Category: Studies

New York Isn’t Special

A week ago, we published a short note on driver-only metro trains, known in New York as one-person train operation or OPTO. New York is nearly unique globally in running metro trains with both a driver and a conductor, and from time to time reformers have suggested switching to OPTO, so far only succeeding in edge cases such as a few short off-peak trains. A bill passed the state legislature banning OPTO nearly unanimously, but the governor has so far neither signed nor vetoed it. The New York Times covered our report rather favorably, and the usual suspects, in this case union leadership, are pissed. Transportation Workers Union head John Samuelsen made the usual argument, but highlighted how special New York is.

“Academics think working people are stupid,” [Samuelsen] said. “They can make data lie for them. They conducted a study of subway systems worldwide. But there’s no subway system in the world like the NYC subway system.”

Our report was short and didn’t go into all the ways New York isn’t special, so let me elaborate here:

  • On pre-corona numbers, New York’s urban rail network ranked 12th in the world in ridership, and that’s with a lot of London commuter rail ridership excluded, including which would likely put London ahead and New York 13th.
  • New York was among the first cities in the world to open its subway – but London, Budapest, Chicago (dating from the electrification and opening of the Loop in 1897), Boston, Paris, and Berlin all opened earlier.
  • New York has some tight curves on its tracks, but the minimum curve radius on Paris Métro Line 1, 40 meters, is comparable to the New York City Subway’s.
  • The trains on the New York City Subway are atypically long for a metro system, at 151 meters on most of the A division and 183 on most of the B division, but trains on some metro systems are even longer (Tokyo has some 200 m trains, Shanghai 180 m trains) and so are trains on commuter rail systems like the RER (204 m on the B, 220 m on the A), Munich S-Bahn (201 m), and Elizabeth line (205 m, extendable to 240).
  • New York has crowded trains at rush hour, with pre-Second Avenue Subway trains peaking at 4 standees per square meter, but London peaks at 5/m^2 and trains in Tokyo and the bigger Chinese cities at more than that. Overall ridership, irrespective of crowding, peaked around 30,000 passengers per direction per hour on the 4 and 5 trains in New York, compared with 55,000 on the RER A.

New York is not special, not in 2025, when it’s one of many megacities with large subway systems. It’s just solipsistic, run by managers and labor leaders who are used to denigrating cities that are superior to New York in every way they run their metro systems as mere villages unworthy of their attention. Both groups are overpaid: management is hired from pipelines that expect master-of-the-universe pay and think Sweden is a lower-wage society, and labor faces such hurdles with the seniority system that new hires get bad shifts and to get enough workers New York City Transit has had to pay $85,000 at start, compared with, in PPP terms, around $63,000 in Munich after recent negotiations. The incentive in New York should be to automate aggressively, and look for ways to increase worker churn and not to turn people who earn 2050s wages for 1950s productivity be a veto point to anything.

Transit-Oriented Development and Rail Capacity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

High-Speed Rail Ridership Estimator Applet

Thijs Niks made a web applet for calculating high-speed rail network ridership estimates. This is based on the gravity model that I’ve used to construct estimates. The applet lets one add graph nodes representing metro areas and edges representing connections between them. It estimates ridership based on the model, construction costs based on a given choice of national construction costs, and overall profitability after interest. It can also automate the exact distances and populations, using estimates of population within a radius of 30 km from a point, and estimates of line length based on great circle length. The documentation can be found here and I encourage people to read it.

This is a very good way of visualizing certain things both about high-speed rail networks and the implications of a pure gravity model. For one, Metcalfe’s law is in full swing, to the point that adding to a network improves its finances through adding more city pairs than just the new edges. The German network overall is deemed to have insufficient financial rate of return due to the high costs of construction (and due to a limitation in the applet, which is that it assumes all links cost like high-speed rail, even upgraded classical lines like Berlin-Hamburg). But if the network is augmented with international connections to Austria, Czechia, Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, and Switzerland, then it moves into the black.

To be clear, this is not a conclusion of the applet. Rather, the applet is a good visualization that this is a conclusion of the model. The model, with the following formula,

\mbox{Ridership} = c\cdot\mbox{Population}_{A}^{0.8}\cdot\mbox{Population}_{B}^{0.8}/(\max\{\mbox{distance}, d\})^{2}

is open to critique. The minimum distance d can be empirically derived from ridership along a line with intermediate stops; I use 500 km, or around a trip time of 2:15. The constant c is different in different geographies, and I don’t always have a good explanation for it. The TGV has a much higher constant than the Shinkansen (by a factor of 1.5), which can be explained by its much lower fares (a factor of about 1.7). But Taiwan HSR has a much higher constant than either, with no such obvious explanation. This is perilous, because Taiwan is a much smaller country than the others for which I’ve tested the model (Japan, South Korea, France, Germany, Spain, Italy). There may be reason to believe that at large scale, c should be lower for higher-population geographies, like the entirety of Europe; the reason is that if c is truly independent of population size, then the model implies that the propensity to travel per individual is not constant, but rather is larger in larger geographies, with an exponent of 0.6. This could to some extent be resolved if we have robust Chinese data – but China has other special elements that make a straight comparison uncertain, namely much lower incomes (reducing travel) and much higher average speeds (increasing travel).

The other issue is that the value of c used in the applet is much higher than the one I use. I use 75,000 for Shinkansen and 112,500 for Europe, with the populations of the metro areas stated in millions of people, the distance given in kilometers, and the ridership given in millions of riders per year. The applet uses 200,000, because its definition of metro area is not taken from national lists but from a flat applet giving the population in a 30 km radius from a point, which reduces Paris from 13 million people to 10.3 million people; it also omits many secondary cities in France that get direct TGVs to the capital, most notably Saint-Etienne and Valence, collectively dropping 12% of the modeled Paris-PACA ridership and 37% of the Paris-Rhône-Alpes ridership. (Conversely, the same method overestimates the size of metro Lille.)

Potentially, if the definition of a metro area is the population within a fixed radius, then the 0.8 exponent may need to be replaced with 1, since the fixed radius already drops many of the suburbs of the largest cities. The reason the gravity model has an exponent of 0.8 and not 1 is that larger metro areas have diseconomies of scale, as the distance from the average residence to the train station grows. Empirically, splitting combined statistical areas in the US into smaller metro areas and metropolitan divisions fits an exponent of 0.8 rather than 1, as some of those divisions (for example, Long Island) don’t have intercity train stations and have a longer trip time; it is fortunate that training the same model on Tokyo-to-secondary city Shinkansen ridership results in the same 0.8 exponent. However, if the definition of the metropolitan area is atypically unfair to New York and other megacities then the exponent is likely better converted to the theoretically simpler 1.

Reasons and Explanations

David Schleicher has a proposal for how Congress can speed up infrastructure construction and reduce costs for megaprojects. Writing about what further research needs to be done, he distinguishes reasons from explanations.

I have argued that many of the stories we tell about infrastructure costs involve explanations but not reasons. There are plenty of explanations for why projects cost so much, from too-deep train stations to out-of-control contractors, but they don’t help us understand why politicians often seem not to care about increasing costs. For that, we need to understand why there is insufficient political pressure to encourage politicians to do better.

I hope in this post to go over this distinction in more detail and suggest reasons. The key here is to look not just at costs per kilometer, but also costs per rider, or benefit-cost ratios in general. The American rail projects that are built tend to have very high benefits, to the point that at normal costs, their benefit-cost ratios would be so high that they’d raise the question of why it didn’t happen generations ago. (If New York’s construction costs had stayed the same as those of London and Paris in the 1930s, then Second Avenue Subway would have opened in the 1950s from Harlem to Lower Manhattan.) The upshot is that such projects have decent benefit-cost ratios even at very high costs, which leads to the opposite political pressure.

Those high benefit-cost ratios can be seen in low costs per rider, despite very high costs per kilometer. Second Avenue Subway Phase 1 cost $6 billion in today’s money and was projected to get 200,000 daily riders, which figure it came close to before the pandemic led to reductions in ridership. $30,000/rider is perfectly affordable in a developed country; Grand Paris Express, in 2024 prices, is estimated to cost 45 billion € and get 2 million daily riders, which at PPP conversion is if anything a little higher than for Second Avenue Subway. And the United States is wealthier than France.

I spoke to Michael Schabas in 2017 or 2018 about the Toronto rail electrification project, asking about its costs. He pointed out to me that when he was involved in the early 2010s studies for it, the costs were only mildly above European norms, but the benefits were so high that the benefit-cost ratio was estimated at 8. Such a project could only exist because Canada is even more of a laggard on passenger rail electrification than the United States – in Australia, Europe, Japan, or Latin America a system like GO Transit would have been electrified generations earlier, when the benefit-cost ratio would have been solid but not 8. The ratio of 8 seemed unbelievable, so Metrolinx included 100% contingency right from the start, and added scope instead of fighting it – the project was going to happen at a ratio of 2 or 8, and the extra costs bringing it down to 2 are someone else’s revenue.

The effect can look, on the surface, as one of inexperience: the US and Canada are inexperienced with projects like passenger rail electrification, and so they screw them up and costs go up, and surely they’ll go down with experience. But that’s not quite what’s happening. Costs are very high even for elements that are within the American (or Canadian) experience, such as subway and light rail lines, often built continuously in Canadian and Western US cities. Rather, what’s going on is that if a feature has been for any reason underrated (in this case, mainline rail electrification, due to technological conservatism), then by the time anyone bothers building it, its benefit-cost ratio at normal costs will be very high, creating pressure to add more costs to mollify interest groups that know they can make demands.

This effect even happens outside the English-speaking world, occasionally. Parisian construction costs for metro and RER tunnels are more or less the world median. Costs for light rail are high by French standards and low by Anglosphere ones. However, wheelchair accessibility is extremely expensive: Valérie Pécresse’s plan to retrofit the entire Métro with elevators, which are currently only installed on Line 14, is said to cost 15 to 20 billion euros. There are 300 stations excluding Line 14, so the cost per station, at 50-67 million € is even higher than in New York. In Madrid, a station is retrofit with four elevators for about 10 million €; in Berlin, they range between 2 and 6 million (with just one to two elevators needed; in Paris, three are needed); in London, a tranche of step-free access upgrades beginning in 2018 cost £200 million for 13 stations. This is not because France is somehow inexperienced in this – such projects happen in secondary cities at far lower costs. Moreover, when France is experimenting with cutting-edge technology, like automation of the Métro starting with Line 1, the costs are not at all high. Rather, what’s going on with accessibility costs is that Paris is so tardy with upgrading its system to be accessible that the benefits are enormous and there’s political pressure to spend a lot of money on it and not try saving much, not when only one line is accessible.

In theory, this reason should mean that once the projects with the highest benefit-cost ratios are built, the rest will have more cost control pressure. However, one shouldn’t be so optimistic. When a country or city starts out building expensive infrastructure, it gets used to building in a certain way, and costs stay high. Taiwanese MRT construction costs began high in the 1990s, and the result since then has not been cost control pressure as more marginal lines are built, but fewer lines built, and rather weak transit systems in the secondary cities.

Major reductions happen only in an environment of extreme political pressure. In Italy, the problem in the 1980s was extensive corruption, which was solved through mani pulite, a process that put half of parliament under indictment and destroyed all extant political parties, and reforms passed in its wake that increased transparency and professionalized project delivery. High costs by themselves do not guarantee such pressure – there is none in Taiwan or the United Kingdom. In the United States there is some pressure, in the sense that the thinktanks are aware of the problem and trying to solve it and there’s a decent degree of consensus across ideologies about how. But I don’t think there’s extreme political pressure – if anything the tendency for local activist groups is to work toward the same failed leadership that kept supervising higher costs, whereas mani pulite was a search-and-destroy operation.

Without such extreme pressure, what happens is that a very strong project like Caltrain or GO Transit electrification, the MBTA Green Line Extension, the Wilshire subway, or Second Avenue Subway is built, and then few to no similar things can be, because people got used to doing things a certain way. The project managers who made all the wrong decisions that let costs explode are hailed as heroes for finally completing the project and surmounting all of its problems, never mind that the problems were caused either by their own incompetence or that of predecessors who weren’t too different from them. The regulations are only tweaked or if anything tightened if a local political power broker feels not listened to. Countries and cities build to a certain benefit-cost ratio frontier, and accept the cost of doing business up to it; the result is just that fewer things are built in high cost per kilometer environments.

Meme Weeding: Embodied Carbon

The greenhouse gases emitted by the production of concrete, called embodied carbon, are occasionally used as a green-NIMBY argument against building new things. A Berlin Green spokesperson coauthored a study opposing U-Bahn construction on the grounds that the concrete used in construction would raise emissions. More recently, I’ve seen American opponents of transit-oriented development in Manhattan, of all places, talk about the high embodied carbon of new high-rise buildings. Katja Diehl calls for a moratorium on new buildings on anti-concrete grounds, and a petition for the EU to shift regulations to be against new buildings and in favor of reuse on embodied carbon grounds got written up favorably by Kate Wagner in the Nation. Against all of this, I’ve found some numbers on the actual emissions involved in concrete production for new buildings, and they are so low as to be insignificant, 1.5 orders of magnitude less than transportation emissions. A decarbonization strategy should largely ignore embodied carbon concerns and embrace pro-growth sentiments: big buildings, big subway systems, big cities.

What is embodied carbon?

Embodied (sometimes called embedded) carbon is the carbon content emitted by the production of materials. The production of concrete emits greenhouses gases, mainly through two mechanisms: the chemical process used to produce cement emits CO2 by itself, and the energy used for production adds to the emissions of the electric grid.

What are the embodied carbon emissions of new buildings?

The embodied carbon content of concrete depends heavily on the local electricity grid as well as on the required strength of the material, with stronger requirements leading to higher emissions. The Climate Group commissioned a report on this in the British context, finding a wide range, but the average is around 250 kg of CO2-equivalent per m^3 of concrete, the 75th percentile is about 300, and the upper bound is 450. This is a cradle-to-gate figure, taking into account the existing conditions of the carbon intensivity of where concrete is produced and of the logistics system for getting it to the construction site. This is already with some reductions from a previous baseline (EC100; the UK average is around EC60), and further reductions are possible, through decarbonizing the logistics and production; the goal of the report is not to bury the concept of embodied carbon as I do but to propose ways to reduce construction industry emissions.

The question is now how to convert cubic meters of concrete into square meters of built-up area. I have not seen European figures for this, but I did find a 2012 report by the Building and Construction Authority. In Singapore, the sustainability index used is the concrete usage index (CUI), measured in meters (cubic meters per square meter). The example projects given in the study, all around 15 years old, have a CUI of 0.4-0.5 m, and it was pointed out to me on social media that in Toronto the average is 0.55 m.

250 kg/m^3 times 0.4 m equals 0.1 t-CO2 per m^2 of built-up area. A 100 m^2 apartment thus has an embodied carbon content of around 10 t-CO2. This is relative to a baseline in which there is already some concern for reducing construction emissions, both the CUI and the carbon content of concrete per m^3, but this is largely without techniques like mass timber or infra-lightweight concrete (ILC). In Singapore the techniques highlighted in the BCA report are fully compatible with the city’s high-rise character, and the example building with gold but not platinum certification has 25 stories.

Should we worry about construction emissions?

No.

An aggressively YIMBY construction schedule, say with 10 dwellings built annually per 1,000 people, say averaging 100 m^2, emits around 0.1 t/capita annually: 0.1 t/m^2 * 100 m^2/unit * 0.01 unit/capita. All figures have ranges (and if anything, 100 is high for the places that build this much urban infill housing), but factor-of-1.5 ranges don’t erase an order of magnitude analysis. The emissions produced by construction, even if it were raised to some of the highest per capita rates found in the developed world – in fact higher rates than any national average I know of – would be about two orders of magnitude lower than present-day first-world emissions. They’d be 1.5 orders of magnitude lower than transportation emissions; in Germany, transport is 22% of national emissions and rising, as all other sources are in decline whereas transport is flat.

There’s a lot of confusion about this because some studies talk about buildings in general providing a high share of emissions. The Bloomberg-era PlaNYC spoke of buildings as the top source of emissions in New York, and likewise the Nation cites WeForum saying buildings are 37% of global emissions, citing a UN report that includes buildings’ operating emissions (its topline figure is 10 Gt in operating emissions, which is 27% of global emissions in 2022). But the construction emissions are insignificantly low. This means that aggressive replacement of older buildings by newer, more energy-efficient ones is an unmixed blessing, exactly the opposite of the conclusion of the green movement.

Instead of worrying about a source of emissions measured per capita in the tens of kilograms per year rather than in the tons, environmental advocates need to prioritize the most important source of greenhouse gases. The largest in developed countries is transportation, with electricity production usually coming second, always falling over the years while transport remains flat. In cold countries, heating is a significant source of emissions as well, to be reduced through building large, energy-efficient apartment buildings and through heat pump installation.

Regulations on new construction’s embodied carbon are likely a net negative for the environment. The most significant social policy concerning housing as far as environmental impact is concerned is to encourage people to live in urban apartment buildings near train stations. Any regulation that makes this harder – for example, making demolitions of small buildings to make room for big ones harder, or demanding that new buildings meet embodied carbon standards – makes this goal harder. This can be understandable occasionally if the goal of the regulation is not environmental, for example labor regulations for construction workers. It is not understandable if the goal is environmental, as the concern over embodied carbon is. People are entitled to their opinion that small is beautiful as a matter of aesthetic judgment, but they are not entitled to alternative facts that small is environmentally friendly.

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

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

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

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

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

Quick Note: Rural Drivers Aren’t Being Oppressed

A new paper is making the round arguing that Spanish rural automobility is a response to peripheralization. It’s a mix of saying what is obvious – in rural areas there is no public transportation and therefore cars are required for basic mobility – and proposing this as a way of dealing with the general marginalization of people in rural areas. The more obvious parts are not so much wrong as underdeveloped – the paper is an ethnography of rural drivers who say they need to drive to get to work and to non-work destinations like child care. But then the parts talking about peripheralization are within a program of normalizing rural violence against the state and against urban dwellers, and deserves a certain degree of pushback.

The issue here is that while rural areas are poorer than urban ones, making them economically more peripheral, they are not at all socially peripheral. This can be seen in a number of both economic and non-economic issues:

  • Rural areas are showered with place-based subsidies to deal with poverty, on top of the usual universal programs (like health care and pensions) that redistribute money from rich to poor regardless of location. This includes farm subsidies, like the Common Agricultural Policy, and infrastructure subsidies in which there’s more investment relative to usage in rural than in urban areas. The automobility of rural areas is itself part of this program: urban motorways can fund themselves from tolls where they need to, but national programs of road improvements end up improving the mobility options of rural areas out of almost exclusively urban taxes. In public transport, this includes considerable political entitlement, such as when Spanish regional governors made a botched train procurement into a national scandal and demanded that the chief of staff of the national transport ministry, Isabel Pardo de Vera Posada, resign over something she’d had nothing to do with.
  • Rural poverty is culturally viewed as the fault of other people than the residents. Poor urban neighborhoods are called no-go zones; I am not familiar enough with Spanish discourse on this but I doubt it’s different from French, German, and Swedish discourses, in which poor rural areas are never so called. A German district with neo-Nazi groups and majority public sympathy with extremism is called a victim of globalization in media, even left-leaning media, and not a no-go zone.
  • Rural areas, regardless of income, are socially treated as more authentic representatives of proper values, with expressions like Deep England or La France profonde contrasting with constant scorn for London, Paris, and Berlin.
  • Rural violence is treated as almost respectable. Political and media reactions to farmer riots with tractors as of late have been to shower the rioters with understanding. In France, the government acceded to the demands, and then-minister of the interior Gérald Darmanin forced law enforcement to act with restraint. In contrast, urban riots by racial minorities lead to mass arrests, the occasional fatal shooting of a rioter, and a discourse that treats riots as fundamentally illegitimate, for example just a few months prior.

The paper denigrates rural policies formed with “barely any understanding of how they are conditioned” and says that “an understanding of socio-spatial cohesion needs to look beyond the traditional objectives of equalizing agricultural incomes to consider how these accessibility gaps affect depopulation, young people’s skills, unemployment and low incomes.” But the issue isn’t understanding. Rural areas are not misunderstood. They are dominant, capable of steering specific subsidies their way that are not available to urbanites at equal income levels.

More broadly, I think it’s difficult for critical urbanism to deal with this issue of the permission structure for rural violence, because the urban-rural dynamic is not the same as the classical dynamic between social classes, or between white and black Americans, in which the socioeconomically dominant group is also the politically dominant one. It’s instead better to analogize it in ethnic terms not to American anti-black racism, or to European anti-immigrant racism, but to anti-Semitism, in which the social acceptance of a base level of violence coexists with the fact that Jews are often a more educated and richer group, leading anti-Semites to promulgate conspiracy theories.

The permission structure for rural drivers to commit violence in demand of government subsidies and government protection from competition is the exact opposite of peripheralization. It’s not a periphery; it’s a political and cultural center that faces a fundamental challenge in that it provides no economic or social value and is in effect a rapacious mafia using violence to extract protection money from an urban society that, due to misplaced sentimental values, responds with further subventions rather than with the full force of law as used against urban and suburban rioters with migration background.

Consultant Slop and Europe’s Decision not to Build High-Speed Rail

I’m sitting on a series of three trains to Rome, totaling 14 hours of travel. If a high-speed rail network is built connecting those cities, the trip can be reduced to about 7.5 hours: 2.5 Berlin-Munich (currently 4), 2 Munich-Verona (currently 5.5), around 2.75 Verona-Rome (currently 3.5), around 0.25 changing time (currently 1). The slowest section is being bypassed with the under-construction Brenner Base Tunnel, but not all of the approaches to the tunnel are, and Germany is happy with its trains averaging slightly slower speeds than the 1960s express Shinkansen.

I bring this up because it’s useful background for a rather stupid report by Transport and Environment that was making the rounds on European social media, purporting to rank the different intercity rail operators of Europe, according to criteria that make it clear nobody involved in the process cares much about infrastructure construction or about what has made high-speed rail work at the member state level. It’s consultant slop, based on a McKinsey report that conflicts with the published literature on intercity rail ridership elasticity, which makes it clear that speed matters greatly. Astonishingly, even negative discourse about the study, by people who I respect, talks about the slop and about the problems of privatization, but not about the need to actually go ahead and build those high-speed connections, without which there are sharp limits to the quality of life available to the zero-carbon lifestyle, limits that make people avoid that lifestyle and instead fly and drive. In effect, Europe and its institutions have made a collective decision over the last 10 or so years not to build high-speed rail, to the point that activism suggesting it reverse course and do so is treated as self-evidently laughable.

The T&E study

The T&E study purports to rank the intercity rail operators of Europe. There are 27 operators so ranked, which do not exactly correspond to the 27 member states, but instead omit some peripheral states, include British and Swiss options, and have some private operators, including inexplicably treating OuiGo as separate from the rest of the TGV. The ranking is of operators rather than infrastructure systems; there is no attention given to planning infrastructure and operations together. Trenitalia comes first, followed by a near-tie between RegioJet and SBB; Eurostar is last. Jon Worth had to pour cold water on the conclusions and the stenography in various European newspapers about them.

In fact, the study fits so perfectly into my post about making up rankings that it is easy to think I wrote the post about T&E – but no, the post is from 2.5 years ago. The issue is that it came up with such bad weighting in judging railways that one is left to wonder if it specifically picked something that would sound truthy and put SBB at or near the top just to avoid raising too many questions. The criteria used are as follows:

  • Ticket prices: 25%
  • Special fares and reductions: 15%
  • Reliability: 15%
  • Booking experience: 15%
  • Compensation policies: 10%
  • Traveler experience (speed and comfort): 10%
  • Night trains and bicycle policy: 5%

None of this is even remotely defensible, and none of this passes any sanity check. No, it is not 1.5 times as important to have special reductions in fares for advance bookings or other forms of price discrimination as to have a combination of speed and comfort. The Shinkansen has fixed fares and is doing fine, thank you very much; SNCF’s own explanations of its airline-style yield management system portray it as a positive but not essential feature – its reports from 2009 recommending high-speed rail development in the United States cite yield management as a 4% increase in revenue, which is good but not amazing.

But more broadly, it is daft to set a full 50% of the weight on fares and fare-related issues (i.e. compensation), and 15% on the booking experience, and relegate speed to part of an issue that is only 10%. That’s not how high-speed rail ridership works. Cascetta-Coppola find a ridership elasticity with respect to trip time of about -2, but only -0.37 with respect to fares. Börjesson finds a much narrower spread, -1.12 and -0.67 respectively, but still the same directionally. Speed matters.

And yet, T&E doesn’t seem to care. The best hints for the reason why are in the way it compares operators rather than national networks, and relies on a McKinsey report pitched at private entrants and not at member state policymakers, who do not normally outsource decisionmaking to international consultants. It doesn’t think in terms of systems or networks, because it isn’t trying to make a pitch at how a member state can improve its rail network, but rather at how a private competitor should aim to make a profit on infrastructure built previously by the state.

The need for state planning

Every intercity rail network worth its name was built and planned publicly, by a state empowered to do so. In East Asia, this comprises the high-speed rail networks of China, Japan, Korean, and Taiwan, all funded publicly, even if Japan subsequently privatized Shinkansen operation (though not construction) to regional monopolies that, while investor-owned, are too prestigious to fail. In Europe, some networks have high-speed rail at their core, like France, and others don’t, like Switzerland or the Netherlands, but the latter instead optimize state planning at lower speed, with tightly timed connections, strategic investments to speed up bottlenecks, and integration between rolling stock, the timetable, and infrastructure.

This feature of the main low-speed European rail network frustrates some attempts at disaggregating the effects of different inputs on ridership and revenue. At the level of a sanity check, there does not appear to be a noticeable malus to French rail ridership from its low frequency at outlying stations. But then France relies on one-seat rides from Paris to rather small cities, which do not have convenient airport access, and in its own way integrates this operating paradigm with rolling stock (bilevels optimized for seating capacity, not fast egress or acceleration) and infrastructure (bypasses around intermediate cities, even Lyon). Switzerland, in contrast, has these timed connections such that the effective frequency even on three-seat rides is hourly, with guaranteed short waits at the transfers, and this provides an alternative way to connect small cities with not just large ones but also each other.

But in both cases, the operating paradigm is connected with the infrastructure, and this was decided publicly by the state, based on governmental financial constraints, imposed in the 1970s in France (leading to extraordinarily low construction costs for the LGV Sud-Est) and the 1980s in Switzerland (leading to the hyper-optimized operations of Bahn 2000 in lieu of a high-speed rail system). A private operator can come in, imitate the same paradigm that the infrastructure was built for, and sometimes achieve lower operating costs by being more aggressive about eliminating redundant positions that a state operator may feel too constrained by unions to. But it cannot innovate in how to run trains. Even in Italy and Spain, where private competition has led to lower fares and higher ridership, all the private competitors have done is force service to look more like the TGV as it is and less like the TGV as SNCF management would like it to be internationally. Even there, they do not innovate, but merely imitate what the TGV already had purely publicly, on infrastructure that was designed for TGV or ICE service intensity all along.

The idea that the private sector can innovate in intercity rail comes from the same imitation of airline thinking that led to the failure of Eurostar, with its high fares and airline-style boarding and queuing. In the airline business, integration between infrastructure and operations is weak, and private airlines can innovate in aircraft utilization, fast boarding, no-frills service, and other aspects that led low-cost carriers to success. Business analysts drawn from that world keep trying to make this work for trains, and fail; the Spinetta Report mentions that OuiGo tanked TGV revenues, and ridership did not materially increase when it was introduced due to inconveniences imposed by the system of segmenting the market by fare.

Europe’s decision not to build high-speed rail

In the 2000s, there was semi-official crayon, such as the TEN-T system, for EU-wide high-speed rail, inspired by the success of the TGV. Little of it happened, and by the 2010s, it became more common to encounter criticism alleging that it could not be done, and it was more important to focus on other things – namely, private competition, the thing that cannot innovate in rail but could in airlines.

At no point was there a formal decision not to build high-speed rail at a European scale. Projects just fell aside, unless they were megaproject tunnels across mountains like the Brenner Base Tunnel or water like the Fehmarn Belt Tunnel, and then there is underinvestment in the approaches, so that the average speed remains shrug-worthy. The discourse shifted from building infrastructure to justifying not building it and pitching on-rail competition instead. This, I believe, is due to factors going back to the 1990s:

  • The failure of Eurostar to produce high ridership. It underperformed expectations; it also underperforms domestic city pairs. SNCF is happy to collect monopoly profits from international travelers, and, in turn, potential travelers associate high-speed rail with high fares and inconvenience and look elsewhere. One failed prominent project can and does poison the technology, potentially indefinitely.
  • The anti-state zeitgeist at the EU level. This can be described as neoliberalism, but the thoroughly neoliberal Blair/Brown and Cameron cabinets happily planned High Speed 2. The EU goes beyond that: it is too scared to act as a state on matters other than trade, and that leads people in EU policy to think in terms of government-by-nudge, rather like the Americans.
  • SNCF and DB’s profiteering off of cross-border travelers in different ways turns them into Public Enemies #1 and #2 for people who travel between different member states by rail, who are then reluctant to see them as successes domestically.

For all of these reasons, it’s preferred at the level of EU policymaking and advocacy not to build infrastructure. Infrastructure requires there to be a public sector, and the EU only does that on matters of trade and regulatory harmonization.

Jon Worth has done a lot of work on getting a passenger rights clause into the agenda for the new EU Parliament, to deal with friction between DB and SNCF when each blames the other when a cross-border passenger is stranded (roughly: DB blames SNCF for running low frequencies so that if DB’s last train is delayed the passenger is stranded, SNCF blames DB for being so delayed in the first place). This is a good kind of regulatory harmonization. It reminds me of the EU’s role in health care: there’s reciprocity among the universal health care systems of Europe, for example allowing EU immigrants but not non-European ones to switch to the Kasse upon arrival; but at the same time, the EU has practically no role in designing or providing these universal health care system or even, as the divergent responses to corona showed in 2020, in coordinating non-pharmaceutical interventions for public health in a pandemic.

But health care does not require large coordinating bodies, and infrastructure does. Refugee camps tended to by UN agencies that have to pay bribes and protection fees to local gangs can have surprisingly good health care outcomes. Cox’s Bazar’s Rohingya camps have infant mortality rates comparable to those of Bangladesh and Burma; Gaza had good if worse-than-Israeli life expectancy and infant mortality until the war started. But nobody can build infrastructure this way. Top-down state action is needed to coordinate, which means actual infrastructure construction, not just passenger rights.

The thinking at the EU level is that greater on-rail competition can improve service quality. But that’s just a form of denial. The EU has no willingness to actually build the high-speed rail segments required to enable rail trips across borders, and so various anti-state actors, most on the center-to-center-right but not all, lie to themselves that it’s okay, that if the EU fails to act as a state then the private sector can step in if allowed to. That’s where the T&E study comes in: it rates operators on how to act like a competitive flight level-zero airline, going with this theory of private-sector innovation to cope with the fact that cross-border rail isn’t being built and try to salvage something out of it.

But it can’t be salvaged, not in this field; the best the private sector can do is provide equivalent service to a good state service on infrastructure that the state built. The alternative to the state is not greater private initiative. In infrastructure, the political alternative is that people who are not Green voters, which group comprises 92.6% of the European Parliament, are going to just drive and fly and associate low-carbon transportation with being contained to within biking distance of city center. The economic alternative is that ties between European cities will remain weak, to the detriment of the European economy and its ability to scale up.

Low Spanish Costs are not About Decentralization

An article by Ben Hopkinson at Works in Progress is talking about what Madrid has been doing right to build subways at such low costs, and is being widely cited. It sounds correct, attributing the success to four different factors, all contrasted with the high-cost UK. The first of these factors, decentralization in Spain compared with its opposite in England, is unfortunately completely wrong (the other three – fast construction, standardized designs, iterative in-house designs – are largely right, with quibbles). Even more unfortunately, it is this mistake that is being cited the most widely in the discussion that I’m following on social media. The mentality, emanating from the UK but also mirrored elsewhere in Europe and in much of the American discourse, is that decentralization is obviously good, so it must be paired with other good things like low Spanish costs. In truth, the UK shares high costs with more decentralized countries, and Spain shares low ones with more centralized ones. The emphasis on decentralization is a distraction, and people should not share such articles without extensive caveats.

The UK and centralization

The UK is simultaneously expensive to build infrastructure in and atypically centralized. There is extensive devolution in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, but it’s asymmetric, as 84% of the population lives in England. Attempts to create symmetric devolution to the Regions of England in the Blair era failed, as there is little identity attached to them, unlike Scotland, Wales, or Northern Ireland. Regional identities do exist in England, but are not neatly slotted at that level of the official regions – Cornwall has a rather strong one but is only a county, the North has a strong one but comprises three official regions, and the Home Counties stretch over parts of multiple regions. Much of this is historic – England was atypically centralized even in the High Middle Ages, with its noble magnates holding discontinuous lands; identities that could form the basis of later decentralization as in France and Spain were weaker.

People in the UK understand that their government isn’t working very well, and focus on this centralization as a culprit; they’re aware of the general discourse from the 1960s onward, associating decentralization with transparency and accountability. After the failure of Blair-era devolution, the Cameron cabinet floated the idea of doing devolution but at lower level, to the metropolitan counties, comprising the main provincial cities, like Greater Manchester or the West Midlands (the county surrounding Birmingham, not the larger official region). Such devolution would probably be good, but is not really the relevant reform, not when London, with its extreme construction costs, already has extensive devolved powers.

But in truth, the extreme construction costs of the UK are mirrored in the other English-speaking countries. In such countries, other than the US, even the cost history of similar, rising sharply in the 1990s and 2000s with the adoption of the more privatized, contractor-centric globalized system of procurement. The English story of devolution is of little importance there – Singapore and Hong Kong are city-states, New Zealand is small enough there is little reason to decentralize there, and Canada and Australia are both highly decentralized to the provinces and states respectively. The OECD fiscal decentralization database has the UK as one of the more centralized governments, with, as of 2022, subnational spending accounting for 9.21% of GDP and 19.7% of overall spending, compared with Spain’s 20.7% and 43.6% respectively – but in Australia the numbers are 17.22% and 46.2%, and in Canada they are 27.8% and 66.5%.

American construction costs have a different history from British ones. For one, London built for the same costs as German and Italian cities in the 1960s and 70s, whereas New York was already spending about four times as much per km at the time. But this, too, is an environment of decentralization of spending; the OECD database doesn’t mention local spending, but if what it includes in state spending is also local spending, then that is 19.07% of American GDP and 48.7% of American government spending.

In contrast, low-cost environments vary in centralization considerably. Spain is one of the most decentralized states in Europe, having implemented a more or less symmetric system in response to Catalan demands for autonomy, but Italy is fairly centralized (13.9% of GDP and 24.8% of government spending are subnational), and Greece and Portugal are very centralized and Chile even more so (2.77%/8.1%). The OECD doesn’t include numbers for Turkey and South Korea so we can merely speculate, but South Korea is centralized, and in Istanbul there are separate municipal and state projects, both cheap.

Centralization and decisionmaking

Centralization of spending is not the same thing as centralization of decisionmaking. This is important context for Nordic decentralization, which features high decentralization of the management of welfare spending and related programs, but more centralized decisionmaking on capital city megaprojects. In Stockholm, both Citybanan and Nya Tunnelbanan were decided by the state. Congestion pricing, in London and New York a purely subnational project, involved state decisions in Stockholm and a Riksdag vote; the Alliance victory in 2006 meant that the revenue would be spent on road construction rather than on public transport.

In a sense, the norm in unitary European states like the Nordic ones, or for that matter France, is that the dominant capital has less autonomy than the provinces, because the state can manage its affairs directly; thus, RATP is a state agency, and until 2021 all police in Paris was part of the state (and the municipal police today has fewer than 10% of the total strength of the force). In fact, on matters of big infrastructure projects, the state has to do so, since the budgets are so large they fall within state purview. Hopkinson’s article complaining that Crossrail and Underground extensions are state projects needs to be understood in that context: Grand Paris Express is a state project, debated nationally with the two main pre-Macron political parties both supporting it but having different ideas of what to do with it, not too different from Crossrail; the smaller capitals of the Nordic states have smaller absolute budgets, but those budgets are comparable relative to population or GDP, and there, again, state decisionmaking is as unavoidable as in London and Paris.

The purest example of local decisionmaking in spending is not Spain but the United States. Subway projects in American cities are driven by cities or occasionally state politicians (the latter especially in New York); the federal government isn’t involved, and FTA and FRA grants are competitive and decided by people who do not build but merely regulate and nudge. This does not create flexibility – to the contrary, the separation between builders and regulators means that the regulators are not informed about the biggest issues facing the builders and come up with ideas that make sense in their heads but not on the ground, while the builders are too timid to try to innovate because of the risk that the regulators won’t approve. With this system, the United States has not seen public-sector innovation in a long while, even before it became ideologically popular to run against the government.

In finding high American costs in the disconnect between those who do and those who oversee, at multiple levels – the agencies are run by an overclass of political appointees and directly-reporting staff rather than by engineers, states have a measure of disconnect from agencies, and the FTA and FRA practice government-by-nudge – we cannot endorse any explanation of high British costs that comes from centralization.

If the policy implications of such an explanation are to devolve further powers to London or a Southeast England agency, then they are likely to backfire, by removing the vestiges of expertise of doers from the British state; the budgets involves in London expansion are too high to be handled at subnational level. Moreover, reduction in costs – the article’s promise of a Crossrail 2, 3, and 4 if costs fall – has no chance of reducing the overall budget; the same budget would just be spent on further tunnels, in the same manner the lower French costs lead to a larger Grand Paris Express program. Germany and Italy in the same schema have less state-centric decisionmaking in their subway expansion, for the simple reason that both countries underbuild, which can be seen in the very low costs per rider – a Berlin with the willingness to build infrastructure of London or Paris would have extended U8 to Märkisches Viertel in the 1990s at the latest.

One possible way this can be done better is if it’s understood in England that decentralization only really works in the sense of metropolitanization in secondary cities, where the projects in question are generally below the pay grade of state ministers or high-level civil servants. In the case of England, this would mean devolution to the metropolitan counties, giving them the powers that Margaret Thatcher instead devolved to the municipalities. But that, by itself, is not going to reduce costs; those devolved governments would still need outside expertise, for which public-sector consultants, in the British case TfL, are necessary, using the unitariness of the state to ensure that the incentives of such public-sector consultants are to do good work and push back against bad ideas rather than to just profit off of the management fees.

The first-line effect

The article tries to argue for decentralization so much it ends up defending an American failure, using the following language:

But the American projects that are self-initiated, self-directed, self-funded, self-approved, and in politically competitive jurisdictions do better. For example, Portland, Oregon’s streetcar was very successful at regenerating the Pearl District’s abandoned warehouses while being cutting-edge in reducing costs. Its first section was built for only £39 million per mile (inflation adjusted), half as much as the global average for tram projects.

To be clear, everything in the above paragraph is wrong. The Portland Streetcar was built for $57 million/4 km in 1995-2001, which is $105.5 million/4 km in 2023 dollars, actually somewhat less than the article says. But $26.5 million/km was, in the 1990s, an unimpressive cost – certainly not half as much as the global average for tram projects. The average for tram projects in France and Germany is around 20 million euros/km right now; in 2000, it was lower. So Portland managed to build one very small line for fairly reasonable costs, but they were not cutting edge; this is a common pattern to Western US cities, in that the first line has reasonable costs and then things explode, even while staying self-funded and self-directed. Often this is a result of overall project size – a small pilot project can be overseen in-house, and then when it is perceived to succeed, the followup is too large for the agency’s scale and then things fall apart. Seattle was building the underground U-Link for $457 million/km in 2023 dollars; the West Seattle extension, with almost no tunneling, is budgeted at $6.7-7.1 billion/6.6 km, which would be a top 10 cost for an undeground line, let alone a mostly elevated one. What has changed in 15 years since the beginning of U-Link isn’t federal involvement, but rather the scope of the program, funded by regional referendum.

The truth is that there’s nothing that can be learned from American projects within living memory except what not to do. There’s always an impulse to look for the ones that aren’t so bad and then imitate them, but they are rare and come from a specific set of circumstances – again, first light rail lines used to be like this and then were invariably followed by cost increases. But the same first-line effect also exists in the reasonable-cost world: the three lowest-cost high-speed rail lines in our database built to full standards (double track, 300+ km/h) are all first lines, namely the Ankara-Konya HST ($8.1 million/km in 2023 PPPs), the LGV Sud-Est ($8.9 million/km), and the Madrid-Seville LAV ($15.4 million/km); Turkey, Spain, and France have subsequently built more high-speed lines at reasonable costs, but not replicated the low costs of their first respective lines.

On learning from everyone

I’ve grown weary of the single case study, in this case Madrid. A single case study can lead to overlearning from the peculiarities of one place, where the right thing to do is look at a number of successes and look at what is common to all of them. Spain is atypically decentralized for a European state and so the article overlearns from it, never mind that similarly cheap countries are much more centralized.

The same overall mistake also permeates the rest of the article. The other three lessons – time is money, trade-offs matter and need to be explicitly considered, and a pipeline of projects enables investment in state capacity, are not bad; much of what is said in them, for example the lack of NIMBY veto power, is also seen in other low-cost environments, and is variable in medium-cost ones like France and Germany. However, the details leave much to be desired.

In particular, one the tradeoffs mentioned is that of standardization of systems, which is then conflated with modernization of systems. The lack of CBTC in Madrid is cited as one way it kept construction costs down, unlike extravagant London; the standardized station designs are said to contrast with more opulent American and British ones. In fact, neither of these stories is correct. Manuel Melis Maynar spoke of Madrid’s lack of automation as one way to keep systems standard, but that was in 2003, and more recently, Madrid has begun automating Line 6, its busiest; for that matter, Northern Europe’s lowest-construction cost city, Nuremberg, has automated trains as well. And standardized stations are not at all spartan; the lack of standardization driving up costs is not about nice architecture, which can be retrofitted rather cheaply like the sculptures and murals that the article mentions positively, but behind-the-scenes designs for individual system components, placement of escalators and elevators, and so on.

The frustrating thing about the article, then, is that it is doing two things, each of which is suspect, the combination of which is just plain bad. The first is that it tries to overlearn from a single famous case. The second is that it isn’t deeply aware of this case; reading the article, I was stricken by how nearly everything it said about Madrid I already knew, whereas quite a lot of what it said about the UK I did not, as if the author was cribbing off the same few reports that everyone in this community has already read and then added original research not about the case study but about Britain.

And then the discourse, unfortunately, is not about the things in the article that are right – the introduction in lessons 2-4 into how the civil service in Madrid drives projects forward – but about the addition of the point about centralization, which is not right. Going forward, reformers in the UK need far better knowledge of how the low- and medium-construction cost world looks, both deeper and broader than is on display here.

Amtrak Doubles Down on False Claims About Regional Rail History to Attack Through-Running

Amtrak just released its report a week and a half ago, saying that Penn Expansion, the project to condemn the Manhattan block south of Penn Station to add new tracks, is necessary for new capacity. I criticized the Regional Plan Association presentation made in August in advance of the report for its wanton ignorance of best practices, covering both the history of commuter rail through-running in Europe and the issue of dwell times at Penn Station. The report surprised me by making even more elementary mistakes on the reality of how through-running works here than the ones made in the RPA presentation. The question of dwell times is even more important, but the Effective Transit Alliance is about to release a report addressing it, with simulations made by other members; this post, in contrast, goes over what I saw in the report myself, which is large enough errors about how through-running works that of course the report sandbags that alternative, less out of malice and more out of not knowing how it works.

Note on Penn Expansion and through-running

In the regional discourse on Penn Station, it is usually held that the existing station definitely does not have the capacity to add 24 peak trains per hour from New Jersey once the Gateway tunnel opens, unless there is through-running; thus, at least one of through-running and Penn Expansion is required. This common belief is incorrect, and we will get into some dwell time simulations at ETA.

That said, the two options can still be held as alternatives to each other, even as what I think is likeliest given agency turf battles and the extreme cost of Penn Expansion (currently $16 billion) is that neither will happen. This is for the following reasons:

  • Through-running is good in and of itself, and any positive proposal for commuter rail improvements in the region should incorporate it where possible, even if no dedicated capital investment such as a Penn Station-Grand Central connection occurs. This includes the Northeast Corridor high-speed rail project, which aims to optimize everything to speed up intercity and commuter trains at minimal capital cost.
  • The institutional obstacles to through-running are mainly extreme incuriosity about rest-of-world practices, which are generations ahead of American ones in mainline rail; the same extreme incuriosity also leads to the belief that Penn Expansion is necessary.
  • While it is possible to turn 48 New Jersey Transit trains per hour within the current footprint of Penn Station with no loss of LIRR capacity, there are real constraints on turnaround times, and it is easier to institute through-running.

The errors in the history

The errors in the history are not new to me. My August post criticizing the RPA still stands. I was hoping that Amtrak and the consultants that prepared the report (WSP, FX) would not stick to the false claim that it took 46 years to build the Munich S-Bahn rather than seven, but they did. The purpose of this falsehood in the report is to make through-running look like a multigenerational effort, compared with the supposedly easier effort of digging up an entire Manhattan block for a project that can’t be completed until the mid-2030s at the earliest.

In truth, as the August post explains, the real difficulties with through-running in the comparison cases offered in the report, Paris and Munich, were with digging the tunnels. This was done fairly quickly, taking seven years in Munich and 16 in Paris; in Paris, the alignment, comprising 17 km of tunnel for the RER A and 2 for the initial section of the RER B, was not even finalized when construction began. The equivalent of these projects in New York is the Gateway tunnel itself, at far higher cost. The surface improvements required to make this work were completed simultaneously and inexpensively; most of the ones required for New York are already on the drawing board of New Jersey Transit, budgeted in the hundreds of millions rather than billions, and will be completed before the tunnel opens unless the federal government decides to defund the agency over several successive administrations.

The errors in present operations

The report lists, on printed-pp. 40-41, some characteristics of the through-running systems used in Paris, Munich, and London. Based on those characteristics, it concludes it is not possible to set up an equivalent system at Penn Station without adding tracks or rebuilding the entire track level with more platforms. Unfortunately for the reputation of the writers of the report, and fortunately for the taxpayers of New York and New Jersey, those characteristics include major mistakes. There’s little chance anyone in the loop understands the RER, any S-Bahn worth the name, or even Crossrail and Thameslink; some of the errors are obviously false to anyone who regularly commuted on any of these systems. Thus, they are incapable of adjusting the operations to the specifics of Penn Station and Gateway.

Timetabling

A key feature of S-Bahn systems is that the trains run on a schedule. Passengers riding on the central trunk do not look at the timetable, but passengers riding to a branch do. I memorized the 15-minute off-peak Takt on the RER B when I took it to IHES in late 2016, and the train was generally on time or only slightly delayed, never so delayed that it was early. Munich-area suburbanites memorize the 20-minute Takt on their S-Bahn branch line. Some Thameslink branches drop to half-hourly frequency, and passengers time themselves to the schedule while operators and dispatchers aim to make the schedule.

And yet, the report repeatedly claims that these systems run on headway management. The first claim, on p. 40, is ambiguous, but the second, on the table on p. 41, explicitly contrasts “headway-based” with “timetable-based” service and says that Crossrail, the RER, and the Munich S-Bahn are headway-based. In fact, none of them is.

This error is significant in two ways. First, timetable-based operations explain why S-Bahn systems are capable of what they do but not of what some metros do. The Munich S-Bahn peaks at 30 trains per hour, with one-of-a-kind signaling; major metros peak at 42 trains per hour with driverless operations, and some small operations with short trains (like Brescia) achieve even more. The difference is that commuter rail systems are not captive metro trains on which every train makes the same stops, with no differentiation among successive trains on the same line; metro lines that do branch, such as M7 and M13 in Paris, are still far less complex than even relatively simple and metro-like lines like the RER A and B. The main exception among world metros is the New York City Subway, which, due to its extensive interlining, must run as a scheduled railroad, benchmarking its on-time performance (OTP) to the schedule rather than to intervals between trains. In the 2000s and 10s, New York City Transit tried to transition away from end-station OTP and toward a metric that tried to approximate even intervals, called Wait Assessment (WA); a document leaked to Dan Rivoli and me went over how this was a failure, leading to even worse delays and train slowdowns, as managers would make the dispatchers hold trains if the trains behind them were delayed.

The second consequence of the error is that the report does not get how crucial timetable-infrastructure planning integration is on mainline rail. The Munich S-Bahn has outer branches that are single-track and some that share tracks with freight, regional, and intercity trains. The 30 tph trunk does no such thing and could not do such thing, but the branches do, because the trains run on a fixed timetable, and thus it is possible to have a mix of single and double track on some sporadic sections. The Zurich S-Bahn even runs trains every 15 minutes at rush hour on a short single-track section of the Right Bank of Lake Zurich Line. Recognizing what well-scheduled commuter trains can and can’t do influences infrastructure planning on the entire surface section, including rail-on-rail grade separations, extra tracks, yard expansions, and other projects that collectively make the difference between a rail network and crayon.

Separation between through- and terminating lines

Through-running systems vary in how much track sharing there is with the rest of the mainline rail network. As far as I can tell, there is always some; near-complete separation is provided on the RER A, but its Cergy branch also hosts Transilien trains running to Gare Saint-Lazare at rush hour, and the Berlin and Hamburg S-Bahn systems have very little track-sharing as well. Other systems have more extensive track sharing, including Thameslink, the RER C and D, and the Zurich S-Bahn; the RER E and the Munich S-Bahn are intermediate in level of separation between those two poles.

It is remarkable that, while the RER A, B, and E all feature new underground terminals for dedicated lines, the situation of the RER C and D is different. The RER C uses the preexisting Gare d’Austerlitz, and has taken over every commuter line in its network; the through-connection between Gare d’Orsay and Gare d’Invalides involved reconstructing the stations, but then everything was connected to it. The RER D uses prebuilt underground stations at Gare du Nord, Les Halles, and Gare de Lyon, but then takes over nearly all lines in the Gare de Lyon network, with the outermost station, Malesherbes, not even located in Ile-de-France. Thameslink uses through-infrastructure built in the 1860s and runs as far as Petersborough, 123 km from King’s Cross on the East Coast Main Line, and Brighton, the terminus of its line, 81 km from London Bridge.

And yet, the report’s authors seem convinced the only way to do through-running is with a handful of branches providing only local service, running to new platforms built separately from the intercity terminal; they’re even under the impression the RER D is like this, which it is not. There’s even a map on p. 45, suggesting a regional metro system running as far as Hicksville, Long Beach, Far Rockaway, JFK via the Rockaway Cutoff and Queenslink, Port Washington, Port Chester, Hackensack, Paterson, Summit, Plainfield, New Brunswick, and the Amboys. This is a severe misunderstanding of how such systems work: they do not arbitrarily slice lines this way into inner and outer zones, unless there is a large mismatch in demand, and then they often just cut the outer end to a shuttle with a forced transfer, as is the case for some branches in suburban Berlin connecting to S-Bahn outer ends. Among the above-mentioned outer ends, the only one where this exception holds is Summit, where the Gladstone Branch could be cut to a shuttle or to trains only running to Hoboken – but then trains on the main line to Morristown and Dover have no reason to be treated differently from trains to Summit.

Were the report’s authors more informed about just the specific lines they look at on p. 41, let alone the broader systems, they’d know that separation between inner and outer services is contingent on specifics of track infrastructure, including whether there are four-track lines with neat separation into terminating express trains and through locals. But even if the answer is yes, as at Gare de Lyon and Gare d’Austerlitz, infrastructure planners will attempt to shoehorn whatever they can into the system, just starting from the more important inner lines, which generate more all-day demand. There don’t even need to be terminating regional trains; the Austerlitz system doesn’t, and the Gare de Lyon and Gare de l’Est systems only do due to trunk capacity limitations. In that case, they’d recognize that there is no need to have two commuter rail systems, one through-running and one not. Penn Station’s infrastructure already lends itself to allowing through-running on anything entering via the existing North River Tunnels.

Branching

S-Bahn systems usually try to keep the branch-to-trunk ratio to a manageable number. Usually, more metro-like systems have fewer branches: Crossrail has two on each side, the RER A has two to the east and three to the west, the Berlin Stadtbahn has two to the west plus short-turns and five to the east, the Berlin North-South Tunnel has three on each side. The Munich S-Bahn has five to the east and nine to the west, and the combined RER B and D system has three to the north and five to the south, but the latter has more service patterns, including local and express trains on the branches. Zurich has so much interlining that it’s not useful to count branches, and better to count services: there are 21 S-numbered routes serving Hauptbahnhof, of which 13 run through one of the two tunnels, as do some intercity trains.

If there are too many branches, then they’re usually organized as sub-branches – for example, Munich has seven numbered routes through the central tunnel, of which two have two sub-branches each splitting far out. Zurich has fewer than 13 branches on each side, but rather there are several services using each line, with inconsistent through-pairing – for example, the three services going to the airport, S2, S24, and S16, respectively run through to two separate branches of the Left Bank Line and to the Right Bank Line.

The table on p. 41 gets the branch count mildly wrong, but the significant is less in what it gets wrong about Europe and more in what it gets wrong about New York. A post-Gateway service plan is one in which New Jersey has 12 branches, but some can be viewed as sub-branches (like Gladstone and the Morristown Line), and more to the point, there are going to be two trunk lines. The current plan at New Jersey Transit is to assign the Northeast Corridor and North Jersey Coast Lines to the North River Tunnels alongside Amtrak, which is technically two branches but realistically four or even five service patterns, and the Morris and Essex, Montclair-Boonton, and Raritan Valley Lines to Gateway, which is four branches but could even be pruned to three with M&E divided into two sub-branches. The Erie lines have no way of getting to Penn Station today; to get them there requires the construction of the Bergen Loop at Secaucus, with an estimated budget of $1.3 billion in 2020, comparable to the total cost of all yet-unfunded required surface improvements in New Jersey for non-Erie service combined.

If the study authors were more comfortably knowledgeable of European S-Bahn systems, they’d know that multi-line systems, while uncommon, do exist, and divide branches in a similar way. The multiline systems (Paris, Madrid, Berlin, Zurich, and London) all have some reverse-branching, in a similar manner to how New York is soon going to have the New Haven Line reverse-branch to Penn Station and Grand Central. The NJT plan is solid and stands to lead to a manageable branch-to-trunk ratio, even with every single line going to Penn Station via the existing tunnel running through.

The consequence of the errors

The lack of familiarity with through-running commuter rail is evident in how the report talks about this technology. It is intimately related to the fact that the way investment should be done is different from what American railroaders are used to. For one, there needs to be much tighter integration between infrastructure and scheduling. For two, the scheduling needs to be massively simplified, with fewer operating patterns per line – usually one, occasionally two, never 13 as on the New Haven Line today. The same ignorance that leads Amtrak and its consultants to assert that the S-Bahn runs on headway management rather than a fixed timetable also leads them not to even know how through-running commuter rail networks plan out their routes and services.

From my position of greater familiarity as both a regular user and a researcher, I can point out that the required investments to make through-running happen in New York are entirely in line with the cheap surface projects done in the comparison cases. New rolling stock is required, with the ability to run on the different voltages of the three networks – but multi-voltage commuter rolling stock is the norm wherever multiple legacy electrification systems coexist, including Paris, London, and Hamburg. Some extensions of electrification and high platform conversions are required – but these are not expensive, and the latter is already partly funded at reasonable unit costs. Some rail-on-rail grade separations are required – but those are already costed and very likely to be funded, potentially out of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

Penn Station would be used as the universal station in this schema, without the separation into a surface terminal and a through- underground station seen in Munich and Paris. But then, Paris and Munich don’t even universally have this separation themselves; Ostbahnhof was reconstructed for the S-Bahn but is still a single station, and the same is true of the RER C. In a way, Penn Station already is the underground through-station, built generations before the modern S-Bahn concept, complementing and largely replacing surface terminals like Hoboken and Long Island City because those are not in Manhattan.

None of this is hard; the hard part is the Gateway tunnel and that’s already fully funded and under construction. But it does require understanding that the United States is so many decades behind best practices that none of what American railroaders think they know is at all relevant. It’s obligatory to understand how the systems that work, in Europe and rich Asia, do, because otherwise, it’s like expecting someone who has never learned to count beyond 10 to prove mathematical theorems. The people who wrote this report clearly don’t have this understanding, and don’t care to get it, which is why what they write is not worth the electrons that make up the PDF.