An article in Streetsblog by Jim Mathews of the Rail Passengers Association talking up Amtrak as a success has left a sour taste in my mouth as well as those of other good transit activists. The post says that Amtrak is losing money and it’s fine because it’s a successful service by other measures. I’ve talked before about why good intercity rail is profitable – high-speed trains are, for one, and has a cost structure that makes it hard to lose money. But even setting that aside, there are no measures by which Amtrak is a successful, if one is willing to look away from the United States for a few moments. What the post praises, Amtrak’s infrastructure construction, is especially bad by any global standard. It is unfortunate that American activists for mainline rail are especially unlikely to be interested in how things work in other parts of the world, and instead are likely to prefer looking back to American history. I want to like the RPA (distinct from the New York-area Regional Plan Association, which this post will not address), but its Americanism is on full display here and this blinds its members to the failures of Amtrak.
More broadly than the TGV, Eurostat reports rail p-km without distinction between intercity and regional trains; the total for both modes in the US was 20.714 billion in 2023 and 30.89 billion in 2019, commuter rail having taken a permanent hit due to the decline of its core market of 9-to-5 suburb-to-city middle-class commuting. These figures are, per capita, 62 and 94 p-km/year. In the EU and environs, only one country is this low, Greece, which barely runs any intercity rail service and even suspended it for several months in 2023 after a fatal accident. The EU-wide average is 955 p-km/year. Dense countries like Germany do much better than the US, as do low-density countries like Sweden and Finland. Switzerland has about the same mainline rail p-km as the US as of 2023, 20.754 billion, on a population of 8.9 million (US: 335 million).
So purely on the question of whether people use Amtrak, the answer is, by European standards, a resounding no. And by Japanese standards, Europe isn’t doing that great – Japan is somewhat ahead of Switzerland per capita. Amtrak trains are slow: the Northeast Corridor is slower than the express trains that the TGV replaced, and the other lines are considerably slower, running at speeds that Europeans associate with unmodernized Eastern European lines. They are infrequent: service is measured in trains per day, usually just one, and even the Northeast Corridor has rather bad frequencies for the intensely used line it wants to be.
Is this because of public support?
No. American railroaders are convinced that all of this is about insufficient public funding, and public preference for highways. Mathews’ post repeats this line, about how Amtrak’s 120 km/h average speeds on a good day on its fastest corridor should be considered great given how much money has been spent on highways in America.
The issue is that other countries spend money on highways too. High American construction costs affect highway megaprojects as well, and thus the United States brings up the rear in road tunneling. The highway competition for Amtrak comprises fairly fast, almost entirely toll-free roads, but this is equally true of Deutsche Bahn; the competition for SNCF and Trenitalia is tollways, but then those tollways are less congested, and drivers in Italy routinely go 160 km/h on the higher-quality stretches of road.
Amtrak itself has convinced itself that everyone else takes subsidies. For example, here it says “No country in the world operates a passenger rail system without some form of public support for capital costs and/or operating expenses,” mirroring a fraudulent OIG report that compares the Northeast Corridor (alone) to European intercity rail networks. Technically it’s true that passenger rail in Europe receives public subsidies; but what receives subsidies is regional lines, which in the US would never be part of the Amtrak system, and some peripheral intercity lines run as passenger service obligation (PSO) with in theory competitive tendering, on lines that Amtrak wouldn’t touch. Core lines, equivalent to Chicago-Detroit, New York-Buffalo, Washington-Charlotte-Atlanta, Los Angeles-San Diego, etc., would be high-speed and profitable.
But what about construction?
What offends me the most about the post is that it talks up Amtrak’s role as a construction company. It says,
Today, our nationalized rail operator is also a construction company responsible for managing tens of billions of dollars for building bridges, tunnels, stations, and more – with all the overhead in project-management staff and capital delivery that this entails.
The problem is that Amtrak is managing those tens of billions of dollars extremely inefficiently. Tens of billions of dollars is the order of magnitude that it took to build the entire LGV network to day ($65.5 billion in 2023 prices), or the entire NBS network in Germany ($68.6 billion). Amtrak and the commuter rail operators think that if they are given the combined cost to date of both networks, they can upgrade the Northeast Corridor to be about as fast as a mixed high- and low-speed German line, or about the fastest legacy-line British trains (720 km in 5 hours).
The rail operations are where Amtrak is doing something that approximates good rail work – lots of extraneous spending, driving up Northeast Corridor operating costs to around twice the fares on German and French high-speed trains, probably around 3-4 times the operating costs on those trains. But capital construction is a bundle of bad standards for everything, order-of-magnitude cost premiums, poor prioritization, and agency imperialism leading Amtrak to want to spend $16 billion on a completely unnecessary expansion of Penn Station. The long-term desideratum of auto-tensioned (“constant-tension”) catenary south of New York, improving reliability and lifting the current 135 mph (217 km/h) speed limit, would be a routine project here, reusing the poles with their 75-80 meter spacing; an incompetent (since removed) Amtrak engineer insisted on tightening to 180′ (54 m) so the project is becoming impossibly expensive as the poles have to be replaced during service. “Amtrak is also doing construction” is a derogatory statement about Amtrak.
Why are they like this?
Americans generally resent having to learn about the rest of the world. This disproportionately affects industries where the United States is clearly ahead (for example, software), but also ones where internal American features incline Americans to overfocus on their own internal history. Railroad history is rich everywhere, and the relative decline of the railway in favor of the highway lends itself to wistful alternative history, with intense focus on specific lines or regions. New Yorkers are, in the same vein, atypically provincial when it comes to the subway’s history, and end up making arguments, such as about the difficulty of accessibility retrofits on an old system, that can be refuted by looking at peer American systems, not just foreign ones.
The upshot is that an industry and an advocacy ecosystem that both intensely believe that railroad decline was because government investment favored roads – something that’s only partly true, since the same favoring of roads happened more or less everywhere – will want to learn from their own local histories. Quite a lot of advocacy by the RPA falls into the realm of trying to revive the intercity rail system the US had in the 1960s, before the bankruptcies and near-bankruptcies that led to the creation of Amtrak – but this system was what lost out to highways and cars to begin with. The innovations that allowed East Asia to avoid the same fate, and the innovations that allowed Western Europe to partly reverse this fate, involve different ideas of how to build and operate intercity rail.
And all of this requires understanding that, on a basic level, Amtrak is best described as a mishmash of the worst features of every European and East Asian railway: speed, fares, frequency, reliability, coverage. Each country that I know of misses on at least one of these aspects – Swiss trains are slow, the Shinkansen is expensive, the TGV has multi-hour midday gaps, German trains barely run on a schedule, China puts its train stations at inconvenient locations. Amtrak misses on all of those, at once.
And while Amtrak misses on service quality in operations, it, alongside the rest of the American rail construction industry, practically defines bad capital planning. Cities can build the right project wrong, or build the wrong project right, or have poor judgment about standards but not project delivery or the reverse, and somehow, Amtrak’s current planning does all of these wrong all at once.
I’m sitting on a series of three trains to Rome, totaling 14 hours of travel. If a high-speed rail network is built connecting those cities, the trip can be reduced to about 7.5 hours: 2.5 Berlin-Munich (currently 4), 2 Munich-Verona (currently 5.5), around 2.75 Verona-Rome (currently 3.5), around 0.25 changing time (currently 1). The slowest section is being bypassed with the under-construction Brenner Base Tunnel, but not all of the approaches to the tunnel are, and Germany is happy with its trains averaging slightly slower speeds than the 1960s express Shinkansen.
I bring this up because it’s useful background for a rather stupid report by Transport and Environment that was making the rounds on European social media, purporting to rank the different intercity rail operators of Europe, according to criteria that make it clear nobody involved in the process cares much about infrastructure construction or about what has made high-speed rail work at the member state level. It’s consultant slop, based on a McKinsey report that conflicts with the published literature on intercity rail ridership elasticity, which makes it clear that speed matters greatly. Astonishingly, even negative discourse about the study, by people who I respect, talks about the slop and about the problems of privatization, but not about the need to actually go ahead and build those high-speed connections, without which there are sharp limits to the quality of life available to the zero-carbon lifestyle, limits that make people avoid that lifestyle and instead fly and drive. In effect, Europe and its institutions have made a collective decision over the last 10 or so years not to build high-speed rail, to the point that activism suggesting it reverse course and do so is treated as self-evidently laughable.
The T&E study
The T&E study purports to rank the intercity rail operators of Europe. There are 27 operators so ranked, which do not exactly correspond to the 27 member states, but instead omit some peripheral states, include British and Swiss options, and have some private operators, including inexplicably treating OuiGo as separate from the rest of the TGV. The ranking is of operators rather than infrastructure systems; there is no attention given to planning infrastructure and operations together. Trenitalia comes first, followed by a near-tie between RegioJet and SBB; Eurostar is last. Jon Worth had to pour cold water on the conclusions and the stenography in various European newspapers about them.
In fact, the study fits so perfectly into my post about making up rankings that it is easy to think I wrote the post about T&E – but no, the post is from 2.5 years ago. The issue is that it came up with such bad weighting in judging railways that one is left to wonder if it specifically picked something that would sound truthy and put SBB at or near the top just to avoid raising too many questions. The criteria used are as follows:
Ticket prices: 25%
Special fares and reductions: 15%
Reliability: 15%
Booking experience: 15%
Compensation policies: 10%
Traveler experience (speed and comfort): 10%
Night trains and bicycle policy: 5%
None of this is even remotely defensible, and none of this passes any sanity check. No, it is not 1.5 times as important to have special reductions in fares for advance bookings or other forms of price discrimination as to have a combination of speed and comfort. The Shinkansen has fixed fares and is doing fine, thank you very much; SNCF’s own explanations of its airline-style yield management system portray it as a positive but not essential feature – its reports from 2009 recommending high-speed rail development in the United States cite yield management as a 4% increase in revenue, which is good but not amazing.
But more broadly, it is daft to set a full 50% of the weight on fares and fare-related issues (i.e. compensation), and 15% on the booking experience, and relegate speed to part of an issue that is only 10%. That’s not how high-speed rail ridership works. Cascetta-Coppola find a ridership elasticity with respect to trip time of about -2, but only -0.37 with respect to fares. Börjesson finds a much narrower spread, -1.12 and -0.67 respectively, but still the same directionally. Speed matters.
And yet, T&E doesn’t seem to care. The best hints for the reason why are in the way it compares operators rather than national networks, and relies on a McKinsey report pitched at private entrants and not at member state policymakers, who do not normally outsource decisionmaking to international consultants. It doesn’t think in terms of systems or networks, because it isn’t trying to make a pitch at how a member state can improve its rail network, but rather at how a private competitor should aim to make a profit on infrastructure built previously by the state.
The need for state planning
Every intercity rail network worth its name was built and planned publicly, by a state empowered to do so. In East Asia, this comprises the high-speed rail networks of China, Japan, Korean, and Taiwan, all funded publicly, even if Japan subsequently privatized Shinkansen operation (though not construction) to regional monopolies that, while investor-owned, are too prestigious to fail. In Europe, some networks have high-speed rail at their core, like France, and others don’t, like Switzerland or the Netherlands, but the latter instead optimize state planning at lower speed, with tightly timed connections, strategic investments to speed up bottlenecks, and integration between rolling stock, the timetable, and infrastructure.
This feature of the main low-speed European rail network frustrates some attempts at disaggregating the effects of different inputs on ridership and revenue. At the level of a sanity check, there does not appear to be a noticeable malus to French rail ridership from its low frequency at outlying stations. But then France relies on one-seat rides from Paris to rather small cities, which do not have convenient airport access, and in its own way integrates this operating paradigm with rolling stock (bilevels optimized for seating capacity, not fast egress or acceleration) and infrastructure (bypasses around intermediate cities, even Lyon). Switzerland, in contrast, has these timed connections such that the effective frequency even on three-seat rides is hourly, with guaranteed short waits at the transfers, and this provides an alternative way to connect small cities with not just large ones but also each other.
But in both cases, the operating paradigm is connected with the infrastructure, and this was decided publicly by the state, based on governmental financial constraints, imposed in the 1970s in France (leading to extraordinarily low construction costs for the LGV Sud-Est) and the 1980s in Switzerland (leading to the hyper-optimized operations of Bahn 2000 in lieu of a high-speed rail system). A private operator can come in, imitate the same paradigm that the infrastructure was built for, and sometimes achieve lower operating costs by being more aggressive about eliminating redundant positions that a state operator may feel too constrained by unions to. But it cannot innovate in how to run trains. Even in Italy and Spain, where private competition has led to lower fares and higher ridership, all the private competitors have done is force service to look more like the TGV as it is and less like the TGV as SNCF management would like it to be internationally. Even there, they do not innovate, but merely imitate what the TGV already had purely publicly, on infrastructure that was designed for TGV or ICE service intensity all along.
The idea that the private sector can innovate in intercity rail comes from the same imitation of airline thinking that led to the failure of Eurostar, with its high fares and airline-style boarding and queuing. In the airline business, integration between infrastructure and operations is weak, and private airlines can innovate in aircraft utilization, fast boarding, no-frills service, and other aspects that led low-cost carriers to success. Business analysts drawn from that world keep trying to make this work for trains, and fail; the Spinetta Report mentions that OuiGo tanked TGV revenues, and ridership did not materially increase when it was introduced due to inconveniences imposed by the system of segmenting the market by fare.
Europe’s decision not to build high-speed rail
In the 2000s, there was semi-official crayon, such as the TEN-T system, for EU-wide high-speed rail, inspired by the success of the TGV. Little of it happened, and by the 2010s, it became more common to encounter criticism alleging that it could not be done, and it was more important to focus on other things – namely, private competition, the thing that cannot innovate in rail but could in airlines.
At no point was there a formal decision not to build high-speed rail at a European scale. Projects just fell aside, unless they were megaproject tunnels across mountains like the Brenner Base Tunnel or water like the Fehmarn Belt Tunnel, and then there is underinvestment in the approaches, so that the average speed remains shrug-worthy. The discourse shifted from building infrastructure to justifying not building it and pitching on-rail competition instead. This, I believe, is due to factors going back to the 1990s:
The failure of Eurostar to produce high ridership. It underperformed expectations; it also underperforms domestic city pairs. SNCF is happy to collect monopoly profits from international travelers, and, in turn, potential travelers associate high-speed rail with high fares and inconvenience and look elsewhere. One failed prominent project can and does poison the technology, potentially indefinitely.
The anti-state zeitgeist at the EU level. This can be described as neoliberalism, but the thoroughly neoliberal Blair/Brown and Cameron cabinets happily planned High Speed 2. The EU goes beyond that: it is too scared to act as a state on matters other than trade, and that leads people in EU policy to think in terms of government-by-nudge, rather like the Americans.
SNCF and DB’s profiteering off of cross-border travelers in different ways turns them into Public Enemies #1 and #2 for people who travel between different member states by rail, who are then reluctant to see them as successes domestically.
For all of these reasons, it’s preferred at the level of EU policymaking and advocacy not to build infrastructure. Infrastructure requires there to be a public sector, and the EU only does that on matters of trade and regulatory harmonization.
Jon Worth has done a lot of work on getting a passenger rights clause into the agenda for the new EU Parliament, to deal with friction between DB and SNCF when each blames the other when a cross-border passenger is stranded (roughly: DB blames SNCF for running low frequencies so that if DB’s last train is delayed the passenger is stranded, SNCF blames DB for being so delayed in the first place). This is a good kind of regulatory harmonization. It reminds me of the EU’s role in health care: there’s reciprocity among the universal health care systems of Europe, for example allowing EU immigrants but not non-European ones to switch to the Kasse upon arrival; but at the same time, the EU has practically no role in designing or providing these universal health care system or even, as the divergent responses to corona showed in 2020, in coordinating non-pharmaceutical interventions for public health in a pandemic.
But health care does not require large coordinating bodies, and infrastructure does. Refugee camps tended to by UN agencies that have to pay bribes and protection fees to local gangs can have surprisingly good health care outcomes. Cox’s Bazar’s Rohingya camps have infant mortality rates comparable to those of Bangladesh and Burma; Gaza had good if worse-than-Israeli life expectancy and infant mortality until the war started. But nobody can build infrastructure this way. Top-down state action is needed to coordinate, which means actual infrastructure construction, not just passenger rights.
The thinking at the EU level is that greater on-rail competition can improve service quality. But that’s just a form of denial. The EU has no willingness to actually build the high-speed rail segments required to enable rail trips across borders, and so various anti-state actors, most on the center-to-center-right but not all, lie to themselves that it’s okay, that if the EU fails to act as a state then the private sector can step in if allowed to. That’s where the T&E study comes in: it rates operators on how to act like a competitive flight level-zero airline, going with this theory of private-sector innovation to cope with the fact that cross-border rail isn’t being built and try to salvage something out of it.
But it can’t be salvaged, not in this field; the best the private sector can do is provide equivalent service to a good state service on infrastructure that the state built. The alternative to the state is not greater private initiative. In infrastructure, the political alternative is that people who are not Green voters, which group comprises 92.6% of the European Parliament, are going to just drive and fly and associate low-carbon transportation with being contained to within biking distance of city center. The economic alternative is that ties between European cities will remain weak, to the detriment of the European economy and its ability to scale up.
Progressive design-build just passed. This project delivery system brings New York in full into the globalized system of procurement, which has led to extreme cost increases in the United Kingdom, Canada, and other English-speaking countries, making them unable to build any urban transit megaprojects. Previously, New York had most of the misfeatures of this system, largely through convergent evolution, but due to slowness in adapting outside ideas, the state took until now, with extensive push from Adams’ orbit, for which Adams is now taking credit, to align. Any progress in cost control through controlling project scope will now be wasted on the procurement problems caused by this delivery method.
What is progressive design-build?
Progressive design-build is a variant on design-build. There is some divergence between New York terminology and rest-of-world terminology; for people who know the latter, progressive design-build is approximately what the rest of the world calls design-build.
To give more detail, designing and constructing a piece of infrastructure, say a single subway station, are two different tasks. In the traditional system of procurement, the public client contracts the design with one firm, and then bids it out to a different firm for construction; this is called design-bid-build. All low-construction cost subway systems that we are aware of use a variant of design-bid-build, but two key features are required to make it work: sufficient in-house supervision capacity since the agency needs to oversee both the design and the build contracts, and flexibility to permit the build contractors to make small changes to the design based on spot prices of materials and labor or meter-scale geological discoveries. The exact details of both in-house capacity and flexibility differ by country; for example, Turkey codifies the latter by having the design contract only cover 60% design, and bundling going from 60% to 100% design with the build contract. Despite the success of the system in low-construction cost environments, it is unpopular among the global, especially English-speaking, firms, because it is essentially client-centric, relying on high competence levels in the public sector to work.
To deal with the facts that large global firms think they are better than the public sector, and that the English-speaking world prefers its public sector to be drowned in a bathtub, there are alternative, contractor-centric systems of project delivery. The standard one in the globalized system is called design-build or design-and-build, and simply means that the same contractor does both. This means less public-facing friction between designers and builders, and more friction that’s hidden from public view. Less in-house capacity is required, and the contracts grow larger, an independent feature of the globalized system. As the Swedish case explains in the section on the traditional and globalized systems, globalized Swedish contracts go up to $300-500 million per contract (and Swedish costs, once extremely low, are these days only medium-low); in New York, contracts for Second Avenue Subway Phase 2 are already in the $1-2 billion range.
In New York, the system is somewhat complicated by the text of legacy rules on competitive bidding, which outright forbid a company from portraying itself as doing both design and construction. It took recent changes to legalize the Turkish system of bundling the two contracts differently; this changed system is what is called design-build in New York and is used for Second Avenue Subway Phase 2, even though there are still separate design and construction contracts, and is even called design-build in Turkey.
Unfortunately, New York did not stop at this, let’s call it, des-bid-ign-build system. Adams and Hochul want to be sure to wreck state capacity. Thus, they’ve pushed for progressive design-build, which is close to what the rest of the world calls design-build. More precisely, the design contractor makes a build bid at the end of the design phase, and is presumed to become the build contractor, but if the price is too high, there’s an escape clause and then it becomes essentially design-bid-build.
The globalized system that led to a cost explosion in the UK and Canada in the 1990s and 2000s from reasonable to strong candidates for second worst in the world (after the US) is now coming to New York, which already has a head start in high construction costs due to other problems. It’s a win-win for political appointees and cronies, and they clearly matter more than the people of the city and state of New York.
I talked last time about how high-speed rail in Texas is stuck in part because of how it learned the wrong lessons from the Shinkansen. That post talks about several different problems briefly, and here I’d like to develop one specific issue I see recur in a bunch of different cases, not all in transportation: learning what managers in a successful case say is how things should run, rather than how the successful case is actually run. In transportation, the most glaring case of learning the wrong lessons is not about the Shinkansen but about the TGV, whose success relies on elements that SNCF management was never comfortable with and that are the exact opposite of what has been exported elsewhere, leading countries that learned too much from France, like Spain, to have inferior outcomes. This also generalizes to other issues, such as economic development, leading to isomorphic mimicry.
This success brought in imitators, comprising mostly countries that looked up to France in the 1990s and 2000s; Germany never built such a system, having always looked down on it. In the 2010s and 20s, the imitation ceased, partly due to saturation (Spain, Italy, and Belgium already had their own systems), partly because the mediocre economic growth of France reduced its soft power, and partly because the political mood in Europe shifted from state-built infrastructure projects to on-rail private competition. I wrote three years ago about the different national traditions of building high-speed rail, but here it’s best to look not at the features of the TGV today but at those of 15 years ago:
High average speed, averaging around 230 km/h between Paris and Marseille; this was the highest in the world until China built out its own system, slightly faster than the Shinkansen and much faster than the German, Korean, and Taiwanese systems. Under-construction lines that have opened since have been even faster, reaching 260 km/h between Paris and Bordeaux.
Construction on cut-and-fill, with passenger-only lines with steep grades (a 300 km/h train can climb 3.5% grades just fine), limited use of viaducts and tunnels, and extensive public outreach including land swap deals with farmers and overcompensation of landowners in order to reduce NIMBY animosity.
Direct service to the centers of major cities, using classical lines for the last few kilometers into Paris and most other major cities; cities far away from the network, such as Toulouse and Nice, are served as well, on classical lines with the trains often spending hours at low speed in addition to their high-speed sections.
Extensive branching: every city of note has its own trains to Paris.
Little seat turnover: trains from Paris to Lyon do not continue to Marseille and trains from Paris to Marseille do not stop at Lyon, in contrast with the Shinkansen or ICE, which rely on seat turnover and multiple major-city stops on the same train.
Open platforms: passengers can get on the platform with no security theater or ticket gates, and only have to show their ticket on the train to a conductor. This has changed since, and now the platforms are increasingly gated, though there is still no security theater.
No fare differentiation: all trains have the same TGV brand, and charge similar fares as the few remaining slow intercity trains, on average much lower than on the Shinkansen. Fares do depend on airline-style buckets including when and how one books a train, and on service class, but there is no premium for speed or separation into high- and low-fare trains. This has also changed since, as SNCF has sought to imitate low-cost airlines and split the trains into the high-fare InOui brand and low-fare OuiGo brand, differentiated in that OuiGo sometimes doesn’t go into traditional city stations but only into suburban ones like Marne-la-Vallée, 25 minutes from Paris by RER. However, InOui and OuiGo are still not differentiated by speed.
SNCF management’s own beliefs on how trains should operate clearly differ from how TGVs actually did operate in the 1990s and 2000s, when the system was the pride of Europe. Evidently, they have introduced fare differentiation in the form of the InOui-OuiGo distinction, and ticket-gated the platforms. The aim of OuiGo was to imitate low-cost airlines, one of whose features is service at peripheral airports like Beauvais or Stansted, hence the use of peripheral train stations. However, even then, SNCF has shown some flexibility: it is inconvenient when a train unloads 1,000 passengers at an RER station, most of whom are visitors to the region and do not have a Navigo card and therefore must queue at ticket vending machines just to connect; therefore, OuiGo has been shifting to the traditional Parisian terminals.
However, the imitators have never gotten the full package outlined above. They’ve made some changes, generally in the direction of how SNCF management and the consultants who come from that milieu think trains ought to run, which is more like an airline. The preference for direct trains and no seat turnover has been adopted into Spain and Italy, and the use of classical lines to go off-corridor has been adopted as well, not just into standard-gauge imitators but also into broad-gauge Spain, using some variable-gauge trains. In contrast, the lack of fare differentiation by speed did not make it to Spain. Fast trains charge higher fares than slow trains, and before the opening of the market to private competition, RENFE ran seven different fare/speed classes on the Madrid-Barcelona lines, with separate tickets.
Ridership, as a result, was disappointing in Spain and Italy. The TGV had around 100 million annual passengers before the Great Recession, and is somewhat above that level today, thanks to the opening of additional lines. The AVE system has never been close to that. The high-speed trains in Italy, a country with about the same population as France, have been well short of the TGV’s ridership as well. Relative to metro area size, ridership in both countries on the city pairs for which I can find data was around half as high as on the TGV. Private competition has partly fixed the problem on the strongest corridors, but nationwide ridership in Spain and Italy remains deficient.
The issue in Spain in particular is that while the construction efficiency is even better than in France, management bought what France said trains should be like and not what French trains actually are. The French rail network is not the dictatorship of SNCF management. Management has to jostle with other interest groups, such as labor, NIMBY landowners, socialist politicians, (right-)liberal politicians, and EU regulators. It hates all of those groups for different reasons and can find legitimate reasons why each of those groups is obstructionist, and yet at least some of those groups are evidently keeping it honest with its affordable fares and limited market segmentation (and never by speed).
More generally, when learning from other places, it’s crucial not just to invite a few of their managers to your country to act as consultants. As familiar as they are with their own success, they still have their prejudices of how things ought to work, which are often not how they actually do work. Experience in the country in question is crucial; if you represent a peripheral country, you need to not just rely on consultants from a success case but also send your own people there to live as locals and get local impressions of how things work (or don’t), so that you can get what the success case actually is.
Amtrak just released its report a week and a half ago, saying that Penn Expansion, the project to condemn the Manhattan block south of Penn Station to add new tracks, is necessary for new capacity. I criticized the Regional Plan Association presentation made in August in advance of the report for its wanton ignorance of best practices, covering both the history of commuter rail through-running in Europe and the issue of dwell times at Penn Station. The report surprised me by making even more elementary mistakes on the reality of how through-running works here than the ones made in the RPA presentation. The question of dwell times is even more important, but the Effective Transit Alliance is about to release a report addressing it, with simulations made by other members; this post, in contrast, goes over what I saw in the report myself, which is large enough errors about how through-running works that of course the report sandbags that alternative, less out of malice and more out of not knowing how it works.
Note on Penn Expansion and through-running
In the regional discourse on Penn Station, it is usually held that the existing station definitely does not have the capacity to add 24 peak trains per hour from New Jersey once the Gateway tunnel opens, unless there is through-running; thus, at least one of through-running and Penn Expansion is required. This common belief is incorrect, and we will get into some dwell time simulations at ETA.
That said, the two options can still be held as alternatives to each other, even as what I think is likeliest given agency turf battles and the extreme cost of Penn Expansion (currently $16 billion) is that neither will happen. This is for the following reasons:
Through-running is good in and of itself, and any positive proposal for commuter rail improvements in the region should incorporate it where possible, even if no dedicated capital investment such as a Penn Station-Grand Central connection occurs. This includes the Northeast Corridor high-speed rail project, which aims to optimize everything to speed up intercity and commuter trains at minimal capital cost.
The institutional obstacles to through-running are mainly extreme incuriosity about rest-of-world practices, which are generations ahead of American ones in mainline rail; the same extreme incuriosity also leads to the belief that Penn Expansion is necessary.
While it is possible to turn 48 New Jersey Transit trains per hour within the current footprint of Penn Station with no loss of LIRR capacity, there are real constraints on turnaround times, and it is easier to institute through-running.
The errors in the history
The errors in the history are not new to me. My August post criticizing the RPA still stands. I was hoping that Amtrak and the consultants that prepared the report (WSP, FX) would not stick to the false claim that it took 46 years to build the Munich S-Bahn rather than seven, but they did. The purpose of this falsehood in the report is to make through-running look like a multigenerational effort, compared with the supposedly easier effort of digging up an entire Manhattan block for a project that can’t be completed until the mid-2030s at the earliest.
In truth, as the August post explains, the real difficulties with through-running in the comparison cases offered in the report, Paris and Munich, were with digging the tunnels. This was done fairly quickly, taking seven years in Munich and 16 in Paris; in Paris, the alignment, comprising 17 km of tunnel for the RER A and 2 for the initial section of the RER B, was not even finalized when construction began. The equivalent of these projects in New York is the Gateway tunnel itself, at far higher cost. The surface improvements required to make this work were completed simultaneously and inexpensively; most of the ones required for New York are already on the drawing board of New Jersey Transit, budgeted in the hundreds of millions rather than billions, and will be completed before the tunnel opens unless the federal government decides to defund the agency over several successive administrations.
The errors in present operations
The report lists, on printed-pp. 40-41, some characteristics of the through-running systems used in Paris, Munich, and London. Based on those characteristics, it concludes it is not possible to set up an equivalent system at Penn Station without adding tracks or rebuilding the entire track level with more platforms. Unfortunately for the reputation of the writers of the report, and fortunately for the taxpayers of New York and New Jersey, those characteristics include major mistakes. There’s little chance anyone in the loop understands the RER, any S-Bahn worth the name, or even Crossrail and Thameslink; some of the errors are obviously false to anyone who regularly commuted on any of these systems. Thus, they are incapable of adjusting the operations to the specifics of Penn Station and Gateway.
Timetabling
A key feature of S-Bahn systems is that the trains run on a schedule. Passengers riding on the central trunk do not look at the timetable, but passengers riding to a branch do. I memorized the 15-minute off-peak Takt on the RER B when I took it to IHES in late 2016, and the train was generally on time or only slightly delayed, never so delayed that it was early. Munich-area suburbanites memorize the 20-minute Takt on their S-Bahn branch line. Some Thameslink branches drop to half-hourly frequency, and passengers time themselves to the schedule while operators and dispatchers aim to make the schedule.
And yet, the report repeatedly claims that these systems run on headway management. The first claim, on p. 40, is ambiguous, but the second, on the table on p. 41, explicitly contrasts “headway-based” with “timetable-based” service and says that Crossrail, the RER, and the Munich S-Bahn are headway-based. In fact, none of them is.
This error is significant in two ways. First, timetable-based operations explain why S-Bahn systems are capable of what they do but not of what some metros do. The Munich S-Bahn peaks at 30 trains per hour, with one-of-a-kind signaling; major metros peak at 42 trains per hour with driverless operations, and some small operations with short trains (like Brescia) achieve even more. The difference is that commuter rail systems are not captive metro trains on which every train makes the same stops, with no differentiation among successive trains on the same line; metro lines that do branch, such as M7 and M13 in Paris, are still far less complex than even relatively simple and metro-like lines like the RER A and B. The main exception among world metros is the New York City Subway, which, due to its extensive interlining, must run as a scheduled railroad, benchmarking its on-time performance (OTP) to the schedule rather than to intervals between trains. In the 2000s and 10s, New York City Transit tried to transition away from end-station OTP and toward a metric that tried to approximate even intervals, called Wait Assessment (WA); a document leaked to Dan Rivoli and me went over how this was a failure, leading to even worse delays and train slowdowns, as managers would make the dispatchers hold trains if the trains behind them were delayed.
The second consequence of the error is that the report does not get how crucial timetable-infrastructure planning integration is on mainline rail. The Munich S-Bahn has outer branches that are single-track and some that share tracks with freight, regional, and intercity trains. The 30 tph trunk does no such thing and could not do such thing, but the branches do, because the trains run on a fixed timetable, and thus it is possible to have a mix of single and double track on some sporadic sections. The Zurich S-Bahn even runs trains every 15 minutes at rush hour on a short single-track section of the Right Bank of Lake Zurich Line. Recognizing what well-scheduled commuter trains can and can’t do influences infrastructure planning on the entire surface section, including rail-on-rail grade separations, extra tracks, yard expansions, and other projects that collectively make the difference between a rail network and crayon.
Separation between through- and terminating lines
Through-running systems vary in how much track sharing there is with the rest of the mainline rail network. As far as I can tell, there is always some; near-complete separation is provided on the RER A, but its Cergy branch also hosts Transilien trains running to Gare Saint-Lazare at rush hour, and the Berlin and Hamburg S-Bahn systems have very little track-sharing as well. Other systems have more extensive track sharing, including Thameslink, the RER C and D, and the Zurich S-Bahn; the RER E and the Munich S-Bahn are intermediate in level of separation between those two poles.
It is remarkable that, while the RER A, B, and E all feature new underground terminals for dedicated lines, the situation of the RER C and D is different. The RER C uses the preexisting Gare d’Austerlitz, and has taken over every commuter line in its network; the through-connection between Gare d’Orsay and Gare d’Invalides involved reconstructing the stations, but then everything was connected to it. The RER D uses prebuilt underground stations at Gare du Nord, Les Halles, and Gare de Lyon, but then takes over nearly all lines in the Gare de Lyon network, with the outermost station, Malesherbes, not even located in Ile-de-France. Thameslink uses through-infrastructure built in the 1860s and runs as far as Petersborough, 123 km from King’s Cross on the East Coast Main Line, and Brighton, the terminus of its line, 81 km from London Bridge.
And yet, the report’s authors seem convinced the only way to do through-running is with a handful of branches providing only local service, running to new platforms built separately from the intercity terminal; they’re even under the impression the RER D is like this, which it is not. There’s even a map on p. 45, suggesting a regional metro system running as far as Hicksville, Long Beach, Far Rockaway, JFK via the Rockaway Cutoff and Queenslink, Port Washington, Port Chester, Hackensack, Paterson, Summit, Plainfield, New Brunswick, and the Amboys. This is a severe misunderstanding of how such systems work: they do not arbitrarily slice lines this way into inner and outer zones, unless there is a large mismatch in demand, and then they often just cut the outer end to a shuttle with a forced transfer, as is the case for some branches in suburban Berlin connecting to S-Bahn outer ends. Among the above-mentioned outer ends, the only one where this exception holds is Summit, where the Gladstone Branch could be cut to a shuttle or to trains only running to Hoboken – but then trains on the main line to Morristown and Dover have no reason to be treated differently from trains to Summit.
Were the report’s authors more informed about just the specific lines they look at on p. 41, let alone the broader systems, they’d know that separation between inner and outer services is contingent on specifics of track infrastructure, including whether there are four-track lines with neat separation into terminating express trains and through locals. But even if the answer is yes, as at Gare de Lyon and Gare d’Austerlitz, infrastructure planners will attempt to shoehorn whatever they can into the system, just starting from the more important inner lines, which generate more all-day demand. There don’t even need to be terminating regional trains; the Austerlitz system doesn’t, and the Gare de Lyon and Gare de l’Est systems only do due to trunk capacity limitations. In that case, they’d recognize that there is no need to have two commuter rail systems, one through-running and one not. Penn Station’s infrastructure already lends itself to allowing through-running on anything entering via the existing North River Tunnels.
Branching
S-Bahn systems usually try to keep the branch-to-trunk ratio to a manageable number. Usually, more metro-like systems have fewer branches: Crossrail has two on each side, the RER A has two to the east and three to the west, the Berlin Stadtbahn has two to the west plus short-turns and five to the east, the Berlin North-South Tunnel has three on each side. The Munich S-Bahn has five to the east and nine to the west, and the combined RER B and D system has three to the north and five to the south, but the latter has more service patterns, including local and express trains on the branches. Zurich has so much interlining that it’s not useful to count branches, and better to count services: there are 21 S-numbered routes serving Hauptbahnhof, of which 13 run through one of the two tunnels, as do some intercity trains.
If there are too many branches, then they’re usually organized as sub-branches – for example, Munich has seven numbered routes through the central tunnel, of which two have two sub-branches each splitting far out. Zurich has fewer than 13 branches on each side, but rather there are several services using each line, with inconsistent through-pairing – for example, the three services going to the airport, S2, S24, and S16, respectively run through to two separate branches of the Left Bank Line and to the Right Bank Line.
The table on p. 41 gets the branch count mildly wrong, but the significant is less in what it gets wrong about Europe and more in what it gets wrong about New York. A post-Gateway service plan is one in which New Jersey has 12 branches, but some can be viewed as sub-branches (like Gladstone and the Morristown Line), and more to the point, there are going to be two trunk lines. The current plan at New Jersey Transit is to assign the Northeast Corridor and North Jersey Coast Lines to the North River Tunnels alongside Amtrak, which is technically two branches but realistically four or even five service patterns, and the Morris and Essex, Montclair-Boonton, and Raritan Valley Lines to Gateway, which is four branches but could even be pruned to three with M&E divided into two sub-branches. The Erie lines have no way of getting to Penn Station today; to get them there requires the construction of the Bergen Loop at Secaucus, with an estimated budget of $1.3 billion in 2020, comparable to the total cost of all yet-unfunded required surface improvements in New Jersey for non-Erie service combined.
If the study authors were more comfortably knowledgeable of European S-Bahn systems, they’d know that multi-line systems, while uncommon, do exist, and divide branches in a similar way. The multiline systems (Paris, Madrid, Berlin, Zurich, and London) all have some reverse-branching, in a similar manner to how New York is soon going to have the New Haven Line reverse-branch to Penn Station and Grand Central. The NJT plan is solid and stands to lead to a manageable branch-to-trunk ratio, even with every single line going to Penn Station via the existing tunnel running through.
The consequence of the errors
The lack of familiarity with through-running commuter rail is evident in how the report talks about this technology. It is intimately related to the fact that the way investment should be done is different from what American railroaders are used to. For one, there needs to be much tighter integration between infrastructure and scheduling. For two, the scheduling needs to be massively simplified, with fewer operating patterns per line – usually one, occasionally two, never 13 as on the New Haven Line today. The same ignorance that leads Amtrak and its consultants to assert that the S-Bahn runs on headway management rather than a fixed timetable also leads them not to even know how through-running commuter rail networks plan out their routes and services.
From my position of greater familiarity as both a regular user and a researcher, I can point out that the required investments to make through-running happen in New York are entirely in line with the cheap surface projects done in the comparison cases. New rolling stock is required, with the ability to run on the different voltages of the three networks – but multi-voltage commuter rolling stock is the norm wherever multiple legacy electrification systems coexist, including Paris, London, and Hamburg. Some extensions of electrification and high platform conversions are required – but these are not expensive, and the latter is already partly funded at reasonable unit costs. Some rail-on-rail grade separations are required – but those are already costed and very likely to be funded, potentially out of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
Penn Station would be used as the universal station in this schema, without the separation into a surface terminal and a through- underground station seen in Munich and Paris. But then, Paris and Munich don’t even universally have this separation themselves; Ostbahnhof was reconstructed for the S-Bahn but is still a single station, and the same is true of the RER C. In a way, Penn Station already is the underground through-station, built generations before the modern S-Bahn concept, complementing and largely replacing surface terminals like Hoboken and Long Island City because those are not in Manhattan.
None of this is hard; the hard part is the Gateway tunnel and that’s already fully funded and under construction. But it does require understanding that the United States is so many decades behind best practices that none of what American railroaders think they know is at all relevant. It’s obligatory to understand how the systems that work, in Europe and rich Asia, do, because otherwise, it’s like expecting someone who has never learned to count beyond 10 to prove mathematical theorems. The people who wrote this report clearly don’t have this understanding, and don’t care to get it, which is why what they write is not worth the electrons that make up the PDF.
I’m at InnoTrans this week, which means I get to both see a lot of new trainsets and talk to vendors for things I am interested in. Those are interesting conversations and much of the content will make it to our upcoming report on high-speed rail in the Northeast and to some ETA reports. But then, in broad stroke, the presentations about the trains here have deeply bothered me, because of how they interact with the issue of on-rail competition. The EU has an open access mandate, so that state-owned and private railways can compete by running trains on tracks throughout the Union, with separation of operations and infrastructure (awkwardly, state railways do both but there are EU regulations prohibiting favoritism, with uneven enforcement). As a result, I’m seeing a lot of pitches geared specifically for potential open access operators, all of which remind me why I’m so negative about the whole concept: it treats infrastructure as a fixed thing and denigrates the idea that it could ever be improved, while enthroning airline-style business analysis.
Proponents of the model cite higher ridership and lower fares due to the introduction of competition in Italy and Spain, but even then, it’s never really invented anything new, and only gotten some city pairs in those two countries to the service quality that integrated state-provided services have always had in France and Germany. In effect, the EU is mandating a dead-end system of managing trains and making a collective decision not to invest in what worked – namely, building and running high-speed lines.
For people unfamiliar with the argument, I wrote a year ago about TGV ridership and traffic modeling. The TGV overperforms a model trained on Shinkansen ridership, which can be explained based on lower fares, leisure travel to the Riviera, and underdeveloped air competition in small metro areas whose residents mostly drive to larger ones to fly. Relative to the same model, Italian and Spanish ridership underperformed the TGV before competition, and rose to roughly match the TGV or be slightly deficient after competition. So competition did lead to growth in ridership, as the competitors added service and lowered fares – but it only created what the French state did by itself. The German state seems to have French-like results: the trains here are much slower than in France, but relative to that, ridership seems to be in line with a TGV-trained model on the handful of city pairs for which I have any data.
This is causing quite a lot of the buzz in the intercity rail industry in Europe to center cross-border competition and new entrants. But this is, judging by the examples the proponents of competition look up to, not creating anything new. It’s not moving rail forward. It’s just filling in gaps that some state-owned railways – but not the largest two – have in their operations.
And worse, it’s making the long-term issues of intercity rail in Europe worse. There’s practically no cross-border high-speed rail construction in Europe, nor any serious push for making it happen. After a great deal of activism by Jon Worth (and others), the European Commission is announcing regulatory measures in its agenda, starting with passenger rights in case of delays. Physical construction is nowhere on the horizon, nor is there any serious advocacy for (say) a Paris-Frankfurt high-speed line or a Bordeaux-Basque Country one. This is a recent development: in the 2000s there was more optimism about high-speed rail, leading to plans like Perpignan-Figueres. But since then, the TEN-T corridor plans turned into low-speed lines and vaporware, and there’s no real interest in fixing that.
Instead, the interest is in letting the private sector lead. State-built high-speed railways – more or less the only high-speed railways – are not in fashion. The private sector is not going to step in and build its own (despite the sad Hyperloop capsule on display at InnoTrans), but instead look for underserved city pairs to come into, competing with state railways. It’s a story of business analysts using techniques brought in from the airline industry rather than one of infrastructure builders.
And it’s exactly those airline-imitating business analysts who are why RENFE, FS, and Eurostar underprovided service to begin with. The airline world lives off of segmenting the market; there are periodic attempts at all-business class airlines, and low-cost carriers entering and exiting the market frequently. It does not build its own infrastructure, not think in terms of things that could work if the infrastructure were a little bit better. A railway that thinks in the same terms might still build, but will not build in coordination with what it runs. It will do the exact opposite of what Switzerland has done with its tight integration of infrastructure and operations planning; therefore, it will get results inferior to those of Switzerland or even France and Germany.
The trains on display at InnoTrans announce proudly that they are homologated for cross-border travel, listing the countries they can operate in. The main high-speed rail vendors here – Siemens, Hitachi, Talgo, Alstom – all talk about this, explicitly; Alstom had a presentation about the Avelia Horizon, awkwardly given in an American accent while talking about how the double-decker cars with 905 mm seat pitch (Shinkansen: 1 meter) minimize track access charges per seat.
In contrast, I have not seen anything about building new lines. I have not seen booths by firms talking about their work building LGVs or NBSes. I have not seen anything by ADIF selling its expertise in low-cost construction; there are some private engineering consultants with booths, but I haven’t seen ADIF, and the French state section of the conference didn’t at all center French construction techniques. The states that have figured out how to build high-speed rail efficiently seem uninterested in doing more with it than just completing their capital-to-provinces networks; even Germany is barely building. Naturally, they’re also uninterested in pitching their construction, even though they do do some public-sector consulting (SNCF does it routinely for smaller French cities). It’s as if the construction market is so small they’re not even going to bother.
Every other booth at the conference talks about innovation with so many synonyms that they swamp what the firm actually does. But beneath the buzzwords, what I’m seeing, at least as far as physical infrastructure goes, is the exact opposite of innovation. I’m seeing filling in small gaps caused by last generation’s bad airline imitation with a different kind of airline imitation, and nothing that moves intercity rail forward.
The 2025-29 capital plan is out, and it is not good. There’s an outline of an ETA report to be released soon going over issues like accessibility, rolling stock costs, and the new faregates. But for now, I’d like to just focus on a high-level issue and how it relates to the subway’s history: State of Good Repair. The capital plan has a summary history of past capital plans on PDF-page 8, and it calls the 1990s and 2000s an era of underinvestment and deferred maintenance, the exact opposite of reality. It treats 2017 as a keystone year for system renewal, which it was not; it was, however, the year current MTA chair Janno Lieber was hired as the head of MTA Construction and Development (formerly Capital Construction). In effect, the plan falsifies the history of the system in order to treat the current leadership as saviors, in service of a plan to spend more money than in 2020-24 while having less to show for it, washing it all with the nebulous promise of State of Good Repair.
The history of State of Good Repair
Traditionally, capital investment is conceived as going to expansion. In New York in the first two thirds of the 20th century, this meant new subway and elevated lines, new connections between subway lines, station upgrades to lengthen the platforms, and new transfers between stations that had previously belonged to different operators. Maintenance was treated as an ongoing expense.
The finances of the subway after WW1 were shaky, and from the Depression onward, it never made money again. Of the two private operators, one, the IRT, was in bankruptcy protection during the Depression, while the public operator, the IND, was debt-ridden due to exceptionally high construction costs for that era and overbuilding. This made it attractive to defer maintenance, on the subway as on mainline rail everywhere in the United States. In 1951, bond money was designated for Second Avenue Subway, but then the money was raided for other priorities, including smaller extensions but also capital renewal, such as replacing the almost 50-year-old IRT rolling stock fleet.
In the 1970s, the city’s poor finances meant it couldn’t subsidize operations and maintenance as much as before, and the maintenance deferral led to a systemwide collapse. NYCSubway.org goes over the various elements of it: chunks of equipment and material were falling onto the street from the elevated lines, and onto the tracks from the retaining walls of open cuts; trains had flat wheels and no lubrication, leading to such squeal that the noise was worse than that of Concorde; train doors and lights malfunctioned; derailments and fires were common. By 1981, the mean distance between failures (MDBF) dropped to its lowest ever, 6,640 miles (10,690 km). One third of the system was under emergency 10 mph speed restrictions, and a quarter of the rolling stock had to be kept in reserve to substitute for equipment failures and could not be run in maximum revenue service. The new trains bought for the system, the R44 and R46, used new technology, for example higher top speed for the use on long express sections, but were defective to the point that the lawsuits against the vendors, St. Louis and Pullman respectively, bankrupted them. The origin of the conservatism of rolling stock orders and the pattern that all American rolling stock manufacture is done at transplant factories owned by European, Japanese, or formerly Canadian firms, are both the result of this history.
The State of Good Repair program as we know it dates to the 1980s, when the MTA, starting with the leadership of Richard Ravitch, began to prioritize maintenance and renewal over expansion. This meant five-year capital programs, to reduce the incentives to defer maintenance in a single year, and a lot of openly crying poverty, where leaders both before and after Ravitch would prefer to extoll the system and downplay its shortcomings. There was large spending on capital as a result, but no Second Avenue Subway. Instead, money went to renewal. Rolling stock was more conservative; the R62 was also imported from Japan, since Reagan cut federal aid to mass transit and so the MTA was free from Buy America’s strictures (in contrast, today states prefer to preemptively obey even when they’re not sure they will get federal funding, and even demand in-state plants). Its mean distance between failures was far higher than that of all other rolling stock, and this greater reliability continued into the R62A, R68, and R68A orders; the systemwide mean distance between failures kept climbing throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, to a peak of around 180,000 miles, or around 280,000 km, in 2005 and again in 2010-11. The slow restrictions that characterized the system in the 1970s were lifted, and rolling stock availability for maximum service rose.
The construction of Second Avenue Subway beginning in 2007 was not viewed as a rebuke to the SOGR program, but rather as the legacy of its success. Leaders like Lee Sander spoke of growth and new lines, setting the stage for what is now known as IBX and was known in then as Triboro RX. The political discourse in the United States at the time was one of transit revival, due to the then-new decoupling of car driving and oil use from economic growth, and the high fuel prices; this was also around the time American discourse discovered European and Japanese high-speed rail, setting the stage for Proposition 1A approving the construction of California High-Speed Rail in 2008.
The present of State of Good Repair
I’ve repeatedly criticized SOGR as a scheme allowing agency heads to demand money with nothing to show for it. The behavior of current MTA leadership is one such example; it is not the only one – Amtrak did the same under Joe Boardman in the 2000s. But it needs to be made clear that the SOGR program of the 1980s and 90s was an unmitigated success. There was visible improvement in the system due to better maintenance of fixed plant and more prudent capital investments, such as the trainsets bought in the era from the R62 to the R160. The present problems of the SOGR concept come essentially because its success in the 1980s and 90s led agencies to talk about it as the next hot thing, even while going in a rather different direction.
In the 2010s, the subway started facing new problems – but these were not problems of undermaintenance. The MDBF crept down to a little less than 120,000 miles at the bottom, in 2017, and was 125,000 miles in 2023. The oldest trains are the worst, but much of the problem comes from other issues than slow replacement of fixed plant. For example, the ongoing slowdowns on the subway – even in the 2000s it was slower than before the 1970s collapse, and speeds are noticeably lower when I visit than when I lived in the city in 2006-11 – come not from insufficient maintenance, but from tighter flagging rules, which are designed to protect workers on adjacent track, but in fact have coincided with more worker injuries than in 1999, with a particular deterioration in worker safety in the 2010s. Andy Byford’s Save Safe Seconds campaign was the right response to the slowdowns, and helped stop the bleeding.
And yet, the idea of SOGR persists, even though the problem it purported to solve has been solved. The worst offender is Amtrak: in the Obama stimulus, it asked for $10 billion for SOGR on the Northeast Corridor, promising trivial reductions in travel times; Amtrak’s chair at the time, Joe Boardman, was the very one who deferred maintenance in order to make Amtrak look more profitable on paper in the service of the Bush administration’s goal of eventual privatization, replacing David Gunn, who was fired because he refused to do so.
In effect, SOGR is now a byword for “investments that aren’t sexy.” Some of those investments are still solid, like those done in the 1990s. Others are wastes of money; their lack of sexiness makes them ideal for managers who rate themselves by the input of how much money their agencies get rather than by outputs like ridership or service quality, since the lack of visible output disempowers civil society and good government watchdogs.
MTA Construction and Development head Jamie Torres-Springer essentially uses this definition in his defense of the capital plan, saying “We looked very closely at a couple of asset types that haven’t been focused on in the past. And to some people, they’re not the most exciting assets. They’re the ones that ensure that we can provide service. It’s structures and power and station components.”
The MTA’s capital plan is likewise denigrating the agency’s own past, saying, of the era in which MDBF rose by a factor of about nine in the span of 15 years, “Investment lagged again in the 1990s and early 2000s” and “After years of progress in the 1980s, investment fell off, culminating in a ‘Summer of Hell’ in 2017. That year, New York’s subway had one of the worst on-time performance of any major rapid transit systems in the world, with only 65% of weekday trains reaching their destinations on-time.”
The problems of train delays are not about investment or about maintenance. Rather, the train delays were about overly ambitious schedules, compounding with the problems of excessive interlining. Of course, interlining had always been present in the system, but the combination of new trains with better braking and signal timers installed based on the performance of older trains meant that the schedules could not be met without slowdowns; managers, in turn, changed how they measured punctuality from on-time performance to wait assessment, the latter more appropriate for subway lines with high frequency (like New York) and little complexity (unlike New York). MTA President Ronnie Hakim, coming from a legal rather than technical background, also denigrated the idea of speed, viewing it not as an essential feature of public transit but as a source of legal liability.
Non-sexy investment can target this; Byford alleviated some of the slowdowns with Save Safe Seconds. In the future, deinterlining the system, starting from DeKalb Avenue’s scrambling of the B, D, N, and Q, where trains lose two minutes due to schedule padding entirely to protect from cascading delays, is necessary. But this is not SOGR – in fact zero dollars are required in capital spending to deinterline DeKalb. Nor is it invisible – this is a visible change on the subway map, which passengers and good government watchdogs can judge for themselves, trading off fewer one-seat rides for higher speed and reliability.
But neither Lieber nor Torres-Springer seems interested in inexpensive fixes. No: both rate themselves by how much money they get rather than by whether it does any good, hence the denigration of the era in which SOGR was a success. As political appointees, they also have no loyalty to the system and its permanent staff, or even to well-regarded leaders (Byford, again) who do not come from the same political milieu. They fail because they exist to allow incompetent governors like Cuomo and Hochul to control a system they have no business running.
This is the second part of my series about the Regional Plan Association event about expanding capacity at Penn Station. Much of the presentation, at least in its first half, betrays wanton ignorance, with which area power brokers derive their belief that it is necessary to dig up an entire block south of Penn Station to add more station tracks, at a cost of $16.7 billion; one railroad source called the people insisting on Penn Expansion “hostage takers.” The first part covered casual ignorance about the history of commuter rail through-running in Europe, including cities that appear in the presentation. This part goes over the core claim made in the presentation regarding how fast trains can enter and exit Penn Station. More broadly, it goes over a core claim made in the source the presentation uses to derive its conclusion, a yet-unreleased consultant report detailing just how much space each train needs at Penn Station, getting it wrong by a factor of 5-10.
The issue is about the minimum time a train needs to berth at a station, called the dwell time. Dwell times vary by train type, service type, and peak traffic. Subways and nearly all commuter trains can keep to a dwell time of 30 seconds, with very few exceptions. City center stations like Penn Station are these exceptions; the RER and the Zurich S-Bahn both struggle with city center dwell times. The Berlin S-Bahn does not, but this is an artifact of Berlin’s atypically platykurtic job density, which isn’t reproducible in any American city. That said, even with very high turnover of passengers at central train stations, the dwell time is still usually measured in tens of seconds, and not minutes. In the limiting case, an American commuter train should be able to dump its entire load of passengers at one station in around two minutes.
The common belief among New York-area railroads is that Penn Station requires very long dwell times. This is not made explicit in the presentation; Foster Nichols’ otherwise sober part of the presentation alludes to “varying dwell times” on pp. 23 and 26, but documents produced by the railroads about their own perceived needs go back years and state precise times; for through-running, it was agreed that the dwell times would be set at 12 minutes in the Tri-Venture Council comprising Amtrak, the LIRR, and New Jersey Transit. The consultant report I reference below even thinks it takes 16 minutes. In truth, the number is closer to 2-3 minutes, and investments that would precede Penn Expansion, like Penn Reconstruction, would be guaranteed to reduce it below 2 minutes.
Dwell times in practice
Before going into what dwell times should be, it is important to sanity-check everything by looking at dwell times as they are. It is fortunate that examples of short dwell times abound.
As mentioned in my previous post, I have just returned from a trip to Brussels and London. My train going out of Berlin was late, so at Hauptbahnhof, the dwell time was just three minutes. The train, which had departed Ostbahnhof almost empty, filled almost to seated capacity at Hauptbahnhof, where there is no level boarding. DB routinely turns trains in four minutes at terminal stations that are located mid-line, like Frankfurt and Leipzig, but this time I observed such dwells at a station with almost complete seat turnover. In Japan, where there is level boarding and two door pairs per car rather than one, the dwell times on the Nozomi are a minute, even at Shin-Osaka, where through-trains transition from JR Central to JR West operation.
On commuter rail, dwell times are shorter, even though the trains are much more crowded at rush hour. The reason is a combination of higher toleration for standees, and higher toleration of mistakes – if passengers get on the wrong train or miss their stop, they will get off at the next stop in a few minutes rather than ending up in the wrong city.
As mentioned in the introduction, Penn Station is a limiting case on commuter rail, since it’s the only station in Manhattan for any possible through-trains today; a future tunnel to Grand Central, studied over 20 years ago as Alternative G and recurrently proposed since in various forms (for example, in the ETA writeup, or in this post of mine from last year), would still leave trains that use the preexisting North River Tunnels running through the East River Tunnels and not making a second Manhattan stop. Thus, the best comparison cases need to be themselves limiting cases, as far as possible.
For this, we need to go to Paris, especially its busiest lines, the RER A and B. The RER B has two central stations: Gare du Nord, Les Halles; Gare du Nord isn’t really in the central business district, but is such a large travel hub that its RER and Métro traffic levels are the highest in both systems. The theoretical dwell time (“stationnement”) is 30 seconds on the RER. In practice, at rush hour, it’s higher – but it’s still measured in tens of seconds. In the 2000s, the RER B reached 70-80 second dwell times at Gare du Nord at peak, before new work reduced the average to 55 seconds. I timed dwell times while living in Paris and riding the RER B regularly to IHES, and at rush hour, the two central stations and Saint-Michel-Notre-Dame were usually 50-60 seconds. This is optimized through signaling as well as wide platforms and single-level trains with four door pairs per car, though the internal configuration of the corridor of the RER B rolling stock still leaves something to be desired, especially if there are passengers with luggage (which there often are, as the line serves CDG Airport).
The RER A has four central business district stations: Les Halles, Auber, Etoile, La Défense; a fifth station, Gare de Lyon, is like Gare du Nord a transport hub with very high originating ridership. A report from the early 2010s lamenting that the theoretical throughput of 30 trains per hour was not achieved in practice blames a host of factors, including high dwell times due to traffic, reaching 50 seconds in the central section. The RER A rolling stock is bilevel with three triple-wide door pairs per car, and for a bilevel its internal circulation is good, but it’s still a bilevel train, and getting through a crowded rush hour car to disembark takes a lot of shuffling.
Is Paris a good comparison case?
Yes.
Part 1 of this series goes over the history of the RER, and points out that in 2019, the RER A had 1.4 million weekday trips, and the RER B 983,000. This compares with a combined LIRR and New Jersey Transit ridership of about 600,000 per weekday. About 67% of LIRR ridership is at rush hour; on SNCF-operated Transilien and RER lines, at the suburban stations, the figure is 46%, and my suspicion is that the RER B is somewhat lower than Transilien.
The higher peakiness in New York evens things up somewhat. But even then, peak hourly traffic into Penn Station from New Jersey was 27,223 passengers in 2019, per the Hub Bound report (Appendix III, Section C), and peak hourly traffic from the four-track East River Tunnels was 33,530; in contrast, the RER A’s peak hourly traffic last decade was 50,000.
Now, Paris does have multiple central stations, whereas there is only one in Manhattan on the LIRR and NJ Transit. That said, this only evens things up. My table on this only includes the SNCF-operated portion, and only includes boardings at a resolution of four hours, not one hour; thus, all central RER A stations are missing. From the table, we get the following maximum boarding counts between 4 and 8 pm and between 6 and 10 am on a work day:
Station
Line
Trains/hour
Boardings (pm)
Boardings (am)
Penn Station
LIRR
37
73,430
4,920
Penn Station
NJ Transit
20
56,664
7,838
Gare du Nord
RER B (both directions)
20
48,989
54,137
Gare du Nord
RER D (both directions)
12
34,512
28,073
Châtelet-Les Halles
RER D (both directions)
12
28,586
6,877
Gare de Lyon
RER D (both directions)
12
49,392
17,158
Haussmann-Saint Lazare
RER E
16
45,383
10,719
The numbers represent single-line trips, so people transferring cross-platform between the RER B and D at Gare du Nord count as boardings. The reason for including both morning and afternoon peak traffic is that afternoon boardings are largely symmetric with morning alightings and vice versa, and so the sum represents total on and off traffic on the train at the peak.
Peak traffic per train in a single direction occurs at Saint-Lazare on the RER E, which only began through-running in May of this year; the counts are from the mid-2010s, when the station was a four-track underground terminal. At the through-stations, total ons and offs per rush hour train are slightly lower than at Penn Station on NJ Transit and slightly higher than on the LIRR. Even taking into account that at Penn Station, 40% of the peak four hour traffic is at the peak hour, and the proportion should be somewhat smaller in Paris, the difference cannot be large. If Gare du Nord can support 60 second dwell times, Penn Station can support dwell times that are not much higher, at least as far as the train-platform interface is concerned.
Gantt charts
A yet unreleased consultant report for the Penn Station Capacity Improvement Project (PCIP) details the tasks that need to be done for a through-running train at Penn Station. This is shown as a pair of Gantt charts, both for a future baseline, the second one assuming dropback crews and station scheduling guaranteeing that trains do not berth on two tracks facing the same platform at the same time. All of this is extravagant and unnecessary, and could not be done by people who are familiar with best practices in Europe or Japan.
This is said to be turn time in the chart and dwell time in the description. But the limiting factor is the passenger path and not the crew path, and for that, it doesn’t matter if a train from New Jersey then goes to Long Island or Stamford and a train from Long Island or Stamford goes to New Jersey or if it’s the other way around.
To be clear, 16 minutes is insanely long as an unpadded turn time, let alone a through-dwell time. The MBTA can do it in 10; I think so can Metro-North at the outer ends. ICE trains turn in four minutes at pinch points like Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof, with extensive rail passenger turnover. So let’s go over how to get from 16 down to a more reasonable number.
Passenger alighting
Alighting does not take 6.5 minutes at Penn Station, even at rush hour, even on trains that are configured for maximum seats rather than fast egress. The limiting factor is not the train doors – the RER D runs bilevels with two door pairs per car and narrow passageways, and would not be too out of place on NJ Transit. Rather, it’s the narrow platforms, which have fewer egress points than they should and poor sight lines. This was studied for the Moynihan Station project, which opened in 2021. The project added new staircases and escalators, and now the minimum clearance time is at most 2.03 minutes, on platform 9, followed by 2.02 minutes on platforms 4 and 5. The expected clearance time, taking into account that passengers prefer to exit near the 7th Avenue end but the egress points are not weighted toward that end, peaks at 4.83 minutes on platform 4 – but passengers can walk along the platform while the train is moving, just as they do on the subway or on the RER.
What’s more, Penn Reconstruction, a project that may or may not happen, but that is sequentially prior to the Penn Expansion project that the slide deck is trying to sell, is required to install additional vertical circulation at all platforms, to reduce the egress times below 2 minutes even in emergency conditions (one escalator out). This is because NFPA 130 requires evacuation in 4 minutes assuming every track that can be occupied is, which given timetabling constraints means both tracks facing each platform other than the single-track platform 9. Responding to Christine Berthet’s questions about through-running, the agency even said that Penn Reconstruction is going to bring all platforms into compliance, but still said dwell times would need to be 8 minutes.
Passenger boarding
Alighting and boarding peak at different times of day. As the above table shows, reverse-peak traffic at Penn Station is only 12% of the combined peak and reverse-peak traffic on NJ Transit, and only 6% on the LIRR. In any circumstance in which the alighting time needs to be stretched to the maximum (again, only somewhat more than 2 minutes), the boarding time can be set at 30 seconds, and vice versa.
Moreover, because the access points to the platforms include escalators, not all running in the peak direction, and not just staircases, reverse-peak traffic consumes capacity that is otherwise wasted. Even the 30 seconds for additional boarding time in the morning rush are generous.
Conductor walk time for safety review
This is not done in Europe. Conductors’ safety review comprises checking whether passengers are stuck in the gap between the platform and the train, which is done after boarding, and takes seconds rather than minutes, using CCTV if the sight lines are obstructed.
Door opening and closing
These do not take 30 seconds each; the total amount of time is in the single digits.
Engineer operating position set-up, and engineer/conductor job briefing
Crews switch out in 1-2 minutes at boundaries between train operating companies in Paris and Shin-Osaka. The RER B is operated by SNCF north of Gare du Nord and by RATP south of it, and they used to switch crews there – and the operating position had to be changed, since the two companies’ engineers preferred different setups, one preferring to sit and the other to stand. It took until the early 2010s to run crews through, and even then it took a few years to unify the line’s dispatching. It does not take 3 minutes to brief the engineer on the job.
Total combined time
On a through-train, using alighting times in line with the current infrastructure at Penn Station, the minimum dwell time is 2-3 minutes, provided trains can be timetabled so that no two tracks facing the same platform have a train present at the same time. If there are four through-platforms, then commuter trains can run every 5 minutes to each platform, which is borderline from the perspective of egress capacity at 7th Avenue but does work.
Intercity trains make this easier to timetable: they have lower maximum capacity unless standing tickets are sold, which they currently are not, and even if Amtrak runs 16-car EMUs, they’ll still have fewer seats than there are seats plus standing spaces on a 10-car NJ Transit train, and not all of them turn over at Penn Station. Potentially, platform 6 can be dedicated to intercity trains in both directions, and then platforms 4 and 5 can run eastbound, alternating, and platforms 7 and 8 can run westbound. Using the timetable string diagram here, the local NJ Transit trains on the Northeast Corridor would have to share a platform, running every 5 minutes, while the express trains can get a dedicated platform running every 10; the local trains are likely to be less crowded and also have more through-passengers, first because usually through-service is more popular in inner suburbs than in outer ones, and second because the likely pairing in our Northeast Corridor plan connects those trains to Long Island City and Flushing while the express trains awkwardly turn into local Metro-North trains to Stamford.
Note that intercity trains can be scheduled to dwell for just 2-3 minutes too, and not just commuter trains. That’s actually longer than Shinkansen express dwell times (involving a crew change at Shin-Osaka), and in line with what I’ve seen with full turnover in Berlin. The Avelia Liberty has better circulation than the ICE 3, since it has level boarding, and any future trainset can be procured with two door pairs per car, like the Velaro Novo or Shinkansen, rather than just one, if dwell times are a concern.
The incuriosity of consultant-driven projects
I spoke to some of the people involved about my problems with the presentation, and got very good questions. One of them pointed out that I am talking about two- and three-minute dwell times in big European cities, and asked, how come experienced international consultants like Arup and LTK, which prepared the Gantt chart above, don’t know this? What’s missing here?
This is a question I’ve had to face with the construction cost comparisons before, and the answer is the same: consultants are familiar with projects that use consultants. Anglo consultants like Jacobs, AECOM, Arup, and WSP have extensive international experience, with the sort of projects that bring in international consulting firms to supervise the designs. The bigger Continental European and East Asian countries have enough in-house engineering expertise that they don’t really bring them in.
This can be readily seen in two ways. First, getting any detailed information about rail projects in France and Germany requires reading the local language. Practically nothing gets translated into English. I almost exclusively use French sources when writing about the RER, which can be readily seen in this post and in part 1. My German is a lot less fluent than my French, but here too I have to rely on reading technical German to be able to say anything about the Berlin or Munich S-Bahn or the ICE at greater depth than English Wikipedia (for one example, compare English and German on switches). A lot of the information isn’t even online and is in railfan books and magazines. This is not an especially globalized industry, and a consultancy that works in English will just not see things that are common knowledge to the experts in France or Germany, let alone Japan.
And second, the few Continental European projects that are more globalized turn into small reference pools for American agencies looking to compare themselves to others. Woody Allen portrays a Barcelona with the works of the only architect his American audience will have heard of. The MTA compares its per-rider costs to those of the not-fully-open Barcelona Metro L9/10, MassDOT uses L9/10 to benchmark the North-South Rail Link (again with the wrong denominator), and VTA uses L9/10 as a crutch with which to justify its decision to build a single-bore San Jose subway. L9/10 is an atypically large project, and atypically expensive for Spain; it also, uniquely, uses more privatization of planning than is the norm in Spain, including design-build project delivery, whence the line from the one of the consultants I’ve had to deal with in the US, “The standard approach to construction in most of Europe outside Russia is design-build” (design-build to a good approximation does not exist in Germany, Spain except L9/10, or Italy, and is uncommon in France and done with less privatization of expertise than in the US).
To take these two points together, then, the elements of foreign systems that are likeliest to be familiar to either American railroaders or English-primary consultants are the biggest and flashiest ones. This can even include elements that are not consultant-driven, if they’re so out there that they can’t be missed, like a high-speed rail network: rail consultants know the TGV exists, even if they’re not as familiar with how SNCF goes around planning and building lines, and can sometimes imitate design standards. Commuter rail infrastructure that’s similarly flashy gets noticed, so the presentation mentions the RER and Munich S-Bahn, even while getting their histories wrong and fixating on the new station caverns that even a tourist on a short trip can notice.
Commuter rail operations are not flashy. The map of RER or S-Bahn lines is neat, which is why rail activists talk about through-running so much – it’s right there posted at every station and on every railcar. But the speed at which people get on and off the train is not as obvious, and it requires looking into detailed reports to do an even rudimentary comparison, none of which in the case of Paris is available in English or easy to find on Google (the word “stationnement” usually means “parking,” in the same manner that the word “dwell” usually means “to live in a place”).
The upshot is that consultant reports written by serious people who absorb the knowledge of the railroaders of the Northeastern US with some British sanity checks can still say things that are so wrong to make the entire report useless. The same process that produces the whopper that the Munich S-Bahn, built 1965-72, took 46 years to build, can produce a Gantt chart that has a combined boarding and alighting time with conductor check that’s more than five times longer than what Penn Station in its current configuration is capable of and more than 10 times longer than what Gare du Nord achieves with similar peak ridership. Based on this false belief regarding dwell times, the agencies are then convinced that through-running is difficult and, separately, many additional tracks at Penn Station are required to fully use the capacity of the under-construction Gateway tunnel, building which would waste $16.7 billion.
I am writing this post riding trains between Brussels and Berlin. My connection in Cologne was canceled as the connecting train was moved to depart earlier than my first train’s arrival time, and somehow, it is faster to stay on the train until Frankfurt and connect there, the trains between Cologne and Berlin are so disturbed this summer. Cologne-Berlin, normally a direct hourly connection in 4-4.5 hours, is slowed to 5.5 hours every two hours this summer. It got me thinking about something Jon Worth said last month about the importance of public transport being there, including at night, because it reminded me of how there are always tradeoffs. Train service cannot literally run 24/7 without changes; maintenance windows are required. So it’s a question of tradeoffs – when service must run less reliably, or not at all. Deutsche Bahn has unfortunately chosen a grossly wrong side of the tradeoff, leading to summertime shutdowns and slowdowns that its French and Japanese peers simply do not have. Those shutdowns, in turn, are, these days, leading to catastrophic levels of popular mistrust in DB.
The tradeoffs
I wrote six weeks ago about the problems of summer maintenance in Germany. But, more generally, there is a tradeoff between span of service on a railway and how consistently service can be delivered. A railway that runs overnight will not have regular maintenance windows, and therefore have to pick some low-traffic period for a special disturbance. On the New York City Subway, this is the weekend: New York City Transit exploits its four-track mainlines and high levels of redundancy in most of the city to shut down individual sections of track on weekends and tell passengers to use alternatives. In Europe, it’s more common for this to be the summer period, when local travel is lower as people go on vacation; unfortunately, in Germany, this extends to intercity rail, during the high season of travel.
Jon says that, “That 5am train with a dozen building workers on it, or the last train home in the evening matter for the trust and reliability of the system, even if those individual trains make heavy losses and are largely empty.” But the point is that knowing that I can book a train in July and have it run as expected without being rerouted onto the slow line is, like the 5 am train, a matter of trust and reliability too. It’s just a matter of which matter of reliability is easier to compromise on.
Then there is a tradeoff of all of this against maintenance efficiency. It is more efficient from the perspective of minimum total gross hours of shutdown to have a long continuous period of shutdown, such as the four-month period planned for the Riedbahn. Nighttime shutdowns require an hour of preparation and disassembly at each end, so that a five-hour nighttime shutdown only yields three hours of maintenance work. Some systems don’t make that work even with regular nighttime shutdowns, such as the London Underground or American systems that are not New York; notably, the Berlin U-Bahn manages to avoid this even with overnight service on weekends.
The situation in Germany
DB’s response to the tradeoffs outlined above is to attempt to run all day, including occasionally at night. There are night trains between Hamburg and southern Germany on the Frankfurt-Cologne high-speed line, so even this line, without any nighttime freight (the grades are far too steep), does not have the regular maintenance windows that LGVs and Shinkansen lines have. As a result, last month, the line was shut for maintenance, and trains were diverted to the old line, taking an hour longer. Right now, the same diversions apply to Cologne-Berlin trains, slowing them by about an hour.
These are not peripheral connections. Frankfurt-Cologne is not quite the busiest intercity line in Germany – that would be the Riedbahn – but it’s a fairly close second, with the same planned traffic level in the Deutschlandtakt of six trains per hour in each direction. It’s the primary connection between the Rhine-Ruhr and not just Frankfurt but also all of southern Germany. Then, Berlin-Cologne connects the two largest metro areas in Germany; the Rhine-Ruhr is close in population to Ile-de-France, while Berlin and Brandenburg have more people than Rhône-Alpes or PACA, which has implications for how much traffic this connection would have if it were fast and reliable, which it is neither (government officials fly between Berlin and Bonn instead of relying on DB).
Is this unavoidable?
No. France has none of these daytime shutdowns on its main lines. Neither does Japan.
German rail advocates sneer at France and ignore Japan, finding all manners of reasons to avoid learning from countries that, on this point, are Germany’s superiors. A common line from within Germany is that its secondary lines are in better shape than France’s, so there is nothing to learn from France. But then, the reason there are routine hour-long delays (or longer) in the summer on the main lines is not that DB runs better service to a city like Siegen or Münster or Jena than SNCF does to their French peers.
The path forward has to be, at the technical level, to institute regular nighttime maintenance windows, and stop trying to make night trains happen. At infrastructure level, it must be to avoid building dual-use infrastructure, and build passenger-dedicated high-speed lines; if freight capacity is needed that the old lines with just slow regional trains can’t provide, then build a separate freight line, based on the needs of freight, at costs that are going to be lower than the long tunnels required for dual-use lines.
But the most important change has to be at the level of governance and culture. Germany believes itself to be at the top of the world. To borrow a joke about Japanese technological stagnation, there is an element here that visiting a German infrastructure system in 2005 had a futuristic vibe like visiting the year 2015, and visiting it today is still like visiting the year 2015. There’s a slew of problems in Germany for which the solution really is “be less German and more French,” and this is one of them, no matter what people who think all French people are unemployed rioters think.
The Regional Plan Association ran an event 2.5 days ago about New York commuter rail improvements and Penn Station, defending the $16.7 billion Penn Station Expansion proposal as necessary for capacity. The presentation is available online, mirrored here, and I recommend people look at the slides to understand the depth of the ignorance and incuriosity of area decisionmakers about best practices displayed in the first half of the presentation; the second half, by Foster Nichols, is more debatable. I hope to make this a series of two or perhaps three posts, focusing on different aspects of why this is so bad. But for now, I’d like to just talk about what the presentation gets wrong about the history of commuter rail improvement in Europe, on pages 17-19. Suffice is to say, the extent of error that can be crammed into a single slide with little text astounded me. With such incuriosity about best practices, it’s not surprising that regional power brokers are trying to will the unnecessary Penn Expansion project into being, never mind that it has no transportation benefits despite its extravagant cost.
The rub is that the presentation on pp. 18-19 says that commuter rail through-running is really hard. Here is page 18:
Regional metro systems comprise a targeted portion of regional rail networks centers of population, employment, business or major attractions like airports that support frequent, fast service
Regional metro systems typically do not operate within original historic train sheds
They operate in new tunnels, shoulder stations adjacent to existing major stations, and separate, simpler interlockings that facilitate frequent service
Then, page 19 shows maps of the RER, Munich S-Bahn, Elizabeth line, and Thameslink, quoting the length it took to build them as, respectively, “30 years,” “46 years,” “2001-2022,” and “1970s-80s, 2009-2020.” The conclusion is “Systems take decades to implement, usually in stages.”
And all of this is a pack of lies.
In fact, commuter rail through-running systems routinely reuse legacy stations, even fairly major ones: both Berlin and Munich Ostbahnhof were incorporated into their respective S-Bahns, and several Parisian train stations were reused for the RER, for example Gare d’Invalides or Luxembourg, with varying levels of modification. New stations are built from scratch underneath surface stub-end terminals like Gare du Nord and Gare de Lyon as depicted in the presentation, but if the station already has through-tracks then it can be used as-is, like Munich Ostbahnhof, and in some cases even stub-end stations are at such grade that their infrastructure can be used. If Boston chooses to build the North-South Rail Link, then, since North and South Stations are both large at-grade terminals, the link will have to include new underground platforms at both stations. But Penn Station is an existing through-station below grade; Amtrak already runs through, and so could commuter rail, without adding platforms.
And as for the lines about the systems having taken 30 and 46 years to build, this is so painfully wrong that it is perhaps best to go over their actual histories. The actual length of time it took depends on one’s definitions, especially for Paris, but the maximum one can support for Paris is 16 years; for Munich, it is seven years.
The history of the RER
The RER and Transilien are, together, the largest commuter rail network in Europe by ridership, with around 1.1 billion annual riders. Globally, only four systems surpass them: Tokyo, Seoul, Osaka, Mumbai; the first two are integrated metro-commuter rail networks to the point that it’s hard to distinguish which mode they are, Osaka is several competing companies none with the ridership of the combined Paris system, Mumbai runs with practically no metro accompanying it. The RER’s history, as I will shortly explain, also makes it a good prototype for modern commuter rail operations, of the same type that is called S-Bahn in Germany. New Yorkers would do especially well to understand this history, which has some parallels to the administrative situation in New York today.
The topline of this is that since the 1960s, Paris has connected its legacy commuter and intercity rail terminals with new through-tunnels, called the RER, or Réseau Express Régional. There are five lines, dubbed A through E. Métro operator RATP runs most of the RER A, and the RER B south of Gare du Nord; national railway SNCF runs the rest plus commuter train networks stub-ending at most of the historic terminals, called Transilien, signed with letters from H to R.
But the history of the RER goes back further – and none of it can be said to have taken 30 years. In short: the Métro was built, starting in the 1890s and opening in 1900, to be totally incompatible with mainline rail – for one, where mainline trains in France run on the left, the Métro runs on the right. This was on purpose: city residents in the Belle Epoque already looked down on the suburbs and worried that if the Métro were compatible with the mainlines, then it might be used to connect to the suburbs and bring suburbanites to their city. The stop spacing, separately, was very tight, even tighter than on New York local subway trains, let alone the London Underground. By the time the system reached the inner suburbs in the 1930s, it was clear that it could not by itself connect the growing suburbs to the city, it would be too slow.
Various proposals for investment in commuter rail go back to the 1920s, but little happened, with one exception: the Ligne de Sceaux, shown as the blue line on the first image entering the city from the south, was acquired by the forerunner of RATP, CMP, in 1938, as the rest of the French mainline network was nationalized. CMP was attracted to the line because of its atypically good penetration into the center of Paris – the other lines terminated farther from the historic center, for example at Gare du Nord or Gare de Lyon. The line was also not useful for SNCF as it was being formed, due to its isolation from the rest of the network. The line was electrified as it was acquired, and run as a regional line, still isolated from all others.
More serious plans for commuter rail through-running began in the 1950s, as postwar growth and suburbanization put more pressure on the system. Gare Saint-Lazare was especially under pressure, first because of growth in the western suburbs, and second because the Paris CBD had been creeping west, making its location more attractive for commuters. In 1956, Marc Langevin proposed an eight-line network; in 1959, RATP and SNCF began collaborating, planning east-west and north-south lines. As late as 1966, there were still plans for two separate north-south lines (for example, see here, p. 244), of which only one has been built and the other is no longer seriously proposed.
In the 1960s, the plans got more serious. Construction began in 1961, starting with the east-west axis, still with an uncertain alignment. Eventually, RATP would take over the Ligne de Vincennes (the eastern red line in the before map) in 1969 and the Ligne de Saint-Germain-en-Laye (the southernmost of the western red lines) in 1972, and connect them with a new tunnel, opening in 1977. Over the 1960s, the plans still had to be refined: it was only in 1963 that it was confirmed that the Ligne de Vincennes’ Paris terminal, Bastille, was too small to be used for this system, and therefore the new tunnels would have to begin farther east, to Nation, which opened in 1969 and is thus already depicted on the before map.
The Ligne de Vincennes was simultaneously modernized, starting in 1966. The entire systems had to be redone, including new platforms and electrification. Nation had to be built underground, starting 1965, complete in 1967 and opening with the rest of the line in 1969.
On the west, the cornerstone was laid in 1971, and construction began shortly later, starting with La Défense. Shuttle trains run by RATP opened between La Défense and Etoile in 1970, and extended to Auber in 1971. In 1972 the line was connected to the Ligne de Saint-Germain-en-Laye.
At the same time, deepening SNCF-RATP integration meant that the planned alignment within the city would need to change to connect to SNCF’s train stations better. Originally, the east-west axis was supposed to run as an express version of Métro Line 1, stopping at Etoile, Concorde, and Châtelet; this was modified to have it swerve north, replacing Concorde with Auber, which is connected to Saint-Lazare. East of Châtelet-Les Halles, the alignment swerves south to connect to Gare de Lyon instead of Bastille.
In 1977, the Nation-Auber section opened, finally offering through-service; the appellation RER A dates only from then. Simultaneously, the north-south axis that was actually built half-opened, connecting the Ligne de Sceaux onward to Les Halles, with cross-platform transfers from the south to the west. On the same date that the central section opened, RATP also inaugurated an entirely greenfield branch of the RER A to the east, initially to Noisy-le-Grand, eventually (by 1992) to the new Marne-la-Vallée development, where Eurodisney was built. Contemporary media reports called Les Halles the biggest metro station in the world, and President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing (center-right) spoke of public transport for everyone, not just the poor. The cost of this scheme was enormous: it cost 5 billion francs (update 8-9: see Alain Dumas’s comment below – it’s 5 billion FRF for the entire RER A, not just the Nation-Auber section), which would make it about $1 billion/km $350 million in 2023 prices, inflation since then more or less canceling out the franc:USD exchange rate. The RER B cost 400 million francs between Luxembourg and Les Halles, a distance of 2.3 km, and 1.6 billion to get to Gare du Nord and connect to the SNCF network to the north (opened 1981), a distance of 3.5 km.
The RER C then opened in 1979, as a second east-west line, on the Left Bank. Missing all of the main centers within Paris, it has always had far lower ridership than the RER A; it was also much easier and cheaper to build – all that was required was a short tunnel connecting Invalides on the west, previously a subsidiary commuter rail-only stop on the same lines to Montparnasse and Saint-Lazare, and Gare d’Orsay on the east, a commuter rail-only extension of the line to Austerlitz. This was built quickly – the decision was made in 1973, and the line opened within six years. This required a total rebuild of Gare d’Orsay with new underground platforms; Invalides required reconstruction as well, but could use the same station and track structures.
Subsequently, the system has added new lines and branches – the RER D opened from the north to new Gare de Nord platforms in 1982, was extended in 1987 along the same tracks used by the RER B to Les Halles but serving dedicated platforms at both stations, and was extended along a new tunnel to and beyond Gare de Lyon in 1995; the RER A acquired new western branches in 1988 to be operated by SNCF, requiring dual-voltage trains since those branches use 25 kV 50 Hz AC and not 1.5 kV DC like the RATP lines; the RER C acquired a new branch also in 1988 taking over part of the Petite Ceinture; the RER E was opened as a stub-end extension of lines from the Gare de l’Est network to a new underground station at Saint-Lazare in 1999, and was finally extended to the west with some through-service this year.
So in a sense, it’s taken 63 years to build the RER, starting 1961, and the work is not yet done. But the core through-running service opened in 1977, within 16 years, with some decisions made midway through the works. The total required work greatly exceeded anything New York needs to do – just what opened through 1977 includes 16 km of double-track central tunnel on the RER A, 3 km on the new branch to Noisy plus 6 km of new above-ground line, 2 km of tunnel on the RER B, and around one km of tunnel on the RER C, inaugurating eight new underground stations, all on the RER A. The RER A’s ridership reached 1.4 million per workday by 2019, and the RER B’s reached 983,000 – and a great majority of the work on both was done by 1981.
The history of the Munich S-Bahn
The Munich S-Bahn is not the oldest or busiest S-Bahn system in Germany; Berlin and Hamburg both have prewar systems, and Berlin’s ridership is considerably higher than Munich’s. Nonetheless, precisely because Berlin and Hamburg built so much of their infrastructure in the steam era, some lessons do not port well to cities today. In contrast, Munich’s entire system has been built after the war – in fact, the construction of the S-Bahn took place over just seven years, from the decision of 1965 to opening in 1972, timed with the Olympics.
As in Paris and many other cities, the history of proposals for rapid urban mainline rail in Munich stretches back decades before the decision was made. The first proposal was made in 1928, and there was more serious planning in Nazi Germany, as the Nazi Party had been founded in Munich and was interested in investing in the city due to that history; by 1941, there were plans for a three-line system, comprising a north-south, an east-west, and a circular tunnel. But little was built, and during the war, the resources of Germany toward rail were prioritized in a different direction.
After the war, Munich grew rapidly. It was not much of an industrial city in the early 20th century; early industrialization in Germany was mostly in the Ruhr and Saxony, while the professional services economy was centered on Berlin, whose metropolitan area in the 1930s was of comparable size to that of Paris. After the war, things changed, at least in the West: the Ruhr’s coal and steel economy stagnated, while southern Germany grew around new manufacturing of cars and chemicals; decentralization dispersed the professional services economy, and while most went to Frankfurt and Hamburg, a share went to Munich (for example, Siemens’ headquarters moved there from Berlin right after the war). The city’s wartime peak population was 835,000; it would surpass 1 million in 1957 and is 1.5 million today. The region, Oberbayern, comprising essentially the metro areas of Munich and Ingolstadt, would grow from 2 million at the beginning of the war to 2.8 million by 1960 and 4.8 million today, and is the richest region in the EU at this scale, with per capita income from work approaching that of New York.
This small size of Munich in 1900 means that it never had as extensive a rail network as Paris or Berlin. It had just two major urban stations: Hauptbahnhof, a terminal with a station throat leading to points west, and Ostbahnhof, a through-station with tracks leading east, south, and the west, the western tracks looping back south of city center to reach Hauptbahnhof. To this day, area railfans would like this loop to be incorporated into a regional S-Bahn system avoiding city center – but Munich is still a rather monocentric city. There was no U-Bahn, unlike in Berlin or Hamburg.
By 1961, the number of suburban commuters into Munich reached 114,000. The undersize rail network relative to the city’s current importance and the rapid growth in wealth meant that car ownership was high, leading to traffic congestion. The trams were slowed down by traffic, to the point of not running faster than walking in city center.
To resolve these problems, both an U-Bahn network and an S-Bahn network were planned. Early planning began in the 1950s, with the federal government taking over the wartime plans in 1956, but as in Paris, the extent of the system to be planned was up in the air: both an east-west axis and a north-south line were desired, and only in 1963 was the decision finalized that the north-south axis should be a municipal U-Bahn tunnel and not an S-Bahn. The study period began in 1961, with the plan approved in 1965 for the construction of a single east-west S-Bahn tunnel between Hauptbahnhof and Ostbahnhof, and a separate U-Bahn system with three branched trunk lines.
Construction was done on a tight timeline, since Munich was awarded the 1972 Olympics in 1966, and delays were not considered acceptable; the first U-Bahn line, U3/U6 running north-south, opened 1971, and the S-Bahn opened 1972, in what is described as a “record time.”
During the seven years of construction, other projects had to be done in parallel. Commuter rail lines had to be extensively upgraded: the project included 143 km of electrification, and 115 stations outfitted with new high platforms at a level of 760 mm mostly 210 meters long. Simultaneously, most of what has become the standard for good timetabling was invented, out of necessity on a network that had to share tracks and systems with other trains on its outer margin, most importantly the clockface schedule – the system was designed around a 20-minute Takt on each branch from the outset, with outer tails running every 40 minutes.
The central tunnel itself, the Stammstrecke, comprises six stations from Hauptbahnhof to Ostbahnhof of which all except Ostbahnhof are underground, and three have Spanish platforms. Ostbahnhof itself is used as a pinch point for some trains, reversing direction depending on branch. The Stammstrecke in total was built for 900 million DM, or $2.8 billion in 2023 PPPs; the overall line included 4.1 km of tunnel and about 7.3 more km of above-ground connections. (Update 8-9: cost fixed – I originally stated it to be 900 DM.)
There has been further investment adding new branches and upgrading the system. The new signal system LZB was installed in the central section experimentally when it opened in 1972, but it was not used on all trains, and was taken out of service in 1983, only returning in 2004 when its capacity was needed, boosting throughput from 24 trains per hour to 30. However, as in Paris, the core of the system’s high ridership, now about 900,000 per workday, comes from infrastructure that was there from the start, and thus it’s most correct to say that the system took not 46 years to build but seven.
Some lessons for New York
By the standards of Paris and Munich, New York has practically everything it needs to run through-service. The electrification systems on its three commuter railroads are not compatible, but multivoltage trains not only are routine, but also already present in New York; the current configurations all have one problem or another, but fundamentally, ordering multivoltage trains is a solved problem. Only a handful of outer branches need to be electrified, and all can be deferred, running with forced transfers until they are wired as is current practice on the Raritan Valley Line and for the most part also the outer Port Jefferson Branch. The LIRR and Metro-North are entirely high-platform and New Jersey Transit’s Manhattan-facing lines only have 68 low-platform stations of which 26 are already funded for high platform conversions.
By far the biggest missing element for New York by cost is the Gateway Program and its Hudson Tunnel Project, which is budgeted at $16 billion and is funded and beginning construction, with the New Jersey land tunnel contract just awarded. Even before the new tunnel opens, it can run some through-service after Penn Station Access opens from the Hell Gate Line, pairing it with some New Jersey Northeast Corridor trains.
On top of that, some surface improvements are prudent, such as some grade separations of rail junctions, the most expensive costing on the order of hundreds of millions (Hunter is $300 million on the budget, maybe $400 million by now); much of that is already getting funds from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law or likely to get them in the near future, since the infrastructure is also used by Northeast Corridor intercity trains.
But it does not need to do anything that area railroaders have convinced themselves they need, especially not new tracks at Penn Station. Nor are decades of prep work needed – rapid installation of high platforms is completely feasible, as was done not just in Munich in the 1960s and 70s but also in suburban New York in the same period and in the 1980s and 90s, converting the LIRR and Metro-North to full high-platform operations and doing the same on the Northeast Corridor in New Jersey.
All that is needed is a modicum of curiosity about the world, curiosity that is not seen in the presentation with its whoppers about the timelines of the RER and Munich S-Bahn, or its belief that new underground tracks are always required as if Penn Station is the same as the surface Gare du Nord. I find myself having to explain to journalists who interview me that all of this can be done, but the people in charge of the railroads around New York cannot do it.
Pedestrian Observations 
