Category: New York

Why is Janno Lieber Constantly Blaming Other People for Problems?

The Editorial Board posted an interview with MTA head Janno Lieber about sundry public transit-related issues. His answers for the most part aren’t bad until he gets to construction costs (and misgenders me), but alongside other recent news about Penn Station Access, they reveal a pattern: Lieber loves blaming other people for problems – nothing is ever the MTA’s fault, everything is someone else’s fault. Nor is he curious about acquiring expertise, to the point that everything is defensive, and everything is about reducing transparency and accountability. Someone like this should not be heading a public transit agency.

Penn Station Access

Penn Station Access, the project to run Metro-North trains from New Rochelle to Penn Station via the Hell Gate Line currently used only by Amtrak, was announced earlier this month to be delayed by a further two years, from 2028 to 2030. The MTA blames Amtrak, which owns most of the line, for not giving it enough work windows.

And, excuse me, but this is bullshit for two separate reasons. The first is that the opening date was said to be 2027 until this year and then 2028. Other people made plans based on MTA announcements; quite a lot of behind-the-scenes advocacy was designed specifically around this date. The state was among those other people: in March, it decided to buy new battery-powered locomotives, each costing $23.45 million (about the same as an eight-car EMU set), on the grounds that it would take too long to acquire new EMUs that were compatible with the different electrification systems used on the line. It’s not at all hard to get new EMUs compatible with both the 12 kV 60 Hz electrification used on most of the line and the 12 kV 25 Hz system used in the last few km into Penn Station based on current New York lead times if the project opens in 2030. But the state made a decision based on the assumption it would need this well before 2030.

In other words, the MTA only discovered that there would be Amtrak-induced delays around two and a half years before planned opening for a project that had been going on for three years and approved for six – and now it’s blaming it on Amtrak instead of on its own poor project management and lack of transparency.

The second reason it’s bullshit is that the relationship between Amtrak and the MTA is mutually abusive. Amtrak is not giving the MTA enough work windows on the Hell Gate Line; the MTA is slowing down Amtrak trains on the New Haven Line between New Rochelle and New Haven, where it owns the tracks, the only part of the Northeast Corridor that is both owned and dispatched by a commuter railroad and not Amtrak (in Massachusetts the MBTA owns the tracks but Amtrak controls dispatching). The maximum allowed cant deficiency on Metro-North territory is based on unmodernized Metro-North values and not based on the modern values that Amtrak rolling stock has been tested for, and there is no attempt to keep Amtrak and Metro-North trains separate east of Stamford, where there are four tracks and light enough traffic that it’s possible, that the top speeds can have a mismatch.

In other words, the MTA complains about being abused by Amtrak, and is likely correct, but refuses to stop abusing Amtrak where it does have control. It could manage this relationship better, but it doesn’t and Lieber isn’t competent enough to know how to do it better.

Fares

The conversation in The Editorial Board heavily features talking about fares, in context of fare evasion and mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani’s proposal for free buses. Lieber is suggesting that instead of free buses, buses can have all-door boarding without free fares, unlocking the speed benefits without forgoing the revenue. He’s right and I want to sympathize with his critique of free buses. But it was Lieber who scuttled plans by Andy Byford to install back-door OMNY card readers and enable all-door boarding without free fares. He calls for all-door boarding as an alternative to free buses now, but when all-door boarding was available as an internally developed plan, he killed it.

He speaks about Europe this and Europe that in the interview, but he’s too ignorant and incurious to understand how things go here and how we make all-door boarding work with proof-of-payment. And the best way to see that is his abominable line, “had a kid who did a semester abroad in Stockholm, and you see them all over in Europe.” That’s his only reference – his kid did a semester abroad. He didn’t ring up any transit agency to ask how to do it. It’s all superficial, almost tourist-level understanding of better-run systems.

This is especially bad in context of what he says about construction costs at the end. He says,

I don’t accept the Alon Levy theory, which, you know, you’re articulating — that somehow, if we just had like this massive in-house force, we would be building everything way, way cheaper. That’s like, hiring— you cannot compete with private-sector engineering. And we don’t have one project after another, like he loves, like Madrid, which built all these subways in a row.

Setting aside the fact that calling me “he” in New York, a city with better access to gender-neutral bathrooms than my own, is obnoxious, we didn’t do a report on Madrid, but did do one on Stockholm. He’s aware of the report (and of the points it makes about ridership per station, the excuse he uses farther down the line for bigger stations). And he still reduces Stockholm to where his kid did a one-semester study abroad to give a little anecdote on fare evasion, which boils down to Americans being so detached from internal national discourses in Europe (except maybe the UK) that they don’t know that we’ve had to deal with the same questions they did, we just have public agencies run by competent people who sometimes make the right decisions and not by people like Janno Lieber.

Reverse-Branching on Commuter Rail

Koji asked me 3.5 days ago about why my proposal for New York commuter rail through-tunnels has so much reverse-branching. I promised I’d post in some more detail, because in truth, reverse-branching is practically inevitable on every commuter rail system with multiple trunk lines, even systems that are rather metro-like like the RER or the S-Bahns here and in Hamburg.

Berlin S-Bahn schematic. Source: Wikipedia.

This doesn’t mean that reverse-branches, in this case the split from the Görlitzer Bahn trunk toward the Stadtbahn via S9 and the Ring in two different directions via S45/46/47 and S8/85, are good. It would be better if Berlin invested in turning this trunk into a single trunk into city center, provided it were ready to build a third through-city line (in fact, it is, but this project, S21, essentially twins the North-South Tunnel). However, given the infrastructure or small changes to it, the current situation is unavoidable.

Moreover, the current situation is not the end of the world. The reasons such reverse-branches are not good for the health of the system are as follows:

  • They often end up creating more frequency outside city center than toward it.
  • If there is too much interlining, then delays on one branch cascade to the others, making the system more fragile.
  • If there is too much interlining, then it’s harder to write timetables that satisfy every constraint of a merge point, even before we take delays into account.

All of these issues are more pressing on a metro system than on a commuter rail system. The extent of branching on commuter rail is such that running each line as a separate system is unrealistic; tight timetabling is required no matter what, and in that case, the lines could reverse-branch if there’s no alternative without much loss of capacity. The S-Bahn here is notoriously unreliable, but that’s the case even without cascading delays on reverse-branches – the system just assumes more weekend shutdowns, less reliable systems (28,000 annual elevator outages compared with 1,800 on the similar-size U-Bahn), and worse maintenance practices.

So, on the one hand, the loss from reverse-branching is reduced. On the other hand, it’s harder to avoid reverse-branching on commuter rail. The reason is that, unlike a metro (including a suburban metro), the point of the system is to use old commuter lines and connect them to form a usable urban and suburban service. Because the system relies on old lines more, it’s less likely that they’re at the right places for good connections. In the case of Berlin, it’s that there’s an east-west imbalance that forces some east-center-east lines via S8, which was reinforced by the context of the Cold War and the Wall.

In the case of New York, consider this map:

The issue is that too much traffic wants to use the Northeast Corridor lines in both New Jersey and Connecticut. Therefore, it’s not possible to segregate everything, with lines using the preexisting North River Tunnels and the new Gateway tunnels having to share tracks. It’s not optimal, but it’s what’s possible.

Transit-Oriented Development and Rail Capacity

Hayden Clarkin, inspired by the ongoing YIMBYTown conference in New Haven, asks me about rail capacity on transit-oriented development, in a way that reminds me of Donald Shoup’s critique of trip generation tables from the 2000s, before he became an urbanist superstar. The prompt was,

Is it possible to measure or estimate the train capacity of a transit line? Ie: How do I find the capacity of the New Haven line based on daily train trips, etc? Trying to see how much housing can be built on existing rail lines without the need for adding more trains

To be clear, Hayden was not talking about the capacity of the line but about that of trains. So adding peak service beyond what exists and is programmed (with projects like Penn Station Access) is not part of the prompt. The answer is that,

  1. There isn’t really a single number (this is a trip generation question).
  2. Moreover, under the assumption of status quo service on commuter rail, development near stations would not be transit-oriented.

Trip generation refers to the formula connecting the expected car trips generated by new development. It, and its sibling parking generation, is used in transportation planning and zoning throughout the United States, to limit development based on what existing and planned highway capacity can carry. Shoup’s paper explains how the trip and parking generation formulas are fictional, fitting a linear curve between the size of new development and the induced number of car trips and parked cars out of extremely low correlations, sometimes with an R^2 of less than 0.1, in one case with a negative correlation between trip generation and development size.

I encourage urbanists and transportation advocates and analysts to read Shoup’s original paper. It’s this insight that led him to examine parking requirements in zoning codes more carefully, leading to his book The High Cost of Free Parking and then many years of advocacy for looser parking requirements.

I bring all of this up because Hayden is essentially asking a trip generation question but on trains, and the answer there cannot be any more definitive than for cars. It’s not really possible to control what proportion of residents of new housing in a suburb near a New York commuter rail stop will be taking the train. Under current commuter rail service, we should expect the overwhelming majority of new residents who work in Manhattan to take the train, and the overwhelming majority of new residents who work anywhere else to drive (essentially the only exception is short trips on commuter rail, for example people taking the train from suburbs past Stamford to Stamford; those are free from the point of view of train capacity). This is comparable mode choice to that in the trip and parking generation tables, driven by an assumption of no alternative to driving, which is correct in nearly all of the United States. However, figuring out the proportion of new residents who would be commuting to Manhattan and thus taking the train is a hard exercise, for all of the following reasons:

  • The great majority of suburbanites do not work in the city. For example, in the Western Connecticut and Greater Bridgeport Planning Regions, more or less coterminous with Fairfield County, 59.5% of residents work within one of these two regions, and only 7.4% work in Manhattan as of 2022 (and far fewer work in the Outer Boroughs – the highest number, in Queens, is 0.7%). This means that every new housing unit in the suburbs, even if it is guaranteed the occupant works in Manhattan, generates demand for more destinations within the suburb, such as retail and schools.
  • The decision of a city commuter to move to the suburbs is not driven by high city housing prices. The suburbs of New York are collectively more expensive to live in than the city, and usually the ones with good commuter rail service are more expensive than other suburbs. Rather, the decision is driven by preference for the suburbs. This means that it’s hard to control where the occupant of new suburban housing will work purely through TOD design characteristics such as proximity to the station, streets with sidewalks, or multifamily housing.
  • Among public transportation users, what time of day they go to work isn’t controllable. Most likely they’d commute at rush hour, because commuter rail is marginally usable off-peak, but it’s not guaranteed, and just figuring the proportion of new users who’d be working in Manhattan at rush hour is another complication.

All of the above factors also conspire to ensure that, under the status quo commuter rail service assumption, TOD in the suburbs is impossible except perhaps ones adjacent to the city. In a suburb like Westport, everyone is rich enough to afford one car per adult, and adding more housing near the station won’t lower prices by enough to change that. The quality of service for any trip other than a rush hour trip to Manhattan ranges from low to unusable, and so the new residents would be driving everywhere except their Manhattan job, even if they got housing in a multifamily building within walking distance of the train station.

This is a frustrating answer, so perhaps it’s better to ask what could be modified to ensure that TOD in the suburbs of New York became possible. For this, I believe two changes are required:

  • Improvements in commuter rail scheduling to appeal to the growing majority of off-peak commuters as well as to non-commute trips. I’ve written about this repeatedly as part of ETA but also the high-speed rail project for the Transit Costs Project.
  • Town center development near the train station to colocate local service functions there, including retail, a doctor’s office and similar services, a library, and a school, with the residential TOD located behind these functions.

The point of commercial and local service TOD is to concentrate destinations near the train station. This permits trip chaining by transit, where today it is only viable by car in those suburbs. This also encourages running more connecting bus service to the train station, initially on the strength of low-income retail workers who can’t afford a car, but then as bus-rail connections improve also for bus-rail commuters. The average income of a bus rider would remain well below that of a driver, but better service with timed connections to the train would mean the ridership would comprise a broader section of the working class rather than just the poor. Similarly, people who don’t drive on ideological or personal disability grounds could live in a certain degree of comfort in the residential TOD and walk, and this would improve service quality so that others who can drive but sometimes choose not to could live a similar lifestyle.

But even in this scenario of stronger TOD, it’s not really possible to control train capacity through zoning. We should expect this scenario to lead to much higher ridership without straining capacity, since capacity is determined by the peak and the above outline leads to a community with much higher off-peak rail usage for work and non-work trips, with a much lower share of its ridership occurring at rush hour (New York commuter rail is 67-69%, the SNCF part of the RER and Transilien are about 46%, due to frequency and TOD quality). But we still have no good way of controlling the modal choice, which is driven by personal decisions depending on local conditions of the suburb, and by office growth in the city versus in the suburbs.

Timetable Padding Practices

Two weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal wrote this piece about our Northeast Corridor report. Much of it was based on a series of interviews William Boston did with me, explaining what the main needs on the corridor are. One element stands out since the MTA responded to what I was saying about schedule padding – I talk about how Amtrak and Metro-North both pad the timetables on the Northeast Corridor by about 25%, turning a technical travel time of an hour into 1:15 (best practices are 7%), and in response, the MTA said that they pad their schedules 10% and not 7%. This is an incorrect understanding of timetable padding, which speaks poorly to the competence of the schedule planners and managers at Metro-North.

The article says,

Aaron Donovan, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, says the extra time built into Metro-North schedules generally averages 10%, depending on destination and length of trips, and takes into account routine track maintenance and capital work that can increase runtime. Metro-North continually reviews models, signal timing, equipment, and other elements of operation to improve travel times and reliability for customers, he says.

This is, to be clear, incorrect. Metro-North routinely recovers longer delays than 10%; delay recovery on the New Haven Line can reach well over 20 minutes out of a nominally two-hour trip, around 25% of the unpadded trip length. The reason this is incorrect isn’t that Donovan is dishonest or incompetent (he is neither of these two things), but almost certainly that the planners he spoke with genuinely believe they only pad 10%, because they, like all American railroaders, do not know how modern rail scheduling is done.

Modern rail scheduling practices in the higher-reliability parts of Europe and Japan start with the technical timetable, based on the actual speed zones and trains’ performance characteristics. This includes temporary speed restrictions. The ideal maintenance regime does not use them, instead relying on regular nighttime maintenance windows during which all tracks are out of service. However, temporary restrictions may exist if a line is taken out of service and trains are rerouted along a slower route, which is regrettably common in Germany. Modern signaling systems are capable of incorporating temporary speed restrictions – this is in fact a core requirement for American positive train control (PTC), since American maintenance practices rely on extensive temporary restrictions for work zones and one-off slowdowns. If the signal system knows the exact speed zones on each section of track, then so can the schedule planners.

The schedule contingency figure is computed relative to the best technical schedule. It is not computed relative to any assumption of additional delays due to dispatch holds or train congestion. The 7% figure used in Switzerland, Sweden, and the Netherlands takes care of the high levels of congestion on key urban segments.

The core urban networks in these countries stack favorably with Metro-North in track utilization. The Hirschengraben Tunnel in Zurich runs 18 S-Bahn trains per hour in each direction most of the day and 20 at rush hour with some extra S20 runs, and the Weinberg Tunnel runs 8 S-Bahn trains per hour and if I understand the network graphic right 7.5 additional intercities per hour. I urge people to go look at the graphic and try tracking down the lines just to see how extensively branched and reverse-branched they are; this is not a simple network, and delays would propagate. The reason the Swiss rail network is so punctual is that, unlike American rail planning, it integrates infrastructure and timetable development. This means many things, but what is relevant here is that it analyzes where delays originate and how they propagate, and focuses investments on these sections, grade-separating problematic flat junctions if possible and adding pocket tracks if not.

Were I to only take timetable padding into account relative to an already more tolerant schedule incorporating congestion and signaling limitations, I would cite much lower figures for timetable padding. Switzerland speaks of a uniform 7% pad, but in Sweden the figures include two components, a percentage (taking care of, among other things, suboptimal driver behavior) and a fixed number of minutes per 100 km, which at current intercity speeds resolve to 7% as in Switzerland. But relative to the technical trip time, the pad factors based on both observed timetable recovery and actual calculations on current speed zones are in the 20-30% range, and not 10%.

Of course, at no point do I suggest that Metro-North and Amtrak could achieve 7% right now, through just writing more aggressive timetables. To achieve Swiss, Dutch, and Swedish results, they would need Swiss, Dutch, or Swedish planning quality, which is sorely lacking at both railroads. They would need to write better timetables – not just more aggressive ones but also simpler ones: Metro-North’s 13 different stopping patterns on New Haven Line trains out of 16 main line peak trains per hour should be consolidated to 2. This is key to the plan – the only way Northern Europe makes anything work is with fairly rigid clockface timetables, so that one hour or half-hour is repeated all day, and conflicts can be localized to be at the same place every time.

Then they would need to invest based on reliability. Right now, the investment plans do not incorporate the timetable, and one generally forward-thinking planner found it odd that the NEC report included both high-level infrastructure proposals and proposed timetables to the minute. In the United States, that’s not the normal practice – high-level plans only discuss high-level issues, and scheduling is considered a low-level issue to be done only after the concrete is completed. In Northern European countries with competently-run railways and also in Germany, the integration of the timetable and infrastructure is so complete that draft network graphics indicating complete timetables of every train to the minute are included in the proposal phase, before funding is committed. In Switzerland, such a timetable is available before the associated infrastructure investments go to referendum.

Under current American planning, the priorities for Metro-North are in situ bridge replacements in Connecticut because their maintenance costs are high even by Metro-North’s already very expensive standards. But under good planning, the priority must be grade-separating Shell Interlocking (CP 216) just south of New Rochelle, currently a flat junction between trains bound for Grand Central and ones bound for Penn Station. The flat junctions to the branches in Connecticut need to be evaluated for grade-separation as well, and I believe the innermost, to the New Canaan Branch, needs to be grade-separated due to its high traffic while the ones to the two farther out branches can be kept flat.

None of this is free, but all of this is cheap by the standards of what the MTA is already spending on Penn Station Access for Metro-North. The rewards are substantial: 1:17 trip times from New Haven to Grand Central making off-peak express stops, down from 2 hours today. The big ask isn’t money – the entire point of the report is to figure out how to build high-speed rail on a tight budget. Rather, the big ask is changing the entire planning paradigm of intercity and commuter rail in the United States from reactive to proactive, from incremental to comfortable with groun-up redesigns, from stuck in the 1950s to ready for the transportation needs of the 21st century.

Second Avenue Subway Phase 2 Station Design is Incompetent

A few hours ago, the MTA presented on the latest of Second Avenue Subway Phase 2. The presentation includes information about the engineering and construction of the three stations – 106th, 116th, and 125th Streets. The new designs are not good, and the design of 116th in particular betrays severe incompetence about how modern subway stations are built: the station is fairly shallow, but has a mezzanine under the tracks, with all access to or from the station requiring elevator-only access to the mezzanine.

What was in the presentation?

Here is a selection of slides, describing station construction. 106th Street is to be built cut-and-cover; 116th is to use preexisting construction but avoid cut-and-cover to reach them from the top and instead mine access from the bottom; 125th is to be built deep-level, with 125′ deep (38 m) platforms, underneath its namesake street between Lexington and Park Avenues.

The problems with 116th Street

Elevator-only access

Elevator-only access is usually stupid. It’s especially stupid when it’s at a shallow station; as the page 19 slide above shows, the platforms are about 11.5 meters below ground, which is an easy depth for both stair and escalator access.

Now, to be clear, there are elevator-only stations built in countries with reasonable subway construction programs. Sofia on Nya Tunnelbanan is elevator-only, because it is 100 meters below street level, due to the difficult topography of Södermalm and Central Stockholm, in which Sofia, 26 meters above sea level, is right next to Riddarfjärden, 23 meters deep. Emergency access is provided via ramps to the sea-level freeway hugging the north shore of Södermalm, used to construct the mined cavern in the first place. Likewise, the Barcelona L9 construction program, by far the most expensive in Spain and yet far cheaper than in any recent English-speaking country, has elevator-only access to the deep stations, in order to avoid any construction outside a horizontal or vertical tunnel boring machine.

The depth excuse does not exist in East Harlem. 11.5 meters is not an elevator-only access depth. It’s a stair access depth with elevators for wheelchair accessibility. Stairs are planned to be provided only for emergency access, without public usage. Under NFPA 130 the stairs are going to have to have enough capacity for full trains, much more than is going to be required in ordinary service, and they’d lead passengers to the same street as the elevators, nothing like the freeway egress of Sofia.

Below-platform mezzanines

To avoid any shallow construction, the mezzanines will be built below the platforms and not above them. As a result, access to the station means going down a level and then going back up to the platform level. In effect, the station is going to behave as a rather deep station as far as passenger access time to the platforms is concerned: the planned depth is 57′, or 17.4 meters, which means that the total vertical change from street level is around 23.5 meters, twice the actual depth of the platforms.

Dig volume

Even with the reuse of existing infrastructure, the station is planned to have too much space north and south of the platforms, as seen with the locations of the ancillary buildings.

I think that this is due to designs from the 2000s, when the plan was to build all stations with extensive back-of-the-house space on both sides of the platform. Phase 1 was built this way, as we cover in our New York case, and after we yelled at the MTA about it, it eventually shrank the footprint of the stations. 116th’s station start and end are four blocks apart, a total of about 300 meters, comparable to 86th Street; the platform is 186 m wide and the station overall has no reason to be longer than 190-200. But it’s possible the locations of the ancillary buildings were fixed from before the change, in which case the incompetence is not of the current leadership but of previous leadership.

Why?

On Bluesky, I’m seeing multiple activists I think well of assume that this is because the MTA is under pressure to either cut costs or avoid adverse community impact. Neither of these explanations makes much sense in context. 106th Street is planned to be built cut-and-cover, in the same neighborhood as 116th, with the same street width, which rules out the community opposition explanation. Cut-and-cover is cheaper than alternatives, which also rules out the cost explanation.

Rather, what’s going on is that MTA leadership does not know how a modern cut-and-cover subway station looks like. American construction prefers to avoid cut-and-cover even for stations, and over time such stations have been laden with things that American transit managers think are must-haves (like those back-of-the-house spaces) and that competent transit managers know they don’t need to build. They may want to build cut-and-cover, as at 106th, but as soon as there’s a snag, they revert to form and look for alternatives. They complain about utility relocation costs, which are clearly not blocking this method at 106th, and which did not prevent Phase 1’s 96th Street from costing about 2/3 as much as 86th and 72nd per cubic meter dug.

Under pressure to cut costs and shrink the station footprint, the MTA panicked and came up with the best solution the political appointees, that is to say Janno Lieber and Jamie Torres-Springer and their staff, and the permanent staff that they deign to listen to, could do. Unfortunately for New York, their best is not good enough. They don’t know how to build good stations – there are no longer any standardized designs for this that they trust, and the people who know how to do this speak English with an accent and don’t earn enough to command the respect of people on a senior American political appointee’s salary. So they improvise under pressure, and their instincts, both at doing things themselves and at supervising consultants, are not good. To Londoners, Andy Byford is a workhorse senior civil servant, with many like him, and the same is true in other large European cities with large subway systems. But to Americans, the such a civil servant is a unicorn to the point that people came to call him Train Daddy, because this is what he’s being compared with.

The Danbury Branch and Rail Modernization

I’ve been asked to talk about how rail modernization programs, like the high-speed rail plan we published at Marron this month, affect the Danbury Branch of the New Haven Line. The proposal barely talks about branch modernization beyond saying that the branches should be electrified; we didn’t have time to write precise branch timetables, which means that the timetable I’m going to post here is going to have more rounding artifacts. The good news is that modernization can be done cheaply, piggybacking on required work on the main of the New Haven Line.

Current conditions

The Danbury Branch is a 38 km single-track unelectrified line, connecting South Norwalk with Danbury making six additional intermediate stops. All stations have high platforms, but they are short, ranging between three and six cars.

Ridership is essentially unidirectional: toward Norwalk and New York in the morning, back north in the afternoon. There is little job concentration near the stations. Within 1 km of Danbury there are only 5,000 jobs per OnTheMap, rising to 10,000 if we include Danbury Hospital, which is barely outside the station’s 1 km radius (but is not easily walkable from it). Merritt 7 is in an office park, but there are only 6,000 jobs there, and nearly everyone drives. The other stations are parking lots, and Bethel is somewhat outside the town center for better parking.

The right-of-way is very curvy, much more so than the main line. Where most of the New Haven Line is built to a standard of 2° curves (radius 873 m), permitting 157 km/h with modern cant and cant deficiency, the Danbury Branch scarcely has a section straight enough with gentler curves than 3°, and much of it has such frequent 4° curves that trains cannot go faster than 100 km/h except for speedups of a few seconds at a time to recover delays.

A first pass on infrastructure and operations

It is effectively free to electrify a 38 km single-track line. The high-speed rail report estimates it at $75 million based on both European electrification costs (see report for sources) and the Southern Transcon proposal, which is $2 million/km on a busy double-track line. The junction between the branch and the main line is flat, but outbound trains can be timetabled to avoid conflict, and inbound trains have no at-grade conflict to begin with. If platform lengthening is desired, then it is a noticeable extra expense; figure $30 million for each eight-car platform, or perhaps half that on single track (but then some stops are double-track), maybe with some pro-rating for existing platforms if they can be easily reused.

The tracks should also be maintained to higher speed, which is a routine application of a track laying machine, with some weekend closures for construction followed by what should be an uninterrupted multidecade period of operations. The curves are already superelevated to a maximum of 5-6″; this is less than the 7″ maximum in US law (180 mm here), but the difference is not massive. The line has a 50 mph speed limit today for the most part, whereas it can be boosted to about 100-110 km/h depending on section, a smaller difference than taking the main line’s 70 mph and turning it into 150-160 km/h.

With a blanket speed limit of 110 km/h – in truth some sections need to dip down to 100 or even less whereas the Bethel-Danbury and Merritt 7-Wilton interstations can be done mostly at 130 – the trip time between South Norwalk and Danbury is, inclusive of 7% pad, 28.75 minutes. The Northeast Corridor report timetables have express New Haven Line commuter trains arriving South Norwalk southbound at :15.25 every 20 minutes and departing northbound at :14.75, so they’d be departing Danbury at :46.5 and arriving :43.5. Meets would occur at the :20, :30, and :40 points.

The :30 point, important as it is a meet even if service is reduced to every 30 minutes, is just south of Branchville, likely too far to use the existing meet at the station. Thus, at first pass, some additional double-tracking is needed, a total of 6 km if it covers the entire Cannondale-Branchville interstation, which would cost around $50 million at MBTA Franklin Line costs. MBTA Franklin Line costs are likely an underestimate, since the terrain on the Cannondale-Branchville interstation is hillier and some additional earthworks would be required on part of the section. A high-end estimate should be the cost of a high-speed rail line without elevated or tunneled segments, around $30 million/km or even less (cut-and-fill isn’t needed as much when the line curves with the topography), say $150 million.

The :20 point southbound is at or just south of Bethel. While this is in a built-up area, the right-of-way looks wide enough for two tracks and the topography is easier; if the station is the meet, then the cost is effectively zero, bundled into a platform lengthening project. Potentially, this could even be further bundled with moving the station slightly south to be closer to the town center. The :40 point southbound is at Merritt 7, which has room for a second track but not necessarily for a platform at it, and could instead get a second track on the opposite side of the platform if there’s enough of a rebuild to turn it into an island with additional vertical circulation; the cost of the second track itself would be a rounding error but the cost of station reconstruction would not be and would likely be in the mid-tens of millions.

How this fits into the broader system

The timetable in the report already assumes that New Haven Line service comprises 6 peak trains per hour (tph) that use the branches. The default assumption, reproduced in the service network graphic, is that New Canaan and Danbury get 3 tph each, and New Canaan gets a grade-separated junction but Danbury does not. Those trains all go to Grand Central with no through-running: only the local trains on the New Haven Line get to run through, since local trains are the highest priority for through-running. If a tunnel connecting the Gateway tunnel with Grand Central is opened, as in some long-term plans (here’s ETA’s, which isn’t very different from past blog posts’), then they can run through to it.

The establishment of this service is not going to, by itself, change the characteristic of ridership on the line. Electrification, better timetabling, and better rolling stock (in this order) can reduce the trip time from an hour today to 29 minutes, and the trip time to Grand Central from about 2:25 to 1:09, but the main effect would be to greatly improve the connectivity of existing users, who’d be driving to the parking lot stations more often, perhaps working from the office more and from home less, or taking the train to social events in the city. Some would opt to use the train to get to work at Stamford, as a secondary market. Over time, I expect that people would buy in the area to commute to work in New York (or at Stamford), but housing permit rates in Fairfield County are low and only limited TOD is likely. It would take concerted commercial TOD at the stations to produce reverse-peak ridership, likely starting with expanding the Merritt 7 office park and making it a bit less auto-oriented.

If the ridership isn’t there, then a train every 20 minutes is not warranted and only a train every 30 minutes should be provided. This reduces the double-track infrastructure requirement but only marginally, as the meets that are no longer needed are the easy ones and the one that still is is the hard one to build, south of Branchville. In effect, something like 80% of the cost provides two thirds of the capacity; this is common to rail projects, in that small cuts in an already optimized budget lead to much larger cuts in benefits, the opposite of what one hopes to achieve when optimizing cuts.

The Problems of not Killing Penn Expansion and of Tariffs

Penn Station Expansion is a useless project. This is not news; the idea was suspicious from the start, and since then we’ve done layers of simulation, most recently of train-platform-mezzanine passenger flow. However, what is news is that the Trump administration is aiming to take over Penn Reconstruction (a separate, also bad project) from the MTA, in what looks like the usual agency turf battles, except now given a partisan spin. I doubt there’s going to be any money for Reconstruction (budgeted at $7 billion), let alone expansion (budgeted at $17 billion), and overall this looks like the usual promises that nobody intends to act upon. The problem is that this project is still lurking in the background, waiting for someone insane enough to say what not a lot of people think but few are willing to openly disagree with and find some new source of money to redirect there. And oddly, this makes me think of tariffs.

The commonality is that free trade is not just good, but is more or less an unmixed blessing. In public transport rolling stock procurement, the costs of tariffs are so high that a single job created in the 2010s cost $1 million over 4-6 years, paying $20/hour. In infrastructure, in theory most costs are local and so it shouldn’t matter, but in practice some materials need to be imported, and when they run into trade barriers, they mess entire construction schedules. Boston’s ability to upgrade commuter rail stations with high platform was completely lost due to successive tightening of the Buy America waiver process under Trump and then Biden, to the point that even materials that were just not made in America (steel, FRP) could not be imported. The problem is that nobody was willing to say this out loud, and instead politicians chose to interfere with bids to get some photo-ops, getting trains that are overpriced and fail to meet schedule and quality standards.

Thus, the American turn away from free trade, starting with Trump’s 2016 campaign. During the Obama-Trump transition, the FTA stopped processing Buy America waivers, as a kind of preemptive obedience to something that was never written into the law, which includes several grounds for waivers. During the Trump-Biden transition, the standards were tightened, and waivers required the approval of a political office at the White House, which practiced a hostile environment, hence the above example of the MBTA’s platform problems. Now there are general tariffs, at a rate that changes frequently with little justification. The entire saga, especially in the transit industry, is a textbook example not just of comparative advantage, but of the point John Williamson made in the original Washington Consensus that trade barriers were a net negative to the country that imposes them even if there’s no retaliation, purely from the negative effects on transparency and government cleanliness. This occurred even though tariffs were not favored in the political elite of the United States, or even in the general public; but nobody would speak out except special interests and populists who favored trade barriers.

And Penn Expansion looks the same. It’s an Amtrak turf game, which NJ Transit and the MTA are indifferent to. NJ Transit’s investment plan is not bad and focuses on actual track-level improvements on the surface. The MTA has a lot of problems, including the desire for Penn Reconstruction, but Penn Expansion is not among them. The sentiments I’m getting when I talk to people in that milieu is that nobody really thinks it’s going to happen, and as a result most people don’t think it’s important to shoot down what is still a priority for Amtrak managers who don’t know any better.

The problem is that when the explicit argument isn’t made, the political system gets the message that Penn Expansion is not necessarily bad, but now is not the time for it. It will not invest in alternatives. (On tariffs, the alternative is to repeal Buy America.) It will not cancel the ongoing design work, but merely prolong it by demanding more studies, more possibilities for adding new tracks (seven? 12? Any number in between?). It will insist that any bounty of money it gets go toward more incremental work on this project, and not on actually useful alternatives for what to do with $17 billion.

This can go on for a while until some colossally incompetent populist of the type that can get elected mayor or governor in New York, or perhaps president, decides to make it a priority. Then it can happen, and $17 billion plus future escalation would be completely wasted, and further investment in the system would suffer because everyone would plainly see that $17 billion buys next to nothing in New York so what’s the point in spending a mere $300 million here and there on a surface junction? If it were important then Amtrak would have prioritized that, no? Even people who get on some level that the agencies are bad with money will believe them on technical matters like scheduling and cost estimation over outsiders, in the same manner that LIRR riders think the LIRR is incompetent and also has nothing to learn from outsiders.

The way forward is to be more formal about throwing away bad ideas. Does Penn Expansion have any transportation value? No. So cancel it. Drop it from the list of Northeast Corridor projects, cancel all further design work, and spend about 5 orders of magnitude less money on timetabling trains at Penn Station within its existing footprint. Don’t let it lurk in the background until someone stupid enough decides to fund it; New York is rather good lately at finding stupid people and elevating them to positions of power. And learn to make affirmative arguments for this rather than the usual “it will just never happen” handwringing.

New York Mayoral Race Thrown Wide Open as Cuomo is Prosecuted, Adams Removed

The June 24th Democratic primary for mayor of New York City has been thrown wide open as both the incumbent mayor Eric Adams and the frontrunner, former governor Andrew Cuomo, have been dealt serious blows. State prosecutors announced an indictment of Cuomo on multiple charges including sexual assault and corruption stemming from his response to the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. Shortly after the indictments were handed, Governor Kathy Hochul announced that in light of the corruption charges against the mayor, she would exercise her gubernatorial prereogative to suspend him for 30 days, and unless new exculpatory evidence came to light would remove him subsequently. The winner of the June primary, she said, will then be appointed as interim mayor until an election can be held.

The governor’s power to remove local officials, including mayors, has not been used since 1932, when governor and president-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt removed New York City Mayor Jimmy Walker following a corruption trial in which he served as prosecutor, judge, and jury. However, it remains part of the state constitution, and is not limited by the judiciary. Political operatives speculate that Hochul refrained from using this power against Adams partly because it had been so rarely used in the past but also partly to avoid empowering the wrong figures. With the new indictments against the former governor, it is speculated that the removal of Adams is intended to send a message to Cuomo that he’s a target as well should he become mayor.

Political figures in the city who have endorsed Cuomo in the primary express shock. A federally elected Democrat says that with Cuomo gone, there is a real risk of the anti-Israel Zohran Mamdani winning, and moderates and liberals should unite around a pro-Israel candidate, who the source did not yet name. The Brooklyn Democratic Party organization released a statement attacking Hochul for interfering with the election and saying that Cuomo’s handling of the pandemic was exemplary.

The remaining candidates in the primary who have made statements by the time this article has gone to press all reacted positively but reservedly. The two who have been running the deepest in the recent polls are Mamdani and City Comptroller Brad Lander, and who have so far refrained from responding to the shifting situation by attacking each other, both focusing on saying that Cuomo and Adams are not appropriate for leading New York.

Quick Note: Report on Electrification and Medium-Speed Rail Upgrades

Nolan Hicks has wrapped up nearly a year of work at Marron on a proposal called Momentum, to upgrade mainline rail in the United States with electrification, high platforms, and additional tracks where needed, short of high-speed rail. The aim is to build low- or perhaps medium-speed rail; the proposed trip times are New York-Albany in 2:05 (averaging 109 km/h) and New York-Buffalo in 5:38 to 5:46 (averaging 123 km/h). The concept is supposed to be used US-wide, but the greatest focus is on New York State, where the plan devotes a section to Network West, that is New York-Buffalo, and another to Network East, that is the LIRR, in anticipation of the upcoming state budget debate.

The costs of this plan are high. Nolan projects $33-35.6 billion for New York-Buffalo, entirely on existing track. The reasoning is that his cost estimation is based on looking at comparable American projects, and there aren’t a lot of such upgrades in the US, so he’s forced to use the few that do exist. A second track on single-track line is costed cheaply with references to various existing projects (in Michigan, Massachusetts, etc.), but third and fourth tracks on a double-track line like the Water Level Route are costed at $30 million/km, based on a proposal in the built-up area of Chicago to Michigan City.

In effect, the benefits are a good way of seeing what upgrades to best American industry practices would do. The idea, as with the costing, is to justify everything with current or past American plans, and the sections on the history of studies looking at electrification projects are indispensable. This covers both intercity and regional rail upgrades, and we’ve used some of the numbers in the drafts at ETA to argue, as Nolan does, against third rail extensions and in favor of catenary on the LIRR and Metro-North.

(Update 4-3: and now the full proposal is out, see here.)

Open BRT

BRT, or bus rapid transit, can be done in one of two ways: closed and open. Closed systems imitate rail lines, in that there is a BRT route along the entire length of the corridor; open ones instead take a trunk route, upgrade it with dedicated lanes and other BRT features, and let routes run through from it to branches that are not so equipped, perhaps because there is less traffic on the branches. I complained 14 years ago that New York City Transit was planning closed BRT in the form of SBS on Hylan Boulevard on Staten Island, a good route for open BRT. Well, now the MTA is planning BRT on the disused North Shore Branch of the Staten Island Railway, arguing that it is better than reactivating rail service because buses could use it as an open corridor – except that this is a poor corridor for open BRT. This leads to the question: which corridors are good for open BRT to begin with?

Trunks and branches are good

Open BRT can be analogized to a Stadtbahn system, fast in the core and slow outside it. Like a Stadtbahn, it works best where several branches can converge onto a single route, where the high traffic both requires higher capacity and justifies higher investment; just as grade separation increases the throughput of a rail line, BRT treatments increase those of a bus through greater separation from other traffic and regularity of service.

Unlike a Stadtbahn, open BRT remains a bus. This means two things:

  1. The trunk route must itself be a strong surface route. It had better be a wide street with room for physically separated bus lanes, or else a city center route that could be turned into a transit mall. A Stadtbahn system puts the fast central portion underground and could do it independently of the street network, or even run under a slow narrow street like Tremont Street in Boston.
  2. The connections from the trunk route to the branches must themselves be strong bus links. If the bus needs to zigzag on narrow residential streets to get between two wider arterials, then it will be unreliable and slow even if one of the wider arterials gets dedicated lanes. A Stadtbahn system can tunnel a few hundred meters here and there to ensure the onramps are adequate, but a surface bus system cannot, not without driving its cost structure to that of a subway but with few of the benefits of underground running.

The North Shore Branch could pass a modified version of criterion 1, but fails criterion 2. In general, former rail lines are bad for such BRT systems, since the street network was never set up for such connections. In contrast, street networks with a central artery and streets of intermediate importance between it and residential side streets emanating from it, which were never used for grade-separated rail lines, are more ideal for this treatment.

Grids are bad

Street grids eliminate the branch hierarchy of traditional street networks. There is still a hierarchy of more and less important grid streets – in Manhattan, the avenues and two-way streets are wider and more used for traffic than the one-way streets – but there is little branching. Bus networks can still branch if they move between streets, which happens in Manhattan, but it’s not usually a good idea: Barcelona’s Nova Xarxa uses the grid to run mostly independent bus routes, each route mostly sticking to a grid arterial, and the extent of branching on the Brooklyn, Queens, and Bronx bus networks is limited to a handful of short segments like the Washington Bridge.

In situations like this, open BRT would not work. Hylan is possibly the only route in New York that has any business running open BRT. For this reason, our Brooklyn bus redesign proposal, and any work we could do for Queens, Manhattan, or the Bronx, eschews the open BRT concept. The buses are upgraded systemwide, since features like off-board fare collection and wider stop spacing are not really special BRT features but are rather normal in, for example, the urban German-speaking world. Center bus lanes are provided wherever there is need and room. There is more identification of a bus route with the street it runs on, but it isn’t really closed BRT, which is a series of treatments giving the BRT routes dedicated fleets and stations, for example with left-side doors to board from metro-style island platforms like Transmilenio.

What this means more broadly is that the open BRT is not a good fit for most of North America, with its grid routes. Occasionally, a diagonal street could act as a trunk if available, but this is uncommon. Broadway is famous for running diagonally to the Manhattan grid, but that’s not a BRT route but a subway route.