Category: Politics and Society
The Politics of QueensLink
The abandoned right-of-way of the Rockaway Cutoff, or Rockaway Beach Branch, is an attractive target for reuse by some groups. Area railfans have wanted to do something with it for years, and I was mostly negative about these plans, but more recently, QueensLink has emerged as a serious plan to extend the subway along the Rockaway Cutoff, to connect neighborhoods in southwestern Queens to one another and to Manhattan, where current connections do not exist (in the middle) or only serve Midtown Manhattan indirectly and slowly (in the south, via the A train). The right-of-way is wide enough that most of it can also accommodate additional infrastructure, in the case of this plan a bike trail.
The problem is that this more serious plan is still not getting much political play. This is not because of the typical reasons people may think of, such as high costs or NIMBYism. Rather, a competing plan for the same corridor, Queensway, wants to turn it into pure parkland, and is backed by a power broker with opinions and connections. The QueensLink advocates have asked for and been so far refused planning money for an environmental impact statement, which step is in better infrastructure environments apolitical; instead, Mayor Eric Adams is connected with a Queensway backer and thus favors Queensway.
The QueensLink project
QueensLink is a subway extension, with a short tunnel to get from the Queens Boulevard Line’s local tracks to the Rockaway Cutoff. Where there is room, a bike trail is included on the same corridor.
As this is a former rail mainline, the connections to the crossing subway lines are not great – the subway placed stations at major street intersections, leading to long walks at the Jamaica and Liberty Avenue transfers. In contrast, the connection to the LIRR is good: there is no station there today, but there used to be one, and it could be reopened, especially now that the Atlantic Branch is retooling to be more useful for urban service, with more stops, higher frequency, and perhaps integrated fares.
The subway connection makes this proposal viable. I previously criticized a proposal to run commuter rail service on the Cutoff, since it would crowd out the busy LIRR Main Line. In contrast, QueensLink has the new branch using the Queens Boulevard local tracks, which are undersubscribed even at rush hour, to the point that it may even be possible to run three rush hour services on the same tracks and not just two like today. The G doesn’t run to Forest Hills, for good reason, but the new service would vacate space at the Forest Hills terminal of the local tracks to the point that it could potentially be viable.
At the Transportation and Land Use program at Marron, we’re building tools to estimate not just costs for public transit construction but also ridership, and it’s likely that QueensLink will be next on our agenda right after the Interborough Express. I can’t give more than first-order estimates now, but it’s notable that the closest parallel bus corridor, Woodhaven, has high ridership: it carries four local or SBS routes and four express routes, with 31,000 weekday boardings among them. Then there’s the possibility of faster service to JFK Airport via QueensLink. It’s not going to be the Second Avenue Subway of Queens by ridership, but because only a short tunnel is needed, it’s not going to come close to Second Avenue Subway in costs either.
QueensLink and Queensway
The alternative to QueensLink isn’t doing nothing, as is usually the case. Some political players have eyed the corridor for a trail project called Queensway. The idea of Queensway is to create more parkland in the area, including a hiking and bike trail; as the map above shows, there is no shortage of parkland there. There’s an obsession of urbanists in the United States with linear parks, in imitation of the High Line; one attempt at imitation even wanted to build a park underground in a former streetcar terminal and called it the Lowline.
I want to dwell on the politics of Queensway, because I know I have a lot of readers in the general neoliberal and rationalist communities, including specifically in New York, and the political support for it is not what their first instinct might be.
Often, it’s the case that public transit projects are supported by broadly developmentalist interest groups, who are also fairly YIMBY, and tend to be rooted in professionals and office workers commuting to city center, and opposed by NIMBYs, who tend to be rooted in longstanding neighborhood residents and small business owners. Neighborhood NIMBYs often like parks, because they’re local improvements; when we studied the Green Line Extension in Boston, we saw some local interest groups demand money for a trail as a precondition to supporting the light rail line.
And this is not at all what is happening with the Rockaway Cutoff. Local interest groups are not consistently anti-QueensLink and pro-Queensway. Some are, but in at least one case, a local advocate came to argue on NIMBY grounds against Queensway, which would bring pedestrians to their backyard, and for QueensLink, since the passing train would not cause unwanted impact and would serve the area. On net, YIMBYer groups are more pro-QueensLink – for example much of the community at the northern end of the corridor, in Community Board 6, which due to its location on the subway has a more pro-transit and pro-development orientation. But it doesn’t boil down to these class interests pitting professional workers against small business owners, at all. Rather, it’s rather random, boiling down to individual power brokers for Queensway.
What autocrats want
I highlight the randomness of the interest groups for Queensway, because it relates to the broadly autocratic style of some leaders, who the de facto system of government in New York empowers too much. In the 2010s, Andrew Cuomo liked the idea of Queensway, and if he wanted something, anyone who wanted to stay in the good grace of the local power system had to support it. The backward air train to LaGuardia, hated by transit activists in the city from the start, is such an example – while Cuomo was in power opposition was restricted to people outside city and state politics, like the technical advocacy community or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Then Cuomo left office and because nobody really wanted it, this project died. Queensway survives, I think partly because it’s not a multi-billion dollar investment, and partly because some power brokers do like it and have attached themselves to Mayor Eric Adams, such as political operative and lobbyist Travis Terry.
The point of this is not that Adams wants Queensway and therefore it will happen. Rather, it’s that, in a system with a democratic deficit like New York, professional decisions often boil down to which random advocate happens to have the ear of the autocrat. I keep contrasting this with the situation in Berlin, in which bike lanes and pedestrianization have been put on hold and even been reversed under Mayor Kai Wegner (CDU) – but Wegner ran on this agenda in the election and CDU came first, and the pivotal party, SPD, chose to enter a coalition with him and not with more left-wing parties under a known-quantity (and disgraced) leader in Franziska Giffey, whose conservative-for-SPD politics and poor relationship with the left was well-known. I dislike this outcome, but voters knew what they were getting. In contrast, in New York, Adams did not run on any explicit agenda of not building public transit, or even on support for interest groups that oppose transit (again, the Queensway support is more individualized than neighborhood-scale NIMBYs). He just makes abrupt decisions, often sniping the judgment of the city’s own civil service, based on what one favorite asks.
The way forward
In healthy infrastructure construction systems and also in Germany, the planning is not politicized; the yes/no decision on what to build must be made by politicians, but the menu of options with their costs and benefits is prepared by the civil service. In contrast, in the United States, even the choice of which projects get an environmental impact study is politicized; QueensLink advocates are asking for money for an EIS, which in the United States is where planning is done, but even that is stalled politically.
The problem is that the message this behavior by the city and state sends is that New York is too messed up to invest in. Private actors who make investment decisions need some amount of political stability and predictability. A political culture of caprice, in which everyone must constantly follow political gossip to have any idea what the autocratic mayor or governor (or in some countries president or prime minister) will do, or else be swamped by otherwise inexplicable investment decisions, screams “go elsewhere, we don’t want you.” Even turning an EIS into a big political ask screams the same thing: “we can’t do, so merely studying is an achievement by itself and you must pay fealty.”
New York’s current system deters investment, not through taxes or union empowerment, but through opacity and unpredictability. I don’t want to turn the question of one right-of-way in Queens into an existential issue that it is not, but on the margin, stonewalling on QueensLink because some politically connected actor personally wants Queensway reinforces this system that repels investment, whereas treating the EIS as an apolitical step and then based on the results of further planning building it or not based on broad interest agreement signals that New York can and wants to build things. It’s the city’s choice.
Costs Per Rider and Willingness to Build
At the Transit Costs Project, we study the costs of urban rail lines per kilometer. This, with our usual controls, is a rough indicator of how efficient a city’s infrastructure construction program is. However, cost-effectiveness is different from efficiency, and is better measured not by just the cost but also the benefits, which are measured by ridership. Thus, cost-effectiveness is best measured by the cost of each project per rider. So what does it mean to compare different cities by their costs per rider, rather than per kilometer?
The answer is, “not much,” at least not as far as efficiency or good decisionmaking. In fact, while some projects persistently have costs per rider that are too high to be cost-effective (for example, it’s endemic to airport extensions), some cities have costs per rider that are too low, such as Berlin. The issue here is that if municipal or state decisionmaking is healthy, it will build cost-effective lines; if a line under discussion has a very high benefit-cost ratio, or equivalently a very low cost per rider, it means it should have been built long ago, and it speaks poorly to the local decisionmaking that it hasn’t been built already, as is unfortunately the case in Berlin.
Cost per rider and cost-effectiveness
As always, let’s start with Second Avenue Subway Phase 1, the project that launched my interest in construction costs and the Transit Costs Project writ large. The projected daily ridership is 202,000; the line came close to it in 2019, reaching about 163,000 (see data here; I’m taking boardings for the three new stations, adding the growth in ridership at Lexington/63rd, and multiplying by two to account for disembarkings), and would have likely reached projection by now but for the pandemic. The cost, in 2023 dollars, was $6.23 billion, or about $31,000 per projected weekday trip.
For another anchoring number, let’s use the Stockholm Metro’s entire construction from the 1940s to the 1970s. This is useful because in addition to costs per rider, there is a published ex post benefit-cost ratio, thanks to the work of Maria Börjesson. The cost of that system, in 2023 PPP dollars, was $3.7 billion, with a ridership of 1,265,900 per workday in 2019, or $2,900/rider, while the benefit-cost ratio is 6 without taking agglomeration into account, or 8.5 with. This does not mean that the value of a rider is only about $24,900; this was the value in the economic situation of postwar Sweden, a country that was substantially poorer than the Sweden of today. In 2023 PPP terms, Sweden’s GDP per capita in 1965, about midway through the opening of the original system, was about $19,400; today, Sweden is 3.5 times richer, and the US is 17% richer than Sweden.
The benefits of urban travel are largely proportional to GDP per capita. The economic benefits of agglomeration are proportional to the value of the economy writ large, and so are the benefits of reduced travel time, which in benefit-cost analyses are usually taken to be proportional to the average hourly wage. Conversely, the ability of a government to spend money on desired outcomes is proportional to its tax base, i.e. the size of its economy. All of this is approximate, but all we’re doing is first-order approximate analysis anyway, and so correcting for GDP per capita is valuable.
As it is, the difference between American and Swedish GDP per capita boils down entirely to working hours. Swedes work shorter hours than Americans, as they, like nearly everyone else in Europe, get much longer vacation time; as of 2022, Sweden’s GDP per hour worked was, by a rounding error, slightly higher than the US’s. However, at the same time, the daily ridership numbers for Sweden are specifically drawn from winter workday ridership, to avoid reporting figures from when ridership is lower during the summer vacation season, and the same is true for daily ridership counts in France. If we give Sweden and France credit by looking at ridership when people aren’t on vacation, we must compare the cost per rider with GDP per capita and not GDP per hour.
The upshot is that countries should be building metros up to a maximum capital cost per rider that’s about as large as their GDP per capita. The $24,900 computation for 1960s’ Sweden is ex post, and usually the ex ante benefit-cost ratio must be at least 1.2 or 1.3 for the project to go ahead due to risk. For light rail the allowable cost should be lower, and for bus projects it should be lower still, due to the higher lifetime operating costs; but for metros and metro-like urban rail projects (such as largely grade-separated light rail, or commuter rail tunnels like Citybanan), this analysis should hold. Second Avenue Subway Phase 1, which opened in a United States with a GDP of $73,300/capita in 2023 prices, is thus very cost-effective; Phase 2, budgeted at something like $70,000/rider in today’s prices, is marginal but makes it (in 2022, US GDP per capita in 2023 prices was $80,300).
Some more costs per rider
Our database of construction costs per km is largely complete, but we don’t have much ridership data. Worse, the costs per rider we do have have some biases. We have better information for the US and Canada than elsewhere, and for Europe than the rest of the non-North American world. Costs are also likeliest to be reported for megaprojects with notable delays or cost overruns and thus an incomplete database will be biased upward; large, international cities have better reporting in English than the rest and this introduces another upward bias in incomplete data (these are typically wealthy and therefore capable of affording a high cost per rider).
With that in mind, here are some (again, incomplete) examples:
- Crossrail cost $24 billion in 2023 PPP terms; ridership in late 2023 was 4.3 million a week, which is usually about 700,000/weekday, said to be above projections, with long-term projections rising to a million/weekday; on current ridership it’s $34,000/rider, and on future projections it’s $24,000.
- Paris Métro Line 14’s original section, opened by 2007, cost $2.44 billion in 2023 PPP terms; ridership in 2019, before more recent extensions and before corona, was 92 million, so around 320,000 per workday, which is $7,600/rider.
- Grand Paris Express was projected in 2021 to cost (in 2023 PPP dollars) around $65 billion, with a ridership projection of 2 million/day from 2022, and 2.3-2.4 million/day from 2012, for around $32,000/rider, or $28,000 if the older ridership projection is used.
- Milan Metro Line 5 cost $2.2 billion in 2023 PPP terms to date, and was said to carry 180,000 daily passengers in 2019, for $12,000/rider.
- Milan Metro Line 4 cost $2.63 billion, and was expected to carry 235,000 riders per day when complete, which would be $11,000/rider; it will be completed this year, but ridership so far is for only the half of the line that has opened so far ans is also still somewhat suffering from corona.
- The U-Bahn extensions in Berlin that are currently in development hell include U8 to Märkisches Viertel projected at 13,160€/rider (around $21,000 in 2023 PPP terms), a U6 extension to the former Tegel Airport projected at 27,200€/rider (around $43,000), and a U7 extension to the current BER airport projected at 23,000€/rider (around $36,000), among others brought up by the new coalition.
Willingness to build and Berlin’s problem
The above numbers should not be taken to mean that Italy and Germany are more cost-effective about metro construction. To the contrary, they indicate that they are leaving value on the table by not building.
Germany has a GDP per capita of $66,000 in PPP terms. The benefit-cost ratios of the U-Bahn extensions in Berlin that are being discussed but not actually brought forward and built are very high, and the U8 extension to Märkisches Viertel is scratching a ratio of 4. It is irresponsible that there isn’t a massive construction plan not just under discussion but in design and soon physical construction. This must include not just those lines but also others to be added until the benefit-cost ratio of the marginal line falls to slightly more than the minimum that deserves funding.
Italy has the same problem. No matter how pessimistic one’s view of the future of the economy of Italy is, the metro lines it is currently building, at least in Milan, are so cost-effective that there have to be more of them. In the 2010s, Italy was in a budget crunch and ended up using public-private partnerships to keep debt off-books, at very high implied interest rate based on the rate of payment to the concessionaire, about 8%. Today, fundamentally, even a stagnant economy with a GDP per capita of $55,000, which may finally overtake its 2007 peak this year, should be building more if the current extensive margin of Milan Metro construction is not even in the teens of thousands of dollars. Perhaps the benefit-cost ratios for Sweden rely not just on Sweden’s GDP per capita of the 1960s but on that of today, after 60 years of growth; but then even absent any of this growth, 55/3.5 > 12.
Paris showcases a healthier situation: the success of M14 endeared the region to driverless metros with longer interstations than the older metro lines but shorter ones than the RER, and with further growth in the region, the state decided to build the 200 km Grand Paris Express to improve circumferential rail service and add more fast radial connections from the suburbs to the city not along the RER. France’s GDP per capita is around $58,000 in PPP dollars; some elements of GPE may be marginal, but the project writ large has a solid benefit-cost-ratio starting with a 2.
Spain is like France in that when it can build, as it could before the Great Recession and as it can now after having recovered, it does. This is the right way to do it: low costs per km should translate to massive subway expansion. If you’re Madrid, you can build lines that would be completely ridiculous anywhere else in terms of land use, like MetroSur, because it’s cheap.
A Paris or Berlin cannot be so profligate as Madrid. Building a line like MetroSur here, which in the Spanish context looks silly but does pass cost-effectiveness muster, would be an economic albatross. But medium-cost cities can still cover most of the built-up area with subway and commuter rail lines; Paris is doing so but Berlin is not.
The problem for Berlin is not quite austerity, which afflicted Southern Europe last decade, producing negative economic growth. In the last coalition, it was the two most left-wing parties, the Greens and Die Linke, which opposed U-Bahn construction. In their view, trams are preferable; they complain about the high construction costs of subways, but don’t meaningfully engage with why they’re still necessary for fast urban transport beyond the range of the handful of inner neighborhoods where people vote for the Greens.
That said, in the current coalition, there’s no real political left. SPD is in it, but under an atypically conservative leader in Franziska Giffey, and the more left-wing faction in the party, including the youth league Jusos, is sidelined. Both parties in the coalition, CDU and SPD, are committed to building those U-Bahn extensions. But then nothing is happening; Giffey is not competent enough to do it, and CDU is too wrapped up in anti-environmental populism to do something that pisses off some environmentalists but makes others happy.
This way, the low costs per rider projected for Berlin U-Bahn expansion are not a testimony to cost-effectiveness. They’re a testimony to political unwillingness to build, for largely petty reasons. It is wasteful to build a subway line with a very high projected cost per rider relative to the country’s wealth, but it is equally wasteful not to build one with a low projected cost per rider, and the latter is what is happening in Berlin, unfortunately.
Worthless Canadian Initiative
Canada just announced a few days ago that it is capping the number of international student visas; the Times Higher Education and BBC both point out that the main argument used in favor of the cap is that there’s a housing shortage in Canada. Indeed, the way immigration politics plays out in Canada is such that the cap is hard to justify by other means: traditionally, the system there prioritized high-skill workers, to the point that there has been conservative criticism of the Trudeau cabinet for greatly expanding low-skill (namely, refugee) migration; capping student visas is not how one responds to such criticism.
The issue is that Canada builds a fair amount of housing, but not enough for population growth; the solution is to build more – in a fast-growing country like Canada, the finance sector expects housing demand to grow and therefore will readily build more if it is allowed to.
Vancouver deserves credit for the quality of its transit-oriented development and to a large extent also for the amount of absolute development it permits (about 10 units per 1,000 residents annually); but its ability to build is much greater than that, precisely because rapid immigration means that more housing is profitable, even at higher interest rates. The population growth coming from immigration sends a signal to the market, invest in long-term tangible goods like housing. Thus, Vancouver deserves less credit for its permissiveness of development – large swaths of the city are zoned for single-family housing with granny flats allowed, including in-demand West Side neighborhoods with good access to UBC and Downtown jobs by current buses and future SkyTrain.
The rub is that restricting student immigration is probably the worst possible way to deal with a housing shortage. Students live at high levels of crowding, and the marginal students, who the visa cap is excluding, live at higher levels of crowding than the rest because they tend to be at poorer universities and from poorer backgrounds. The reduction in present-day demand is limited. In Vancouver, an empty nester couple with 250 square meters of single-family housing in Shaughnessy is consuming far more housing, and sitting on far more land that could be redeveloped at high density, than four immigrants sharing a two-bedroom apartment in East Vancouver.
In contrast, the reduction in future demand is substantial, because those students then graduate and get work, and many of them get high-skill, high-wage jobs (the Canadian university graduate premium is declining but still large; the American one is larger, but the US is also a higher-inequality society in general); having fewer students, even fewer marginal students who might take jobs below their skill level, is still a reduction in both future population and future productivity. What this means is that capital owners deciding where to allocate assets are less likely to be financing construction.
The limiting factor on housing production is to a large extent NIMBYism, and there, in theory, immigration restrictions are neutral. (In practice, they can come out of a sense of national greatness developmental conservatism that wants to build a lot but restrict who can come in, or out of anti-developmental NIMBYism that feels empowered to build less as fewer people are coming; this situation is the latter.) However, it’s not entirely NIMBYism – private developmental still has to be profitable, and judging by the discourse I’m seeing on Canadian high-rise housing construction costs in Toronto and Vancouver, it’s not entirely a matter of permits. Even in an environment with extensive NIMBYism like the single-family areas of Vancouver and Toronto, costs and future profits matter.
Eurostar Security Theater and French Station Size
Jon Worth has been doing a lot of good work lately pouring cold water on various press releases of new rail service in Europe. Yesterday he wrote a long post, reacting to some German rail discourse about the possibility of Eurostar service between London and Germany; he explained the difficulties of connecting Eurostar to new cities, discussing track and station capacity, signaling, and rolling stock.
Jon, whose background is in EU politics, wastes no time in identifying the ultimate problem: the UK demands passport controls, and this demand is unlikely to be waived in the near future due to concerns over Brexit and the need to have visible border control theater. In turn, the passport control and the accompanying security theater (not strictly required, but the UK insists for Channel Tunnel security) mean that boarding trains is a slow process since platforms must be kept sterile; thus, a Eurostar station requires dedicated platforms, and if it has significant rail traffic then it requires many of them, with low throughput per track. This particularly impacts the prospects of Eurostar service to Germany, because it would go via Belgium and Cologne, which has far from enough platforms for this operation.
What I’d like to add to this analysis is that Eurostar made a choice to engage in such controlled operations in the 1990s. The politics of Brexit can explain why there’s no reform that is acceptable to the British political system now; it cannot explain why this was chosen in the 1990s. The norm in Europe before Schengen was that border control officers would perform on-board checks while the train traveled between the last station in the origin country and the first station in the destination country; long nonstop trains between Paris and London or even Lille and London are ideal for such a system. Britain insists on the current system of border control before boarding because this way it can deny entry to people who otherwise would enjoy non-refoulement protections – but in the 2000s the politics in Britain was not significantly more anti-immigration than in, for example, Germany, or France.
Rather, the issue is that Britain insisted on some nebulous notion of separateness, and this interacted poorly with train station design in France compared with in Germany. Parisian train stations are huge, and have a large number of terminating tracks. Dedicating a few terminal tracks to sterile operations is possible at Gare du Nord, and would be possible at other Parisian terminals like Gare de Lyon if they pointed in the direction of a place that demanded them. SNCF has conceived of its operations, especially internationally, as airline-like, and this contributed to complacency about how the train stations are being treated like airports.
Germany developed different (and better) ways of conceiving of train operations. More to the point, Germany doesn’t really have Paris’s terminals with their surplus of tracks, except for Frankfurt and Munich. Cologne, the easiest place to get to London from, doesn’t have enough tracks for sterile operations. This is fine, because German domestic trains do not imitate airlines, even where there is room (instead, the surplus of tracks is used for timed connections between regional trains); this also cascades to international trains connecting to Germany, whether from countries that have more punctual rail networks like Switzerland or from countries that work by a completely different paradigm like Belgium or France.
And now Eurostar politically froze a system that was only workable at low throughput, at a handful of stations with more room for sterile operations than is typical. The system is still below its ridership projections from before opening; it was supposed to be part of a broader international rail network, but that never materialized, because of the burden of security theater, the high fares, and the indifference of Belgium to extending high-speed rail so that it would be useful for international travelers (the average speeds between Brussels-Midi and the German border are within the upper end of the range for upgraded classical lines, even though HSL 2 and 3 are new high-speed lines).
And now, with the knowledge of the 2010s, it’s clear that any future expansion of Eurostar requires forgoing the airline-like paradigm that led SNCF to stagnation in the same decade. This clashes with British political theater now, but there’s no other way forward.
And this even affects domestic British rail planning. London planners are fixated on Paris as their main comparison. This way, they are certain trains must turn slowly at city terminals, requiring additional tracks at Euston and other stations that are or until recently were part of High Speed 2, at a total cost of several billion pounds. In Germany and the Netherlands (at Utrecht) trains can move faster, down to turns of seven to eight minutes on German regional trains and four to five minutes on intercity trains pinching at terminal stations like Frankfurt. But planners in large cities look down on smaller cities; it’s no different from how planners in New York assume that because New York is bigger than Stockholm, Second Avenue Subway’s stations have higher ridership than the stations of Citybanan (in fact, Citybanan’s two stations, located in city center, are significantly busier).
This way, a particular feature of historic Parisian stations – they have a lot of tracks – got turned into something that every city’s train station is assumed to have. It means Eurostar can’t operate into other stations, because there is no surplus of platforms allowing segregating service to the UK away from all other traffic; it also means that planners in the UK that are trying to engineer stations assume British stations must be overbuilt to Parisian specs.
Janno Lieber Lies to New York About Costs and Regulations
After being criticized about the excessive size of subway stations designed on his watch, MTA head Janno Lieber fired back defending the agency’s costs. In a conversation with the Manhattan Institute, he said about us, “They’re not wrong that the stations are where the MTA stations add cost. But they are wrong about how they compare us – the cost per mile is misleading” (see discussion on social media here). Then he blamed labor and the fire code. Blaming labor is a small but real part of the story; this is common among the white-collar managers Eric and I have talked to, and deserves a separate explanation for why this concern is overblown. But the issue of the fire code is fraud, all the way.
I’ve previously seen some journalists and advocates who write about American construction costs talk about fire safety, which is mentioned occasionally as a reason designs cannot be changed. It’s not at all what’s going on, for two separate reasons, each of which, alone, should be grounds to dismiss Lieber and ensure he never works for the state again.
The first reason is that the fire safety regulation in the United States for train stations, NFPA 130, has been exported to a number of other countries, none of which has American costs or the specific American tradition of overbuilding stations. China uses NFPA 130. So does Turkey. Spain uses a modification. We can look at their designs and see that they do not build oversize stations. I’ve seen an environmental impact analysis in Shanghai, with the help of a Chinese student studying this issue who explained the main planning concerns there. I could write an entire blog post about China (not a 10,000-word case report, of course), but suffice is to say, if the train is projected to be 160 m long, the station dig will be that plus a few meters – and Chinese stations have mezzanines as I understand it. Spanish and Turkish stations have little overage as well; building a dig twice as long as the station’s platforms to house back-of-the-house spaces is unique to most (not all) of the Anglosphere, as design consultants copy bad ideas from one another.
Even the claim that NFPA 130 requires full-length mezzanines is suspect. It requires stations to be built so that passengers can evacuate in four minutes in emergency conditions, rising to six minutes counting stragglers (technically, the throughput needs to be enough to evacuate in four minutes, but with latency it can go up to six). The four minute requirement can be satisfied on the lettered lines of the subway in New York with no mezzanines and just an access point at each end of the platform, but it’s close and there’s a case for another access point in the middle; no full-length mezzanine is required either way. If the stations are any shorter, as on the numbered lines or in other North American cities, two escalators and a wide staircase at the end of each platform are more than enough, and yet the extensive overage is common in those smaller systems too (for example, in Vancouver, the Broadway extension is planned with 128 m long digs for 75 m trains, per p. 9 here).
“Fire safety” is used as an excuse by people with neither engineering background nor respect for anything quantitative or technical. Lieber is such a person: his background is in law and he seems incurious about technical issues (and this is also true of his successor at MTA Capital Construction, public policy grad Jamie Torres-Springer).
Perhaps due to this lazy incuriosity, Lieber didn’t notice that the MTA has extensive influence on the text of NFPA 130, bringing us to the second reason his claim is fraudulent. NFPA 130 is not to blame – again, it’s the same code as in a number of low- and medium-cost countries – but Nilo Cobau explains that the NFPA process is such that big agencies have considerable input, since there aren’t many places in the US that build subways. Nolan Hicks pointed out in the same thread, all linked in the lede paragraph, that the MTA has a voting member and two alternates on the board that determines NFPA 130 and hasn’t requested changes – and that Montreal, subject to the same codes, built a station with little overage (he says 160 m digs for 150 m platforms).
The handwaving of a fire code that isn’t even different from that of cheaper places is there for one purpose only: to deflect blame. It was a struggle to get Lieber and other New York leaders to even admit they have high costs, so now they try to make it the fault of anyone but themselves: fire safety regulations, organized labor, what have you.
Labor is a real issue, unlike fire safety, but it’s overblown by managers who look down on line workers and have generally never been line workers. Lieber graduated law school, was hired by USDOT at either junior-appointed or mid-level civil servant role, I can’t tell which, and then did managerial jobs; his successor as head of MTA Construction and Development, Jamie Torres-Springer, graduated public policy. These aren’t people who worked themselves up from doing engineering, architecture, planning, or ethnographic work; add the general hostility American white-collar workers have toward blue-collar workers, and soon people in that milieu come to believe that just because their top 5%er wages are much higher than they could earn anywhere else in the world, the sandhogs also earn much more than they could anywhere else in the world, when in truth New York sandhog and Stockholm miner wages and benefits are very close.
Occasionally the point that it’s not wages but labor productivity seeps in. There, at last, we see a real problem with labor. Eric and I found that about a third of the sandhogs on Second Avenue Subway didn’t really need to be there. Further cuts could be achieved through the use of more labor-efficient techniques, which the MTA is uninterested in implementing. The rest of the American labor premium comes from excessive staffing of white-collar supervisors, including representatives from each utility, which insists that the MTA pay for the privilege of having such representatives tell them what they can and cannot do in lieu of mapping the utilities and sending over the blueprints. All included, labor was around 50% of the cost of Second Avenue Subway, where the norm in Italy, Turkey, and Sweden is around 25% (note how higher-wage Sweden is the same as lower-wage Italy and much lower-wage Turkey); excessive labor costs contributed a factor of 1.5 premium to the project, but the other factor of 6 came from excessive station size, deep mining of stations (which thankfully will not happen at 106th and 116th Street; it will at 125th but that’s unavoidable), lack of system standardization, and a litany of project delivery problems that are generally getting worse with every iteration. Lieber personally takes credit for some of the privatization of planning to design-build consultancies, though to be fair to him, the project delivery problems predate him, he just made things slightly worse.
A New York that wants to build will not have incompetent political appointees in charge. It will instead hire professionals with a track record of success; as no such people exist within the American infrastructure construction milieu, it should use its own size and prestige to find someone from a low-cost city to hire, who will speak English with an accent and know more engineering than American legal hermeneutics. And it will not reward people who defraud the public about the state of regulations just because they’re too lazy to know better.
Quick Note: Anti-Green Identity Politics
In Northern Europe right now, there’s a growing backlash to perceived injury to people’s prosperity inflicted by the green movement. In Germany this is seen in campaigning this year by the opposition and even by FDP not against the senior party in government but against the Greens. In the UK, the (partial) cancellation of High Speed 2 involved not just cost concerns but also rhetoric complaining about a war on cars and shifting of high-speed rail money to building new motorway interchanges.
I bring this up for a few reasons. First, to point out a trend. And second, because the Berlin instantiation of the trend is a nice example of what I talked about a month ago about conspiracism.
The trend is that the Green Party in Germany is viewed as Public Enemy #1 by much of the center-right and the entire extreme right, the latter using the slogan “Hang the Greens” at some hate marches from the summer. This is obvious in state-level political campaigning: where in North-Rhine-Westphalia and Schleswig-Holstein the unpopularity of the Scholz cabinet over its weak response to the Ukraine war led to CDU-Green coalitions last year (the Greens at the time enjoying high popularity over their pro-Ukraine stance), elections this year have produced CDU-SPD coalitions in Berlin and Hesse, in both cases CDU choosing SPD as a governing partner after having explicitly campaigned against the Greens.
This is not really out of any serious critique of the Green Party or its policy. American neoliberals routinely try to steelman this as having something to do with the party’s opposition to nuclear power, but this doesn’t feature into any of the negative media coverage and barely into any CDU rhetoric. It went into full swing with the heat pump law, debated in early summer.
In Berlin the situation has been especially perverse lately. One of the points made by CDU in the election campaign was that the red-red-green coalition failed to expand city infrastructure as promised. It ran on more room for cars rather than pedestrianization, but also U-Bahn construction; when the coalition agreement was announced, Green political operatives and environmental organizations on Twitter were the most aghast at the prospects of a massive U-Bahn expansion proposed by BVG and redevelopment of Tempelhofer Feld.
And then this month the Berlin government, having not made progress on U-Bahn expansion, announced that it would trial a maglev line. There hasn’t been very good coverage of this in formal English-language media, but here and here are writeups. The proposal is, of course, total vaporware, as is the projected cost of 80 million € for a test line of five to seven kilometers.
This has to be understood, I think, in the context of the concept of openness to new technology (“Technologieoffenheit”), which is usually an FDP slogan but seems to describe what’s going on here as well. In the name of openness to new tech, FDP loves raising doubts about proven technology and assert that perhaps something new will solve all problems better. Hydrogen train experiments are part of it (naturally, they failed). Normally this constant FUD is something I associate with people who are out of power or who are perpetually junior partners to power, like FDP, or until recently the Greens. People in power prefer to do things, and CDU thinks it’s the natural party of government.
And yet, there isn’t really any advance in government in Berlin. The U8 extension to Märkisches Viertel is in the coalition agreement but isn’t moving; every few months there’s a story in the media in which politicians say it’s time to do it, but so far there are no advances in the design, to the point that even the end point of the line is uncertain. And now the government, with all of its anti-green fervor – fervor that given Berlin politics includes support for subway construction – is not so much formally canceling it as just neglecting it, looking at shiny new technologies that are not at all appropriate for urban rail just because they’re not regular subways or regular commuter trains, which don’t have that identity politics load here.
Conspiracies and 15-Minute Cities
The ongoing conspiracy theories about 15-minute cities make me think about the issue of conspiracies and extremism more in general. The difference between what the conspiracy theories say and what the actual program is is vast. This is true even when there is lively critique of the program by non-conspiracists, critique that the conspiracists seem unaware of, or at best indifferent to. This set of facts about conspiracists – they are wrong even when the things they oppose happen to have serious problems; they are uninterestingly wrong; they do not cooperate with serious critics and often react violently against them – is general.
It’s relevant here for two reasons. First, because there’s a growing amount of anti-environmental and anti-public transport extremism, in which the possession of a large, polluting car is treated as an identity market. Such extremism never seriously interacts with any real critique of public transport construction programs or any kind of critique of urbanism. And second, because I have a lot of readers who come from a rationalist or Effective Altruism background and like doing what they call steelmanning: finding the strongest argument someone could make for a stance even if they didn’t make it, and arguing with that. I beseech my rationalist readers: please stop steelmanning – if extremists refuse to engage with any serious critique even when it argues against the same thing they argue against, it’s not to their credit and you should make inferences from that instead of acting as their lawyers.
But first, what are 15-minute cities and what’s the conspiracy theory?
15-minute cities
For some background, there is a trend in the urbanist world of calling for urbanism that enables people to make all their regular travel needs – retail, recreation, child care, social spaces, work – within a 15-minute travel radius by public or non-motorized transportation. Some versions of this vision drop work from these needs, due to the realization that people in cities travel 30-60 minutes each way to work and not 15. Parisian urban politics tends to believe in this vision, with work included: the city tries to spread work places around the city as isotropically as possible, creating jobs in residential neighborhoods rather than in city center; when I critique the vision, I usually focus on its implementation there, since the city’s political leadership adheres to it, and global adherents of the model generally think highly of Paris and of Mayor Anne Hidalgo.
The conspiracy theory is that it’s really a conspiracy to confine people into a 15-minute radius and prevent them from traveling further.
This conspiracy theory is not just the usual opposition to transit-first or pedestrian- and bike-first cities from drivers. Drivers who oppose bike lanes and prioritization of public transport and resent cities that don’t expand highways speak of a war on cars. The conspiracy theorists who think 15-minute cities are a confinement attempt love cars and love driving, as an anti-environmental identity marker, but care little about highway expansion; they think they’re being literally imprisoned and spied on.
There is an extensive critique of 15-minute cities from within the world of urbanism. I’ve long complained that it’s a consumption-centric model of urbanism; I think little of Hidalgo. I’m fairly neoliberal about the primacy of work over consumption, but Marco Chitti, who isn’t, points out that these 15-minute cities exist by the grace of service workers who commute in from elsewhere taking far longer than 15 minutes to get to work. Paris itself has long been critiqued for its museumification.
And none of the conspiracy theories about 15-minute cities comes close to touching any of the serious critiques. The critique that 15-minute cities center consumption over production is a YIMBY line, YIMBYs generally backing production theory in which people choose where to live based on access to jobs, not consumption amenities. But the conspiracy theorists tilt NIMBY, viewing developers as part of the conspiracy to make their lives worse (by making it easier for other people to live nearby); the conspiracy theorists who want to be more developmental and have heard of YIMBY are busy complaining that YIMBYs don’t back developing more single-family housing on the fringes of urban areas.
Likewise, the more social critique of Marco and others talks about inequality. The conspiracy theorists once again don’t care about any of this. They identify in opposition to anything that reeks of socialism. (There are of course far left conspiracy theorists, but these aren’t the ones saying that 15-minute cities are about confinement.) They hate the state and, for all of their hate of the idea of government by lawsuit, they hate the idea of government by bureaucrats more; one of them told me that the concept of an ambitious civil servant is scary and it’s good to force civil servants to keep their heads down.
I bring up the notions of social equality, the state, and upzoning to point out that the solutions to the real problems of Paris today are the exact opposite of what the conspiracy theorists who think 15-minute cities are confinement want. There’s no point in discussing those real problems around extremists, because the extremists at best don’t care, and at worst negatively care.
Other examples
The example above of how conspiracy theories about 15-minute cities have nothing to do with the real problems of that kind of urbanism, and there isn’t even a kernel of truth, generalizes outside urbanism and transportation. Much of it concerns anti-vaccination extremism, but there are other cases.
For example, there have been Jihadist conspiracy theories that vaccination is a Western plot to sterilize Muslim men. Based on that theory, Jihadists have attacked vaccination drives in Pakistan, murdering aid workers. Far too many organs steelman those theories, arguing that they were a natural byproduct of CIA meddling, citing in some cases a fake vaccination drive set up by the CIA to harvest people’s DNA. The truth is that, first of all, it was a real vaccination drive, in which a single doctor was trying to send over DNA to find Osama bin Laden (and didn’t). But second and more importantly, this anti-vaccination sentiment predates this episode, going back to the mid-2000s. The primary grievance the Jihadists have about vaccines did not mention anything about the CIA harvesting DNA; the Jihadists appeared completely unaware, having developed their theories completely independently.
For another example, in 1980s Germany, there was a public dispute over how to commemorate the Nazis, called the Historikerstreit. Historians on the right, like Ernst Nolte, charged that Germany ought to be prouder of its past, that Hitler was just concerned about the crimes of communism, that the Holocaust was just an overreaction to the gulags; right-wing publications like FAZ published Nolte’s popular writings on this. To Nolte and others, the anti-Semitism was just an unfortunate byproduct of how many Jews were communists. The right lost that debate; historians on the left, like Eberhard Jäckel, pointed out that Hitler in fact underestimated the Soviet Union because he thought Jews and Bolshevism were weak. The rat cage torture, which Nolte said Hitler was most concerned about, appeared nowhere in Mein Kampf, whereas anti-Semitic conspiracy theories did; the only quote from Hitler about it is ambiguous and from 1943. Moreover, far from centering communism as the great evil, Hitler also called capitalism a Jewish conspiracy to produce social alienation. Nolte was in effect steelmanning the Nazis, inventing an argument that they were not interested in to distract from what they were interested in and what they did.
On Hierarchy and the Civil Service
Some argument on a military history blog with good posts and terrible comments led me down a rabbit hole of talking about different models of how large, hierarchical organizations function.
The origin of this is that I’ve been reading the same things about military organization and the chain of command, in different variations. Here, via Quora, is the best encapsulation of how a multi-layer hierarchy works, on a submarine:
The CO never gives orders directly to watch standers. He works through the OOD or EOOW (officer of the deck and engineering officer of the watch). 99.9% of the time through the OOD. – He/She must re enforce their authority and not hijack it. It will cause confusion. If a Captain gives an order to a watch stander he/she assumes the conn. but not the deck. (See my other postings about this.)
The contrast is with personalistic managerial styles, in which the top person in the hierarchy constantly subverts and undermines their direct subordinates, by changing plans at the last minute, giving orders to low-rank people directly, or openly scolding the direct subordinates as out of touch. Think, for example, about the common cultural stereotypes of middle management; upper management that invoke such stereotypes against middle management is unlikely to be able to implement any long-term corporate culture, because the people responsible for implementing it know that they can be sniped by the top at any moment.
I bring this up here because populist politicians, or politicians in populist systems, love so undermining their own instruments of governance. The civil service is one such instrument, and is what’s relevant for infrastructure – but this undermining also includes other instruments.
For example, in the 2018 Senate race, Beto O’Rourke visited college students to induce them to turn out to vote for him and against Ted Cruz – and let people know that political consultants recommended against this move. Needless to say, O’Rourke uses consultants just like everyone else (and in US politics, at least for the Democrats, all candidates use the same pool of consultants – there’s no separation into, say, ones advising more left-wing and ones advising more centrist candidates). But he still felt it was necessary to scold his own instruments of campaigning.
So this isn’t even about the trend in the US, and in some countries with democratic backsliding, of replacing the apolitical civil service with party institutions. Personalistic politicians (and the US encourages personalism even in non-populists) undermine the instruments of ideological party governance, too.
The upshot of all of this is that a city like New York can have large civil service departments, but it won’t really have a strong civil service if the mayor keeps publicly undermining it. If planners know that whatever they work on will get sniped on a whim, they will not give their best; they’ll adopt punch-clock behavior, doing just the minimum until they qualify for a pension. If planners know that whatever they do, they’ll face a glass ceiling and have to answer to an inexperienced aide to a political appointee, they’ll leave as soon as they can. The most talented workers will go to the private sector, and everyone who can leave the city will as services atrophy.
The Importance of Tangibles
I’m writing this post on a train to Copenhagen. So many things about this trip are just wrong: the air conditioning in the car where we reserved seats is broken so we had to find somewhere else to sit, the train is delayed, there was a 10-minute stop at the border for Danish cops to check the IDs of some riders (with racial profiling). Even the booking was a bit jank: the Deutsche Bahn website easily sells one-ways and roundtrips, but this is a multi-city trip and we had to book it as two nested roundtrips. Those are the sort of intangibles that people who ride intercity trains a lot more than I do constantly complain about, usually when they travel to France and find that the TGV system does really poorly on all the metrics that the economic analysis papers looking at speed do not look at. And yet, those intangibles at the end of the day really are either just a matter of speed (like the 10-minute delay at the border) or not that important. But to get why it’s easy for rail users to overlook them, it’s important to understand the distinction between voice and exit.
Voice and exit strategies
The disgruntled customer, employee, or resident can respond in one of two ways. The traditional way as understood within economics is exit: switch to a competing product (or stop buying), quit, or emigrate. Voice means communicating one’s unhappiness to authority, which may include exercising political power if one has any; organizing a union is a voice strategy.
These two strategies are not at all mutually exclusive. Exit threat can enhance voice: Wikipedia in the link above gives the example of East Germany, where the constant emigration threat of the common citizenry amplified the protests of the late 1980s, but two more examples include union organizing and the history of Sweden. With unions, the use of voice (through organizing and engaging in industrial action) is stronger when there is an exit threat (through better employment opportunities elsewhere); it’s well-known that unions have an easier time negotiating better wages, benefits, and work conditions during times of low unemployment than during times of high unemployment. And with Sweden, the turn-of-the-century union movement used the threat of emigration to the United States to extract concessions from employers, to the point of holding English classes for workers.
Conversely, voice can amplify exit. To keep going with the example of unions, unions sometimes engage in coordinated boycotts to show strength – and they request that allies engage in boycotts when, and only when, the union publicly calls for them; wildcat boycotts, in which consumers stop using a product when there is a labor dispute without any union coordination, do not enhance the union’s negotiating position, and may even make management panic thinking the company is having an unrelated slump and propose layoffs.
The upshot is that constantly complaining about poor service is a voice strategy. It’s precise, and clearly communicates what the problem is. However, the sort of people who engage in such public complaints are usually still going to ride the trains. I’m not going to drive if the train is bad; I’d have to learn how to drive, for one. In my case, poor rail service means I’m going to take fewer trips – I probably would have done multiple weekend trips to each of Munich and Cologne this summer if the trains took 2.5 hours each way and not 4-4.5. In the case of more frequent travelers than me, especially railfans, it may not even mean that.
The trip not taken
On this very trip, we were trying to meet up in Hamburg with a friend who lives in Bonn, and who, like us, wants to see Hamburg. And then the friend tried booking the trip and realized that it was 4.5 hours Hbf-to-Hbf, and more than five hours door-to-door; we had both guessed it would be three hours; a high-speed rail network would do the trip in 2:15. The friend is not a railfan or much of a user of social media; to Deutsche Bahn, the revenue loss is noticeable, but not the voice.
And that’s where actually measuring passenger usage becomes so important. People who complain are not a representative cross-section of society: they use the system intensively, to the point that they’re unlikely to be the marginal users the railroad needs to attract away from driving or to induce to make the trip; they are familiar with navigating the red tape, to the point of being used to jank that turns away less experienced users; they tend to be more politically powerful (whereas my friend is an immigrant with about A2 German) and therefore already have a disproportionate impact on what the railroad does. Complaints can be a useful pilot, but they’re never a substitute for counting trips and revenue.
The issue is that the main threat to Deutsche Bahn, as to any other public railroad, is loss of passengers and the consequent loss of revenue. If the loss of revenue comes from a deliberate decision to subsidize service, then that’s a testament to its political power, as is the case for various regional and local public transport subsidy scheme like the Deutschlandticket and many more like it at the regional level in other countries. But if it comes from loss of passenger revenue, or even stagnation while other modes such as flying surge, then it means the opposite.
This is, if anything, more true of a public-sector rail operator than a private-sector one. A private-sector firm can shrink but maintain a healthy margin and survive as a small player, like so many Class II and III freight rail operators in the United States. But a national railway is, in a capitalist democracy, under constant threat of privatization. The threat is always larger when ridership is poor and when the mode is in decline; thus, British Rail was privatized near its nadir, and Japan National Railways was privatized while, Shinkansen or no Shinkansen, it was losing large amounts of money, in a country where the expectation was that rail should be profitable. Germany threatened to do the same to Deutsche Bahn in the 1990s and 2000s, leading to deferred maintenance, but the process was so slow that by the time it could happen, during the 12 years of CSU control of the Ministry of Transport, ridership was healthy enough there were no longer any demands for such privatization. The stagnant SNCF of the 2010s has had to accept outside reforms (“Société Anonyme”), stopping short of privatization and yet making it easier to do so in the future should a more right-wing government than that of Macron choose to proceed.
The path forward
Rail activists should recognize that the most important determinant of ridership is not the intangibles that irk people who plan complex multi-legged regional rail trips, but the basics: speed, reliability, fares, some degree of frequency (but the odd three-hour wait on a peripheral intercity connection, while bad, is not the end of the world).
On the train I’m on, the most important investment is already under construction: the Fehmarn Belt tunnel is already under construction, and is supposed to open in six years. The construction cost, 10 billion € for 18 km, is rather high, setting records in both countries. The project is said to stand to shorten the Hamburg-Copenhagen trip time, currently 4:40 on paper with an average delay of 21 minutes and a 0% on-time performance in the last month, to 2.5 hours. If Germany bothers to build high-speed approaches, and Denmark bothers to complete its own high-speed approaches and rate them at 300 km/h and not 200-250, the trip could be done in 1.5 hours.
Domestically, and across borders that involve regular overland high-speed rail rather than undersea tunnels, construction of fast trains proceeds at a sluggish pace. German rail advocates, unfortunately, want to see less high-speed rail rather than more, due to a combination of NIMBYism, the good-enough phenomenon, and constant sneering at France and Southern Europe.
But it’s important to keep focusing on a network of fast rail links between major cities. That’s the source of intercity rail ridership at scale. People love complaining about the lack of good rail for niche town pairs involving regional connections at both ends, but those town pairs are never going to get rail service that can beat the car for the great majority of potential riders who own a car and aren’t environmental martyrs. In contrast, the 2.5- and three-hour connection at long intercity distances reliably gets the sort of riders who are more marginal to the system and respond to seeing a five-hour trip with exit rather than voice.
Quick Note on Ecotourism and Climate
On Mastodon, I follow the EU Commission’s feed, which reliably outputs schlock that expresses enthusiasm about things that don’t excite anyone who doesn’t work for the EU. A few days ago, it posted something about green tourism that goes beyond the usual saying nothing, and instead actively promotes the wrong things.
The issue at hand is that the greenest way to do tourism is to avoid flying and driving. The origin of Greta Thunberg’s activism is that, in 2018, she was disturbed by the standard green message at school: recycle bottles, but fly to other continents for vacations and tell exciting stories. The concept of flight shame originates with her; she hasn’t flown at all since 2015 and famously traveled to New York by sailboat, but most of her followers are more pragmatic and shift to trains where possible (domestically) and not where it is too ridiculous (internationally, even within Europe).
So environmentally sustainable tourism means tourism that does not involve flying or driving. It means taking the train to Munich or Hamburg or Cologne – or Rome, for the dedicated environmental masochist – doing city center tourism, and at no point using a form of transportation that isn’t a train or maybe a bus.
But the European Commission isn’t recommending that. It’s telling people to choose ecotourism, with a top-down photo of a forest. From Europe, this invariably means flying long distances, and then getting around by taxi in a biome that Europe does not have, usually a tropical climate. The point of ecotourism is not to reduce emissions or any other environmental footprint; it’s to go see a place of natural beauty before it’s destroyed by climate change coming in part from the emissions generated by the trip to it.
This worse-than-nothing campaign comes at a time when there’s growth in demand for actually green tourism in sections of Europe. The more hardcore greens talk about night trains so that they can do those all-rail trips to more distant parts of Europe. People who believe that the Union might be able to do something instead hold out for high-speed trains.
Even with the Commission’s regular appetite for words over actions, there are things that can be done about greening tourism. For example, it could help advertise intra-European attractions that could be done by rail. Berlin is full of these “You are EU” posters that say nothing; they could be telling people how to get to Prague, to any Polish city within reasonable train range, to Jutland if there’s anything interesting there.
At longer range, it could be helping promote circuits of travel entirely by rail. There’s already an UNESCO initiative promoting circuits, designed entirely around ecotourism principles (i.e. drive to where you can see pretty landscapes). This could be adapted to rail circuits, perhaps with some promotional deals. People who go on vacation for 5 weeks at once could be induced to ride trains visiting a different city every few days, breaking what would be a flight or an unreasonably long rail trip into short segments; there are enough cycles in the European intercity rail network that people wouldn’t need to visit the same city twice. For example, one route could go Berlin-Prague-Vienna-Salzburg-Venice-Rome-Milan-Basel-Cologne-Berlin. This is a rather urban route; circuits that include non-urban rail destinations like Saxon Switzerland or the Black Forest are also viable, but the more destinations are added, the smaller the circuit can be.
Pedestrian Observations 