Category: New York
Infrastructure and Democracy
Two stories, one recent and one older, have made me think about the undemocratic way the US builds infrastructure. The older story is California HSR’s cost overrun coming from scope creep; the biggest overruns were in the Bay Area, where power brokers from different agencies wanted separate territory at stations, leading to additional tunnels and viaducts. The newer one is Long Island’s reaction to the MTA’s developing proposals to add Metro-North service to Penn Station, sharing the East River Tunnels with the LIRR and Amtrak; the reaction is negative on misinformed grounds, but the misinformation often comes from official sources.
In both cases, there’s a democratic deficit in US local government that’s in play. Swiss infrastructure projects require a referendum, and involve detailed benefits announced to the public. In Lucern, a recent urban tunnel was sold to the public on the grounds that it would enable certain clockface frequencies toward the south and southeast, such as a train every 15 minutes to Hergiswil and an hourly express train to Engelberg; the full cost was included in the referendum. Even much larger projects, such as the Gotthard Base Tunnel, are funded by referendum. Nothing of that sort happens in the US, even when there are referendums on infrastructure.
I’ve begun to believe that California’s original sin with its HSR project is that it refused to do the same. Prop 1A was a referendum for what was billed as one third of the cost, $10 billion. In reality it was $9 billion and $1 billion in extra funds for connecting local transit; in year of expenditure dollars the estimated budget then was $43 billion, so barely a fifth of the project’s cost was voted on. The HSR Authority planned on getting the rest of the money from federal funding and private-sector funding. Prop 1A even required a 1:1 match from an external source, so confident the Authority was that it would get extra money.
In reality, at the time the proposition was approved to go to ballot, the financial crisis hadn’t happened yet, and there was no talk of a large fiscal stimulus. Although the stimulus bill gave California $3 billion, in 2008 the HSR Authority couldn’t know this source of money would be available, and yet it assumed it would get $17-19 billion in federal funding. Likewise, no private investor was identified back then, and promises of foreign funding have been inconclusive so far and again only come years after the referendum. Put another way, Californians voted without any information about where 79% of the budget for HSR would come from. The state is now scrambling for extra funding sources, such as cap-and-trade revenues. Since there is no real dividing line between on-budget and off-budget when 79% of the budget is undetermined, costs could rise without controls. An agency that had lined $43 billion in prior funding via referendum would be too embarrassed by any cost increase requiring it to ask for more money from any source; a large cost increase could make the difference between project and no project.
In the Long Island case, there was of course no referendum – East Side Access and Metro-North’s Penn Station Access were both decided by the commuter rail agencies and the state legislature. However, even subject to the legislative decisions, there has been very little transparency about what’s going on. The MTA has provided scant details about service planning for after East Side Access opens: total tph counts for each terminal, but nothing about off-peak frequencies, nothing about which LIRR lines would have service to which terminal, and nothing about the frequency of each individual LIRR line. A major change, the end of through-service from east of Jamaica to Flatbush Avenue, is not explicitly mentioned; one has to read between the lines to see that there’s no service planned to Flatbush Avenue, which is planned to be connected to Jamaica by shuttle service (and the shuttle service is still not going to offer urban rail frequencies or fare integration with buses and the subway).
In this climate, it’s easy for people to disbelieve that the agencies involved know what they’re doing, even when they are. Penn Station Access is unpopular among Long Island politicians, who view the East River Tunnels as their turf and do not want to share with Metro-North. The MTA and New Jersey Transit keep saying that Penn Station is at capacity without further explanation, and the MTA says it will add Metro-North trains to Penn; is it any wonder that state legislators see those two statements and, in the context of past cost overruns, oppose Penn Station Access?
When there is democracy – by which I mean not just periodic elections offering two parties to choose from, but a referendum process, transparency, and community consultations – people have an incentive to be informed. It’s possible to sway many people in one’s community and have a positive effect on local state services. Local politicians who are informed on the subject will be able to lead spending and planning efforts and can count on the support of informed voters. In contrast, when there is democratic deficit, being informed is far less useful, because decisions are made independently of what people think unless they are power brokers, or perhaps wealthy, power-brokering communities.
Alexis de Tocqueville observed as much when he visited the US two hundred years ago, when it was already far more democratic, for white men, than any European country: American farmers were more informed about politics than their European counterparts. Today, everyone in the first world has democracy and universal franchise, with a few exceptional countries that are worse-run than people give them credit for. But on the local level, some countries have done much more and get rewarded with a system of accountability to the voters, leading to better governance. The US is trading on an unreformed political system, in which the check on local officials’ power comes from neighboring fiefdoms rather than from the people.
The feudal character of local government in the US is leading to the usual exasperation with the system. But instead of turning toward democracy, transit supporters cheer as governments turn toward absolutism, increasing the power of the state at the expense of other stakeholders. California is reforming its environmental protection laws in response to abuse of the system by powerful communities; in reality, one of the state legislators involved in the effort recently left politics to work for Chevron. A reformer at Cornell recently proposed to improve transportation governance by “[putting] a bipartisan committee in a locked room.” Thomas Friedman cheers Chinese megaprojects as a way to achieve progress and sustainability; he says nothing about the more cost-effective projects done democratically in Europe, even though they involve some equally impressive edifices like the Alpine base tunnels. Throughout the transit activist community, including nearly every blogger and commenter but also the main activists on the ground, there’s a tendency to view any community opposition to a project as NIMBYism and to ask for changes that make it easier for the government to get its projects done, as in the Robert Moses era. Social democrats and neo-liberals are equally complicit in the march for not just centralization, which can be done with democratic checks, but also concentration of power in the hands of state officials.
Good infrastructure does not come from autocrats. Nothing comes from autocrats except more wealth and power for the autocrats, which may or may not involve infrastructure that is useful to the public. Undemocratic systems lead to a feedback loop in which the people have no incentive to be informed while the power brokers have no incentive to make sure anyone is informed, and this way it’s easy to spend $8 billion on a train station and approach tracks, without knowing or caring how many orders of magnitude this is more expensive than the average first-world rail tunnel. A good transit advocate has to advocate for more democracy, transparency, and simplicity in government operations, because decisions made behind closed doors are almost invariably made for the benefit of the elite that’s on the right side of those doors.
The Problem with Anchoring
A major idea due to Jarrett Walker, adopted with gusto by Vancouver’s Translink, is that transit should be anchored at both ends. That is, transit lines should have busy destinations at both ends, and should strive to reorient development such that the maximum intensity is near the ends. I was skeptical about this from the start, but now that I live in Vancouver and see the practice every time I go to UBC, I realize it’s much worse.
The Translink document justifying the layout has a figure, Figure 10 on PDF-page 15, showing that if development intensity peaks in the middle, then the bus will be overcrowded in the middle and empty at the ends. In contrast, if development intensity peaks at the ends, then the bus will be crowded but not overcrowded the entire way. Or, as Jarrett says, “If a transit line is operating through an area of uniform density, about 50% of its capacity goes to waste.”
Both in theory and in practice, this argument fails to note that a bus with development at the ends will be overcrowded the entire way, because people will travel longer. If UBC were located around Central Broadway instead of at the very west end of the metro area, people would just have shorter travel time; at no point would there be more westbound a.m. crowding because at no point would there be more westbound passengers traveling at the peak. There would be more eastbound a.m. crowding, but that’s not the Broadway buses’ limiting factor. Of the top four routes for passups, which have far more than the fifth route, three are east-west with strong anchors at both end (UBC at the west, the Expo Line at the east) and one, the third worst, is a C-shaped amalgamation of two north-south routes, with peak development downtown, in the middle of the C.
On a theoretical level, development intensity is a result of high land prices justifying high density, and in an urban area high land prices come from proximity to other urban land. In cities without topographic or political constraints on development, the CBD is always near the center of the metro area, and in coastal cities the CBD is usually near the shore but near the center along the axis parallel to the shore. Major secondary nodes usually arise in areas close to many suburbs, often the richer ones, and there’s travel demand to them from all directions: see for examples La Defense near Paris and Shinjuku and the other secondary CBDs in Tokyo. Some of those nodes happen to be near the shore (UBC, Santa Monica and Long Beach, Coney Island) but most aren’t. Any newly-built anchor will sprout further development around it unless there’s very strong local resistance. To connect all those neighborhoods that lie beyond the secondary CBD, unanchored transit lines are then unavoidable.
We’re left then with anchors that are at geographic edges, such as on shores. Those raise travel distances, because people can only live at one direction from them, so for a given residential density they will have to travel longer on average. They look attractive to transit managers because they also make the buses more uniformly full, but they’re worse for passengers who have to travel longer, often standing the entire way because of overcrowding. They’re not even good for transit agency finance, because urban transit invariably has either flat fare (as is the case within Vancouver proper) or fare that depends on distance fairly weakly. Short trips generate as much or almost as much money for the agency while requiring less effort to run because of lower crowding levels. Trips in which most passengers ride end to end are the least efficient, unless they can overcome this with very high crowding levels all day.
Now, what does help finances as well as the passenger experience is bidirectional demand. Anchors are good at that. However, what’s just as useful in cases of asymmetric peak demand is destinations that are short of the most crowded points. For example, in Manhattan the north-south subways fill as they go southward in the a.m. peak. This means that commercial buildings north of Midtown, generating passenger traffic that either is northbound (hence, reverse-peak) or gets off the train before it gets the most crowded within Midtown, add ridership without requiring running more trains. The MTA’s guidelines explicitly call for matching frequency to demand at the most crowded point of each line based on uniform sets of peak and off-peak crowding guidelines. This favors not outlying anchors, but development sprinkled uniformly along transit lines outside the CBD. The same development in the North Bronx would have low transit mode share (UBC has high transit mode share, but it’s at a geographic edge, and on top of that it has a huge body of students), while on the Upper East Side and Upper West Side it would have high transit mode share. The only outer ends where heavy upzoning is appropriate are those that aren’t really ends, such as Flushing and Jamaica, preexisting secondary centers in their own right to which people take the subway from the west and drive from the east.
De facto, Translink makes cost figures available for each bus route, and we can compare costs per boarded passenger on the east-west routes and on the north-south ones. The east-west routes have an initial advantage because they have bidirectional peak demand, whereas the north-south and C-shaped ones do not, and have few destinations short of the CBD, mainly just on Central Broadway or Commercial Drive. Despite this inherent east-west advantage, cost per rider is not lower on the east-west lines. Of the top ten route numbers, there are five balanced east-west routes: 99, 9, 41, 49, 25; and four north-south or C-shaped ones serving downtown: 20, 16, 8, 3. (The 135 is east-west connecting downtown with SFU, and could be included in either category.) Going in the same order as above, the east-west routes cost $0.61, $1.21, $1.10, $1.31, $1.47 per passenger, while the north-south ones cost $1.02, $1.29, $1.09, $1.06. (The 135 costs $1.32.) The three routes that interline to UBC on 4th Avenue – the 4, 84, and 44 – cost $1.62, $1.30, and $0.78 respectively, averaging to $1.30; the 84 is anchored at the Millennium Line, the 44 is anchored downtown, and the 4 is anchored downtown but also continues farther east.
The 99 is much cheaper to run than the other routes despite its high proportion of end-to-end ridership, but it is also critically crowded and benefits from multiple peaks as it serves both a secondary CBD and a university; it is also express, which among the other routes under discussion is only true of the 44, the 84, and the 135. Among the local routes, the north-south routes are actually a bit cheaper to run than the east-west routes even if we exclude the 4 as a not fully anchored exception. The 20, the 8, and the 3 all have their maximum development intensity at the downtown end with some extra development in their inner areas, near SkyTrain and Broadway, and a lot of medium-intensity development at the tail. This provides suitable short-of-CBD destinations adding passengers at low cost.
For one measure of productivity, we can divide the number of boardings per hour by the average load. The result is the reciprocal of the average number of hours spent by each passenger on the bus; a higher number means each passenger spends less time on the bus, indicating higher turnover, or equivalently more revenue relative to crowding. The 99, 9, 41, 49, and 25 have ratios of 2.79, 3.13, 2.65, 1.93, 2.13; the 20, 16, 8, and 3 have ratios of 3.26, 2.73, 3.57, 3.24. The 20, 8, and 3 again look very good here, helping explain their low operating costs and also their low crowding (they rank 12th, 27th, and 20th respectively in passups but 2nd, 6th, and 7th in weekday ridership). The 49 and 25, both highly anchored routes, do not look as good, and indeed have many passups relative to ridership (they rank 1st and 4th in passups but 8th and 10th in weekday ridership); they have the redeeming feature that they protrude slightly into Burnaby, where zonal fares are higher, but judging by a map of the passups, the 25 seems to get a large majority of its ridership strictly within Vancouver, with Nanaimo Station as the eastern anchor rather than Brentwood.
We can extend this analysis further by looking at New York’s bus operating costs. Cap’n Transit laboriously compiled a spreadsheet of operating cost per New York City Transit bus route. Within Manhattan, the pattern is that east-west routes have much lower operating costs per passenger than north-south routes. The M15, the busiest route in Manhattan with ridership comparable to that of the 99 in Vancouver and with the best finances among the north-south routes, almost breaks even on direct operating costs; most of the major east-east routes are outright profitable counting only direct operating costs. The key difference is that the east-west routes are much shorter, so passengers are paying the same amount of money for less distance. In his own analysis, the Cap’n notes that the express bus with the best finances is also one of the shortest, and that in general the profitable-after-direct-operating-costs buses have many transfer points to the subway, which suggests short trips as well.
Having seen more evidence for the theory that good bus finances require short trips rather than endpoint anchors, we can go back to Vancouver and compare more routes. The busiest north-south route not on the above list, the 2/22, works more like the 16 than like the 20, 8, and 3: not only is the 22 C-shaped rather than terminating downtown, but also it serves corridors that are less busy than Commercial and inner Main, reducing the availability of short trips. The shorter 2, overlying the longer 22, has 3.42 boardings per hour per load, but still costs $1.43 per rider; the 22 has only 2.15 boardings per hour per load and costs $1.61 per rider, and also ranks 3rd citywide in passups versus 11th in weekday ridership. On both the 16 and the 22, the north-south legs (Arbutus and Renfrew for the 16, Macdonald and Clark/Knight for the 22) are streets that aren’t very busy by themselves, but instead act as important cross-streets for Broadway and other east-west streets. Here are Knight, Renfrew, Arbutus, and Macdonald, and here are, by contrast, Commercial, Fraser, and Main, all around the same cross avenue (near but not at 16th).
The same is true of the east-west buses. The 99, 9, and 41 have better finances than the 49 and the 25. They also do better on passups, ranking 2nd, 11th, and 10th versus 1st, 3rd, and 4th in ridership. The 99 has much better finances than all other buses, which can be chalked to its overcrowding, but ultimately comes from continuous intense development all over Broadway making it a prime corridor. 41st has some of this development as well: here is how a strip of it looks close to the cross street I live on. Compare this with 49th and King Edward around the same cross street. This is not cherry-picked: 49th and King Edward just aren’t commercial streets, and even where they act as important cross streets such as at Cambie there’s not much development there. Of course 4th does have this commercial development and is almost as expensive as 49th and King Edward, but its commercial development is discontinuous, and the relatively intense section between Granville and Balsam is short enough that people can walk it.
So what this means for transit-friendly development is that it should not worry about anchoring, but instead try to encourage short trips on local transit. In his original post about Vancouver’s anchoring, Jarrett says of Marine Drive, at the southern edge of Vancouver proper, “From a transit efficiency standpoint, it would be a good place for some towers.” This is not good transit: from the perspective of both costs and ridership any residential development south of Broadway in which people take the bus downtown is equivalent, so might as well put it immediately south of Broadway or at King Edward, 41st, or 49th to connect with the east-west bus routes and let people live closer to work. Commercial development, too, is best placed short of downtown, because if it’s on Marine Drive people will drive to it whereas if it’s along the blocks immediately south of Broadway many won’t.
Better would be to do what Vancouver hasn’t done, and encourage medium-intensity development all over the major corridors, of the kind that exists on Commercial, Fraser, Main, and 41st and allows their respective bus routes to serve productive short trips, generating low costs without excessive crowding. Towers on Marine Drive, to the extent that their inhabitants would even use transit instead of driving, would clog all the north-south buses. Mixed-use medium-rise development running continuously along Arbutus (which already has an abandoned rail corridor that could make a relief light rail line if the Canada Line gets too crowded) and the major east-west corridors would have the opposite effect, encouraging local trips that wouldn’t even show up at the most crowded point of the line. I’ve argued before that this urban layout is good for walkability, but it appears to also be good for surface transit productivity.
This is also relevant to upzoning around SkyTrain stations. There has not been so far any upzoning around Cambie, even though the Canada Line has been in operation for 3.5 years and was approved for construction over 8 years ago, but there will be some very soon. Vancouver’s draft plan, as shown on PDF-pages 26-27, permits 4 floors of residential development on the cross streets with the stations, 6 on Cambie itself, and between 6 and 12 with mixed use near the stations themselves. Continuous commercial development will be permitted only on Cambie between 41st and 49th. This will be of some use to the east-west buses because there will be more destinations at Cambie, but it will not create the same variety of small destinations available on Main, Fraser, 41st, Commercial, and Broadway, not without further upzoning near intersections that are nowhere near SkyTrain. It’s better than the towers of the Burnaby stations, but it’s still not very good. There is commercial upzoning near Marine Drive, but that can’t be very transit-oriented given the location, and it can’t do much for north-south bus productivity since in the nearby neighborhoods car ownership is high.
It’s too late to change the rezoning plan to permit more linear commercial development on the cross streets, but it’s possible to do better when Vancouver gets around to building Broadway SkyTrain. On Broadway itself, general intensification, allowing more residential density and replacing residential-only zoning with mixed-use zoning, should suffice. There is continuous commercial development from east of Cambie to west of Arbutus, with a two-block gap to Macdonald, and a one-block gap between Macdonald and Alma; both gaps are within a few hundred meters of the cross streets and can be closed easily. The Alma-Sasamat gap on 10th is probably too hard, though. The Arbutus-Macdonald gap on 4th can also be closed, though those blocks are nearly a kilometer from where the stations would be. But it’s as important to allow commercial zoning extending as far south as possible on the major north-south streets, especially Arbutus. Continuous mixed-use zoning should extend at least as far as 16th, and maximum residential density should be at a minimum 4 floors and ideally 6, as Arbutus, Macdonald, and 16th are very wide and the intersections feel out of scale to the current 1-story development.
Of course, this principle of design is true only of urban transit, both surface and rapid. Once the stop spacing increases to regional rail levels, it is no longer feasible to have continuous commercial development, and usually the street networks of the different suburbs are separate anyway without continuous arterials. In all cases it’s important to allow commercial zoning around stations, but the spiky development characteristic of the Expo and Millennium Lines becomes a better idea the longer the stop spacing is. Endpoint anchoring also becomes more justifiable at near-intercity scales, such as New York-New Haven or Boston-Providence: the fares are closer to proportional to distance, and also neither New Haven nor Providence is sprouting suburbs at such scale and distance that it’s justifiable to extend Metro-North or the MBTA with their usual stop spacing past those cities. But at the scale of urban transit, or even inner regional rail, the natural endpoint of a line is not a secondary anchor, and transit agencies should control peak-to-base ratios by commercial upzoning along corridors and near many stations outside the CBD rather than by making people ride transit kilometers longer than would be necessary if the zoning were different.
C-Shaped Lines
The ideal rapid transit line looks something like a straight line. It can have deviations, but on a map it will be more or less a line with a definitive direction. Most rapid transit lines are indeed linear, or failing that circular (to provide circumferential service) or L-shaped. In most cities there are just a handful of C-shaped exceptions: London has just one (the Piccadilly Line), Tokyo two (the Marunouchi Line and the Yokosuka-Sobu Line), Paris one (the RER C; Metro 2 and 6 should really count as a circle), Seoul one (Line 6). In contrast, in some cities, such as New York, there are many C-shaped lines. Since most people aren’t traveling in semicircles, it’s worth talking about reasons why cities may build lines that don’t have the most efficient shape.
Reason 1: water
Cities right next to a large body of water may have lines that double back. Chicago has the Blue Line, Toronto has the Yonge-University-Spadina Line, San Francisco has the Daly City-Dublin and Daly City-Fremont BART routes and the T-Third Muni route. If Boston extends the Green Line to Somerville, the Green Line will form a C. Tokyo’s Yokosuka-Sobu through-line is in this category as well. Usually, the transit operator doesn’t expect anyone to take the line for its full length; Toronto is planning a crosstown line bridging the far ends of the C. Such lines are C-shaped because they are really two interlined lines coming from the same direction.
Reason 2: two separate lines joined at the outer end for operational reasons
This can be similar to reason 1 in that nobody is expected to take the line along its full length, but here the joining occurs at the outer end. Singapore’s North-South Line and Vancouver’s Millennium Lines are both examples of this. In Singapore’s case this comes from an international boundary; in Vancouver’s it comes from the need to connect the line to the Expo Line so that trains can go to the maintenance yard, and it proved too hard to connect the lines at the inner end, at Broadway/Commercial. In both examples, what should really be two separate lines are joined by an outer loop that functions as somewhat of a circumferential, but the lines were not planned to provide circumferential service and are not good at connecting to anything other than the two joined lines. (Singapore built a separate circumferential, the Circle Line.) Arguably, the RER C falls into this category too, except the connection between the lines is too inner.
Reason 3: a half-formed circumferential
Hong Kong’s Kwun Tung Line is circumferential in the sense that it doesn’t serve Hong Kong Island, just Kowloon; partially because of water, it is C-shaped. New York’s G route used to be in this category back when it ran to Forest Hills, but in 2001 it was truncated to Court Square and became linear. Other lines in this category are hypothetical: if Paris’s Metro 2 and 6 count as C-shaped, then they fall into this category; Boston’s busiest bus, Line 66, is vaguely C-shaped, acting as a circumferential in the southwestern arc from Harvard to Dudley; and if New York builds Triboro RX then it will fall into this category, too. In this case, usually another reason, or a pure ridership concern, is what prevents completing the line as a full circle, but the line is configured to be useful for interchanges. The Kwun Tung Line is useful for end-to-end trips, but the other hypothetical cases aren’t: Triboro RX would be useful for short trips, but to get from the Bronx to southern Brooklyn, the D is much faster.
Reason 4: administrative boundaries
In regions without much intergovernmental cooperation, administrative boundaries can be as sharp as coastlines. Everything proceeds as in reason #1, but this time the inefficiency is entirely preventable. This specifically affects New York and SEPTA Regional Rail. Morally, New York’s north-south lines should connect the Bronx with Brooklyn and the east-west lines should connect Queens with New Jersey. But because New Jersey is administratively separate, the Queens lines loop back into Brooklyn, creating some awkward shapes on the F, the R, and especially the M both before and after its recent combination with the V. (Some Bronx-Brooklyn lines are also awkwardly shaped, but this is because of water). Likewise, SEPTA Regional Rail barely goes into New Jersey, and only in Trenton; PATCO, serving Camden, is separate, and as a result, while the system had the R# designations, the R5 and R6 were C-shaped and the R7 and R8 self-intersected, helping ensure there was not much suburb-to-suburb ridership.
Reason 5: aberrations
In some cases, such as the Marunouchi Line or Singapore’s self-intersecting Downtown Line, there’s no apparent reason, and in that case the two branches combine to form a C-shaped line for essentially random reasons. Maybe the ideal route through city center is one that connects two branches in the same direction; maybe there is more demand to one direction than to the other.
Of the above five reasons, it is reason 4 that is the most angering. Jersey City and the hill cities to its north have as long a history of ferry-oriented New York suburbanization as Brooklyn. But because of administrative reasons, they never got as much rapid transit, stunting their development. New York’s subway plans never really made any use of the Hudson Tubes, and even the unrealized plans for a North Jersey subway network made surprisingly little use of existing infrastructure. The result: 12 km out of Manhattan, at the same distance as Flushing, New Jersey only has Bogota, Rutherford, and Hackensack; 20 km out, at the same distance as still fairly dense Cambria Heights, New Jersey has Paramus and Montclair.
It’s of course too late for New York to do things right, but for a city just beginning to build a subway network, it’s important to make sure that lines are straight and hit developing suburbs in all directions, so that they can develop as high-density transit-oriented communities, and not as low-density auto-oriented ones.
Branching
S-Bahns and similar systems have two defining features. One has been hashed to death on this blog: they reuse legacy rail lines, allowing urban rapid transit to extend arbitrarily deep into suburbia. The other, common also to many other transit technologies, is that they branch extensively, allowing them to run many services on the outer ends, where there’s no demand for rapid transit frequency, while interlining to produce high frequency in the center, where there is.
Since branching is a service planning decision independent of technology, any technology could branch. The branching-friendliest technology is subway-surface: the central subway segment has higher capacity measured in trains per hour than the outer surface segments, and this requires branching. For examples, consider the Boston Green Line, Muni Metro, the Frankfurt U-Bahn, and SEPTA’s Subway-Surface lines. However, even when the entire line is rapid transit, branching is useful to ensure higher service where there is higher demand, and infrastructure improvements will typically focus on boosting capacity in the center. For example, the RER A has moving-block signaling allowing 30 peak-direction trains per hour in the center, but fixed-block signaling on the branches, which do not need such capacity.
Even when rapid transit is built separate from both light rail and mainline rail, branching is useful for lines going into the suburbs or even outer-urban neighborhoods. This is practiced in both New York and London, both of which have extensive branching. Observe further that in both cities, the lines reaching farthest out – the A in the Queens-bound direction and the Metropolitan line in the west – are also the most highly branched.
It’s the opposite situation that is weird. When lines do not branch, there must be a strong outer anchor, or else trains need to run empty outside the center. The alternative is short-turns, and if there’s no space for this, the resulting service patterns can be awkward. Shanghai, which has little branching, runs Line 2 in two segments, a central segment with higher frequency and longer trains and an eastern one with lower frequency and shorter trains; trains do not run through. Beijing has a similar awkwardness with the split between Line 1 and the Batong Line, and Toronto has a split between the Bloor-Danforth line and the technologically incompatible Scarborough rapid transit. (The Sheppard line suffers from the same problem today, but it has the excuse that it was planned to continue west to the Spadina subway rather than stub-ending at Yonge.) Paris has little branching on the Métro as well, but the Metro only serves inner parts of the metro area, many lines have strong outer anchors (for example, La Défense on Line 1), and two others providing some of the farthest-out service branch. The RER branches much more heavily, as befits a suburban system. Tokyo has little branching on the subway proper, but the subway is for the most part inner-urban, and lines continue to the suburbs along commuter lines, which do branch.
In North America, this configuration has been common across a variety of new-build systems, especially ones that should have been S-Bahns. BART does this the most extensively, but the Washington Metro is also highly branched for its size, MARTA branches, the light rail systems branch once more than one line is built, and so on. BART in particular imitated the service planning aspect of commuter rail perfectly, and is an S-Bahn in all but the cost of extending the system further.
The problem with any branching is that it reduces frequency on the branches, potentially scaring away ridership. When a single rapid transit line splits in two it’s rarely a problem, and when city-center service splits into suburban services even more is easy to justify. I think the main issue in urban or inner-suburban cases is that with typical rapid transit frequencies (3-minute peak service or slightly better, a peak-to-base ratio of 2:1 or somewhat less) the trunk has about 5-minute off-peak service, and if it splits into two branches, this means 10-minute service on the branches. If the branching occurs early enough that dense neighborhoods with short-distance travel demand are on branches, it may be too little. In addition, if one branch has much more demand than the other, then it’s usually hard to match frequency on each branch to demand, since it requires trains to be unevenly spaced.
The issue is that branch frequency, 10-15 minutes, is in the transition zone between urban show-up-and-go frequency, where schedules do not matter, and suburban frequency, where they do. It’s perhaps less relevant in small cities with small enough transit systems that even 10-minute service is considered very good, but in large cities, people expect more, creating somewhat of an inner-urban metro envy effect.
That said, 10-minute suburban and outer-urban service can be done clockface, making the average wait much smaller. It is done on the RER A in the midday off-peak, with three 10-minute branches, and could be done with two 10-minute branches quite easily. Likewise, it could be done for 15-minute branches (the RER B already does this); the two A branches in New York have close to 15-minute frequency each, and if New York City Transit’s service planning considered it as a factor instead of focusing more on headway management it could ensure predictable schedules at Ozone Park and the Rockaways.
Transit and Place
There is a large class of transit supporters who think that every right-of-way that can be used for transit should be preserved for this purpose, even if it is not very useful. A few overzealous railfans on the message boards opposed the opening of the High Line park and wanted the viaducts to be used for an extension of the 7 train. This is extreme and nowadays the transit activists I know support the High Line while opposing schemes to recreate it in an inferior context. But even serious bloggers like Cap’n Transit, Ben Kabak, and John Morris are opposing plans to create a Low Line out of the abandoned trolley terminal at the Essex/Delancey subway stop, on the grounds that it could be useful for transit one day.
Now, it’s possible that the Low Line idea is bad because people would not want to go to an underground park. But it’s not a problem for transit; the Williamsburg Bridge doesn’t need trolleys since it has a subway running on (and because the bridge is high there is no way a bus could cross it without passing within two blocks of Marcy, the subway stop at the Brooklyn end of the bridge). The lines running on it are in fact underused: as can be seen on PDF-pages 65-73 of the latest Hub Bound Travel Data report, peak-hour traffic on the J/M/Z entering the Manhattan core was one of the lower in the system as of 2010 – higher than the bottom two track pairs (8th Avenue local and Montague) but in a near-tie for third lowest with several others. So there’s not much use for the trolley terminal as a modern Williamsburg Bridge bus (or trolley) terminal.
But what is more important than just the Low Line is place. To succeed, transit needs not only to exist, which it already does in the area in question, but also to have places to connect to. If for some reason the trolley terminal would need to be demolished to build room for foundations for several skyscrapers, it would be an unambiguous win for transit, since it would create more destinations for people to take the existing J/M/Z and F trains to. The surrounding neighborhood might disagree regarding the implications for urbanism, though I’d argue that Midtown-like skyscrapers would be better-integrated into the streetscape than the projects east and south of the station. If the Low Line succeeds as a park, it will be similar: not in the sense of providing jobs for tens of thousands of people, but in the sense of creating a place for people to go to. (In fact, a park has less peaky demand than offices, so it could be better for subway finances even at relatively low levels of usage.)
Last year, I brought up the question of the infrastructure’s highest value mainly as a way of deciding which kind of service (regional, intercity, etc.) should get first priority on any given rail line, but the same is true about transit versus place. In an area with enough transit and not enough place, it’s more important to create more development, for both good urbanism and more successful transit.
This does not mean every proposal to turn a rail right-of-way into a park is good. Despite my skepticism that the Rockaway Cutoff can be a successful rail line, I’m even more skeptical about its value as a park; it’s not in an area that can ever draw many people, since the density (of both residences and jobs) is not high by New York standards and it is far from other destinations that could draw people from outside the nearby neighborhoods. However, in areas that are lacking in good parks, or could use new development, it is better to concentrate on creating place.
For examples of this elsewhere, consider the railyards in Long Island City, Hoboken, and Sunnyside. Two of my earliest posts proposed to build a regional rail station in Sunnyside and then develop the area around it with air rights over the railyard; this is what should be done in an area that needs both transit and place. But in Hoboken and Long Island City, there’s ample transit, and the only use of the railyards is to park trains that can’t do to Manhattan because of lack of electrification or lack of capacity in the approach tunnels. Since parking trains is an inefficient use of space, and both areas have good connections to Manhattan by subway or PATH, there should be plans to remove the railyards and redevelop them to create more place, leaving just enough rail infrastructure to run through-trains, to be parked in lower-value areas. This development can be either parkland or buildings, depending on what is in demand in the area. Based purely on Google Earth tourism, I believe Hoboken does not need additional parks and so development there should be just a new secondary CBD on top of the PATH station, while Sunnyside and Long Island do, and so development there should include parks as well as high-density office and residential construction.
Instead of worrying about turning unused and for the most part unusable transit infrastructure into place, good transit activists should focus on preserving infrastructure that could potentially be used. In the New York area, probably the most useful piece of infrastructure that isn’t currently used is the Bergen Arches, allowing the Erie lines to enter Jersey City at Pavonia/Newport, a more central location than Hoboken; this is one of four options for a location for a new regional rail tunnel from New Jersey to Lower Manhattan, and is arguably the best option for an integrated regional rail network.
In the 1990s there were plans to reuse the Bergen Arches for a roadway, since modified to include both a road option and a rail option, and in 2011 the Christie administration allocated some money to further studies; an analysis from 2004 scored various road and transit options, not including a regional rail network, and gave the highest score to a roadway with a single high-occupancy vehicle and bus lane per direction. (A trail got the second lowest score, after no-build.) Since Jersey City (and the entire region) needs more transit from the north and west, while further formation of place will and should cluster around the waterfront, it’s important to fight any plan to give the Bergen Arches to a non-railroad use unless and until a regional rail plan is formulated that places the New Jersy-Lower Manhattan tunnel at another location.
In contrast, the Low Line should not be a priority. On the contrary, if the park plan is even partially sound, or the place could be reused as another place if the park idea fails, then good transit advocates should support the idea, since it’d be good urbanism. With a few exceptions, good transit requires good urbanism and vice versa.
Intercity Buses and Trains
In the three countries with the longest and traditionally largest HSR networks – Japan, Germany, and France – there is no large intercity bus network, with government regulations against the development of one. The US and Canada are in somewhat of the opposite situation – intercity buses are legal, but intercity trains are subject to a variety of regulations and operating practices raising operating costs so much that outside the thickest corridors they might as well be illegal. The best situation is in South Korea, which has well-developed networks of both buses and trains; the result is that on the Seoul-Daegu and Seoul-Busan city pairs, buses have 7-8% of the market and trains 67%.
On top of that, the express buses in North America do not get very high mode share. I’ve seen no reliable numbers, but when I looked at Megabus and Bolt schedules on the largest city pairs, the two carriers combined were about even with Amtrak, whose mode share on the entire NEC is 6% according to the Vision.
So why is Cap’n Transit suddenly telling us to love the bus (though he rejects the loaded term “love the bus”) and advocate for more investment into bus stations at various locations around the metro area? Doctrinaire libertarians have the excuse that the kind of regulations they are used to thinking of are the French regulations against domestic competition with rail and not the FRA’s safety rules. But the Cap’n of course knows exactly how pernicious FRA rules are. Since he thinks in terms of activist energy as the primary resource to manage, and not the government’s budget, this could be taken as a desperation at any attempt to reform Amtrak and the FRA.
But more likely, this comes from the fact that many intercity bus supporters fought (and lost) regulations against curbside pickups, which are the way Megabus, Bolt, and others could serve New York without paying for space at Port Authority, imitating the practices of the older Chinatown buses.
The immediate trigger for thinking where to place bus stops then is the impending loss of curbside space. Since buses are in many ways intermediate between cars and trains in terms of capacity and the point-to-point versus hub-and-spoke tradeoff, a bus expansion then has to mean finding more and more places to pick up. A legacy train station will run out of running line capacity long before it runs out of station track capacity, but a curbside bus stop uses valuable urban space and a bus station can and does run out of space.
And this is where buses stop being too useful. Frequency is freedom. Because the bus operators compete with one another, passengers need to be ticketed on a specific company, and that already cuts into frequency. On top of that, unlike trains, buses have a very large stop penalty, since they need to get off the highway and into the city. New York-Washington trains make intermediate stops in Philadelphia; express buses don’t. Even with dominant CBD stations, the frequency on the buses in the Northeast isn’t great: from New York, Bolt offers half-hourly service from to Philadelphia, hourly service to Boston, and less than hourly service to each of Baltimore and Washington, and all four city pairs have one dominant stop pair; Megabus frequency is hourly to Boston and hourly with a half-hourly peak to the other three.
Adding more stops means diluting this less-than-great frequency even further. It would work if bus stops were consolidated and people could buy one ticket good on any company, but the business model that has reduced ticket prices is probably not compatible with such cooperation. It would also work if the market share were 67%, but it isn’t and never will be.
The other problem is that people have not just origins but also destinations – and those destinations cluster in the CBDs, and the more the passenger is willing to pay, the likelier it is they’ll be traveling to the CBD. A train run from Woodside or Newark to New York will be full in one direction and empty in the other; the reason those trains can make money (they don’t in New York, but do in Tokyo, which is as CBD-dominant) is that they’re so full in the peak direction it makes up for lower reverse-peak occupancy. For intercity travel, this is harder. High-speed rail can make a profit on these asymmetric intercity runs because it’s so fast that it can cut costs that depend on travel time and not distance, such as operator wages, dispatcher wages, and some train maintenance. Buses don’t have that luxury, and need to be full in both directions, which favors CBD-to-CBD runs, or runs between neighborhoods that are likely to be destinations as well as origins (such as Chinatown-to-Chinatown runs).
Trains are unique among common-carrier transportation modes in that service uses corridors and not points. They are similar to cars this way: I-95 and the Northeast Corridor serve many overlapping city pairs. Bus services do not have this advantage, because the nature of an expressway network is such that they have to deviate to make a station stop, and in the largest cities this deviation is considerable; it can take an hour for a bus to navigate New York’s streets. This makes them more point-to-point, like planes, and on a corridor with four large cities on one line, this is much less efficient.
In general, I think a lot of the pro-bus attitude among liberals and general transit activists (as opposed to libertarians, who I will address in a future post) amounts to defeatism. We will never be able to improve government to the point that trains have high mode share, so let’s downgrade service. We will never be like France or Germany or Switzerland or Japan, so let’s import practices from China and Scotland.
Transit activists for the most part have not only political but also personal preferences for travel by transit. When I visited Buffalo, I took the Empire Service instead of flying. This creates a skewed impression for what’s good; to me, the Empire Service is a semi-useful service, even as to the average traveler it might as well not be there. If the existing service is straightforwardly a worse version of good service – such as a commuter train that should run faster and more frequently, or an intercity train that should be HSR – this is not a problem. But if it is different – such as a bus where a train is more appropriate, a light rail or dedicated subway line where an S-Bahn is appropriate, or even a rapid transit line in the wrong type of neighborhood – then the activism can be in a wrong direction.
The problem is that the 80-90% of travelers who drive are not currently agitating for the mode of transit most likely to get them to switch. Like transit users, they have at least to some extent made their peace with their current mode’s deficiency, and if anything they will demand more highway expansions even on corridors where transit is much more useful for the same cost. But we can take a step back and look at case studies from peer first-world countries and see that buses have mode shares in the single digits while trains can dominate corridors in the Northeast Corridor distance range.
Nobody Likes Riding North American Commuter Rail
In New York, two neighborhoods at the edge of the city have both subway and commuter rail service: Wakefield and Far Rockaway. Wakefield has 392 inbound weekday Metro-North boardings, and 4,955 weekday subway boardings. Far Rockaway has 158 riders (an average of boardings and alightings) and 4,750 subway boardings. Although both Wakefield and Far Rockaway are served by the 2 and A, which run express in Manhattan, those trains make many local stops farther out – in fact the 2 and A are the top two routes in New York for total number of stations – and are much slower than commuter rail: the 2 takes 50 minutes to get to Times Square while Metro-North gets to Grand Central within 25-30 minutes; the A takes about 1:05 to get to Penn Station, the LIRR about 55 minutes.
Vancouver, whose commuter rail service runs 5 daily roundtrips, all peak-hour, peak-direction, has a weekday ridership of 10,500. The Evergreen Line, duplicating the inner parts of the commuter rail service, is expected to get 70,000.
Caltrain, a service of intermediate quality between Vancouver’s peak-only trains and New York’s semi-frequent off-peak electrified service, has an intermodal station at Millbrae, which is now BART’s southern terminal. Millbrae has 5,970 BART exits per weekday versus 2,880 Caltrain boardings. And BART takes a circuitous route around the San Bruno Mountain and only serves San Francisco and the East Bay, while Caltrain takes a direct route to just outside the San Francisco CBD and serves Silicon Valley in the other direction.
The MBTA provides both subway and commuter rail service, with several intermodal stations: Forest Hills, Quincy Center, Braintree, Porter Square, Malden, JFK-UMass. In all cases, ridership levels on the subway are at least 30 times as high as on commuter rail. Rapid transit and commuter rail stations are close together at the edge of the Green Line’s D line, a former commuter line; the line’s outer terminus, Riverside, gets 2,192 weekday boardings, while the nearest commuter rail station, Auburndale, gets 301.
Across those systems and several more, such as Chicago’s Metra and Toronto’s GO Transit (no link, it’s private data), the commuter rail stations located within city limits, even ones not directly adjacent to a rapid transit station, usually get little ridership (there are some exceptions, such as Ravenswood on Chicago’s UP-N Line). The suburban stations beyond reasonable urban transit commute range are much busier.
Of course, this is just a North American problem. In Japan, where commuter rail and urban rapid transit are seamlessly integrated, people ride commuter rail even when the subway is an option. Consult this table of ridership by line and station for JR East lines in Tokyo: not only would any investigation of ridership on the main lines (e.g. Tokaido on PDF-page 1, Chuo on PDF-page 8) show that their ridership distribution is much more inner-heavy than in New York and Boston, but also stations with transfers to the subway can have quite a lot of riders. Nakano on the Chuo Line, at the end of Tokyo Metro’s Tozai Line, has 247,934 daily boardings and alightings, comparable to its subway traffic of 133,919 boardings.
Although my various posts about commuter rail industry practices focus partially on operating costs, this is not directly what makes people choose a slower subway over a faster commuter train. Rather, it’s a combination of the following problems:
1. Poor service to microdestinations. Rapid transit gets you anywhere; North American commuter rail gets you to the CBD. For people in Wakefield who are going anywhere but the immediate Grand Central or East 125th Street area, Metro-North is not an option. Station spacing is too wide, which means the choice of destinations even from a station that isn’t closed is more limited, and trains usually make just one CBD stop.
2. Poor transfers to other lines. The transfers usually require paying an extra fare and walking long distances from one set of platforms to another.
3. High fares. In the German-speaking world, and in Paris proper, fares are mode-neutral. It costs the same to ride the RER as the Metro, except for a handful of recent Metro extensions to the suburbs that postdate the RER, such as to La Defense. In Japan, JR East fares are comparable to subway fares, though there are no free transfers. In North America this is usually not the case: it costs much more to ride commuter rail than to ride a parallel subway or light rail line.
4. Low frequency. This is partly a result of low ridership based on the previous factors, partly a tradition that was never reformed, and partly a matter of very high operating costs. With low enough off-peak frequency (Wakefield and Far Rockaway are served hourly midday), commuter rail can achieve cost recovery similar to that of subways, and in some cities even surpass it. People who have no other options will ride hourly trains.
None of those problems is endemic to mainline rail. They’re endemic to North American mainline rail culture, and in some cases to labor practices. It’s all organization – it’s not a problem of either electronics or concrete, which means that the cost to the taxpayers of fixing it, as opposed to the political cost to the manager who tries to change the culture, is low.
The electronics and concrete do matter when it comes to building extensions – and this is where the ARC Alt G vs. Alt P debate comes from, among many others – but even commuter rail systems that do not need such extensions underperform. For example, Toronto does not need a single meter of commuter rail tunnel. Philadelphia, which already got most of the concrete it needs and partially fixed the microdestination problem, gets somewhat more commuter rail ridership in areas where people have alternatives, but frequency on the branches is still pitiful and inner-city stop spacing outside Center City is still too wide, leading to disappointing ridership.
Another way to think about it is that infrastructure should be used for everything, and not segregated into local transit and railroad super-highways that aren’t very accessible to locals. There are eight tracks connecting Manhattan directly with Jamaica, but the four used by the subway are far busier than the four used almost exclusively by suburbanites. Something similar is true of the Metro-North trunk, and some MBTA and Metra lines – the commuter rail infrastructure is redundant with rapid transit and gives very high nominal capacity, but in reality much of it is wasted. In this way, the mainline rapid transit concept including the Paris RER, the Germanic S-Bahn, and the Japanese commuter rail network, far outperforms, because it mixes local and regional traffic, creating service that everyone can use.
Sanity Checks on HSR Ridership
If you multiply the populations of the metro areas served as a proxy for HSR ridership, then by comparison to Shinkansen lines as well as the AVE, New York-Washington traffic should be about 15-20 million passengers per year. It’s even higher if we include Madrid-Seville, an overperformer with more ridership than Madrid-Barcelona. This is just between the two metro areas, excluding additional passengers to Philadelphia. This raises two questions: what does the data suggest about modifying product-of-populations as a proxy, perhaps to account for distance? And, more importantly, is such ridership realistic for the Northeast Corridor?
First, at least on the Shinkansen and the AVE, in the range of distances up to nearly 4 hours, there’s no effect of distance on ridership, especially if we combine air and rail ridership. (We’re trying to apply this analysis to a city pair on which trains will take not much more than an hour and a half; end-to-end air traffic can be assumed to be zero.) Beyond that, Tokyo-Fukuoka air and rail ridership combined still underperforms shorter-distance links. One explanation is that as distance increases, total travel volume decreases, but rail and then air market share grows at the expense of cars and buses, and in the 1.5-4-hour range, these effects more or less cancel out. At longer distances, there is no longer much highway travel for trains and planes to poach.
With distance ignored, large cities consistently underperform small cities. This is not a surprise based on SNCF’s refined gravity model of ridership, in which travel volume is proportional not to the product of the city populations, but to the product raised to an exponent lower than 1. SNCF uses an empirically derived exponent, between 0.8 and 0.9, and AVE and Shinkansen data is indeed more consistent with that range. Some city pairs still underperform in a way that can’t be explained by population and distance, such as Tokyo-Okayama, but the exponent perfectly explains why Tokyo-Osaka underperforms a model with exponent 1.
So what about the Northeast Corridor? Current Amtrak ridership between New York and Washington is 1.74 million, but that’s just between Penn Station and Union Station. Amtrak provides its top 10 city pairs in the Northeast in its Master Plan, which include New York-Baltimore and New York-BWI, at 650,000 between them. I don’t know the ridership on more minor city pairs, such as those involving Newark or Stamford. I would guess the total including those is about 3-3.5 million; this is based just on extrapolating that of the top-10 markets on the southern half of the line just under half the ridership is between the New York and Washington metro areas, and applying a fudge factor to account for the fact that secondary markets not involving New York-Washington are less likely to make the top 10.
In contrast, based on comparison to the Shinkansen and AVE, we should expect HSR ridership of 15-20 million, about 5 times what I believe the present ridership is. (In fact, based on comparison to the lower-fare KTX, it should be if anything higher.) This is despite the fact that the current trip time is either 2:47 or 3:25 whereas with HSR it would be about 1:35. The importance of this is that we can’t expect induced demand to quintuple ridership out of halving trip time, but instead we need to explain this based on competition with cars and buses.
Part of this competition has to be about fares. Amtrak charges very high fares (see the route performance report) – on average, 28 cents per km on the Regional, and 48 on the Acela. Shinkansen fares average 23 cents per km on Tokaido, 20 on Sanyo, and 24 on the JR East network. That said, the shorter distance of New York-Washington means that absolute fares are not higher, particularly on the cheaper option. However, high fare per km does mean the trip is less competitive with cheap express buses and with driving.
This comes in addition to travel time. The Regional is an hour faster than Megabus; HSR that is three hours faster Megabus, especially if it’s also cheaper than today’s Regional, could make a serious dent in the Megabus network. Express buses already have trouble with secondary markets, because those can’t piggyback on primary markets as intermediate stops the way they can with trains. Better trains could poach the express bus market and reduce it to where it was ten years ago.
At the range of the top-performing city pairs, most people take trains rather than use roads. I do not have data for individual city pairs in Japan (but see here for Korea, where HSR overperforms, perhaps due to lower fares, which are about 15 cents per km before discounts), but at the distance of New York-Washington, 360 km, trains get a little more than half the total mode share and cars get the other half. Amtrak’s 2010 Vision says that the current rail mode share on the entire Northeast Corridor is 6%; it does not say what the share on New York-Washington is, but I’ve seen 14% elsewhere (no reference, sorry), and the Vision says that incremental Master Plan improvements will raise it to 26%. Of course going from 14% to 50% also involves induced demand, and this means the expected rise in ridership is a higher factor, potentially a factor of 5.
I’m not going to try using this method to estimate shorter-distance ridership, because then car ownership, sprawl levels, etc. become a much bigger issue, and quick-and-dirty sanity checks don’t work and are no replacement for serious ridership studies. But we can apply the method to other longer-distance portions of the Northeast Corridor. If we use the lower end of the scale, we get New York-Washington at 15 million annual passengers or a little more, New York-Boston at 15 million or a little less, Boston-Washington at 6 million, Boston-Philadelphia at 5 million.
As a secondary sanity check, the Boston-Washington air market is about 2.5 million, and for HSR to get 2.5 times as much ridership on a formerly air-dominated city pair as the pre-HSR air travel volume is the same performance Eurostar got.
All four metro areas should be interpreted as broadly as possible, to maintain comparability with Japanese metro areas, whose definition is loose and roughly comparable to the American combined statistical area. So there are just four cities on the Northeast Corridor, really. This is still not all the ridership there is – there is still New York-Philadelphia and Philadelphia-Washington, I’m just less comfortable making even an ex-recto estimate. But even without those two potentially high-ridership city pairs, we get high passenger density on all segments of the line.
Update: although I have not found city-to-city ridership data from France, I have found region-to-region numbers from Paris to the southwest. I also have some air traffic volumes from which we can deduce air/rail markets: on Paris-Nice the TGV has a 31% share of the air/rail market; on Paris-Marseille I’ve seen numbers ranging from 60% to 83%, and for this post’s purposes I’m going to assume 70%. We get air/rail traffic numbers from Paris to Marseille (5.2 million, but this grows to 9.2 million if we assume 83% TGV share and declines to 3.9 million if we assume 60%), Nice (4.2 million), Midi-Pyrenees (3.2 million), Aquitaine (5.5 million), and Poitou-Charentes (3.3 million). With the exception of the Midi-Pyrenees number, which represents a fairly long distance, all overperform the Shinkansen. Ignoring distance as always and using an exponent of 0.8, Paris-Marseille overperforms Tokyo-Sendai by a factor of 1.85, Paris-Nice by 2.21, Paris-Midi-Pyrenees by 0.77 (i.e. it underperforms), Paris-Aquitaine by 1.26, and Paris-Poitou-Charentes by 1.22. Per-kilometer fares are much lower than on Shinkansen – indeed SNCF’s total revenue, both high- and low-speed, divided just by TGV passenger-km, is €0.14 – and this can contribute to the higher traffic.
Paris-Nice can be explained as a major leisure corridor, similar to the unusually high passenger traffic to Florida or Las Vegas. But bear in mind that Nice and Marseille are metro areas and not entire regions, and under any assumption that Bordeaux and Toulouse get a greater share of the travel to Paris than the rural areas in their respective regions, they will overperform by a substantial margin. Although French metro areas are defined less loosely than Japanese ones, which can skew the Marseille and Nice numbers, the Aquitaine and Midi-Pyrenees numbers are if anything defined too loosely due to the inclusion of outright rural departments.
Carolyn Maloney’s International HSR Proposal
Carolyn Maloney, the Congresswoman representing Manhattan’s East Side, gave an interview to the Globe and Mail in which she called for high-speed rail between New York and Canadian cities. She did not specify which cities, but presumably those are Montreal and Toronto. The article quoted Andrew Cuomo as saying that connecting New York to Montreal and Toronto would be “transformative,” though it did not mention that Cuomo killed plans for HSR from New York to Buffalo. It is unclear to me whether Maloney is serious, or merely as serious as Cuomo; for the purposes of this post, let us assume that she is serious. Is it justifiable to build HSR from New York to Montreal and Toronto?
Long-time readers will know that I am skeptical of international HSR lines. But let me explain why I think New York-Toronto could be successful, while New York-Montreal could not.
First, perhaps because of the common language, the travel markets from the US to Montreal underperform those to Toronto. According to Statscan data, Toronto has about three times as many travelers to New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and the other top metro areas in the US as Montreal does. The two cities’ metro area population ratio is only about 1.5:1; this is indeed the ratio of their travel markets to leisure destinations such as Las Vegas and Miami. US data generally points to higher numbers, sometimes by a substantial margin; it also points to a ratio of about 2.5-3:1 between Toronto and Montreal travel, this time even to Las Vegas and Miami. (US data excludes planes with up to 60 seats, but these are only about 20% of New York-Toronto departures, and of course a smaller proportion of seats.)
In addition, New York-Toronto may be in a similar situation to New York-London, in which the two cities’ common industry (finance) leads to more business travel. For some evidence of this effect, the Canadian data shows that Calgary and Houston, the two countries’ respective oil capitals, are each other’s top air market on the other side of the border. The same is of course true of financial capitals New York and Toronto, though as the largest cities in their respective countries, this is less surprising. But we should not overinterpret this effect: the New York-Toronto air market is still just 900,000 people a year (according to Canada) or 1.5 million (according to the US), though it far beats New York-Montreal’s 300,000 or 600,000.
Even 1.5 million times an induced demand factor is not enough to build HSR by itself. We could add existing travel volumes from New York to Niagara Falls and from Toronto to Buffalo, but most likely they are not enough by themselves.
The main reason New York-Toronto could be defensible is that a large majority of the New York-Toronto construction would not be done just for New York-Toronto travel. HSR on the Empire Corridor, up to Buffalo, is justifiable entirely based on domestic traffic. At the other end, the Lakeshore West corridor, which already can sustain medium speeds (GO’s top speed is 150 km/h), should be electrified and retrofitted with passing sidings based entirely on local commuter traffic. There are about 100 km between Buffalo and Hamilton, and 160 between Buffalo and Toronto, compared with 850 between New York and Toronto. Since HSR fares and operating profits roughly scale with distance traveled, the operating revenue of the lower-trafficked 100 km between Buffalo and Hamilton should really be multiplied by 8.5. If New York-Toronto traffic is about 3.5 million a year, a similar multiple of preexisting air traffic as Eurostar, then we can expect the construction of the 100 km to add about 3 billion passenger-km a year; 30 million passenger-km of revenue per km of route to be constructed is very good, comparable to the Sanyo Shinkansen. If we need to use New York-Toronto traffic to justify even Toronto-Hamilton upgrades, then we’ll have 18.5 million passenger-km of revenue per km of construction, comparable to the JR East Shinkansen network.
Of course these passenger densities, and hence returns on investment, are not available to the full line; they’re only available to this last link completing New York-Toronto. To enjoy such favorable ratio the preexisting routes must already be in place. We cannot use the 30 million passenger-km/km figure to justify building New York-Buffalo as a first step toward New York-Toronto. If Maloney intends to do that, then she is setting the line up for failure; 3.5 million passenger-km/km is too little. Amtrak has about the same on the Northeast Corridor, from which it squeezes operating profits, but the capital construction was paid by private railroads between 1831 and 1917; building a greenfield line for this performance is unwarranted. At most, we can use it to add to domestic traffic in case the merits of a domestic line are close to good enough but not quite.
New York-Montreal does not have the same advantage as New York-Toronto. Not only is the travel volume much smaller to being with, but also it would require building about 360 km of route, in the rolling hills of Vermont, to create a link of 590 km. Very little of that 360 km is a reasonable commuter rail route by itself – on the line I sketched to measure distance, only 30. So at best this is 330 out of 590. If we attempt the same calculation as for New York-Toronto, we obtain just 2.7 million passenger-km/km. Moreover, the intermediate markets are much weaker than US-Niagara Falls or Buffalo-Toronto. For now, HSR between New York and Montreal should remain an unfulfilled dream of Montreal boosters.
Of course, it’s possible that Maloney just emphasized the possible connections to Canada, and her actual drive is going to be Empire Corridor HSR, which is a welcome change from Cuomo’s opposition. Canadians do not vote in US elections. In that case, a link to Toronto would become stronger, because of the piggybacking on preexisting New York-Buffalo HSR. The line would hinge entirely on constructibility over the river and border control issues then. International links underperform, but sometimes they are short enough relative to the possibility to be worth it.
Are Larger Planes Feasible?
In my previous post, I showed how, in New York, high-speed rail can’t realistically be expected to reduce demand for travel much, and so to decongest its airspace something else is needed. The solutions are to reduce the number of slots, which means either moving them elsewhere (i.e. building relief airports) or increasing plane size. Although increasing plane size is desirable from an operational and environmental point of view, it has problems that make it harder than in Japan, where short-distance domestic flights use widebodies as large as the 747. In contrast, because short-distance air shuttles in the Northeast use very small planes, high-speed rail is a surprisingly promising way to reduce air congestion, despite my original implication.
The key to the plane size problem is this chart of the world’s top air city pairs, with Seoul-Jeju topping at nearly 10 million passengers per year. The chart mainly shows Asian city pairs; Europe and the US are not on the chart. The reason is that the chart considers individual airports, rather than city airspaces; data from within the US shows that there are city pairs that would make the list, all multi-airport. New York-South Florida is close to 20,000 passengers per day, or 7.1 million per year, but there are three airports at each end, and they are fairly evenly matched: the busiest of the nine airport pairs, LaGuardia-Fort Lauderdale, has just 3,500 passengers per day, too few to make the international list.
What this means is that if airlines offer any frequency, it’s harder to provide service with larger planes. Harder does not mean impossible, but this is nothing like the huge travel volumes between Haneda and Japan’s other major domestic airports. Larger planes soak up passengers very quickly: despite being the world’s busiest airport pair measured by seats flown, Tokyo-Sapporo has 23 flights per day, with 767s and 777s, compared with 60 for New York-Boston, mostly regional jets.
The other issue is competition between airlines. Tokyo-Sapporo is a duopoly between ANA and Japan Airlines. The busiest routes in the US have more companies, and if they don’t, then they’re dominated by a low-cost carrier, which will stick to narrowbodies to maintain fleet uniformity. The American competition, including the presence of low-cost carriers, lowers the fare: a random check of a roundtrip between Tokyo and Sapporo in early December gives me a fare of about $900 roundtrip, versus $80 one-way for New York-Chicago for the same check, or $171 on average.
However, the competition also means that if each airline wants to offer high frequency on its own, it must fly smaller planes. Even a plane every two hours works out to about 8 departures per day per direction; if the plane is a 787, it’s nearly 4,000 passengers per day in both directions. The busiest single-airline, single-airport pair in the US is American flying LaGuardia-O’Hare, at 2,400 passengers per day; this excludes connecting traffic, but connecting traffic will not by its own make the difference between LaGuardia-O’Hare and Tokyo-Sapporo.
To ordinary travelers the choice of airline doesn’t matter too much: there’s no difference between having two airlines each with flights that leave on the hour, and having each airline’s flights depart every other hours so that they overlie and create hourly frequency. At 6,300 passenger per day on all airlines, JFK-LAX has enough traffic as it is to run fifteen 787s per day in each direction. But other airport pairs not dominated by low-cost carriers, including those to South Florida, could only support three to five 787s.
More speculatively, good transit access to airports – including commuter rail through-running to allow easy travel from New Jersey and Westchester to JFK and from Long Island to Newark – could reduce the difference between Newark and JFK for the average traveler. This means that Newark and JFK could be lumped together. Business travelers may still want their hourly flights out of LaGuardia, but the rest could do with a flight out of each of JFK and Newark every two hours, alternating.
The problem is that it requires a massive rise in the transit mode share of airport access, because it is impossible to drive between JFK and New Jersey in a reasonable amount of time. That said, a political environment that taxed jet fuel to incentivize larger planes would also tax gas and induce a mode shift toward transit. In either case, LaGuardia would be outside this system, since connecting it to mass transit is expensive, and has little benefit other than airport travel; in contrast, commuter rail through-running is not only cheaper but also useful to people traveling to the Jamaica and Newark CBDs, who outnumber air travelers.
So on the busiest routes larger planes are feasible, but nontrivial. The final question should be how useful this exercise is. Each of New York’s three main airports has about a thousand aircraft movements per day – five hundred per direction. There are about 110 daily departures to Chicago, Miami, and Los Angeles, combined. Consolidation into larger planes can realistically cut about a third, or 3% of aircraft movements – a bit more at JFK, a bit less at the rest on account of low-cost flights. Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach add another 50 between them, but they’re dominated by JetBlue. A few additional thick markets like San Francisco and Orlando add a bit more, but it can’t amount to more than 5% of the total.
In contrast, there are more than 40 daily flights to Washington, more than 60 to Boston (including Providence and Manchester), and nearly 30 to Philadelphia. Adding in the other cities within 3-hour HSR radius gives us about 300 departures per day, 19% of the aircraft movements. Most of those would see O&D air travel disappear, and even at the outer margin of the radius they’d see air travel greatly diminish. Connecting flights would also decrease, because of the relative ease of air/rail connections. Philadelphia would have no reason for an air connection to New York if people could take a train to the airport that were faster than flying; the same is true of Boston and Washington, though Boston is far enough and has no easy air/rail connection, so it might retain a handful of daily flights.
Although I could weasel and say that everything is needed – larger planes, relief airports, and substitution of short trips by HSR – the reality is that those are not equally significant. Not even close. My previous post’s analysis of New York’s air market papered over a large difference between the share of passenger traffic and the share of aircraft traffic that can be substituted by HSR, coming from the use of regional jets on short-range flights. (By the way, this is especial to New York; in California most short-range flights are run by Southwest and use 737s, and so at LAX, the share of short-range flights among both passengers and aircraft movements is the same, at 21%.)
So as it turns out, a significant portion of New York’s air traffic can be replaced, helping decongest the airspace. The total is close to a quarter, of which nearly 20% comes from HSR replacing the air shuttles, and an additional 3-5% could come from consolidation of domestic thick markets into less frequent flights on widebodies.
Pedestrian Observations 
