In the three countries with the longest and traditionally largest HSR networks – Japan, Germany, and France – there is no large intercity bus network, with government regulations against the development of one. The US and Canada are in somewhat of the opposite situation – intercity buses are legal, but intercity trains are subject to a variety of regulations and operating practices raising operating costs so much that outside the thickest corridors they might as well be illegal. The best situation is in South Korea, which has well-developed networks of both buses and trains; the result is that on the Seoul-Daegu and Seoul-Busan city pairs, buses have 7-8% of the market and trains 67%.

On top of that, the express buses in North America do not get very high mode share. I’ve seen no reliable numbers, but when I looked at Megabus and Bolt schedules on the largest city pairs, the two carriers combined were about even with Amtrak, whose mode share on the entire NEC is 6% according to the Vision.

So why is Cap’n Transit suddenly telling us to love the bus (though he rejects the loaded term “love the bus”) and advocate for more investment into bus stations at various locations around the metro area? Doctrinaire libertarians have the excuse that the kind of regulations they are used to thinking of are the French regulations against domestic competition with rail and not the FRA’s safety rules. But the Cap’n of course knows exactly how pernicious FRA rules are. Since he thinks in terms of activist energy as the primary resource to manage, and not the government’s budget, this could be taken as a desperation at any attempt to reform Amtrak and the FRA.

But more likely, this comes from the fact that many intercity bus supporters fought (and lost) regulations against curbside pickups, which are the way Megabus, Bolt, and others could serve New York without paying for space at Port Authority, imitating the practices of the older Chinatown buses.

The immediate trigger for thinking where to place bus stops then is the impending loss of curbside space. Since buses are in many ways intermediate between cars and trains in terms of capacity and the point-to-point versus hub-and-spoke tradeoff, a bus expansion then has to mean finding more and more places to pick up. A legacy train station will run out of running line capacity long before it runs out of station track capacity, but a curbside bus stop uses valuable urban space and a bus station can and does run out of space.

And this is where buses stop being too useful. Frequency is freedom. Because the bus operators compete with one another, passengers need to be ticketed on a specific company, and that already cuts into frequency. On top of that, unlike trains, buses have a very large stop penalty, since they need to get off the highway and into the city. New York-Washington trains make intermediate stops in Philadelphia; express buses don’t. Even with dominant CBD stations, the frequency on the buses in the Northeast isn’t great: from New York, Bolt offers half-hourly service from to Philadelphia, hourly service to Boston, and less than hourly service to each of Baltimore and Washington, and all four city pairs have one dominant stop pair; Megabus frequency is hourly to Boston and hourly with a half-hourly peak to the other three.

Adding more stops means diluting this less-than-great frequency even further. It would work if bus stops were consolidated and people could buy one ticket good on any company, but the business model that has reduced ticket prices is probably not compatible with such cooperation. It would also work if the market share were 67%, but it isn’t and never will be.

The other problem is that people have not just origins but also destinations – and those destinations cluster in the CBDs, and the more the passenger is willing to pay, the likelier it is they’ll be traveling to the CBD. A train run from Woodside or Newark to New York will be full in one direction and empty in the other; the reason those trains can make money (they don’t in New York, but do in Tokyo, which is as CBD-dominant) is that they’re so full in the peak direction it makes up for lower reverse-peak occupancy. For intercity travel, this is harder. High-speed rail can make a profit on these asymmetric intercity runs because it’s so fast that it can cut costs that depend on travel time and not distance, such as operator wages, dispatcher wages, and some train maintenance. Buses don’t have that luxury, and need to be full in both directions, which favors CBD-to-CBD runs, or runs between neighborhoods that are likely to be destinations as well as origins (such as Chinatown-to-Chinatown runs).

Trains are unique among common-carrier transportation modes in that service uses corridors and not points. They are similar to cars this way: I-95 and the Northeast Corridor serve many overlapping city pairs. Bus services do not have this advantage, because the nature of an expressway network is such that they have to deviate to make a station stop, and in the largest cities this deviation is considerable; it can take an hour for a bus to navigate New York’s streets. This makes them more point-to-point, like planes, and on a corridor with four large cities on one line, this is much less efficient.

In general, I think a lot of the pro-bus attitude among liberals and general transit activists (as opposed to libertarians, who I will address in a future post) amounts to defeatism. We will never be able to improve government to the point that trains have high mode share, so let’s downgrade service. We will never be like France or Germany or Switzerland or Japan, so let’s import practices from China and Scotland.

Transit activists for the most part have not only political but also personal preferences for travel by transit. When I visited Buffalo, I took the Empire Service instead of flying. This creates a skewed impression for what’s good; to me, the Empire Service is a semi-useful service, even as to the average traveler it might as well not be there. If the existing service is straightforwardly a worse version of good service – such as a commuter train that should run faster and more frequently, or an intercity train that should be HSR – this is not a problem. But if it is different – such as a bus where a train is more appropriate, a light rail or dedicated subway line where an S-Bahn is appropriate, or even a rapid transit line in the wrong type of neighborhood – then the activism can be in a wrong direction.

The problem is that the 80-90% of travelers who drive are not currently agitating for the mode of transit most likely to get them to switch. Like transit users, they have at least to some extent made their peace with their current mode’s deficiency, and if anything they will demand more highway expansions even on corridors where transit is much more useful for the same cost. But we can take a step back and look at case studies from peer first-world countries and see that buses have mode shares in the single digits while trains can dominate corridors in the Northeast Corridor distance range.

If you multiply the populations of the metro areas served as a proxy for HSR ridership, then by comparison to Shinkansen lines as well as the AVE, New York-Washington traffic should be about 15-20 million passengers per year. It’s even higher if we include Madrid-Seville, an overperformer with more ridership than Madrid-Barcelona. This is just between the two metro areas, excluding additional passengers to Philadelphia. This raises two questions: what does the data suggest about modifying product-of-populations as a proxy, perhaps to account for distance? And, more importantly, is such ridership realistic for the Northeast Corridor?

First, at least on the Shinkansen and the AVE, in the range of distances up to nearly 4 hours, there’s no effect of distance on ridership, especially if we combine air and rail ridership. (We’re trying to apply this analysis to a city pair on which trains will take not much more than an hour and a half; end-to-end air traffic can be assumed to be zero.) Beyond that, Tokyo-Fukuoka air and rail ridership combined still underperforms shorter-distance links. One explanation is that as distance increases, total travel volume decreases, but rail and then air market share grows at the expense of cars and buses, and in the 1.5-4-hour range, these effects more or less cancel out. At longer distances, there is no longer much highway travel for trains and planes to poach.

With distance ignored, large cities consistently underperform small cities. This is not a surprise based on SNCF’s refined gravity model of ridership, in which travel volume is proportional not to the product of the city populations, but to the product raised to an exponent lower than 1. SNCF uses an empirically derived exponent, between 0.8 and 0.9, and AVE and Shinkansen data is indeed more consistent with that range. Some city pairs still underperform in a way that can’t be explained by population and distance, such as Tokyo-Okayama, but the exponent perfectly explains why Tokyo-Osaka underperforms a model with exponent 1.

So what about the Northeast Corridor? Current Amtrak ridership between New York and Washington is 1.74 million, but that’s just between Penn Station and Union Station. Amtrak provides its top 10 city pairs in the Northeast in its Master Plan, which include New York-Baltimore and New York-BWI, at 650,000 between them. I don’t know the ridership on more minor city pairs, such as those involving Newark or Stamford. I would guess the total including those is about 3-3.5 million; this is based just on extrapolating that of the top-10 markets on the southern half of the line just under half the ridership is between the New York and Washington metro areas, and applying a fudge factor to account for the fact that secondary markets not involving New York-Washington are less likely to make the top 10.

In contrast, based on comparison to the Shinkansen and AVE, we should expect HSR ridership of 15-20 million, about 5 times what I believe the present ridership is. (In fact, based on comparison to the lower-fare KTX, it should be if anything higher.) This is despite the fact that the current trip time is either 2:47 or 3:25 whereas with HSR it would be about 1:35. The importance of this is that we can’t expect induced demand to quintuple ridership out of halving trip time, but instead we need to explain this based on competition with cars and buses.

Part of this competition has to be about fares. Amtrak charges very high fares (see the route performance report) – on average, 28 cents per km on the Regional, and 48 on the Acela. Shinkansen fares average 23 cents per km on Tokaido, 20 on Sanyo, and 24 on the JR East network. That said, the shorter distance of New York-Washington means that absolute fares are not higher, particularly on the cheaper option. However, high fare per km does mean the trip is less competitive with cheap express buses and with driving.

This comes in addition to travel time. The Regional is an hour faster than Megabus; HSR that is three hours faster Megabus, especially if it’s also cheaper than today’s Regional, could make a serious dent in the Megabus network. Express buses already have trouble with secondary markets, because those can’t piggyback on primary markets as intermediate stops the way they can with trains. Better trains could poach the express bus market and reduce it to where it was ten years ago.

At the range of the top-performing city pairs, most people take trains rather than use roads. I do not have data for individual city pairs in Japan (but see here for Korea, where HSR overperforms, perhaps due to lower fares, which are about 15 cents per km before discounts), but at the distance of New York-Washington, 360 km, trains get a little more than half the total mode share and cars get the other half. Amtrak’s 2010 Vision says that the current rail mode share on the entire Northeast Corridor is 6%; it does not say what the share on New York-Washington is, but I’ve seen 14% elsewhere (no reference, sorry), and the Vision says that incremental Master Plan improvements will raise it to 26%. Of course going from 14% to 50% also involves induced demand, and this means the expected rise in ridership is a higher factor, potentially a factor of 5.

I’m not going to try using this method to estimate shorter-distance ridership, because then car ownership, sprawl levels, etc. become a much bigger issue, and quick-and-dirty sanity checks don’t work and are no replacement for serious ridership studies. But we can apply the method to other longer-distance portions of the Northeast Corridor. If we use the lower end of the scale, we get New York-Washington at 15 million annual passengers or a little more, New York-Boston at 15 million or a little less, Boston-Washington at 6 million, Boston-Philadelphia at 5 million.

As a secondary sanity check, the Boston-Washington air market is about 2.5 million, and for HSR to get 2.5 times as much ridership on a formerly air-dominated city pair as the pre-HSR air travel volume is the same performance Eurostar got.

All four metro areas should be interpreted as broadly as possible, to maintain comparability with Japanese metro areas, whose definition is loose and roughly comparable to the American combined statistical area. So there are just four cities on the Northeast Corridor, really. This is still not all the ridership there is – there is still New York-Philadelphia and Philadelphia-Washington, I’m just less comfortable making even an ex-recto estimate. But even without those two potentially high-ridership city pairs, we get high passenger density on all segments of the line.

Update: although I have not found city-to-city ridership data from France, I have found region-to-region numbers from Paris to the southwest. I also have some air traffic volumes from which we can deduce air/rail markets: on Paris-Nice the TGV has a 31% share of the air/rail market; on Paris-Marseille I’ve seen numbers ranging from 60% to 83%, and for this post’s purposes I’m going to assume 70%. We get air/rail traffic numbers from Paris to Marseille (5.2 million, but this grows to 9.2 million if we assume 83% TGV share and declines to 3.9 million if we assume 60%), Nice (4.2 million), Midi-Pyrenees (3.2 million), Aquitaine (5.5 million), and Poitou-Charentes (3.3 million). With the exception of the Midi-Pyrenees number, which represents a fairly long distance, all overperform the Shinkansen. Ignoring distance as always and using an exponent of 0.8, Paris-Marseille overperforms Tokyo-Sendai by a factor of 1.85, Paris-Nice by 2.21, Paris-Midi-Pyrenees by 0.77 (i.e. it underperforms), Paris-Aquitaine by 1.26, and Paris-Poitou-Charentes by 1.22. Per-kilometer fares are much lower than on Shinkansen – indeed SNCF’s total revenue, both high- and low-speed, divided just by TGV passenger-km, is €0.14 – and this can contribute to the higher traffic.

Paris-Nice can be explained as a major leisure corridor, similar to the unusually high passenger traffic to Florida or Las Vegas. But bear in mind that Nice and Marseille are metro areas and not entire regions, and under any assumption that Bordeaux and Toulouse get a greater share of the travel to Paris than the rural areas in their respective regions, they will overperform by a substantial margin. Although French metro areas are defined less loosely than Japanese ones, which can skew the Marseille and Nice numbers, the Aquitaine and Midi-Pyrenees numbers are if anything defined too loosely due to the inclusion of outright rural departments.

Carolyn Maloney, the Congresswoman representing Manhattan’s East Side, gave an interview to the Globe and Mail in which she called for high-speed rail between New York and Canadian cities. She did not specify which cities, but presumably those are Montreal and Toronto. The article quoted Andrew Cuomo as saying that connecting New York to Montreal and Toronto would be “transformative,” though it did not mention that Cuomo killed plans for HSR from New York to Buffalo. It is unclear to me whether Maloney is serious, or merely as serious as Cuomo; for the purposes of this post, let us assume that she is serious. Is it justifiable to build HSR from New York to Montreal and Toronto?

Long-time readers will know that I am skeptical of international HSR lines. But let me explain why I think New York-Toronto could be successful, while New York-Montreal could not.

First, perhaps because of the common language, the travel markets from the US to Montreal underperform those to Toronto. According to Statscan data, Toronto has about three times as many travelers to New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and the other top metro areas in the US as Montreal does. The two cities’ metro area population ratio is only about 1.5:1; this is indeed the ratio of their travel markets to leisure destinations such as Las Vegas and Miami. US data generally points to higher numbers, sometimes by a substantial margin; it also points to a ratio of about 2.5-3:1 between Toronto and Montreal travel, this time even to Las Vegas and Miami. (US data excludes planes with up to 60 seats, but these are only about 20% of New York-Toronto departures, and of course a smaller proportion of seats.)

In addition, New York-Toronto may be in a similar situation to New York-London, in which the two cities’ common industry (finance) leads to more business travel. For some evidence of this effect, the Canadian data shows that Calgary and Houston, the two countries’ respective oil capitals, are each other’s top air market on the other side of the border. The same is of course true of financial capitals New York and Toronto, though as the largest cities in their respective countries, this is less surprising. But we should not overinterpret this effect: the New York-Toronto air market is still just 900,000 people a year (according to Canada) or 1.5 million (according to the US), though it far beats New York-Montreal’s 300,000 or 600,000.

Even 1.5 million times an induced demand factor is not enough to build HSR by itself. We could add existing travel volumes from New York to Niagara Falls and from Toronto to Buffalo, but most likely they are not enough by themselves.

The main reason New York-Toronto could be defensible is that a large majority of the New York-Toronto construction would not be done just for New York-Toronto travel. HSR on the Empire Corridor, up to Buffalo, is justifiable entirely based on domestic traffic. At the other end, the Lakeshore West corridor, which already can sustain medium speeds (GO’s top speed is 150 km/h), should be electrified and retrofitted with passing sidings based entirely on local commuter traffic. There are about 100 km between Buffalo and Hamilton, and 160 between Buffalo and Toronto, compared with 850 between New York and Toronto. Since HSR fares and operating profits roughly scale with distance traveled, the operating revenue of the lower-trafficked 100 km between Buffalo and Hamilton should really be multiplied by 8.5. If New York-Toronto traffic is about 3.5 million a year, a similar multiple of preexisting air traffic as Eurostar, then we can expect the construction of the 100 km to add about 3 billion passenger-km a year; 30 million passenger-km of revenue per km of route to be constructed is very good, comparable to the Sanyo Shinkansen. If we need to use New York-Toronto traffic to justify even Toronto-Hamilton upgrades, then we’ll have 18.5 million passenger-km of revenue per km of construction, comparable to the JR East Shinkansen network.

Of course these passenger densities, and hence returns on investment, are not available to the full line; they’re only available to this last link completing New York-Toronto. To enjoy such favorable ratio the preexisting routes must already be in place. We cannot use the 30 million passenger-km/km figure to justify building New York-Buffalo as a first step toward New York-Toronto. If Maloney intends to do that, then she is setting the line up for failure; 3.5 million passenger-km/km is too little. Amtrak has about the same on the Northeast Corridor, from which it squeezes operating profits, but the capital construction was paid by private railroads between 1831 and 1917; building a greenfield line for this performance is unwarranted. At most, we can use it to add to domestic traffic in case the merits of a domestic line are close to good enough but not quite.

New York-Montreal does not have the same advantage as New York-Toronto. Not only is the travel volume much smaller to being with, but also it would require building about 360 km of route, in the rolling hills of Vermont, to create a link of 590 km. Very little of that 360 km is a reasonable commuter rail route by itself – on the line I sketched to measure distance, only 30. So at best this is 330 out of 590. If we attempt the same calculation as for New York-Toronto, we obtain just 2.7 million passenger-km/km. Moreover, the intermediate markets are much weaker than US-Niagara Falls or Buffalo-Toronto. For now, HSR between New York and Montreal should remain an unfulfilled dream of Montreal boosters.

Of course, it’s possible that Maloney just emphasized the possible connections to Canada, and her actual drive is going to be Empire Corridor HSR, which is a welcome change from Cuomo’s opposition. Canadians do not vote in US elections. In that case, a link to Toronto would become stronger, because of the piggybacking on preexisting New York-Buffalo HSR. The line would hinge entirely on constructibility over the river and border control issues then. International links underperform, but sometimes they are short enough relative to the possibility to be worth it.