Category: High-Speed Rail
Northeast Corridor HSR, 90% Cheaper
Amtrak’s latest Next-Generation High-Speed Rail plan is now up to $151 billion, from a prior cost of $117 billion. This is partially a small cost escalation, but mostly including Master Plan upgrades to the legacy line. Per kilometer of route length, this means the project has now crossed the $200 million/km mark, a higher cost than 60%-underground Chuo Shinkansen maglev. The primary cause of the high cost of Amtrak’s project is the heavy amount of deep-cavern urban tunneling: nearly a tenth of the cost is the Gateway Tunnel, a rebranded bundling of ARC into the project, and a similar amount is a similar project in Philadelphia. At least this time they’re serving Rhode Island with a stop in or near Providence rather than Woonsocket.
In contrast with this extravaganza, it is possible to achieve comparable travel times for about one tenth the cost. The important thing is to build the projects with the most benefit measured in travel time reduced or reliability gained per unit of cost, and also share tracks heavily with commuter rail, using timed overtakes to reduce the required amount of multi-tracking.
I propose the following general principles, guiding any future development in the corridor:
1. Rolling stock is cheaper than infrastructure. This is not true everywhere, but the Northeastern US and Japan both have high infrastructure-to-equipment cost ratios. A Shinkansen train today costs about $4 million per car judging by how much Taiwan pays. A 16-car train every 15 minutes from Washington to Boston, with a one-way travel time including turnaround of about 3:30, would require 30 sets, or 480 cars, or $2 billion. Therefore, it makes financial sense to demand more of the rolling stock: some tilting as present on the Talgo, Pendolino, N700, or E5; high initial acceleration as present on the N700-I; and high power-to-weight ratio as on the Talgo and Shinkansen models, or even possibly an all-cars-powered Pendolino.
The difference between an average and a top-rate train could easily amount to 20 minutes between Washington and Boston. Making up those 20 minutes with infrastructure, once the easiest projects have been completed, would cost far more than $2 billion.
2. Speed up commuter trains instead of bypassing them. The place where this is most obvious and useful is the Boston-Providence segment. I have nothing to add that I didn’t already say in my pair of posts on the subject last year. Something similar is true between Baltimore and Washington. It is more difficult between New York and New Haven, but at least there are curves that have to be bypassed anyway, and so the track sharing can be reduced to a manageable degree given the line’s heavy commuter traffic.
This requires fixing agency turf battles, which costs a lot of political capital but is almost free to the taxpayer. In contrast, long multi-track segments, often with new viaducts, easily run into the billions. Amtrak’s single biggest question mark east of New York is the string of tunnels from Penn Station to New Rochelle to Danbury, all so that it doesn’t have to share tracks with Metro-North. It could buy the commuter operations and subsidize them forever and still come out ahead of all those tunnels.
3. The regulations should be based on service needs. As a corollary of #1 and 2 and the every minute counts philosophy they espouse, the regulations should allow trains that can operate safely. Here safety is determined by actual practice and track record, rather than what the FRA thinks safety is, which has an incidental relationship with reality. That Shinkansen trains do not meet UIC standards should not be even a minor issue; trains in Japan are safer than in the UIC’s prime-mover European countries.
4. On shared segments that aren’t bypassed, build infrastructure that allows higher speeds. This is a corollary of #2: if legacy routes are to be upgraded rather than bypassed, there’s no point in assuming present-day speed limits, such as Metro-North’s 75 mph/120 km/h limit in Connecticut, will remain in place, and therefore projects should be built with high radius of curvature. Assume that large portions of the New Haven Line will host trains going at 240 km/h.
5. Make sure station throats allow full speed. Every non-geometric restriction on speed – tunnel diameter, track condition, switches – should be eliminated. Higher-speed switches are cheaper than new concrete pouring; more precise track maintenance is cheaper than most people realize, standing at about $100,000 per double-track-km on average; Shinkansen trains’ noses are designed (and European trains’ noses can be modified) to allow full speed through narrow tunnels, as Shinkansen construction standards minimize tunnel diameter to reduce costs.
The time cost of even a short segment inhibiting full-throttle acceleration in station throats is higher than most people realize. A kilometer a train has to wend at 50 km/h when it could go 200, such as the Penn Station throat, is worth 54 seconds. At stations closer to full-speed zone, this speed-restricted kilometer slows the train’s acceleration to full speed further down the line, and thus it comes at the expense of a kilometer at 300-360 km/h, raising the time cost even further.
6. Fix curves in higher speed zones. This applies mainly to the S-curve flanking I-287 in Metuchen: its curvature is not terrible, but because to its south there are no geometric speed restrictions for tens of kilometers and to its north the curves are also reasonably gentle, its bang for the buck can be surprisingly high.
7. Worry about track capacity when all other capacity factors have been optimized. An intercity railroad that runs 8-car trains is definitionally not at capacity. Running 16-car trains requires lengthening a small number of platforms, most at easy locations. Doubling train capacity across the Hudson chokepoint requires building a new tunnel under the river. Amtrak currently runs 4 trains per hour into Penn Station at the peak; if after everything else has been built it has exhausted the capacity of 4 trains per hour each with 16 cars and a thousand seats, its operating profits will let it pay for any further expansion.
With the above seven principles, one could come up with a reasonable set of projects of immediate significance. With a total cost in the single-digit billions, they’d eliminate most of the barriers to full-speed travel between New York and Washington, and leave New York-Boston with just one major problem section between Stamford and Milford. Best-practice trains, even ones optimized for a straighter route – for example, Shinkansen or the Talgo, but not the Pendolino, which is both heavier and less powerful but has a much larger degree of tilting – could go from Boston to Washington in about 4 hours, or not much more.
Getting this further down to 3 hours would require further investment according to the same principles, but even 4 hours, by virtue of the markets to and from New York, would generate the profits required to pay for them. Moreover, the contrast between fast travel on bypass segments in eastern Connecticut or straight legacy segments in Rhode Island and New Jersey and the remaining slower problem segments would create political will to complete the system. The areas with the most NIMBY resistance should be left for last, because today’s train riders as well as Amtrak itself are not nearly as powerful as they will be if the mostly NIMBY-free projects cut train travel time from 7 hours to 4.
The Recession Won’t Last Forever
The article about New York State’s decision to discontinue studying high-speed rail between New York and Buffalo is by itself not terribly surprising. Although Andrew Cuomo likes flashy public works projects, of which HSR is one, he is consistently pro-road and anti-rail.
The study released by the state sandbagged actual HSR on cost grounds – it did not provide any further analysis, and in two ways (lower average speed than most HSR lines, and a requirement for tilting) stacked the deck against it – but instead looked into medium-speed rail, with top speed of 110-125 mph, which is frequently misnamed HSR in the US. This, too, is not surprising. State DOTs have no idea how HSR works, and tend to make mistakes, not know how to do cost control, and so on.
What’s most surprising is the explanation for why not to do anything substantial: as one of the HSR proponents quoted in the article complains, “The State of New York is worried about making ends meet; the economy is not doing so great. That’s the reason in the short term.” Taking his argument at face value, the state is refusing to advance study of an HSR line because economic conditions are bad now, a decade or more before such line could even open.
The recession won’t last forever; if it does, there are bigger things to worry about than transportation. Other than immediate reconstruction projects, for which the environmental reviews are fast-tracked, major projects take years to do all the design and environmental studies. California has been planning HSR since the late 1990s. It intended to go to ballot in 2004, and after delays did so in 2008. HSR is scheduled to break ground later this year, assuming the state does not cancel the project. An HSR project for which planning starts now will start construction after the economy recovers not from this recession, but from the next one.
The recurrent theme in the article is the state’s preference for mundane over flashy projects, but rejecting HSR shows the exact opposite.Starting planning now costs very little. In fact, the best thing any state agency can do is keep planning multiple big-ticket project contingencies pending an infusion of money; this way, it can dust off plans and execute them faster if there’s a stimulus bill in the next recession. That’s long-term planning. Refusing to advance construction because it won’t start until long after Cuomo’s Presidential run in 2006 2016 isn’t.
Of course, the same goes in the other direction. Too many people, building on Keynesian stimulus ideas, want massive infrastructure spending now as a public works program. For example, Robert Cruickshank (and in comments, Bruce McF) argues for long-term benefits coming from the stimulus effect. Although construction in 2012-3 would have an impact, a multi-decade project spanning periods of both growth and recession should not rely on estimates of job creation solely from periods of recession. On the contrary, economic costs and benefits should be based on a long-term multi-business cycle trend.
I propose the following principles for interaction between business cycles and very long-term investment:
1. Assume your project will be undertaken in a period of close to (but not quite) full employment, in terms of both funding sources and economic effects, unless you specifically intend to advance construction in a recession.
2. If you want to use a recession to lock in lower interest rates, higher job impacts, or lower construction costs, make sure you have a shovel-ready project, or else try to advocate for better staffing at the requisite regulatory agencies well ahead of time so that they can fast-track it.
3. Treat fiscal surpluses coming from an economy at full employment as one-time shots rather than an ongoing situation that can be used for regular spending or tax cuts. Growth doesn’t last forever, either.
Plan B for HSR
Now that the California state legislature’s dragging its feet on releasing the state’s money for high-speed rail, there’s talk about a Plan B. The official Plan B, supported by the chair of the State Senate’s transportation committee, is to redistribute most of the money from the Central Valley toward the train stations of San Francisco and Los Angeles. Since the federal money was conditioned on sending everything to the Central Valley, and a last-ditch Plan B is unlikely to get USDOT to change the rules, most likely the actual Plan B is to kill California HSR and redistribute the $3.3 billion in federal elsewhere within the US. Illinois and North Carolina both want money for their medium-speed projects, and Amtrak wants money for Northeast Corridor improvements.
Because the Northeast Corridor improvements Amtrak wants are not necessarily the most cost-effective, I think it’s most paramount to look for projects that are in the intersection: part of the Master Plan, ideally as ready as possible (e.g. ones that are considered state of good repair), but also compatible with future upgrades to full HSR standards. In particular, this means no investment in parts of the mainline that should be bypassed in the future, but high investment in parts that shouldn’t.
Although the cost projected by Amtrak for these upgrades is in all cases higher than it should be, the high value of investment in the Northeast Corridor is such that they are still cost-effective. This is similar to Second Avenue Subway, which despite the immense cost has such a high projected ridership that its cost per rider is fine, if higher than it should be.
Projects that are to my knowledge still in progress, such as Portal Bridge, are excluded. The same is true of projects that are too big or too cost-ineffective at present construction costs.
Constant Tension Catenary
Cost: $1 billion for “high-speed territory,” which appears to be a small subset of the New York-Washington mainline; including related upgrades, just the 40 km between New Brunswick and Morrisville that are already funded are $450 million. For the full line, figure $2-3 billion. The non-US cost should be about $1 billion, but because of benefits, paying the premium is worth it.
Benefit: higher reliability in summer. No limit to top speed except for the curves; although present-day rolling stock can only do 150 or 160 mph (240-255 km/h), up from 135 mph (215 km/h) allowed by the existing catenary, the time savings for future rolling stock capable of higher speed are substantial. The more curves are fixed along the line, the greater the benefit.
New Haven Line Bridge Replacement
Two bridges (Devon, over the Housatonic River, and Cos Cob, over Mianus) require replacement; two more (Saga, in Westport, and Walk, in Norwalk) require rehabilitation. Except for the Walk Bridge, which can be bypassed on I-95, those bridges should carry high-speed traffic in the future.
Cost: unclear – the plan says $4.4 billion for many projects on the New Haven Line, and a separate breakdown only says that replacing both the Saga and Walk Bridges costs $600 million. For what it’s worth, replacing the (two-track) movable Connecticut River Bridge with a high-level fixed bridge is pegged at $500 million, over a wider river.
Benefit: higher reliability and capacity. No speed limit on unpowered bridges, versus the 40 mph (65 km/h) limit today. More subtly, on both sides of the Cos Cob Bridge there are short, sharp curves; rebuilding the bridge as a high-level bridge with a single very gentle curve imposing no speed limit could be done more or less within right-of-way, though the Cos Cob station platforms might have to be moved slightly. Even more subtly, more reliability means less padding on both Metro-North and Amtrak’s part, and with federal funding obtained by Amtrak this can potentially allow intercity trains to go at a higher speed elsewhere on the New Haven Line than Metro-North currently permits.
The segment between the NY/CT state line and Stamford is in my experience the slowest on the Northeast Corridor outside immediate major-station areas, and when I timed the trains on it, the northbound trains did it in about 11 minutes, for an average speed of 60 km/h. The curves immediately west of Stamford are actually fairly gentle, and letting the trains run on this segment at speed could nearly halve this travel time. While this would require higher cant and cant deficiency than the low values currently used on the New Haven Line, there’s little point in raising them while speeds are so limited on the Cos Cob Bridge.
B&P Tunnel Replacement
The tunnels immediately west of Baltimore were poorly engineered and impose a tight speed limit, slowing down trains by about 1.5-2 minutes even though they are adjacent to a station. While this is a relatively straightforward project, it may not be sufficiently advanced in the design and environmental clearance phase, making it a candidate for future funding but not for stimulus funding.
Cost: Amtrak’s Master Plan says $1 billion. The FRA’s study on the matter says $770 million. Both figures are within the normal non-US range for urban tunneling of this length, though the Amtrak figure is toward the upper end of it.
Benefit: reliability, and on the margins some extra space for intercity trains to pass commuter trains (on the margins, because for the next two stations south of the tunnels there are four tracks already). Some trip time improvement, and even more trip time improvement if there is new high-acceleration rolling stock, for which speed limits in station throats add more to trip times. Reduction in maintenance costs – curves as sharp as those in the existing tunnels (about 250-meter radius) begin to wear the wheels of trains, and the best available future rolling stock, Shinkansen trains, has the highest minimum curve radius, though it is well below 250 meters (I believe it is 190).
Pelham Bay Bridge Replacement
Cost: $500 million together with curve modifications between New York and New Rochelle. Just repairing the bridge more, which is not the same as replacement, is $100 million.
Benefit: like Cos Cob, Pelham Bay is flanked by two sharp, short curves. Replacing it even without doing anything else would eliminate a speed restriction in a zone that for a few km could support 200 km/h.
Medium-Term Future
There are additional projects that can be undertaken, in relatively small chunks. Some have been hinted at; some haven’t been studied at all that I know of, but have tantalizing benefits for future high-speed service. Because there’s no design yet, except possibly for Elizabeth, it’s unlikely anything can be done by any deadline, but design should begin promptly to make the next round of funding. At any rate, the above shorter-term projects are more than enough to soak up all funding that could become available if California fails to appropriate money for its own HSR project and returns the federal funds.
New Rolling Stock
The Acelas are heavy, low-capacity, low-performance, and high-maintenance. New trains can’t be FRA-compliant, and in practice some time (measured in years, not decades) can pass before the best rolling stock is legal on US track. But Amtrak and all involved in HSR on existing track should be at the forefront of asking for an overhaul. High-acceleration trains, capable of about the same cant deficiency as the Acela (for example the E5 Series Shinkansen and the high-speed Talgos), can achieve much faster trip times than possible today, with trivial changes to right-of-way geometry. Of course the tracks would have to be maintained to higher standards, but that’s much cheaper than moving a viaduct or carving a new right-of-way through a residential suburb.
Elizabeth S-Curve Modification
Cost: ??? The project would entail stretching the present reverse-curve, and probably demolishing all or parts of Union County College’s Elizabeth Kellogg building, a new medium-sized building that cost $48 million to build, as well as a parking garage between the college and the train station. The chief difficulty is easing a curve that’s on a viaduct.
Benefit: current speed limit on the curve is 55 mph (90 km/h), and because the limiting factor is not radius but how fast one can reverse a curve, there’s not much that can be done by raising superelevation. If only the above two buildings are removed, and some parking lots are taken, the curve appears to be modifiable to a radius of about 1,500 meters, which with cutting-edge superelevation (200 mm) and the E5 or Talgo 350’s cant deficiency (about 175 mm) corresponds to 220 km/h. This effectively extends the high-speed zone in New Jersey farther north, closer to Newark.
An express New Jersey Transit train taking a curve with radius 1,500 meters and superelevation 200 mm at its top speed of 160 km/h would have perfectly balanced cant to within a millimeter, and so there is no need to reduce cant to accommodate it.
Metuchen S-Curve Modification
Metuchen is Elizabeth’s shy, ignored sister. Amtrak’s Vision travel time simulation does not fix the curve at all. Update: as Jim notes in comments, the Master Plan does talk about some fix, calling it the Lincoln Interlocking. The total cost of this, Elizabeth, constant tension catenary, additional curve realignments in Pennsylvania and Connecticut, and other projects Amtrak identifies as immediate trip time improvements is $4 billion, of which a portion has already been allocated.
Cost: ??? The project entails straightening two reverse curves, an easier one between Metropark and Metuchen and a harder one on both sides of I-287. Some residential takings may be required, especially for the former; the latter may require partial takings at a strip mall and an industrial building. Since the railroad is not on viaduct here, structure costs should be far lower than in Elizabeth.
Benefit: current speed limit is 100 mph (160 km/h). The S-curve is not as tight as at Elizabeth and this means there’s more potential for an increase in speed, but not too much. With minor takings, the curves in the area can all be straightened to 2,500 meters (280 km/h) except the I-287 curve, whose maximum feasible radius depends on how many takings are allowed; with very superficial takings, 1,800 meters (240 km/h) is possible, and with completely taking the strip mall and industrial site there’s practically no limit. Although the existing speed is much higher than at Elizabeth, this is smack in the middle of an otherwise full-speed zone, and so the benefits of speed boost are higher.
Second update: I forgot to say – with the same assumptions as for Elizabeth, a 160 km/h NJT express would have 17 mm of cant excess on an 1,800-meter curve and 80 mm on a 2,500-meter curve, both lower than the cant excess of stopping trains on some of the curvy stations in southeastern Connecticut.
Port Chester-Greenwich Bypass
Most of the slowness of the segment between the NY/CT state line and Stamford comes from Cos Cob, but part of it comes from a sharp curve in Port Chester that can’t be modified without too many takings. As an alternative, trains should leave the existing line just south of Rye, travel along I-95 and its gentler curves, bypass Port Chester and Greenwich, and rejoin in the vicinity of the newly-raised Cos Cob Bridge. Curve radius without significant residential takings would be about 1,300 meters through the I-95 S-curve in Rye and Port Chester, and 2,000 meters elsewhere.
Cost: ??? This is about 7 km of new line, with significant portions on viaduct. Parts of the Greenwich station house may need to be knocked down or moved.
Benefit: the direct benefit is bypassing two curves in the middle of what would be, in the presence of a fixed Cos Cob Bridge, a relatively high-speed segment. The indirect benefit is that it gives intercity trains several fast kilometers to overtake express commuter trains. Not only does this boost reliability, but also, like the Cos Cob fix, it makes it possible for intercity trains to travel faster elsewhere on the line without mucking up commuter trains’ schedule. Currently permitted top speed in Metro-North territory is 90 mph (145 km/h) in New York State and 75 (120) in Connecticut, but those curve fixes would allow much higher speed on a long continuous segment. With higher superelevation, current curvature would permit a continuous 200 km/h south to Harrison and north to Stamford, 170 km/h through Harrison south to New Rochelle, and 160 km/h through Stamford.
New Rochelle Interlocking Grade-Separation
Cost: ??? Harold Interlocking, a more complex project, is about $300 million. But this project conversely would require minor curve modification between New Rochelle and Pelham Bay for full benefit, and also some takings through New Rochelle to straighten the existing S-curve. Ultimate cost depends on how much straightening is involved.
Benefit: current speed through the interlocking is 30 mph (50 km/h). The flat junction also leads to capacity constraints at rush hour, limiting intercity train movements and forcing them into slots that may be suboptimal in other parts of the line. Depending on how many takings one is willing to engage in, an S-curve with enough space to fully reverse the curve could have a radius anywhere from 700 meters (150 km/h) and up. 700 meters represents minimal takings; the point of diminishing returns is about 1,800 meters (about as much as other curves farther north can be eased to, permitting 240 km/h), which would require taking a row or two of buildings east of the tracks.
Eastern CT I-95 Bypass
Not a small project at all, but it can be broken into segments, some of which allow postponing or canceling projects on the existing Shore Line. In addition, Connecticut wants to widen I-95 in this area from 4 to 6 lanes, and since the capacity of HSR is much higher, the money can be reprogrammed without net loss of auto capacity.
This project would start right at New Haven Union Station, cross the Quinnipiac River at a new bridge near US 1 and the new I-95 bridge, follow I-95 to the state line, and then cut across barely-populated territory to the Shore Line at Kingston, where it straightens.
Cost: this is 121 km of tunnel-free route, and based on similar costs in Europe, it should be $2.5 billion. Carefully tracing through the unit costs implied by the Penn Design group, following California HSR costs, produces a figure of $2 billion. But this assumes much lower costs for the bridges over the rivers than Amtrak has produced so far; Amtrak costs are likely much higher, though not by orders of magnitude.
Benefit: New Haven-Providence in about 40 minutes, New Haven-Boston in about an hour. Current travel time can be improved using better rolling stock, but there’s a point of diminishing returns, and reliability with present-day movable bridges, especially over the Connecticut River, is low, requiring extra schedule padding.
The three basic segments of this are New Haven-East Haven (i.e. the Quinnipiac bridge), East Haven-Old Saybrook, and Old Saybrook-Kingston; the Old Saybrook point comes from the fact that I-95 and the Shore Line are close there and there’s room for a track connection. The eastern segment bypasses the curviest segment with the worst bridges, but requires difficult bridges of its own; that said, the Penn Design methodology, under which a single bridge over a river is not as expensive as multiple grade separations, makes this segment look cheaper than it probably is. The western segment offers new capacity for commuter rail in the New Haven area, because it completely removes Boston-bound trains from State Street and points north.
Commuter Rail-HSR Compatibility
Cost: ??? This involves strategic four-track overtake segments; see example for the MBTA here and here, and for Metro-North to Penn Station here. For comparison, 17 km of four-tracking the three-track gap between the Devon Bridge and New Haven is $15 million, and 8 km of three-tracking the two-track Readville-Canton segment is $80 million. The much higher cost of the latter project presumably comes from the fact that this is new track rather than what appears to be restoring a fourth track that used to exist. But since those four-tracking segments are quite short, not much longer than a station and approaches, the cost of each should be in the low tens of millions.
In addition, MARC and especially the MBTA would need to obtain more modern rolling stock, to minimize infrastructure costs. An 8-car EMU is $20 million at Metro-North/LIRR/SEPTA costs (as well as the costs of European countries; American EMU orders are hardly more expensive than European ones, in contrast with the situation for infrastructure). That said, operating costs would be reduced due to lower energy consumption and a lower breakdown rate.
Benefit: de jure only capacity, but de facto those are busy commuter lines and intercity traffic should not take absolute precedence. As a result, those overtakes are crucial for letting HSR run at the full speed allowed by right-of-way geometry, rather than at reduced speed to avoid interfering with regional traffic. The new rolling stock and more rigorous operating schedule would also speed up regional trains significantly; MBTA trains could run from Boston to Providence in 51 minutes, down from 1:10 today, even while being overtaken by HSR twice during each run and making 3 additional stops.
Destination Centralization
It’s by now a commonplace that jobs are more centralized than residences, in terms of CBD concentration. But what I think is worse-known is that destinations in general are incredibly centralized, both across and within metro areas. In other words, people from out of town, especially out of country, are more likely to visit the more central metro regions, and within those regions are more likely to visit city center.
For good examples, take tourist travel to Britain and France, both conveniently capital-centric for this discussion. London has 15.6 million annual international visitors, slightly more than its metro area population; Paris has 9.7 million, slightly less than its metro area population. Most secondary cities in both Britain and France don’t even come close: the same ratio in Glasgow, Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool, and Birmingham ranges from one quarter to one half, and in secondary French cities is even lower, down to one ninth for Marseille. (Nice and Monaco, a specialized tourist region, punch above their weight; so does Edinburgh.) You can peruse the numbers and see that the same observation is true in a number of countries with one well-known global city, excepting those with a different region specializing in tourism.
For business travel specifically, one look at the distribution of four- and five-star hotels in a country and a metro region will show similar centralization. For example, consider the New York hotels shown on Five Star Alliance. Counting separately listed hotels in Connecticut, there are 56 five-star hotels, of which 50 are in Manhattan (mostly in Midtown), four in Fairfield County, and one each in Hoboken and Huntington. On hotels.com, there are 40 four-and-a-half- and five-star hotels; of those I can find information about 37, and of those 36 are in Manhattan and one is in White Plains. In Boston, Five Star Alliance shows 18 hotels, one in Cambridge and the rest in Back Bay and Downtown Boston; hotels.com shows 11, all downtown or in Back Bay. In Philadelphia, Five Star Alliance shows 8 and hotels.com 4 of which I can find information about 3, and in both cases all hotels are in Center City.
Let’s untangle what this means. Of course there’s a concentration of activity in Manhattan, Downtown Boston, and Center City. Just not that much. Manhattan has 22% of the jobs in Greater New York; it doesn’t have 50 in 56 jobs, or even 50 in 56 jobs that require commuting (it has 36% of jobs that involve out-of-county commuting).
I believe this boils down to a specialization of usages that attract visitors from far away. There is tourism in the Hamptons and the Jersey Shore, in the Poconos and the Hudson Highlands, in Vermont and Cape Cod. However, a huge fraction of it is local. I doubt anyone from California has ever visited the Northeast for the primary purpose of skiing in Vermont, unless it involved a corporate retreat with a lot of locals. The things that are special enough to attract people from far away are by definition uncommon. Moreover, unless those are obscure niches, they will be famous enough to have the resources to pay for prime location. They’ll cluster in the CBDs of the largest cities because everything else relevant to them is in the CBDs of the largest cities; the main factor that can break agglomeration economics, high cost, is less relevant to them.
It’s the same reason why CBDs so often host corporate headquarters, major law firms, and similar outfits. Once the cluster has been established, everyone wants to be in it, and as a result of competition, only the richest users, typically the ones with the most global networks (thus, most likely to bring in outside travelers), can afford it.
What this means for an intercity transportation network is that being located downtown has great value, even in very suburbanized metro areas. A station in the San Francisco CBD is more valuable than one in San Jose or Gilroy, and a station in Downtown Los Angeles is more valuable than one in the San Fernando Valley or Palmdale. The same is of course true of the intermediate cities, and this is why there’s a good reason to serve their downtowns rather than skirt them as the LGVs do. (Of course, there are other reasons – cost and noise – to not serve their downtowns. However, ignoring costs, the benefits are on the side of downtown stations, making a value engineering decision to avoid urban areas less obvious.)
This is one primary advantage of high-speed rail over flying: it gets you closer to your destination. To leverage that, operators make sure to locate their stations as close as practically possible to the CBD. In no place that I am aware of did HSR serve a city at a peripheral location, except when necessary for line geometry. Japan National Railways built Shin-Osaka because it was impossible for a through-line to get to Osaka Station above ground, and SNCF builds peripheral stations for small towns to avoid expensive urban construction; in neither case do trains pass by a CBD but stop elsewhere, and in both countries HSR builders make major effort when reasonably practical to serve city centers.
High- and Low-Speed Rail Coordination
The debate about what kind intercity rail to build tends to be either/or. On one side, there’s HSR-only advocacy: this represents the attitude of SNCF, especially in the earlier years of the TGV, and such American HSR proponents as John Mica. In this view, legacy rail is inherently slow and money-losing and the best that can be done is to start fresh; generally, this view also looks down on integration with legacy regional rail. On the other side, there’s a legacy-only advocacy, which represents how Britain upgraded its intercity rail network in and after the 1970s and also the attitude of proponents of Amtrak-plus lines in the US.
The problem with this is that there are a lot of different markets out there, and the service levels they justify and the construction challenges they impose are different. Sometimes such markets are in the same general area, and this means some lines should be HSR and some should be upgraded low-speed rail.
Countries that tried to go to one extreme of this debate are now learning the hard way that they need to do both. Britain radically optimized its intercity main lines, which now have the highest average speed in the world except for HSR – but it needs more, and this requires it to build a new HSR line at immense cost. In the other direction, France’s TGV-only strategy is slowly changing. SNCF still doesn’t care about legacy intercity lines, but the regions are investing in regional rail, and one region even uses the high-speed line for local service. Japan gets away with neglecting most of the intercity lines because its physical and political geography is such that markets that can support HSR dominate, but other countries cannot.
This means that best network design is going to have to deal with both approaches’ political difficulties at the same time. Upgrading legacy rail means upgrading legacy rail operating practices, against opposition of workers and managers who are used to old and inefficient ways of doing things. And building HSR on the thickest markets means giving special treatment to some regions with infrastructure that other regions don’t justify; it’s economically solid, but the optics of this are poor.
But the advantage of doing it this way from the start is that it’s more future-proof, and allows integrated design in terms of schedules, which lines are upgraded, how cities are connected, and so on.
Doing it piecemeal may require redoing a connection along a different alignment. The issue is that HSR compresses travel times along the line only. It’s like urban rapid transit this way, or for that matter like the air network. A legacy rail system (or a national highway system, or urban buses) has fairly consistent average speed. This means that in a combined system, the optimal path between two cities may not be the shortest path, in case one is close to the HSR trunks.
For example, look at Upstate New York. None of its four major metro areas is large enough to justify a high-speed connection to New York by itself, but all four combined do. Although international service to Toronto is overrated, it could be justifiable in light of Buffalo’s relative economic integration with Ontario and also the mostly straight, partially grade-separated right-of-way available in Canada; this would further thicken the market.
If we draw a rudimentary map of other desired connections, none thick enough to warrant more than an upgraded low-speed train, the fastest connections are not always obvious. For example, with average HSR speed of 240 km/h and legacy rail speed of 100 km/h, it’s faster to get from New York to Ithaca via Syracuse than directly via Binghamton. This is why the connection to Ithaca is through a line that points toward Syracuse, even if it’s not the shortest route to Binghamton. It’s one of many small local optimization problems.
More interestingly, we get a mini-hub in Syracuse. Although it’s the smallest of the four main Upstate cities, it lies at the junction of the trunk line and lines to Binghamton and Watertown, and also has secondary cities at the right location for regional rail. (The largest comparable secondary city near Rochester is Geneva, which happens to be close to and have a good rail connection to I-90, a prime candidate for HSR corridor; thus it should get commuter service using the trunk line, which would be far faster than an all-legacy train.) This means that schedules should be set up to coordinate transfers in Syracuse.
This is a normal way to set things up in an all-legacy format, as is done in Switzerland, but it can equally apply to HSR. The construction challenges on the Empire Corridor are nowhere near as complex as those in California, Pennsylvania, and other truly mountainous states, but they’re still nontrivial. But now that we know that Syracuse should be a hub, one answer to the question “How many design compromises to make to reduce costs?” is “Build just enough to allow integrated transfers in both New York and Syracuse.”
(In practice this means HSR arriving in Syracuse on the hour and in New York whenever convenient. The main intercity line into New York is the Northeast Corridor, a very thick market that at HSR speed would have enough traffic to support show-up-and-go frequency. This is not true of lines serving Syracuse; Watertown is not Washington and Binghamton is not Boston.)
The main cost of doing things this way is political. It requires willingness to both prioritize markets and cut construction costs, as necessary to build HSR, and improve legacy rail operating practices and carefully integrate services, as necessary to build a working legacy rail network. The fiscal cost is not outrageous – those legacy lines are cheap relative to everything else (rebuilding the unelectrified New York-Scranton line is $550 million), and HSR on thicker markets will at least partially pay for itself.
Once we discard the notion that present-day Amtrak operating patterns are adequate, the question stops being about whether one trusts Amtrak or not, and purely about how to build a new transportation network. And then the correct answer to “High-speed or legacy?” is “Both, seamlessly integrated with each other.”
The Cost of Heavy Freight Trains
Over at Pennsylvania HSR, Samuel Walker reminds us that the dominance of coal for US freight traffic slows down passenger trains, and this has a social cost in addition to the direct costs of coal mining and burning. But another post of his, regarding cant deficiency, suggests more problems coming from mixing modern passenger trains with very heavy freight. Coal trains slow all other traffic in three different ways, of which just one is the conventional schedule conflict, and even that means more than just slowing down intercity trains.
Schedule conflict reduces not just speed, but also span and punctuality. The Northstar Line in Minnesota shares track with BNSF’s Northern Transcon; since the line is freight-primary, there’s no room for off-peak service, and passenger trains can’t extend to the line’s natural terminus in St. Cloud, not without constructing additional tracks. Similarly, in Houston, plans for a commuter line to Galveston included peak-only service from the start.
Second, independently of scheduling, slow trains force faster trains to slow down by limiting the amount of superelevation that can be used. As a reminder: on curves, they bank the track, with the outer rail above the inner rail, to partly counter centrifugal force. If they do not cant the train enough, there’s cant deficiency; if they cant too much, there’s cant excess. Although there are strict limits for cant excess (in Sweden, 100 mm, or 70 on tighter curves), stricter than for cant deficiency (150 mm for a non-tilting passenger train, give or take), technically commuter trains could safely run at higher cant excess; however, for freight trains, high cant excess is unsafe because loads could shift, and the higher axle load means trains would chew up the inner track. Very heavy trains first require the track to have a lower minimum speed, and second have an even more limited cant excess because of the damage they’d cause to the track (about 2″, or 50 mm, in US practice). Walker links to a US standard guideline that uniformly assumes 3″ cant; greenfield high-speed lines go up to 180-200 mm.
And third, heavy freight trains damage tracks regardless. Coal trains also limit the amount of revenue the railroad gets out of each train, leaving limited money for maintenance, and are not time-sensitive, giving railroads no reason to perform adequate maintenance. To compensate, industry practices have to be less than perfect: cant and cant deficiency are less than the maximum permitted by right-of-way geometry and minimum speed, and freight railroads require barriers between their track and passenger track to protect from inevitable freight derailments. Even then the US safety level is well below what’s achieved anywhere else in the world with trustworthy statistics.
Of course, coal provides a great boon to the freight railroads. It’s a captive market. The railroads could price out coal and focus on higher-value intermodal traffic. Some of the lines that already focus on intermodal traffic are friendlier to passenger service, such as the FEC.
However, realistically, the end of coal is only going to come from environmental regulations. Those same regulations would apply to oil, inducing a mode shift from trucks to rail. The coal trains that would stop running would be replaced by trains carrying higher-value goods. The details depend on what the purpose and kind of environmental regulations are, but today’s environmental movement is heavily focused on climate change and not as concerned with local environmental justice, so loss of coal traffic due to a high carbon tax or local air pollution tax, both of which would also affect oil and gas, is much likelier than loss of coal traffic due to restrictions on mountaintop removal and air quality regulations at mining sites, which would not. (Of course oil causes plenty of damage to the biosphere, but the mainstream environmental movement is much more concerned with effects on humans than on other organisms.)
The political issue at hand, besides the easy to explain but hard to implement matter of avoiding catastrophic climate change, is what freight railroads are used to. Their entire business model is geared toward relatively low-value goods. A steep carbon tax is a risk: it should raise their mode share of total value of goods transported, which is currently 4% (see also figure 4.3 here), but it would come from a new set of goods, with requirements and challenges different from those of the current mix. The railroads would have to reintroduce fast freight, which most haven’t run in decades, and refine it to deal with the needs of shippers today. It’s not only a headache for the managers, but also a substantial risk of failure – perhaps rival railroads would be able to get all the traffic because they’d adapt to the new market faster, perhaps shippers would change their factory placement to move goods over shorter distances, perhaps they would not be able to cope with the immediate increase in fuel costs, etc.
Because of this, freight railroads may end up fighting a policy that would most likely benefit them. Although they represent a critical part of an emission reduction strategy, and are all too happy to point out that they consume much less fuel than trucks, fuel is a major cost to them, and coal is big business for them. These are not tech startups; these are conservative businesses that go back to the 19th century. Heavy coal trains then add a political cost as well: they help turn an industry that could be a major supporter of climate change legislation neutral or hostile to the idea.
Table of Train Weights
Here are some trains, and their weights. The headline figure is weight per linear meter of length, but also includes other metrics of interest. Not included is any feature of interior design, such as the number of seats or the number and location of doors, as those reflect choices about seated vs. standing capacity and about the relative importance of quick boarding and alighting.
Most trains on the list are low-speed commuter trains, but a few are high-speed. All are EMUs, except for high-speed trains with dedicated power cars and two DMUs that are included for comparison. All are single-deck except the TGV Duplex, which is as light as a single-deck TGV.
All figures are in metric units. Length and width are in meters, weight in tons, and (short-term) power in megawatts. Load is the average weight in tons per axle; it is not the same as the axle load, which is the maximum loaded weight per axle. To the best of my ability, I’ve tried to give dry weights, without passengers, though I believe the N700 Shinkansen number is with passengers.
For English units, 1 metric ton per linear meter equals 0.336 short tons per linear foot.
| Train | Lng | Wt | Width | Pow | P/W | Ld | Wt/lng |
| E231 Series | 200 | 256 | 2.95 | 1.52 | 5.9 | 6.4 | 1.28 |
| E231 Series motor | 20 | 28.5 | 2.95 | 0.38 | 13.3 | 7.1 | 1.43 |
| DBAG Class 423 | 67.4 | 105 | 3.02 | 2.35 | 22.4 | 10.5 | 1.56 |
| Talgo AVRIL | 200 | 315 | 3.2 | 8.8 | 27.9 | 15 | 1.57 |
| E233 Series | 200 | 319 | 2.95 | 3.36 | 10.5 | 8 | 1.59 |
| FLIRT, Swiss | 74 | 120 | 2.88 | 2.6 | 21.7 | 12 | 1.62 |
| A-Train, Japan (E257) | 185.5 | 306 | 2.95 | 2.9 | 9.5 | 8.5 | 1.65 |
| Desiro Classic | 41.7 | 69 | 2.83 | 0.55 | 8 | 11.5 | 1.65 |
| E751 Series motor | 20.5 | 34 | 2.98 | 0.58 | 17 | 8.5 | 1.66 |
| DBAG Class 425 | 67.5 | 114 | 2.84 | 2.35 | 20.6 | 11.4 | 1.69 |
| FLIRT, Finnish | 75 | 132 | 3.2 | 2.6 | 19.7 | 13.2 | 1.76 |
| N700 Series | 405 | 715 | 3.36 | 17.08 | 23.9 | 11.2 | 1.77 |
| CAF Regional | 98 | 175 | 2.94 | 2.4 | 13.7 | 14.6 | 1.79 |
| E351 Series | 252 | 456 | 2.84 | 3.6 | 7.9 | 9.5 | 1.81 |
| BR Class 357 | 83 | 158 | 2.8 | 1.68 | 10.7 | 9.9 | 1.9 |
| TGV Duplex | 200 | 380 | 2.9 | 8.8 | 23.2 | 14.6 | 1.9 |
| X60 | 107 | 206 | 3.26 | 3 | 14.6 | 14.7 | 1.93 |
| Coradia Cont., 4 cars | 71 | 140 | 2.92 | 2.88 | 20.6 | 14 | 1.97 |
| Francilien (SNCF Z 50000), 8 cars | 112.5 | 235 | 3.06 | 2.62 | 11.1 | 13.1 | 2.09 |
| Zefiro 380 | 215 | 462 | 3.4 | 10 | 21.6 | 14.4 | 2.15 |
| A-Train, UK HSR (BR 395) | 121 | 265 | 2.81 | 3.36 | 12.7 | 11 | 2.19 |
| LIRR M-7 | 26 | 57.5 | 3.2 | 0.8 | 13.9 | 14.4 | 2.21 |
| Velaro CN | 200 | 447 | 3.27 | 8.8 | 19.7 | 14 | 2.24 |
| MNRR M-8 | 26 | 65.5 | 3.2 | 0.8 | 12.2 | 16.4 | 2.52 |
| Silverliner V | 26 | 66.5 | 3.2 | 0.8? | 12? | 16.6 | 2.56 |
| Colorado Railcar, 1-level | 26 | 67 | 3.2? | 0.96 | 14.3 | 16.8 | 2.59 |
| Acela Express | 202 | 566 | 3.16 | 9.2 | 16.3 | 17.7 | 2.8 |
The table separates Japanese, European, and American trains, the latter two with hardly any overlap. I did not include too many French and British commuter trains, and those are fairly heavy by European standards, but even they are a bit lighter than the M-7, the lightest modern FRA-compliant train (British trains tend toward 2 t/m, French trains toward slightly more). I did include the lightest European trains I know of but not all the Japanese trains, selected mainly for the big Tokyo-area workhorses (E231, E233) and longer-range, higher-speed JR East trains that I thought were comparable to the needs of longer-distance American regional lines.
Eyeballing the non-American trains, I think it’s fair and unambitious to think of a train of the future that weighs 1.8 tons per meter, can achieve 15 kW/t, and is capable of 160 km/h. Multiple vendors beat that, often by a large enough margin to cushion against the slight weight increase coming from a wider loading gauge. The upshot of this is that any regulatory overhaul and regional rail revival in the US has to be coupled with a large train order replacing older, less capable trains over time, which means dropping an order for several thousand EMUs over 20 or so years. No single company can make all of these, but sharing in the order, as was done for the R160, could work.
Why Long Island Should Get An HSR Spur
Having looked into why high-speed rail from New York to Boston should go through Providence, I want to explain why it should go through New Haven, rather than through any of the fanciful Long Island routings proposed most prominently by the Penn design group. Like Hartford, Long Island should have high-speed trains use the LIRR Main Line, but at medium speed rather than high speed, and with careful consideration to the much more important needs of commuter rail.
Although the LIRR Main Line shares one characteristic with the New Haven-Springfield line, namely that it is very good for 160-200 km/h but bad for 300, the reasons are subtler and less geometric. The most visible is NIMBYism. Even increasing the traffic of existing LIRR trains raised the ire of some suburbs along the Main Line, which opposed the three-tracking project (since canceled due to budget shortfall) on the grounds that extra train traffic would reduce quality of life and that eminent domain would be required. This is not Caltrain, whose local residents do not know what electric trains sound like; this is Long Island, which has lived with these trains for generations. Introducing HSR is asking for trouble.
Of course, the same could be said about any suburb that HSR needs to pass through. Connecticut is full of NIMBYs, just like Long Island. The reasons usually given for avoiding the existing Shore Line are that it’s too developed and has too much local opposition. But those are present on Long Island, and are worse because of the higher population density. For examples, compare Westport and Cos Cob with Brentwood and Farmingdale. The LIRR offers multiple straight rights-of-way, but all are going to have the same speed limits as heavily upgraded and modified tracks on the Shore Line – 250 km/h in the better parts, and 200 in the worse parts.
The Penn design proposal is not even the best Long Island proposal, for three reasons:
1. It insists on proceeding from Penn Station to Jamaica on the Lower Montauk Line. If a connection from the line to Penn Station opens, it’ll be far more useful for local rail, while intercity rail can use the Main Line. The difference between appropriating a Manhattan-accessible Lower Montauk Line for HSR and replacing the Lexington Avenue Line with a truck tunnel is one of degree, not kind; in both cases, local passenger rail is the most valuable use of the infrastructure.
2. It departs from the Main Line to use the Hempstead Branch (necessarily eviscerating commuter service) as well as abandoned tracks through endless residential suburbs, full of urban grade crossings. The Main Line has grade crossings and would need to be four-tracked, but the local NIMBYs actually supported grade separation, and multi-tracking at least could be sold as the local transit improvement project that it is.
3. Last and worst, it sharply veers north after stopping at Ronkonkoma, along a curve whose radius judging by the alignment map is around 900 meters (=150 km/h if superelevation and cant deficiency are set at normal HSR levels, or 170 km/h at cutting-edge levels). Then it crosses the Long Island Sound at its widest, so that it adds more than 20 kilometers to the New York-New Haven route length over the Shore Line, all at medium speed.
A route similar to the Penn design route but using the more feasible Main Line alignment would be 9 minutes slower than the optimal Shore Line route – 41 versus 32 minutes – with stops at Jamaica and Hicksville, enforced by unfixable track curvature near the stations. But in addition to the extra travel time, fixing the alignment through New Rochelle, Darien, and Bridgeport is far cheaper than a long undersea tunnel. A better Long Island route would follow the Main Line to the end and tunnel near Greenport, trading deeper waters for shorter tunneling and a route length comparable to that of the optimal Shore/I-95 alignment, so it could achieve a comparable trip time. But even that’s unneeded: it’s 15 km of deep tunneling, whereas if one is willing to slightly compromise on trip times, the only Connecticut tunneling required for a Shore Line fix is 3 km in Bridgeport.
The other problem is what to do about commuter service. The Providence Line’s traffic level is low enough and its average interstation is long, allowing a blended plan. Shared tracks between New Rochelle and Penn Station would see more commuter traffic, but intercity trains would go slower anyway, and there is more room for four-tracking. The Ronkonkoma Branch’s 10-minute peak service requires at least one overtake between Hicksville and Ronkonkoma and probably two, in addition to four-tracking the Main Line; this is feasible, but less than optimal, and the overtakes would have to be constructed in more constrained locations than those available on the Providence Line. East of Ronkonkoma commuter service may need to be cut, but this is less of a problem on account of its low traffic. On the other hand, the Main Line west of Hicksville is not a problem with four tracks, and neither is the New Haven Line – express commuter trains could weave in and out.
On the benefits side, offering Long Island service to Boston that doesn’t go through New York is better than not doing so. However, the difference in benefits with New Haven, while positive, is smaller than it seems. The New Haven Line has almost as much ridership as the LIRR Main Line, and Stamford is a bigger edge city than Mineola and Garden City. On top of that, since the optimal LIRR option connects to the Shore Line in the far east of Connecticut, there is no hope for service to Hartford except on legacy track. On balance, the advantage of the LIRR option is just service to Jamaica, a larger draw than those smaller cities and suburbs, but there the time saving is the smallest.
On top of that, does such a small benefit really justify the cost? Having some high-speed trains run through to Jamaica, Mineola, Hicksville, and Ronkonkoma at lower speed requires re-electrifying the LIRR with catenary, which is a fraction of the cost of all those urban grade separations and 1-2 order of magnitude cheaper than an undersea tunnel and land connections. On a similar note, since half an undersea tunnel is of no use, it’s harder to break construction into small chunks if it is necessary, putting it at a disadvantage against a route consisting of cutoffs and modifications of the existing line. The route of 1834 may work now that we can build tunnels, but the cost structure favors that of 1846 and 1852.
High-Speed Rail Should Serve Providence
The most straightforward part of constructing greenfield tracks for high-speed rail on the Northeast Corridor is east of New Haven. There are good legacy lines to hook into, and good Interstate corridors to follow when the legacy lines are too curvy. It’s also the segment with the biggest variation in alignment options, which boil down to going through Hartford and going through Providence. Both the Penn design proposal and the Amtrak proposal go through Hartford and avoid Providence, and this is a bad idea, for both costs and benefits reasons.
See here for a very early and rough draft of my HSR map, which goes through Providence; there are significant issues with this map west of New Haven, but it’s fairly accurate east of Haven. It uses I-95 between New Haven and the state line, and transitions to the legacy line around Kingston; Hartford would be served on the legacy line, which would be electrified. I have not seen detailed drawings of Amtrak’s proposal, but here is the detailed Penn design map, going through Hartford: the idea is to use a combination of I-91 and a heavily upgraded legacy line, and then transition to I-84 in Hartford and then I-90, while retaining the Shore Line for slower service to Providence. The latter option turns out to be inferior, essentially because full HSR is easier to build through Providence whereas a medium-speed branch is easier to build to Hartford.
First, the cost side. Because the portions of the Shore Line used by the Providence option are straight and already built to high standards, minimal upgrade work is required there. The bulk of the cost would be constructing high-speed track along a mostly flat, not very developed right-of-way, with two and a half painful segments (New London, the cutoff east of New Haven, and the Connecticut River crossing as the half). East of New London the median is available, cutting costs further. All in all, this is 125 km of largely at-grade track, and about 60 km of cheap electrification to Hartford.
Going through Hartford is about equally hard. The New Haven-Springfield line is built to low-speed standards, with grade crossings and curves that are good for 200 km/h rather than 300. It avoids the river crossings of I-95, but I-84 and I-90 are a bit curvier and follow more rugged and urbanized terrain, and the urban segment through Hartford looks harder than that through and immediately east of New Haven. Per kilometer it could cost about the same, but 200 km of new track are required.
The costs by themselves are not a huge deal. The New York-New Haven segment requires new grade-separated junctions, multiple bypasses, and some urban tunneling. In contrast, mostly at-grade track costs $20 million per kilometer or not much more, so despite the large difference in length, the difference in cost is about $2.5 billion vs. $4 billion.
However, there’s also a constructability argument for I-95, which is that it can be done in segments more easily, using portions of the Shore Line before the full line opens. This could be useful if money were made available in very small chunks. The Hartford route could be done partly on an electrified Springfield line, but Hartford-Boston has to be done in one go.
But a bigger issue is that going through Providence has two advantages over going through Hartford without regards to costs. First, Providence is a larger city than Hartford: its metro area is about 20% larger than Hartford’s, and the central city is 40% larger and denser. Although the Hartford option passes near Worcester, there is no way to bring a station into Worcester itself without excessive tunneling; the Penn design plan puts the station at the edge of the built-up area, 7 kilometers from downtown Worcester. The Providence option passes through much smaller New London, but it can at least be served by a station that’s within the city, one km from the present station.
The other advantage is how to serve the city that does not get to be on the HSR mainline. The Springfield line is easy to upgrade, since it is straight enough for medium speed, and grade crossing protection good for about 180 km/h is relatively cheap. This would give Hartford very good service to New York – about half an hour to New Haven, and a little more than another half an hour to New York. The Shore Line in contrast is curvy and slow and already has a fair amount of superelevation and cant deficiency, making future upgrades much harder. Providence would still get better trip times than today coming from better rolling stock and higher speeds west of New Haven, but better trip times than about 1:45 to New York are only possible with trains with high degree of tilt, which tend to be a maintenance nightmare.
For the record, my original proposal above is from 2009, and I only accepted my current job at Brown in 2011. However, in the interest of full disclosure, by 2009 I already knew that Brown had one of the best departments in my field, whereas Hartford doesn’t have a research university of comparable quality. I don’t think it biased my choice – the idea of following the present alignments and serving present lines as much as possible appears elsewhere in the plan as well as in my regional rail proposals for New York and Boston – but then again nobody thinks their own choices are biased.
Update on the Grapevine (Hoisted from Comments)
Put a fork in the idea of saving a few billions of dollars on California High-Speed Rail by switching from the Palmdale alignment to the I-5 alignment through the Grapevine. The HSR Authority conducted a new study and found that, after fiddling with the parameters to create the maximally bad result for the Grapevine alignment, the Grapevine alignment does not save money. Go to page 39-40 to see how convoluted the studied Grapevine option is. This is driven not by geotechnical considerations, but by political ones: the owners of Tejon Ranch, which covers much of the area of study, oppose HSR through their property. Even so, the base cost of the Grapevine is $13.5 billion, versus $15 billion for Palmdale; this difference was papered over by fudging a risk adjustment factor. As commenter Jon explains,
Having skimmed through the study, a few points come to mind:
1) The length of the I-5 route has increased largely due to the requirement to diverge from the current route east of Bakersfield rather than bypass Bakersfield to the west. I’m sure this requirement is driven by a desire to get the Frseno – Bakersfield EIR/EIS certified in time to start construction on the ICS. What would the effect of a west Bakersfield bypass be on the cost and travel time of an I-5 route?
2) The cheapest and fastest I-5 route bisected the proposed Tejon Ranch, but the study didn’t take this route forward to detailed analysis. Instead they analyzed a ‘considerably more expensive and slower’ route which cuts right through Lebec, in order to avoid the ‘significant cost and schedule risk’ involved in bisecting the Tejon Ranch. How fast and expensive would the I-5 route through the Tejon Ranch have been? How difficult would it be to permit this route?
3) Also the risk adjustment to account for the 5% design- this seems to be an obvious fudge. You can see everything they changed in Appendix B. What is the justification for increasing the risk allocation for real estate from 20% to 40%, for example?
Despite the potentially large cost difference, the HSR Authority is loathe to use eminent domain, even when the cost is much smaller than the alternative. Something similar happened in the Central Valley, when the initial plan to hew to existing transportation corridors became untenable as it became clear it would require many viaducts and grade separations, and only after value engineering has the cost overrun been limited by running around unserved cities. With a less positive result, it’s happened repeatedly on the Peninsula, for example with the substandard San Bruno grade separation project.
The problem here is that no value engineering is possible unless the I-5 option is kept open. Thus it’s important for us as good transit activists to demand that the HSR Authority engineer both options to learn more about the risk, allowing eventually for the cheapest and most reliable option to be picked.
Pedestrian Observations 