Category: Incompetence
Buy America is a Scam
Streetsblog’s interview with Amalgamated Transit Union President Larry Henley hits on the normal points regarding labor issues and transit, but one bit there deserves additional followup, regarding Buy America provisions:
Tanya Snyder: Some transit advocates are also critical of things like Buy America provisions because it costs transit agencies more money.
Larry Henley: This is the Wal-Mart question. This is whether or not we have a country at all anymore.
If the goal is to race to the bottom, to get the cheapest products, which means the cheapest labor, then we ought to be mindful that while we’re preserving the fiscal integrity of the MTA, we’re ruining the lives of American kids. We’re making it impossible for them to get a job. And if you look at the unemployment rates today, as staggering as they sound, it’s 9 percent overall, but for college educated kids it’s 4 percent. Which means that people who lack a college education no longer have a future in America. They just don’t.
…So that now, we have people in China and India and all across the world competing with American kids.
…This is about a moral crisis in America. And then they have the gall to come back and make all these arguments about American people being inefficient or American people not working hard enough and why shouldn’t they all be part time. But the central issue is that we have allowed corporations like Wal-Mart to wring every ounce of hope out of young Americans’ lives.
In the comments, Stephen Smith already justly mocked Henley for complaining about China and India when the major rolling stock and bus vendors are from peer developed countries, and Buy America’s most recent derailing of a light rail order was about imports from Spain, a country with 21% unemployment. But there’s much more at stake here.
Buy America’s purported role is to create American jobs. But let’s examine the costs. Amtrak’s Sprinter locomotives, compliant with both FRA regulations and Buy America, cost 30% more than the European locomotives they’re based on, and 50% more than competitor products built only for passenger trains rather than also for freight trains. A 30% premium works out to an extra cost of about $100 million, providing 250 jobs. Since the income earned by skilled workers is normally around $100,000 or less rather than $400,000, we can conclude most of the premium doesn’t go to workers. Or, for an even more egregious example, but without job numbers specified, look to SMART’s DMUs, at twice the cost of comparable European trains.
In other words, it’s a scam. Blocking parallel imports ensures only a select number of vendors can bid, driving up prices. Usually there’s a small sop to American labor, well-publicized in the media with photo-ops of people in hard hats – e.g. the 250 jobs heralded for the Sprinter order – but the bulk of the extra money goes elsewhere. It creates makework for consultants and lobbyists. It increases vendor profits, since fewer companies, typically the largest and most global ones, can bid. (This also goes for regulations: Caltrain applied for its FRA waiver in consultation with the biggest train manufacturers, potentially locking out Stadler and other small up-and-comers.)
When the number of vendors is very small, the result can be not just high cost, but also shoddy work. The reason the US has no legacy domestic rolling stock vendors is that two of the few that remained by the 1970s, protected by Buy America but servicing an ever-shrinking market, sold New York City Transit defective trains, the R44 and R46 orders; this was one of many mishaps facing the city in the 1970s. The subsequent lawsuits bankrupted the vendors. The R44 is still a lemon, though since refurbishment the R46 has performed well. In the 1980s, NYCT switched to global vendors instead; the next order, the R62, was not federally funded due to Reagan’s cuts, so NYCT went ahead and imported trains from Kobe, which worked fine.
There is another way, but, as with most other issues facing transportation, it requires importing ideas from other developed countries. The idea in question is that parallel imports are not a bad thing, either for the economy or for workers. The US and Canada import cars from each other; neither is any worse for it. To a much smaller extent due to trade barriers and different sets of regulations, North America imports cars from Europe and Japan – and the attempts to fight it have not resulted in a union revival, but in the proliferation of non-union plants in low-wage states.
Parallel imports are not an anti-worker or anti-union tactic. The Swiss Socialist Party is for them, and, far from a neo-liberal sop, it also supports linking trade to human rights and workers’ rights and has a general roster of policy positions that most Daily Kos contributors would love to see the Democratic Party endorse.
The majority of trade is within the developed world. To the extent Buy America is supposed to protect American workers from low-wage countries, it has failed; NYCT’s Buy America-compliant R160 trains were partially manufactured in Brazil to save money. The main function of Buy America is to protect companies that do business in the US from competition, period. At that it has done a very good job; it’s just not good for the public, which has to pay for it.
Followup on the FRA and Amtrak
My posts about the FRA and American railroad incompetence are getting a lot of traction nowadays, thanks to links from Aaron Renn and Stephen Smith, of which the latter has been relinked by Matt Yglesias. The comments to those posts have often brought up the question of why I believe that come 2015, the buff strength requirement will be gone. They also sometimes propose that FRA regulations are useful in the unique circumstances of American railroads. Let me address both concerns right now.
In 2009, Amtrak published its first document proposing higher-speed trains in the Northeast. In this document Amtrak states that,
Subsequent analysis by Amtrak suggests achieving 2 hour and 15 minute service between New York and Washington in the long-term by 2030 will require modifications to existing equipment, or deployment of next generation rolling stock, to allow required speeds through curves, as well as expansion of capacity into and through Manhattan, NY. Table 2 includes estimates of costs required to replace Amtrak’s existing NEC fleet with next generation equipment. As discussed above, this next generation of equipment has the potential to be lighter, and thus faster, than the current generation. However, performance specifications for such equipment will need to be developed and will depend in part on emerging standards for positive train control (PTC) and crash avoidance systems.
My reading of this is that the Amtrak believes the FRA will indeed waive buff strength requirements once PTC comes online; this is buttressed by the fact that Caltrain got a waiver, based in part on a requirement that it install PTC first. The PTC discussed doesn’t seem to be heading anywhere good – note the discussion of developing performance specifications rather than using the emerging worldwide standard that is ERTMS – but it does indicate that Amtrak’s new premium-cost locomotives could be much lighter.
As an aside, this document is what first clued me in to Amtrak’s incompetence. For example, immediately below the paragraph quoted above, Amtrak proposes to raise cant deficiency (“underbalance”) on Metro-North territory from 3″ to 5″; the Acela trainsets can do 7″, and Pendolino trainsets close to 11″. Based on this rather low standard, Amtrak claims “an additional five minutes of trip time reductions are potentially available with the deployment of modified or new equipment.” (Try half an hour.)
As for the second concern, usually the arguments in favor of FRA regulations hinge upon exaggerated claims that the US railroad system is unique. One commenter claims that railroaders call cab cars coffin cars because of the possibility of grade crossing accidents. In reality, lightweight trains safely cross roads at-grade abroad, to say nothing of light rail networks in the US.
There are still plenty of old-time railroaders who believe that in crashes, FRA compliance offers extra protection. It does not. Please read Caltrain’s structural report and compliance assessment for the FRA waiver, which include a technical explanation of the mechanisms for accident survivability used in Europe. Caltrain’s simulations show that high buff strength is only relevant at relative speeds between 15 and 25 mph, and that European EMUs and compliant cars are equally safe in grade crossing accidents. The FRA seems convinced of the safety of European EMUs; it is reportedly harassing Japanese manufacturers about compliance with European survivability regulations (for example, in collisions with a 6-kg steel ball) rather than American ones. Finally, high weight is a liability as much as it is an asset: at Chatsworth, the loss of life came from the fact that the first passenger car telescoped into the heavy locomotive.
Update: the Business Alliance for Northeast Mobility, an organization supporting Amtrak’s NEC Master Plan, published an article claiming Amtrak made the right choice to buy the aforementioned locomotives, claiming that Amtrak is underfunded. Recall that the Master Plan is the document that came out of the report referenced above, complete with the same laconic assumptions on train performance, as well as false claims about capacity constraints. The Business Alliance’s article’s greatest sin is the claim at the end that,
Smith also ignores the question of funding when he suggests that Amtrak should purchase Electric Multiple Units (EMUs) for the NEC. Unlike locomotives and non-motorized passenger cars, currently in use on the NEC, EMUs have smaller engines on each passenger car. The debate between investing in EMUs vs. locomotives + cars is beyond the scope of this post. Still, what’s clear is that EMUs would need a significantly higher up-front investment and require an even larger amount of government support, which is highly unlikely at this time.
In reality, a new unpowered Amtrak coach costs $2.2 million, about the same as a decent FRA-compliant EMU on the LIRR and Metro-North. And the three European EMU orders in Railway Gazette’s April 2011 compilation cost between $1.3 and $2 million per car.
Airport Access vs. City Access
New York’s MTA and Port Authority have just released slides from a meeting discussing alternatives for transit access to LaGuardia. While the airport is the nearest to Midtown Manhattan by road and thus the option of choice for many business travelers, its transit options consist of local buses within Queens or to Upper Manhattan, and as a result its passengers are the least likely to use transit: about 10%, vs. 15% for JFK and 17% for Newark. Transit to the airport has been on and off the agenda for quite some time, with the most recent attempt, a Giuliani-era proposal to extend the Astoria Line, torpedoed due to community opposition to elevated trains.
Regular readers of this blog know that I have little positive to say about transit geared toward airport travelers. Business travelers are much better at demanding airport transit than using it. However, LaGuardia’s location is such that it could serve as a useful outer-end anchor for multiple lines providing transit to underserved areas. One is north-south service in Queens east of the Astoria Line, for example along Junction Boulevard; there’s already a bus that goes on Junction, but it’s slow and infrequent, and the lines do not combine into a single trunk except on airport grounds. Another is east-west service along 125th Street, which is replete with traffic and supports higher combined frequency on the four lines serving it than any other bus corridor in the city. Yet another is any service to East Elmhurst, which is a very dense neighborhood far from the subway.
The alternatives analysis seems biased in favor of Select Bus Service, i.e. not quite BRT, but such a question can just as well be asked of any mode of transportation, up to and including subways. However, even if the proposal is to physically separate the bus lanes, much good can be done on those corridors, independently of airport traffic. Because BRT can be done open rather than closed, the airport travel market could in principle even be served by a few direct buses from 1st/2nd Avenues through the Triboro Bridge, or perhaps over the Queensboro if the city adds physically separate lanes on Northern or Queens Boulevard. Those business travelers who are willing to use airport transit put a premium on direct service to the CBD: circumferential lines such as those proposed here would do more good for ordinary city residents than for air travelers.
In a world in which New York’s construction costs are normal rather than very high, it would be possible to speculate about subway extensions. Although city officials have favored an extension of the Astoria Line, there are better ways to serve that segment of Queens, providing north-south service to East Elmhurst and perhaps additional east-west service north of the Flushing Line. My preference is something like this: a shuttle under Junction intersecting all existing and possible future radial subways, and a continuation of Second Avenue Subway along 125th Street. Although it has a gap in service from Harlem to the airport, Second Avenue Subway Phase 2 has a natural tie-in to 125th, making the airport less important as an anchor than it is for surface transit; and even with a subway, 125th may well have enough remaining bus traffic to justify physically separated median bus lanes.
Although the possibility of subway extension is remote given current construction costs, an SBS extension is likely. It’s affordable at current costs and willingness to pay, and provides lines on a map that political leaders can point to and say “I did it.” In addition, boosters and business leaders tend to like airport expansions, and those are sometimes useful for the city.
Although New York currently prefers closed to open BRT, it’s still possible that airport access will indeed be used as an excuse to improve city transit with circumferential SBS routes in Queens and Harlem. It’s unlikely much good will come of it – note how the slides talk about “service to the airport and Western Queens” instead of “service to Western Queens and the airport” – but it’s feasible.
The Mother of All Interest Conflicts
Best industry practice for cutting transportation capital costs, found in Madrid, is to separate design from construction and keep the project management in-house. The FTA’s practice is different:
Parsons Brinckerhoff said Wednesday it has been awarded a contract by the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) to develop and document a transit asset management framework and implementation guide that will support the FTA’s State of Good Repair and Asset Management Programs.
The FTA estimates there is a nationwide backlog of $50 billion to $80 billion in deferred maintenance and replacement needs, the vast majority of which are rail-related.
PB is going to decide what projects are necessary and how to build them, and will also be able to bid on design and construction. Naturally, the numbers it will come up with are going to be favorable to its private interest; the common interest is not profitable for the company.
This is especially egregious in state of good repair (SOGR) money, which is often a series of rent-seeking scams. Agencies do not impartially judge how much money they need for maintenance and then ask for it. Instead, they massage the numbers based on whether the political mood is such that they could get more or less money. In 2005, the Amtrak board fired President David Gunn for insisting on competing SOGR before attempting to move to profitability; by 2009, when the stimulus provided plenty of money, Amtrak suddenly remembered it had deferred maintenance and came up with the $10 billion NEC Master Plan, essentially SOGR plus a few small upgrades.
A few agencies, such as New York City Transit, treat SOGR seriously (this was thanks to Richard Ravitch and David Gunn) and push for it even when the politicians want something different; most just use it as an excuse to justify high capital costs without anything to show for it. Look again at Amtrak, which even as it cries poverty about SOGR is trying to portray its finances as very good, for example listing a farebox recovery ratio that, unlike the practice at peer national railroads, excludes depreciation and interest. Heads Amtrak is profitable and competent and should get what it wants, tails it has a backlog of deferred maintenance and needs more money.
This is more a political than technical problem, but normal political advocacy is not going to help. Politicians can get credit for massive overhauls or new infrastructure involving ribbon cuttings; they won’t get credit for adding to the design and management budget, no matter how much money it will save in the long run.
Therefore, politicians who care more about being seen as fiscally conservative than about saving money force agencies to cut their in-house expertise. Instead, agencies outsource everything to consultants; this can work sometimes, but the people who would oversee them have been cut, so that there’s nobody in charge who’s loyal to the interests of the agency or the public. As a result, nobody in the US knows anything about good practices for rail infrastructure construction except people with the mother of all conflicts of interest, and nobody knows anything about rolling stock except New York City Transit, which designs rolling stock in-house or buys designs and prototypes separately from revenue equipment.
The agencies have bought into this system, since they share in the overly expensive designs and must defend them. Madrid doesn’t separate design from construction just because of interest conflict issues; the reason stated by Madrid Metro CEO Manuel Melis Maynar is that changes are unavoidable, and a construction crew uninvolved with the original design would be less stubborn about sticking to the blueprint. Since such separation does not exist in the US, and on the contrary the people currently in charge are used to the system so much that they bring up design/build contracts as an improvement, agency inertia is directed toward making the agency even less competent.
California HSR is perhaps the worst example of this. The HSR Authority consists of nine politicians, overseeing a skeletal crew of professionals (I believe there are only six engineers/planners). Unsurprisingly, the Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) Peer Review Group wrote a peer-review report accusing the HSRA of having no expertise in project management or even in negotiating a good PPP so that the private sector could do it. Even more unsurprisingly, hiring more staff to bolster an agency that’s currently incompetent is risky and nobody wants to be responsible for either potential delays or spending good money after bad, despite the possibility of large cost savings in the medium and long runs.
Quick Note: Road Boondoggles
With all the focus on poorly done transit investment on this blog, it’s sometimes easy to forget that the primary source of US transportation waste is still roads. Consider for example the following projects proposed in Southern California, not all funded:
– $1 billion fully funded for adding one carpool lane in one direction for 10 miles to the 405 through Sepulveda Pass; since the 405 will have to be closed for two days, this is locally dubbed Carmageddon. This is about $60 million per unidirectional lane-km, which is to my knowledge a record for above-ground highways.
– $3 billion proposed for 4.5 miles of twin tunnels to complete a gap in the 710, of which $780 million is funded by Measure R, which generally funded transit projects. The cost, $400 million per km, is not high by global tunnel standards, but compared with the opportunity cost of building transit in the area, it’s enormous.
– $4.1 billion for widening the 5 from 8 lanes to 12-14 for 27 miles, not yet funded. It’s about $18 million per unidirectional lane-km, a figure that’s cropped up elsewhere in the US and should be compared with about $15-80 million per double track-km for light rail, which has about eight or ten times the capacity per unidirectional track or lane.
Those projects are cheaper than the Big Dig or the Bay Bridge Eastern Span replacement, but also provide much less – two are routine widenings, and one is a minor tunnel. The point is that even small upgrades to road capacity cost as much as a major transit project.
The US road network has been a money sink going back to the first federal-aid highway act, in 1917. The reference here is 20th Century Sprawl, by Owen Gutfreund, who describes how motorist lobbies complained about license fees, fuel taxes, and other fees since the 1910s, and created road lockboxes for the revenue generated. Even though gas taxes were treated differently from cigarette and alcohol taxes, which do not go toward funding tobacco and distilleries, they were still not enough to pay for roads. In fact the only paid for about half the cost of highways, and there was a huge subsidy from gas tax-ineligible urban roads to the national and state roads.
The situation today is hardly different. Although proportionally there’s much less cross-subsidy than in the 1930s, due to the growth of suburbs connected by Interstates or other gas tax-eligible numbered roads, roads’ financial performance is still low. Under the fiction that local streets are paid by the tooth fairy, US roads are $75 billion a year in the hole: as of 2008, all gas tax and toll receipts are $122 billion, including the portion diverted to non-highway purposes, whereas total receipts to be spent on gas tax-eligible highways are $197 billion, including $4.3 billion spent on collection expenses. That’s 62% cost recovery.
It gets worse when one does a total lifecycle cost analysis and does not deed all local gas tax money to state highways: in Texas, the best-performing highways have 50% cost recovery, and most have much less. In Maryland, one transit advocate computed a 20% cost recovery for state highways, based on an analysis that treats most of the gas tax as just a sales tax on gasoline; but even if one considers the gas tax to be a user fee for roads, the extra money only raises cost recovery to 32%. Even tollways frequently lose money when interest on capital is included, and in one case even when interest is not included.
In other words, the entirety of the US road program is one giant money hole, of proportions that far exceed even the worst transit projects. I talk less about it because the best industry practice is to toll the roads and build far less of them rather than to control costs; there’s a good way to build a subway, but not to build 14-lane freeways.
Is Technical Activism Necessary?
Since my post on technicals and politicals is getting some wider traction, with a discussion on Auckland Transport Blog, I should raise the question of whether technicals are even necessary. Recall that technicals are the transit activists who tend to mistrust transit authorities, especially when they claim a certain project or project component is required when it is unnecessary abroad or just very expensive. It’s a sort of activism that’s created by agency incompetence. I can imagine being technical about New York; I can’t imagine the same about Zurich.
Not knowing enough about the level of government competence in New Zealand, I can’t know how relevant what I’m going to say is to Auckland. Reading Auckland Transport Blog suggests that Auckland’s expansion projects are well-run, and the primary obstacle is political opposition by the National Party. In Auckland based on the impression I get from the blog, or in most major European cities (for example, Paris), the major divisions among transit advocates are either about pure politics (social services versus profitability) or value questions concerning how express lines should run or whether there should be more investment into buses or rail. Once the investment plan at each given level of funding is optimized, the question becomes how much funding to provide.
The political/technical division thus seems to be primarily North American and maybe Australian/New Zealander, certainly not European. In Europe, because the average quality of local projects is much higher, it is much easier to tell the bad projects apart.
Take Stuttgart 21, an expensive boondoggle that only looks good on a map. The need for massive takings and the high and escalating cost of the project led to massive protests, catapulting the Green Party to a state election victory for the first time in German history. But unlike unpopular rail projects in the US, the response was not to cancel all investment (the Green-SPD coalition wants to give more priority to rail investment and put it on equal footing with roads) but instead look for better solutions, hiring Swiss rail experts and coming up with an alternative plan. In other words, there was no difference between politicals and technicals.
In the US, such a response would be unthinkable. There’s no way for a mass movement to support transit investment in general but also oppose specific projects that are bad and promote more cost-effective alternatives. The Tea Party is heavily against all transit and urbanism, regardless of merit, and should not count. The opposition to Stuttgart 21 gathered in weekly protests by the tens of thousands; the opposition to ARC gathered in small rooms with about ten people in attendance.
Premium Cost, Substandard Quality Locomotives
I’m a little late to the game here, but let me just say that Amtrak’s just-funded contract for new electric locomotives is supremely expensive: $560 million for 70 locos, or $8 million each, $466 million for 70 locos, or $6.7 million each (see comment by aw with this link). The locomotives are an FRA-compliant version of Siemens’ EuroSprinter product, which has recently been sold in Europe for €3.7–4 million per unit, as has Bombardier’s competing TRAXX locomotive (in fact, the TRAXX even sold for €3.2 million). Amtrak is paying a premium of about 60-80% 35-50% for these locomotives, depending on exchange rates.
It gets worse. The new locos will enter service in 2013, just two years before the national mandate for positive train control goes in effect, allowing trains to be lighter and avoid the most onerous FRA regulations (in fact, the Northeast Corridor, where most of the locos are to run, already has a PTC system). The special modifications and design are what caused an increase in both weight, from 86-87 metric tons for the standard EuroSprinter to 97 for the Amtrak Cities Sprinter, and cost.
To put things in perspective, Sweden recently bought 180 km/h EMUs for €1.6 million per car. And the 700 Series Shinkansen cost $2.5 million per car. In other words, Amtrak could have gotten 3 EMUs for the price for one locomotive. (Amtrak’s new single-deck coaches cost $2.3 million per car, the same as EMUs abroad.)
The US Department of Transportation is announcing that “Siemens Industry USA is adding 250 new manufacturing jobs in order to design and build 70 new energy-efficient locomotives for Amtrak.” The cost premium works out to about $200-250 million $100-150 million, or $800,000-1,000,000 $400,000-600,000 per job added; the total cost is $2.2 million $1.9 million per US manufacturing job. Needless to say, most of this money is not going to American manufacturing workers, but to consultants and Siemens’s train designers.
Boosters’ Romanticism
One would expect that boosters of unbridled growth, such as Thomas Friedman, Richard Florida, Ed Glaeser, and countless proponents of urban growth would constantly look to the future and deprecate the past. They certainly deprecate attempts to recreate the past. But do they? Despite unabashed pro-Americanism, they crow about the fast growth of China. Glaeser looks back to an era of great infrastructure spending on water works in turn-of-the-century America. Infrastructurist and urbanophile bloggers look back to Daniel Burnham and early-20th century public works (though the Infrastructurist and Urbanophile themselves are very self-conscious and are more thoughtful in their boosterism).
Instead of writing about history as a series of epics, let us examine it with the same critical eye we examine the present. This means looking at historical paths not taken, much as we should examine alternatives for projects today; this also means looking at costs and benefits. In most cases, the inspirational projects of the past tend to not look very good under the microscope.
For a concrete example, consider the Interstate system. Examples of writings on infrastructure that take its greatness for granted are numerous, even on Streetsblog as far as job creation is concerned. But in reality, it was an epic disaster for most involved. The original 1954 estimate for the cost, enshrined in the 1956 act creating the network, was $25 billion; by 1958 it had already climbed to $40 billion, and the final cost was $114 billion. The construction required demolishing thousands of dwellings in each city the highways went through. Even burying the highways does not help: the scar of Boston’s Central Artery is still there despite the Big Dig, because amidst cost overruns they dropped the option of building above the tunnel.
The utter failure of the USA’s road-building program goes further back. As explained by Owen Gutfreund in his book 20th Century Sprawl, urban streets, on which it was illegal to spend gas tax money until the late 1930s, subsidized the early highways and rural roads; overall, roads only covered about half their capital costs through gas taxes. Tollways faced intense opposition from the AAA and the auto and tire industries. Instead an entire bureaucracy was created to ram roads through, paving the way to the large-scale neighborhood destruction of the 1950s. Tellingly, New York and San Francisco, the first two major cities to have freeway revolts, had a smaller population decline through 1980 than the other major non-Sunbelt cities, and are now the only two to have since surpassed their 1950 population peaks.
Transit investment in that era was no better. New York’s major project in the 1920s and 1930s was the construction of the IND, competing with the existing privately-run IRT and BMT networks. The new lines generally did not add transportation options. The Crosstown and Queens Boulevard Lines added service, but did not connect to existing IRT or BMT stops; to this day, the G train has no transfer to non-IND lines in Downtown Brooklyn, and only one, difficult transfer in Queens, which opened just a month ago. The remainder simply paralleled existing elevated or subway lines, which were subsequently torn down.
Part of it was the general opposition to elevated rail in that era, coupled with fascination with both subways and elevated highways. But only part: one IND line, the Sixth Avenue Line, required building new track alongside and later below the existing Hudson Tubes (now PATH), dooming previous plans to extend them to Grand Central for greater regional connectivity. On top of it, the difficulty of building next to an active subway created massive cost escalation, dooming future expansion plans that would add new service.
Although both of the above examples are from the middle of the 20th century, previous infrastructure investment was not much better. It’s a commonplace that New York’s first subway line was built in four years, versus ten for just one phase of Second Avenue Subway. It’s less widely known that ground broke on the subway in 1900 only after multiple decades of political bickering, route changes, and scandals; a short underground demonstration line using pneumatic tube technology had opened in 1869.
Even before then, Britain had undergone a pair of Railway Manias, one in the 1830s and one in the 1840s (thanks to Danny in the comments for the link). Relative to GDP, the latter mania dwarfed both the 1990s’ tech bubble and the 2000s’ housing bubble. Costs ran over estimates by a factor of 2 or more, and ridership underperformed estimates. Although by the end of the Victorian era the lines had surpassed the mid-19th century predictions and were profitable, the investment was too fast, and ruined many investors.
Nobody romanticizes the present, because its problems are apparent to all. Some people romanticize the future; those are the boosters, for whom every problem with growth has a simple solution. But even those can easily slip and romanticize the past, whose main actors have since become national heroes and whose main battles have turned into epic legends. Obama and Bloomberg are controversial; Eisenhower and LaGuardia are heroes.
Bad US Rail Practices, and What It Means for FRA Regulations
As I alluded to in the last few posts, although the FRA is the primary obstacle to a passenger rail revival, the old railroader traditions it reinforces are still strong in the commuter railroads. At some, for example the MBTA and the New York-area railroads, practices are even worse in terms of cost and performance than required by the FRA.
Witness the following issues, recurring on almost all US commuter lines:
1. Overstaffing, more than required by the FRA. The MBTA currently has one assistant conductor per two cars, and its proposal for an upgrade to newer rolling stock retains one conductor per two cars. The New York- and Chicago-area commuter trains have 3-6 conductors, punching everyone’s tickets. Caltrain maintains assistant conductors even though it does not punch tickets anymore. And New York’s plan with smartcards is not to institute proof-of-payment, as is normal throughout Europe, but rather to have conductors check every ticket using a smartcard reader, only faster: Jay Walder said as much at the MTA Unconference (it starts at 7:50 into the linked video, and goes into the next part).
2. Poor choice of rolling stock. See the same link above for the MBTA’s present acceleration profile, which is similar to that of the other commuter rail operators in the US using diesel locomotives. During acceleration from 0 to 60 mph, a train loses 70 seconds relative to going the same distance at full speed, and even under the DMU plan, it would lose 43. In contrast, a FLIRT loses about 13 seconds accelerating from 0 to 100 km/h. Despite this, there are no plans to electrify or ask for an FRA waiver.
Electrification alone could solve some problems, even without a waiver. The EMUs used by Metro-North lose 13-15 minutes from 12 intermediate stops on the Harlem Line, which after factoring in 30 seconds of dwell time works out to 35-45 seconds per station counting both acceleration and deceleration. Alternatively, if electrification is out, then an FRA waiver would open the doors to fast-accelerating as well as more fuel-efficient DMUs.
3. Poor use of existing infrastructure, especially at terminals. Even with FRA regulations, commuter trains with push-pull or multiple-unit service turn in about 5 minutes at their outer ends. They dwell for much longer at the downtown terminal, creating the illusion of capacity issues. To solve those capacity problems, railroads propose massive concrete, with no attempt to improve electronics or organization: the ARC cavern, the expensive ESA cavern, track expansion at Boston South.
4. A concrete-before-all-else strategy of investment, in direct opposition with organization before electronics before concrete. Amtrak and the commuter railroads that claim to be at capacity never investigated the possibility of better signaling, such as ERTMS. In addition, Amtrak’s Master Plan proposes extra trackage to avoid capacity problems in Massachusetts and Maryland that could be resolved with timed overtakes. Although organization is not sexy, it’s trivial for the various railroads using a station to share ticket vending machines and concourses, instead of separating into agency turfs; in addition, electronics is capital investment, and can get federal investment as well as good headlines about squeezing more capacity out of infrastructure. There’s no excuse for prioritizing concrete.
5. Poor integration with local transit in terms of fares and schedules. Commuter train stations are usually glorified parking lots; for one especially egregious example, compare Westborough’s train station location with its downtown location. Transit-oriented development is minimal. Best industry practice is to do the opposite, and instead integrate commuter rail with connecting buses at the suburban end, to say nothing of urban rail at the city end. Clipper in the Bay Area and the MTA’s proposals in the New York area have a single card that can be used to pay on both commuter rail and urban transit, but people will still have to purchase tickets separately, being punished first by the inherent inconvenience of transferring and then by being made to pay an extra fare.
6. Indifference to off-peak and reverse-peak riders. Peak ridership can fill trains, but is expensive to provide, because providing for more of it requires additional capital spending as well as additional employees working split shifts. Among the older railroads, the LIRR deserves singular scorn for running trains one-way on its two-track Main Line; although peak traffic on the three lines using the two-track segment is 23 tph, within the capabilities of two tracks under present signaling, the LIRR prefers being able to run express trains than any reverse peak trains. Outside the inner ends of a few very busy lines, such as the New Haven Line, off-peak service is at best hourly, and sometimes much worse. And at the peak, the commuter railroads eviscerate local service on their busiest lines in order to provide trains that make a few local stops and then express to the city, ensuring nobody will be able to use them to get to suburban job centers on the way.
7. Poor timetable adherence. Metro-North and Metra do somewhat better than the rest, but Amtrak only achieves 80% on-time performance even when it owns the tracks, and that’s after counting Northeast Corridor trains that are 20 minutes late as being on time. In contrast, SBB achieves 92% on-time performance by a 3-minute standard.
The importance of all this is that reform has to come from above, directed from Congress or the White House, or else from below by reform-minded railroads asking for many waivers and creating a template for smaller railroads to follow. Bruce McFarling has written various comments saying the FRA’s problem is one of regulatory capture by the freight railroads, and therefore the solution is to spend money on inferior passenger rail until there’s enough of a lobby for passenger rail-friendlier rules. This is unlikely; passenger rail advocates rarely care, with some positive but small exceptions such as NJ-ARP, and the passenger rail operators depicted in this post are wedded to the old way of doing things.
FRA reform by itself could help some of this, by creating a template for modern operations, consisting of a clockface schedules, short turnaround times, modern rolling stock, and regionally integrated fares and schedules. However, absent it, some forward-thinking railroad has to be the first to propose modernization. The MTA is ideally suited for it because of its high commuter rail ridership, but has no interest. As a result, good transit advocated need to keep harping on commuter operators as well as Amtrak to improve and reform, or propose reforms themselves. Hoping the status quo reforms itself will not cut it.
Bad FRA Regulations
Since many people are linking to my previous post identifying the FRA as the primary obstacle to an American railroad revival, I’m hoisting a comment I wrote on the Infrastructurist detailing some of the FRA regulations that are the most destructive.
The original references for this are from Zierke’s website and the East Bay Bicycle Coalition, but those are a few years out of date, and recently the FRA has made noises about reforming the first two rules, which are the most destructive to intercity rail. Unfortunately, those reforms are not good enough, chiefly because they are designed to preserve the FRA’s bureaucracy, piling more obstacles on any attempt to modernize US trains.
1. 945 tons buff strength for locomotives and end cars and 360 for coaches (link); the maximum that’s even partly defensible is Europe’s 200, and Japan’s 100 is perfectly safe. This is by far the most important: as a result of this rule, the Acela power cars weigh 90 metric tons, vs. 68 for the TGV power cars they’re derived from. Zierke notes that the lighter the train, the higher the FRA weight penalty is.
2. 4″ maximum cant deficiency for non-tilting trains, except 5″ on track connected to 110+ mph rail (derisively called the magic HSR waiver by railfans). The Acela is limited to 7″ despite tilting. Non-tilting TGVs do 180 mm in France (about the same as the Acela) and tilting trains do 250-300 mm in Japan and a bunch of European countries, no special testing required except on actual track. In addition, superelevation is limited by regulation to 7″ minus a safety margin; high-speed lines around the world have 180 mm actual superelevation, and the Tokaido Shinkansen, which has tighter curves, has 200 mm.
Those two regulations are already being somewhat modified. Amtrak seems to believe that the nationwide mandate for positive train control (PTC), passed in 2008 in response to the Chatsworth crash, will allow it to run lighter trains; the FRA has granted Caltrain a waiver from the FRA buff strength rule provisioned upon PTC installation. As for cant deficiency, the FRA has already decided on a revision allowing tilting trains up to 225 mm cant deficiency, and non-tilting trains up to 150 mm by testing.
Unfortunately, those two reforms only look good at first glance. The Caltrain waiver application from the buff strength rule was devised in consultation with the biggest rolling stock manufacturers – Bombardier, Kawasaki, Alstom, and Siemens – which indicates which rules they could comply with and which they could not. This may well lock out smaller vendors, such as Stadler and CAF. Stadler’s FLIRT is the fastest-accelerating, highest-powered regional train on the market; it is also very light, and may well not comply even with regulations Caltrain did not ask out of.
In addition, since such waivers depend on PTC, if the freight railroads succeed in their attempt to delay or water down PTC implementation, which they consider too expensive, then future rolling stock purchases will remain heavy. Indeed, Amtrak’s purchase of new electric locomotives, due to enter service in 2013, is FRA-compliant and more expensive than purchases of similar locomotives in Europe; this despite the fact that they are intended to run on the Northeast Corridor, which has a PTC system.
As for the cant deficiency waiver, it was obtained by testing existing outdated technology in the US, such as Amtrak locomotives and the EMUs used on commuter rail in the Northeast. No attempt was made to use high-cant deficiency European technology, a point also made by Drunk Engineer. Such trains would have to be tested to the FRA’s satisfaction, and not be allowed to run at the same speeds as they do in Europe. In fact the FRA’s proposed rule revision includes a language about higher track standards for cant deficiency higher than 5″, never mind that TGVs run on less than perfect legacy track at 7″ cant deficiency.
In addition, for high-cant deficiency operation, it’s important to regulate both cant deficiency and the rate at which it changes. The muscles can adjust to lateral acceleration, given enough time; thus the jerk, or the rate of change of acceleration, must also be prescribed. With a proper superelevation ramp and change in cant deficiency based on the abilities of existing trains, high speeds and high cant deficiencies can combine well, as found in a Swedish study about the feasibility of very high-speed trains on legacy track.
Additional FRA regulations, which hamper regional rail more than intercity rail, seem to be here to stay. These include the following:
3. Two employees per train; regional trains should have one. But, bear in mind, many regional operators have multiple conductors, and the limit to lower staffing is antiquated trains or managerial incompetence rather than the FRA. For example, the MBTA believes it needs one conductor per two cars.
4. Brake tests at every turnaround. Intercity trains can enter a stub-end station and back away in 3-4 minutes, and do every day in Germany; regional trains turn around in 3-4 minutes in Japan. However, Amtrak makes Keystone trains dwell 10 minutes at Philadelphia.
5. Four-quadrant gates required for quiet zones; these make quiet zones expensive, and as a result trains have to blare loud horns at grade crossings, alienating neighbors and creating NIMBYism.
6. No regulations encouraging high-performance lightweight cars and good signaling. The FRA should mandate a modern system, preferably ETCS, which permits a throughput of up to 37 trains per hour at standard speeds. This is 12 tph more than currently can run between New Jersey and New York, and would be about $13 billion cheaper than Amtrak’s Gateway tunnel proposal, which would add 21 tph.
The multitude of bad regulations is why I think FRA reform has to be intensive, without any half-measures. The new rail regulations in the US should as much as possible be based on UIC (predominantly European) and Japanese regulations, with the present status quo ignored.
The only role of American regulators should be to devise a coherent system to allow European and Japanese trains to interact with each other. In some places, such as PTC and jerk, it requires greater regulation, based on best industry practices in the rest of the developed world. But in most other areas, the rule should as far as possible be that everything that’s legal in Europe or Japan is legal in the US.
I’ll repeat my exhortation in my post on Mica’s privatization plan: please contact the relevant Congressional representatives and let them know that any real reform must include extensive FRA reform. Organization and electronics should come before concrete, and such deregulation of rolling stock could jive well with the conservative mood in Congress that Mica is channeling. And if it does not, then never mind – the Democrats could seize FRA reform, too, as a good-government issue. It’s more important than whether future railroads are run publicly or privately.
Pedestrian Observations 