Category: New York
Connecting New Jersey to Manhattan, Redux
This post responds to arguments made by Brian in comments regarding how to connect New Jersey regional trains to Manhattan, in addition to the present tunnels to Penn Station; Brian argues for leveraging the Staten Island Railway, including the North Shore Branch, since a Staten Island-Manhattan tunnel should be built anyway.
In my post about the various options for connecting New Jersey to Lower Manhattan, all four alternatives I looked at featured a tunnel across the Hudson from the Hudson County waterfront to Manhattan, differing only in the location of the portals and the route used to get to the New Jersey portal. There are in principle other options, and I’d like to explain why they’re less feasible, and conversely why a connection along the lines I suggested should be one of the top two priority trans-Hudson projects, together with an additional tunnel pair to Penn Station.
First, because Lower Manhattan is the second most important business district in the region, as well as a subway hub, it deserves some connection. More than that, it deserves a connection from as many directions as possible, same as Midtown, and it deserves a connection earlier rather than later. The longer it takes to build a direct commuter rail line to it, the more it will decline in favor of other business districts, which with the exception of Midtown are much harder to serve with transit. It’s likely that if the LIRR, the Pennyslvania, the Lackawanna, the Erie, and the New York Central had all managed to build commuter lines to Lower Manhattan, instead of relying on the subway and the Hudson Tubes for the final connection, Lower Manhattan would not have lost out to Midtown so readily; Midtown would remain more convenient for commuters from Uptown Manhattan, the Bronx, and Queens, but not for commuters from Long Island or New Jersey.
Because of those principles, we get that a connection from the Erie lines to Lower Manhattan is critical. Once we accept that the major New Jersey lines, or groups of lines, need to be connected to both Manhattan job centers, it becomes best to gear the Lower Manhattan connection to the Erie lines, which are the northernmost in New Jersey and therefore wouldn’t intersect a Lower Manhattan connection to another line. The ARC solution of looping trains around Secaucus and connecting them to Penn Station is a fine first step but is inadequate afterward: a Lower Manhattan connection from the Erie lines would intersect the other lines at Secaucus, allowing a transfer, but a connection from any other direction would not allow a transfer from the Erie lines to Lower Manhattan.
On top of this, the cost involved in building such a connection, along any of the four alignments I proposed, is a tunnel across the Hudson, some extra tunneling on the Manhattan or Jersey City side (the farther south the alignment, the more Jersey City and the less Manhattan tunneling is needed), and of course a station in Lower Manhattan. This is quite bare-bones in the sense that any other connection to Lower Manhattan has to incur the same costs of a tunnel across water, and a Manhattan station. Concretely, this means it’s easier to tunnel from Jersey City or Hoboken to Manhattan than from Staten Island to Manhattan, and as such this would be built first, becoming the initial connection from New Jersey to Lower Manhattan.
I waver on whether this should be done before or after four-tracking the North River Tunnels. The tunnels are still extraordinarily busy at rush hour, and even state of the art signaling will only buy a few years before traffic matches the new capacity; moreover, Lower Manhattan-bound commuters can already transfer to PATH at Newark Penn cross-platform or at Hoboken, either of which is more convenient than transferring at Penn Station. On the other hand, people can also get to the southern edge of Midtown on PATH, and direct Lower Manhattan service can justify diverting some Morris and Essex trains from the mainline. It buys at most a few more years of breathing room, but it adds more destinations that can be reached by train, whereas a Midtown solution just adds capacity to an existing destination.
But, now, what of a future Staten Island connection? If a Staten Island-Manhattan tunnel is built, along the straightest alignment, bypassing Brooklyn, then it could provide a second connection from New Jersey to Lower Manhattan. This is the brunt of Brian’s comment: it would require using the bridge from Elizabeth to the North Shore Branch, which is active, and for another access point a new bridge from the mainline to Perth Amboy, but even building the latter bridge costs much less than new tunnels. Here is a map of the alignments.
The problem with using this for through-trains from the Jersey Shore and the Raritan Valley Line, the lines that connect best to Staten Island, is speed. The distance to Grand Central through either Staten Island and Lower Manhattan or the Northeast Corridor and Penn Station is about the same; the distance to Lower Manhattan is several kilometers shorter and one transfer fewer than via Secaucus, but once one connection to Lower Manhattan exists, a secondary connection would have to be justified based on demand to all job centers, of which Midtown is the biggest.
But now the Staten Island connection would have a much lower average speed. It is curvier, independently of all other considerations. The tunnel from Staten Island to Manhattan should also be lower-speed, to reduce the required bore diameter and save money. Since there is no good reason for intercity trains to use this connection – the Perth Amboy connection leads to no intercity line, and the North Shore Branch connection would require building a new junction to the Northeast Corridor, which would be both expensive and curvy – there is no reason to optimize for speed, unlike the case for the Northeast Corridor. So the choice is between one line where express commuter trains could do 160 km/h except maybe in the last few kilometers into Manhattan, and one where they’d do 100 or charitably 130.
On top of that, there are more stations in Staten Island, and also more local demand. Part of it is just bad operating practices in New Jersey – there should be more local stops in Elizabeth – but Staten Island has far more local demand, and so dropping local stops to make it easier to run express trains is less justified. As of 2000, the latest year for which the census data is readily available, Staten Island had 53,000 Manhattan-bound commuters. The relevant intermediate cities on the Northeast Corridor and North Jersey Coast Line – Newark, Elizabeth, Linden, Rahway, Carteret, and Woodbridge – had 10,500 between them. The corresponding numbers of Brooklyn-bound commuters are 29,000 and 1,500, respectively. It makes sense to keep the current stop spacing on the trunk line between Newark and Rahway, or add just one or two stops, but it makes none to not fit a North Shore Branch service with many local stops, which would then slow down longer-distance regional trains.
While the North Shore Branch can’t be widened except with many takings, the Staten Island Railway mainline could conceivably be four-tracked to allow overtakes, and this would make it a more competitive route. But if there is money for that, there is probably money to six-track the remaining four-track gap between Newark Airport and Linden, allowing full separation of local commuter trains, express commuter trains, and intercity trains on the Northeast Corridor except for segments on which the speeds are similar (Newark-New York) or ones where traffic is low enough to fit on existing tracks (south of Rahway).
The problem is really that the North Jersey Coast Line doesn’t have enough traffic to justify two highly separated branches, one through Staten Island and one through the Northeast Corridor. The split I proposed in my regional rail posts is much smaller – trains are only split east of Penn Station, after they begin overlapping with the Morris and Essex Lines, and so it’s possible to time transfers in such a way that people from Long Branch can board any train and be at their destination with just one additional easy transfer. At most this may justify a few peak hour runs; otherwise, even if the Tottenville-Perth Amboy bridge is built, timed transfers at Perth Amboy are almost as good and avoid reducing frequency on each branch too much.
Troll Rail Projects
In lieu of a real post, I want to discuss a few possible rail projects that are not completely thought-out. By this I mean rail projects that probably have critical constructibility and cost problems, but not obvious ones. They lie somewhere between true trolling – say, transcontinental HSR from New York to Los Angeles – and projects that are difficult and not yet proposed but need to be seriously considered, such as new train tunnels to Lower Manhattan or a Geary subway.
The projects are roughly ordered from most serious to most frivolous. The projects for the Northeast may well be feasible and should be at least considered, and the first was probably originally not done due to agency turf issues. The rolling stock projects are the most speculative – they suggest things to be done by competent rolling stock manufacturers that probably would’ve done them already if they could. The non-Northeastern infrastructure projects are somewhere in between. Make of this what you will. Just, please, do not use any of this as the basis for any alternative proposal, and do not link with a description like “Why have transit agencies not thought of this?” unless you know what you’re doing.
Northeast
ARC-North: the proposals for cross-Hudson tunnels that connect to Penn Station, including ARC Alt G and now Amtrak’s Gateway, would have the new tunnels connecting to the south of the main intercity through-tracks: ARC goes to the southern tracks, currently used by New Jersey, and Amtrak eventually wants to add tracks to the south. I propose that when they eventually build such a project, they build the new tunnels to the north, connecting to the existing northern pair of East River Tunnels; a connection to Grand Central could then be built from one of the two East River tunnel pairs, the one not used by intercity trains.
Right now, the northernmost tracks have the most access points and the southernmost tracks the fewest. The system would take advantage of the reduction in demand to Penn Station after East Side Access opens. In case the present-day North River Tunnel diameter is too narrow to allow for higher speeds, the new tunnel could then be used (also) by intercity trains at 200 km/h while letting commuter trains go to Grand Central without reducing capacity there.
Northeast Corridor to Market East, on the cheap: a short connection between North Philadelphia and North Broad, similar to that proposed for the Chestnut Hill West Line but used for the Northeast Corridor instead, would let intercity trains serve Market East or Suburban Station, in addition to 30th Street Station. Trains continuing down to Washington would probably not want to use such a connection, as it would slow them down because of the sharp turn in the SEPTA tunnel, but trains continuing on the Keystone Corridor would emerge from 30th Street oriented the right way. Right now trains to the Keystone Corridor have to either reverse direction (as they do today) or use a connection that skips 30th Street Station (as the fastest New York-Chicago trains did in the Broadway Limited era). It could be useful for local HSR trains if there ever were HSR from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh.
Philadelphia Bypass: also on the subject of HSR from New York to the Keystone Corridor, if express trains skip Philadelphia, it would be useful to build a bypass roughly along existing freight routes and I-276, starting at Trenton and ending somewhere between King of Prussia and Exton. The cost may not justify this in terms of cost per minute saved on New York-Pittsburgh (and New York-Cleveland, and New York-Chicago).
Providence Downcity Station: using the East Side Rail Tunnel, trains could continue west to Downcity, and then connect to the legacy tracks by hopping over I-95 in Federal Hill. For commuter trains, an underground station at Thayer Street is necessary. This is a pick-your-poison project in terms of takings: there are tradeoffs between curve radius, i.e. noise, and takings, and also between both and centrality. One option would be a curved station over City Hall Park, which would become the new Kennedy Plaza, and then what is now Kennedy Plaza would be landscaped and turned into the new City Hall Park. Another would go straight west, cutting through Citizens Plaza, and have a station elevated over Memorial Boulevard.
To troll even further, trains could use abandoned trackage starting from East Providence and then go to Fall River (reconstructing more abandoned trackage) and Newport (building new tracks through Bristol and over the Mount Hope Bridge).
Old Erie Line Revival: New Jersey Transit’s Main Line trains do not use the Erie Main Line south of Paterson, which is abandoned, but instead go along the Lackawanna’s old Boonton Branch. The right-of-way for the original Erie line is still intact, and serves the center of Passaic better. It might be useful to rebuild the tracks, which would require viaducts, and realign the Main Line. Service on all lines would probably require too many outlets – not even a dedicated tunnel to Lower Manhattan, combined, could be used for all lines serving that part of North Jersey, so some would have to be severed and turned over to light rail (maybe the Northern Branch) or the subway. The old Erie line is actually the best candidate for being part of a subway extension, since it serves dense communities and has a natural terminus at Paterson, where it would probably have to go underground.
Steinway Tunnel Widening: the Steinway Tunnel was widened from trolley loading gauge to IRT loading gauge when what is now the 7 was built. Since the rest of the 7 is built to the wider BMT/IND loading gauge, widening the tunnel is a useful capacity reliever to spend money on. It’s probably supremely expensive – I’m sure the MTA has studied it in the past; it’s also far from the most crowded Queens-Manhattan crossing point. But the cost may compare favorably with other means of providing extra capacity, and it may also be beneficial to let some Flushing Line trains serve Broadway and some Astoria Line trains serve 42nd Street.
West Coast
Subway to Burbank: Los Angeles’s Red Line does not go straight north along Vermont to Burbank, but swerves west to swerve more of Hollywood and serves Universal City and North Hollywood on the Valley side of the mountains. Since Downtown Burbank is a major secondary employment center, soon to be served by HSR, why not extend the city’s transit system in that direction? The Orange Line there should be a no-brainer, but more speculatively, the MTA could find money (another ballot measure, maybe?) and program another a subway branch off the Red Line that serves Burbank, with excessive splitting prevented by a new Vermont subway, or even (to troll further) an entirely new line that follows Western south of the mountains.
San Jose – Almaden Street Station: San Jose has a medium-sized CBD, roughly comparable to Providence or Burbank, but Diridon Station is separated from it by a freeway. Since there’s already a plan to spend large amounts of money of turning it into a multi-level train station, which the local technical activists have dubbed Diridon Intergalactic (or Pangalactic), why not also move the station? Trains could go on an alignment like this, elevated over Almaden, on a viaduct dedicated to Caltrain and HSR so that only four tracks would be needed. It would also bypass the current reverse curve between Tamien and Diridon, obviating the need for an iconic bridge. In a realistic, cost-conscious blended plan this is too expensive, but they should at least compare the cost with both a blended plan and the proposed full-fat business plan before rejecting it.
San Francisco – Embarcadero Station: with Transbay Terminal facing every planning and constructibility problem known to humanity, and the current terminal at 4th and King too far from the CBD, why not extend the trains under King Street and then the Embarcadero and build a station near the Ferry Building? Building this close to water is a nightmare, and the curve from King to the Embarcadero may be too sharp, but at least this connects to BART directly and has no station length constraints. On the third hand, the Embarcadero is wide but possibly not wide enough for three platforms and six tracks.
Rolling Stock
Tilting HSR: tilting HSR trains are either relatively low-speed (the Pendolino is limited to 250 km/h, with a few derivatives capable of a bit more) or relatively low-tilt (Talgos are capable of 180 mm of cant deficiency, and the latest Shinkansen trains have active suspension allowing up to about the same for the E5 Series. However, trains capable of 250 mm cant deficiency and 360 km/h are feasible; this is the main subject of Martin Lindahl’s thesis, which I (and others) have been quoting as a ready source of HSR track standards around the world. That said, probably the only place in the world that needs such trains is the Northeast Corridor, due to its unique combination of long straight stretches, on which very high speeds are possible or could be with minor infrastructure upgrades, and long curvy stretches, on which even major upgrades could not bring up to full HSR standards.
Catenary-free HSR: there’s new technology for catenary-free light rail, which is intended for use in historic city centers with aesthetic opposition to trolleywire. The contactless power supply is buried under the tracks, with each segment activated only when a train is completely above it. Although the technology is still low-speed, it could be useful for HSR. Pantographs generate disproportionate noise at high speeds, and Japan specifically has been squeezing every possible decibel out of low-noise pantographs. Being able to eliminate the pantograph would carry this to its logical conclusion. On the margins, it would also permit narrower rights-of-way, since no space for catenary poles would be needed.
Northeast Corridor: Dealing With Capacity
To build high-speed rail on the Northeast Corridor cheaply, intercity trains will have to share tracks with regional trains at several locations, which between them comprise a majority of the corridor. At most of these, commuter traffic is heavy enough that it must be accommodated in some way; only in a minority is it so insignificant that Amtrak can feasibly kick trains out if need be. So far I’ve only explained how track-sharing can be done between Boston and Providence and between New York and New Rochelle, both far from the busiest segments of the corridor.
I’d like to start tackling the more difficult segments, New York-Trenton and New Rochelle-Stamford. Thankfully, they are almost fully four-tracked; the one exception is the North River Tunnels and the immediate approaches, where there is little speed difference between intercity and regional trains. Unfortunately, even four tracks are not enough to provide full separation between services that do not run at the same speed, because those corridors are busy enough to warrant both local and express commuter service. This requires some scheduling creativity. In both cases, what is required is having express commuter trains weave between the local tracks and the intercity tracks.
As before, my explicit assumptions are that the rolling stock is optimized, and that speed limits except those coming from right-of-way geometry have already been eliminated. However, since unlike the MBTA, Metro-North runs good rolling stock, and New Jersey Transit runs passable rolling stock, we can’t realistically expect either to buy the most powerful regional trains on the market; that said, New Jersey Transit is looking into new trains, and we will assume those trains will be in line with the high-performance but heavy Silverliner Vs. What we can expect is better on-time performance and less schedule padding. The amount of commuter traffic is assumed to be similar to or slightly higher than today; the outer ends of both lines can be expected to lose traffic from commuter to intercity trains, but the rest will not.
Complicating all this is the requirement of making all the trains cohere into one line. In other words, unlike the situation for Boston-Providence, Newark-Trenton can’t stand on its own; the trains need to depart Newark with suitable gaps to allow trains to come in from the Kearny Connection. Likewise, New Rochelle-New Haven needs to feed into New Rochelle-New York in such a way that trains can share tracks on that segment. The most difficult portion is then combining the two commuter halves of the Northeast Corridor together to allow through-running, without holding commuter trains for too long at Penn Station. One possibility is to expand the entire route between the tunnels and Newark to a long overtake segment, and have all commuter trains stop at Secaucus to further slow them down and permit intercity trains that arrived at New York second to arrive at Newark first.
Newark-Trenton
Current peak traffic on New Jersey Transit’s Northeast Corridor and North Jersey Coast lines is 13 trains per hour. Of those, only 2 make local stops from Rahway north, and both are North Jersey Coast trains. An additional 2 trains are express North Jersey Coast trains, leaving us with 9 trains at Metropark (3 stopping from New Brunswick, 3 more stopping from Jersey Avenue, 3 super-express from Trenton).
The introduction of high-speed trains would change the distribution of demand dramatically. From Trenton, HSR would be far faster. Even from Princeton Junction, it would be substantially faster to take a commuter train south to Trenton and connect to HSR to New York. For passengers desiring a one-seat ride, trains could continue to run, but make more stops along the way. We may suppose that no commuter train will skip any stop from Metropark south, and that an additional 2 trains that currently run express to New Brunswick or Jersey Avenue will run local, providing the Rahway-Newark segment with a peak local traffic of 4 tph.
The desired ideal is that all commuter trains will stay away from the inner two tracks, with brief forays when absolutely necessary. The above rule regarding local runs ensures no overtakes among the commuter trains take place south of Rahway. We are then left with the task of ensuring all overtakes north of Rahway make use of the two existing six-track segments, around Newark Airport, and from just south of the Elizabeth curve to Union Interlocking between the mainline and the North Jersey Coast Line, the latter segment including Linden and Rahway.
Because the southern six-track segment persists through the interlocking, it provides a fully separated route between local coast trains and express mainline trains, and also between local mainline trains and express coast trains southbound. Slightly modifying the interlocking to allow a separated northbound path between local mainline and express coast trains that does not use the inner two tracks may be required.
Now, a Silverliner V running at 160 km/h appears to lose about 90 seconds to a high-platform stop. For the record, a FLIRT would lose 75 seconds. Since there are five local stops north of the interlocking, we have to deal with 7.5 minutes. With 2-minute headways, this means local trains can depart Newark 9.5 technical minutes ahead of express trains on the same branch (mainline or coast), and 6.5 ahead of express trains on the opposite branch. Since 11/9.5 = 1.16 and a 16% pad is excessive, 11 scheduled minutes of separation are enough, and we obtain the following option for departure times out of Newark:
Express :00
Express :02
Express :04
Local :06
Express :15
Express :17
…
Each local must serve a different branch from the express immediately following, since 9 < 9.5. The express afterward – for example the :17 express after the :06 local – is separated by 11 minutes, and so can run on any branch. This allows 16 tph, of which 4 are local, and at least 4 have to run on the New Jersey Coast Line. Of course not every slot has to have a train scheduled in it.
Adding local frequency at the expense of express frequency is possible, but requires tightening the gap between a local train and the express that follows it, unless we allow inconveniences such as serving the local stations at highly irregular intervals. For example, 10-minute local headways allow trains to depart Newark at,
Express :00
Local :02
Express :10
Local :12
…
The 8-minute difference means each express must serve a different destination from the preceding local, and this underserves the mainline at only 6 tph. We can add stops to the express trains (or saddle them with inferior, locomotive-hauled rolling stock), but two stops are required, unless New Jersey Transit makes sure to get cutting-edge trains, which is unlikely; with FLIRTs, the time difference shrinks from 7.5 minutes to 6.25 and only one stop is required. In either case, we might as well squeeze an :x8 express, also serving a different destination from the local ahead of it.
Another option is to use the Linden-Rahway segment for overtakes. Trains lose 3 minutes there. If we add an infill stop, they lose 4.5, which is very close to the 4 minutes required to switch the order of two trains. This means express trains need to approach Linden 2-2.5 minutes behind the locals, and thus leave Newark 7 minutes behind. We obtain,
Local :00
Express :07
Express :09 (different destination from the :00 local)
…
(12-minute clockface pattern)
Since 12-minute schedules are generally awkward and my New York-New Rochelle proposal uses 10- (below) or 15-minute schedules (in the original link), we should add a Newark Airport or Elizabeth stop to the express trains, and then they leave Newark about 5-5.5 minutes behind the locals, and we can have a 7.5-minute pattern, which divides 15 evenly. Alternatively, we can add the stop and then have a 10-minute pattern again. We either get 6 local and 12 express slots with each express serving a different destination from the local behind it, or 8 local and 8 express slots, and there is no restriction on destination:
Local :00
Express :05
Express :07
Local :10
Express :15
Express :17
…
or
Local :00
Express :05
Local :07
Express :13
Local :15
Express :20
…
Note that nowhere here does HSR share tracks with anything except maybe in the Newark Penn Station throat, under any of the options. Thus, any discussion of HSR speed zones is irrelevant, except perhaps at the final stage when some tweaks to the basic schedule are under consideration.
New Rochelle-Stamford
Like Newark-Trenton, this is a four-track segment. However, commuter traffic here is heavier, and there are no six-track segments. Instead, overtakes between express commuter trains and intercity trains must be done on bypass segments. The one that we will consider is, as I outlined before, a route from just south of Rye to between Greenwich and Cos Cob, following the I-95 right-of-way.
No HSR on the New Haven Line should be considered with New Rochelle as it is. The flat junction and S-curve together severely constrain train speed and capacity. Since the junction has to be grade-separated, and some takings are required, we might as well assume the separation allows trains to proceed without crossing opposing traffic no matter where they go. Furthermore, the station should be six-tracked if necessary.
We will also assume the curve has been partially eased, to a radius of 700 meters with appropriate superelevation spirals, permitting our example 375-mm-equivalent-cant trains 150 km/h. We will also assume that Harrison has been partially eased to 1,500 meters, permitting 220; that the curve toward the bypass around Rye is 1,500 meters, which may be slightly too optimistic but not by more than a few seconds of travel time; and that the curves farther north until the Stamford approach are 2,000, permitting 250. The approach to Stamford consists of two curves forming a wide S, the western one at 1,000 (180 km/h) and the eastern one at 800 (160). Note that these upgrades allow express commuter trains to travel at 160 on the shared segments – indeed, they require it to avoid or at least limit cant excess. Local trains have more limited cant because of the needs of freight.
We will assume the number of trains is about the same, with capacity boosted with longer trains; where New Jersey Transit runs 12-car trains because of limited capacity across the Hudson, Metro-North tends to run 8-car trains. Unlike in New Jersey’s case, there’s little point then in programming more slots for trains.
Let us now consider Easy Mode, with all Metro-North trains using the existing route to Grand Central. We have two track-sharing segments, one between New Rochelle and Rye, and one between Greenwich and Stamford. The first segment is 12 km long and has 3 stations with 2 more at the ends; the second is 8 km long and has 3 stations as well, with just 1 more at one end.
On the first segment, there are 18 Metro-North tph peak today: 12 not stopping at all, 2 stopping only at Harrison, and 4 local. Now if the express trains share tracks with HSR rather than the locals, we will want to schedule trains HSR-express-express repeating every 10 minutes, or HSR-express-express-express repeating every 15; the former allows more versatile HSR slots (local and express), and the 15-minute assumption of New York-New Rochelle has no relevance in Easy Mode.
Current scheduled time between Rye and New Rochelle is 17 minutes for local trains; judging by both rolling stock capability and the local-express schedule difference, nonstop trains take about 10 minutes, and trains stopping at Rye but not New Rochelle take 12. Sped up to 160 km/h, with 7% schedule padding, nonstop trains would take about 6 minutes. HSR would take 3:35, again padded 7%. This means that, with 2-minute headways in both directions (fast-ahead-of-slow, and slow-ahead-of-fast), and 6-minute express commuter trains, we can have (northbound times from New Rochelle, HSR passing and commuter trains passing or stopping):
HSR :00
Express :02
Express :04
HSR :10
…
This is because by Rye, the :10 HSR is still 3.5 minutes behind the :04 express Metro-North train.
Alternatively, it’s possible but very tight to have an express-express-local schedule, assuming commuter trains are not sped up but the stop penalty is reduced to 80 seconds (so, 4 minutes for 3 stops), which is feasible at the speeds of the line:
Express :00
Express :02
Local :04
Express :10
…
This requires express trains to weave effortlessly to tracks 2 and 5 of a 6-track New Rochelle station, or to stop at New Rochelle.
A mixed schedule, with half the express trains sharing track with HSR and half with the local trains, is also feasible, but is essentially like drinking half coffee and half tea: while the 8-minute local-express gap on the local tracks is fine as it is, the gap on the HSR tracks requires speeding up the express trains anyway.
Note that if the all express trains share tracks with HSR, it is trivial to add local service, or to replace express trains with locals.
The other segment is easier, because it is shorter and lower-traffic, with only 13 tph (3 local, the rest express). HSR would take 2:24 with pad; express commuter trains take 7 today and could take 3:24 with a speed-up. The speed-up would be very significant here as this is a slow segment today, with the movable Cos Cob Bridge restricting speeds. The present speed difference is already almost small enough to allow HSR-express-express, as above; we need to cut another 36 seconds from the express travel time, which we can do with improved reliability reducing padding (the pad I’ve observed between Stamford and Grand Central is 10 minutes). Local-express-express would be 7 vs. 12 minutes, and if locals could consistently take just 11 minutes, as some already do, or if expresses could easily weave to the express tracks just north of Greenwich after HSR trains diverge to the bypass, then it would be feasible.
To finish Easy Mode, let us reconcile the two segments, which after all are populated by the same trains. If we have HSR-express-express on both segments and use the bypass as an overtake, we need to ensure that a commuter train that was 2 minutes ahead of HSR before is now 4 minutes behind after: 4, and not 2, because each HSR train overtakes 2 express trains. Losing 6 minutes is difficult, as the current local travel time between Greenwich and Rye is just 7 minutes. But with approaches this is a bit more than 8 minutes, and HSR would do the segment in 2:08, padded. This has the only drawback of awkwardly making express trains make stops at Greenwich (understandable given traffic), Port Chester, and Rye.
As an alternative, we can also do local-express-express on one segment and HSR-express-express on the other. Since the HSR-express-express schedule is tighter on the southern segment, the southern segment should have local-express-express. This only requires us to avoid having trains run a mixture of local and express too much: as two of the Greenwich-Stamford locals run express south of Greenwich and three of the Harrison-New Rochelle locals only run as far north as Harrison, we can simply combine those to create more locals going all the way from Stamford to Grand Central.
Now, let us move on to Hard Mode, which includes New Rochelle-New York. A consistent 15-minute schedule does not look possible to me on New Rochelle-Stamford without reducing peak commuter traffic to 16 tph, for example by lengthening trains and platforms. If that were done, 8 tph local on the local tracks with 4 turning at or south of Greenwich, and 8 tph express in HSR-express-express pattern on the southern shared segment, would be feasible.
So let us consider 10-minute schedules. HSR and express trains run at almost the same speed, since there are few areas south of New Rochelle on which even 200 km/h is at all feasible. The difference between HSR and express 145 km/h M8s (stopping at New Rochelle and Sunnyside), as already investigated in my original post on the subject, is 3:15 without pad, and 3:29 with. This means the express needs to leave New Rochelle up to 4.5 minutes after the HSR train, so that it will arrive at Sunnyside 8 minutes after, and 2 ahead of the next HSR. With a 9-minute time difference between HSR and the express trains from Greenwich to New Rochelle, this requires the express to be at least 4.5 minutes ahead of HSR at Greenwich, which with very minor speed-up is possible. What this means is that with mixed HSR-express-express and local-express-express as in Easy Mode, the first express after each HSR will go to Penn Station and the second one will go to Grand Central.
The question then is what to do with local trains. If they only go as far north as Co-op City, then it’s easy; with the exception of Hell Gate Bridge, the tracks in the Bronx would have to be four-tracked anyway to allow some overtake, and since there’s room, there’s not much traffic now, and this represents an expansion of Metro-North service, we can safely assume four-tracking. In that case local trains, making no stops in Queens except Sunnyside, would run at the same speed as the express trains on the two-track segment south of Hunts Point, and could be scheduled anywhere. An Astoria stop would require them to be scheduled immediately after the HSR and express trains southbound, which is feasible as near Sunnyside those would be close together already, with the express just ahead of HSR.
Of course, as this is Hard Mode, we cannot assume the local trains turn at Co-op City. Instead, we will make them turn at New Rochelle, or ideally run through farther north as locals. Now, southbound HSR trains, we have established, pass New Rochelle at :00, express trains leave at :04:30 and :06:30, and local trains leave at :02:30. This means we should extend four-tracking at Co-op City such that the local goes at the exact same speed as the express, which does stop at New Rochelle, until after it diverges to the local tracks at Co-op City; alternatively, if there is room in the schedule, we can have the local trains leave at :02 and then there is enough room.
Rearrangement of trains heading toward Hell Gate should be considered a trivial problem: if locals are too far ahead, or too far behind, the number of stops could be adjusted, or they could be held at the Bronx stations longer. Because the time difference between a local and an HSR in the Bronx and Queens combined is just under 10 minutes, the first option would require an extra stop or two or longer dwell times, making the local lose a full 10-minute headway and thus come immediately after the next HSR. By then the express has shifted back to about :07-:08 and so it’s not a threat even if the local does make an Astoria stop.
Conclusion
None of this is elegant. The schedules don’t necessarily match. Local HSR trains would add extra complications, though at least they’d reduce the speed difference with commuter trains in Metro-North territory. All agencies involved need to be on the same page. Through-running would involve a multi-overtake schedule, in which the most local trains get overtaken several times, by different classes of trains (HSR and express). Punctuality doesn’t have to be Japanese, but it needs to be Swiss, or else the entire edifice collapses.
And it’s still far cheaper than trying to overbuild everything to prevent this mess. The only commuter trains sharing track with HSR in this region are Metro-North, and those are fairly punctual, though this involves heavy padding. The rolling stock assumed is already in operation or in the procurement stage. The track repairs required are straightforward, and the curve modifications required, while annoying, are not the end of the world; the one greenfield bypass follows an existing Interstate, and the takings required, while nonzero, are low.
The travel time implied for this is a little more than 17 minutes from Newark to Trenton, for an intercity train stopping only at Newark (though this requires a top speed of 360 km/h causing severe noise impact in New Brunswick and Trenton), a little more than 8 between New Rochelle and Stamford, and just less than 10 between Sunnyside and New Rochelle. Depending on how much speed can be squeezed out of narrow tunnels and a new Portal Bridge, about 11 minutes Sunnyside-Newark, including New York and Newark dwell times, could be done; this is about 46 minutes Stamford-Trenton, a segment that Amtrak currently does in 1:45 excluding the long New York dwell time. And the amount of concrete pouring required is quite small for an hour’s worth of travel time reduction. Even a top speed that’s less noisy and ambitious, and lower speeds through the existing tunnels, do not raise this travel time far above 50 minutes.
Great things are possible if we first look at what is feasible, and then demand that agencies cooperate to achieve it, instead of program everything around public transportation agencies that act like rival gangs. If everything is optimized right, travel times not much higher than those Amtrak is targeting become possible, for a small fraction of the price, and capacity constraints can be kicked down the road to when passenger rail makes enough money to pay to relieve them. Organization, electronics, and small, strategic concrete pouring can go a long way. The choice is not between HSR for a twelve-figure sum and small improvements for an eleven-figure sum; it’s between low-cost HSR and agency turf battles.
The Recession Won’t Last Forever
The article about New York State’s decision to discontinue studying high-speed rail between New York and Buffalo is by itself not terribly surprising. Although Andrew Cuomo likes flashy public works projects, of which HSR is one, he is consistently pro-road and anti-rail.
The study released by the state sandbagged actual HSR on cost grounds – it did not provide any further analysis, and in two ways (lower average speed than most HSR lines, and a requirement for tilting) stacked the deck against it – but instead looked into medium-speed rail, with top speed of 110-125 mph, which is frequently misnamed HSR in the US. This, too, is not surprising. State DOTs have no idea how HSR works, and tend to make mistakes, not know how to do cost control, and so on.
What’s most surprising is the explanation for why not to do anything substantial: as one of the HSR proponents quoted in the article complains, “The State of New York is worried about making ends meet; the economy is not doing so great. That’s the reason in the short term.” Taking his argument at face value, the state is refusing to advance study of an HSR line because economic conditions are bad now, a decade or more before such line could even open.
The recession won’t last forever; if it does, there are bigger things to worry about than transportation. Other than immediate reconstruction projects, for which the environmental reviews are fast-tracked, major projects take years to do all the design and environmental studies. California has been planning HSR since the late 1990s. It intended to go to ballot in 2004, and after delays did so in 2008. HSR is scheduled to break ground later this year, assuming the state does not cancel the project. An HSR project for which planning starts now will start construction after the economy recovers not from this recession, but from the next one.
The recurrent theme in the article is the state’s preference for mundane over flashy projects, but rejecting HSR shows the exact opposite.Starting planning now costs very little. In fact, the best thing any state agency can do is keep planning multiple big-ticket project contingencies pending an infusion of money; this way, it can dust off plans and execute them faster if there’s a stimulus bill in the next recession. That’s long-term planning. Refusing to advance construction because it won’t start until long after Cuomo’s Presidential run in 2006 2016 isn’t.
Of course, the same goes in the other direction. Too many people, building on Keynesian stimulus ideas, want massive infrastructure spending now as a public works program. For example, Robert Cruickshank (and in comments, Bruce McF) argues for long-term benefits coming from the stimulus effect. Although construction in 2012-3 would have an impact, a multi-decade project spanning periods of both growth and recession should not rely on estimates of job creation solely from periods of recession. On the contrary, economic costs and benefits should be based on a long-term multi-business cycle trend.
I propose the following principles for interaction between business cycles and very long-term investment:
1. Assume your project will be undertaken in a period of close to (but not quite) full employment, in terms of both funding sources and economic effects, unless you specifically intend to advance construction in a recession.
2. If you want to use a recession to lock in lower interest rates, higher job impacts, or lower construction costs, make sure you have a shovel-ready project, or else try to advocate for better staffing at the requisite regulatory agencies well ahead of time so that they can fast-track it.
3. Treat fiscal surpluses coming from an economy at full employment as one-time shots rather than an ongoing situation that can be used for regular spending or tax cuts. Growth doesn’t last forever, either.
The Urban Geography of Park-and-Rides
The urban geography of transit cities and of car cities is relatively well-understood. In a transit city, there will be a strong CBD surrounded by residences with spiky secondary centers, all quite small geographically but dense, centered around train stations and junctions; because density is high throughout, minor trips are done on foot. In a car city, all trips are done by car, the core is weak, and most employment is in suburban edge cities and edgeless cities.
What I haven’t seen is an explanation of how urban geography works in mixed metro areas: there are those in which short trips are done on foot and long ones in cars, such as new urbanist developments, and those in which short trips are done by car and long ones on transit, such as park-and-ride-oriented commuter suburbs. It is the latter that I want to address in this post.
The first feature of park-and-rides is that of all combinations of modes of transportation, they are the fastest and enable suburbs to sprout the farthest from the center. This is because the segment of the trip done in a car is uncongested and so driving is faster than transit, while the segment done on a train parallels a congested road, and conversely makes few stops so that average speeds are high.
On top of this, because intra-suburban trips are done by car, the density in the suburbs is very low, comparable to proper car cities (see the lower end of the density profiles of the New York, Chicago, and Boston metro areas), and this forces sprawl to go outward. New York is the world’s most sprawling city measured in total built-up area; the only other city of comparable size that’s not a transit city or a bus/jitney city is Los Angeles, which is forced to have denser suburbs because of the mountains. Of course Houston and Dallas sprawl even more relative to size, but because they lack New York’s transit-oriented core, there’s an inherent limit to their size.
The other feature is that there’s a definite socioeconomic history to the development of the auto-oriented commuter suburbs of transit cities. First, people move to the suburbs and commute into the city, almost always by train due to road congestion (or, as in the earliest New York suburbs, because mass motorization hasn’t arrived yet). The mass exodus into these suburbs comes from cars rather than commuter rail, and so the local services for people living in those suburbs are built at automobile scale, rather than at the walkable town center scale of 1910.
In North America there’s also a definite class element here – the early movers are the rich rather than the poor. Historically this was partly because poor people couldn’t afford regular train fare, and partly because the impetus for suburbanization was idyllic country homes with access to urban jobs rather than cheap housing for the poor. If I’m not mistaken, this wasn’t the case in Australian cities’ suburbanization, leading to a more urban transit-style mode of running mainline rail. The result of this class distinction is that North American commuter rail styles itself as for the rich: agencies make an effort to ensure everyone has a seat and downplay comfortable standing space, and the expectation is that transit is a last-ditch mode of transportation for when cars just don’t have the capacity to get people downtown, and so nobody needs to take the trains in the off-peak or take a bus to the train.
The result is that the park-and-ride city will still have a strong core with high-capacity transportation, and the primary CBD will maintain its supremacy for high-income jobs. Establishing edge cities in the direction of the favored quarter can happen, but there’s still a congested city nearby, and so from many directions it’s impossible to drive, and taking transit is impossible. Thus jobs in White Plains and Stamford are not nearly as high-paying as jobs in Manhattan.
There can even be secondary CBDs, if the inner part of the metro area, where people take transit more regularly than the suburban commuters do, is large enough. But those secondary CBDs are frequently quite auto-oriented. Brooklyn’s mode share for jobs is only 42-39 in favor of transit (for residents, it’s 60-25), and all other counties in the New York region except Manhattan have more workers driving than taking transit, a situation that is not true if one looks at residents. Those secondary CBDs then have mixed characteristics: they are dense and fairly walkable, as can be expected based on their history and location, but also have plentiful parking and a large share of drivers demanding even more. They can accommodate multiple modes of transportation, but driving is more convenient, and from the suburbs the commuter rail system isn’t always geared to serve them.
Commuter Rail Ridership Distribution
As a followup to my claim that the Northeast Corridor in New Jersey had a more outer-suburban ridership than the Morris and Essex lines, I decided to tabulate the ridership distribution of various commuter lines. This tells you what percent of the ridership originates within some distance of the city center. All lines in New York are included, though some are grouped together because of branching.
Explanation: the ridership numbers for New Jersey Transit come from the New York Times, and those for the LIRR and Metro-North come from files published by the MTA. To maintain comparability with the Metro-North and NJT numbers, ridership in city terminal areas is ignored for calculation purposes; thus, X% really means X% of beyond-city ridership. This means stations from Jamaica west, from Newark Penn east, and from Harlem south are not counted. All km points are calculated from Penn Station or Grand Central, even for lines that do not run through to those stations. Finally, some lines are lumped together, when they share stations beyond the excluded city terminal zone.
| Line\km | 20 | 30 | 40 | 50 | 60 | 80 | 100 |
| NJ NEC/NJC (66,997) | 4 | 14.2 | 31.3 | 44.6 | 59.6 | 78.2 | 98.7 |
| R. Val. (10,639) | 0 | 13.8 | 51.7 | 74.3 | 84.4 | 98.5 | 100 |
| M&E/MB (35,183) | 5.6 | 36.3 | 64.7 | 81 | 91.8 | 98.9 | 100 |
| Erie Main/BC (13,249) | 16 | 35.6 | 60.7 | 73.9 | 81.2 | 89 | 92.9 |
| P. Val. (3,674) | 5.5 | 39 | 70.3 | 97.3 | 100 | 100 | 100 |
| Hudson (25,442) | 5.3 | 16.7 | 30.8 | 52.6 | 66.7 | 76.2 | 88.8 |
| Harlem (45,117) | 4.7 | 27 | 68.8 | 73.9 | 82 | 91.3 | 98.1 |
| NH + NC/D/W (61,973) | 0.1 | 13.6 | 31.4 | 42.7 | 60.8 | 77 | 90.2 |
| Port W. (23,404) | 14.1 | 80.8 | 100 | 100 | 100 | 100 | 100 |
| LIRR Main (65,104) | 0 | 8.5 | 29.1 | 51.7 | 69.2 | 83.7 | 99.9 |
| Mont. + Atl. (58,835) | 0 | 10 | 52.9 | 80 | 88 | 96.3 | 99.3 |
Note that the data isn’t completely reliable. The NJT and Metro-North data sets paper this over by counting just one direction, but the LIRR counts both, and there are discrepancies, for example at Huntington. So the numbers above have a fair margin of error around them.
Observe that the ridership of the Northeast Corridor is so skewed outward that despite having twice the ridership of the Morris and Essex lines in New Jersey, the Morris and Essex lines actually beat it on ridership within 40 km of Penn Station. Similarly, the Harlem Line beats the New Haven Line up to 50 km.
Similar data exists in Boston, and, in harder to search form even if you speak the language, Tokyo (better data for Tokyo can be found here, but for most lines the numbers include only inner and middle segments, up to about 50 km outside Tokyo Station). It’s also quite easy in both cities to set a boundary of the excluded city zone, and with Boston this could allow constructing the same table.
The implication of the difference between various lines is that some lines are more local and some are practically intercity. This relates to the service decisions within each line – more stops or fewer stops – but there aren’t a horde of people in Elizabeth and South Newark who are clamoring to ride rush hour trains into Penn Station and would in large numbers if only stop spacing were narrower, or a horde of people in Sussex County who’d ride if only there were fewer stops between Dover and Penn Station.
That said, the more local lines do have potential for local service on trips that American commuter rail doesn’t serve. There’s an untapped market of people commuting from New Jersey to Jamaica and Brooklyn, or from Long Island to Newark and Jersey City, and this market necessarily needs to be served with more local trains, because most people in it live closer to the city.
Regional Rail for New York: What Can Be Done Now
MTA Chairman Joe Lhota recently proposed to through-route commuter rail lines in the New York area, as was proposed in the past by the RPA, the Institute for Rational Urban Mobility, and more recently myself. Lhota proposed other, less flashy ideas for integration, including better track sharing at Penn Station and lengthening platforms to accommodate 10-car trains. Although a network that looks like my proposal should still be the goal for the next 20 years, there are several things that can be done in the very short run. None is do-it-tomorrow immediate, but neither does any require very difficult modification of equipment or organization or significant infrastructure investment. Most should not require extensive studies.
Note that this is not a wishlist of the most important commuter rail reorganization projects in the region. Many of those reorganizations do not have anything to do with interagency integration, and are therefore not included. Only projects that are very cheap and would come from or benefit integration are on this list.
1. Integrated ticket machines at Penn Station. This requires the physical tickets on New Jersey Transit to look like those on the LIRR and Metro-North (and thus some modifications to the fare barriers at Secaucus and Newark Airport), and some reprogramming of ticket machines, but no change otherwise. Ideally a ticket from (say) Hicksville to Newark should cost less than the sum of tickets from Hicksville to New York and New York to Newark, to encourage reverse-peak traffic, but strictly speaking the discount is not needed. Amtrak and commuter rail machines should also be integrated, though the physical tickets can still be different if switching over is too hard.
2. Integrated concourses at Penn Station. This means treating the upper and lower concourses as belonging to all three railroads. This requires Amtrak to give up its single-file queuing and accept that people already can walk around and get to its trains from other railroads’ turfs. Trains should be announced on all concourses, and all access points to a platform should be clearly signed with the next train’s type and schedule.
3. Timed transfers. Although a clean integrated timetable is impossible, because trains interline on some inner segments to increase capacity, a partial version is still possible. What this means is that, with hourly off-peak service on each branch, Morris and Essex trains should arrive at Penn Station just before the hour, as should one of the several hourly trains on the New Jersey side of the Northeast Corridor, and then two or three branches going to the east (say, to New Haven and Port Washington, and on one additional LIRR line for service to Jamaica) should leave just after the hour, with the tightest connection done cross-platform. This would make trips from New Jersey to JFK and from Long Island to Newark easier, and the choice of services to participate in the system should be consistent with even spacing on interlined trunks.
4. Modification of rolling stock. Metro-North’s M8s can run under 60 Hz catenary and third rail, but unfortunately not 25 Hz catenary; as lower frequency requires a larger transformer, modifying the trains to run on the New Jersey side of the Northeast Corridor may be too hard in the very short term (though not in the medium and long terms). However, NJT’s ALP-46 locomotives and Arrow EMUs can run on 12 kV 25 Hz and 25 kV 60 Hz catenary, and thus modifying them to run on Metro-North’s 12 kV 60 Hz catenary is easy, allowing them to run from the NJT network to the New Haven Line. Unfortunately, because locomotives accelerate more slowly than EMUs and the Arrows are quite old, they do not have very good performance for short-stop service, for which through-running is the most useful.
5. Voltage change on the Northeast Corridor’s New Jersey side to 25 kV 60 Hz. This voltage change was done to the Morris and Essex lines and much of the North Jersey Coast Line. It is somewhere on Amtrak’s wishlist of projects, but I do not know how high it is. This allows M8s to run through, ensuring the better rolling stock is available for the service that needs it the most. It may possibly be bundled with Amtrak’s installation of constant tension catenary south of New Brunswick to reduce costs. Since this eliminates the need for 25 Hz transformers in the future, this meas future NJT rolling stock would be lighter.
6. Depending on 4-5, rolling stock sharing along interlined services. In practice this means M8s on local Northeast Corridor services, which would also allow adding and serving infill stations in New Jersey (for example, more regular service to North Elizabeth, and perhaps a station at South Street in Newark), and Arrows and locomotives on express services from Penn Station and New Jersey to New Haven.
7. Platform raising on the North Jersey Coast Line and the Morris and Essex lines, if service using M8s rather than Arrows is desired. Because of the voltage, it’s actually easier for M8s to serve the Morristown Line other than their inability to serve low platforms: it would only require 8-21 km of reelectrification rather than 88-101. The Morris and Essex lines also have a more inner-suburban distribution of ridership than the Northeast Corridor Line, which gets most of its ridership from more distant stations, and this makes them in one sense better-suited for through-service. (In another sense, the Northeast Corridor is better, since it serves downtown Newark, a secondary CBD that draws some commuters from suburbs and boroughs east of Manhattan.)
It is my belief that all of the above, possibly except #5 and #7, are feasible within months or at worst a very small number of years, and would not require additional environmental work. Even #5 and #7, which are more expensive, are still close to two orders of magnitude cheaper than a full through-running plan with new tunnels serving Lower Manhattan.
The medium term is more expensive – perhaps an order of magnitude less than the full program rather than two – and would include further modernization, allowing full through-service on every line and more efficient equipment utilization. It can also assume friendlier regulations, which a snap integration cannot, and this in particular means better rolling stock in the future and higher speeds even with existing rolling stock. Clockface schedules and frequent off-peak service would allow planning infrastructure repairs and upgrades around specific schedules. For example, the current local Stamford-Grand Central schedule is 1:06, but an express train I recently took from New Haven came to Grand Central more than 10 minutes ahead of schedule, suggesting excessive padding; minor upgrades should allow an M8 to do Stamford-New York in an hour minus turnaround time making local stops, and more ambitiously New York-New Brunswick in 45 minutes minus turnaround time.
Lhota can’t do much in the long term, because this requires an enormous investment into concrete, a political decision and a longer-term one than Lhota’s term as MTA chair. However, he can both implement the above seven points within his term, and also set in motion various work rule reforms and small-scale capital project planning and apply for the requisite FRA waivers to permit the medium-term reforms to succeed.
Bus and Rail Mantras
Bus is cheaper than rail. Paint is cheap. Rail only made sense a hundred years ago when construction costs were lower. Trains have no inherent advantage over buses. It doesn’t cost more to operate a bus than to operate a train. All of those are true in specific sets of circumstances, and Curitiba and Bogota deserve a lot of credit for recognizing that in their case they were true and opting for a good BRT system. Unfortunately, the notion that buses are always cheaper than trains has turned into a mantra that’s applied even far from the original circumstance of BRT.
The advantage of buses is that dedicating lanes to them and installing signal priority are financially cheap, if politically difficult in the face of opposition from drivers. Even physically separating those lanes is essentially cost-free. This advantage disappears completely when it comes to installing new lanes, or paving an existing right-of-way. Hartford is paving over an abandoned railroad at a cost of $37 million per km.
Not to be outdone, New York’s own MTA just proposed to pave about 8.5 km of the Staten Island Railway’s North Shore Branch for $371 million. A light rail alternative was jettisoned because the MTA insisted on continuing the line to the West Shore Plaza, along what is possibly the least developed road in the city.
Another, related mantra is that light rail is cheaper than heavy rail. This contributed to the MTA’s decision not to pursue a Staten Island Railway-compatible solution, which would allow lower capital costs and cheaper maintenance since trains could be maintained together with the existing fleet without modifying the existing yard. As with all mantras, this one has a kernel of truth: it’s much cheaper to build on-street light rail than elevated rail or a subway. As with the BRT mantra, this is not true when the discussion is about what to do in an existing right-of-way.
Worse, because the MTA believed its own hype, it completely missed the point of surface transit. People who believe these mantras about bus, light rail, and heavy rail can easily miss the advantage of on-street running wherever the streets are more central than the railroad rights-of-way. The North Shore Branch hugs the shore for much of the way, halving station radius. The most developed corridor is Forest Avenue, hosting the S48, the third busiest bus in the borough and the busiest in the same area and orientation as the line in question. (The busiest in the borough, the S53, crosses the bridge to connect the North Shore to the subway in Brooklyn.) Of the three other east-west routes in the North Shore, the one that the North Shore Branch parallels the most closely, the S40, has the lowest ridership. It would be both vastly cheaper and better for bus riders to have dedicated bus lanes on Forest, or possibly Castleton, which hosts the S46.
In cities that did not develop around mainline rail corridors but rather around major streets, the only reason to use mainline rail corridors for urban transit is that reactivating them for rail can be done at much lower cost than building on-street light rail. New York is for historical reasons such a city: Staten Island development follows Forest and Castleton rather than the North Shore Branch, and for similar reasons Park Avenue in Manhattan and the Bronx is a relatively unimportant commercial corridor.
Now, these mainline corridors have great use for regional transit. Queens Boulevard can’t be easily used for train service to Long Island, and Lexington Avenue can’t be easily used for train service to Westchester. Staten Island has great potential for regional transit – but only if it’s electrified rail going through a tunnel to Manhattan. It’s expensive, but it’s what it takes to be time-competitive with the ferry and with buses to the subway. A more competent agency than the MTA would keep planning and designing such high-cost, high-benefit projects, to be built in the future if funding materializes; such plans could also be used to concretely argue for more funding from the state and from Congress.
Instead, the MTA is spending more money than most light rail lines cost, to make such a mainline connection from the North Shore to Manhattan impossible in the future. The best scenario in such a situation is that the busway would have to be railstituted, for a few hundred million dollars – an embarrassing reminder of the busway folly, but still a much smaller sum than the cost of the tunnel. The worst scenario is that like on Los Angeles’s Orange Line, the need to keep buses operating during construction would make it impossible to replace them with trains.
There aren’t a lot of lose-lose (or win-win) situations with transportation, even if we ignore driver convenience, but this is one of them. It’s a fiscal disaster relative to predicted ridership and the operating costs of buses, it makes future transit expansion in the borough more difficult, and it follows a marginal route. All this is so that the MTA can say it’s finally making use of an abandoned right-of-way.
High- and Low-Speed Rail Coordination
The debate about what kind intercity rail to build tends to be either/or. On one side, there’s HSR-only advocacy: this represents the attitude of SNCF, especially in the earlier years of the TGV, and such American HSR proponents as John Mica. In this view, legacy rail is inherently slow and money-losing and the best that can be done is to start fresh; generally, this view also looks down on integration with legacy regional rail. On the other side, there’s a legacy-only advocacy, which represents how Britain upgraded its intercity rail network in and after the 1970s and also the attitude of proponents of Amtrak-plus lines in the US.
The problem with this is that there are a lot of different markets out there, and the service levels they justify and the construction challenges they impose are different. Sometimes such markets are in the same general area, and this means some lines should be HSR and some should be upgraded low-speed rail.
Countries that tried to go to one extreme of this debate are now learning the hard way that they need to do both. Britain radically optimized its intercity main lines, which now have the highest average speed in the world except for HSR – but it needs more, and this requires it to build a new HSR line at immense cost. In the other direction, France’s TGV-only strategy is slowly changing. SNCF still doesn’t care about legacy intercity lines, but the regions are investing in regional rail, and one region even uses the high-speed line for local service. Japan gets away with neglecting most of the intercity lines because its physical and political geography is such that markets that can support HSR dominate, but other countries cannot.
This means that best network design is going to have to deal with both approaches’ political difficulties at the same time. Upgrading legacy rail means upgrading legacy rail operating practices, against opposition of workers and managers who are used to old and inefficient ways of doing things. And building HSR on the thickest markets means giving special treatment to some regions with infrastructure that other regions don’t justify; it’s economically solid, but the optics of this are poor.
But the advantage of doing it this way from the start is that it’s more future-proof, and allows integrated design in terms of schedules, which lines are upgraded, how cities are connected, and so on.
Doing it piecemeal may require redoing a connection along a different alignment. The issue is that HSR compresses travel times along the line only. It’s like urban rapid transit this way, or for that matter like the air network. A legacy rail system (or a national highway system, or urban buses) has fairly consistent average speed. This means that in a combined system, the optimal path between two cities may not be the shortest path, in case one is close to the HSR trunks.
For example, look at Upstate New York. None of its four major metro areas is large enough to justify a high-speed connection to New York by itself, but all four combined do. Although international service to Toronto is overrated, it could be justifiable in light of Buffalo’s relative economic integration with Ontario and also the mostly straight, partially grade-separated right-of-way available in Canada; this would further thicken the market.
If we draw a rudimentary map of other desired connections, none thick enough to warrant more than an upgraded low-speed train, the fastest connections are not always obvious. For example, with average HSR speed of 240 km/h and legacy rail speed of 100 km/h, it’s faster to get from New York to Ithaca via Syracuse than directly via Binghamton. This is why the connection to Ithaca is through a line that points toward Syracuse, even if it’s not the shortest route to Binghamton. It’s one of many small local optimization problems.
More interestingly, we get a mini-hub in Syracuse. Although it’s the smallest of the four main Upstate cities, it lies at the junction of the trunk line and lines to Binghamton and Watertown, and also has secondary cities at the right location for regional rail. (The largest comparable secondary city near Rochester is Geneva, which happens to be close to and have a good rail connection to I-90, a prime candidate for HSR corridor; thus it should get commuter service using the trunk line, which would be far faster than an all-legacy train.) This means that schedules should be set up to coordinate transfers in Syracuse.
This is a normal way to set things up in an all-legacy format, as is done in Switzerland, but it can equally apply to HSR. The construction challenges on the Empire Corridor are nowhere near as complex as those in California, Pennsylvania, and other truly mountainous states, but they’re still nontrivial. But now that we know that Syracuse should be a hub, one answer to the question “How many design compromises to make to reduce costs?” is “Build just enough to allow integrated transfers in both New York and Syracuse.”
(In practice this means HSR arriving in Syracuse on the hour and in New York whenever convenient. The main intercity line into New York is the Northeast Corridor, a very thick market that at HSR speed would have enough traffic to support show-up-and-go frequency. This is not true of lines serving Syracuse; Watertown is not Washington and Binghamton is not Boston.)
The main cost of doing things this way is political. It requires willingness to both prioritize markets and cut construction costs, as necessary to build HSR, and improve legacy rail operating practices and carefully integrate services, as necessary to build a working legacy rail network. The fiscal cost is not outrageous – those legacy lines are cheap relative to everything else (rebuilding the unelectrified New York-Scranton line is $550 million), and HSR on thicker markets will at least partially pay for itself.
Once we discard the notion that present-day Amtrak operating patterns are adequate, the question stops being about whether one trusts Amtrak or not, and purely about how to build a new transportation network. And then the correct answer to “High-speed or legacy?” is “Both, seamlessly integrated with each other.”
Quick Note: How Much Tunnels Really Cost
New York is currently building a 3-kilometer tunnel between Brooklyn and Staten Island, using the same EPB method that Madrid uses to build subway tunnels. The cost of the single-bore tunnel is $250 million, and the project will be completed by 2014.
Of course, this is a water tunnel rather than a train tunnel. The diameter of the tunnel is somewhat smaller than that of a single-track train tunnel. Double-track tunnels, even ones built to high-speed rail standards, are substantially wider, but the amount of concrete lining required is proportional to radius rather than to cross-sectional area. For example, the double-track Seikan Tunnel is 9.7 meters wide, little more than single-track HSR tunnels in Europe, as Japanese construction tries to minimize tunnel clearances to cut costs and instead equip Shinkansen trains with elaborate aerodynamic noses. While 9.7 is more than 2.5 times the diameter of the water tunnel in question, 250 million times 2.5 is still far below the construction cost of any recent tunneling project in New York.
The expensive part of tunneling, then, is not the actual tunnel. It’s everything else, especially the station caverns. Both ARC and East Side Access included multilevel deep caverns in Manhattan with full-length mezzanines; of course they’d be more expensive.
For what it’s worth, an 8-kilometer long, 9.7-meter wide tunnel from Staten Island to Manhattan would cost $1.75 billion at the same per-km, per-meter cost of this water tunnel. Of course stations at St. George and especially Lower Manhattan would add much more, forcing a lot of difficult choices about location, but the basic infrastructure is not all that expensive.
Pedestrian Observations 