Category: Incompetence

Washington Union Station

Amtrak’s announcement that it needs $7 billion to improve Union Station, in a way that is tangential to train or passenger capacity, has gotten some deserved flak already on other blogs. What I want to discuss instead is a pair of issues relating to capacity: passenger circulation, and track capacity. Especially on the latter, Union Station does have some problems, not at current traffic, but enough that future traffic increases may require difficult at-grade merges. The core of the problem is that the terminal tracks are located to the west of the through-tracks, with an at-grade junction, rather than between them.

Fortunately, the passenger circulation capacity issue is easier. Although Amtrak claims 100,000 passengers use the station every day, in reality the number is beefed up with Metro riders, similarly to Penn Station’s 600,000 daily passengers statistic, of which nearly half is subway ridership. Total ridership on MARC and VRE is 53,000 per weekday, and Amtrak has a total of 13,000 boardings and alightings per day there (not per weekday, but intercity traffic does not have the weekday peak of commuter traffic). This is 66,000 boardings and alightings, assuming every MARC and VRE trip begins or ends at Union Station. In contrast, on just two tracks with ordinary subway platforms, Metro has 34,000 boardings at the station; page 13 of Amtrak’s announcement shows the relative scale of Metro and mainline infrastructure. The mainline half of the station’s ridership is passengers who are likelier to be carrying luggage or not be local, but the main difference between it and the Metro half is that the Metro half is using Metro turf and the mainline half is using the station above which Amtrak’s headquarters is located.

If there is a problem, it comes from Amtrak’s practice of corralling riders at waiting points, instead of letting them filter onto the platforms or the stations whenever they like, as is done every day on trains in France and Germany, or on the less busy stations of the Northeast Corridor. Stephen Smith tells me that unlike in New York or Boston, where the waiting areas are at least adjacent to the platform and the problem is one of having just one access point (or just one official access point in New York), in Washington there is another antechamber between the passengers and the train. An extra 100 meters of walking adds about a minute of travel time in a congested space, and perhaps 45 seconds in a clear one; Amtrak’s current practice adds multiple minutes to door-to-door travel time, and also forces pedestrian congestion once it clears passengers to access the platform.

Adding access points is also a good thing, but that does not cost $7 billion, and does not require redoing the entire main concourse. But possibly the most important thing to do in the near term is making all platforms high, also nowhere near a $7 billion project; the diagrams on Amtrak’s announcement suggest all terminal tracks and most through-tracks will be high-platform, but one through-platform will remain low.

Now, track capacity is where things get more interesting, because potentially there is a problem, coming from terminal layout. A not very clear, but public, diagram can be found here: look for Washington Union Terminal, and within it, Interlockings C (the outer station throat and a nearby yard), K (the inner throat and the actual tracks), and A (the connection from the through-tracks to First Street Tunnel). Note that terminating tracks 7-20 are to the west of through-tracks 22-29, and the junction is at grade, which represents a problem for easy cookie-cutter planning.

The operationally simplest but most expensive to deal with this is to build a grade separation. If it’s anything like Harold, expect a $300 million price tag. At present and expected levels of traffic, this is overkill.

I claim that if MARC and VRE trains continue to terminate at Union Station, no special work is needed: Brunswick and Camden Line traffic can be segregated on tracks 7-9 (and the turnaround capacity, easily about 12 tph for 3 tracks, is more than those lines will need between them), VRE traffic can be segregated on tracks 24-25, and Penn Line traffic can use the same tracks as the terminating intercity trains.

The only at-grade conflict would be between northbound trains originating at Washington, and southbound ones continuing through to Virginia, and even high possible traffic levels (say, 12 tph terminating including the Penn Line sprawled across 11 tracks of which 3 already have long platforms and arguably 3 more can be lengthened, 2 tph through across 4 tracks) can be scheduled in a similar manner to all-terminating stations, treating the through-trains as terminating trains that have to use specific tracks and have no limit on dwell time.

Specifically, because Penn Line (or local HSR) trains would leave immediately after express HSR trains to reduce the number of required overtakes, at worst we’d have trains originating at :00 and :02, repeating every 10 minutes, and then there’s an 8-minute window within which to schedule southbound through-trains.

So instead let us assume commuter trains run through, in which case we may as well assume they have good reliability so that they can be scheduled with 2-minute headways. Current peak traffic is 3 tph Brunswick, 2 tph Camden, 3 tph Penn, and lower combined traffic on the Virginia side. Assume that peak traffic will grow to 3 tph Brunswick and Camden and 6 tph combined Penn and through-HSR; in fact the most potential for growth is off-peak, and because multiple platforms are very long, long trains may be used if there are capacity problems.

We now have 6 tph terminating HSR, 6 tph through-traffic on the Penn Line (including HSR), and 6 tph through-commuter traffic on the Camden and Brunswick Lines; Camden and Brunswick are physically to the west of the Northeast Corridor, and so in addition to conflicts between terminating and through trains, we have conflicts between through-Camden/Brunswick and southbound through-Penn/HSR.

In this situation, we can have southbound terminating HSR and through-Penn/HSR trains clearing the throat at :00 and :02 again. Northbound terminating HSR trains have to depart 2 minutes after the arrival of southbound through-Penn/HSR trains, e.g. :04, and then northbound through-Camden/Brunswick trains can depart between :06 and :08; northbound through-Penn/HSR trains are always to the east of everything else and so do not conflict with anything.

Because southbound through-Camden/Brunswick trains conflict with terminating trains, they can be scheduled at the same time as northbound through-trains of some kind, which constrains the symmetry axis we choose but is otherwise workable. For example, if Camden/Brunswick trains both depart and arrive at :07 then with the terminating trains arriving :00 and departing :04, we have a symmetry axis ending in a 2 or a 7 (and through-Penn/HSR trains would arrive and depart at :02). But then the terminating trains also arrive just before the through-Penn/HSR trains and depart just after, implying they are slower or else there would be an overtake just north of the station. We can instead switch the trains – and then terminating trains arrive and depart :02, and through-Penn/HSR arrive southbound :00 and depart northbound :04. Note that there is no conflict between northbound terminating trains and southbound through-trains.

So it is possible to do this without extra infrastructure beside longer and level-boarding platforms, which are cheap. Let us finish by seeing what extra trains can be scheduled into the above 18 tph schedule. Scheduling 6 tph of terminating trains is easy: trains arriving :04 and departing :00, the opposite of the terminating HSR trains discussed above, will be adequately separated. The problem then is just the need to overtake the :02 through-trains along the tracks; however, at such a level of demand, 18 tph combined HSR and commuter on the Northeast Corridor, full four-tracking there would be necessary anyway.

But no extra through-traffic can be realistically scheduled into the same timetable, because the southbound :04 trains would conflict with the northbound :04 terminating trains. Changing the schedule so that it’s the terminating trains that arrive and depart at the same time is, however, possible: since we’re four-tracking the entire Baltimore-Washington line at this stage, we can have terminating trains arrive and depart :02, Camden/Brunswick trains do the same :07, and through-Penn/HSR trains arrive and depart :00 and :04. That said, this means it’s impossible to schedule more than 6 terminating tph into Union Station; I believe it’ll be easier to fill all those extra intercity trains into Washington than fill 18 tph going from Washington toward Virginia, both intercity and commuter.

Of course, the traffic levels discussed here are all very high, especially for HSR. An HSR system that fills even 6 tph is one that can pay for future capacity increases out of operating profits. The importance should be getting a starter system with reasonable capacity for the next few years and then build capacity projects as required, with immediate construction done only on the most critical segments or those that would be hard to reconstruct with more future traffic.

So we’re back to the question of what needs to be done with Union Station, and the answer is hardly anything. It’s not even Moynihan Station, which is also sold as a bigger transportation benefit than it is, but is at least billed as a grand station to be named after a politician more than anything (and is only about $1.5 billion). It’s even worse than Gateway and the Market East station, which would have positive transportation value, and are just very cost-ineffective. It’s not solving any problem for the foreseeable future; it’s just using big numbers about current traffic and growth to scare people into thinking more capacity is needed, and mostly it’s using small increases in track capacity to justify throwing billions of dollars on beautifying Amtrak’s headquarters.

Surreptitious Cost Escalations and Spurious Cost Savings

In response to my previous post regarding the extreme cost of Amtrak’s new Northeast Corridor Vision plan, people both on forums and on blogs have said that it’s actually a cost saving coming from bundling the Vision with the earlier Master Plan. Although the original cost was $117 billion and the current one is $151 billion, the current one is still lower than the sum of the original cost plus the cost of the Master Plan, by $15 billion. This looks like a cost saving, but it’s actually not.

The explanation is that the Master Plan still contains elements that are unnecessary if large portions of the line, including nearly the entire New York-Boston segment, are bypassed. The list of projects on PDF-page 21 of the plan contains additional tracks in eastern Connecticut and a replacement of the bridge over the Connecticut, boosting capacity. However, if the intercity trains are removed from the line, there is no need to boost capacity. Low-performing branch lines – and this is what Shore Line East is without intercity trains – can be and are spun off to regional agencies: JR East abandoned the northern reaches of the Tohoku Main Line as it extended the Tohoku Shinkansen, spinning them off to the prefectures to run as it is not interested in running regional rail at the low densities of northern Japan and the intercity functions were all rolled into the Shinkansen.

So in that sense, any cost saving was spurious: Amtrak simply removed some, but not all, Master Plan projects that are obviated by the plan for a bypass. It’s no different from the fact that the Tokaido Main Line and the PLM Line are still double-tracked, as in both cases the national railroad chose to build high-speed rail parallel to them instead of to quadruple-track them to boost capacity.

But on top of that, there is at least some cost overrun implied in the plan. The cost breakdown is not detailed enough to make this clear, but the cost of the Gateway Tunnel is up to $14.7 billion, from $10-13.5 billion last year. It’s buried deep enough that it’s hard to see, or discern what the total overrun is, but it’s there. So Amtrak has a surreptitious cost escalation for the Gateway project at the same time as a spurious cost saving from partially merging the Vision and the Master Plan.

The CAHSR-SNCF Bombshell

The most important HSR news right now is the recent revelation on the LA Times, strategically made immediately after the state legislature had voted to appropriate the required money to begin construction, that the California HSR Authority had brushed off an offer from SNCF, which came with funding attached, to take over and build the project. SNCF’s offer would run trains through I-5 all the way instead of the chosen route vaguely along State Route 99, bypassing Bakersfield and Fresno.

Stephen Smith, who’s talked to the same sources who spoke with the LA Times, says that SNCF was interested in either I-5 or a greenfield alignment just west of SR 99 that would serve Bakersfield and Fresno with edge-of-urban area stations, though I-5 was “the only alignment… that private backers felt was financially viable.”

Although in 2009 SNCF submitted a document proposing to build the project along the chosen alignment, serving Bakersfield and Fresno at city-center stations, the document is stamped “Do not circulate outside government,” and the source says explicitly that the HSR Authority had pressured SNCF not to say anything about alignments, and more recently rejected its I-5 (or west-of-99) proposal out of hand. The HSR Authority responded, brushing off some of the article’s concerns and raising what is essentially FUD: HSR Authority Chair Dan Richard made sure to mention the manufactured controversy over the fact that SNCF had been forced by the Nazis to help ship Jews to extermination camps.

I do not have any access to sources, confidential or otherwise, but at least some analysis of this can be made from public information. The key cost numbers the LA Times provided are,

The I-5 route would have been the shortest, fastest and lowest-cost alignment, with a price tag of about $38 billion — sharply less than the rail authority’s current route, which has been estimated at various times to cost $34 billion, $43 billion, $98 billion and now $68 billion.

The problem: the cost of the Central Valley segment is a sufficiently small portion of the cost that it can’t possibly make the entire or even most of difference between $38 billion and the current price tag. It’s unclear to me what $38 billion should be compared to – 2010 dollars or year-of-expenditure dollars, and the Blended Plan ($68 billion YOE) or the full Phase 1 ($98 billion YOE) – but the lowest number, the Blended Plan in 2010 dollars, is $53 billion, $15 billion more than SNCF’s proposal. I have asked what exactly the comparable Authority number is and will update when I get an answer.

In contrast, the Initial Construction Segment, which includes a large majority of the Phase 1 Central Valley segment (though not the most difficult part, through Bakersfield) is $5.2 billion in 2010 dollars (see PDF-page 15 of the 2010 business plan); the actual money appropriated is just over $6 billion, but if we’re doing YOE numbers then we must compare $38 to $68 and then the difference doubles. Since the cost of construction along I-5, although lower than along the chosen route with its viaducts and grade separations, is nonzero, we get that a relatively small fraction of the cost difference, perhaps a quarter or a third, is attributable to this design choice.

So if it’s not just I-5, what is it, and what can we learn from this? I believe the results should if anything make the HSR Authority look even worse than it already does in light of this story and its lackluster response. This is because it means the entire amount of money required to build to SNCF’s specs but serve Bakersfield and Fresno, at edge-of-urban-area stations if the cities object to the noise of trains through downtown (which at least Fresno does not), is a small number of billions of dollars. This means that if service to those two cities was the true dealbreaker, the Authority could have asked SNCF to change the alignment back to the chosen route or a greenfield route just west of it, and then demanded that Fresno and Bakersfield pay for the difference.

Fresno had been hoping to use statewide HSR money to bundle its own project of grade-separating the freight tracks through the city along the Union Pacific right-of-way. The poor relationship between the HSR Authority and Union Pacific dashed the plans to use its right-of-way where it is superior to the BNSF alignment. That said, the threat of being left out of the network entirely could have induced it to come up with money for this on its own; the segment of the project through the Fresno area is $1-1.5 billion. A downtown station in Bakersfield is more difficult, especially if one gets from the Central Valley to the LA Basin via the Grapevine rather than via Palmdale, but in Bakersfield there are some complaints about the impacts that a downtown alignment would cause, and at any rate even I-5 would come close to serving the urban area.

In addition, portions of the cost savings that do not come from alignment choice have to be attributed to superior cost control. Part of the difference between American and rest-of-world construction costs has to come from more mundane issues such as proper supervision of contractors, since the difference is large and persistent and remains in place even after one controls for such issues as the percentage of the route that is in tunnel. (For example, recall that the Tohoku Shinkansen extension cost $4.6 billion for 82 km, of which a third is just one long tunnel and another sixth additional shorter tunnels).

The other lesson we can learn from this episode is political, regarding cost escalations and strategic misrepresentation. Too many political transit supporters downplay the issue. LightRailNow claims that a cost escalation that occurs before construction starts is not a cost escalation, but just a more accurate cost estimate; Robert Cruickshank did not quite say the same when the 2010 business plan for CAHSR revealed costs had doubled, but came close to it by describing the plan as more careful and thorough. In reality, large bombshell reports shortly after money has been obligated are a hallmark of secretive, untrustworthy planning, precisely the kind likeliest to lie about costs.

The main problem with megaprojects is not the dollar cost. In the grand scheme of things, a lot of them can generate enough social rate of return, and sometimes even a purely financial rate of return; at any rate, even when they are cost-ineffective, they are a small proportion of total GDP. The problem is getting politicians to vote for them. This means that issues such as institutional inertia are in play. It’s harder to get people to rescind money than to get them to vote against spending money.

If the primary cause of cost escalations is unforeseeable challenges, then we will see them come in timed with engineering developments, contract awards, and actual construction. If instead it is strategic misrepresentation, then they will be timed to come just after major political hurdles regarding funding: the passage of a referendum, legislative funding, an electoral victory by a supportive politician. The California HSR bombshells aren’t quite this clean, but they come a lot closer to the outright lying hypothesis.

Northeast Corridor HSR, 90% Cheaper

Amtrak’s latest Next-Generation High-Speed Rail plan is now up to $151 billion, from a prior cost of $117 billion. This is partially a small cost escalation, but mostly including Master Plan upgrades to the legacy line. Per kilometer of route length, this means the project has now crossed the $200 million/km mark, a higher cost than 60%-underground Chuo Shinkansen maglev. The primary cause of the high cost of Amtrak’s project is the heavy amount of deep-cavern urban tunneling: nearly a tenth of the cost is the Gateway Tunnel, a rebranded bundling of ARC into the project, and a similar amount is a similar project in Philadelphia. At least this time they’re serving Rhode Island with a stop in or near Providence rather than Woonsocket.

In contrast with this extravaganza, it is possible to achieve comparable travel times for about one tenth the cost. The important thing is to build the projects with the most benefit measured in travel time reduced or reliability gained per unit of cost, and also share tracks heavily with commuter rail, using timed overtakes to reduce the required amount of multi-tracking.

I propose the following general principles, guiding any future development in the corridor:

1. Rolling stock is cheaper than infrastructure. This is not true everywhere, but the Northeastern US and Japan both have high infrastructure-to-equipment cost ratios. A Shinkansen train today costs about $4 million per car judging by how much Taiwan pays. A 16-car train every 15 minutes from Washington to Boston, with a one-way travel time including turnaround of about 3:30, would require 30 sets, or 480 cars, or $2 billion. Therefore, it makes financial sense to demand more of the rolling stock: some tilting as present on the Talgo, Pendolino, N700, or E5; high initial acceleration as present on the N700-I; and high power-to-weight ratio as on the Talgo and Shinkansen models, or even possibly an all-cars-powered Pendolino.

The difference between an average and a top-rate train could easily amount to 20 minutes between Washington and Boston. Making up those 20 minutes with infrastructure, once the easiest projects have been completed, would cost far more than $2 billion.

2. Speed up commuter trains instead of bypassing them. The place where this is most obvious and useful is the Boston-Providence segment. I have nothing to add that I didn’t already say in my pair of posts on the subject last year. Something similar is true between Baltimore and Washington. It is more difficult between New York and New Haven, but at least there are curves that have to be bypassed anyway, and so the track sharing can be reduced to a manageable degree given the line’s heavy commuter traffic.

This requires fixing agency turf battles, which costs a lot of political capital but is almost free to the taxpayer. In contrast, long multi-track segments, often with new viaducts, easily run into the billions. Amtrak’s single biggest question mark east of New York is the string of tunnels from Penn Station to New Rochelle to Danbury, all so that it doesn’t have to share tracks with Metro-North. It could buy the commuter operations and subsidize them forever and still come out ahead of all those tunnels.

3. The regulations should be based on service needs. As a corollary of #1 and 2 and the every minute counts philosophy they espouse, the regulations should allow trains that can operate safely. Here safety is determined by actual practice and track record, rather than what the FRA thinks safety is, which has an incidental relationship with reality. That Shinkansen trains do not meet UIC standards should not be even a minor issue; trains in Japan are safer than in the UIC’s prime-mover European countries.

4. On shared segments that aren’t bypassed, build infrastructure that allows higher speeds. This is a corollary of #2: if legacy routes are to be upgraded rather than bypassed, there’s no point in assuming present-day speed limits, such as Metro-North’s 75 mph/120 km/h limit in Connecticut, will remain in place, and therefore projects should be built with high radius of curvature. Assume that large portions of the New Haven Line will host trains going at 240 km/h.

5. Make sure station throats allow full speed. Every non-geometric restriction on speed – tunnel diameter, track condition, switches – should be eliminated. Higher-speed switches are cheaper than new concrete pouring; more precise track maintenance is cheaper than most people realize, standing at about $100,000 per double-track-km on average; Shinkansen trains’ noses are designed (and European trains’ noses can be modified) to allow full speed through narrow tunnels, as Shinkansen construction standards minimize tunnel diameter to reduce costs.

The time cost of even a short segment inhibiting full-throttle acceleration in station throats is higher than most people realize. A kilometer a train has to wend at 50 km/h when it could go 200, such as the Penn Station throat, is worth 54 seconds. At stations closer to full-speed zone, this speed-restricted kilometer slows the train’s acceleration to full speed further down the line, and thus it comes at the expense of a kilometer at 300-360 km/h, raising the time cost even further.

6. Fix curves in higher speed zones. This applies mainly to the S-curve flanking I-287 in Metuchen: its curvature is not terrible, but because to its south there are no geometric speed restrictions for tens of kilometers and to its north the curves are also reasonably gentle, its bang for the buck can be surprisingly high.

7. Worry about track capacity when all other capacity factors have been optimized. An intercity railroad that runs 8-car trains is definitionally not at capacity. Running 16-car trains requires lengthening a small number of platforms, most at easy locations. Doubling train capacity across the Hudson chokepoint requires building a new tunnel under the river. Amtrak currently runs 4 trains per hour into Penn Station at the peak; if after everything else has been built it has exhausted the capacity of 4 trains per hour each with 16 cars and a thousand seats, its operating profits will let it pay for any further expansion.

With the above seven principles, one could come up with a reasonable set of projects of immediate significance. With a total cost in the single-digit billions, they’d eliminate most of the barriers to full-speed travel between New York and Washington, and leave New York-Boston with just one major problem section between Stamford and Milford. Best-practice trains, even ones optimized for a straighter route – for example, Shinkansen or the Talgo, but not the Pendolino, which is both heavier and less powerful but has a much larger degree of tilting – could go from Boston to Washington in about 4 hours, or not much more.

Getting this further down to 3 hours would require further investment according to the same principles, but even 4 hours, by virtue of the markets to and from New York, would generate the profits required to pay for them. Moreover, the contrast between fast travel on bypass segments in eastern Connecticut or straight legacy segments in Rhode Island and New Jersey and the remaining slower problem segments would create political will to complete the system. The areas with the most NIMBY resistance should be left for last, because today’s train riders as well as Amtrak itself are not nearly as powerful as they will be if the mostly NIMBY-free projects cut train travel time from 7 hours to 4.

The Recession Won’t Last Forever

The article about New York State’s decision to discontinue studying high-speed rail between New York and Buffalo is by itself not terribly surprising. Although Andrew Cuomo likes flashy public works projects, of which HSR is one, he is consistently pro-road and anti-rail.

The study released by the state sandbagged actual HSR on cost grounds – it did not provide any further analysis, and in two ways (lower average speed than most HSR lines, and a requirement for tilting) stacked the deck against it – but instead looked into medium-speed rail, with top speed of 110-125 mph, which is frequently misnamed HSR in the US. This, too, is not surprising. State DOTs have no idea how HSR works, and tend to make mistakes, not know how to do cost control, and so on.

What’s most surprising is the explanation for why not to do anything substantial: as one of the HSR proponents quoted in the article complains, “The State of New York is worried about making ends meet; the economy is not doing so great. That’s the reason in the short term.” Taking his argument at face value, the state is refusing to advance study of an HSR line because economic conditions are bad now, a decade or more before such line could even open.

The recession won’t last forever; if it does, there are bigger things to worry about than transportation. Other than immediate reconstruction projects, for which the environmental reviews are fast-tracked, major projects take years to do all the design and environmental studies. California has been planning HSR since the late 1990s. It intended to go to ballot in 2004, and after delays did so in 2008. HSR is scheduled to break ground later this year, assuming the state does not cancel the project. An HSR project for which planning starts now will start construction after the economy recovers not from this recession, but from the next one.

The recurrent theme in the article is the state’s preference for mundane over flashy projects, but rejecting HSR shows the exact opposite.Starting planning now costs very little. In fact, the best thing any state agency can do is keep planning multiple big-ticket project contingencies pending an infusion of money; this way, it can dust off plans and execute them faster if there’s a stimulus bill in the next recession. That’s long-term planning. Refusing to advance construction because it won’t start until long after Cuomo’s Presidential run in 2006 2016 isn’t.

Of course, the same goes in the other direction. Too many people, building on Keynesian stimulus ideas, want massive infrastructure spending now as a public works program. For example, Robert Cruickshank (and in comments, Bruce McF) argues for long-term benefits coming from the stimulus effect. Although construction in 2012-3 would have an impact, a multi-decade project spanning periods of both growth and recession should not rely on estimates of job creation solely from periods of recession. On the contrary, economic costs and benefits should be based on a long-term multi-business cycle trend.

I propose the following principles for interaction between business cycles and very long-term investment:

1. Assume your project will be undertaken in a period of close to (but not quite) full employment, in terms of both funding sources and economic effects, unless you specifically intend to advance construction in a recession.

2. If you want to use a recession to lock in lower interest rates, higher job impacts, or lower construction costs, make sure you have a shovel-ready project, or else try to advocate for better staffing at the requisite regulatory agencies well ahead of time so that they can fast-track it.

3. Treat fiscal surpluses coming from an economy at full employment as one-time shots rather than an ongoing situation that can be used for regular spending or tax cuts. Growth doesn’t last forever, either.

Core Connectors and In-Between Neighborhoods

In some American cities, new or proposed transit lines are either core connectors, i.e. city-center circulator streetcars built for development purposes, or far-flung commuter rail extensions with few urban stops. Both are present in Providence, with the South County extension of the MBTA and the Core Connector, but worse circulators than in Providence are proposed elsewhere (for example, in New Haven), and exurb-focused commuter rail with parking lot stations is the standard in most Sunbelt cities and also in Massachusetts. At first I thought my opposition to both was just a matter of wonky support of a specific stop distance and service pattern that falls in between those two extremes, but recently, after attending Providence urbanist blogger meetings and also rereading old threads about New Haven, I realized there’s a political and social dimension to all this.

Recall that old American cities have a donut-shaped income distribution: gentrified in the center, poor in most other urban neighborhoods and inner suburbs, and middle-class to rich in most suburbs. Those two forms of bad transit are specifically built to cater to the rich parts of the metro area, and ignore the poor parts. The problem, of course, is that the poor parts are precisely where transit ridership is concentrated. People in the gentrified cores of smaller cities can walk; people in the suburbs own cars, and those cities have too many roads and too much parking for buses to be an even semi-reasonable alternative.

In Providence, as I recently brought up, the busiest buses follow Broad and North Main, and serve working-class and poor populations. The same is true in New Haven: the busiest line by far runs on Dixwell, connecting the Yale student ghetto, the in-between poor neighborhoods, and the strip malls in middle-class Hamden. So what service addition does a study by the South Central Regional Council of Governments (SCORAG) propose? Naturally, a circulator connecting Union Station with the New Haven Green. You could chalk this up to a belief in systemwide upgrades over building a few high-performance lines, but many outlying bus stops have no shelter, and the study says nothing about that.

When Peter Brassard first pitched the idea of a local rail shuttle service in Providence and its inner suburbs to us privately, the observation one of us made (I think it was Jef Nickerson, but I’m not sure) is that it would invert the usual relationship between infrastructure investment and income. This is mostly accidental – the mainline serves Olneyville and Pawtucket but not the East Side. But something like this is more likely than not when the focus is on serving reasonably dense neighborhoods and perhaps inner-suburban malls outside walking range.

The same is true of what I believe to be the most promising rail shuttle service in New Haven – namely, a service using the Farmington Canal Trail, which runs about 200 meters east of Dixwell, and could be reused by light rail reaching downtown New Haven on city streets or rapid transit connecting to the mainline with a very short tunnel or trench. With a stop spacing of a little less than a kilometer, modern rolling stock could average 35-40 km/h in service, double the speed of the current bus.

I suspect part of the bias against such service comes from the belief that building ten kilometers of light rail is expensive. Because there’s an implicit hierarchy in planners’ mind between services, they think a downgrade is an automatic cost saver, even when it’s not – for instance, when a bus on an abandoned railroad costs far more than most rail reactivation projects do. One of these mantras is that commuter rail infill is less expensive (and then they build infill stations at $100 million apiece, strategically located away from the intersection with the main bus corridor). As a rule of thumb, each of these downgrades just raises unit costs because of various overbuilding schemes until total cost is the same as if they’d built regular urban rail, but the benefits are much lower.

But it’s more than a technical bias; it’s also political bias. The Core Connector is explicitly a development project. It may even be a successful one, if it convinces local power broker Colin Kane to drop plans for building 7,000 parking spaces in the Jewelry District, as described in a recent paywalled article in Next American City. Development projects like this never go to extant low-income neighborhoods, unless there’s an explicit effort at gentrification, and usually locals protest against the displacement; neglect is much easier and less controversial than redevelopment.

The technical and political biases merge in one of the less challenged cost-effectiveness metrics, the cost per new rider. Although it’s presented in neutral terms – the cost is compared to the predicted total transit ridership if the project is built minus the predicted total if it is not – the results privilege adding choice riders (that is, those who already own a car and drive to work) over retaining existing riders. Although transit revivals happen, most of the world’s transit cities built out their systems before most people got cars, and people simply kept using transit instead of buying cars even as they moved into the middle class. Portland may have about the same metro area transit mode share as before it built light rail, but other cities of similar age lost ground and have even lower transit use.

It’s tricks like ignoring retention that lead Boston to downrate replacing the southern half of the Silver Line with light rail on its list of possible projects even though it would be very cheap by US standards per rider, and rate new commuter rail branches well beyond the continuous built-up area as more cost-effective. The rail bias factor implied by the computation for new riders is less than 0.5%: 130 new riders against 34,000 existing ones. A Transportation Research Board analysis finds the rail bias is in the 34-43% range. I suspect that if the Silver Line served richer areas than Roxbury, Boston would use a more reasonable rail bias than 130/34,000, bringing down costs per new rider by two orders of magnitude. New York went ahead with Second Avenue Subway; it is undoubtedly the most important subway project in the region, but the next best corridors, e.g. Utica, serving less chic neighborhoods than the Upper East Side, are ignored.

The technical reason to build urban rail a certain way – own-right-of-way, stops roughly every kilometer within the city, etc. – is of course separate. Technical characteristics do not tell you which neighborhoods to serve, not without first looking into existing demand patterns. It is just fortunate that New Haven has a right-of-way closely paralleling Dixwell, and unfortunate that Providence has none paralleling Broad. But the income donuts, and more generally the connection between density and old industrial development that is usually working-class (since gentrification in such cities is within walking distance of the core rather than within transit distance), have certain social implications. The most annoying to the planner and the government official is that they must invest in poor neighborhoods as they are, and do not have a special reason to try to foist change upon them.

Or they can just build core connectors for the cities and park-and-ride extensions for the suburbs. The FTA will fund these no matter what; its cost-effectiveness metrics are biased that way to avoid having to send every penny it has available to a few expensive but high-ridership lines such as Second Avenue Subway. The developers will like them, because of real or imagined property value benefits. The state will like them – state governments are dominated by suburbanites and urban developers and view transit as pork rather than as useful spending based on ridership metrics; Rhode Island is much likelier to find support for development in the Jewelry District than for boring rail lines in already-developed Providence neighborhoods. It’s a win-win for everyone except the riders, and they don’t count.

Providence: Busy Versus Frequent Buses

While trying to come up with a good proposal for upgraded buses or streetcars in Providence, I tried to base route decisions on RIPTA’s most frequent buses. But as it turns out, there’s a substantial difference between the most frequent and the busiest routes, and existing policies toward investment do not reward high ridership at all.

By far the two busiest lines in the state are routes 11 (Broad Street), with 6,500 weekday riders, and 99 (North Main to Pawtucket), with 5,200. Those are also the two most frequent, with 10-minute peak and midday service, and are usually interlined. This is the only case in which frequency matches traffic: of the next batch of busiest routes – 20, 22, 56, and 60, each with about 3,000 weekday riders – only the 56 has 15-minute off-peak service, the rest ranging from 22 to 35, with the 20 and 22 having 22-23-minute frequency even at the peak. Several less busy lines have 20-minute all-day service, and the frequent network, which uses a 20-minute weekday off-peak standard, looks different from the highest-traffic network.

However, previous and proposed development-oriented transit, including the fake trolleys and now the streetcar, avoid even the 11 and 99. The fake trolleys are distinguished in branding, 20-minute frequency even on weekends and in the evenings, and consistent interlining across Kennedy Plaza. The 92 fake trolley runs from the East Side to Federal Hill without changing its number, but regular buses, including the 11 and 99, change their route number at Kennedy Plaza, and that’s if there’s a consistent route they interline with at all. (When Jef Nickerson pressed RIPTA on this issue, RIPTA said it wants to preserve flexibility.) Likewise, the streetcar is a city-center circulator, and ideas for where to extend it afterward avoid Broad Street and North Main; local transit activists I have talked to believe the preference is for Broadway, a wide street hosting two routes (27, 28) that have 4,500 weekday riders between them, still less than Broad. (The alternative route in the same direction, Westminster, has 3,500 on its two buses, but the difference comes from the routes’ respective tails west of Olneyville Square, and the segments along Westminster and Broadway look about even.)

This is not to say that the state spurns the busiest routes. After the previous Governor vetoed it six times, Governor Chafee recently signed a bill to provide bus signal priority on the busiest lines. The brand for this is called rapid bus. At best, this shows the state thinks that rich people on the East Side and the Federal Hill gentrifiers, and soon the Jewelry District gentrifiers, prefer to ride a service that’s not called a bus, even if it is one. At worst, it points to skewed priorities: the streetcar is explicitly a development tool, and much more expensive than clearly posting schedules at the top end of the bus tunnel and rearranging schedules to provide constant headways within it.

A related issue is the ability to railstitute bus routes. Among all the busy routes, route 11 is among the hardest to replace with commuter rail. Peter Brassard’s urban shuttle proposal and my Woonsocket regional rail proposal use existing railroad lines. Arguably, this could take over the longer-distance functions of the 99, whose demand primarily comes from Pawtucket rather than North Main in Providence. However, the 11 is not paralleled by any rail line. This makes it the most important corridor for any upgrade. Alternative routes, such as continuing the existing streetcar proposal farther south, do not capture the local demand on Broad, which is of moderate intensity everywhere along the corridor. The distribution of demand on Broad is linear, which is less the case for other routes, which connect various anchors spaced farther apart.

It’s not normal for the relationship between traffic and frequency to be so weak. (In New York, busy routes that aren’t frequent by a 10-minute standard are the exception, and are very close to making the cut, e.g. the B8 and Bx39 run sometimes every 10 minutes midday and sometimes every 12). RIPTA needs to be asking itself why some routes are overserved and others are underserved.

But more importantly, the city and the state need to ask themselves why they’re building special branding as not-a-regular-bus around routes that aren’t even the ones that most need it. The fake trolleys get emphasized and specially colored on the map. It’s RIPTA’s fault that the interlined buses aren’t consistently signed, but all of the investment decisions are on the city and the state. Even if it’s necessary to build a streetcar to the Jewelry District and the hospital, why not say that pending additional funds the city will extend it toward and then along Broad? The alignment wouldn’t be any more awkward than that already proposed, and it would only miss a relatively short segment of Broad.

Bus and Rail Mantras

Bus is cheaper than rail. Paint is cheap. Rail only made sense a hundred years ago when construction costs were lower. Trains have no inherent advantage over buses. It doesn’t cost more to operate a bus than to operate a train. All of those are true in specific sets of circumstances, and Curitiba and Bogota deserve a lot of credit for recognizing that in their case they were true and opting for a good BRT system. Unfortunately, the notion that buses are always cheaper than trains has turned into a mantra that’s applied even far from the original circumstance of BRT.

The advantage of buses is that dedicating lanes to them and installing signal priority are financially cheap, if politically difficult in the face of opposition from drivers. Even physically separating those lanes is essentially cost-free. This advantage disappears completely when it comes to installing new lanes, or paving an existing right-of-way. Hartford is paving over an abandoned railroad at a cost of $37 million per km.

Not to be outdone, New York’s own MTA just proposed to pave about 8.5 km of the Staten Island Railway’s North Shore Branch for $371 million. A light rail alternative was jettisoned because the MTA insisted on continuing the line to the West Shore Plaza, along what is possibly the least developed road in the city.

Another, related mantra is that light rail is cheaper than heavy rail. This contributed to the MTA’s decision not to pursue a Staten Island Railway-compatible solution, which would allow lower capital costs and cheaper maintenance since trains could be maintained together with the existing fleet without modifying the existing yard. As with all mantras, this one has a kernel of truth: it’s much cheaper to build on-street light rail than elevated rail or a subway. As with the BRT mantra, this is not true when the discussion is about what to do in an existing right-of-way.

Worse, because the MTA believed its own hype, it completely missed the point of surface transit. People who believe these mantras about bus, light rail, and heavy rail can easily miss the advantage of on-street running wherever the streets are more central than the railroad rights-of-way. The North Shore Branch hugs the shore for much of the way, halving station radius. The most developed corridor is Forest Avenue, hosting the S48, the third busiest bus in the borough and the busiest in the same area and orientation as the line in question. (The busiest in the borough, the S53, crosses the bridge to connect the North Shore to the subway in Brooklyn.) Of the three other east-west routes in the North Shore, the one that the North Shore Branch parallels the most closely, the S40, has the lowest ridership. It would be both vastly cheaper and better for bus riders to have dedicated bus lanes on Forest, or possibly Castleton, which hosts the S46.

In cities that did not develop around mainline rail corridors but rather around major streets, the only reason to use mainline rail corridors for urban transit is that reactivating them for rail can be done at much lower cost than building on-street light rail. New York is for historical reasons such a city: Staten Island development follows Forest and Castleton rather than the North Shore Branch, and for similar reasons Park Avenue in Manhattan and the Bronx is a relatively unimportant commercial corridor.

Now, these mainline corridors have great use for regional transit. Queens Boulevard can’t be easily used for train service to Long Island, and Lexington Avenue can’t be easily used for train service to Westchester. Staten Island has great potential for regional transit – but only if it’s electrified rail going through a tunnel to Manhattan. It’s expensive, but it’s what it takes to be time-competitive with the ferry and with buses to the subway. A more competent agency than the MTA would keep planning and designing such high-cost, high-benefit projects, to be built in the future if funding materializes; such plans could also be used to concretely argue for more funding from the state and from Congress.

Instead, the MTA is spending more money than most light rail lines cost, to make such a mainline connection from the North Shore to Manhattan impossible in the future. The best scenario in such a situation is that the busway would have to be railstituted, for a few hundred million dollars – an embarrassing reminder of the busway folly, but still a much smaller sum than the cost of the tunnel. The worst scenario is that like on Los Angeles’s Orange Line, the need to keep buses operating during construction would make it impossible to replace them with trains.

There aren’t a lot of lose-lose (or win-win) situations with transportation, even if we ignore driver convenience, but this is one of them. It’s a fiscal disaster relative to predicted ridership and the operating costs of buses, it makes future transit expansion in the borough more difficult, and it follows a marginal route. All this is so that the MTA can say it’s finally making use of an abandoned right-of-way.

One-Way Pairs: the Bad and the Ugly

One of Jane Jacobs’ prescient observations about bus service in The Death and Life is that one-way pairs, as practiced on the avenues in Manhattan, are bad for riders. Her argument was that one-way pairs require people to walk too long to the bus line, and this cancels out any gains in speed. (This is truer today, when signal priority is an option, than it was fifty years ago.) Jarrett Walker has formalized this in two posts using station radius as an argument; the issue is that passengers need to be within a short walking distance of both halves of the line, and this reduces coverage.

However, not all one-way pairs are created equal. An underrated reason to keep bus services on one line is simplicity: it’s easier to remember that a route follows one street than that it follows two, and also service to specific destinations can become easier. Taking a cue from proper rapid transit, ITDP’s magnum opus BRT standard treats it as a given that buses should run in the median of a street and only even lists one-way pairs as an option on very narrow streets, and even then as an inferior one. The argument revolves around service identity.

In particular, one-way pairs that preserve a semblance of service identity and simplicity are not as bad as one-way pairs that do not. For the original walk-distance reason, it’s also better to have the one-way pair closer together. Jarrett specifically praises Portland’s light rail one-way pair, located a short block apart, as an example of a good couplet. Manhattan’s one-way pairs are located a long block apart, so the walking distance is worse.

But even Manhattan’s one-way pairs are at least coherent. The First/Second Avenue bus follows First and Second Avenues for the entire length of the avenues; south of Houston, it follows Allen, the continuation of First. This is the advantage of the grid. In Providence, things are not as nice, though still somewhat coherent, if one remembers, for example, that Angell and Waterman Streets form a one-way pair (they’re treated as such for car travel, too, so anyone in the neighborhood would know, though people from outside would not).

In contrast, this is how Tel Aviv’s one-way pairs work. They’re getting worse amidst the various bus reform. The post is in Hebrew, but look at the map at the bottom of bus #5, the city’s busiest (and most frequently bombed back in the 1990s and early 2000s). The travesty is that none of those streets on which the line runs in one direction only is even one-way. East of Ibn Gabirol, the street hosting lines 25, 26, and 189 on the map, the streets are wide and two-way. The reason for the complication is lack of left turns. In order to make car traffic flow a little more smoothly, Tel Aviv has completely eviscerated its bus service.

In principle, Tel Aviv has infrastructure for consistent one-way pairs when necessary and regular two-way service elsewhere. For example, Dizengoff and Ben Yehuda, the two north-south streets hosting buses to the west, function as such for cars. They both have contraflow lanes for buses, allowing buses to use them as two-way streets; some do (for example, #5 on Dizengoff), while others still go one-way (for examples, #9 and #55). Likewise, Jabotinsky, the east-west street feeding into the big circuit, is one-way and narrow west of Ibn Gabirol, and could be a one-way pair with Arlozorov to its south; but Arlozorov is kept two-way, and so #66 is two-way, and #22 uses the two as a one-way pair. (By the way, those are fan-made maps; the official maps don’t use color to distinguish routes, and are thus completely unusable.)

The results of the mess coming from ending any service coherence are predictable. Israeli car ownership, low by first-world standards, is rising rapidly, and the social justice and affordable housing protesters are now complaining about high fuel prices. None of them is anti-transit on principle, and all who I confront tell me they’d ride transit if it were usable. I live without a car in a city with worse transit than Tel Aviv, but to me car ownership is not aspirational. When the only transit people know in their country is unusable, people this generation will get cars. The next bus reform will then take into account more left turn restrictions coming from the need to accommodate more vehicles. The next generation of people will grow up with the expectation of even worse bus service and not conceive of any alternative to automobility.

FRA Rules Are Not Just Buff Strength

The FRA waiver approach, adopted by Caltrain, appears to be a relatively simple way for agencies to get out of the buff strength rule. Caltrain applied for and got a waiver from a number of regulations that increase train weight, including buff strength but also several others. The comments written in Caltrain’s application, as well as the experience from SMART, suggest that there are problems with the FRA bigger than just the one regulation that’s most glaringly unnecessary.

First, the regulations that Caltrain asked out of are not just buff strength, but also less sexy rules: corner posts, collision posts, anti-climb mechanism, and so on. All of these are extra work for trains, and Caltrain indicates that it’s impossible to modify European EMUs to meet these rules for a small order. It would result in “no bids,” the application said, based on feedback from the largest vendors.

Now, SMART’s experience is very high capital costs for rolling stock: $6.7 million per two-car DMU. Those are compliant DMUs; there were four other bids, some compliant and some not, all more expensive. However, even the noncompliant bids were not off-the-shelf. They were not even noncompliant in general – they needed to comply with all rules except buff strength. Off-the-shelf DMUs run on mainline tracks in North America with time separation. One positive example is the O-Train, which has spent $34 million on six three-car sets for a service expansion, using completely off-the-shelf Alstom Coradia trains for the new order; the initial order not only used off-the-shelf Bombardier Talents, but also piggybacked on a large Deutsche Bahn order.

Although the performance under a partial FRA regime can be comparable to that under a European regime, the cost of modifying small orders can be very large, as Caltrain discovered. As a result, commuter rail agencies make do with inferior products such as the Colorado Railcar (which loses 42 seconds accelerating to 60 mph, vs. about 30 for a Stadler GTW) and pay $4-5 million per car.

For large orders, the problem is less acute, and indeed, Northeastern commuter rail EMUs are fine, if not great. The M-7s are a little heavier than comparable European EMUs, and the Silverliner Vs and the M-8s are much heavier, but the cost per car is only about $2.5 million, the performance is fairly good, and the reliability is very high. Spread over more than a thousand M-7s, the modifications required to build a compliant EMU are not too expensive. The FRA or other branches of the government could theoretically try to get uniform designs for other cars to spread modification costs over multiple orders, but instead, the next-generation trains proposed for Amtrak orders are overweight and low-performance, and explicit geared toward the needs of local manufacturers rather than those of transit agencies.

Another issue is the reliance on large vendors in drafting regulations and waivers. That’s a first line of cost increase, since it could shut out smaller vendors, which can’t adapt to the unique regulations so easily. Auckland had 11 bids for rolling stock for its electrification project; Caltrain designed its waiver in consultation with 4. On top of this, note again that Caltrain said about the buff strength rule that “to require compliance would result in no bids received.” If there could be bids but they are too high, then it’s harder if at all possible to get waivers. Many of the regulations are quite small and vehicles could be modified to meet them, for some additional cost – nothing huge by itself, but added together, it makes a DMU cost $3.3 million per car and not $2 million.

Finally, while the waiver regime allows new rolling stock to get in, it says nothing about maintenance regimes. Caltrain did not ask for waivers from maintenance requirements, even though the FRA discourages multiple-unit trains by treating them as locomotives for maintenance purposes. The Talents, Coradias, etc. have established maintenance requirements, and often agencies order not only the trains but also maintenance over their lifetime, from the manufacturers, who already know how to fix them. They do not explode from undermaintenance in Europe. Neither do their counterparts in Japan.

The alternative approach is to start from service needs, rather than from bureaucratic needs. This is what I mean when I talk about FRA revolutions. A train or a train concept with a history of success elsewhere should by default be legal on mainline tracks in the US and so should the established operating and maintenance practice, and it’s up to the FRA to show that it’s unsafe rather than up for the manufacturers to prove it once again. This is to a large extent the approach used with time-share waivers, which have put Talents and soon Coradias on mainline track in Canada and GTWs and Desiros in the US. If collisions with freight trains are prevented using other means (not that FRA compliance offers much protection to begin with!), and there is a track record of normal operation absent freight trains, there should not be problems with running those trains on shared mainline track. They do it in Europe and Japan, more safely than in the US. There’s no legitimate reason not to import that practice.