Category: Shoddy Studies
Amtrak Releases Bad Scranton Rail Study
There’s hot news from Amtrak – no, not that it just announced that it hired Andy Byford to head its high-speed rail program, but that it just released a study recommending New York-Scranton intercity rail. I read the study with very low expectations and it met them. Everything about it is bad: the operating model is bad, the proposed equipment is bad and expensive, the proposed service would be laughed at in peripheral semi-rural parts of France and Italy and simply wouldn’t exist anywhere with good operations.
This topic is best analyzed using the triangle of infrastructure, rolling stock, and schedule, used in Switzerland to maximize the productivity of legacy intercity line, since Swiss cities, like Scranton, are too small to justify a dedicated high-speed rail network as found in France or Japan. Unfortunately, Amtrak’s report falls short on all three. There are glimpses there of trying and failing, which I personally find frustrating; I hope that American transportation planners who wish to imitate European success don’t just read me but also read what I’ve read and proactively reach out to national railways and planners on this side of the Atlantic.
What’s in the study?
The study looks at options for running passenger trains between New York and Scranton. The key piece of infrastructure to be used is the Lackawanna Cutoff, an early-20th century line built to very high standards for the era, where steam trains ran at 160 km/h on the straighter sections and 110 km/h on the curvier ones. The cutoff was subsequently closed, but a project to restore it for commuter service is under construction, to reach outer suburbs near it and eventually go as far as the city’s outermost suburbs around the Delaware Water Gap area.
Amtrak’s plan is to use the cutoff not just for commuter service but also intercity service. The cutoff only goes as far as the Delaware and the New Jersey/Pennsylvania state line, but the historic Lackawanna continued west to Scranton and beyond, albeit on an older, far worse-built alignment. Thus, the speed between the Water Gap and Scranton would be low; with no electrification planned, the projected trip time between New York and Scranton is about three hours.
I harp on the issue of speed because it’s a genuine problem. Google Maps gives me an outbound driving time of 2:06 right now, shortly before 9 pm New York time. The old line, which the cutoff partly bypassed, is curvy, which doesn’t just reduce average speed but also means a greater distance must be traversed on rail: the study quotes the on-rail length as 134 miles, or 216 km, whereas driving is just 195 km. New York is large and congested and has little parking, so the train can afford to be a little slower, but it’s worth it to look for speedups, through electrification and good enough operations so that timetable padding can be minimized (in Switzerland, it’s 7% on top of the technical travel time).
Operations
The operations and timetabling in the study are just plain bad. There are two options, both of which include just three trains a day in each direction. There are small French, Italian, and Spanish towns that get service this poor, but I don’t think any of them is as big as Scranton. Clermont-Ferrand, a metro area of the same approximate size as Scranton, gets seven direct trains a day to Paris via intermediate cities similar in size to the Delaware Water Gap region, and these are low-speed intercities, as the area is too far from the high-speed network for even low-speed through-service on TGVs. In Germany and Switzerland, much smaller towns than this can rely on hourly service. I can see a world in which a three-hour train can come every two hours and still succeed, even if hourly service is preferable, but three roundtrips a day is laughable.
Then there is how these three daily trains are timetabled. They take just less than three hours one-way, and are spaced six hours apart, but the timetable is written to require two trainsets rather than just one. Thus, each of the two trainsets is scheduled to make three one-way trips a day, with two turnarounds, one of about an hour and one of about five hours.
Worse, there are still schedule conflicts. The study’s two options differ slightly in arrival times, and are presented as follows:
Based on the results of simulation, Options B and D were carried forward for financial evaluation. Option B has earlier arrival times to both New York and Scranton but may have a commuter train conflict that remains unresolved. Option D has later departure times from New York and Scranton and has no commuter train conflicts identified.
All this work, and all these compromises on speed and equipment utilization, and they’re still programming a schedule conflict in one of the two options. This is inexcusable. And yet, it’s a common problem in American railroading – some of the proposed schedules for Caltrain and high-speed rail operations into Transbay Terminal in San Francisco proposed the same.
Equipment and capital planning
The study does not look at the possibility of extending electrification from its current end in Dover to Scranton. Instead, it proposes a recent American favorite, the dual-mode locomotive. New Jersey Transit has a growing pool of them, the ALP-45DP, bought most recently for $8.8 million each in 2020. Contemporary European medium-speed self-propelled electric trains cost around $2.5 million per US-length car; high-speed trains cost about double – an ongoing ICE 3 Neo procurement is 34 million euros per eight-car set, maybe $6 million per car in mid-2020s prices or $5 million in 2020 prices.
And yet somehow, the six-car dual-mode trains Amtrak is seeking are to cost $70-90 million between the two of them, or $35-45 million per set. Somehow, Amtrak’s rolling stock procurement is so bad that a low-speed train costs more per car than a 320 km/h German train. This interacts poorly with the issue of turnaround times: the timetable as written is almost good enough for operation with a single trainset, and yet Amtrak wants to buy two.
There are so many things that could be done to speed up service for the $266 million in capital costs between the recommended infrastructure program and the rolling stock. This budget by itself should be enough to electrify the 147 km between Dover and Scranton, since the route is single-track and would carry light traffic allowing savings on substations; then the speed improvement should allow easy operations between New York and Scranton every six hours with one trainset costing $15 million and not $35-45 million, or, better yet, every two hours with three sets. Unfortunately, American mainline rail operators are irrationally averse to wiring their lines; the excuses I’ve seen in Boston are unbelievable.
The right project, done wrong
There’s an issue I’d like to revisit at some point, distinguishing planning that chooses the wrong projects to pursue from planning that does the right projects wrong. For example, Second Avenue Subway is the right project – its benefits to passengers are immense – but it has been built poorly in every conceivable way, setting world records for high construction costs. This contrasts with projects that just aren’t good enough and should not have been priorities, like the 7 extension in New York, or many suburban light rail extensions throughout the United States.
The intercity rail proposal to Scranton belongs in the category of right projects done wrong, not in that of wrong projects. Its benefits are significant: putting Scranton three hours away from New York is interesting, and putting it 2.5 hours away with the faster speeds of high-reliability, high-performance electric trains especially so.
As a note of caution, this project is not a slam dunk in the sense of Second Avenue Subway or high-speed rail on the Northeast Corridor, since the trip time by train would remain slower than by car. If service is too compromised, it might fail even ignoring construction and equipment costs – and we should not ignore construction or equipment costs. But New York is a large city with difficult car access. There’s a range of different trips that the line to Scranton could unlock, including intercity trips, commuter trips for people who work from home most of the week but need to occasionally show up at the office, and leisure trips to the Delaware Water Gap area.
Unfortunately, the project as proposed manages to be both too expensive and too compromised to succeed. It’s not possible for any public transportation service to succeed when the gap between departures is twice as long as the one-way trip time; people can drive, or, if they’re car-free New Yorkers, avoid the trip and go vacation in more accessible areas. And the sort of planning that assumes the schedule has conflicts and the dispatchers can figure it out on the fly is unacceptable.
There’s a reason planning in Northern Europe has converged on the hourly, or at worst two-hourly, frequency as the basis of regional and intercity timetabling: passengers who can afford cars need the flexibility of frequency to be enticed to take the train. With this base frequency and all associated planning tools, this region, led by Switzerland, has the highest ridership in the world that I know of on trains that are not high-speed and do not connect pairs of large cities, and its success is slowly exported elsewhere in Europe, if not as fast or completely as it should be. It’s possible to get away without doing the work if one builds a TGV-style network, where the frequency is high because Paris and Lyon are large cities and therefore frequency is naturally high even without trying hard. It’s not possible to succeed on a city pair like New York-Scranton without this work, and until Amtrak does it, the correct alternative for this study is not to build the line at all.
No, the Anglosphere isn’t Especially NIMBY
There’s an article going around social media on Financial Times, by John Burn-Murdoch, making the case that slow housing growth, with consequent rises in rents, is a pan-Anglosphere phenomenon. A non-paywalled summary can be found on New York Magazine by Eric Levitz, reproducing the FT graphs showing changes in the number of housing units per capita in various developed countries, and making some general comments about Anglo culture. The problem with this analysis is that it’s completely false. As someone who did once err in an analysis of the Anglo problem of high construction costs – a problem that Britain did not have until the 1990s and Canada and Australia until the 2000s or even 2010s – let me throw some cold water on this Anglo NIMBY theory.
Housing construction rates
Housing construction rates per capita show no generic Anglosphere effect. The highest rates are in Austria, the Nordic countries and Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. Here are the numbers as far as I’ve been able to find, all expressed in dwelling completions per 1,000 people in 2021:
Australia (starts): 9
Austria: 7.9
New Zealand: 6.9
Finland: 6.8
Denmark: 6.1
Canada: 5.8
Norway: 5.3
Switzerland: 5.2
Sweden: 5
Belgium: 4.9
France (starts): 4.7
Netherlands: 4.1
Ireland: 4.1
US: 4
Germany: 3.5
UK: 3
Portugal: 2.2
Spain: 1.7
Italy: 1.5
The FT article’s data mostly ends in 2020, whereas the above list is from 2021. But looking at earlier years doesn’t change much. The annual average in 2016-20, relative to 2018 and not 2021 population, was 8.2 in Australia, 5.8 in New Zealand, and 5.2 in Canada – slightly lower per capita than in 2021, and yet higher than in all comparison countries. In those other comparison countries the numbers are usually fairly stable as well going back to the mid-2010s recovery from the Great Recession; the only notable changes are in Spain, Portugal and Denmark, which saw sharp rises in construction from the mid-2010s (in Spain’s case, still a far cry from pre-Great Recession rates).
Some trends can be discerned. Southern Europe has low construction rates, owing to the poor state of its economy – but note that Europe’s top builder, Finland, was hit hard by the Great Recession, when coincidentally the smartphone revolution devastated Nokia, and took until last year to recover to its pre-recession GDP per capita. Germany builds the least in Northern Europe; Austria builds the most, for which difference I have no explanation. However, there is no trend separating the Anglosphere into its own group. The US and UK build less than most countries they’re like to be compared with, but those comparison countries include their Anglo peers.
So why does Burn-Murdoch think there’s an Anglo trend here?
FT’s statistics
Burn-Murdoch uses a different statistic from construction rates per capita. He instead looks at the rate of change in the overall number of dwellings per capita in the above countries I listed, minus Austria and Switzerland. The Anglo countries have stagnated at 400-450 dwellings per 1,000 people since the 1980s; the non-Anglo European countries have kept developing housing and are now in the 500-550 range.
The problem is that housing per capita is the wrong measure to use. It’s influenced by both housing construction rates and population growth, the latter coming from birthrates and immigration. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are all notable for their high immigration rates, and therefore Canada and Australia have seen slow rises in dwellings per capita and New Zealand has even seen decreases. The same is true of Sweden and Norway, which build a fair amount of housing but are not seeing a large increase in the dwelling stock per capita, because people keep coming in to fill these new apartments.
Instead, on FT’s graphic of growth in housing per capita in the last 10 years, the standouts are France, Portugal, Italy, and Finland. Finland indeed builds a lot of housing, but its issue is that its weak economy in the last 15 years has not been able to attract as many immigrants as Sweden and Norway. Italy and Portugal are literally the two lowest per capita builders on this list, and have negative population growth thanks to weak economies and very low birthrates, so their per capita housing stock looks like it’s doing well.
Where is the housing built?
A real distinction, motivating YIMBY movements even in fast builders like Canada, is where the housing is built. This is an important question at both the national level and the regional level. At the national level, one should expect housing to be built where there is the most demand, typically in the richest city regions. At the regional level, one should likewise expect housing to be built in the areas with the best access to work, which can be infill near city center, or new areas opened by the construction of urban rail lines.
The links on the list above often include subnational breakdowns that one can peruse. Thus, for example, in Norway, we find that Oslo built less housing per capita than the rest of the country in 2021, only 3.7/1,000 people, but Viken, a gerrymandered county collecting Oslo’s suburbs, built more, 7.5/1,000, averaging to 6.2 regionwide. France is less certain, since my regional data is approvals and not starts or completions. In Ile-de-France in 2021, the approval rate for new dwellings was 5.9/1,000 people, with Paris itself at a pitiful 1.2, and same source gives the national rate as 7/1,000. But going a few years back, the French rate is still around 5/1,000, whereas the Francilien one is about 7/1,000 (still with little construction in the city).
A uniquely American misfeature is that while the overall rate of housing construction is below average for a growing country rather than terrible, the interregional pattern of where housing is built is awful. The richest regions of the United States don’t build very much, with the exception of Seattle. New York, the largest by far of these regions, builds well below the national average. Thus, while in stagnant Italy, Spain, and Portugal (or for that matter Japan) the rich main cities are still growing, in the United States the richest city regions have below-average population growth, which is seen at every congressional reapportionment once per decade.
But even this is not an Anglo feature: there’s a detailed local breakdown for England, and while London does build less than the rest of the country, it’s not by a large margin, about 2.5/1,000 people averaged over the last few years versus 3 overall. And in Canada, there’s a detailed local breakdown by metro area and within each such region, and there we see 2021 completion rates of 7.3/1,000 in Toronto, 4.8/1,000 in Toronto’s suburbs, 7/1,000 in Calgary, 9.1/1,000 in Edmonton, and 9.5/1,000 in Metro Vancouver (of which 9.9/1,000 were in Vancouver proper – this isn’t sprawl).
To temper my praise for Vancouver and its high growth rates, I should specify that while Canada is building housing in decent if not eye-popping quantities, in the regions where it’s most needed, it’s not building housing in the neighborhoods where it’s most needed. Metro Vancouver builds transit-oriented development on SkyTrain but not in its richest places: the West Side of the city remains strongly NIMBY, despite its excellent location between city center and UBC, forcing students into hour-long commutes; an indigenous West Side housing project built without needing to consult local NIMBYs is deeply controversial among those same NIMBYs.
That said, “housing is not built in rich urban neighborhoods” is not a national-scale statistic, nor a particularly Anglo one (very little housing is built in Paris proper). So why is it so appealing to posit NIMBYism as a uniquely Anglo problem?
The false appeal of deep roots
Middlebrow writers love talking about deep roots – that is, processes that are said to be part of a shared cultural heritage that stretches a long way back, and is therefore by implication hard to impossible to change through policy. An American bestselling book argued that the South’s political institutions come from its unique history of Scottish rather than English settlement (and not from, say, slavery) – institutions that are nowhere in sight in modern Scotland. Often (but not always!), it’s a thin veneer for racism, normalizing the idea that non-Westerners could never perform on a par; until the growth of the Asian Tigers was impossible to ignore, there was a common belief in the West that Confucianism was a deeply-rooted obstacle to growth, which now has flipped to an argument that it’s a deeply-rooted accelerator of growth.
In the case of housing, it’s therefore important to note that even in the US and UK, there’s no longstanding pattern of NIMBYism beyond what’s found in every non-city-state. The US had rapid urban growth around the turn of the century, which romantics found offensive – but that’s little different from the concurrent urbanization of Germany. Romantic and nationalistic interests fought against this urban growth throughout this era, from the 1870s to World War Two. Japan and South Korea today are famous in YIMBY circles for their high capital-region housing growth rates, but neither country is happy with its capital-centricity, and South Korea is even relocating capital functions to a new city in the far suburbs of Seoul.
There’s a real longstanding difference between London and comparable Continental cities like Paris and Berlin, in that London’s housing typology, the rowhouse, is much less dense than the mid-rise apartment blocks of the Continent. This goes back to early industrialization, when Paris, Berlin, and other Continental cities were walled for tax purposes and British cities were not. Thus, Britain evolved a culture of “gentlemen don’t live on shelves” whereas the French and German urban middle classes were happy with mid-rise apartments.
However, New York behaves in exactly the same way as Continental cities: there were historic impediments to urban sprawl coming from the width of the Hudson and East Rivers, leading to a mid-rise urban form and the now-familiar pattern in which middle-class city residents live in a single-story apartment in a multistory building (British dwellings were multistory even for the working class). And New York’s elite hated the city, fleeing to segregated suburbs more than a 100 years ago far away from Jewish and Catholic immigrants, and inventing modern zoning to keep Jews out of Fifth Avenue department stores. The city is fiercely NIMBY today, building little housing by the standards of Berlin or of Paris with its inner suburbs.
Very little of the problem of NIMBYism in either Britain or the US – or for that matter Germany – is especially deeply rooted. The US has an unusual problem with democratic deficit at the local level, which YIMBYs seek to resolve through disempowering local actors and creating national networks that push for more pro-development policy; they are starting to see some success in California. New Zealand, without federalism, imitated some of the California YIMBYs’ proposals and is seeing a wave of new construction and falling rents in parts of the country. Germany is the NIMBYest place in Northern Europe, but high rents are understood as a problem and so SPD has, in its usual slow pace, sought to embrace YIMBYism, Olaf Scholz pledging to increase the housing construction rate here from 250,000 units a year (3/1,000) to 400,000 (4.8/1,000) and the party’s next generation within Jusos openly calling themselves YIMBYs. The UK has a parliamentary casework system that lets petty actors constrain the otherwise unitary state, but not when the state makes something a priority, and so Labour runs on increasing housing production.
In fact, in the US, UK, and Germany, we’re even seeing the same political pattern emerge: in response to slow housing production and high rents, national and nationally-looking center-left forces are politicizing the issue in order to flush out urban NIMBYs, who vote center-left as well but are locally rather than nationally rooted and so have opinions out of touch with those of the median voter or party supporter. Even there, we see a difference: the UK also has center-right thinktanks pushing for the same on neoliberal grounds, and this is also seen in Canada, whereas CSU is proudly NIMBY and the Republicans are, from their origin of embracing housing construction in Texas, slowly trending that way too.
None of this is deeply-rooted or Anglo. Sometimes, social trend evolve in parallel in multiple countries. It’s easy to pattern-match this to Anglo or not; I do this for infrastructure construction costs and have to constantly remind people that until the 1990s, London built urban rail tunnels for the same per-km cost as Milan and Rome, and Canadian cities only lost their ability to build efficiently 10-20 years ago. The same is true of housing: first of all, there’s no Anglo-wide pattern at all, the UK and US differing profoundly from Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and second of all, their shared characteristics are also shared with Germany.
Push and Pull Factors and Measuring Modal Shift
There’s a longstanding debate among activists and academics about what the best way of effecting modal shift from cars to public transport is. Pull factors concern making public transport better through building more rail lines, running them more frequently, improving service convenience, or reducing fares. Push factors concern making driving harder through speed limits, fuel taxes, congestion pricing, and reallocation of street space from cars to public and non-motorized transport. There’s a tendency on the New Left to favor push factors (but the East Asian developmental states are best characterized as push-before-pull and not pure pull).
This has been refined by researchers at the climate research institute, the Ariadne Project, who published a paper in late 2021 rating various push and pull policies on effectiveness for reducing transport emissions. They conclude that push factors dominate, and pull factors are small, with construction of new public transit almost insignificant, only worth a reduction of around 300,000 tons of CO2 a year Germany-wide, 0.039% of national emissions as of 2021; instituting a 120 km/h speed limit on the Autobahn is said to have about 10 times that effect, while the biggest effects yet would come from carbon taxes. The study laments that pull factors are so much more popular than push factors, which they admit suppress society-wide consumption.
The research suffers from the same problem as other work in this direction, in that it is bad at estimating the impact of public transport on mode shift. It briefly argues that construction of public transport increases overall consumption and therefore doesn’t do much to reduce emissions. This way, it’s like 2020’s carbon critique of U-Bahn expansion, which I criticized two months ago; the carbon critique argues that each kilometer of U-Bahn built only reduces CO2 emissions by 714 tons a year through mode shift, under the assumption that only 20% of public transport riders are diverted from cars.
This doesn’t pass a sanity check. 300,000 divided by 714 is 420 km, which is about comparable to the total route length of the four grade-separated U-Bahn systems in Germany plus the Wuppertal Schwebebahn; I think the two figures, 300,000 and 714/km, come from different sources, and judging by the other elements in the study, I suspect 300,000 assumes less construction than a full doubling of Germany’s rapid transit network length. Nonetheless, even under a more generous assumption, this is far too low compared with macro trends in public transport usage.
The best way to use macro trends as a sanity check is to look at some cases with much more and much less public transport than the present. Do they look like it’s a total difference of 0.039%? No, and that’s even taking into account that transit cities tend to be wealthier, stimulating more consumption and more production. As I pointed out in my post two months ago, while Germany averages 9.15 t-CO2/capita, Berlin only does 5.38, and while Germany averages 580 cars per 1,000 people, Berlin only does 327. The difference is largely about Berlin’s pull factors. Push factors in the city are not extensive, and what exists is implemented only in areas that already have very low car use.
Even lower household emissions in Berlin must be viewed as downstream of the density that is enabled by the presence of a large urban rail network. Cars are a low-capacity mode of transport, so an auto-oriented region, like American metro regions, has to spread out its homes and destinations to limit congestion, and this increases household emissions (single-family houses emit more than apartment buildings) and also encourages people to travel longer distances for their commute and routine non-commute trips.
This is not easy to measure. Public transport projects have gotten fairly good in the last generation at estimating ridership, but estimating the responsibility of one particular project to modal shift is hard. It interacts with the entire city region. For example, building one rail line can be measured to shift modes in the neighborhoods it serves, but it also encourages destinations to locate in city center since people from the neighborhoods the line serves can now access it, and the increase in office, retail, and community development then leads to a small modal shift citywide. Worse, trying to tease out the effect of the rail line on modal shift sufficiently carefully may lead researchers to count this citywide effect negatively, since one econometric technique is to compare the neighborhoods near the line with neighborhoods in the same city not on the line.
In practice, the construction of rail lines tends to co-occur with other policies that improve public transport, which may be pull or push factors. This means that it’s very easy to misattribute the effect of urban rail expansion to those other factors. I am convinced that this is what is happening here; the proper comparison must be at the level of an entire region, looking at the emissions of different regions with different levels of public transport usage.
The upshot is that if it is hard to measure the effect of public transport construction on modal shift and emissions, then the uncertain factors should not be set to zero. Rather, they should be set to sanity-check levels. For example, one can compare New York with the rest of the United States, since it’s a starker difference between a transit city and an auto-oriented country than anywhere in Europe, and correct for non-transport effects like climate and electricity mix, both of which are easy to measure.
Within Germany, Berlin has 42% lower emissions than the rest of the country per capita. Berlin achieves this with an urban rail network that, in 2019, got 1,289 million rail trips, nearly all within the city of 3.7 million, a minority in the suburban region of perhaps 1.3 million. This is around 250 trips/person regionwide, and 320/person citywide assigning around 20% of S-Bahn ridership to suburbs like Potsdam and Oranienburg. What’s more, Germany doesn’t start from zero; this is not the United States, with multiple large cities with around 10 annual rail trips per capita. Netting out buses from VDV’s data (p. 25) gets around 6.3 billion rail trips in Germany in 2019 including trams, or 75 per capita.
The difference between 320 and 75 is around 250 – I know it’s actually 245 but at this point I’m deliberately reducing precision because those are sanity-check estimates and I don’t want people thinking they’re correct to three significant figures (try 1.5). If we attribute the entire Berlin-Germany difference of about 3.8 t-CO2/capita to public transport and downstream changes to the urban layout, then we get 0.015 t saved per annual trip generated. To get from there to 300,000 tons saved, we just need 20 million annual rail riders, or around 65,000 daily ones, which is easy to generate on a single line; the approximately 2 km extension of U8 to Märkisches Viertel that Berlin keeps postponing is estimated to generate 25,000-30,000.
Now, to sanity-check the sanity check, the estimate here is that every trip on urban rail saves 15 kg-CO2. This is an aggressive figure; new cars nowadays average 100 g/km and averaged 180 g/km in 2001 (source, PDF-p. 15), and the average displaced car trip is not 150 km or even 80 km – Americans average around 45 km/day, or somewhat more when only adults are considered. Rather, the issue is a combination of factors:
- Because the limiting factor to car transport is capacity, in practice what happens in an auto-oriented region is that it fills from the inside outward, and any modal shift ends up displacing the outermost and longest car trips. I proposed a model for that in a blog post from four years ago.
- Public transport displaces car trips on a more than one-to-one basis (and certainly more than 20% as in the carbon critique of the U-Bahn). This is because public transport users also walk and bike, and transit cities have high modal splits for active transport by the standards of auto-oriented cities, if not by the standards of Dutch cities. Berlin’s all-trip modal split in 2018 was 26% car, 27% public transport, 18% bike, 30% walking – and the high active transport modal split exists not because of road diets, which are few and far between, but because of the presence of a large core fed by the U- and S-Bahn.
- Public transport reduces household energy usage by encouraging people to live in apartment buildings with shared walls rather than in single-family houses, which have much greater heating requirements; this is also the mechanism through which transit cities have relatively high usage of active transport even without trying very hard.
I don’t think these factors fully explain away the gap between 45 km/day and 150 km per trip (so around 300/day), but they explain a large enough fraction of it that the installation of a system like what Berlin has – or, better, what Tokyo has – should be a climate priority. If your model says it doesn’t, it needs a lot more work than to just talk about the consumption effects of more public transport (if you’re bothered by how Berlin is poor for its size, compare New York with the rest of the United States).
In fact, if estimating modal shift is hard, then it’s best to approximate it by ridership. It’s imperfect because there is the effect of walking and biking; some lines really do just compete with walking, like city-center streetcars, but usually, to first order, it’s a good enough estimate. If it’s hard to estimate the benefits then they should not be set to zero, but rather set proportionally to something easier to measure, in this case ridership. Investment should follow ridership-maximizing strategies, and only deviate from them in corner cases.
Berlin Greens Know the Price of Everything and Value of Nothing
While trying to hunt down some numbers on the costs of the three new U5 stations, I found media discourse in Berlin about the U-Bahn expansion plan that was, in effect, greenwashing austerity. This is related to the general hostility of German urbanists and much of the Green Party (including the Berlin branch) to infrastructure at any scale larger than that of a bike lane. But the specific mechanism they use – trying to estimate the carbon budget – is a generally interesting case of knowing the costs more certainly than the benefits, which leads to austerity. The underlying issue is that mode shift is hard to estimate accurately at the level of the single piece of infrastructure, and therefore benefit-cost analyses that downplay ridership as a benefit and only look at mode shift lead to underbuilding of public transport infrastructure.
The current program in Berlin
In the last generation, Berlin has barely expanded its rapid transit network. The priority in the 1990s was to restore sections that had been cut by the Berlin Wall, such as the Ringbahn, which was finally restored with circular service in 2006. U-Bahn expansion, not including restoration of pre-Wall services, included two extensions of U8, one north to Wittenau that had begun in the 1980s and a one-stop southward extension of U8 to Hermannstrasse, which project had begun in the 1920s but been halted during the Depression. Since then, the only fully new extension have been a one-stop extension of U2 to Pankow, and the six-stop extension of U5 west from Alexanderplatz to Hauptbahnhof.
However, plans for much more expansive construction continue. Berlin was one of the world’s largest and richest cities before the war, and had big plans for further growth, which were not realized due to the war and division; in that sense, I believe it is globally only second to New York in the size of its historic unrealized expansion program. The city will never regain its relative wealth or size, not in a world of multiple hypercities, but it is growing, and as a result, it’s dusting off some of these plans.
Most of the lines depicted in red on the map are not at all on the city’s list of projects to be built by the 2030s. Unfortunately, the most important line measured by projected cost per rider, the two-stop extension of U8 north (due east) to Märkisches Viertel, is constantly deprioritized. The likeliest lines to be built per current politicking are the extensions of U7 in both directions, southeast ti the airport (beyond the edge of the map) and west from Spandau to Staaken, and the one-stop extension of U3 southwest to Mexikoplatz to connect with the S-Bahn. An extension to the former grounds of Tegel is also considered, most likely a U6 branch depicted as a lower-priority dashed yellow line on the map rather than the U5 extension the map depicts in red.
The carbon critique
Two days after the U5 extension opened two years ago, a report dropped that accused the proposed program of climate catastrophe. The argument: the embedded concrete emissions of subway construction are high, and the payback time on those from mode shift is more than 100 years.
The numbers in the study are, as follows: each kilometer of construction emits 98,800 tons of CO2, which is 0.5% of city emissions (that is, 5.38 t/person, cf. the German average of about 9.15 in 2021). It’s expected that through mode shift, each subway kilometer saves 714 t-CO2 in annual emissions through mode shift, which is assumed to be 20% of ridership, for a payback time of 139 years.
And this argument is, frankly, garbage. The scale of the difference in emissions between cities with and without extensive subway systems is too large for this to be possibly true. The U-Bahn is 155 km long; if the 714 t/km number holds, then in a no U-Bahn counterfactual, Berlin’s annual greenhouse gas emissions grow by 0.56%, which is just ridiculous. We know what cities with no or minimal rapid transit systems look like, and they’re not 0.56% worse than comparanda with extensive rapid transit – compare any American city to New York, for one. Or look again at the comparison of Berlin to the German average: Berlin has 327 cars per 1,000 people, whereas Germany-wide it’s 580 and that’s with extensive rapid transit systems in most major cities bringing down the average from the subway-free counterfactual of the US or even Poland.
The actual long-term effect of additional public transport ridership on mode shift and demotorization has to be much more than 20%, then. It may well be more than 100%: the population density that the transit city supports also increases the walking commute modal split as some people move near work, and even drivers drive shorter distances due to the higher density. This, again, is not hard to see at the level of sanity checks: Europeans drive considerably less than Americans not just per capita but also per car, and in the United States, people in New York State drive somewhat shorter distance per car than Americans elsewhere (I can’t find city data).
The measurement problem
It’s easy to measure the embedded concrete of infrastructure construction: there are standardized itemized numbers for each element and those can be added up. It’s much harder to measure the carbon savings from the existence of a better urban rail system. Ridership can be estimated fairly accurately, but long-term mode shift can’t. This is where rules of thumb like 20% can look truthy, even if they fail any sanity check.
But it’s not correct to take any difficult to estimate number and set it to zero. In fact, there are visible mode shift effects from a large mass transit system. The difficulty is with attributing specific shifts to specific capital investments. Much of the effect of mode shift comes from the ability of an urban rail system to contribute to the rise of a strong city center, which can be high-rise (as in New York), mid-rise (as in Munich or Paris), or a mix (as in Berlin). Once the city center anchored by the system exists, jobs are less likely to suburbanize to auto-oriented office parks, and people are likelier to work in city center and take the train. Social events will likewise tend to pick central locations to be convenient for everyone, and denser neighborhoods make it easier to walk or bike to such events, and this way, car-free travel is possible even for non-work trips.
This, again, can be readily verified by looking at car ownership rates, modal splits (for example, here is Berlin’s), transit-oriented development, and so on, but it’s difficult to causally attribute it to a specific piece of infrastructure. Nonetheless, ignoring this effect is irresponsible: it means the carbon benefit-cost analysis, and perhaps the economic case as well, knows the cost of everything and the value of little, which makes investment look worse than it is.
I suspect that this is what’s behind the low willingness to invest in urban rail here. The benefit-cost analyses can leave too much value on the table, contributing to public transport austerity. When writing the Sweden report, I was stricken by how the benefit-cost analyses for both Citybanan and Nya Tunnelbanan were negative, when the ridership projections were good relative to costs. Actual ridership growth on the Stockholm commuter trains from before the opening of Citybanan to 2019 was enough to bring cot per new daily trip down to about $29,000 in 2021 PPP dollars, and Nya Tunnelbanan’s daily ridership projection of 170,000 means around $23,000/rider. The original construction of the T-bana cost $2,700/rider in 2021 dollars, in a Sweden that was only about 40% as rich as it is today, and has a retrospective benefit-cost ratio of between 6 and 8.5, depending on whether broader agglomeration benefit are included – and these benefits are economic (for example, time savings, or economic productivity from agglomeration) scale linearly with income.
At least Sweden did agree to build both lines, recognizing the benefit-cost analysis missed some benefits. Berlin instead remains in austerity mode. The lines under discussion right now are projected between 13,160€ and 27,200€ per weekday trip (and Märkisches Viertel is, again, the cheapest). The higher end, represented by the U6 branch to Tegel, is close to the frontier of what a country as rich as Germany should build; M18 in Paris is projected to be more than this, but area public transport advocates dislike it and treat it as a giveaway to rich suburbs. And yet, the U6 branch looks unlikely to be built right now. When the cost per rider of what is left is this low, what this means is that the city needs to build more infrastructure, or else it’s leaving value on the table.
How to Waste Money on Public Transportation
This is the fourth in a series of five (not four) posts about the poor state of political transit advocacy in the United States, following posts about the Green Line Extension in metro Boston, free public transport proposals, and federal aid to operations, to be followed by a post about how to do better instead.
I think very highly of Yonah Freemark. His academic and popular work on public transport and urbanism ranges from good to excellent, and a lot of my early thinking (and early writing!) on regional rail and high-speed rail owes a debt to him.
But I think he’s wrong in his proposal for a Green New Deal for transportation. This is a proposal by the Climate and Community Project (not the Urban Institute as I said in previous posts – sorry) to decarbonize transport in the United States, through fleet electrification and investments in public transport. Yonah is one of several authors; I identify him with the public transit-related parts of the report, but I want to make it clear that it’s the report I’m criticizing, regardless of who wrote what.
The fundamental problem of the CCP report is what I’ve been building up to in the last three posts in this series: it tries to please everybody by throwing money everywhere and making conflicting promises. The Green Line Extension was built this way under Deval Patrick, and costs ballooned, and what passed for discipline under Charlie Baker just reinforced the same long-term loss of state capacity that led to the cost explosion.
For example, here’s its take on fleet electrification:
In other words, there is a compelling and immediate need to decarbonize this fleet within a decade. And that’s feasible: buses are replaced every 10 to 15 years on average, and commuter rail trains about every 25 years; currently, commuter trains in the United States are on average 22 years old. Publicly owned vehicles would be replaced with the electric equivalent; for privately owned contracted vehicles (the case for many school buses), and requirements for electrification would be written into contracts and tax credits given to assist the transition of buses from fossil fuels to electric. The commissioning of thousands of new transit vehicles would produce new, good-paying union jobs in manufacturing. The shift to electric transit vehicles would affect maintenance requirements, and the Department of Transportation must ensure the mechanic and operator workforce is fully prepared for the electric transition through workforce retraining assistance. This may require retraining, such as encouraging mechanics to retrain as electric vehicle charging installers.
(…)
Electrifying existing diesel railways would require overhead catenary electrical wires to be useful for electrified trains (though the trains themselves actually cost less than diesel vehicles). The cost of railway electrification infrastructure alone is between roughly $1 and $5 million per mile. There are roughly 6,600 miles of non-electrified commuter rail in the United States, plus roughly 20,800 miles of non-electrified Amtrak service (with some overlap between the two). Amtrak’s routes are mostly owned by freight rail companies, but we suggest joint electrification that includes both passenger trains and freight trains, using this program for Amtrak and another we lay out below for the freight lines. To electrify the national passenger rail network of existing lines would cost between $27 and $137 billion. In addition, new trains would have to be purchased to run on these electrified lines.
I cite this pair of paragraphs because of something they show about the study: it is not uniformly bad. The second paragraph is a decent idea (though $1m/mile is very cheap), and trying to workshop how to wire the national freight network is not necessarily a bad idea, even if the report doesn’t go into enough detail about what the business barrier to electrification is for the private carriers.
But the first quoted paragraph is awful. Here’s the key thing: “The commissioning of thousands of new transit vehicles would produce new, good-paying union jobs in manufacturing” is a giant waste of money. Bus vendors outside North America consistently produce equipment for much less than the protected North American market; the Boris Bus, at £350,000 per unit (around $500,000), is both cheaper than American buses and locally considered expensive, a prime example of Boris Johnson’s poor performance as mayor of London.
The passenger rail industry does not exist in the United States, and attempts by American governments to coerce it to build factories domestically in order to create well-paying jobs have resulted in ballooning costs. The premium for recent American rolling stock orders, behind bespoke regulations, protectionism, informal state-level protectionism, and agency heads that know less than recently-graduated interns who make one quarter of what they do (less, if those interns are European), looks like 50% over European equivalents. Nor does this do much job creation, except perhaps for sitework consultants: the premium for some recent orders has been $1 million per $20/hour 4-to-6-year job created. Those are not objectively good jobs – the wages are not much higher than present-day retail, food service, and delivery jobs – but backward-looking politicians consider them inherently moral, and the report coddles them instead of looking forward.
Then, the report has the following recommendations for how to spend money on improving public transportation:
End the use of federal infrastructure funding for new highway infrastructure, except for focused opportunities that improve equity. Provide immediate funds for a quick-start infrastructure program for walking and cycling. Vastly expand support for transit and metropolitan network planning.
Appropriate $250 billion over 10 years, or $25 billion annually, in federal funding bill to support transit operations funding throughout the United States.
Increase federal support for transit and intercity rail capital projects to $400 billion over 10 years, or $40 billion annually, providing funds for new lines, maintenance of existing infrastructure, and upgrades designed for equitable accessibility.
Require metropolitan planning organization voting systems to be proportional to resident population. Mandate adjustments to local zoning policy to enable more dense, affordable housing near transit in exchange for federal aid. Implement regional commuter benefits throughout the nation.
This, I’m sorry, is a bad program. The $40 billion/year capital investment is not bad, but the proposal explicitly includes maintenance, making it vulnerable to the state of good repair scam, in which agencies demand escalating amounts of money for infrastructure with nothing to show for it. The $25 billion/year operating aid is likely to be a waste as well.
Transit agencies can invest money prudently, but the report says nothing about how to do it, instead proposing to zero out highway funding (which is a good way to save money, but is less relevant to mode shift than American transit advocates think it is). The one concrete suggestion for what to do with the money is “One goal, for example, would be for all residents to have access to a bus or train with a short wait within at most a 15-minute walk at all times of the day.” This is a standard I can get behind in a dense place like New York; nearly everywhere else, it means overfunding coverage routes in low-density areas, often middle-class white flight suburbs, ahead of workhorse urban routes. Writing years ago about New Haven, Sandy Johnston noted that a bus reform there would cannibalize the circuitous suburban bus branches to add service on the core routes through the city and Hamden. The CCP report would do the opposite, boosting frequencies where they are least useful.
Finally, the MPO rules seem weak. I get what Yonah (and perhaps the other authors) wants to do here: he wants to incentivize more housing production near mass transit nodes. But MPO voting weights are not especially relevant. What is relevant is using state power to disempower local communities, which are dominated by NIMBYs even in places where the residents vote YIMBY at the state level, such as San Francisco. The report talks about banning single-family zoning (okay, but duplexes are not TOD), but that’s it. Then it suggests extracting developer profits through mandatory inclusionary housing, which acts as a tax on TOD and reduces housing production. The authors of the study are left-wing, but do not propose public housing, only taxes on TOD to subsidize some local housing; Yonah knows this is not how social housing works in Paris, but he still proposes this for the United States.
The theme of lack of willingness to prioritize flow throughout these recommendations. There is no discussion of how to prioritize good investments, how to increase efficiency (the report points out operating costs for all US transit combined are $50 billion/year; this is 2.5 times the German level, for similar ridership, not per capita), how to make sure that progress does not get extracted by programs for groups thought inherently moral.
The Interborough Study
I was excited about the idea of Interborough Express (IBX) as announced by New York Governor Kathy Hochul, and then last week her office released a preliminary report about the alternatives for it, and I got less excited. But it’s not that the study is bad, or that Hochul is bad. Rather, the study is a by the numbers alternatives analysis, shorter than the usual in a good way; its shortcomings are the shortcomings of all American planning.
The main rub is that the report looks at various options for the IBX route, broken down by mode. There’s a commuter rail option, which bakes in the usual bad assumption about commuter rail operations, including heavier trains (lighter trains are legal on US tracks as of 2018) and longer dwell times that are explained as a product of the heavier trains (dwell times have nothing to do with train mass). That’s par for the course – as we saw yesterday, everything that touches mainline rail in North America becomes stupid even in an otherwise understandable report.
But even excluding commuter rail, the study classifies the options by mode, focusing on bus rapid transit and light rail (and no subway, for some reason). It compares those two options and commuter rail on various measures like expected ridership and trip times. This is normal for American alternatives analyses for new corridors like IBX: they look at different modes as the main decision point.
This is also extraordinarily bad governance. There are some fundamental questions that are treated as afterthoughts, either not studied at all or mentioned briefly as 1-2 sentences:
- How far north should the line go? The IBX plan is to only go from Jackson Heights to the south, in contrast with older Triboro proposals going into the Bronx.
- What should the stop spacing be? The stops can be widely spaced, as in the current proposal, which stops mainly at intersection points with other lines, or more closely spaced, like an ordinary subway line.
- Under a light rail option, should the line be elevated where the trench is too narrow or at-grade?
- Should freight service be retained? What are the benefits of retaining freight rail service on the Bay Ridge Branch and what are the incremental costs of keeping it versus taking over the right-of-way?
- How large should the stations be?
- How frequent should the trains be? If freight service is retained, what frequencies are compatible with running freight on the same tracks for part or all of the line?
A better study must focus on these questions. Some of them, moreover, must be decided early: urban planning depends on whether the line goes into the Bronx or not; and industrial planning depends on what is done with freight service along the corridor.
Those questions, moreover, are more difficult than the modal question. A BRT option on a rail corridor without closely parallel arterial roads should be dismissed with the same ease that the study dismisses options not studied, and then the question of what kind of rail service to run is much less important than the scope of the project.
But American planning is obsessed with comparing public transit by mode rather than by corridor, scope, or any other aspect. Canadian planning has the same misfeature – the studies for the Broadway SkyTrain extension looked at various BRT and light rail options throughout, even though it was clear the answer was going to be SkyTrain, and omitted more fundamental questions regarding the cost-construction disruption tradeoff or even the scope of the project (the original studies from 2012 did not look at truncating to Arbutus, an option that had been talked about before and that would eventually happen due to cost overruns).
So overall, the IBX study is bad. But it is interestingly bad. Andrew Cuomo was a despicable governor who belongs in prison for his crimes. Less criminal and yet similarly loathsome people exist in American public transit. And yet, Hochul and her office are not like that, at all. This is not a sandbag, or a corrupt deal. It’s utterly ordinary in its failure; with all the unique failures of the Cuomo era stripped, what is left is standard American practice, written more clearly than is usual, and it just isn’t up to par as an analysis.
Hochul has been moving on this project very quickly, and good transit advocates should laud this. It should not take long to publish a report comparing alternatives on more fundamental questions than mode, such as scope, the role of freight, and the extent of civil infrastructure to be used. The costs and benefits of IBX heavily depend on the decisions made on such matters; they should not be brushed aside.
New York Publishes a Bad Benchmarking Report
I’ve grown to intensely dislike benchmarking reports. It’s not that the idea of benchmarking bad. It’s that they omit crucial information – namely, the name of the system that one is compared with. The indicators always have a wide variety of values, and not being able to match them with systems makes it impossible to do sanity-checks, such as noticing if systems with high costs per car-km are consistently ones that run shorter trains. This way, those anonymized reports turn into tools of obfuscation and excusemongering.
The MTA in New York recently published such a report, including both US-wide and international benchmarking for the subway as well as commuter rail. The US benchmarking is with comparable American systems – exactly the ones I’d compare, with the systems listed by name as NTD data is wisely not anonymized. The international benchmarking for the subway is with CoMET, which includes most of the larger global systems as well as a handful of smaller ones, like Vancouver; for commuter rail, it’s with ISBeRG, which has an odd list of systems, omitting the RER (which is counted in CoMET), all of Japan except JR East, and any S-Bahn, skipping down to Australian systems, Cape Town, and Barcelona.
That, by itself, makes much of the international benchmarking worthless. The standard metric for operating costs is per car-km. This is covered in pp. 8-9, showing that New York has fairly average costs excluding maintenance, but the second highest maintenance costs. But here’s the problem: I’m seeing a comparison to an undifferentiated mass of other systems. One of them is an outlier in maintenance costs, even ahead of New York, but I do not know which it is, which means that I cannot look at it and see what it does wrong – perhaps it has an unusually old fleet, perhaps it is small and lacks scale, perhaps it is domestically viewed as scandal-ridden.
Far more useful is to look at complete data by name. For example, JICA has complete operating cost data for Japanese metro systems. Its tables are complete enough that we can see, for example, that overall operating costs are around $5/car-km for all systems, regardless of scale; so scale should not be too important, or perhaps Tokyo’s wealth exactly cancels out the scale effect. There are, on table 2.37 on PDF-p. 117, headcounts for most systems from which we can impute labor efficiency directly, using train-km data on PDF-p. 254; Yokohama gets 1,072 train-hours a year per driver at 35 km/h (the rough average speed I get from Hyperdia).
And here’s the thing: without the ability to fill in missing data like average speed, or to look at things the report didn’t emphasize, the report is not useful to me, or to other independent researchers. It’s a statement of excuses for New York’s elevated operating and maintenance cost, with officious proclamations and intimidating numbers.
For example, here’s the excuse for high maintenance costs:
High maintenance costs for NYCT are largely attributable to 24-hour service. Most COMET peer agencies shut down every night, allowing for four hours of continuous daily maintenance. In comparison, NYCT subway’s 24-hour service requires maintenance to occur within 20-minute windows between late night trains, reducing work efficiencies. Additionally, maintenance costs for NYCT have risen recently to support the improvements as part of the Subway Action Plan, which have led to a significant improvement to on-time performance year over year since inception.
Okay, so here we’re seeing what starts like a reasonable explanation – New York doesn’t have regular nighttime maintenance windows. But the other American systems studied do and they’d be above global average too; Boston has regular nighttime work windows but still can’t consign all track maintenance to them, and has almost the same maintenance cost per car-km as New York. Moreover, track maintenance costs per car-km should feature extensive scale effects – only at freight rail loads is the marginal track wear caused by each additional car significant – and New York runs long trains.
Then there is the Subway Action Plan line, which is a pure excuse. Other systems do preventive maintenance too, thank you very much. New York is not unusually reliable by global standards, and the benchmarking report doesn’t investigate questions like mean distance between failures or some measure of the presence of slow restrictions – and because it is anonymized, independent researchers can’t use what it does have and get answers from other sources.
The study has a section on labor costs, showing New York’s are much higher than those of some peer cities. Thankfully, that part is not anonymized, which means I can look at the cities with overall labor costs that are comparable to New York’s, like London, and ignore the rest; New York’s construction labor costs are higher than London’s by a factor of about 2, despite roughly even regionwide average wages. Unfortunately, a key attribute is missing: labor efficiency. The JICA study does better, by listing precise headcounts; but here the information is not given, which means that drawing any conclusion that is not within the purview of MTA’s endless cold war on its unions is not possible. As it happens, I know that New York is overstaffed, but only from other sources, never anonymized.
It’s worse with commuter rail. First of all, at the level of benchmarking, the study’s list of comparisons is so incomplete and so skewed (three Australian systems, again) that nothing it shows can be relevant. And second, commuter rail in North America comes with its own internal backward-looking culture of insularity and incompetence.
The report even kneecaps itself by saying,
While it is true that benchmarking provides useful insights, it is also important to acknowledge that significant differences exist among the railroads that pose challenges for drawing apples-to-apples conclusions, particularly when it comes to comparisons with international peers. Differing local economies, prevailing wages and collective bargaining agreement provisions can have dramatic impacts on respective labor costs. Government mandates, including safety regulations, vary widely, and each railroad exists in a unique operating environment, often with different service schedules, geographic layouts and protocols. Together these factors have also have a significant impact on relative cost structures.
To translate from bureaucratic to plain English, what they’re saying is that American (and Canadian) practices for commuter rail are uniquely bad, but controlling for them, everything is fine. The report then lists the following excuses, all of which are wrong:
• Hours of Operation: LIRR provides 24 hours of service 7 days per week, and MNR provides 20-22 hours of service 7 days a week
• Ungated System: Neither LIRR nor MNR operate gated systems, therefore they require onboard fare validation/collection
• Branch Service: Both LIRR and MNR run service to and from a central business district (New York City) and do not have ability to offer through-running service
• Electrification: Both LIRR and MNR operate over both electrified and non-electrified territory, thereby requiring both electric and diesel fleets
It’s impressive how much fraud – or, more likely, wanton indifference and incuriosity – can fit into just four bullet points. Metro-North’s hours of service are long, but so are those of the JR East commuter lines; the Yamanote Line runs 20 hours a day, which means the nighttime maintenance window is shorter. Ungated systems use proof-of-payment ticketing throughout Europe – I don’t know if Rodalies de Catalunya runs driver-only trains, but the partly-gated RER and the ungated S-Bahns in the German-speaking world do. Through-running is a nice efficiency but not all systems have it, and in particular Melbourne has a one-way loop system akin to that of the Chicago L instead of through-running. Finally, electrification on the LIRR and Metro-North is extensive and while their diesel tails are very expensive, they also sometimes exist in Europe, including in London on a line that’s partly shared with the Underground, though I don’t know if they do in the report’s comparison cases.
The report does not question any of the usual assumptions of American mainline rail: that it must run unusually heavy vehicles, that it run with ticket-punching conductors, etc.
For a much more useful benchmarking, without anonymization, let’s look at German S-Bahns briefly. There is a list of the five largest systems – Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Stuttgart – with ridership and headcounts; some more detail about Berlin can be found here. Those five systems total 6,200 employees; the LIRR has 7,671 and Metro-North 6,773. With 2,875 employees, the Berlin S-Bahn has more train-hours than the LIRR, Metro-North, and New Jersey Transit combined; about as many car-km pro-rated to car length as the LIRR times 1.5; and more ridership than all American commuter rail systems combined. The LIRR in other words has more workers than the largest five German S-Bahns combined while the Berlin S-Bahn has more riders than all American commuter rail systems combined.
The excuses in the report highlight some of the reasons why – the US sticks to ticket-punching and buys high-maintenance trains compliant with obsolete regulations – but omits many more, including poor maintenance practices and inefficient scheduling of both trains and crew. But those are not justifications; they are a list of core practices of North American commuter rail that need to be eliminated, and if the workers and managers cannot part with them, then they should be laid off immediately.
Platform Edge Doors
In New York, a well-publicized homicide by pushing the victim onto the subway tracks created a conversation about platform edge doors, or PEDs; A Train of Thought even mentions this New York context, with photos from Singapore.
In Paris, the ongoing automation of the system involves installing PEDs. This is for a combination of safety and precision. For safety, unattended trains do not have drivers who would notice if a passenger fell onto the track. For precision, the same technology that lets trains run with a high level of automation, which includes driverless operations but not just, can also let the train arrive with meter-scale precision so that PEDs are viable. This means that we have a ready comparison for how much PEDs should cost.
The cost of M4 PEDs is 106 M€ for 29 stations, or 3.7M€ per station. The platforms are 90 meters long; New York’s are mostly twice as long, but some (on the 1-6) are only 70% longer. So, pro-rated to Parisian length, this should be around $10 million per station with two platform faces. Based on Vanshnook’s track map, there are 204 pairs of platform faces on the IRT, 187 on the IND (including the entire Culver Line), and 165 on the BMT (including Second Avenue Subway). So this should be about $5.5 billion, systemwide.
Here is what the MTA thinks it should cost. It projects $55 million per station – but the study is notable in looking for excuses not to do it. Instead of talking about PEDs, it talks about how they are infeasible, categorizing stations by what the excuse is. At the largest group, it is accessibility; PEDs improve accessibility, but such a big station project voids the grandfather clause in the Americans with Disabilities Act that permits New York to keep its system inaccessible (Berlin, of similar age, is approaching 100% accessible), and therefore the MTA does not do major station upgrades until it can extort ADA funding for them.
Then there is the excuse of pre-cast platforms. These are supposed to be structurally incapable of hosting PEDs; in reality, PEDs are present on a variety of platforms, including legacy ones that are similar to those of New York, for example in Paris. (Singapore was the first full-size heavy rail system to have PEDs – in fact it has full-height platform screen doors, or PSDs, at the underground stations – but there are later retrofits in Singapore, Paris, Shanghai, and other cities.)
The trains in New York do not have consistent door placement. The study surprisingly does not mention that as a major impediment, only a minor one – but at any rate, there are vertical doors for such situations.
So there is a solution to subway falls and suicides; it improves accessibility because of accidental falls, and full-height PSDs also reduce air cooling costs at stations. Unfortunately, for a combination of extreme construction costs and an agency that doesn’t really want to build things with its $50 billion capital plans, it will not happen while the agency and its political leaders remain as they are.
The Invention of Bad Railroad Timetables
The rail advocate Shaul Picker has uploaded a fascinating potpourri of studies regarding commuter rail operations. Among them, two deserve highlight, because they cover the invention of bad timetable practices in New York, and, unfortunately, not only think those practices are good, but also view their goodness as self-evident. They are both by Donald Eisele, who was working for the New York Central and implemented this system on the lines that are now Metro-North, first introducing the concept to the literature in 1968, and then in 1978 asserting, on flimsy evidence, that it worked. Having implemented it in 1964 based on a similar implementation a few years earlier in the Bay Area, Eisele must be viewed as one of the people most responsible for the poor quality of American mainline service, and his idea of zone theory or zonal operations must be discarded in favor of the S-Bahn takt.
Zone theory
Eisele’s starting point is that commuter rail service should be exclusively about connecting the suburbs with city center. He contrasts his approach with urban transit, which is about service from everywhere to everywhere; trips short of Manhattan were 20% of single-trip ticket revenue for New York Central suburban operations and 5% of multi-ride pass revenue, and the railroad wanted to eliminate this traffic and focus on suburb-to-city commuters. From this inauspicious starting point, he implemented a timetable in which suburban stations are grouped into zones of a few contiguous stations each, typically 2-4 stations. At rush hour, a train only stops within one zone, and then expresses to city center, which in the original case means Grand Central.
The idea behind zone theory is that, since all that matters is a rapid connection to city center, trains should make as few stops as possible. Instead of trying to run frequently, it’s sufficient to run every 20 or 30 minutes, and then once a train fills with seats it should run express. This is accompanied by a view that longer-haul commuters are more important because they pay higher fares, and therefore their trips should not be slowed by the addition of stops closer in.
It’s important to note that what zone theory replaced was not an S-Bahn-style schedule in which all trains make all stops, and if there’s more demand in the inner area than the outer area then some trains should short-turn at a major station in the middle. American railroads had accumulated a cruft of timetables; Eisele goes over how haphazard the traditional schedules were, with short but irregular rush-hour intervals as some trains skipped some stations, never in any systematic way.
The first paper goes over various implementation details. For example, ideally a major station should be the innermost station within its zone, to guarantee passengers there a nonstop trip to city center. Moreover, considerable attention goes to fare collection: fares are realigned away from a purely distance-based system to one in which all stations in a zone have the same fare to city center, simplifying the conductors’ job. The followup paper speaks of the success of this realignment in reducing fare collection mistakes.
The failure of zone theory
We can see today that zone theory is a complete failure. Trains do not meaningfully serve anyone except 9-to-5 suburban commuters to the city, a class that is steadily shrinking due to job sprawl and a change in middle-class working hours. Ridership is horrendous: all three New York commuter railroads combined have less ridership than the Munich S-Bahn, a single-trunk, seven-branch system in a metropolitan area of 3 million. Metro-North would brag about having an 80% market share among rush hour commuters from its suburban shed to Manhattan, but that only amounts to about 90 million annual riders. In contrast, the modal split of rail at major suburban job centers, even ones that are adjacent to the train station like White Plains and Stamford, is single-digit percent – and Metro-North is the least bad of New York’s three railroads in this category.
Even on the original idea of providing fast service from the suburbs to city center, zone theory is a failure. The timetables are not robust to small disturbances, and once the line gets busy enough, the schedules have to be padded considerably. I do not have precise present-day speed zones for Metro-North, but I do have them for the LIRR courtesy of Patrick O’Hara, and LIRR Main Line service is padded 30% over the technical travel time of present-day equipment on present-day tracks. A textbook I have recently read about scheduling best practices cites a range of different padding factors, all single-digit percent; Switzerland uses 7%, on a complex, interlined network where reliability matters above all other concerns. With 30% padding, the LIRR’s nonstop trains between Ronkonkoma and Penn Station, a distance of 80 km, take about as long as local trains would with 7% padding.
Eisele is right in the papers when he complains about the institutional inertia leading to haphazard schedules. But his solution was destructive, especially in contrast with contemporary advances in scheduling in Europe, which implemented the all-day clockface schedule, starting with Spoorslag ’70 and then the Munich S-Bahn takt in 1972.
Zone theory and reliability
The first paper claims as self-evident that zonal timetables are reliable. The argument offered is that if there is a short delay, it only affects trains within that zone, and thus only affects the stations within the zone and does not propagate further. There is no attempt at modeling this, just claims based on common sense – and transport is a field where intuition often fails and scientific analysis is required.
The problem is that zone theory does not actually make trains in different zones independent of one another. The second paper has a sample timetable on PDF-p. 4 for the evening rush hour, and this can also be reversed for the morning. In the morning, trains from outer zones arrive in city center just after trains from inner zones; in the afternoon, trains serving outer zone stations depart city center first, always with a gap of just a few minutes between successive trains. In the morning, a delay in a suburban zone means that the trains in the zones behind it are delayed as well, because otherwise they would clash and arrive city center at literally the same minute, which is impossible.
This isn’t purely an artifact of short headways between running trains. Subway systems routinely have to deal with this issue. The key is that on a subway system, trains do not have much of their own identity; if a train is delayed, the next train can perfectly substitute for it, and cascading delays just mean that trains run slightly slower and (because the equipment pool is fixed) are slightly more crowded. The principle that individual suburban stations should only be served every 20-30 minutes means no such substitution is possible. S-Bahn trains are not as interchangeable as subway trains, which is why they cannot run as frequently, but they still manage to run every 2-3 minutes with 7% padding, even if they can’t reach the limit values of a train very roughly 1.5 minutes achieved by some big city subways.
Eisele did not think this through and therefore made an assertion based on intuition that failed: reliability did not improve, and with long-term deterioration of speed and lack of reduction in operating expenses, the express timetables at this point are slower than an all-stops S-Bahn would be.
Consultants and Railroaders Turn New Haven Line Investment Into Shelf Art
The state of Connecticut announced that a new report concerning investment in the New Haven Line is out. The report is damning to most involved, chief of all the Connecticut Department of Transportation for having such poor maintenance practices and high construction costs, and secondarily consultant AECOM for not finding more efficient construction methods and operating patterns, even though many readily exist in Europe.
What started out as an ambitious 30-30-30 proposal to reduce the New York-New Haven trip time to an hour, which is feasible without construction outside the right-of-way, turned into an $8-10 billion proposal to reduce trip times from today’s 2 hours by 25 minutes by 2035. This is shelf art: the costs are high enough and the benefits low enough that it’s unlikely the report will lead to any actionable improvement, and will thus adorn the shelves of CTDOT, AECOM, and the governor’s office. It goes without saying that people should be losing their jobs over this, especially CTDOT managers, who have a track record of ignorance and incuriosity. Instead of a consultant-driven process with few in-house planners, who aren’t even good at their jobs, CTDOT should staff up in-house, hiring people with a track record of success, which does not exist in the United States and thus requires reaching out to European, Japanese, and Korean agencies.
Maintenance costs and the state of good repair racket
I have a video I uploaded just before the report came out, explaining why the state of good repair (SOGR) concept has, since the late 1990s, been a racket permitting agencies to spend vast sums of money with nothing to show for it. The report inadvertently confirms this. The New Haven Line is four-track, but since the late 1990s it has never had all four tracks in service at the same time, as maintenance is done during the daytime with flagging rules slowing down the trains. Despite decades of work, the backlog does not shrink, and the slow zones are never removed, only replaced (see PDF-p. 7 of the report). The report in fact states (PDF-p. 8),
To accommodate regular maintenance as well as state-of-good-repair and normal replacement improvements, much of the four-track NHL typically operates with only three tracks.
Moreover, on PDF-p. 26, the overall renewal costs are stated as $700-900 million a year in the 2017-21 period. This includes rolling stock replacement, but the share of that is small, as it only includes 66 new M8 cars, a less than second-order item. It also includes track upgrades for CTRail, a program to run trains up to Hartford and Springfield, but those tracks preexist and renewal costs there are not too high. In effect, CTDOT is spending around $700 million annually on a system that, within the state, includes 385 single-track-km for Metro-North service and another 288 single-track-km on lines owned by Amtrak.
This is an insane renewal cost. In Germany, the Hanover-Würzburg NBS cost 640 million euros to do 30-year track renewal on, over a segment of 532 single-track-km – and the line is overall about 30% in tunnel. This includes new rails, concrete ties, and switches. The entire work is a 4-year project done in a few tranches of a few months each to limit the slowdowns, which are around 40 minutes, punctuated by periods of full service. In other words, CTDOT is likely spending more annually per track-km on a never-ending renewal program than DB is on a one-time program to be done once per generation.
A competent CTDOT would self-abnegate and become German (or Japanese, Spanish, French, Italian, etc.). It could for a few hundred million dollars renew the entirety of the New Haven Line and its branches, with track geometry machines setting the tracks to be fully superelevated and setting the ballast grade so as to improve drainage. With turnout replacement, all speed limits not coming from right-of-way geometry could be lifted, with the possible exception of some light limits on the movable bridges. With a rebuild of the Grand Central ladder tracks and turnouts for perhaps $250,000 per switch (see e.g. Neustadt switches), trains could do New York-New Haven in about 1:03 making Amtrak stops and 1:27 making all present-day local stops from Stamford east.
Infrastructure-schedule integration
The incompetence of CTDOT and its consultants is not limited to capital planning. Operations are lacking as well. The best industry practice, coming from Switzerland, is to integrate the timetable with infrastructure and rolling stock planning. This is not done in this case.
On the contrary: the report recommends buying expensive dual-mode diesel locomotives for through-service from the unelectrified branches instead of electrifying them, which could be done for maybe $150 million (the Danbury Branch was once electrified and still has masts, but no wires). The lifecycle costs of electric trains are half those of diesel trains, and this is especially important when there is a long electrified trunk line with branches coming out of it. Dual-mode locomotives are a pantomime of low electrification operating costs, since they have high acquisition costs and poor performance even in electric mode as they are not multiple-units. Without electrification, the best long-term recommendation is to shut down service on these two branches, in light of high maintenance and operating costs.
The choice of coaches is equally bad. The report looks at bilevels, which are a bad idea in general, but then adds to the badness by proposing expensive catenary modifications (PDF-p. 35). In fact, bilevel European trains exist that clear the lowest bridge, such as the KISS, and those are legal on American tracks now, even if Metro-North is unaware.
The schedule pattern is erratic as well. Penn Station Access will soon permit service to both Grand Central and Penn Station. And yet, there is no attempt to have a clean schedule to both. There is no thought given to timed transfers at New Rochelle, connecting local and express trains going east with trains to Grand Central and Penn Station going west, in whichever cross-platform pattern is preferred.
The express patterns proposed are especially bad. The proposal for through-running to Philadelphia and Harrisburg (“NYX”) is neat, but it’s so poorly integrated with everything else it might as well not exist. Schedules are quoted in trains per day, for the NYX option and the GCX one to Grand Central, and in neither case do they run as frequently as hourly (PDF-p. 26). There is no specific schedule to the minute that the interested passenger may look at, nor any attempt at an off-peak clockface pattern.
Throw it in the trash
The desired rail investment plan for Connecticut, setting aside high-speed rail, is full electrification, plus track renewal to permit the elimination of non-geometric speed limits. It should cost around $1 billion one-time; the movable bridge replacements should be postponed as they are nice to have but not necessary, their proposed budgets are excessive, and some of their engineering depends on whether high-speed rail is built. The works on the New Haven Line are doable in a year or not much more – the four-year timeline on Hanover-Würzburg is intended to space out the flagging delays, but the existing New Haven Line is already on a permanent flagging delay. The trains should be entirely EMUs, initially the existing and under-order M8 fleet, and eventually new lightweight single-level trains. The schedule should have very few patterns, similar to today’s off-peak local and express trains with some of one (or both) pattern diverting to Penn Station; the express commuter trains should take around 1:30 and intercity trains perhaps 1:05. This is a straightforward project.
Instead, AECOM produced a proposal that costs 10 times as much, takes 10 times as long, and produces half the time savings. Throw it in the trash. It is bad, and the retired and working agency executives who are responsible for all of the underlying operating and capital assumptions should be dismissed for incompetence. The people who worked on the report and their sources who misinformed them should be ashamed for producing such a shoddy plan. Even mid-level planners in much of Europe could design a far better project, leaving the most experienced and senior engineers for truly difficult projects such as high-speed rail.
Pedestrian Observations 