Category: Incompetence
New York Isn’t Special
A week ago, we published a short note on driver-only metro trains, known in New York as one-person train operation or OPTO. New York is nearly unique globally in running metro trains with both a driver and a conductor, and from time to time reformers have suggested switching to OPTO, so far only succeeding in edge cases such as a few short off-peak trains. A bill passed the state legislature banning OPTO nearly unanimously, but the governor has so far neither signed nor vetoed it. The New York Times covered our report rather favorably, and the usual suspects, in this case union leadership, are pissed. Transportation Workers Union head John Samuelsen made the usual argument, but highlighted how special New York is.
“Academics think working people are stupid,” [Samuelsen] said. “They can make data lie for them. They conducted a study of subway systems worldwide. But there’s no subway system in the world like the NYC subway system.”
Our report was short and didn’t go into all the ways New York isn’t special, so let me elaborate here:
- On pre-corona numbers, New York’s urban rail network ranked 12th in the world in ridership, and that’s with a lot of London commuter rail ridership excluded, including which would likely put London ahead and New York 13th.
- New York was among the first cities in the world to open its subway – but London, Budapest, Chicago (dating from the electrification and opening of the Loop in 1897), Boston, Paris, and Berlin all opened earlier.
- New York has some tight curves on its tracks, but the minimum curve radius on Paris Métro Line 1, 40 meters, is comparable to the New York City Subway’s.
- The trains on the New York City Subway are atypically long for a metro system, at 151 meters on most of the A division and 183 on most of the B division, but trains on some metro systems are even longer (Tokyo has some 200 m trains, Shanghai 180 m trains) and so are trains on commuter rail systems like the RER (204 m on the B, 220 m on the A), Munich S-Bahn (201 m), and Elizabeth line (205 m, extendable to 240).
- New York has crowded trains at rush hour, with pre-Second Avenue Subway trains peaking at 4 standees per square meter, but London peaks at 5/m^2 and trains in Tokyo and the bigger Chinese cities at more than that. Overall ridership, irrespective of crowding, peaked around 30,000 passengers per direction per hour on the 4 and 5 trains in New York, compared with 55,000 on the RER A.
New York is not special, not in 2025, when it’s one of many megacities with large subway systems. It’s just solipsistic, run by managers and labor leaders who are used to denigrating cities that are superior to New York in every way they run their metro systems as mere villages unworthy of their attention. Both groups are overpaid: management is hired from pipelines that expect master-of-the-universe pay and think Sweden is a lower-wage society, and labor faces such hurdles with the seniority system that new hires get bad shifts and to get enough workers New York City Transit has had to pay $85,000 at start, compared with, in PPP terms, around $63,000 in Munich after recent negotiations. The incentive in New York should be to automate aggressively, and look for ways to increase worker churn and not to turn people who earn 2050s wages for 1950s productivity be a veto point to anything.
Why is Janno Lieber Constantly Blaming Other People for Problems?
The Editorial Board posted an interview with MTA head Janno Lieber about sundry public transit-related issues. His answers for the most part aren’t bad until he gets to construction costs (and misgenders me), but alongside other recent news about Penn Station Access, they reveal a pattern: Lieber loves blaming other people for problems – nothing is ever the MTA’s fault, everything is someone else’s fault. Nor is he curious about acquiring expertise, to the point that everything is defensive, and everything is about reducing transparency and accountability. Someone like this should not be heading a public transit agency.
Penn Station Access
Penn Station Access, the project to run Metro-North trains from New Rochelle to Penn Station via the Hell Gate Line currently used only by Amtrak, was announced earlier this month to be delayed by a further two years, from 2028 to 2030. The MTA blames Amtrak, which owns most of the line, for not giving it enough work windows.
And, excuse me, but this is bullshit for two separate reasons. The first is that the opening date was said to be 2027 until this year and then 2028. Other people made plans based on MTA announcements; quite a lot of behind-the-scenes advocacy was designed specifically around this date. The state was among those other people: in March, it decided to buy new battery-powered locomotives, each costing $23.45 million (about the same as an eight-car EMU set), on the grounds that it would take too long to acquire new EMUs that were compatible with the different electrification systems used on the line. It’s not at all hard to get new EMUs compatible with both the 12 kV 60 Hz electrification used on most of the line and the 12 kV 25 Hz system used in the last few km into Penn Station based on current New York lead times if the project opens in 2030. But the state made a decision based on the assumption it would need this well before 2030.
In other words, the MTA only discovered that there would be Amtrak-induced delays around two and a half years before planned opening for a project that had been going on for three years and approved for six – and now it’s blaming it on Amtrak instead of on its own poor project management and lack of transparency.
The second reason it’s bullshit is that the relationship between Amtrak and the MTA is mutually abusive. Amtrak is not giving the MTA enough work windows on the Hell Gate Line; the MTA is slowing down Amtrak trains on the New Haven Line between New Rochelle and New Haven, where it owns the tracks, the only part of the Northeast Corridor that is both owned and dispatched by a commuter railroad and not Amtrak (in Massachusetts the MBTA owns the tracks but Amtrak controls dispatching). The maximum allowed cant deficiency on Metro-North territory is based on unmodernized Metro-North values and not based on the modern values that Amtrak rolling stock has been tested for, and there is no attempt to keep Amtrak and Metro-North trains separate east of Stamford, where there are four tracks and light enough traffic that it’s possible, that the top speeds can have a mismatch.
In other words, the MTA complains about being abused by Amtrak, and is likely correct, but refuses to stop abusing Amtrak where it does have control. It could manage this relationship better, but it doesn’t and Lieber isn’t competent enough to know how to do it better.
Fares
The conversation in The Editorial Board heavily features talking about fares, in context of fare evasion and mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani’s proposal for free buses. Lieber is suggesting that instead of free buses, buses can have all-door boarding without free fares, unlocking the speed benefits without forgoing the revenue. He’s right and I want to sympathize with his critique of free buses. But it was Lieber who scuttled plans by Andy Byford to install back-door OMNY card readers and enable all-door boarding without free fares. He calls for all-door boarding as an alternative to free buses now, but when all-door boarding was available as an internally developed plan, he killed it.
He speaks about Europe this and Europe that in the interview, but he’s too ignorant and incurious to understand how things go here and how we make all-door boarding work with proof-of-payment. And the best way to see that is his abominable line, “had a kid who did a semester abroad in Stockholm, and you see them all over in Europe.” That’s his only reference – his kid did a semester abroad. He didn’t ring up any transit agency to ask how to do it. It’s all superficial, almost tourist-level understanding of better-run systems.
This is especially bad in context of what he says about construction costs at the end. He says,
I don’t accept the Alon Levy theory, which, you know, you’re articulating — that somehow, if we just had like this massive in-house force, we would be building everything way, way cheaper. That’s like, hiring— you cannot compete with private-sector engineering. And we don’t have one project after another, like he loves, like Madrid, which built all these subways in a row.
Setting aside the fact that calling me “he” in New York, a city with better access to gender-neutral bathrooms than my own, is obnoxious, we didn’t do a report on Madrid, but did do one on Stockholm. He’s aware of the report (and of the points it makes about ridership per station, the excuse he uses farther down the line for bigger stations). And he still reduces Stockholm to where his kid did a one-semester study abroad to give a little anecdote on fare evasion, which boils down to Americans being so detached from internal national discourses in Europe (except maybe the UK) that they don’t know that we’ve had to deal with the same questions they did, we just have public agencies run by competent people who sometimes make the right decisions and not by people like Janno Lieber.
How One Bad Project Can Poison the Entire Mode
There are a few examples of rail projects that fail in a way that poisons the entire idea among decisionmakers. The failures can be total, to the point that the project isn’t built and nobody tries it again. Or the outcome can be a mixed blessing: an open project with some ridership, but not enough compared with the cost or hassle, with decisionmakers still choosing not to do this again. The primary cases I have in mind are Eurostar and Caltrain electrification, both mixed blessings, which poisoned international high-speed rail in Europe and rail electrification in the United States respectively. The frustrating thing about both projects is that their failures are not inherent to the mode, but rather come from bad project management and delivery, which nonetheless is taken as typical by subsequent planners, who benchmark proposals to those failed projects.
Eurostar: Flight Level Zero airline
The infrastructure built for Eurostar is not at all bad: the Channel Tunnel, and the extensions of the LGV Nord thereto and to Brussels. The UK-side high-speed line, High Speed 1, had very high construction costs (about $160 million/km in today’s prices), but it’s short enough that those costs don’t matter too much. The concept of connecting London and Paris by high-speed rail is solid, and those trains get a strong mode share, as do trains from both cities to Brussels.
Unfortunately, the operations are a mess. There’s security and border control theater, which is then used as an excuse to corral passengers into airline-style holding areas with only one or two boarding queues for a train of nearly 1,000 passengers. The extra time involved, 30 minutes at best and an hour at worst, creates a serious malus to ridership – the elasticity of ridership with respect to travel time in the literature I’ve seen ranges from -1 to -2, and at least in the studies I’ve read about local transit, time spent out of vehicle usually counts worse than time spent on a moving train (usually a factor of 2). It also holds up tracks, which is then used as an excuse not to run more service.
The excusemaking about service is then used to throttle the service offer, and raise prices. As I explain in this post, the average fare on domestic TGVs is 0.093€/passenger-km, whereas that on international TGV services (including Eurostar) is 0.17€/p-km, with the Eurostar services costing more than Lyria and TGV services into Germany. This includes both Eurostar to London and the services between Paris and Brussels, which used to be called Thalys, which have none of the security and border theater of London and yet charge very high fares, with low resulting ridership.
The origin of this is that Eurostar was conceived as a partnership between British and French elites, in management as well as the respective states. They thought of the Chunnel as a flashy project, fit for high-end service, designed for business travelers. SNCF management itself believes in airline-style services, with fares that profiteer off of riders; it can’t do it domestically due to public pressure to keep the TGV affordable to the broad public, but whenever it is freed from this pressure, it builds or recommends that others build what it thinks trains should be like, and the results are not good.
What rail advocates have learned from this saga is that cross-border rail should decenter high-speed rail. Their first association of cross-border high-speed rail is Eurostar, which is unreasonably expensive and low-ridership even without British border and security theater. Thus, the community has retreated from thinking in terms of infrastructure, and is trying to solve Eurostar’s problem (not enough service) even on lines where they need competitive trip times before anything else. Why fight for cross-border high-speed rail if the only extant examples are such underperformers?
This dovetails with the mentality that private companies do it better than the state, which is dominant at the EU level, as the eurocrats prefer not to have any visible EU state. This leads to ridiculous press releases by startups that lie to the public or to themselves that they’re about to launch new services, and consultant slop that treats rail services as if they are airlines with airline cost structures. Europe itself gave up on cross-border rail infrastructure – the EU is in panic mode on all issues, the states that would be building this infrastructure (like Belgium on Brussels-Antwerp) don’t care, and even bilateral government agreements don’t touch the issue, for example France and Germany are indifferent.
Caltrain: electrification at extreme costs
In the 2010s, Caltrain electrified its core route from San Francisco to Tamien just south of San Jose Diridon Station, a total length of 80 km, opening in 2024. This is the only significant electrification of a diesel service in the United States since Amtrak electrified the Northeast Corridor from New Haven to Boston in the late 1990s. The idea is excellent: a dense corridor like this with many stations would benefit greatly from all of the usual advantages of electrification, including less pollution, faster acceleration, and higher reliability.
Unfortunately, the costs of the project have been disproportionate to any other completed electrification program that I am aware of. The entire Caltrain Modernization Project cost $2.4 billion, comprising electrification, resignaling (cf. around $2 million/km in Denmark for ETCS Level 2), rolling stock, and some grade crossing work. Netting out the elements that are not direct electrification infrastructure, this is till well into the teens of millions per kilometer. Some British experiments have come close, but the RIA Electrification Challenge overall says that the cost on double track is in the $3.8-5.7 million/km range in today’s prices, and typical Continental European costs are somewhat lower.
The upshot is that Americans, never particularly curious about the world outside their border, have come to benchmark all electrification projects to Caltrain’s costs. Occasionally they glance at Canada, seeing Toronto’s expensive electrification project and confirming their belief that it is far too expensive. They barely look at British electrification projects, and never look at ones outside the English-speaking world. Thus, they take these costs as a given, rather than as a failure mode, due to poor design standards, poor project management, a one-off signaling system that had very high costs by American standards, and inflexible response to small changes.
And unfortunately, there was no pot of gold at the end of the Caltrain rainbow. Ridership is noticeably up since electric service opened, but is far below pre-corona levels, as the riders were largely tech workers and the tech industry went to work-from-home early and has still not quite returned to the office, especially not in the Bay Area. This one failure, partly due to unforeseen circumstances, partly due to poor management, has led to the poisoning of overhead wire electrification throughout the United States.
Did the Netherlands Ever Need 300 km/h Trains?
Dutch high-speed rail is the original case of premature commitment and lock-in. A decision was made in 1991 that the Netherlands needed 300 km/h high-speed rail, imitating the TGV, which at that point was a decade old, old enough that it was a clear success and new enough that people all over Europe wanted to imitate it to take advantage of this new technology. This decision then led to complications that caused costs to run over, reaching levels that still hold a European record, matched only by the almost entirely tunneled Florence-Bologna line. But setting aside the lock-in issue, is it good for such a line to run at 300 km/h?
The question can be asked in two ways. The first is, given current constraints on international rail travel, did it make sense to build HSL Zuid at 300 km/h?. It has an easy answer in the negative, due to the country’s small size, complications in Belgium, and high fares on international trains. The second and more interesting is, assuming that Belgium completes its high-speed rail network and that rail fares drop to those of domestic TGVs and ICEs, did it make sense to build HSL Zuid at 300 km/h?. The answer there is still negative, but the reasons are specific to the urban geography of Holland, and don’t generalize as well.
How HSL Zuid is used today
This is a schematic of Dutch lines branded as intercity. The color denotes speed and the thickness denotes frequency.
The most important observation about this system is that HSL Zuid is not the most frequent in the country. Frequency between Amsterdam and Utrecht is higher than between Amsterdam and Rotterdam; the frequency stays high well southeast of Utrecht, as far as Den Bosch and Eindhoven. The Dutch rail network is an everywhere-to-everywhere mesh with Utrecht as its central connection point, acting as the main interface between Holland in the west and the rest of the country in the east. HSL Zuid is in effect a bypass around Utrecht, faster but less busy than the routes that do serve Utrecht.
This needs to be compared with the other small Northern European country with a very strong legacy rail network, Switzerland. The map, with the same thickness and color scheme but not the same length scale, is here:
The orange segments are Alpine base tunnels, with extensive freight rail. The main high-cost investment in passenger-dedicated rail in Switzerland is not visible on the map, because it was built for 200 km/h to reduce costs: Olten-Bern, with extensive tunneling as well as state-of-the-art ETCS Level 2 signaling permitting 110 second headways. The Swiss rail network is centered not on one central point but on a Y between Zurich, Basel, and Bern, and the line was built as one of the three legs of the Y, designed to speed up Zurich-Bern and Basel-Bern trains to be just less than an hour each, to permit on-the-hour connections at all three stations.
By this comparison, HSL Zuid should not have been built this way. It is not useful for a domestic network designed around regular clockface frequencies and timed connections, in the Netherlands as much as in Switzerland. There is little interest in further 300 km/h domestic lines – any further proposals for increasing speeds on domestic trains are at 200 km/h, and as it is the domestic trains only go 160. In a country this size, so much time is spent on station approaches that the overall benefit of high top speed is reduced. Indeed, from Antwerp to Amsterdam, Eurostar trains take 1:20 over a distance of 182 km, an average speed comparable to the fastest classical lines in Europe such as the East Coast Main Line or the Southern Main Line in Sweden. The heavily-upgraded but still legacy Berlin-Hamburg line averages about 170 km/h when the trains are on time, and if German trains ran with Dutch punctuality and Dutch padding it would average 190 km/h.
What about international services?
The fastest trains using HSL Zuid are international, formerly branded Thalys, now branded Eurostar. They are also unfathomably expensive. Where NS’s website will sell me Amsterdam-Antwerp tickets for around 20€ if I’m willing to chain trips on slow regional trains, or 27€ on intercities doing the trip in 1:37 with one transfers, Eurostar charges 79-99€ for this trip when I look up available trains in mid-August on a weekday. For reference, the average domestic TGV trip over this distance is around 18€ and the average domestic ICE trip is around 22€. It goes without saying that the line is underused by international travelers – the fares are prohibitive.
Beyond Antwerp, the other problem is that Belgium has built HSL 1 from the French border to Brussels, HSL 2 and 3 from Leuven to the German border, and HSL 4 from Antwerp to the Dutch border, but has not bothered building a fast line between Brussels and Antwerp (or Leuven). The 46 km line between Brussels South and Antwerp Central takes 46 minutes by the fastest train. A 200 km/h high-speed line would do the trip in about 20, skipping Brussels Central and North as the Eurostars do.
But what if the fares were more reasonable and if Belgian trains weren’t this slow? Then, we would expect to see a massive increase in ridership, since the line would be connecting Amsterdam with Brussels in 1:40 and Paris in slightly more than three hours, with fares set at rates that would get the same ridership seen on domestic trains. The line would get much higher ridership.
And yet the trip time benefits of 300 km/h on HSL Zuid over 250 km/h are only 3 minutes. While much of the line is engineered for 300, the line is really two segments, one south of Rotterdam and one north of it, totaling 95 km of 300 km/h running plus extensive 200 and 250 km/h connections, and the total benefit to the higher top speed net of acceleration and deceleration time is only about 3 minutes. The total benefit of 300 km/h relative to 200 km/h is only about 8 minutes.
Two things are notable about this geography. The first is that the short spacing between must-serve stations – Amsterdam, Schiphol, Rotterdam, Antwerp – means that trains never get the chance to run fast. This is partly an artifact of Dutch density, but not entirely. England is as dense as the Netherlands and Belgium, but the plan for HS2 is to run nonstop trains between London and Birmingham, because between them there is nothing comparable in size or importance to Birmingham. North Rhine-Westphalia is about equally dense, and yet trains run nonstop between Cologne and Frankfurt, averaging around 170 km/h despite extensive German timetable padding and a slow approach to Cologne on the Hohenzollernbrücke.
The second is that the Netherlands is not a country of big central cities. Randstad is a very large metropolitan area, but it is really an agglomeration of the separate metro areas for Amsterdam, Rotterdam, the Hague, and Utrecht, each with its own set of destinations. The rail network needs to serve this geography with either direct trains or convenient transfers to all of the major centers. HSL Zuid does not do that – it has an easy transfer to the Hague at Rotterdam, but connecting to Utrecht (thus with the half of the Netherlands that isn’t Holland) is harder.
In retrospect, the Netherlands should have built more 200 and 250 km/h lines instead of building HSL Zuid. It could have kept the higher speed to Rotterdam but then built direct Rotterdam-Amsterdam and Rotterdam-Utrecht lines topping at 200 km/h, using the lower top speed to have more right-of-way flexibility to avoid tunnels. Separate trains would be running from points south to either Amsterdam or Utrecht, and fares in line with those of domestic trains would keep demand high enough that the frequency to both destinations would be acceptable.
In contrast, 300 km/h lines, if there are no slow segments like Brussels-Antwerp in their midst and if fares are reasonable, can be successful, if the single-core cities served are larger and the distances between stations are longer. The distances do not need to be as long as on some LGVs, with 400 km of nonstop running between Paris and Lyon – on a 100 km nonstop line, such as the plans for Hanover-Bielefeld including approaches or just the greenfield segment on Hamburg-Hanover, the difference between 200 and 300 km/h is 9 minutes, so about twice as much as on HSL Zuid and HSL 4 relative to their total length. This works, because while western Germany is dense much like the Netherlands, it is mostly a place of larger city cores separated by greater distances. The analogy to HSL Zuid elsewhere in Europe is as if Germany decided to build a line to 300 km/h standards internally to the Rhine-Ruhr region, or if the UK decided to build one between Liverpool and Manchester.
The Hamburg-Hanover High-Speed Line
A new high-speed line (NBS) between Hamburg and Hanover has received the approval of the government, and will go up for a Bundestag vote shortly. The line has been proposed and planned in various forms since the 1990s, the older Y-Trasse plan including a branch to Bremen in a Y formation, but the current project omits Bremen. The idea of building this line is good and long overdue, but unfortunately everything about it, including the cost, the desired speed, and the main public concerns, betray incompetence, of the kind that gave up on building any infrastructure and is entirely reactive, much like in the United States.
The route, in some of the flattest land in Germany, is a largely straight new high-speed rail line. Going north from Hanover to Hamburg, it departs somewhat south of Celle, and rejoins the line just outside Hamburg’s city limits in Meckelfeld. The route appears to be 107 km of new mainline route, not including other connections adding a few kilometers, chiefly from Celle to the north. An interactive map can be found here; the map below is static, from Wikipedia, and the selected route is the pink one.
For about 110 km in easy topography, the projected cost is 6.7 billion € per a presentation from two weeks ago, which is about twice as high as the average cost of tunnel-free German NBSes so far. It is nearly as high as the cost of the Stuttgart-Ulm NBS, which is 51% in tunnel.
And despite the very high cost, the standards are rather low. The top speed is intended to be 250 km/h, not 300 km/h. The travel time savings is only 20 minutes: trip times are to be reduced from 79 minutes today to 59 minutes. Using a top speed of 250 km/h, the current capabilities of ICE 3/Velaro trains, and the existing top speeds of the approaches to Hamburg and Hanover, I’ve found that the nonstop trip time should be 46 minutes, which means the planned timetable padding is 28%. Timetable padding in Germany is so extensive that trains today could do Hamburg-Hanover in 63 minutes.
As a result, the project isn’t really sold as a Hamburg-Hanover high-speed line. Instead, the presentation above speaks of great trip time benefits to the intermediate towns with local stops, Soltau (population: 22,000) and Bergen (population: 17,000). More importantly, it talks about capacity, as the Hamburg-Hanover line is one of the busiest in Germany.
As a capacity reliever, a high-speed line is a sound decision, but then why is it scheduled with such lax timetabling? It’s not about fitting into a Takt with hourly trip times, first of all because if the top speed were 300 km/h and the padding were the 7% of Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Sweden then the trip time would be 45 minutes, and second of all because Hamburg is at the extremity of the country and therefore it’s not meaningfully an intercity knot that must be reached on the hour.
Worse, the line is built with the possibility of freight service. Normal service is designed to be passenger-only, but in case of disruptions on the classical line, the line is designed to be freight-ready. This is stupid: it’s much cheaper to invest in reliability than to build a dual-use high-speed passenger and freight line, and the one country in the world with both a solid high-speed rail network and high freight rail usage, China, doesn’t do this. (Italy builds its high-speed lines with freight-friendly standards and has high construction costs, even though its construction costs in general, e.g. for metro lines or electrification, are rather low.)
Cross-Border Rail and the EU’s Learned Helplessness
I’m sitting on a EuroCity train from Copenhagen back to Germany. It’s timetabled to take 4:45 to do 520 km, an average speed of 110 km/h, and the train departed 25 minutes late because the crew needed to arrive on another train and that train was late. One of the cars on this train is closed due to an air conditioner malfunction; Cid and I rode this same line to Copenhagen two years ago and this also happened in one direction then.
This is a line that touches, at both ends, two of the fastest conventional lines in Europe, Stockholm-Malmö taking 4:30 to do 614 km (136 km/h) and Berlin-Hamburg normally taking 1:45 to do 287 km (164 km/h) when it is on time. This contrast between good lines within European member states, despite real problems with the German and Swedish rail networks, and much worse ones between them, got me thinking about cross-border rail more. Now, this line in particular is getting upgraded – the route is about to be cut off when the Fehmarn Belt Line opens in four years, reducing the trip time to 2:30. But more in general, cross-border and near-border lines that slow down travel that’s otherwise decent on the core within-state city pairs are common, and so far there’s no EU action on this. Instead, EU action on cross-border rail shows learned helplessness of avoiding the only solution for rail construction: top-down state-directed infrastructure building.
The upshot is that there is good cross-border rail advocacy here, most notably by Jon Worth, but because EU integration on this matter is unthinkable, this advocacy is forced to treat the railroads as if they are private oligopolies rather than state-owned public services. Jon successfully pushed for the incoming EU Commission of last year to include passenger rights in its agenda, to deal with friction between different national railroads. The issue is that SNCF and DB have internal ways of handling passenger rights in case of delays, due to domestic pressure on the state not to let the state railroad exploit its users, and they are not compatible across borders: SNCF is on time enough not to strand passengers, DB has enough frequency and extreme late-night timetable padding (my connecting train to Berlin is padded from 1:45 to 2:30, getting me home well past midnight) not to strand passengers; but when passengers cross from Germany to France, these two internal methods both fail.
At no point in this discussion was any top-down EU-level coordination even on the table. The mentality is that construction of new lines doesn’t matter – it’s a megaproject and these only generate headaches and cost overruns, not results, so instead everything boils down to private companies competing on the same lines. That the companies are state-owned is immaterial at the EU level – SNCF has no social mission outside the borders of France and therefore in its international service it usually behaves as a predatory monopoly profiteering off of a deliberately throttled Eurostar/Thalys market.
If there’s no EU state action, then the relationship between the operator, which is not part of the state, and the passenger, is necessarily adversarial. This is where the preference for regulations that assume this relationship must be adversarial and aim to empower the individual consumer comes from. It’s logical, if one assumes that there will never be an EU-wide high-speed intercity rail network, just a bunch of national networks with one-off cross-border megaprojects compromised to the point of not running particularly quickly or frequently.
And that is, frankly, learned helplessness on the part of the EU institutions. They take it for granted that state-led development is impossible at higher level than member states, and try to cope by optimizing for a union of member states whose infrastructure systems don’t quite cohere. Meanwhile, at the other end of the Eurasian continent, a continental-scale state has built a high-speed rail network that at this point has higher ridership per capita than most European states and is not far behind France or Germany, designed around a single state-owned network optimized for very high average speeds.
This occurs at a time when support for the EU is high in the remaining member states. There’s broad understanding that scale is a core benefit of the union, hence the regulatory harmonization ensuring that products can be shipped union-wide without cross-border friction. But for personal travel by train, these principles go away, and friction is assumed to only comprise the least important elements, because the EU institutions have decided that solving the most important ones, that is speed and frequency, is unthinkable.
Second Avenue Subway Phase 2 Station Design is Incompetent
A few hours ago, the MTA presented on the latest of Second Avenue Subway Phase 2. The presentation includes information about the engineering and construction of the three stations – 106th, 116th, and 125th Streets. The new designs are not good, and the design of 116th in particular betrays severe incompetence about how modern subway stations are built: the station is fairly shallow, but has a mezzanine under the tracks, with all access to or from the station requiring elevator-only access to the mezzanine.
What was in the presentation?
Here is a selection of slides, describing station construction. 106th Street is to be built cut-and-cover; 116th is to use preexisting construction but avoid cut-and-cover to reach them from the top and instead mine access from the bottom; 125th is to be built deep-level, with 125′ deep (38 m) platforms, underneath its namesake street between Lexington and Park Avenues.
The problems with 116th Street
Elevator-only access
Elevator-only access is usually stupid. It’s especially stupid when it’s at a shallow station; as the page 19 slide above shows, the platforms are about 11.5 meters below ground, which is an easy depth for both stair and escalator access.
Now, to be clear, there are elevator-only stations built in countries with reasonable subway construction programs. Sofia on Nya Tunnelbanan is elevator-only, because it is 100 meters below street level, due to the difficult topography of Södermalm and Central Stockholm, in which Sofia, 26 meters above sea level, is right next to Riddarfjärden, 23 meters deep. Emergency access is provided via ramps to the sea-level freeway hugging the north shore of Södermalm, used to construct the mined cavern in the first place. Likewise, the Barcelona L9 construction program, by far the most expensive in Spain and yet far cheaper than in any recent English-speaking country, has elevator-only access to the deep stations, in order to avoid any construction outside a horizontal or vertical tunnel boring machine.
The depth excuse does not exist in East Harlem. 11.5 meters is not an elevator-only access depth. It’s a stair access depth with elevators for wheelchair accessibility. Stairs are planned to be provided only for emergency access, without public usage. Under NFPA 130 the stairs are going to have to have enough capacity for full trains, much more than is going to be required in ordinary service, and they’d lead passengers to the same street as the elevators, nothing like the freeway egress of Sofia.
Below-platform mezzanines
To avoid any shallow construction, the mezzanines will be built below the platforms and not above them. As a result, access to the station means going down a level and then going back up to the platform level. In effect, the station is going to behave as a rather deep station as far as passenger access time to the platforms is concerned: the planned depth is 57′, or 17.4 meters, which means that the total vertical change from street level is around 23.5 meters, twice the actual depth of the platforms.
Dig volume
Even with the reuse of existing infrastructure, the station is planned to have too much space north and south of the platforms, as seen with the locations of the ancillary buildings.
I think that this is due to designs from the 2000s, when the plan was to build all stations with extensive back-of-the-house space on both sides of the platform. Phase 1 was built this way, as we cover in our New York case, and after we yelled at the MTA about it, it eventually shrank the footprint of the stations. 116th’s station start and end are four blocks apart, a total of about 300 meters, comparable to 86th Street; the platform is 186 m wide and the station overall has no reason to be longer than 190-200. But it’s possible the locations of the ancillary buildings were fixed from before the change, in which case the incompetence is not of the current leadership but of previous leadership.
Why?
On Bluesky, I’m seeing multiple activists I think well of assume that this is because the MTA is under pressure to either cut costs or avoid adverse community impact. Neither of these explanations makes much sense in context. 106th Street is planned to be built cut-and-cover, in the same neighborhood as 116th, with the same street width, which rules out the community opposition explanation. Cut-and-cover is cheaper than alternatives, which also rules out the cost explanation.
Rather, what’s going on is that MTA leadership does not know how a modern cut-and-cover subway station looks like. American construction prefers to avoid cut-and-cover even for stations, and over time such stations have been laden with things that American transit managers think are must-haves (like those back-of-the-house spaces) and that competent transit managers know they don’t need to build. They may want to build cut-and-cover, as at 106th, but as soon as there’s a snag, they revert to form and look for alternatives. They complain about utility relocation costs, which are clearly not blocking this method at 106th, and which did not prevent Phase 1’s 96th Street from costing about 2/3 as much as 86th and 72nd per cubic meter dug.
Under pressure to cut costs and shrink the station footprint, the MTA panicked and came up with the best solution the political appointees, that is to say Janno Lieber and Jamie Torres-Springer and their staff, and the permanent staff that they deign to listen to, could do. Unfortunately for New York, their best is not good enough. They don’t know how to build good stations – there are no longer any standardized designs for this that they trust, and the people who know how to do this speak English with an accent and don’t earn enough to command the respect of people on a senior American political appointee’s salary. So they improvise under pressure, and their instincts, both at doing things themselves and at supervising consultants, are not good. To Londoners, Andy Byford is a workhorse senior civil servant, with many like him, and the same is true in other large European cities with large subway systems. But to Americans, the such a civil servant is a unicorn to the point that people came to call him Train Daddy, because this is what he’s being compared with.
Against State of Good Repair
We’re releasing our high-speed rail report later this week. It’s a technical report rather than a historical or institutional one, so I’d like to talk about a point that is mentioned in the introduction explaining why we think it’s possible to build high-speed rail on the Northeast Corridor for $17 billion: the current investment program, Connect 2037, centers renewal and maintenance more than expansion, under the moniker State of Good Repair (SOGR). In essence, megaprojects have a set of well-understood problems of high costs and deficient outcomes, behind-the-scenes maintenance has a different set of problems, and SOGR combines the worst of both worlds and the benefits of neither. I’ve talked about this before in other contexts – about Connecticut rail renewal costs, or leakage in megaproject budgeting, or the history of SOGR on the New York City Subway, or Northeast Corridor catenary. Here I’d like to synthesize this into a single critique.
What is SOGR?
SOGR is a long-term capital investment to bring all capital assets into their expected lifespan and maintenance status. If a piece of equipment is supposed to be replaced every 40 years and is currently over 40, it’s not in good repair. If the mean distance between failures falls below a certain prescribed level, it’s not in good repair. If maintenance intervals grow beyond prescription, then the asset to be maintained is not in good repair. In practice, the lifespans are somewhat conservative so in practice a lot of things fall out of good repair and the system keeps running. The upshot is that because the maintenance standards are somewhat flexible, it’s easy to defer maintenance to make the system look financially healthier, or to deal with an unexpected budget shortfall.
Modern American SOGR goes back to the New York subway renewal programs of the 1980s and 90s, which worked well. The problem is that, just as the success of one infrastructure expansion tempts the construction of other, less socially profitable ones, the success of SOGR tempted agencies to justify large capital expenses on SOGR grounds. In effect, what should have been a one-time program to recover from the 1970s was generalized as a way of doing maintenance and renewal to react to the availability of money.
Megaprojects and non-megaprojects
In practice, what defines a megaproject is relative – a 6 km light rail extension is a megaproject in Boston but not in Paris – and this also means that they are not easy to locally benchmark, or else there would be many like them and they would be more routine. This means that megaprojects are, by definition, unusual. Their outcome is visible, and this attracts high-profile politicians and civil servants looking to make their mark. Conversely, their budgeting is less visible, because what must be included is not always clear. This leads to problems of bloat (this is the leakage problem), politicization, surplus extraction, and plain lying by proponents.
Non-megaprojects have, in effect, the opposite set of problems. Their individual components can be benchmarked easily, because they happen routinely. A short Paris Métro extension, a few new infill stations, and a weekend service change for track renewal in New York are all examples of non-megaprojects. These are done at the purely professional level, and if politicians or top managers intervene, it’s usually at the most general level, for example the institution of Fastrack as a general way of doing subway maintenance, and that too can be benchmarked internally. In this case, none of the usual problems of megaprojects is likely. Instead, problems occur because, while the budgeting can be visible to the agency, the project itself is not visible to the general public. If an entire new subway line’s construction fails and the line does not open, this is publicly visible, to the embarrassment of the politicians and agency heads who intended to take credit for it. In contrast, if a weekend service change has lower productivity than usual, the public won’t know until this problem has metastasized in general, by which point the agency has probably lost the ability to do this efficiently.
And to be clear, just as megaprojects like new subway lines vary widely in their ability to build efficiently, so do non-megaproject capital investments vary, if anything even more. The example I gave writing about Connecticut’s ill-conceived SOGR program, repeated in the high-speed rail report, is that per track- or route-km the state spends in one year about 60% as much as what Germany spends on a once per generation renewal program, to be undertaken about every 35 years. Annually, the difference is a factor of about 20. New York subway maintenance has degraded internally over time, due to ever tighter flagging rules, designed for worker protection, except that worker injuries rose from 1999 to the 2010s.
The Transit Costs Project
The goal of the Transit Costs Project is to use international benchmarking to allow cities to benefit from the best of both worlds. Megaprojects benefit from public visibility and from the inherent embarrassment to a politician or even a city or state that can’t build them: “New York can’t expand the subway” is a common mockery in American good-government spaces, and people in Germany mock both Bavaria for the high costs and long timeline of the second Munich S-Bahn tunnel and Berlin for, while its costs are rather normal, not building anything, not even the much-promised tram alternatives to the U-Bahn. Conversely, politicians do get political capital from the successful completion of a megaproject, encouraging their construction, even when not socially profitable.
Where we come in is using global benchmarking to remove the question marks from such projects. A subway extension may be a once in a generation effort in an American city, but globally it is not, and therefore, we look into how as much of the entire world as we can see into does this, to establish norms. This includes station designs to avoid overbuilding, project delivery and procurement strategies, system standards, and other aspects. Not even New York is as special as it thinks it is.
To some extent, this combination of the best features of both megaprojects and non-megaprojects exists in cities with low construction costs. This is not as tautological as it sounds. Rather, I claim that when construction costs are low, even visible extensions to the system fall below the threshold of a megaproject, and thus incremental metro extensions are built by professionals, with more public visibility providing a layer of transparency than for a renewal project. This way, growth can sustain itself until the city runs out of good places to build or until an economic crisis like the Great Recession in Spain makes nearly all capital work stop. In this environment, politicians grow to trust that if they want something big built, they can just give more money to more of the same, serving many neighborhoods at once.
In places with higher costs, or in places that are small enough that even with low costs it’s rare to build new metro lines, this is not available. This requires the global benchmarking that we use; occasionally, national benchmarking could work, in a country with medium costs and low willingness to build (for example, Germany), but this isn’t common.
The SOGR problem
If what we aim to do with the Transit Costs Project is to combine the positive features of megaprojects and non-megaprojects, SOGR does the exact opposite. It is conceived as a single large program, acting as the centerpiece of a capital plan that can go into the tens of billions of dollars, and is therefore a megaproject. But then there’s no visible, actionable, tangible promise there. There is no concrete promise of higher speed or capacity. To the extent some programs do have such a promise, they are subsumed into something much bigger, which means that failing to meet standards on (say) elevator reliability can be excused if other things are said to go into a state of good repair, whatever that means to the general public.
Thus, SOGR invites levels of bloat going well beyond those of normal expansion megaprojects. Any project can be added to the SOGR list, with little oversight – it isn’t and can’t be locally benchmarked so there is no mid-career professional who can push back, and conversely it isn’t so visible to the general public that a general manager or politician can push back demanding a fixed opening deadline. For the same reason, inefficiency can fester, because nobody at either the middle or upper level has the clear ability to demand better.
Worse, once the mentality of SOGR is accepted, more capital projects, on either the renewal side or the expansion side, are tied to it, reducing their efficiency. For example, the catenary on the Northeast Corridor south of New York requires an upgrade from fixed termination/variable tension to auto-tension/constant tension. But Amtrak has undermaintained the catenary expecting money for upgrades any decade now, and now Amtrak claims that the entire system must be replaced, not just the catenary but also the poles and substations. The language used, “the system is falling apart” and “the system is maintained with duct tape,” invites urgency, and not the question, “if you didn’t maintain this all this time, why should we trust you on anything?”. With the skepticism of the latter question, we can see that the substations are a separate issue from the catenary, and ask whether the poles can be rebuilt in place to reduce disruption, to which the vendors I’ve spoken with suggested the answer is yes using bracing.
The Connecticut track renewal program falls into the same trap. With no tangible promise of better service, the state’s rail lines are under constant closures for maintenance, which is done at exceptionally low productivity – manually usually, and when they finally obtained a track laying machine recently they’ve used it at one tenth its expected productivity. Once this is accepted as the normal way of doing things, when someone from the outside suggests they could do better, like Ned Lamont with his 30-30-30 proposal, the response is to make up excuses why it’s not possible. Why disturb the racket?
The way forward
The only way forward is to completely eliminate SOGR from one’s lexicon. Big capital programs must exclusively fund expansion, and project managers must learn to look with suspicion on any attempt to let maintenance projects piggyback on them.
Instead, maintenance and renewal should be budgeted separately from each other and separately from expansion. Maintenance should be budgeted on the same ongoing basis as operations. If it’s too expensive, this is evidence that it’s not efficient enough and should be mechanized better; on a modern railroad in a developed country, there is no need to have maintenance of way workers walk the tracks instead of riding a track inspection train or a track laying machine. With mechanized maintenance, inventory management is also simplified, in the sense that an entire section of track has consistent maintenance history, rather than each sleeper having been installed in a different year replacing a defective one.
Renewal can be funded on a one-time basis since the exact interval can be fudged somewhat and the works can be timed based on other work or even a recession requiring economic stimulus. But this must be held separate from expansion, again to avoid the Connecticut problem of putting the entire rail network under constant maintenance because slow zones are accepted as a fact of life.
The importance of splitting these off is that it makes it easier to say “no” to bad expansion projects masquerading as urgent maintenance. No, it’s not urgent to replace a bridge if the cost of doing so is $1 billion to cross a 100 meter wide river. No, the substations are a separate system from the overhead catenary and you shouldn’t bundle them into one project.
With SOGR stripped off, it’s possible to achieve the Transit Costs Project goal of combining the best rather than the worst features of megaprojects and non-megaprojects. High-speed rail is visible and has long been a common ask on the Northeast Corridor, and with the components split off, it’s possible to look into each and benchmark to what it should include and how it should be built. Just as New York is not special when it comes to subways, the United States is not special when it comes to intercity rail, it just lags in planning coordination and technology. With everything done transparently based on best practices, it is indeed possible to build this on an expansion budget of about $17 billion and a rounding-error track laying machine budget.
The Problems of not Killing Penn Expansion and of Tariffs
Penn Station Expansion is a useless project. This is not news; the idea was suspicious from the start, and since then we’ve done layers of simulation, most recently of train-platform-mezzanine passenger flow. However, what is news is that the Trump administration is aiming to take over Penn Reconstruction (a separate, also bad project) from the MTA, in what looks like the usual agency turf battles, except now given a partisan spin. I doubt there’s going to be any money for Reconstruction (budgeted at $7 billion), let alone expansion (budgeted at $17 billion), and overall this looks like the usual promises that nobody intends to act upon. The problem is that this project is still lurking in the background, waiting for someone insane enough to say what not a lot of people think but few are willing to openly disagree with and find some new source of money to redirect there. And oddly, this makes me think of tariffs.
The commonality is that free trade is not just good, but is more or less an unmixed blessing. In public transport rolling stock procurement, the costs of tariffs are so high that a single job created in the 2010s cost $1 million over 4-6 years, paying $20/hour. In infrastructure, in theory most costs are local and so it shouldn’t matter, but in practice some materials need to be imported, and when they run into trade barriers, they mess entire construction schedules. Boston’s ability to upgrade commuter rail stations with high platform was completely lost due to successive tightening of the Buy America waiver process under Trump and then Biden, to the point that even materials that were just not made in America (steel, FRP) could not be imported. The problem is that nobody was willing to say this out loud, and instead politicians chose to interfere with bids to get some photo-ops, getting trains that are overpriced and fail to meet schedule and quality standards.
Thus, the American turn away from free trade, starting with Trump’s 2016 campaign. During the Obama-Trump transition, the FTA stopped processing Buy America waivers, as a kind of preemptive obedience to something that was never written into the law, which includes several grounds for waivers. During the Trump-Biden transition, the standards were tightened, and waivers required the approval of a political office at the White House, which practiced a hostile environment, hence the above example of the MBTA’s platform problems. Now there are general tariffs, at a rate that changes frequently with little justification. The entire saga, especially in the transit industry, is a textbook example not just of comparative advantage, but of the point John Williamson made in the original Washington Consensus that trade barriers were a net negative to the country that imposes them even if there’s no retaliation, purely from the negative effects on transparency and government cleanliness. This occurred even though tariffs were not favored in the political elite of the United States, or even in the general public; but nobody would speak out except special interests and populists who favored trade barriers.
And Penn Expansion looks the same. It’s an Amtrak turf game, which NJ Transit and the MTA are indifferent to. NJ Transit’s investment plan is not bad and focuses on actual track-level improvements on the surface. The MTA has a lot of problems, including the desire for Penn Reconstruction, but Penn Expansion is not among them. The sentiments I’m getting when I talk to people in that milieu is that nobody really thinks it’s going to happen, and as a result most people don’t think it’s important to shoot down what is still a priority for Amtrak managers who don’t know any better.
The problem is that when the explicit argument isn’t made, the political system gets the message that Penn Expansion is not necessarily bad, but now is not the time for it. It will not invest in alternatives. (On tariffs, the alternative is to repeal Buy America.) It will not cancel the ongoing design work, but merely prolong it by demanding more studies, more possibilities for adding new tracks (seven? 12? Any number in between?). It will insist that any bounty of money it gets go toward more incremental work on this project, and not on actually useful alternatives for what to do with $17 billion.
This can go on for a while until some colossally incompetent populist of the type that can get elected mayor or governor in New York, or perhaps president, decides to make it a priority. Then it can happen, and $17 billion plus future escalation would be completely wasted, and further investment in the system would suffer because everyone would plainly see that $17 billion buys next to nothing in New York so what’s the point in spending a mere $300 million here and there on a surface junction? If it were important then Amtrak would have prioritized that, no? Even people who get on some level that the agencies are bad with money will believe them on technical matters like scheduling and cost estimation over outsiders, in the same manner that LIRR riders think the LIRR is incompetent and also has nothing to learn from outsiders.
The way forward is to be more formal about throwing away bad ideas. Does Penn Expansion have any transportation value? No. So cancel it. Drop it from the list of Northeast Corridor projects, cancel all further design work, and spend about 5 orders of magnitude less money on timetabling trains at Penn Station within its existing footprint. Don’t let it lurk in the background until someone stupid enough decides to fund it; New York is rather good lately at finding stupid people and elevating them to positions of power. And learn to make affirmative arguments for this rather than the usual “it will just never happen” handwringing.
Open BRT
BRT, or bus rapid transit, can be done in one of two ways: closed and open. Closed systems imitate rail lines, in that there is a BRT route along the entire length of the corridor; open ones instead take a trunk route, upgrade it with dedicated lanes and other BRT features, and let routes run through from it to branches that are not so equipped, perhaps because there is less traffic on the branches. I complained 14 years ago that New York City Transit was planning closed BRT in the form of SBS on Hylan Boulevard on Staten Island, a good route for open BRT. Well, now the MTA is planning BRT on the disused North Shore Branch of the Staten Island Railway, arguing that it is better than reactivating rail service because buses could use it as an open corridor – except that this is a poor corridor for open BRT. This leads to the question: which corridors are good for open BRT to begin with?
Trunks and branches are good
Open BRT can be analogized to a Stadtbahn system, fast in the core and slow outside it. Like a Stadtbahn, it works best where several branches can converge onto a single route, where the high traffic both requires higher capacity and justifies higher investment; just as grade separation increases the throughput of a rail line, BRT treatments increase those of a bus through greater separation from other traffic and regularity of service.
Unlike a Stadtbahn, open BRT remains a bus. This means two things:
- The trunk route must itself be a strong surface route. It had better be a wide street with room for physically separated bus lanes, or else a city center route that could be turned into a transit mall. A Stadtbahn system puts the fast central portion underground and could do it independently of the street network, or even run under a slow narrow street like Tremont Street in Boston.
- The connections from the trunk route to the branches must themselves be strong bus links. If the bus needs to zigzag on narrow residential streets to get between two wider arterials, then it will be unreliable and slow even if one of the wider arterials gets dedicated lanes. A Stadtbahn system can tunnel a few hundred meters here and there to ensure the onramps are adequate, but a surface bus system cannot, not without driving its cost structure to that of a subway but with few of the benefits of underground running.
The North Shore Branch could pass a modified version of criterion 1, but fails criterion 2. In general, former rail lines are bad for such BRT systems, since the street network was never set up for such connections. In contrast, street networks with a central artery and streets of intermediate importance between it and residential side streets emanating from it, which were never used for grade-separated rail lines, are more ideal for this treatment.
Grids are bad
Street grids eliminate the branch hierarchy of traditional street networks. There is still a hierarchy of more and less important grid streets – in Manhattan, the avenues and two-way streets are wider and more used for traffic than the one-way streets – but there is little branching. Bus networks can still branch if they move between streets, which happens in Manhattan, but it’s not usually a good idea: Barcelona’s Nova Xarxa uses the grid to run mostly independent bus routes, each route mostly sticking to a grid arterial, and the extent of branching on the Brooklyn, Queens, and Bronx bus networks is limited to a handful of short segments like the Washington Bridge.
In situations like this, open BRT would not work. Hylan is possibly the only route in New York that has any business running open BRT. For this reason, our Brooklyn bus redesign proposal, and any work we could do for Queens, Manhattan, or the Bronx, eschews the open BRT concept. The buses are upgraded systemwide, since features like off-board fare collection and wider stop spacing are not really special BRT features but are rather normal in, for example, the urban German-speaking world. Center bus lanes are provided wherever there is need and room. There is more identification of a bus route with the street it runs on, but it isn’t really closed BRT, which is a series of treatments giving the BRT routes dedicated fleets and stations, for example with left-side doors to board from metro-style island platforms like Transmilenio.
What this means more broadly is that the open BRT is not a good fit for most of North America, with its grid routes. Occasionally, a diagonal street could act as a trunk if available, but this is uncommon. Broadway is famous for running diagonally to the Manhattan grid, but that’s not a BRT route but a subway route.
Pedestrian Observations 