Category: High-Speed Rail
Defrauding the Public on European Rail Profits
Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield) penned an op-ed defending his attempt to strip California high-speed rail of all funding. In the usual litany of complaints about the deficit, he referenced a 2008 study by Amtrak’s Office of Inspector General claiming that European passenger railroads lose money but keep those losses off-books. The study is fraudulent. It does not specify a methodology, which means it’s hard to pinpoint where exactly the numbers don’t match actual reality; however, some hints are provided by the following claim:
1. Public Funding to the Train Operating Companies may be accounted for as revenue, and
2. Public Funding to the Infrastructure Managers enables them to charge “user fees” to the Train Operating Companies that may be significantly lower than the actual infrastructure maintenance expenses.
Ad 1, it is not difficult to separate transport income from public funding. The balance sheets often state the source of income clearly. Most public funding comes from operating regional trains under contract, which SNCF and DB keep separate from their core intercity business, which is profitable. A minority of public funding is subsidies for social services, for example state-mandated discounts to active-duty troops, the elderly, and the unemployed; a libertarian would instantly recognize such mandates as taxes and deduct them from the subsidies. See for example page 30 of SNCF’s books, which clearly shows the majority of public funding (not counting RFF, which is nominally private) is from local sources, for operating commuter rail.
It is true that regional rail is heavily subsidized in Europe, but the same is true in the US. But in the US there’s far less national railroad involvement in commuter rail than in Europe, so comparing Amtrak to every train that has an SNCF logo is disingenuous. Worse, the study picks and chooses which Amtrak trains to compare European trains to: it ignores the long-distance trains, and in one figure (p. 13) only compares the Northeast Corridor to European networks and ignores the state-supported corridors, organizationally the closest thing to the TER or DB Regio in the US.
Ad 2, the choice of how to set the track access fees is a political one, and often the political choice is to set the access fees high. In France, in anticipation of open access RFF has recently raised tolls to far above track maintenance costs, effectively moving all French rail profits from SNCF to RFF and preventing competing companies from making a profit on the popular Paris-Lyon segment. Even in 2006, the toll on Paris-Lyon was €14.60 per train-km, the highest of all European lines although, because it has the most traffic, its maintenance cost should be the lowest per train-km.
A 2008 study of the costs and benefits of HSR in Europe published by the OECD and International Transport Forum finds that the maintenance costs per single-track-km in Europe average €30,000. This is €82 per single-track-km per day; to find the appropriate cost per train-km, divide by the number of daily trains in each direction. The LGV Sud-Est’s 2006 tolls would cover that average maintenance cost in just six daily runs; maximum frequency on the line is ten trains per direction per hour. Of the five or six lines on the list of rail links and their tolls that are HSR, the average toll is €10 per train-km. Of course this excludes depreciation and interest, but at least on the LGV Sud-Est, depreciation is quite low since the line was cheap to construct, and the construction bonds have already been paid. SNCF’s complaint that it’s being milked by tolls far above maintenance costs seems correct.
Of course, RFF’s books are more than just maintenance costs. They’re also debt accumulated by SNCF when it was run far less efficiently than today. Much like with JNR, this debt may have to be absorbed by the state, leading to predictable claims of subsidies. In reality, all this would do would be retroactively subsidize losses from decades ago. This is exactly what happened with JNR: the state absorbed the debt coming from operating losses, but required the JR companies to take over the Shinkansen construction debt, see pp. 46 and 88 of this document on privatization.
That this study has been picked up by Heritage, Reason (p. 7), and others as evidence that high-speed rail will lose money is not surprising – those organizations are paid by industry groups including the Koch Brothers and Reason spreads disinformation about trains – but for Amtrak to mislead the people who are footing its bill is inexcusable. It is probably not a matter of incompetence. Amtrak’s claim that every railroad in the world receives public funds is very unlikely to be an honest mistake. Claiming that Japan absorbed Shinkansen debt could be an honest mistake – I only found the aforementioned privatization document while looking for sources for my privatization post. But claiming that SNCF keeps public funding hidden from view when in fact it clearly states it receives regional funding for regional rail requires actively searching for reasons to tar SNCF. The alternative possibility that Amtrak included commuter rail in the calculation merely turns Amtrak’s claim from an outright lie to intentional misleading.
Amtrak’s Office of the Inspector General most likely knows what it’s doing. Nominally it’s independent of Amtrak, but if Amtrak dies, it will have nobody to supervise. Amtrak is losing money when its peer first-world railroads make money, it’s under siege by Republicans who point to those losses as a reason to private and dismember it, and it has no intention of reforming. The only way out of this conundrum is to defraud the public about peer first-world railroad practices, and I believe that this is exactly what the OIG did here. Amtrak’s existing services are sufficiently well-patronized that they have special interests behind them; therefore, feeding Reason’s propaganda is not an existential threat. But House Transportation Committee Chair John Mica’s calls for fundamental change could resonate with Republicans and moderate Democrats, and this could mean the end of Amtrak. It’s rational to lie to the public that it’s impossible to do better.
What is not rational is public acceptance of this. Heads should have rolled about this document. All involved should have resigned or been fired. Mica should have suspected shenanigans and invited both the authors of the study and officials from SNCF and DB for a hearing. Amtrak proper of course embraces the results and continues along its merry way, but I expect no better from it anymore. What I do expect is that the public in general and rail advocates in particular will be as livid as I am about being defrauded.
Disappointment 2050
The political transit bloggers are talking about the new RPA/America 2050 report on high-speed rail published by the Lincoln Institute, which recommends a focus on the Northeast and California. Unfortunately, this is not an accurate description of the report. Although it does indeed propose to start with the Northeast and California, that’s not the focus of the report; instead, the focus is to argue that HSR is everything its boosters claim it is and then some more, and demand more money for HSR, from whatever source.
Look more closely at the section proposing to focus on New York and California. Although the authors say the US should prioritize, minimal argument was offered for why these are the best options. The report shows the map from the RPA’s study on the subject, which proposes a few other priorities and isn’t that good to begin with (it grades cities on connecting transit based on which modes they have, not how much they’re used). But it says nothing more; I’d have been interested to hear about metro area distribution questions as discussed on pages 113-5 in Reinhard Clever’s thesis and pp. 10-11 of his presentation on the same topic, and alignment and regional rail integration questions such as those discussed by the much superior Siemens Midwest study, but nothing like that appears in this report.
The report then pivots to the need to come up with $40 billion for California and $100 billion for the Northeast Corridor, under either the RPA’s gold-plated plan or Amtrak’s equally stupid Vision. The RPA first came up with the idea of spending multiple billions on brand new tunnels under Philadelphia, which was then copied by the Vision, and wants trains to go through Long Island to New Haven through an undersea tunnel. Clearly, cost-effectiveness is not the goal. Since the methodology of finding the best routes is based on ridership per km, offering a gold-plated plan is the equivalent of trying to connect much longer distances without a corresponding increase in ridership, which goes against the original purpose of the RPA study.
Together with the neglect of corridors that scored high on the RPA’s study but have not had official high-speed rail proposals costing in the tens of billions (the SNCF proposal and the above-mentioned Siemens report are neither official nor affiliated with the RPA), the conclusion is not favorable. The most charitable explanation is that the RPA was looking for an official vehicle to peddle its own Northeast HSR plan but actually believes it has merit. The least charitable is that the RPA wants to see spending on HSR megaprojects regardless of cost-effectiveness.
The treatment of other issues surrounding HSR is in line with a booster mentality, in which more is always better. Discussing station placement, the report talks about the development benefits that come from downtown stations and the lack of benefit coming from exurban stations, as nearly all stations on LGVs are. It does not talk about the tradeoff in costs and benefits; others have done so, for example the chief engineer of Britain’s High Speed 2, who also talks about other interesting tradeoffs such as speed versus capacity versus reliability, but the report prefers to just boost the most expensive plan.
More specifically, the report contrasts CBD stations, suburban stations, and exurban stations. In reality, many stations are outside the CBD but still in the urban core with good transit connections, such as Shin-Osaka, Lyon Part-Dieu, and 30th Street Station, but those are implicitly lumped with beet field stations. This helps make spending billions on tunnels through Philadelphia, as both the RPA and Amtrak propose, look prudent, when in reality both Japan and France are happy to avoid urban tunneling and instead build major city stations in conveniently urban neighborhoods. In fact, Japan’s own boosters and lobbyists crow about the development around such stations.
In line with either view of the report’s purpose, the literature it studies is partial. Discussing the effect of HSR on development, it quotes a study about the positive effect of HSR on small towns in Germany on the Cologne-Frankfurt line, but not other studies done in other countries. For example, in Japan, the effect of the Shinkansen on the Tohoku and Joetsu regions was decidedly mixed. The report also quotes the positive story of Lille’s TGV-fueled redevelopment, which was not replicated anywhere else in France, where cities just passively waited for infrastructure to rescue them. But instead of talking about Lille’s program of redevelopment, the report contrasts it with failed development cases in cities with exurban stations, never mind that no city achieved what Lille did, even ones with downtown stations, like Marseille. It’s not quite a Reason-grade lie, but it’s still very misleading.
Finally, the section about how to fund the $100 billion Northeast system and California’s $43 billion starter line has suggestions that are so outlandish they defy all explanation. The authors propose the following:
1. Raise the gas tax by 15 cents a gallon or more. Several cents could be devoted to passenger rail.
2. Add a $1 surcharge on current passenger rail tickets to produce approximately $29 million annually.
3. Shift from a national gas tax to a percentage tax on crude oil and imported refined petroleum products. RAND estimated that an oil tax of 17 percent would generate approximately $83 billion a year. Five billion dollars of this amount could be dedicated to passenger rail.
Of these, proposal #2 is by far the stupidest. Amtrak receives subsidies; to tax tickets is to propose shifting some change from the left pocket to the right pocket. Why not go ahead and propose to reduce Amtrak’s subsidy by the same amount and require it to raise fares or improve efficiency?
But proposals #1 and 3 are equally bad. Wedding train funding to a steady stream of gas taxes has been the status quo for decades; the result is that APTA is so used to this unholy marriage that it opposed a climate change bill that would tax gas without diverting the funds back to transportation. (That by itself should be reason for good transit advocates to dismiss APTA as a hostile organization, just one degree less malevolent than Reason and Cato and one degree less obstructionist than the FRA.) And if it were a wise long-term choice, if it were politically feasible to add to the gas tax just to build competing trains, the US political climate would look dramatically different, and instead of talking about focus, we’d be talking about how to extend the under-construction Florida HSR line.
A report that was serious about a mode shift from cars to cleaner forms of transportation would not talk about 15 cents per gallon; it would talk in terms of multiple dollars per gallon, as gas is taxed in Europe and high-income Asia. The best explanation I can think of for the funding mechanisms is that the RPA has internalized the tax-as-user-fee model of ground transportation, one that has never worked for cars despite the AAA’s pretense otherwise and that won’t work for anything else.
The overall tone of the report slightly reminds me of Thomas MacDonald’s Highway Education Board, with its industry-sponsored “How Good Roads Help the Religious Life of My Community” essay contests. It reminds me of Thomas Friedman’s “win, win, win, win, win” columns even more – which is unsurprising since I think of Friedman as the archetypal booster – but when this boosterism applies not to a policy preference but to spending very large amounts of public money, I begin to suspect that it’s advertising rather than optimism. Friedman for all his faults crows about American and Indian entrepreneurs inventing new things rather than about extracting $100 billion from the Northeast to pay for unnecessary greenfield tunneling.
Therefore, good transit activists should dismiss this report, and avoid quoting it as evidence that prioritizing is necessary. This was not what the RPA was preaching back when it thought it could get away with proposing more, and the rest of the report is so shoddy it’s not a reliable source of analysis. There may be other reasons to focus on those corridors, but the RPA did not argue them much, instead preferring to literally go for big bucks.
Quick Note: California HSR Could Save $4 Billion on the Grapevine
California HSR’s just-released July progress report, as reported on bakersfield.com, contains the pleasant surprise that switching the alignment from the Tehachapis and Palmdale to the I-5 alignment on the Grapevine could save $4 billion.
Furthermore, the study indicating such cost savings “identified more than one feasible alignment over the mountain pass.” The Grapevine option was rejected in 2005 because the preliminary engineering found only one feasible alignment that crosses known faults at-grade and has a maximum tunnel length of 6 miles and maximum 3.5% grade, compared with hundreds through the Tehachapis. Therefore finding multiple alignments, such that even if further meter-scale geological studies discover new faults then some option will make it through, is likely to tilt the field back toward the Grapevine.
Robert Cruickshank is surprisingly pessimistic about the Grapevine, on the grounds that Palmdale is an important market to serve. In reality, Palmdale is a small commuter market – i.e. it has a strong peak and low revenue per rider – so giving it up is a small deal, probably fully canceled out by the gain of about 10 minutes’ trip time on the shorter Grapevine.
But most importantly, it’s most important to get an initial operable segment ready, and this means connecting the Central Valley to the LA Basin. As I’ve explained before, a major advantage of the Grapevine is that it allows connecting to the legacy Metrolink line at Santa Clarita rather than at Palmdale, avoiding tens of kilometers of sharp curves on the climb between the LA Basin and Antelope Valley.
I’m unable to find the progress report, so I don’t know to what extent “$4 billion in savings” literally means coming in $4 billion under budget. If it does, it means that theoretically, the money available suffices to build from Los Angeles to a point between Bakersfield and Fresno; Obama’s now-moribund $4 billion for HSR, matched 50:50, would be more than enough to build from Los Angeles to Fresno.
Update: here is the progress report. The relevant section is on page 27. It says only that “an alternative via the Grapevine may save between $1B and $4B in capital cost” – still unclear whether it means coming $1-4 billion under budget, or staying within budget while avoiding a $1-4 billion cost overrun on the Tehachapis.
It’s too bad the approximate amount remains unclear. The required budget is on the same order as the amount that may become available in the next two years depending on Congressional machinations, and so it’s important for California to know how much it should be asking for. For example, if it were made clear that an additional $2.5 billion in federal funding were enough to complete LA-Fresno, then Dianne Feinstein might try to include the full amount for high-speed rail in the transportation bill for 2012 rather than just $100 million.
Obama Proposes $4 Billion for HSR
President Obama’s new jobs bill includes $50 billion for infrastructure construction, including $10 billion for an infrastructure bank, $4 billion for high-speed rail, and $2 billion for Amtrak. Assuming it can get past the Republican Congress and that it will not be watered down as it already has been since the beginning of the year, the question arises: where to spend the money?
Fortunately, the separate grant for Amtrak suggests that the Northeast Corridor will be funded from a separate pile of money. This means that it’s more feasible to spend 100% of the HSR money in California. I claim that, in light of California’s present funding situation, this is the best possible use of the money, and, furthermore, the federal government should let California know of this as soon as possible, before it lets contracts out to tender.
Recall that California’s present HSR money is sufficient to build from Bakersfield to a point between Fresno and Merced, at least in principle, as the Environmental Impact Report projects slightly higher costs. Recall further that the $8 billion that could be made available to California – Obama’s $4 billion plus matching funds from Proposition 1A – are more or less enough to build from Bakersfield to Sylmar.
More precisely, the cost estimate for Bakersfield-LA is $12.6 billion, but according to CARRD, which independently of this also thinks the cost is going to be $18.6 billion, Palmdale-Sylmar is half the cost of Palmdale-LA, and as a result adding up Bakersfield-Sylmar using the 2009 Business Plan numbers works out to just under $9 billion. The approximately $1 billion in missing funds could either be obtained from local or private sources, or diverted from the plans to build north of Fresno; the segment that goes through and north of Fresno is expected to cost $1-2 billion, and diverting all north-of-Fresno money to Bakersfield-Sylmar should suffice to build the system from Sylmar to Fresno, with a cheap electrified legacy onward connection to LA.
Alternatively, if it turns out that going from Bakersfield to the LA Basin through Tejon Pass rather than through Palmdale is cheaper, then it’s possible to terminate the line in Santa Clarita and have trains continue further south at lower speed. This is in principle possible even through Palmdale, but then the legacy segment of the line would be both longer and curvier.
In other words, by spending all possible HSR money in California now, the Obama administration can guarantee a useful initial operating segment from LA to Fresno. On the margin the benefit of this is much bigger than its share of the cost, since it makes the difference between an upgraded San Joaquins train and a Phase 0 high-speed line.
If the administration funds California in full, then people will be able to ride a fairly long segment at full speed, connecting at lower speed to a major city. Some people are still going to call this a train to nowhere until it connects to San Francisco, but fewer people will use this epithet on LA-Fresno than on Bakersfield-Merced.
The primary problem with American transportation planning is that there is no transportation policy in the US. There is an industrial policy, a jobs policy, and construction for pizzazz on both sides, as well as the joy of hippie-punching among conservatives. An open HSR segment that is not a complete cost or ridership disaster could at least blunt the hippie-punching, if not develop local expertise that could eventually lead to transportation policy. In countries where HSR is in operation, or something close enough to it, the conservatives do not oppose its construction, even quite right-wing ones such as Berlusconi and Cameron.
The worst thing that can be done is spreading the money thin. The not-really-high-speed lines funded elsewhere, or, even worse, funding to Amtrak’s massively overpriced Vision plan, can only lead to small, barely noticeable improvements, ensuring there are plenty of disaffected people to continue the treatment of intercity transportation as a cultural political football. The only place where $4 billion in federal money makes a difference between having a usable system and not having one is California, and this is the basket the administration should put its eggs in.
California High-Speed Rail Alignment Questions
The most contentious technical issue about the California High-Speed Rail project is which alignment to use to get from the Central Valley to the Bay Area. The two options are Altamont Pass, roughly paralleling 580, and Pacheco Pass, much farther to the south. A summary of all alternatives can be found on page 115 of the revised Bay Area-Central Valley EIR. For more detailed examination of the alternatives, see the old EIR: the base Altamont option is on pages 903-4, the base Pacheco option on pp. 969-70. Although Altamont is somewhat longer, the two alignments are about even on travel time from Los Angeles to San Francisco (in fact, Altamont is 2 minutes faster).
The basic tradeoff is that Pacheco is somewhat faster for LA-San Jose and serves San Jose and San Francisco on one line, while Altamont is much faster for Bay Area-Sacramento and requires less construction overall and has separate branches to San Francisco and San Jose. Overall, Altamont is superior because of its advantage for travel from the Bay Area to Sacramento and the Upper Central Valley (except Merced, whose commute ties to the Bay Area are weaker than those of Modesto and Stockton). Transit activists and environmentalists either preferred Altamont or did not have an opinion. However, San Jose didn’t want to be left on what it perceived as merely a branch, and lobbied hard for Pacheco, and as a result Pacheco became the preferred alternative; in addition, unlike the NIMBYs on the Peninsula, the NIMBYs in Pleasanton and Tracy complained about HSR early.
A third option is to go via Altamont but enter San Francisco from Oakland via a second Transbay Tube (old EIR, pp. 957-8). The EIR projected it to have the highest ridership, since it serves both San Francisco and Oakland on one branch and has the shortest LA-SF travel time. It was rejected because a second tube would be very expensive, though in fact the EIR pegs the cost of this option at a few hundred million dollars more than the base Pacheco and Altamont options; urban construction along the Caltrain line is expensive as well. In a crunch trains could continue along an electrified but not otherwise upgraded Caltrain line at lower speed, reducing cost, but by a similar token people could transfer to BART at Livermore under any Altamont option and at West Oakland under a second tube option. However, should a second tube be built anyway to relieve the near-capacity BART tube, such an option would become far and away the best, making all others redundant.
The choice of Pacheco became one of the galvanizing features of the technicals in California, who without exception preferred Altamont. To answer concerns that Bay Area-Sacramento travel has to be served, both the HSR Authority and various politicals have proposed a cure that’s worse than the disease: build a high-speed commuter overlay along Altamont (the official version) or the I-80 corridor used by Capitol Corridor trains (consensus among pro-Pacheco blog commenters, see e.g. this map with a second tube just for SF-Sacramento trains).
Pacheco itself is mildly defensible. It would arguably have been superior if Sacramento did not exist, and I-80 would have been the better alignment for SF-Sacramento service if LA did not exist. But given that LA and Sacramento both exist, Altamont’s ability to serve LA, Sacramento, and SF with just one expensive bit through the pass becomes more valuable. If Altamont is built, there would be no point in a Pacheco overlay, whose primary use would then be a frankly uncompetitive connection to Monterey. But Pacheco leads to demands for an overlay service, one that’s almost certainly too expensive to build just for Bay Area-Sacramento travel.
The Capitol Corridor, the other option for SF-Sacramento service, is too slow. With a bus connection from SF to Emeryville, the fastest service takes 2:08 from downtown SF to Sacramento. Even Pacheco beats that: express trains detouring through Gilroy and Merced will nominally take 1:53; service via Altamont is a little more than an hour . For SJ-Sacramento travel, it’s 3:05 on Amtrak and 1:24 via Pacheco. Substantial upgrades are impossible since Union Pacific owns the track and restricts passenger trains’ performance in order to remove a headache for freight operations. The remaining option is to build passenger-dedicated bypasses, at considerable cost and with little benefit over doing it right the first time.
Construction Costs, Third World Edition
It’s a commonplace that building things is cheap in third-world countries, with low wages, few labor and environmental controls, and lax regulations. The reality is quite different. The difference disappears once one makes sure to do a PPP adjustment; poor countries’ currencies are persistently undervalued relative to their PPP exchange rate, and often also relative to true market value, and this could lead to a distortion in cost structure.
Recall that in Continental Europe, a fully-underground subway line costs anywhere between $110 million and $250 million per km, removing one outlier at each end from my list. Spanish construction costs are generally much lower than the European average, with commuter tunnels coming in well under $100 million/km.
In Delhi, the Metro’s construction costs are very high. The next phase involves 108 km, of which 41 are underground and the rest elevated, and is scheduled to cost 30,000 crores. At current exchange rates this is $6.7 billion, but at the PPP rate it’s $17.6 billion, i.e. $163 million per kilometer. Such a cost is normal by European standards for a fully-underground line; it’s not normal for a line that’s majority-elevated. It is almost as expensive as mostly-above ground extensions of American lines, for example the Silver Line in Washington.
In Beijing, the subway construction costs are also higher than one would expect given low wages, but only about as high as those of Europe. Fully-underground lines are about $150 million per km: these include Line 8 Phase 2 ($2.5 billion/17 km), Line 6 Phase 1 ($4.9 billion/30 km), and Line 14 Phase 1 ($4.5 billion/30 km); the first two are confirmed to be fully underground, and while I can’t find a claim in either direction for the last, all lines it intersects are fully underground. Chinese high-speed rail costs are quite similar to European costs as well: the lines rated at 350 km/h are between $19 and 50 million per km; there’s little tunneling on most lines, but long viaducts, e.g. the $42 million/km Beijing-Shanghai HSR line is 1.2% in tunnel and 86.5% elevated.
In Baghdad, the under-construction above-ground metro line, built by Alstom, is costing $1.5 billion for 22–25 km. With a PPP adjustment, this goes up to $83-94 million/km, depending on whose report of the line’s length one believes. It’s better than India, but not especially good.
Turkey is proving itself to be the Spain of the developing world. Its construction costs are often high per kilometer, but only because Istanbul’s geography is such that lines have to cross under major bodies of water, in seismic terrain. Marmaray, a commuter rail tunnel connecting the European and Asian halves of the city, cost $3.5 billion for 13.6 km of tunnel; while the overall cost, $333 million/km after PPP conversion, is high, it must be weighed against the extreme complexity of the project. The extension of the Istanbul Metro’s M2 line going under the Golden Horn rather than the Bosporus, is $148 million/km, again with PPP conversion. In contrast, the fully underground first phase of M4 is, if I understand the reference, and that’s a big if, $40 million per km (add all three cost amounts, then convert to US dollars); when a line goes underground rather than underwater, Istanbul builds it as cheaply as Madrid. Mainline rail construction in Turkey is also inexpensive: Turkey plans to build 14,000 km of rail, with a substantial portion permitting 250 km/h speeds, for $45 billion; that’s $4 million per km.
Iranian construction costs are low as well. Tehran Metro Line 3, as usual after PPP conversion, is $61 million per km; it is two-thirds underground.
Although there are no third-world lines that have breached $500 million per km, as several first-world lines have, this is probably entirely due to the fact that India, with the highest construction costs, builds its subways mostly above ground. A fully underground Delhi Metro line will probably cost as much as one in Tokyo, despite Delhi’s much less densely built existing network.
The pattern we see here is, first, that the one country on the list following the English legal and political tradition also has English construction costs. And, second, third-world countries do not build rail more cheaply than first-world countries, after adjusting for living costs but not wages; in other words, they spend more of their income on building those lines.
While labor costs in China are lower than in Europe, so is the productivity of labor. If everything in China cost across the board less than in the first world, it would be as rich as the first world; the reason it’s not as rich is precisely that labor doesn’t go as far as in more industrialized countries. China’s rapid growth should be thought of as a process of catching up to what the developed world learned over two hundred years of industrialization that has made it so much more efficient now than it was in 1800.
MBTA-HSR Compatibility
There is going to be major investment in the Northeast Corridor, and several possibilities, including Amtrak’s NEC Master Plan, call for running trains at higher frequency and somewhat higher speeds than today on the Providence Line, and assumes electrification of commuter service. Since the line is already being used by the MBTA, which according to Amtrak is limiting the number of intercity train slots for capacity reasons, this calls for a good measure of schedule integration, based on the principle of organization before electronics before concrete.
Amtrak’s Master Plan calls for three-tracking the entire Providence Line south to Attleboro (one viaduct excepted) instead, at a cost of $464 million – $80 million in Phase 1, $384 million in Phase 2 – in addition to money spent on unnecessary expansion at South Station. Such a cost is excessive, suggesting that better MBTA-HSR compatibility is required. Full-fat HSR programs go even further and avoid the Providence Line in favor of a greenfield alignment or an I-90 alignment, instead of making use of the existing high-speed track in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. To reduce costs, a better plan would four-track short segments for passing sidings, and time the overtakes. The principle is similar to that of the blended Peninsula plan in California, in the version proposed by Clem Tillier.
In many ways, for example the metro area populations involved and the current ridership level, the Providence Line is similar to the Caltrain line. The main difference is that the Providence Line has fewer stops and therefore can expect higher average speeds. In addition, the Providence Line is straighter and passes through less developed areas, so that even today Acela trains plow it at 240 km/h, and about 330 km/h is possible with true high-speed trains and higher superelevation.
In Switzerland, trains run as fast as necessary, not as fast as possible. In this context, this means running just fast enough to meet a good clockface schedule. Boston-Providence travel time on the MBTA today is about 1:10; for a good takt, this should be cut to about 55 minutes, allowing hourly service with two trainsets and half-hourly service with four.
For the purposes of schedule symmetry and avoiding switching moves at high speed, passing segments should have four tracks rather than three when possible. Costs should be controlled by making those passing segments much shorter than the three-tracking Amtrak proposes.
Finally, the timetables proposed here are based on the following performance assumptions: regional trains have a top speed of 160 km/h, accelerate like a FLIRT (45 seconds acceleration plus deceleration penalty), have an equivalent cant of 300 mm, and dwell at stations for 30 seconds. Intercity trains accelerate like an idealized N700-I, have an equivalent cant of 375 mm, and dwell for 60 seconds. The equivalent cant is by and large unimportant; the acceleration and dwell times for regional trains are. The approach into and out of South Station has a speed limit of 70 km/h through the 90-degree curve toward Back Bay, and 100 km/h to south of the curve at Back Bay; intercity trains are limited to 200 km/h south to Readville and 250 km/h south to the Canton viaduct, and, at the southern end, 225 km/h west of the curve in Attleboro and, curves permitting, 200 km/h in Rhode Island. Regional trains turn in 5 minutes, or 4 at a minimum, and intercity trains turn in 10 minutes at a minimum. Signaling allows a headway of 2 minutes at a speed of 200 km/h and 3 minutes at higher speed, but if a regional train starts from a siding stop, it can follow a high-speed train more tightly initially, say 1 minute, still far higher than a safe stopping distance, since the spacing rapidly increases over time. Grades are ignored; the Providence Line is flat enough that they’re not an issue. Timetables should be padded 7% from the technical time.
With the above assumptions, the technical time for regional trains is 38 minutes with the present stopping pattern, which yields 41 minutes with padding; this compares with 46 minutes for the fastest Acela. Clearly, if Acela service levels remain similar to what they are today – which includes the Master Plan, which calls for a 10% reduction in Boston-New York travel time (see page 40 on the PDF linked above) – there’s no need for passing segments. To raise travel time to 55 minutes, trains should make more frequent stops, and/or run to T. F. Green Airport always. Although the speed profile of regional and intercity trains would be different, the average speed would be the same, and given that the corridor has a small number of trains per hour of each type, this mismatch is no cause for concern. The $464 million Amtrak is proposing would then be a complete waste, and the federal government should spend any money toward this goal on electrifying more MBTA lines and funding EMUs.
However, in a scenario involving a significantly improved intercity service, the best technical time for nonstop Boston-Providence service with a top speed of 300 km/h decreases to about 19 minutes (20.5 with pad), and this makes overtakes necessary. A slowdown to 250 km/h only adds about one minute of travel time, so the operating pattern is almost identical.
If 15-minute service, both regional and high-speed, is desired, then regional trains can be about 11 minutes slower between successive passing segments, since 11 = 15-3-1 or 15-2-2. A single mid-line overtake is theoretically possible: 41-20.5 = 20.5 < 2*11. However, such an overtake would have to be exactly at the midline, and, in addition, there could be merge conflicts at Providence, whose station tracks include two on the mainline and two on one side of the mainline as opposed to one on each side.
It’s still possible, but tight, to have a single overtake at Sharon. The immediate station vicinity would be four-tracked; this is no trouble, since the area around the station is undeveloped and reasonably flat. In addition, there’s more than enough time in the Providence area, making the merge conflict a lesser problem. However, this is very tight near Boston South, beyond signaling capability unless four-tracking extends a few kilometers further north. One way to counter this problem is to slow high-speed trains by making them all stop at Back Bay and/or Route 128, adding precious minutes to the schedule but reducing the speed difference. Conversely, the current weekday pattern of Providence Line trains skipping Ruggles could be made permanent. There is no room for infill stops; the overtake would only add 4 minutes to regional train travel time, so there’s time to run further to the airport at 160 km/h, and even make an extra stop at Cranston.
Another possibility is to have two overtakes, taking advantage of existing four-tracking around Attleboro. The capital costs are similar; it would require four-tracking around Route 128, possibly extending north to Readville if an on-the-fly overtake is desired. The operating complexity is much higher, since there’s one more opportunity for a late train to mess up the entire schedule. However, there is plenty of slack south of Attleboro and north of Route 128 allowing for additional stops. Under this option, the train loses 4 minutes waiting at Attleboro and about 2.5 at Readville, since the overtake is not completely on-the-fly, raising travel time to 47.5 minutes. There’s no time for airport trains, not on the same takt. However, there’s space in the schedule for 5-6 infill stops in addition to Readville; Forest Hills, Pawtucket, Central Falls, and perhaps one more in each of Boston and Providence closer to city center.
In principle, it’s possible to extend this analysis to 10-minute service, with three overtake segments, at Route 128, Sharon, and Attleboro. In practice, this is operationally cumbersome, and the operating profits coming from filling six full-length high-speed trains from New York to Boston ought to be able to pay for four-tracking the entire line, even the viaduct.
Not included in this analysis are the branches. Those are not a worry since north of Readville there are three tracks, and frequencies on the other lines are low. The Stoughton Line is a bigger problem; however, with the three tracks through Boston, it could still be shoehorned. Electrifying it should not be difficult due to its short length, though the proposed Taunton extension would make it harder.
Every Time You Justify Infrastructure on Competitiveness Grounds, A Kitten Dies
You’ve heard it before: the US is falling behind China and Europe, and has to build more infrastructure to stay competitive in the 21st century. It’s unavoidable in almost any Thomas Friedman article. Boosters, construction industry interests, and even ordinary high-speed rail supports keep asking, how can a country grow without matching other countries’ HSR investment? Never once do they stop to ask why HSR should do anything to help increase competitiveness, beyond vague promises about reducing oil dependence and carbon emissions, issues for which HSR is roughly priority #20.
Countries do not in fact compete with one another. This is made clear in Paul Krugman’s 1994 article in Foreign Affairs, Competitiveness: A Dangerous Obsession. If China builds HSR and becomes richer as a result, the US does not suffer. It’s not competing with Chinese productivity in any meaningful way. In principle, the effect on US wages could be negative if production moves to China or positive if the larger Chinese market buys more American goods; in practice, the effect of other countries’ growth on the US is negligible.
But let’s zoom in and discuss how exactly HSR, or other large infrastructure projects, could lead to more competitiveness. They could boost productivity, but that is mostly an issue for freight transportation. Passenger transportation is mainly a consumer product, not a producer product. In fact, during its own spurt of fast growth from the 1960s to 1997, South Korea lagged in building passenger transportation, explicitly because it prioritized capital investments in industry over such consumer products as highways.
International corporations looking for a place to site a new factory will not look at the general infrastructure situation; they’ll look at what’s useful to their needs. Nissan chose Smyrna, Tennessee for its plant because it had good freight rail and Interstate access and was in a low-wage, anti-union state. The closest thing to passenger-oriented infrastructure that we could look at in such cases is international airports, and the Nashville area only has a small one; Nissan, and the other Japanese and European companies locating plants in the South, would have clustered in Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston if they’d cared.
Let’s zoom in even more, specifically on Nissan and what it’s done to Smyrna. Smyrna is a company town; Nissan even told it to zone the area around the plant as industrial-only, on the theory that commercial development would distract the workers too much. In any other context, the proponents of competitiveness and high-value-added industrial policy would decry such cases as a race to the bottom; and yet, those are among the few situations in which there’s actual competition among regions. The local drivers of a productive economy, rather than one that’s simply a passive recipient of other companies’ transplant factories, have nothing to do with infrastructure megaprojects. Silicon Valley exists because of Stanford, not because of the Peninsula Line or US 101.
At least, there’s competition among regions looking for foreign investment. In other contexts, it’s not as clear. The effects of HSR on national economic growth are too small to be visible, which means that it’s impossible to conduct a study that reliably tells if they exist. But the effects on regional development, a related trope, are decidedly mixed. It’s clear that HSR promotes development near the station; it’s unclear whether it actually develops the surrounding areas, rather than merely concentrates development near the station. Evidence from the Shinkansen as well as other high-speed systems is decidedly mixed – see for example this review.
Building public infrastructure is not a race. Other countries’ experience is a good teacher of what works and what doesn’t, and, provided adjustments for different circumstances are made, can help gauge whether HSR will be successful in the US. However, there is a very big difference between saying that HSR succeeded on a route similar to an American proposal and saying that the US must build because other countries are building as well.
As Krugman notes, the mentality of treating things as if they were races oversimplifies, and leads to bad projects. In the case of transportation, it means focusing on visibility, prestige, and spectacle rather than on cost-effectiveness, usability, and mode share. This is where development-oriented transit comes in: one of the causes of airport transit boondoggles is the insistence of cities and airport authorities that their airport access be world-class, which means a no-expense-spared people mover or, worse, premium rail link to downtown. Those projects, too, often come with promises of competitiveness, as if an airline is going to choose its hub based on the existence of a rail link with a 10% mode share rather than low landing fees or proximity to many travelers and destinations.
At least, development-oriented transit is transit. Paul Barter’s thesis explains how in the postwar period, Asian cities often started building freeways simply because that was what the US was doing and they wanted to be modern. I’m most reminded by the line from the Onion, attributed to the Chinese government: “this year, a million people in China will die from cancer – cancer is a very modern disease.” HSR exists largely because Japan National Railways President Shinji Sogo refused to accept a railway decline and instead built the Tokaido Shinkansen. Although HSR is not freeways, some of the rhetoric coming from various boosters glorifying China’s lack of environmental and community protection has the same basic problem of placing a national race over quality of life.
(Some) HSR projects are good economic and transportation development; they should be sold as good economic and transportation development. Read this summary on Reason & Rail and note how nowhere does Paulus Magnus mention competitiveness. Japan didn’t build the Shinkansen in order to compete with anyone, and France and Germany didn’t build the LGVs and ICE system in order to compete with Japan. If what they’ve done has succeeded then it’s likely that similar American lines could also succeed and should be built, but it’s not a race and the concept of being behind or of needing to imitate what others have done promotes boondoggles, not good transit.
Cost Overruns: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Hate Bent Flyvbjerg
Let me preface this post by saying I have nothing against Bent Flyvbjerg or his research. My problem is purely with how it’s used in the public media, and frequently even in other academic studies, which assume overruns take place even when they do not.
Stephen Smith sent me a link to an article in The Economist complaining about cost overruns on the California HSR Central Valley segment. The article gets its numbers wrong – for one, the original cost estimate for Merced-Bakersfield was never $6.8 billion, but instead was $7.2 billion in 2006 dollars and $8 billion in YOE dollars, according to CARRD, and as a result it portrays a 25% overrun as a 100% overrun. But the interest is not the wrong numbers, but the invocation of Flyvbjerg again.
Nowhere does the article say anything about actual construction costs – it talks about overruns, but doesn’t compare base costs. It’s too bad; Flyvbjerg himself did a cost comparison for rapid transit, on the idea that the only way to reliably estimate costs ex ante is to look at similar projects’ ex post costs. His paper has some flaws – namely, the American projects he considers are older than the European projects, and there’s no systematic attempt at controlling for percentage of the line that’s underground, both resulting in underestimating the US-Europe cost difference – but the method is sound. Unfortunately, this paper is obscure, whereas his work on cost overruns is famous.
In the case of high-speed rail, it seems to me, from pure eyeballing, that there is a difference between countries in how much costs run over, and that this correlates strongly with high construction costs. German train projects, including the one example cited by the Economist, run over a lot. French and Spanish high-speed lines do not, and also cost much less.
Of course, this by itself doesn’t mean this correlation should keep holding: up until Barcelona Line 9, originally budgeted at €1.9 billion but now up to €6.5 billion, Spanish subway lines were built within budget. France has not yet had a factor-of-3 overrun on a major project, but it might in the future, and I’m not going to bet my life that it won’t. But what this does suggest is that looking at German overruns as if they’re typical rather than extremal cases is deeply misleading.
There’s an argument to be made that California’s inability to rein in the contractors will in fact lead to German cost overruns. California HSR’s projected costs look downright reasonable, whereas rapid transit projects in the state are unusually expensive. The proposed BART to San Jose tunnel is $4 billion for 8 km – very high by general subway standards, and unheard of for a subway in low-density suburbia. Going by Flyvbjerg’s own attempts to find ex ante cost estimates that are reliable, this could be used as evidence for future cost escalations; general overruns couldn’t, not without being more specific.
EMUs Versus Locomotives
I keep getting pushback from Amtrak defenders about my article about its locomotive order. I think I addressed most points, but one that I didn’t that keeps coming up is whether electric multiple units are really better for train service than locomotives hauling unpowered cars. The answer is in Amtrak’s case an unambiguous yes, but it requires more argument.
Ordinarily, the cost tradeoff between multiple units and locomotives is that unpowered cars are less expensive and lower-maintenance than EMUs while locomotives are much more expensive and higher-maintenance. EMUs have definite advantage in performance; they accelerate faster, and, when the consists are short their energy consumption is much lower, since most modern locomotives are optimized for longer freight trains. Because the advantage is the most pronounced for short consists, Amtrak asked Vermont to buy US Railcar’s FRA-compliant DMUs for the Vermonter train, replacing the current diesel loco-hauled setup; Vermont itself puts the breakeven point between DMUs and locos at 4-5 cars, but the DMUs in question have just one vendor and are extraordinarily expensive by global standards.
Conversely, locomotives require much more track maintenance than EMUs, because of their higher axle load. Road wear is proportional to the fourth power of axle load, so the less even the weight distribution is, the higher the road wear is. Track wear does not satisfy such a neat formula; all old comments of mine stating the contrary should be ignored. However, for freight traffic such a formula does hold, and locomotives have axle loads comparable to those of freight trains. One could also observe that in Japan, railroads make every effort to keep axle load low, and therefore avoid articulated bogies; furthermore, almost all Shinkansen axles are powered to keep weight distribution even, whereas European high-speed EMUs only power about half the axles (Siemens’ Velaro has a maximum axle load of 17 t, and an average load of 14 t).
Generally, the trend in countries with well-run passenger rail systems is away from locomotives and toward EMUs. The exceptions come from three cases:
1. Some technologies, most notably the Talgo tilting wheels, can’t be used with powered bogies. The same is true of the tilting TGV test train.
2. Some railroads ignore track maintenance costs and focus on train maintenance. This includes SNCF, since the tracks are the responsibility of RFF.
3. Cultural inertia may make railroads too used to separate power cars. This again includes SNCF, which needed power cars for the TGV because of the technological limitations of the 1970s and 80s, requiring very large transformers.
In the specific case of Amtrak and the Northeast Corridor, not only are reasons 1-2 not an issue, but also the cost question favors EMUs. Look again at Vermont’s report, which seriously posits unpowered coaches costing up to $5.5 million each, more than a standard off-the-shelf EuroSprinter loco; Amtrak’s recent order is much cheaper, at $2.2 million per car, but still comparable to the FRA-compliant M7 EMU and not much less per meter of car length (and more per car) than the Coradia Nordic EMUs used in Sweden or the FLIRTs used in Finland.
In comments elsewhere, I’ve heard that one reason to keep the locomotives is that they can be detached and replaced with diesels on through-trains to unelectrified territory. This is pure cultural inertia; EMUs, and even power cars that are permanently coupled to unpowered coaches, can be attached to a diesel locomotive, as the TGV did to reach Sables d’Olonne. More cynically, the cost of Amtrak’s locomotives is $466 million, which, at Northeast Corridor electrification cost (about $3 million/km), could electrify 155 km of route, almost all the way from Washington to Richmond. At the cost of electrifying the line to Sables d’Olonne (about $1.2 million/km), it could electrify nearly 400 km. Amtrak’s insistence on locomotives is reducing flexibility here rather than increasing it.
But in general, the move toward EMUs is not about flexibility; railroads around the world deprecate it and have semi-permanently coupled trains. It comes from the fact that, outside Amtrak’s uniquely bad experience with Metroliner EMUs, they work better. I’ve already mentioned higher acceleration. In addition, all else being equal, they’re more flexible, and can be scaled to any length: the M7s are married pairs. I’ve seen commenters that claim the exact opposite, by looking only at EMUs with articulated bogies; those have nothing to do with the question at hand (the TGV has articulated bogies, too), and indicate that the operator cares about other things more than about flexible length, for example a walk-through train or reducing the number of bogies.
Another problem with locomotives, besides inferior performance, is limited capacity. A single-deck 200-meter long AGV has 466-510 seats, compared with about 350 for a single-deck TGV and 545 for a double-deck TGV. SNCF is still eschewing the AGV because its capacity limit is so great it needs double-deck trains, but Alstom is developing a train with standard, unarticulated bogies that it claims can reach 600 seats with one deck.
Although Amtrak does not have the capacity problems of the LGV Sud-Est, it too is capacity-constrained, in another way. The limiting factor to Amtrak’s capacity is the lack of cars; as a result, buying EMUs instead of locomotives and coaches would add more capacity per dollar spent. It’s brutal, but true. Even the slightly more expensive Nordic EMUs would be an improvement; they’re still cheaper than coaches plus a single locomotive for all train lengths up to 14 cars (if the loco is an Amtrak Cities Sprinter) or 9 cars (if it’s a TRAXX or Prima).
In reality, the reason Amtrak uses locomotives is entirely cultural inertia. It was burned with the Metroliners, and thinks that unpowered cars last longer because, well, they have to. The reality that the M7, or the average European EMU, lasts 40 years, the same as Amtrak’s coaches; however, that idea was not invented by Amtrak, and is therefore out. It thinks that unpowered coaches are cheaper, while buying coaches that cost the same as EMUs. And so on. This is yet another bad US rail practice, hindering rail revival by making it too expensive and reducing performance.
Pedestrian Observations 