims about the at-grade railway separating the city from the beach and even saying that high-voltage electrification causes cancer. In Toronto, the electrification project for the RER ran into a similar problem: while rail electrification reduces noise emissions, some suburbs still demanded noise walls, and the province caved to the tune of$1 billion.

Such extortion is surplus extraction – Israel and Toronto are both late to electrification, and thus those projects have very high benefit ratios over base costs, encouraging squeaky wheel behavior, raising costs to match benefits. Keeping the surplus with the state is crucial for enabling further expansion, and requires a combination of the political courage to say no and mechanisms to defer commitment until design is more advanced, in order to disempower local communities and empower planners.

Other betterments have a logical reason to be there, such as the streetscape and drainage improvements for the Nice tramway, or to some extent the Somerville Community Path. The problem with them is that chaining them to a megaproject funded by other people’s money means that they have no sense of cost control. A municipality that has to build a bike path out of its own money will never spend $100 million on 3 km; and yet that was the projected cost in Somerville, where the budget was treated as acceptable because it was second-order by broader GLX standards. Bad expansion projects Sometimes, infrastructure packages include bad with good projects. The bad projects are then leakage. This is usually the politically hardest nut to crack, because usually this happens in an environment of explicit political negotiation between actors each wanting something for their own narrow interest. For example, this can be a regional negotiation between urban and non-urban interests. The urban interests want a high-value urban rail line; the rest want a low-value investment, which could be some low-ridership regional rail or a road project. Germany’s underinvestment in high-speed rail essentially comes from this kind of leakage: people who have a non-urban identity or who feel that people with such identity are inherently more morally deserving of subsidy than Berlin or Munich oppose an intercity high-speed rail network, feeling that trains averaging 120-150 km/h are good enough on specious polycentricity grounds. Such negotiation can even turn violent – the Gilets Jaunes riots were mostly white supremacist, but they were white supremacists with a strong anti-urban identity who felt like the diesel taxes were too urban-focused. In some cases, like that of a riot, there is an easy solution, but when it goes to referendum, it is harder. Southern California in particular has an extreme problem of leakage in referendums, with no short- or medium-term solution but to fund some bad with the good. California’s New Right passed Prop 13, which among other things requires a 2/3 supermajority for tax hikes. To get around it, the state has to promise somthing explicit to every interest group. This is especially acute in Southern California, where “we’re liberal Democrats, we’re doing this” messaging can get 50-60% but not 67% as in the more left-wing San Francisco area and therefore regional ballot measures for increasing sales taxes for transit have to make explicit promises. The explicit promises for weak projects, which can be low-ridership suburban light rail extensions, bond money for bus operations, road expansion, or road maintenance, damage the system twice. First, they’re weak on a pure benefit-cost ratio. And second, they commit the county too early to specific projects. Early commitment leads to cost overruns, as the ability of nefarious actors (not just communities but also contractors, political power brokers, planners, etc.) to demand extra scope is high, and the prior political commitment makes it too embarrassing to walk away from an overly bloated project. For an example of early commitment (though not of leakage), witness California High-Speed Rail: even now the state pretends it is not canceling the project, and is trying to pitch it as Bakersfield-Merced high-speed rail instead, to avoid the embarrassment. The issue of roads I focus on what I am interested in, which is public transport, but the leakage problem is also extensive for roads. In the United States, road money is disbursed to the tune of several tens of billions of dollars per year in the regular process, even without any stimulus funding. It’s such an important part of the mythos of public works that it has to be spread evenly across the states, so that politicians from a bygone era of non-ideological pork money can say they’ve brought in spending to their local districts. I believe there’s even a rule requiring at least 92% of the fuel tax money generated in each state to be spent within the state. The result is that road money is wasted on low-growth regions. From my perspective, all road money is bad. But let’s put ourselves for a moment in the mindset of a Texan or Bavarian booster: roads are good, climate change is exaggerated, deficits are immoral (German version) or taxes are (Texan version), the measure of a nation’s wealth is how big its SUVs are. In this mindset, road money should be spent prudently in high-growth regions, like the metropolitan areas of the American Sunbelt or the biggest German cities. It definitely should not be spent in declining regions like the Rust Belt, where due to continued road investment and population decline, there is no longer traffic congestion. And yet, road money is spent in those no-congestion regions. Politicians get to brag about saving a few seconds’ worth of congestion with three-figure million dollar interchanges and bypasses in small Rust Belt towns, complete with political rhetoric about the moral superiority of regions whose best days lay a hundred years ago to regions whose best days lie ahead. Leakage and consensus It is easy to get trapped in a consensus in which every region and every interest group gets something. This makes leakage easier: an infrastructure package will then have something for everyone, regardless of any benefit-cost analysis. Once the budget rather than the outcome becomes the main selling point, black holes like SOGR are easy to include. It’s critical to resist this trend and fight to oppose leakage. Expansion should go to expansion, where investment is needed, and not where it isn’t. Failure to do so leads to hundreds of billions in investment money most of which is wasted independently for the construction cost problem. # Commuter Rail Express Service Best Practices After my last post on poor timetabling in the New York area, I got a lot of feedback comparing New York’s zonal system with existing high-quality commuter rail networks. Some of it was in comments, but most interesting was a post by the pseudonymous socialist Emil Seidel, who compares the situation in New York with that of Munich. I’m going to go over some best practices here – this is not intended as a highlight of poor American practices. That said, because of the application to New York, I’m going to go over Paris and Tokyo, as they’re both very large cities, in addition to cleaner German examples, including Berlin (where I live), Nuremberg (where Herbert in comments lives and where a Twitter commenter pointed out express service), and finally Emil’s example of Munich. The upshot is that yes, commuter trains do often have express service, and it’s common for the express service to run local on an outer segment and then express closer in. However, this is not really the New York zone theory. Most importantly, high-quality local service always comes first, and everything else is an overlay. This is common to all of the examples we will look at, and is the most fundamental fact of commuter rail: S-Bahn service is urban rail on mainline tracks. Infrastructure for local trains Local service always comes first, ahead of any longer-range regional service. This can be readily seen in infrastructure allocation: in all examples I know of in the German-speaking world, Paris, and Tokyo, when there’s scarce infrastructure built for through-service, local trains get it ahead of longer-range regional ones. • In Paris, the RER is defined as what runs through on newly-built tunnels, whereas Transilien service terminates at one of the historic terminals of Paris. This distinction is fundamental and precedes other distinctions, such as frequency – there are sections of Transilien H, J, and L that have higher frequency than some RER branches. And where the two systems run side-by-side, the RER is the more local one. • In Germany, newly-built tunnels are for S-Bahn service. For example, in Munich, the S-Bahn gets to use the tunnel, while other trains terminate on the surface; this is also the case in Frankfurt, Stuttgart (until the upcoming Stuttgart 21), and Berlin (until the North-South Main Line opened). • In Zurich, there are two through-tunnels under Hauptbahnhof. The older one is used principally by the S-Bahn; the newer one is used by the S-Bahn as well as longer-distance trains. But many long-distance trains stay on the surface. • In Tokyo, local commuter trains get preference in JR through-running. The original set of through-tracks at Tokyo Station was used for local trains on the Yamanote and Keihin-Tohoku Line, while faster, longer-distance regional trains were demoted, and through-running ceased entirely when the Shinkansen took their space in the 1990s. Regional trains only resumed through-running when the Ueno-Tokyo Line opened in 2015. The Shinkansen’s use of space over regional train is justified because it serves large secondary cities in the Tohoku region and not just suburbs. Timetabling for local trains Local trains are also the most important priority for high frequency. In all of the five example cities for this post, local frequency is high, even on branches. In Tokyo and Paris, the trunks don’t really run on takts; Japan and France overall have less rigid takts than Germany but do have off-peak takt patterns, it’s just not very important to passengers when a train on the RER A or the Chuo Line comes every 4-5 minutes off-peak. Elsewhere, there are takts. There are also takts on the branches in Paris. Typical frequencies are a train every 10, 15, or 20 minutes; they may be lower on outer branches, especially ones that are operationally half-branches, i.e. branches of branches like the two halves of S1 and S2 in Munich. All of this depends on city size; Berlin is bigger than Munich, which is bigger than Nuremberg. • In Berlin, S-Bahn branches run every 10 or 20 minutes, but the ones running every 10 usually have short-turning variants, so the outer portions only get 20-minute service. The outer ends of 10-minute service – Spandau, Buch, Frohnau, Friedrichshagen, Teltow Stadt, Grünau – tend to be 15-18 km from the center, but one, Potsdam, is almost 30 km out. • In Munich, S-Bahn branches likewise run every 10 or 20 minutes at rush hour, with some tails that have ugly 40-minute headways. Off-peak, the numbered branches run every 20 minutes. • In Nuremberg, frequency is weaker, as it is a small city. But S2 has a 20-minute takt up to Schwabach, about 15 km out. Let us now compare larger cities. Just as Berlin has higher frequency at a given radius than Munich and Nuremberg, so does Paris have even higher frequency, and Tokyo yet higher. On the RER A, branches run every 10 minutes all day; Marne-la-Vallée, home to Disneyland Paris as well as a suburban office park, sees trains every 10 minutes off-peak, 37 km outside city center. At the other end, Cergy sees a train every 10 minutes all day at similar distance, and at rush hour this rises to 5 minutes, but half the trains run on Transilien L rather than the RER. Some of these Parisian RER trains run express. The RER B, off-peak, has a pattern with three services, each running every 15 minutes: at each end these go minor branch (Robinson or Mitry-Claye), major branch express (major stops to Massy and then local to Saint-Rémy or nonstop to CDG), major branch local (local to Massy or CDG). So yes, nonstop trains exist, in the special context of an airport, but local trains still run every 15 minutes as far as 20-30 km from city center. At rush hour, frequencies rise and there’s no more room for express trains to the north, so trains run every 6 minutes to each of CDG or Mitry, all local: local service always comes first. Tokyo has even higher local frequency. Rapid lines tend to have their own dedicated pair of tracks, there is so much traffic. For example, the Chuo Line has four tracks to Mitaka: the local tracks carry the Chuo-Sobu Line, and the express tracks carry the Chuo Rapid Line farther out. Both patterns are very frequent. What Tokyo does have is a melange of express services with names like Special Rapid, Limited Express, or Liner. However, they are timetabled around the local services, or the regular rapid ones if there’s a rapid track pair as on Chuo, even in environments with competition between private railways for commuter traffic. The Chuo Rapid Line’s basic pattern, the vanilla rapid, runs irregularly every 3-8 minutes off-peak, with Special Rapid trains making limited stops timetabled around those, with timed overtakes at major stations. Thus frequency stays very high even as far out as Tachikawa, 37.5 km from Tokyo Station. Moreover, at rush hour, where frequency is denser, there is less, sometimes no, special express service. Timetabling for express trains All of our five example cities have express trains. In Berlin, Munich, and Nuremberg, they’re branded as RegionalBahn, distinct from the S-Bahn. In Paris, some RER trains run express, but mostly Transilien provides extra express service. In Tokyo, it’s all branded as part of the Kanto area commuter rail network. This is the core of Emil’s argument: express service exists in Germany, but has separate branding. Nonetheless, there are best practices for how to do this. In Jarrett Walker’s bus-based terminology, it is better to run limited, that is make major stops, than to run express, that is have long nonstop sections from outer areas to city center. Sometimes patterns are somewhat of a hybrid, like on some New York subway lines, but the basic principle is that regional trains never skip major stations. • In Berlin, the Stadtbahn, built in the 1880s, has four tracks, two dedicated to local S-Bahn trains and two to everything else. Intercity trains on the Stadtbahn only stop at Hauptbahnhof and Ostbahnhof, but regional trains make roughly every other S-Bahn stop. Elsewhere, some stations are never missed, like Lichtenberg and Wannsee. Note also that as in Paris, Berlin likes its airport express service, branded FEX, which skips the RegionalBahn station and S-Bahn branch point Schöneweide. • In Munich, some RegionalBahn services express from the S-Bahn terminal, where they always stop, to Hauptbahnhof; some also make a few stops on the way. It depends on the line – Dachau and Laim are both popular RegionalBahn stops. • In Nuremberg, I encourage people to look at the map. Express trains abound, at fairly high frequency, each named service running hourly, and they always make certain major stations like Erlangen and Fürth. The stopping pattern can be more local once there’s no S-Bahn, but it’s not really local. For example, at both ends of Berlin’s RE 1, a half-hourly regional line between Brandenburg an der Havel and Frankfurt an der Oder with half the trains continuing west to Magdeburg and south awkwardly to Cottbus, there are stops spaced 7-10 km apart between the built-up area of Berlin-Potsdam and those of Brandenburg and Frankfurt. In Paris and Tokyo, similarly, express trains stop at major stations. The RER B’s express pattern does run nonstop between Gare du Nord and CDG, but to the south of Paris, it makes major stops like Bourg-la-Reine rather than trying to run nonstop from Massy to Paris; moreover, the RER trains make all stops within the city core, even neighborhood stops like Cité-Universitaire or Nation. Tokyo’s Special Rapids likewise stop at major stations like Kokubunji, and don’t run nonstop from outer suburban branches to Shinjuku and Tokyo. What this means for New York New York does not run its commuter rail in the above way. Not even close. First, local frequency is weak. The pre-corona timetables of the New Haven and Harlem Lines have 30-40 minute gaps at rush hour at radii where Berlin still has some 10-minute service. Off-peak the schedule is more regular but still only half-hourly. Hourly S-Bahn systems exist, for example in Mannheim, but those are mocked by German railfans as not real S-Bahns but barely upgraded regional rail systems using the term S-Bahn for marketing. And second, express trains are not designed to provide an express overlay on top of local trains with transfers where appropriate. When they’re zoned, they only make a handful of stops at rush hour and then express, often without overlapping the next zone for a transfer. This is the case even where the infrastructure is a four-track line set up for more normal express service: the Hudson Line is set up so that Ossining, Tarrytown, and Yonkers have express platforms, but its timetable largely ignores that in favor of long nonstops, with 20-minute gaps at Yonkers. In the future, it is critical to focus on a high-quality local takt, with frequency depending on city size. In Boston, a Berlin-size city, the TransitMatters plan calls for a 15-minute takt, sometimes 10 minutes, generally as far out as 20-30 km. But New York is a larger city, and needs 5 minutes within the city and 10 well into suburbia, with a strong local schedule that express trains can go around if appropriate. S-Bahn service, by whatever name or brand it has, is always about using mainline infrastructure to operate urban rail and extend the city into the suburbs. # Meme Weeding: Polycentricity and High-Speed Rail There is a common line among German rail advocates that high-speed rail is not a good fit for Germany’s urban geography because the country is more polycentric than Japan or France. Per such advocates, it’s more important to connect small cities to a national network of trains averaging 120 km/h. It’s based on a wrong understanding of what polycentrism really means in the context of an entire country, and I’d like to explain why. A correct understanding would lead to a national effort to complete a high-speed rail program connecting all of the major cities at higher average speeds than 200 km/h, potentially going up to the 230-250 km/h range typical of France. How Germany and France differ When Germans speak of the superiority of the German InterCity concept to high-speed rail, the main comparison is France, which Germans are primed to think of as a nation of lazy spendthrifts. So it’s most valuable to compare the urban geographies of these two countries, and only secondarily rely on either other European countries or on Asian examples. The most glaring difference is that there is no Paris in Germany. Ile-de-France has about 20% of France’s population, and is far and away the richest region, concentrating all the important corporate headquarters, basing its economy not on a specific industry but on its status as France’s primate city. Germany has nothing like this. The largest single-core metropolitan region here is Berlin, which at 5 million people is around 6% of national population. Moreover, cities are somewhat economically specialized, so the wealth of the richest cities is split across Munich’s heavy industry, Frankfurt’s finance, and so on. Supposedly, this makes high-speed rail a poorer fit for Germany – there’s no Paris to just connect to every other city. But in reality, a high-speed rail network would still connect all the major cities: Berlin, Hamburg, Hanover, Bremen, the Rhine-Ruhr complex, Dresden, Leipzig, Frankfurt, Nuremberg, Mannheim, Munich, Stuttgart, Karlsruhe. Some of the smaller cities, like Erfurt and Fulda, happen to lie on lines between larger cities and are already connected, just not at as high a speed since German high-speed lines almost always have long legacy segments with a top speed of 160 km/h or even less. And once all the cities are included, Germany turns into better geography for high-speed rail than France. Precise numbers depend on definitions, but around half of the German population lives in the above-listed 13 metropolitan areas of at least 1 million. In France, it’s only one third, and the median French person lives in a metro area of about 350,000; TGVs are thus forced to spend much of their running time on classical lines at low speed to reach cities like Grenoble and Saint-Etienne, and even some larger cities including Nantes, Toulon, Nice, and Toulouse are not on LGVs. High-speed rail and connectivity In the above map, the trip times are very aggressive – Berlin-Hanover in an hour is doable nonstop but barely and the sort of advocates who think train performance levels are still stuck in the 1990s may think it is impossible to do better than 1:30. But the 2020s are not the 1990s, thankfully. The important thing to note is that not only does it connect all major city pairs, but also there is no alternative that has that feature. The Deutschlandtakt without further investments in speed connects Berlin and Munich in 4 hours, which is borderline for high-speed rail; in Cascetta-Coppola, the elasticity of ridership with respect to travel time in Italy ranges between -2.2 and -1.6, so going from 4 hours to 2.5 more than doubles ridership, for less cost than it’s taken to get to 4 hours so far since Germany has built the hardest segment first and much of what remains is in the pancake-flat North German Plain. With high-speed rail, the longest distance between two major cities, Hamburg-Munich, is 3:45, compared with 5:20 in the D-takt. This also cascades to the roughly half of Germany that lives outside the metropolitan areas. A smaller city like Rostock, Münster, Regensburg, or Halle gets a connection to the national network either way; the D-takt actually only gives Rostock and Regensburg two-hourly rather than hourly connections to the nearest major node. It takes an hour under the D-takt to get between Regensburg and Nuremberg; the connections between Regensburg and the rest of the country depend primarily on how fast trains are between Nuremberg and the other million-plus urban areas. Germany benefits from having centrally-located train stations everywhere, making transfers already easier than in France, where Paris has four distinct TGV terminals. Getting between two Parisian stations’ lines requires using a bypass, on which trains run at low frequency, at best stopping at Marne-la-Vallée and CDG, both 30 km from city center. In contrast, Germany train stations are set up for through service except Frankfurt, which is about to get an announcement for a through-service tunnel. To the extent that any bypasses are needed here, they’re because a station’s tracks point the wrong way for some through-service, as in Cologne and (even after through-service opens) Frankfurt; in both cases there’s a convenient near-center station, that is Deutz within walking distance of Cologne Hbf and Frankfurt Airport 10 km from Hbf, and at any rate the lines would have far more demand if speeds between major cities rose to French levels, so the frequency wouldn’t suffer. Polycentricity and high-speed rail Polycentricity does not make high-speed rail an inappropriate choice for intercity transportation. It’s neutral, and the urban geography of Germany, in terms of density and city size, is conducive to such a network. The question at this point is not about building a single line like Paris-Lyon, but about completing the half-built system that Germany has, and at that scale, having many major cities is not a problem at all. So why do German activists keep bringing up polycentricity? I have a few explanations, none legitimate: • Germans look down on France, and bring up the most glaring differences to justify not learning. I’ve spent more than a decade watching Americans make up the silliest reasons why they can’t learn from Europe, reasons that are often unrecognizable to a European (“American cities weren’t bombed in WW2” – but neither was Paris). The same is visible internally to Europe, where Germany will not learn from France or Southern Europe. • Polycentricity is a convenient excuse to morally elevate rural and pretend-rural life over the big city, a common romantic trope in an arc from 19th-century nationalism to the modern New Left. High-speed rail breaks this pretense: it centers the largest cities, and tells the rest that their participation in national transport comes from their connections to large cities, which the romantics find deeply immoral. For the same reason, the German New Left finds subways less moral than streetcars. • Older activists are stuck in the past, when they were younger. In the 1980s, European high-speed rail meant Paris-Lyon, and not the national TGV network. At the scale of Paris-Lyon, Germany’s lack of a Paris indeed weakens high-speed rail. But it’s not the 1980s anymore; at this point the question is about completing fast links like Hamburg-Hanover and Erfurt-Frankfurt, not building the first link. My impression is that younger Greens support high-speed rail more than older ones, who joined the party to express opposition to nuclear power rather than support for immigration. Looking forward rather than backward, nothing in Germany’s urban geography is an obstacle to a connected high-speed rail network. With central stations and less of the population living in truly isolated rural and small-city communities, Germany can expect to greatly surpass any other Western intercity rail network if it builds high-speed rail, more than reaching DB’s pre-corona 250 million ridership target. # Quick Note: Deterioration of Speed A regrettable feature of rail transport is that often, the speed of a line deteriorates over time after it opens or finishes a major upgrade. This can come from deferred maintenance or from proper maintenance that includes stricter speed limits or more timetable padding; in either case, it’s because maintaining the original schedule is not seen as a priority, and thus over time service degrades. In some cases, this can also include a deterioration of frequency over time, usually due to inattention. This is not excusable behavior. The networks where this feature exists, including the US, France, and Germany, are not better-run than the Shinkansen, where I have not seen any such deterioration of Shinkansen speed in many years of poking around timetables on Hyperdia, or the system in Switzerland. Switzerland’s timed transfers make it impossible for gradual deterioration of speed to accumulate – trains are scheduled to just make connections to other trains at major nodes, and so if they slow down too much then they can’t make the transfers and the entire network degrades. I wish I could say degradation is a purely American phenomenon. It’s very common in the United States, certainly – on the subway in New York the deterioration made citywide news in 2017 (including one piece by me), on the trains between New York and New Haven the schedule is visibly slower now than it was in the late 2000s, on Amtrak the Northeast Corridor has degraded since the 2000s. Speed is not viewed as a priority in the US, and so there are always little excuses that add up, whether they’re flagging, the never ending State of Good Repair program on the New Haven Line under which at no point in the last 20-25 years have all four tracks been in service at the same time, or just inattention to reliability. But no. France and Germany have had this as well. The TGV used to run between Paris and Marseille in 3:03 every two hours and in 3:06 every other hour; today I see a 3:04 itinerary every four hours and the rest start at 3:11. And here, the Berlin-Hamburg trains were timetabled at 1:30 in the mid-2000s, giving an average speed of 189 km/h, the highest in Germany even though the top speed is only 230 and not 300; the fastest itinerary I can find right now is 1:43, averaging only 165 km/h. I stress that such deterioration does not have any benefits. It’s an illusory tradeoff. When New York chose to slow down the L trains’ braking rate as part of CBTC installation, this was not seen in reduced systemwide maintenance costs; speed just wasn’t a priority, so the brakes were derated. The 7 train, as I understand it, will instead speed up when CBTC comes online, a decision made under Andy Byford’s program to speed up service. Nor has France saved anything out of the incremental slowdowns in TGV service. Operating costs are up, not down. The savings from slowdowns are on the illusory to microscopic spectrum, always trumped by increases in cost from other sources, for example the large increases in wages in the 2010s due to the cheminot strikes. By far the greatest cost of speed is during construction. During operations, faster service means lower crew costs per km. This is where the Swiss maxim of running trains as fast as necessary comes from. This isn’t about derating trains’ acceleration – on the contrary, Switzerland procures high-performance trains. It’s about building the least amount of physical infrastructure required to maintain a desired timetable, and once the infrastructure is built, running that timetable. # The Different National Traditions of Building High-Speed Rail I’ve written five pieces about national and transnational traditions of building urban rail: US, Soviet bloc, UK, France, Germany. I’m about to continue this series with a post about Japan, but yesterday I made a video on Twitch jumping ahead to different national traditions of high-speed rail. The video recording cut two thirds of the way through due to error on my part, so in lieu of an upload, I’m writing it up as a blog post. The traditions to cover are those of Japan, France, Germany, and China; those are the world’s four busiest networks, and the other high-speed rail networks display influences from the first three of those. The briefest description is that the Shinkansen is treated like a long-range subway, the TGV like an airplane at flight level zero, and the ICE like a regional rail (and not S-Bahn) network. China doesn’t quite fit any of these modes but has aspects of all three, some good, some not. But this description must be considerably nuanced. For example, one would expect that airplane-like trains would have security theater and a requirement for early arrival. But the TGV has neither; until recently, platforms were completely open, and only recently has SNCF begun gating them, not for security but for ticket checks, with automatic gates and QR codes. Likewise, until recently passengers could get to the train station 2-3 minutes before the train’s departure and get on, and only now is SNCF requiring passengers to show up as long as 5 minutes early. Tabular summary For more detailed data on costs and tunnel and viaduct percentage, consult our high-speed rail cost database. The Shinkansen as a subway The Shinkansen network has very little branching. Currently there is none south of Tokyo; a short branch to Nagasaki is in planning but will not open anytime soon. To the north, there is more branching, and the Yamagata and Akita Mini-Shinkansen lines, the only legacy lines with Shinkansen through-service, split trains, with one part of the train continuing onward to Shin-Aomori and Hokkaido and another part splitting off to Yamagata or Akita. Going south of Tokyo, the off-peak frequency to Shin-Osaka is four express Nozomi trains an hour, at :00, :09, :30, :51 off-peak; two semi-express Hikari, at :03, :33; and one local Kodama, at :57. The 21-minute gaps are ugly, but on a train that takes around 2.5 hours to get to Shin-Osaka, they’re not too onerous. Thus, there is a culture of going to the train station without pre-booking a ticket and just getting on the next Nozomi. The ticketing system reinforces this: there is no dynamic yield management, but instead fixed ticket prices between pairs of station depending on seat class. What yield management there is is static: the Nozomi has a small surcharge, to justify excluding it from the JR Rail Pass and so shunt tourists to the Hikari. This is not literally the headway-management system seen on some unbranched subway systems, like the Moscow Metro and Paris Métro; Moscow keeps time by distance from the preceding train, and not by a fixed schedule. But this is fine: some subway systems are timetabled, like the U-Bahn in Berlin and the Tokyo subway. Tokyo even manages to mix local and express trains on some two-track subway lines with timed overtakes. To the scheduler, the fixed timetable is of paramount importance. But to the passenger, it isn’t – people don’t time themselves to a specific train. Another subway-like characteristic includes interior layout, designed around fast egress. Shinkansen cars have two door pairs each and platforms are 1,250 mm high with level boarding, enabling 1 minute dwell times even at very busy stations like Shin-Osaka. Trains make multiple stops in the Tokyo and Osaka regions, and even Nozomi and equivalent fastest-train classes on other lines stop there, to distribute loads. There is no cafe car, and luggage is overhead, to maximize train seating space: a 25 meter car has 18-20 seating rows with 1-meter pitch, which is greater efficiency than is typical in Europe. Station location decisions, finally, are designed as far as practical to be in city centers. Stations with Shin- before their names are new stations, like Shin-Osaka and Shin-Yokohama, but they tend to be sited close to city centers, at intersections with subway and commuter rail lines. The main drawback of Japan is that the construction costs are very high. This comes from a political decision to build elevated lines rather than at-grade liens with earthworks, as is common in Europe. This preponderance of els has been exported to South Korea, Taiwan, and China, all of which have high costs relative to the tunneling proportion; the KTX, essentially a Shinkansen adapted to an environment in which the legacy trains are standard-gauge too, is notable for having low tunneling costs, as is common in Korea, but high costs on lines with moderate amounts of tunneling thanks to the high share of construction on bridges. East Asia has high population density, which lets it get away with high costs since the ridership is high enough to compensate – THSR is at this point returning around 4% on very high costs. But in any other environment, this leads to severe problems. China, with lower incomes and fares than in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, already has trouble paying interest on lines other than the Beijing-Shanghai system. India, building a turnkey Shinkansen as recommended by Japanese consultants, who were burned by Taiwan’s mix of European and Japanese technology on an operationally-Japanese system, is spending enormous sums of money: the Mumbai-Ahmedabad corridor is around PPP$50.6 billion, for 508 km, 100 million/km on a line that’s only 5% in tunnel and even those tunnels could have been avoided by running on broad gauge and using existing a widened legacy right-of-way in Mumbai. The TGV as flight-level zero air travel As detailed in New Departures by Anthony Perl, the history of the TGV differs from that of the Shinkansen in a key aspect: the TGV was built after the postwar decline of rail travel (as was the ICE), whereas the Shinkansen was built before it (as was to some extent CRH). The Shinkansen was built in 1959-64: there was no decline in rail evident yet, with only 12 cars/1,000 people in Tokyo in 1960, and the system was designed to deal with growing ridership. In contrast, the TGV was planned after the 1973 oil crisis, in a then-wealthier and more motorized country than Japan, aiming to woo passengers back to the train from the car and the plane. Previously, SNCF had been engaging in experiments with high speed and high-voltage electrification, inventing 25 kV 50 Hz electrification in the process, which would be adopted by the Shinkansen and become the global standard for new electrification. It also experimented with running quickly on ballasted track – without modifications, the trains of that era kicked ballast up at high speed, there was so much air resistance. But investment had gone to legacy intercity rail, driving up the average speed of the electrified Mistral to 130 km/h and the Aquitaine to 145 km/h. Nonetheless, competition with air was fierce and air shuttles in that era before security theater attracted many people in competition with four-hour trains from Paris to Lyon and Bordeaux. The TGV’s real origin is then 1973. The crisis shocked the entire non-oil-exporting world, leading to permanently reduced growth not just in rich countries (by then including Japan) but also non-oil-exporting developing countries, setting up the sequence of slow growth under import substitution and then the transition to neoliberalism. France reacted to the crisis with the slogan “in France, we have ideas,” setting up the nuclearization of French electricity in the 1980s, reduced taxes on diesel to encourage what was then viewed as surplus fuel rather than as a deadly pollutant, and the construction of the electric TGV. Despite the ongoing growth of the Shinkansen then, there was extensive skepticism of the TGV in the 1970s and early 80s. The state refused to finance it, requiring SNCF to borrow on international markets. The LGV Sud-Est employed cost-cutting techniques including 3.5% grades and high superelevation to avoid tunnels, at-grade construction with cut and fill balancing out to avoid surplus dirt, and land swaps for farms that would be split by the line to avoid needing to build passageways. Construction costs were only 5.5M€/km in 2021 euros. Unfortunately, costs have risen since and stand at 20M€/km, or even higher on Bordeaux-Toulouse. But the LGV network remains among the least tunneled in the world thanks to the use of high grades; in our database the only less tunneled network, that of Morocco, is a turnkey TGV, built at unusually low cost. As in Japan, the line was built between the two largest cities: Paris and Lyon. Also as in Japan, Lyon could not be served at the historic center of Perrache, but instead at a near-center location, Part-Dieu, which then became the new central business district, as the LGV Sud-Est was built concurrently with the Lyon Metro and nearby skyscrapers, as is typical for a European city wishing to avoid skyscrapers in historic centers. But everything else was different. There were no real intermediate stops the way that the express Shinkansen have always stopped at Nagoya and Kyoto: the LGV Sud-Est skipped Dijon, which instead was served on a branch, and the two intermediate stops on the line, Le Creusot and Mâcon-Loché, are on the outskirts of minor towns and only see a few trains per day each. Moreover, relying on France’s use of standard-gauge, there was, from the start, extensive through-service beyond Lyon, toward Marseille, Geneva, Saint-Etienne, and Grenoble. Frequency was for the most part low, measured in trains per day. There was little investment in regional rail outside the capital, unlike in Germany, and therefore there was never any attempt to time the connections from Saint-Etienne and Grenoble to the TGV at Part-Dieu. At the other end, Paris did not build a central station, unlike German or Japanese cities. The time for such a station was, frustratingly, just a few years before work began on the TGV in earnest: RATP was building the RER starting in the 1960s and early 70s, including a central station at Les Halles, which opened 1977. But this was designed purely for urban and suburban use, and the TGV stayed on the surface. The last opportunity for a Paris central station was gone when SNCF extended the RER D from Gare de Lyon to Les Halles. Thus Paris has four distinct TGV stations – Lyon, Montparnasse, Nord, and Est – with poor connections between them. This turned the TGV into a point-to-point system. Were there a central station, trains could have gone Lille-Paris-Lyon-Marseille. But there wasn’t, and so for Lille-Lyon service, SNCF built the Interconnexion Est, bypassing Paris and also serving Disneyland and Charles-de-Gaulle Airport. When the LGV Atlantique opened, Tours kept its historic terminal, and thus trains went either Paris-Tours or Paris-Bordeaux bypassing Tours. When the LGV Sud-Est was extended south with the LGVs Rhône-Alpes and Méditerranée, trains did not go via Part-Dieu, even though it had always been configured as a through-station for points south, but rather via a bypass serving Lyon’s airport; trains today go Paris-Lyon, Paris-Marseille, or at lower frequency Lyon-Marseille, but not Paris-Lyon-Marseille. Of note, Japan’s subway-like characteristic is partly the outcome of its linear geography along the Taiheiyo Belt, making it an ideal comparison also for the Northeast Corridor in the United States. But Lille, Paris, Lyon, and Marseille are collinear, and yet the service plans do not make use of that geography. There is no planning around seat turnover: if a train makes an intermediate stop, it’s one with very low ridership, like Mâcon, with no attempt to have seats occupied by Paris-Lyon passengers and then by Lyon-Marseille ones. Over time, this led to a creeping airline-ization of the TGV. Airline-style dynamic yield management was introduced, I believe in the 1990s. This was after SNCF had spent the 1980s marketing the TGV as 260 km/h for the same fare as 160 km/h; the overall fares on legacy intercity trains and TGVs are similar per p-km, but TGVs have opaque pricing, and are designed to maximize fares out of Paris-Lyon in particular, where air competition vanished. The executives at SNCF are increasingly drawn from the airline world, and, perhaps out of social memory of the navettes competing with 4-hour trains in the 1970s, they think that trains cannot compete with air travel if they take longer than 3-3.5 hours, even though they do successfully on such city pairs as Paris-Toulon. Having skipped Germany’s InterCity revolution and its refinements in Switzerland, Austria, and the Netherlands, the TGV network has stagnated in the last decade. Ridership is up since the pre-Great Recession peak but barely, only by around 10%. The frequency is too weak for inter-provincial links, where people mostly drive, and in the 1990s and 2000s the TGV network grew to dominate the Paris-province market; there isn’t much of a remaining market for the current operating paradigm to grow into. While some regional links are adopting takt timetables, for example some of the Provence TERs, SNCF management has done no such thing. Instead, it has spent the last 15 years pursuing airline strategies, including imitation of low-cost airlines, first iDTGV and then OuiGo. A generalist elites of business analysts believes in market segmentation and price discrimination, which do not work on a mode of travel where a frequent, flexible timetable is so paramount. Among the countries influenced by France, Spain is notable for realizing that it has a problem with operations. In an interview with Roger Senserrich, ADIF head Isabel Pardo de Vera spoke positively of Spain’s efficient engineering and construction, but centered ADIF and RENFE’s problems, including the poor operations. Like Italy and Belgium, and more recently Morocco, Spain learned the concept of high-speed rail from France; also like Italy and Belgium, it mixed in a few German elements, which in the 1980s meant Germany’s more advanced LZB signaling, but at the time, there was no Switzerland-wide takt yet, and the inferiority of French operations and scheduling was not yet evident. But Spain self-flagellates – this is how it learns – whereas France is just a hair too rich to recognize its weaknesses and far too proud for its elite to Germanize where needed. The ICE as long-distance regional rail Germany came into the 1960s with some of the most advanced legacy rail in the world, with technology that would be adopted as a Shinkansen standard. This goes back to the 1920s, when Deutsche Reichsbahn was formed from the merger of the state-level railways in the wake of the post-WW1 German Revolution. The new railway regulation, dating to 1925, promoted new kinds of engineering now completely standard, such as the tangential switch. DRB would also experiment with 200 km/h diesel express trains in the 1930s. Even in the 1960s and early 70s, when the most advanced rail tech was clearly in Japan, Deutsche Bundesbahn kept up with rail tech, much like SNCF, inventing LZB signals. But unlike Japan and France, Germany never built a complete high-speed rail network. The InterCity network, dating to 1971, was designed around fast legacy trains, at slightly lower speeds than available on the express French legacy trains. The key was that city pairs would be served every two hours, with timed connections at intermediate points boosting many to hourly. This was from the start based on a regular takt and turnover, with more expansive service to smaller cities. High-speed lines in Germany were delayed, and often built on weird alignments. The most important reason is that in the formative period, from 1971 to 1990, there was no such country as Germany. The country was called West Germany, and, much like Japan, had a fairly linear population distribution from the Ruhr upriver to Cologne, Frankfurt, Mannheim, and finally either Karlsruhe or Stuttgart and Munich; but the largest city proper, Hamburg, lay outside this corridor. The north-south orientation of West Germany contrasted with the rail network it inherited. Until the post-WW1 German Revolution, the rail networks were run by the states, not by the German Empire, and thus interstate connections were underbuilt. Prussia had an east-west orientation, and therefore north-south lines were relatively underbuilt (see for example the 1896 map), and to top it off most north-south routes crossed the Iron Curtain. To solve many problems at once, but not to solve any of them well, Germany’s first high-speed line connected Hanover, Göttingen, Kassel, Fulda, and Würzburg. Getting to more substantial cities like Hamburg and Frankfurt requires onward through-service at lower speed. The LGV Sud-Est had a minimum curve radius of 3.2 km, and usually 4 km, and can squeeze 300 km/h out of it now, without any tunnels; the Hanover-Würzburg line has a minimum radius of 5.1 km and a maximum grade of 1.25% and is limited to 280 km/h (service runs at 250 km/h), as it was built as a mixed freight-passenger line. Subsequent lines have, like Hanover-Würzburg, not been complete connections between major cities. Here the difference with France, Italy, South Korea, and China is evident. All are standard-gauge countries, like Germany, and all employ through-service to various degrees. But France opened a complete Paris-Lyon high-speed line in 1981-3, and only the last 30 km into Paris were on legacy trains (since reduced to 8 km with the Interconnexion Est), and likewise Italian, Chinese, and Korean high-speed lines connect major cities all the way. In contrast, this never happens in Germany at longer distance than Cologne-Frankfurt, a 180 km connection. There are always low- or medium-speed segments in between. The maximum average speed between major cities in Germany is either Cologne-Frankfurt or Berlin-Hamburg, a 230 km/h line with tilting trains, both averaging around 180 km/h; the Tokaido Shinkansen, with legacy 2.5 km curves, squeezes 210 km/h out of the Nozomi, and LGVs routinely average 230-250 km/h between Paris and major secondary cities. Nor are the lower speeds in Germany saving money. The mixed passenger/freight lines have heavier tunneling than they would need if they had 3.5-4% grades. Hanover-Würzburg cost 36M€/km in 2021 euros thanks to its 37% tunneled alignment. German construction costs are not high relative to the tunneling percentage, unlike Chinese or Taiwanese costs, let alone British ones, but the tunneling percentage is in many cases unnecessarily high. This is thankfully not exported to every Northern European country that learned from the InterCity, but the Netherlands, as NIMBY-ridden as Germany, built an unnecessary tunnel on the HSL Zuid and had very high costs even taking that into account; Italy, with an otherwise-French system, likewise overbuilds, as pointed out by Beria-Albalate-Grimaldi-Bel, with viaducts designed to carry heavy freight trains even where there is no such demand. So the bad in Germany is that the lines have very shallow grades, forcing heavy tunneling, and the costs are so high that the system is not complete. Is there good? Yes! The InterCity system’s focus on high frequency enables decent service between major cities. Berlin-Munich trains, compromised by the Erfurt detour and subsequent descoping of much of the line, do the trip in 4.5 hours where they should be taking 3 and even 2.5 hours. But it’s not the same as the 4 hours of the pre-TGV Mistral to Lyon or Aquitaine to Bordeaux, the latter of which averaged the same speed as most Berlin-Munich trains today. The Aquitaine ran as a single daily Bordeaux-Paris-Bordeaux round-trip, and another train, branded the Etendard, ran the same route daily but Paris-Bordeaux-Paris. In contrast, DB today connects Berlin-Munich roughly every hour. It’s far more flexible, and the connections to other intercity trains are better. And just as the TGV’s inexpensive construction has been perfected in Spain while France has slouched on cost control, so has the interconnected system of Germany been perfected on the margins of its sphere of influence, especially in Switzerland. Swiss connections are never fast: the country is too small for 300 km/h trains to make large differences in door-to-door trip times. The average speed on the workhorse Swiss lines connecting the Zurich-Bern-Basel triangle is around 110-120 km/h. But they run on a half-hourly takt, and other lines run on an hourly takt, and connections at the major cities are timed. European urbanism has a long tail of small cities, unlike American or Asian urbanism, and the Swiss takt connections those small cities to one another through regular timed transfers, with investments to prioritize punctuality. This leads to a false belief among German rail advocates in a tradeoff between French or Spanish speed and Swiss or Dutch or Austrian connectivity. The latter set of countries have higher rail ridership per capita, and even Germany has recently overtaken France’s intercity rail ridership (though not yet per capita), and thus activists in Germany think investing in high speed is a waste. But what is actually happening is that the countries of Europe that look up to France have built high-speed rail, and the countries that look down on France have not; the Netherlands has HSL Zuid but it’s peripheral to the national network and its system is otherwise rather Swiss. Germany absolutely can and should complete its network. It just needs to understand that in certain aspects, countries it is used to stereotyping as spendthrift have done a more prudent job than it has. Already, the younger rail advocates I meet, like Felix Thoma, seem interesting in applying the Deutschlandtakt concept to a high-speed rail network, rather than to a medium-speed one as the previous generations called for. But Germany is a NIMBY country. NIMBYs blocked French levels of energy nuclearization in the 1970s and 80s, creating the last generation’s Green Party (current leader, Annalena Baerbock, is 40 and came of age after those fights); NIMBYs sue projects they dislike on frivolous grounds until the politicians lose interest, much as in the US with its government-by-lawsuit, and thus high-speed rail on the Hamburg-Hanover line has been stuck in limbo for a generation. Besides the political deference to NIMBYs, who as in the US are not as powerful as either they or the state thinks, the main problem then is unwillingness to merge French and German planning insights where they work. I might also add Japanese insights – the Shinkansen is far more efficient with platforms than any European railroad – but they’re less important here or in France than in the UK, which is a ridiculously high-cost version of French planning. China as a mixture of all modes, some good, some awful When I started planning this video and now post, I was puzzling over where to slot China. Other systems seemed fairly easy to slot as Japanese, German, or French, with the occasional special feature (insanely high UK costs, HSL Zuid in an otherwise Swiss intercity takt system, Korean standard-gauge adaptations). But China is its own thing. It makes sense: on the eve of corona, China had 2.3 billion annual high-speed rail riders, comfortably more than than the rest of the world put together; Japan, the second busiest network, had 436 million. In Europe, only France has more high-speed rail ridership per capita, by the smallest of margins. Historically, the system should be viewed as having borrowed liberally from other systems in richer countries that built out their networks earlier. Among the three prior traditions, the one most similar to what CRH has converged on is the Shinkansen, and yet there is significant enough divergence I would not class CRH as a direct Shinkansen influence the way I do the KTX and THSR. This also mirrors the situation for rapid transit: China displays clear Soviet influences but has diverged sufficiently that it must be viewed as a separate tradition now. The most important feature is that CRH evolved on the cusp of the decline of rail in favor of cars and planes, a decline that has been more complete in Western countries. In the 1980s and early 90s, China was already growing very quickly; this was from a very low base, so it was not noticed in richer countries, but it was enough that there were already motorization and domestic air travel competing with China Railway. This led to a multi-phase speed-up campaign, announced in 1993 and implemented from 1997 to 2007. At this point, construction was on legacy alignments to legacy stations. In the North China Plain, the railroads were straight thanks to the flat topography, and so what was needed was investment in the quality of the physical plant – the sort of investments figured out in midcentury France and Germany, adapted by the Shinkansen. This was not trivial, not in a then-low-income country like China, but it was not enormously expensive either. At the same time, there was growing electrification in China, using 25 kV 50 Hz, leading to higher and higher train classes, all charging premium fares over the third-world tickets for traditional trains. At the apex was the D class, covering 200 km/h EMUs; the one time I rode a train in China, a day trip from Shanghai to Jiaxing and back in 2009, the way back was on a D class train, which had the comfort level and speed of the Northeast Corridor, topping at 170 km/h and averaging maybe 110. This investment has continued, and as of 2019, 72% of the network is electrified. But China was already looking for more. In 2008, the Beijing-Tianjin high-speed line opened, as the world’s first 350 km/h line. In the financial crisis’s aftermath, China rapidly built out the network as fiscal stimulus, and by 2011, ridership overtook the Shinkansen’s as the world’s largest. Without legacy considerations, the system is built for 380 km/h, even though trains run at 350 km/h, and express trains average 280-290 km/h. Like the United States and unlike Japan or most of Western Europe, China has an extensive freight rail network. Its approach is the opposite of Germany’s: high-speed lines are dedicated to passengers, and some are officially called passenger-dedicated lines, or PDLs, to make this clear. Freight trains go on the legacy network. Regional rail in China is very weak; the few lines that exist are new-builds, rather like long-range subways, and frequency is often lacking, the Beijing lines branded as S-Bahn barely running off-peak. With nearly all intercity rail having moved over to CRH, the legacy network is relatively free for freight use, even coal trains, which are slow and care little for reliability improvements for higher-end intermodal cargo. However, the passenger-only characteristic of CRH’s system does not mean it’s employed French cost-cutting techniques. Rather, lines run almost exclusively on viaducts and have shallow grades, raising construction costs as in the rest of East Asia. Stations are newly-built at high expense: Beijing South cost 7 billion yuan, which in today’s PPP dollars is around3 billion. There are many tracks and no economization with fast turnarounds as in Japan, and station layouts are comparable to airports, with some security theater.

Beijing South is at least just outside the Second Ring Road. Other stations are farther out. This is not just the beet field stations that characterize TGV service to small cities like Amiens or Metz, but also outlying stations in major centers. Shanghai Station only sees high-speed trains on the local line to Nanjing, providing a dedicated track pair equivalent to Kodama service while Nozomi-equivalent trains continue on to Beijing on their own tracks. The trains to Beijing get a separate Shanghai station, Hongqiao, colocated with the city’s domestic airport. The connecting subways tend to be better than at true beet field stations in France, which miss regional rail connections, but those stations are still well outside city center.

China is moreover exporting the bad more than the good. Chinese-funded projects in Africa are not fast – the average speeds are perhaps midway through China’s speed-up campaign, predating CRH. But they do have oversize, airport-like stations located well outside city centers. This happens even when right-of-way to enter city center exists, as in Nairobi.

On mixing and matching

Understanding these four distinct traditions is important for high-speed rail planning, in those four countries as well as elsewhere, such as in the UK and US. It’s important to understand the tradeoffs that these traditions made, and drawbacks that are not so much tradeoffs as things that didn’t seem important at the time.

Most notably, Britain has oversize stations, spending billions on new terminals such as in Birmingham. This comes from the low efficiency of most European turnaround operations, because most European cities have huge rail terminals from the steam era with a surplus of tracks. When trains need to turn fast, they do: German trains running through Frankfurt, which is a terminal, turn in 3-4 minutes to continue to their onward destination. In Tokyo, where space is at a premium, JR East learned to turn trains in 12 minutes even while giving them a cleaning, and with such tight operations, Britain should be able to fit traffic growth within existing station footprints.

It is also desirable to learn from students who have surpassed their old teachers. Korea has lower construction costs than Japan, Spain has lower construction costs than France and greater understanding of the need to integrate the timetable and infrastructure, Switzerland has perfected the German system to the point that German rail advocacy calls for reimportation of its planning maxims.

In the same way that Taiwan built infrastructure to European specs but is running Japanese trains on it, to its profit and to Japan’s chagrin, it may be advisable to build infrastructure in the French (or, better yet, Spanish) way but then run trains on it the German (or better yet, Swiss) way. But it’s more nuanced than this conclusion, due to important contributions from China and Japan, and due to the focus on having a central station, which France chose not to build in Paris to its detriment.

But in general, I think it behooves countries to learn to implement the following from those four traditions:

• Japan: the best rolling stock, high-efficiency turnaround operations, reliable schedules; avoid excessive viaducts and Japan’s increasing demand for turnkey systems.
• France: passenger-dedicated infrastructure standards (supplemented by Cologne-Frankfurt), land swap deals for at-grade construction, cost control (in the Spanish version – France is deteriorating); avoid TGV rolling stock and airline-style pricing.
• Germany: takt (especially in the Swiss and Dutch versions), open station platforms, integration between timetable and infrastructure, seat turnover, decent rolling stock; avoid empowering NIMBYs and building mixed lines with freight.
• China: separation of passenger and freight operations, very high average speeds; avoid airline-style outlying stations and excessive viaducts.

# Randal O’Toole Gets High-Speed Rail Wrong

Now that there’s decent chance of US investment in rail, Randal O’Toole is resurrecting his takes from the early Obama era, warning that high-speed rail is a multi-trillion dollar money sink. It’s not a good analysis, and in particular it gets the reality of European and Asian high-speed rail systems wrong. It displays lack of familiarity with rail practice and rail politics, to the point that most nontrivial assertions about rail in Europe and Asia are incorrect.

More broadly, the way O’Toole gets rail investment here wrong comes from making unexamined American assumptions and substituting them for a European or Japanese reality regarding rail as well as rail politics. If the US can’t do it, he thinks other countries can’t. Unfortunately, he’s even unfamiliar with recent work done on American costs, when he compares the Interstate system positively with recent high-speed rail lines.

High-Speed Rail Profitability: France

I’m currently working on building a database similar to our urban rail costs for high-speed rail. Between this and previous iterations of analyzing the TGV, I’ve been reading a lot of internal French reports about its system. Thankfully, France makes available very good public information about the costs and technical specifications of its system. It helps that I read French, but the gap between what’s available for France and Belgium (see for example line schemas) is vast. This provides crucial background that O’Toole is missing.

The most important thing to understand is that the TGV network is profitable. The Spinetta report on the fiscal losses of SNCF makes it clear, starting on p. 60, that the TGV network is profitable, and recommends favoring its development over the money-losing legacy networks, especially the branch lines. The report even calls for closing weak branch lines with only a few trains a day, which I called the Spinetta Axe at the time, in analogy with the Beeching Axe. Due to public outcry the state rejected the cuts and only implemented the organizational changes promoted by the report.

Moreover, all lines are very profitable excluding the cost of fixed capital. The Spinetta report’s TGV section says that operating costs average €0.06/seat-km, which is around 0.085€/p-km, despite overstaffing of conductors (8 per conventional 400-car TGV) and extensive travel on legacy track at low speed and higher per-km labor costs. Average TGV fare revenue per an ARAFER report from 2016 is 0.10€/p-km – compare p-km on p. 15 and revenue on p. 26. This is typical for Europe – RENFE and DB charge similar fares, and the nominal fares seem to have been flat over the last decade.

What’s dicier is cost of capital. In all other European countries for which I’m aware of the process, all of which are Northern rather than Southern, this is done with benefit-cost analysis with a fixed behind-the-scenes discount rate. France, in my view wisely, rates lines by their financial and social rates of return instead. A 2014 report about the Bordeaux-Toulouse LGV, recently given the go-ahead for 7.5 billion €, warns that the profitability of LGVs decreases as the system is built out: the LGV Sud-Est returned 15% to SNCF’s finances and 30% to French society (including rider consumer surplus), but subsequent lines only returned 4-7% to SNCF’s finances, and Bordeaux-Toulouse is likely to return less, 6% including social benefits per the study and at this point slightly less since the study assumed it would cost slightly less than the current budget.

The general theme in the French discourse on trains is that the TGV network is an obvious success. There absolutely is criticism, which focuses on the following issues:

• Regional rail, that is not intercity rail, is underdeveloped in France outside Paris. The ridership of TER networks is pitiful in comparison with German-speaking and Nordic metropolitan areas of comparable size. For example, sourced to a dead link, Wikipedia claims 64,300 TER PACA trips per day, comprising the metropolitan areas of Marseille (1.8 million), Nice (1), Toulon (0.6), and Avignon (0.5); in Helsinki (1.5) alone, there are 200,000 daily commuter rail trips. But this isn’t really about high-speed rail, since TER planning and subsidies are devolved to regional governments, and not to SNCF.
• SNCF has contentious labor relations. In the early 2010s, the unions went on a wave of strikes and got wage concessions that led to the evaporation of SNCF’s 600 million €/year primary surplus. The railway unions in France (“cheminots”) are unpopular, and Macron has been able to pass reforms to SNCF’s governance over their strikes and objections.
• Future LGVs are not as strong as past ones. Real costs in France are rising, and the network already links Paris with all major secondary cities in airplane-competitive time save Nice. Interprovincial links on the network are weak, despite the construction of the LGV Rhin-Rhône, and nothing like the Deutschlandtakt is on the horizon enabling everywhere-to-everywhere travel.
• SNCF thinks like an airline and not like a railroad. It separates passengers into different buckets as airlines do, has many executives with airline background (and Spinetta is ex-Air France), thinks passengers do not ride trains for longer than 3 hours even though at 4 hours the modal split with air is still better than 50-50, and has poor integration between the TGV and legacy rail.
• SNCF still has a lot of accumulated debt from past operating losses, some predating the TGV and the start of regional subsidies for regional rail. It was hoped that TGV profits could cover them, but they can’t. This mirrors the controversy in Japan in the 1980s, where, in the breakup of JNR into the JRs and their privatization, debt from past operating losses was wiped but not debt from Shinkansen construction (see Privatization Best Practices, PDF-p. 106).

However, saying that the existing network is a failure is the domain of cranks and populists. It is unrecognizable from the discussion of transportation investments in France.

What O’Toole says about high-speed rail

O’Toole’s understanding of internal French (or Spanish, or Japanese) issues is weak. This isn’t surprising – Americans to a good approximation never have good insights on the internal issues of any other country, even when it speaks English. The American political sphere, which includes political thinktanks like Cato, is remarkably ignorant globally, and rather incurious. As a result, what he says about the TGV is based on an Americanized understanding. To wit:

Bus-rail competition

The Northeastern United States has a weak rail network: Amtrak averages vintage 1960s speeds and charges 2-4 times the per-km fare of the TGV. As a result, an ecosystem of private intercity buses has developed, starting with unregulated ones like Fung Wah and, as they were shut down, corporate systems like Megabus and Bolt. O’Toole is fond of these buses, with their lower fares and road-like lack of integration between infrastructure and operations.

And thus, he claims, falsely, that European high-speed rail cannibalized profitable buses. This is unrecognizable from within Europe, where intercity buses were underdeveloped until recently. In France, US-style intercity buses are called Macron buses, because the deregulation that brought them into existence passed in the mid-2010s, when Macron was the economy minister. They complement high-speed rail but do not replace it, because trains get me from Paris to the German border in 1:45 and buses don’t.

To be fair, TGV ridership has been stagnant in the last few years. But this stagnation goes back to the financial crisis, and if anything ridership picked up starting 2017 with the opening of the LGV Sud-Europe-Atlantique. So the buses are not even outcompeting the trains – they thrive in the gaps between them, just as historically they did on international routes, where rail fares are considerably higher and ridership lower.

High-speed rail construction costs

O’Toole looks at the most expensive few lines possible:

Britain’s 345‐​mile London–Scotland HS2 high‐​speed rail line was originally projected to cost £32.7 billion (about $123 million per mile) and is currently expected to cost £106 billion ($400 million per mile).

International comparisons of high-speed rail costs exist, and Britain’s costs are by far the worst. For example, a 2013 Australian comparison looking at the prospects for such a system in Australia finds that High-Speed 1/CTRL, the line linking the Channel Tunnel with London, cost A$134 million/km, and the second costliest line in the dataset was thee 94% tunneled Bologna-Florence line, at A$95 million/km.

French costs up until the LGV Bordeaux-Toulouse stood around $25-30 million per km in 2021 dollars, net of tunnels. German costs are similar, but German lines have far heavier tunneling than France, a range of 26-51% in tunnel compared with 0-6% in France. One reason is topography. But another is that Germany prefers mixed-use passenger-freight lines, which forces higher construction costs as freight requires gentler grades and, since superelevation must be lower, wider curves; France, like Japan and China, builds dedicated passenger lines, and, unlike Japan or China, keeps them largely at-grade to reduce costs. O’Toole says, without more references, that it would cost$3-4 trillion to build a US-wide high-speed rail network. But the official Obama-era crayon, at 20,000 km, would be $500 billion at tunnel-free European costs, or maybe$600 billion with 5% tunneling, mostly in difficult places like California and across the Appalachians.

Freeway costs

O’Toole proposes more freeways, and says that to build the Interstate system today would cost $530 billion so it’s better than high-speed rail. Here is where his lack of knowledge of the most recent literature on infrastructure costs is a serious drag on his analysis: Brooks-Liscow establish that there was a large real increase in Interstate cost throughout the life of the program, so a budget that’s really a mixture of cheaper early-1960s construction and more expensive construction in the 1970s is not applicable today. The same issue affects rail costs: the LGV Sud-Est cost, in today’s money, around$8 million/km, which cost would never recur. Brooks-Liscow explain this by greater surplus extraction from citizen voice groups, which demanded detours and route compromises raising costs. This appears true not just diachronically within the US but also synchronically across countries: so far, the low-cost subways we have investigated are all in states with bureaucratic rather than adversarial legalism, while medium-cost Germany is more mixed. Politicized demands leading to more tunneling are well-documented within Germany – the Berlin-Munich line was built through a topographically harder alignment in order to serve Erfurt, at Thuringia’s behest.

So no, today costs from the 1960s are not relevant. Today, urban motorway extensions cost double-digit millions of dollars per lane-km, sometimes more. The I-5 improvement project in Los Angeles is \$1.9 billion for I-5 South, a distance of 11 km, adding two lanes (one HOV, one mixed traffic) in each direction. It’s possible to go lower than this – in Madrid this budget would buy a longer 6-lane tunnel – but then in Madrid the construction costs of rail are even lower, for both metros and high-speed lines.

The discourse on profits

In contrast with the basic picture I outlined for the TGV, French media and researchers often point out threats to rail profitability. This can easily be taken to mean that the TGV is unprofitable, and if one has an American mindset, then it’s especially easy to think this. If SNCF officials say that 20% of TGVs lose money, then surely they must be hiding something and the figure is much higher, right? Likewise, if Spinetta says that the TGV network is profitable but not all trains are, then surely the situation is even worse, right?

But no. This is an Americanized interpretation of the debate. In the US, Amtrak is under constant pressure to show book profits, and its very existence is threatened, often by people who cite O’Toole and other libertarians. Thus, as a survival strategy, Amtrak pretends it is more profitable than it really is.

This has no bearing on the behavior of railroads elsewhere, though. SNCF is not so threatened. The biggest threat from the perspective of SNCF management is union demands for higher wages, and therefore, its incentive is to cry poverty. Nobody in France takes out yardsticks of farebox recovery ratios, and therefore, nobody needs to orient their communications around what would satisfy American libertarians.

Energy

Within the European high-speed rail research community, the energy efficiency of high-speed rail is well-understood, and many studies look at real-world examples, for example the metastudy of Hasegawa-Nicholson-Roberts-Schmid. In fact, it’s understood that high-speed rail has lower energy consumption than conventional rail. For example, here is García Álvarez’s paper on the subject. This is counterintuitive, because higher speeds should surely lead to higher energy consumption, as Hasegawa et al demonstrate – but high-speed lines run at a uniform speed of 200 or 250 or 300 or 350 km/h, whereas legacy rail has many cycles of acceleration and deceleration. At speeds of up to about 200 km/h, nearly all electricity consumption is in acceleration and not maintaining constant speed, and even at 300 km/h, a late-model high-speed train consumes only above one third of its maximum power maintaining speed.

Instead of this literature, O’Toole picks out the fact that all else being equal energy consumption rises in speed, which it is not equal. Garcia in fact points out that higher speeds are better for the environment due to better competition with air, in line with environmental consensus that trains are far superior on well-to-wheels emissions to cars and planes. Worse, O’Toole is citing Chester-Horvath’s lifecycle analysis, which is not favorable to California High-Speed Rail’s energy efficiency. The only problem is that this paper’s analysis relies on a unit conversion error between BTUs and kWh, pointed out by Clem Tillier. The paper was eventually corrected, and with the correct figures, high-speed rail looks healthy.

Competition with cars and planes

Where high-speed rail exists, and the distance is within a well-understood range of around 300-800 km, it dominates travel. A 2004 report by Steer Davies Gleave has some profiles of what were then the world’s main networks. For Japan, it includes a graphic from 1998 on PDF-p. 120 of modal splits by distance. In the 500-700 km bucket, a slight majority of trips all over Japan are made by rail; this is because Tokyo-Osaka is within that range, and due to those cities’ size this city pair dominates pairs where rail is weaker, especially inter-island ones. In the 300-500 km bucket more people drive, but the Shinkansen is stronger than this on the Tokyo-Nagoya pair, it’s just that 300-500 includes many more peripheral links with no high-speed rail service. It goes without saying that high-speed rail does not get any ridership where it does not exist.

In France, this was also studied for the LGV PACA. On p. 14, the presentation lists modal splits as of 2009. Paris-Toulon, a city pair where the TGV takes around 4 hours, has an outright majority for the TGV, with 54% of the market, compared with 12% for air and 34% for driving. Paris-Cannes is 34% and Paris-Nice is 30%, both figures on the high side for their 5:00-5:30 train trips. Lyon-Nice, a 3:30 trip with awful frequency thanks to SNCF’s poor interprovincial service, still has a 25% market share for the TGV.

In general, competition with cars is understudied. Competition with planes is much more prominent in the literature, with plenty of reports on air-rail modal splits by train trip length. JR East, Central (PDF-p. 4), and West all report such market shares, omitting road transport. Many European analyses appeared in the 2000s, for example by Steer Davies Gleave again in 2006, but the links have rotted and Eurostat’s link is corrupt.

O’Toole misunderstands this literature. He lumps all air and road links, even on markets where rail is weak, sometimes for geographical factors such as mountains or islands, sometimes for fixable institutional ones like European borders. In fact, at least measured in greenhouse gas emission and not ridership, all air travel growth in Europe since 1990 has been international. International high-speed rail exists in Europe but charges higher fares and the infrastructure for it is often not built, with slowdowns in border zones. This is a good argument for completing the international network in Europe and a terrible one against building any network at all.

Topography

Even at the level of basic topography, O’Toole makes elementary errors. He discusses the Tokaido Shinkansen, pointing out its factor-of-2 cost overrun. But its absolute costs were not high, which he characterizes as,

The Tokyo–Osaka high‐​speed rail line supposedly made money, but it was built across fairly flat territory

So, first of all, the “supposedly” bit is painful given how much JR Central prints money. But “fairly flat territory” is equally bad. Japan’s mountainous topography is not an obscure fact. It’s visible from satellite image. Per Japanese Wikipedia, 13% of the route is in tunnel, more than California High-Speed Rail.

The United States can and should do better

The report is on stronger grounds when criticizing specifics of Amtrak and California High-Speed Rail. American rail construction is just bad. However, this is not because rail is bad; it’s because the United States is bad.

And there’s the rub. Americans in politics can’t tell themselves that another country does something better than the US does. If it’s in other countries and the US can’t do it, it must be, as O’Toole calls rail, obsolete. This is especially endemic to libertarians, who are intellectually detached from their European right-liberal counterparts (Dutch VVD, German FDP, etc.) even more than the American center-left is from social democrats here and the right is from the mainline and extreme right here.

So here, faced with not too hard to find evidence that high-speed rail is profitable in Europe and Asia, and in fact intercity rail is profitable here in general (direct subsidies are forbidden by EU law unless the line is classified as regional), unlike in the United States, O’Toole makes up reasons why trains here are unprofitable or unsuccessful. He says things that are not so much wrong as unrecognizable, regarding topography, buses, construction costs, debt, the state of the TGV debate, or greenhouse gas emissions.

O’Toole is aware of our transit costs comparison. I imagine he’s also aware of high-speed rail cost comparisons, which exist in the literature – if he’s not, it’s because he doesn’t want to be so aware. And yet, no matter how loudly the evidence screams “the United States needs to become more like France, Germany, Japan, Spain, etc.,” American libertarians always find excuses why this is bad or unnecessary. And then, when it comes to expanding freeways, suddenly the cost concerns go out the door and they use unrealistically low cost figures.

But figuring out why the US is bad requires way deeper dives. It requires delving into the field and understanding how procurement is done differently, what is wrong with Amtrak, what is wrong with the California High-Speed Rail Authority, how engineering is done in low- and medium-cost countries, various tradeoffs for planning lead time, and so on. It requires turning into the kind of expert that libertarians have spent the last 60 years theorizing why they need not listen to (“public choice”). And it requires a lot of knowledge of internal affairs of successful examples, none of which is in an English-speaking country. So it’s easier to call this obsolete just because incurious Americans can’t do it.

# Modeling High-Speed Rail for Germany

I’ve used a ridership model to construct a proposal for American high-speed rail – but what about the country I live in? There’s an election this year and one of the contested issues is climate change, and with growing passenger rail advocacy, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that there will be a large federal investment in dedicated high-speed lines (“NBS”). So I think it’s useful to model what German intercity rail will look like if there is greater investment in NBSes, culminating in a nationwide network such that ICEs will spend nearly all the time on NBSes or occasionally heavily upgraded legacy lines (“ABS”) rather than on slower lines.

If anything, I’m more optimistic about this network on the 15-year horizon than about American high-speed rail. Germany is slowly building more lines, like Stuttgart-Ulm, with Ulm-Munich, Frankfurt-Mannheim, Hanover-Bielefeld, and Frankfurt-Fulda on the horizon. People are also studying the prospects of a more expansive map as part of Deutschlandtakt additions, but unfortunately many 200 km/h ABSes are considered good enough even if they’re in easy terrain for a 300 km/h NBS, like Berlin-Halle/Leipzig.

The model

The professional way to model ridership is to split the travel zone, in this case the entire country, into very small pieces. I’m instead going to use an approximation with metropolitan areas and divisions thereof. For an illustration of my model’s level of sophistication, see below:

The gravity model to use is approximately,

$\mbox{Ridership} = \mbox{Pop}_{A}^{0.8}\cdot\mbox{Pop}_{B}^{0.8}/\mbox{distance}^{2}$

The justification for the exponent 2 in the gravity model is that the elasticity of ridership with respect to trip times appears to be close to -2. The justification for the exponent 0.8 is that it empirically appears true when considering Japanese cities’ Shinkansen ridership to Tokyo; the reason for this is that metropolitan areas comprise many different subsections, and the ones farther from city center have longer effective trip time counting connection time to the train station, and larger metropolitan areas tend to have longer distance from the center to the edge.

In the linked paper, the elasticity remains -2 even at short distances. However, we’re going to assume a minimum distance below which the elasticity vanishes, to avoid predicting infinite ridership as distance goes to zero. If distance is expressed in km, the best-fit constant is 75,000, with populations and annual ridership both in millions, and then if there’s no minimum distance, the model predicts Frankfurt (with 4 million people) to Mannheim (2.8 million, 75 km away) has 92 million annual riders just between the two regions, which is utter nonsense. In Japan, ridership looks like the floor is 500 km. In Germany, I’m going to round this to 2.5 hours, and because in practice it’s a bit more than 500 km, I’m going to round the constant 0.3/2.5^2 down to 1.8. We thus get,

$\mbox{Ridership} = 1.8\cdot\mbox{Pop}_{A}^{0.8}\cdot\mbox{Pop}_{B}^{0.8}/\mbox{max}\{2.5, \mbox{time}\}^{2}$

The network

This is the current draft of what I think Germany should build:

This isn’t too different from past maps I made. Berlin-Hanover is 60 minutes on this map and not 75 as on previous maps; a nonstop Velaro Novo can do it in 60 minutes, and the projected ridership is high enough that a half-hourly stopping train for service to Wolfsburg is viable in addition to a core express service. The branch point in the Rhine-Ruhr is moved to Dortmund, which slightly slows down service to Cologne and requires more tunnels, but improves frequency to the system massively, since Dortmund is a connection point to regional trains. Göttingen-Erfurt is dropped – all it does is connect Hanover and Hamburg with Erfurt, which is very small, and speed up travel to Nuremberg and Munich by 30 minutes, which is interesting but not enough to justify 100 km of high-speed rail.

Frankfurt still has an awkward-looking loop, whose purpose is to permit trains from Mannheim to enter the central tunnel to be constructed from the east and then run through to Cologne. However, this may not be necessary – trains from Cologne to Mannheim could just as well skip Frankfurt Hbf, serving Frankfurt at the airport or at a new station to be constructed at Frankfurt Süd, analogous to Cologne-Deutz for north-south through-trains. The expected traffic level is so high that the hit to Cologne-Frankfurt frequency is not awful, and the network complexity added by the skip isn’t higher than that added by having Frankfurt-Mannheim trains enter the tunnel from both directions depending on onward destination.

The network trip times are expressed in multiples of 15 minutes, with some places where timed connections are desirable, such as Fulda between Berlin-Frankfurt and Hamburg-Munich trains. However, overall, the traffic density predicted by the model is so high that on the stronger lines, like Cologne-Frankfurt, the timetable would not look like an integrated timed transfer system but rather the more continuous rapid transit-style model seen in Japan.

The power of polycentricity

The 0.8 exponent in the formula for ridership means that if we get to divide a single metropolitan area into subregions, then its ridership will increase. This is only justifiable if trains serve all such subregions; if the trains only serve some subregions, then we have to subtract them out. When we analyze New York or Tokyo, we can’t just add up each part of the metropolitan area separately – if we do so we must remove unserved sections like Long Island or Chiba, and the effect turns out to be similar to just lumping the metro area together.

However, in the Rhine-Ruhr, trains do serve nearly all sections of the region. The shape of the network there is such that intercity trains will continue stopping at Dortmund, Bochum, Essen, Duisburg, Wuppertal, Dusseldorf, and Cologne, at a minimum. The only recognizable centers without stops are Bonn and Mönchengladbach, and Bonn is connected to Cologne by streetcar.

Dividing cities and counties that are in the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region into the influence zones of the seven cities with stops based on what is the closest, we get Dortmund with 1.8 million, Bochum with 0.5, Essen 2, Duisburg 1, Wuppertal 0.9, Dusseldorf 2.3 (2 if we subtract out Mönchengladbach), and Cologne 2.9. Adding them up with exponents 0.8 is equivalent to considering a monocentric metropolitan core of 18.1 million; if we subtract out Mönchengladbach, it’s 17.6 million. This is enormous – larger than Paris and London, where only one high-speed rail stop is possible per train.

This also means we need to separately consider domestic and international traffic. Randstad is polycentric as well, and at a minimum there should be stops at Utrecht (1 million), Amsterdam (2.5), and Rotterdam (3.5), which means the region acts like a monocentric region of 9 million. The upshot is that if there were a 300 km/h train connecting Utrecht with Dusseldorf and Cologne with onward connections at both ends, and fares were st at domestic ICE rates and not Thalys rates, the connection between the two conurbations alone would generate about 17 million passengers a year. Of course, the model thinks all trip times up to 2.5 hours are equivalent, and the most distant city pair, Rotterdam-Dortmund, would be perhaps 1:45, but onward connections to German cities like Mannheim, Stuttgart, and Hanover are all 2:30 or longer with a 300 km/h Dutch line, and so there are benefits to constructing such a line over running at lower speed within the Netherlands.

To the extent the Frankfurt-Mannheim region can be thought of as a polycentric megaregion, the same is true there. Frankfurt, by which I mean Hesse-Darmstadt minus Bergstrasse, is 3.7 million people; Mainz is 0.6; the Rhine-Neckar (including Bergstrasse) is 2.4 million; Karlsruhe is 1.1 million; Stuttgart is 2.5 million. The model thinks that these regions combined generate 25 million annual trips to the Rhine-Ruhr.

# Zoomers Day Trip to Bielefeld on the ICE

2033-04-01

There’s a rite of passage every year in Berlin of taking a day trip to Bielefeld, an hour and a half away by ICE, every 10 minutes. The idea is to be able to retort to aging millennials who joke that Bielefeld does not exist than they’ve actually been there.

The Abitur is coming soon, and 12th-grade students are supposed to study, but Adam Mansour, Katja Brühl, Max Kleinert, and Nora Martinek are going in Bielefeld. It is not the best day to travel. Friday is a school day, even if it’s short enough it ended at 13:30, and it’s also a popular travel day so the tickets were a bit more expensive, and Adam had to convince his parents it’s worth spending 80€ and all the Germans do it. But at least today it means they don’t have to wake up at 7:00 tomorrow.

On the train going west, Katja keeps complaining about how the train bypasses Magdeburg because of 1980s-90s politics. She says she was looking for labor-related museums in Bielefeld but couldn’t find any; instead, she talks about how the mayor of Hanover is leading a red-black coalition and it’s not the SPD that she’s voting for in September or the SPD that subsidized childcare in Berlin that let her parents afford to have children.

The other three don’t find her annoying. Max and Nora come from much wealthier families, and Nora’s is scratching 10,000€/month, but when Katja talks about how thanks to education reforms pushed on the Länder by the Green-led federal government she could go to the same school as them, they don’t feel either attacked or guilty. They feel happy that they know her and Adam. They listen to what she says about Jusos and housing, the EU, feminism, or comprehensive schools, and it clicks with them because it’s their world too. They know that there are people who resent that the cities are growing faster and associate immigration with social problems; but they associate immigration with Adam’s parents, or with Nora, who only moved to Germany when she was five but who nobody ever calls an immigrant. Adam, in turn, does get called a Syrian immigrant, even though he was born in Germany, his parents having arrived just before the 2015 wave.

There are some American tourists on the train, talking about how pretty Germany is and how they wished the United States could have such a system. Max leans forward and says, “every time they’re on a train, they talk just about the train,” figuring circumlocutions because the Americans might recognize the German word Amerikaner and realize he is talking about them. Nora and Katja giggle, and Adam then joins too.

Otherwise, they try to distract themselves by talking about the exams and about university plans. All plan to go, and all have been told by teachers that they should get good enough grades to go where they want, but Max wants to study medicine and needs to get a 1.0 to get past the numerus clausus. “Do you want me to test you?” Adam asks him.

“Lol.”

They are all competitive about grades, even Katja, who told them once that neoliberal models of academic competition promoted inequality, and the Greens should do more to prevent what she calls the Americanization of German education. But Max told them when they planned the trip last week that he was treating it as his vacation day when he wouldn’t need to think about school.

Getting off the train, they start walking toward city hall; Bielefeld doesn’t have a bikeshare system, unlike Berlin, and bringing a bike on the ICE is not allowed. Adam insists on stopping on the way and taking detours to photograph buildings; most aren’t architecturally notable, but they’re different from how Berlin looks.

They run to the Natural History Museum and the Kunsthalle. The museum closes at 17:00 and they have less than an hour, then less an hour at the Kunsthalle until it closes at 18:00. They furiously photograph exhibits when they don’t have enough time to look at them and talk about them.

Adam is especially frantic at the archeology section, just because of the reminder of what he is giving up. He has read a lot of popular history and for the longest time wanted to go study it, but felt like he wouldn’t be able to get work with a humanistic degree and instead went for the real stream at school. When he met Katja two years ago he felt like this choice was confirmed – Katja for all her political interests is going to study environmental engineering and at no point expressed doubt about it.

Max spits on the Richard Kaselowsky memorial when the staff isn’t looking, distracted by other customers. In Berlin he might not even do this, but in Bielefeld he wouldn’t mind getting thrown out of a museum if worst came to worst. Nora and Adam didn’t know the history so as they go in he tells them Kaselowsky was a Nazi and so was the museum’s founder Rudolf Oetker, and the Oetker heirs had to return a few items that may have been stolen from Jewish owners in the Holocaust.

They find a döner place with good reviews and good falafel for Katja and are eating there. Normally they’d go out and get different things in Berlin, but Bielefeld is still a small city and even with Germany’s rapid immigration in the 2020s it doesn’t have Berlin’s majority-migration-background demographics.

Where they’re sitting overlooks the pedestrianized streets of the old city. There are some bikes, some pedestrians, some walking delivery drones. Berlin has a few of these zones within the Ring but they’re not contiguous and Bild accuses the Greens of promoting car-free zones for everyone except the federal government.

They talk about where they want to go, but Max and Katja are hesitant to publicly say what they feel about where they are. It’s Nora who openly says that she’s having fun and that Bielefeld definitely exists no matter what her parents say, but she wouldn’t want to live here. She doesn’t know if she wants to stay in Berlin – she wants to go to TU Munich, partly to see more places, partly because of some parental pressure to leave home – but Bielefeld feels a little too dörferlich.

They all laugh, and Adam says that judging by how his parents describe Daraa, it was a lot smaller than this. He says that they didn’t ever describe Daraa as especially lively, and always compared it negatively with Berlin when he was young and then eventually they just stopped talking about it, it stopped being important to them. Max and Katja nod and start comparing Bielefeld to parts of Germany they know well through extended family – Max’s father is from Münster and his mother’s family is in Göttingen and Hamburg, Katja’s parents are both from Berlin but her mother has family in Fürstenwalde.

And then somehow it drifts back to the election. Katja is worried the Union might win the election this time, stop free work migration, and freeze the carbon taxes at present levels. Adam doesn’t have family left in Syria but they have a few classmates who have family in India, in Vietnam, in Turkey. For the most part things are okay, but there’s always the occasional teacher or group of students who still think Neukölln and Gesundbrunnen are bad neighborhoods; they know who to avoid because people who are racist always find something negative to say to Adam specifically.

But for now, they have one another, and they have exams to score highly on to move on and go to university, and they have two hours to kill in Bielefeld until the ICE train they booked in advance departs to take them back home.