Category: Incompetence
Germany and Summer Maintenance
I’ve been looking at some intercity rail trips in Germany for later this summer, and was reminded of how nonfunctional the system is this season. I was asked specifically about Cologne-Frankfurt trips, and discovered that for later this month, they’re timetabled to take 2.5 hours. These cities are 180 km apart on the high-speed line, where trains normally take a little longer than an hour, but right now the trains don’t seem to be using the line – rather, they’re on the classical line, which follows the Rhine and is not at all fast. This is not the only line or the only summer that this is happening; since I moved to Germany, my summer travel plans have been constrained by these seasonal slowdowns, and between them and the mediocre average speed of most German intercity lines, I’ve forgone trips I would have made at French speeds and reliability. The rationale for these summer closures for maintenance is wholly without merit on intercity rail, and this practice holds back rail travel at the time when demand is highest. Deutsche Bahn should cease this practice and instead do like neighbors with year-round intercity rail travel.
Why?
Rail lines must have regular closures for maintenance. The norm is that this is done overnight, on both urban rail and mainline rail. However, overnight closures are sometimes supplemented by daytime closures, especially for longer-term renewal; daytime closures are especially common on lines that don’t close overnight at all. Readers from New York with its 24/7 service are all too familiar with weekend service changes, which may shut down entire line segments and direct riders to alternative routes. German U-Bahns don’t run 24/7, but do run overnight on weekends, so there are only five nights of maintenance windows and not seven. New York-style weekend closures are not common in Berlin, but occasionally some segments are shut, though in my experience it’s more common on the S-Bahn.
To be clear, there are good and bad reasons to engage in daytime shutdowns. Long maintenance windows allow higher productivity, so agencies prefer them when they can get away with them. The balance of when agencies and rail companies use daytime maintenance windows depends on all of the following factors:
- Traffic: daytime shutdowns are used more often during less busy times – for example, RATP uses them in the summer, when everyone is on vacation and so Métro traffic is reduced.
- Redundancy: systems on which passengers can bypass closed sections, such as the New York City Subway or the German national rail networks, can reroute passengers onto alternatives, which does not eliminate the cost to passengers of the closure but does reduce it. RATP also uses the redundancy of the Métro with the RER to do summertime shutdowns and tells passengers to transfer.
- Single-tracking options: this is specific to weekend closures rather than longer-term ones, but, if the system is set up in a way that permits trains to single-track around obstacles, which is common in twin-bore tunnels, then weekend closures are rather easy. The Copenhagen Metro’s combination of twin-bore tunneling and driverless operations permits single-tracking even overnight, permitting 24/7 service without weekend service changes.
- Agency culture: some agencies are just more accepting of disruptions than others. MBTA insiders insist to me that concrete curing requires weekend shutdowns, often of multiple lines at once, even though Boston has regular nighttime shutdowns; evidently, Japanese subways manage to run without this.
The situation of German intercity rail
Germany uses long-term shutdowns, measured in months, to do rail infrastructure renewal. These are usually in the summer, because, in Germany as in Paris, this is vacation season and therefore people are less likely to be going to work. The national network here is highly redundant, and intensive summertime shutdowns slow down passengers but do not make trips literally impossible: the Cologne-Frankfurt work is evidently adding about 1.5 hours to trips, and work previously done on the Frankfurt-Mannheim line slowed passengers by about 40 minutes (while still permitting some timed connections); in contrast, unscheduled breakdowns on the Northeast Corridor due to summer heat lead to trip cancellations.
The stupid thing about this is that while summer vacation travel reduces demand on urban rail, it has the opposite effect on intercity rail. The summer is consistently high season for intercity travel, precisely because it’s when people take vacations. In France, at least on domestic TGVs, fast trains are in plenty. But not here – instead, the trains are the least likely to be running, due to maintenance.
Much of the problem is that, unlike Shinkansen lines and LGVs, most German high-speed lines do not have regular nighttime closure windows. They run mixed traffic – passenger trains during the day, freight trains during the night. This feature allows for more flexibility of freight rail, but raises the construction and maintenance costs. Mixed lines must be built with freight-friendly features including gentler grades and lower superelevation (see explanation for superelevation here), the latter requiring wider curves to allow high speeds on passenger trains; both features require more tunneling, and as a result, German high-speed lines are much tunnel-heavier than French ones, raising costs. Maintenance is more difficult as well due to the lack of regular nighttime shutdowns.
That said, the Cologne-Frankfurt line is not a mixed line. It’s a passenger-only line, with a ruling grade of 4%, higher than any other high-speed line I know of (LGVs use 3.5%). It also has the tightest curves I know of on newly-built high-speed lines relative to speed, running at 300 km/h on 3.35 km radius curves, a lateral acceleration in the horizontal plane of 2.07 m/s^2; only the Shinkansen has faster lateral acceleration, and that’s on older lines running tilting trains. Consequently, it’s actually the least tunnel-heavy of the German high-speed lines. Nonetheless, it evidently does not run every day, every year, the way LGVs and Shinkansen lines do.
This is where I suspect agency culture comes into play. American cities other than New York and to some extent Chicago shut down their subway systems overnight, but still force passengers onto bus diversions on weekends for maintenance, where their foreign counterparts do no such thing; this has to be understood as a combination of managers not really caring about weekend service (leading to lower base frequency as well) and comparing themselves to New York even without 24/7 service. In Germany, the culture is that high-speed lines should be built to mixed standards, even if they are useless for freight, for political reasons, and renewal should consequently be done in long-term shutdowns with accelerated work, and this culture is evidently also affecting a line that is built to passenger-only standards. This may also be compounding with the European culture of summer vacations, leading to reduced urban rail service during summers – I am not sure, having seen explicit service reductions in Paris and Stockholm but not here.
Conclusion
Long-term closures have tradeoffs. In some cases they are legitimate, especially when the time cost to passengers is greatly reduced and when traffic is lower. However, neither of these two conditions applies in the case of intercity rail traffic in Germany. The closures are happening during the busiest time of intercity travel, and delaying passengers by an hour or even more. Worse, this practice is used not just on mixed lines like Hanover-Würzburg but also on passenger-dedicated Cologne-Frankfurt, which has regular nighttime work windows. When the reason for the closures is cultural, it ceases to be legitimate; it instead points out to an agency that refuses to think outside of its box, and will not assimilate better practices from elsewhere.
Why is Kathy Hochul Against Masks on the Subway?
The New York City Subway is showing solidarity with Israel: like public transportation in Israel, it does not usefully run on weekends. Today, while going from my hotel to Marron, I waited 16 minutes for the F train, and when I got to the platform, there was already a small crowd there; the headway must have been 20 minutes. Now writing this on the way north to Queens, I’m seeing canceled trains and going through reroutes hoping that it’s possible to get from Marron to the Queens Night Market in under an hour; revising hours later, I now know it would have been but the 7 train is skipping the nearest stop to the Night Market, 111th Street.
This is on my mind as I see that Governor Kathy Hochul, after abruptly canceling congestion pricing in legally murky circumstances, wants to also ban wearing masks on the subway. I write this on a car where I’m the only person wearing a mask as far I can see, but usually I do see a handful of others who wear one like me or Cid. Hochul told the New York Post that Jewish groups asked her to do so citing security concerns, since some anti-Semitic rioters cover their faces. Jewish and pro-Israel groups have said no such thing, and I think it’s useful to bring this up, partly because it does affect the subway, and partly because it speaks to how bad Hochul’s political knowledge is that she would even say this.
Now, I don’t think the mask ban is going very far. For a few days, instead of getting constant constituent calls all the time demanding that congestion pricing be restored, legislators were getting such calls only half the time, and got calls demanding they oppose the mask ban the other half. Congestion pricing is likely not within Hochul’s personal authority to cancel, but evidently the MTA board did not overrule her and did not sign that the state consented to congestion pricing; but a mask ban is definitely not within her authority, certainly not when it would be new policy rather than status quo policy (if not status quo law, since congestion pricing did get signed into law).
That said, the invocation of Jewish or pro-Israel concerns was troubling, for a number of reasons, chief of which is that the groups so named did not in fact demand a subway mask ban. The Anti-Defamation League asked for a mask ban at protests, where the current left-wing American protest culture involves wearing masks but very rarely medical ones. Hochul cited unnamed Jewish advisors, when at no point has any significant element in the American Jewish community called for this. There are a number of possibilities, all of which are derogatory to her judgment, knowledge, or other political skills.
The first possibility is that she’s just lying. Nobody asked for this, not on the subway, and she’s trying to change the topic from her total failure on congestion pricing; a mask ban at protests alone, as proposed by Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass (at least before she just got corona), would not change the conversation on issues of public transportation.
The second is that she is using the ADL for cover because the ADL has little patience for anything it perceives as too left-wing, and Hochul wants to position herself as a moderate and her pro-congestion pricing opponents as too liberal. If that was the intent, then it’s dumb – subway advocacy is not at all radical, and the people spearheading both the lawsuit against Hochul and the rallies in favor of congestion pricing are neither anti-Israel nor baitable on this subject.
And the third is that she internalized a kind of conspiratorial anti-Semitism; she doesn’t weaponize it against Jews like properly anti-Semitic politicians, but a politician from Buffalo, thrust into a stage with different demographics from what she’s used to, might still believe, in the back of her mind, that Jews are conspiring and say things they do not mean. It’s complete hogwash – pro-Israel groups are open about who they are and what they want, and have little trouble calling for changes that they think are necessary for the protection of the great majority of American Jews who are at least somewhat pro-Israel. They have no need to whisper in a governor’s ear and every reason to call for such a ban in the open if they believe it is good; that they haven’t should end any suspicion that they want it.
In any of the above cases, the inevitable conclusion is that Hochul knows neither how to govern nor how to do politics effectively. She can’t distract the public from her own inability to run the state, certainly not by piling one failure upon another.
Standardizing the Right Way
Picking consistent standards in order to make use of economies of scale is an important part of good planning. In our construction costs report, we attribute a high cost premium on systems and finishes in New York to lack of standardization of station designs and parts, to the point that the three stations of Second Avenue Subway used two different escalator vendors. This point has appealed to a number of area activists, who reach to not just what we report cross-nationally but also American history. John Pegram, who comments here as BQRail and writes an excellent blog on Substack, gave the example of the PCC streetcars of interwar America a week ago, and I promised I’d follow up on this; the news of the cancellation of congestion pricing delayed this post somehow but it’s still important to discuss. The issue here is that good public transportation procurement requires not just consistent standards, but also good ones, which give international vendors a familiar environment and keep in touch with technological advances.
The starting point for me is that the rolling stock on American subways and commuter rail is fairly standardized. New York City Transit procured standard designs in the 1990s, dubbed the R110A and R110B, and for decades kept buying trains based on these designs. In the 1990s and 2000s, it worked, in the sense that the trains were of comparable quality and cost to rolling stock in other large cities (although they were on the heavy side). But over time, technology diverged, and by the 2010s, a cost premium started to appear. By now, NYCT subway car contracts have a noticeable premium over the European norm, even if this premium is far smaller than the infrastructure cost premium.
Commuter and intercity rail cars have a similar issue with what the standard is. American commuter rail cars follow a few standard designs – the EMU design (in either the LIRR/Metro-North version or the SEPTA one), and the unpowered car hauled by a diesel locomotive one. DMU designs are not at all standard, and do have cost premiums as a result, especially since these are also small orders. That said, nearly all American commuter rail ridership is on EMUs or locomotive-hauled trains (usually diesel, occasionally electric), and those, too, have their problems.
The most glaring problem is that those designs are not at all what the rest of the world does. A few of the changes are modular, including the platform height and the loading gauge. The others are not; the consultants who write the design specs do so without trying to fit themselves to common products made by the multinational vendors.
Then, those specs are extremely detailed; there’s little room for a vendor to try to pawn off a standard Coradia or FLIRT and make that fit with little modification. The RFPs run into the deep hundreds of pages; SEPTA had one with more than 500 pages, and Amtrak’s most recent one ran to, I believe, 1,000. They define even what a train is, as opposed to the looser RFPs common in Europe – Spanish RFPs are 50-70 pages and have single-digit summaries, detailing just how many cars are needed, what the loading gauge is, what electrification is required, and what the expected performance level is.
Designs exist that do dialog with the international vendors and aim at a comparable product – the FRA reform process that led to alt-compliance did exactly that. But then no American commuter rail operator has bothered to make use of alt-compliance; they still buy the heavy, low-performance, low-reliability equipment that they’re used to buying, even as technology marches on and vendors don’t specialize in making that anymore.
The original example of the PCC standard is well-taken in the sense that there need to be repeatable standards. However, it’s important to understand that technological advances in trains exist in East Asia and Europe, and not in North America. American standardization needs to be around what is sold on the other side of either the Atlantic or the Pacific, with no wheel reinvention, and no “we are familiar with this so we’ll keep buying this” excusemaking.
Quick Note on Respecting the Civil Service
The news about the congestion pricing cancellation in New York is slowing down. Governor Hochul is still trying to kill it, but her legal right to do so at this stage is murky and much depends on actors that are nominally independent even if they are politically appointed, especially New York State Department of Transportation Commissioner Marie Therese Dominguez. I blogged and vlogged about the news, and would like to dedicate this post to one issue that I haven’t developed and barely seen others do: the negative effect last-minute cancellations have on the cohesion of the civil service.
The problem with last-minute cancellations is that they send messages to various interest groups, all of which are negative. My previous blog post went over the message such caprice sends to contractors: “don’t do business with us, we’re an unreliable client.” But the same problem also occurs when politicians do this to the civil service, which spent years perfecting these plans. I previously wrote about the problem with Mayor Eric Adams last-minute canceling a bike lane in Brooklyn under pressure, but what Hochul is doing is worse, because there was no public pressure and the assumption until about 3.5 days ago was that congestion pricing was a done deal.
With the civil service, the issue is that people are remunerated in both money and the sense of accomplishment. Industries and companies with a social mission have been able to hire workers at lower pay, often to the point of exploitation, in which managers at NGOs tell workers that they should be happy to be earning retail worker wages while doing professional office work because it’s for the greater good. But even setting aside NGOs, a lot of workers do feel a sense of professional accomplishment even when what they do is in a field general society finds boring, like transportation. One civil servant in the industry, trying to encourage an activist to go into the public sector, said something to the effect that it takes a really long time to get a reform idea up the hierarchy but once it happens, the satisfaction is great; the activist in question now works for a public transit agency.
Below the threshold of pride in one’s accomplishments, there is the more basic issue of workplace dignity. Workers who don’t feel like what they do is a great accomplishment still expect not to be berated by their superiors, or have their work openly denigrated. This is visible in culture in a number of ways. For example, in Mad Men, the scene in which Don Draper won’t even show a junior copywriter’s idea to a client has led to the famous “I don’t think about you at all” meme. And in how customers deal with service workers, ostentatiously throwing the product away in front of the worker is a well-known and nasty form of Karenish disrespect.
What Hochul did – and to an extent what Adams did with the bike lane – was publicly throwing the product that the state’s workers had diligently made over 17 years on the floor. A no after years of open debate would be frustrating, but civil servants do understand that they work for elected leaders who have to satisfy different interest groups. A no that came out of nowhere showcases far worse disrespect. In the former case, civil servants can advocate for their own positions with their superiors; “If we’d played better we would have won” is a frustrating thing to come to believe in any conflict, from sports to politics, but it’s understandable. But in the latter case, the opacity and suddenness both communicate that there’s no point in coming up with long-term plans for New York, because the governor may snipe them at any moment. It’s turning working for a public agency into a rigged game; nobody enjoys playing that.
And if there’s no enjoyment or even basic respect, then the civil service will keep hemorrhaging talent. It’s already a serious problem in the United States: private-sector wages for office workers are extremely high (people earning $150,000 a year feel not-rich) and public-sector wages don’t match them, and there’s a longstanding practice by politicians and political appointees to scorn the professionals. It leaves the civil service with the dregs and the true nerds, and the latter group doesn’t always rise up in the hierarchy.
Such open contempt by the governor is going to make this problem a lot worse. If you want to work at a place where people don’t do the equivalent of customers taking the coffee you made for them and deliberately spilling it on the floor while saying “I want to speak to the manager,” you shouldn’t work for the New York public sector, not right now. I’ll revise my career recommendation if Dominguez and others show that the governor was merely bloviating but the state legislature had passed the law mandating congestion pricing and the governor had signed it. I expect this recommendation will be echoed by others as well, judging by the sheer scorn the entire transportation activist community is heaping on Hochul and her decision – even the congestion pricing opponents don’t trust her.
Hochul Suspends Congestion Pricing
New York Governor Kathy Hochul just announced that she’s putting congestion pricing on pause. The plan had gone through years of political and regulatory hell and finally passed the state legislature earlier this year, to go into effect on June 30th, in 25 days. There was some political criticism of it, and lawsuits by New Jersey, but all the expectations were that it would go into effect on schedule. Today, without prior warning, Hochul announced that she’s looking to pause the program, and then confirmed it was on hold. The future of the program is uncertain; activists across the region are mobilizing for a last-ditch effort, as are suppliers like Alstom. The future of the required $1 billion a year in congestion pricing revenue is uncertain as well, and Hochul floated a plan to instead raise taxes on businesses, which is not at all popular and very unlikely to happen.
So last-minute is the announcement that, as Clayton Guse points out, the MTA has already contracted with a firm to provide the digital and physical infrastructure for toll collection, for $507 million. If congestion pricing is canceled as the governor plans, the contract will need to be rescinded, cementing the MTA’s reputation as a nightmare client that nobody should want to work with unless they get paid in advance and with a risk premium. Much of the hardware is already in place, hardly a sign of long-term commitment not to enact congestion pricing.
Area advocates are generally livid. As it is, there are questions about whether it’s even legal for Hochul to do so – technically, only the MTA board can decide this. But then the governor appoints the MTA board, and the appointments are political. Eric is even asking about federal funding for Second Avenue Subway, since the MTA is relying on congestion pricing for its future capital plans.
The one local activist I know who opposes congestion pricing says “I wish” and “they’ll restart it the day after November elections.” If it’s a play for low-trust voters who drive and think the additional revenue for the MTA, by law at least $1 billion a year, will all be wasted, it’s not helping. The political analysts I’m seeing from within the transit advocacy community are portraying it as an unforced error, making Hochul look incompetent and waffling, rather than boldly blocking something that’s adverse to key groups of voters.
The issue here isn’t exactly that if Hochul sticks to her plan to cancel congestion pricing, there will not be congestion pricing in New York. Paris and Berlin don’t have congestion pricing either. In Paris, Anne Hidalgo is open about her antipathy to market-based solutions like congestion pricing, and prefers to reduce car traffic through taking away space from cars to give to public transportation, pedestrians, and cyclists. People who don’t like it are free to vote for more liberal (in the European sense) candidates. In Berlin, similarly, the Greens support congestion pricing (“City-Maut”), but the other parties on the left do not, and certainly not the pro-car parties on the right. If the Greens got more votes and had a stronger bargaining position in coalition negotiations, it might happen, and anyone who cares in either direction knows how to vote on this matter. In New York, there has never been such a political campaign. Rather, the machinations that led Hochul to do this, which people are speculating involve suburban representatives who feel politically vulnerable, have been entirely behind the scenes. There’s no transparency, and no commitment to providing people who are not political insiders with consistent policy that they can use to make personal, social, or business plans around.
Everything right now is speculation, precisely because there’s neither transparency nor certainty in state-level governance. Greg Shill is talking about this in the context of suburban members of the informal coalition of Democratic voters; but then it has to be informal, because were it formal, suburban politicians could have demanded and gotten disproportionately suburb-favoring public transit investments. Ben Kabak is saying that it was House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries who pressed Hochul for this; Jeffries himself said he supports the pause for further study (there was a 4,000 page study already).
The chaos of this process is what plays to the impression that the state can’t govern itself; Indignity mentions it alongside basic governance problems in the city and the state. This is how the governor is convincing anti-congestion pricing cynics that it will be back in November and pro-congestion pricing ones that it’s dead, the exact opposite of what she should be doing. Indecision is not popular with voters, and if Hochul doesn’t understand that, it makes it easy to understand why she won New York in 2022 by only 6.4%, a state that in a neutral environment like 2022 the Democrats usually win by 20%.
But it’s not about Hochul personally. Hochul is a piece of paper with “Democrat” written on it; the question is what process led to her elevation for governor, an office with dictatorial powers over policy as long as state agencies like the MTA are involved. This needs to be understood as the usual democratic deficit. Hochul acts like this because this signals to insiders that they are valued, as the only people capable of interpreting whatever is going on in state politics (or city politics – mayoral machinations are if anything worse). Transparency democratizes information, and what Hochul is doing right now does the exact opposite, in a game where everyone wins except the voters and the great majority of interests who are not political insiders.
Militarized and Other New Capital Cities
The news of the ongoing construction of Nusantara, Indonesia’s new capital in Borneo to replace Jakarta, got me thinking about other moves by various countries to create new capitals from scratch, to avoid having to deal with the urbanity of the existing capital. On this issue, Nusantara joins Brasilia, Islamabad, (at the subnational level) Chandigarh, and, most ominously, Naypyidaw and Egypt’s New Administrative Capital (NAC). The last two, unlike Nusantara, are built for explicitly military purposes, with the military considering the people to be its main adversary rather than any external enemy. Such capitals always waste money that could be spent on improving literally anything else – health, education, transportation, water, electricity, business climate, anti-poverty grants. In the less militarized cases, like Brasilia, these are just waste; in the more militarized cases, these showcase that the state is run by parasites.
Non-militarized cases
The move to Nusantara is being justified on the grounds that Jakarta is sinking. In truth, it’s better to view this as a continuation of the Transmigrasi program that the state has engaged in for decades. The zeitgeist was one of concerns about overpopulation leading to either forced sterilization of the poor or a program of settlement by the core population in peripheral regions; in Indonesia, this took the form of encouraging Javans to settle elsewhere in the country, where in practice they formed an overclass and sidelined the preexisting population. Nusantara, in a mostly undeveloped part of Borneo, needs to be viewed within this program, rather than as a tragic response to climate change.
Brasilia, similarly, was built on developmentalist grounds: the Brazilian elite wanted to develop the interior of the country, viewing the rainforest and savanna as low-value land to be mined and farmed. As this process predates the military dictatorship (1964-85; Brasilia was founded 1960), this is not really a matter of militarization. Rather, it’s better viewed as developmental failure – the resources invested in the new city could have gone to more productive uses, and the value of that land for farming and mining turned out not to be much.
The environmental impacts of the program of developing the interior were wholly negative. In Brazil, half of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions are land use changes and another quarter are from the agriculture sector, leading Brazil to emit 10.7 t/capita in greenhouse gases. In Germany, the figure is 8.1 t/capita, with a large industrial sector and an infamously still substantial coal sector, and on these lower emissions, Germany produces close to four times Brazil’s GDP per capita. The environmental impact of Nusantara is likely to be the same in direction as Brazil’s program, and to the extent it’s likely to be smaller in magnitude, it’s because it’s a smaller endeavor than Brazil’s entire program of developing the interior, in which Brasilia was just one component.
Militarized cases
The worst are not Brasilia, or likely Nusantara, but rather Naypyidaw and the NAC. I’ve been asked to provide some resources on social media, going over what’s involved in both projects.
Naypyidaw
The military junta that ran Myanmar between 1962 and 2011 (with significant tightening in 1988) and has run it since 2021, and exercised significant power between 2011 and 2011, built the new capital, officially since 2005, unofficially since a few years earlier, at a remote location 320 kilometers from Yangon and 240 from Mandalay. After the 1988 protests and the crackdown establishing the military government that 1990s-2000s human rights advocates knew and hated, the regime made changes to Yangon to suppress future protests, evicting 500,000 people from city center in the process. Where normally such efforts mostly target poor people in order to create the illusion of a poverty-free city center and facilitate urban renewal, in Yangon the evictions targeted the middle class, which was sympathetic to the protest movement and had communities that had sheltered protesters. But even the new Yangon was not good enough for the generals, and so they shifted to Naypyidaw.
Part of the reason was that Yangon was too multiethnic, in a part of the country that was majority-Mon until the 20th century, while Naypyidaw could be more comfortably Bamar. But the main reason was security needs. The adversary in this case is not any foreign government – a city built in 2005 by a government that might worry about American-led regime change would look at what was going on in Iraq and opt to maintain its capital in a large, dense central city to facilitate insurgency and make it easy to hide among the civilian population. Naypyidaw instead does the exact opposite – it’s easy for a superior military force to take. Rather, its threat model is a popular uprising, and thus the modernist planning with separation of uses exists to prevent the broad public from being able to stage an insurgency. There is extensive regime propaganda in the city, such as national museums telling uncritical histories, but no major religious sites, since those might shelter protesters, as happened in 1988.
The urbanism of Naypyidaw is, essentially, a giant military camp. It is designed with strict separation of uses and large roads between different complexes for movement between them; people are not expected to walk between places. The Guardian calls it a post-apocalyptic suburbia, but I don’t think that’s quite right. In an auto-oriented American city, there’s nowhere to walk, but everyone owns a car and the development forms make it convenient to drive to one’s work and regular non-work destinations. Dubai, criticized vociferously among urbanists for its tackiness and auto-oriented character, is a place where one can drive or be driven to shopping malls and towers within a close distance. Naypyidaw doesn’t have any of this and doesn’t seem to even try; it’s a collection of sites, designed for no need but that of control by the military of a population that does not want to be controlled by it. It’s a monument not to modernist urbanism, though it tries to affect that, but rather to destruction of value by an unwanted government.
New Administrative Capital
The situation in Egypt, to be clear, is a lot less brutal than in Burma. At the same time, Egypt is several times richer, which creates more value that can be extracted and given over to cronies. This can be seen in the construction of the NAC, to replace Cairo.
The immediate history of the NAC is that in 2011, Egypt famously had the Arab Spring revolution overthrowing Hosni Mubarak; in the subsequent election, the only preexisting organized political force, the Muslim Brotherhood, won the election, leading Mohamed Morsi to take office as president starting in 2012. The election was free and the state of civil liberties improved, but the Muslim Brotherhood was making moves to consolidate power, leading to fears among human rights and democracy protesters of new authoritarianism, which led to a protest movement in 2013 called Tamarod, demanding new elections; later in the same year, the military reacted to the protests by launching a coup, removing Morsi from power and restoring the military elements of the prior regime, including a pardon of Mubarak, who was on trial for corruption. Eventually, the chief of the Egyptian Armed Forces, General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, won a rigged presidential election in 2014, and has been president ever since. Much of the focus of the protest movements was street protests in Cairo, where Tahrir Square became a global metonym for democracy protests (for example, in Israel, where people basically never draw any positive inspiration from Arab political trends). This created a need among Sisi and his inner circle for a new capital in the desert, built to forestall any future Tahrir.
The capital could not even be named New Cairo, because there’s already a New Cairo, an eastern suburb of Cairo built expressly in order to decentralize the capital; Cairo is a huge, dense city. For a while, it was mocked as New New Cairo, for its location even farther east of New Cairo; by now, it has the formal name New Administrative Capital, with construction having begun in 2016.
The NAC is designed around digital surveillance of the population, and showcasing that Egypt can develop the desert, and maybe decongesting Cairo. It has pretenses of being the next Dubai, but where Dubai invites global starchitects to buy prestige, the NAC is instead giving contracts to domestic elites (as was also the case for Naypyidaw); the military directly owns 51% of the agency developing the NAC and the state ministry of housing only 49%, and the contracts are designed to enrich people who are politically connected to the government.
The violence levels involved are, again, much lower than in Burma. But precisely because Egypt’s economy is solidly middle-income, it’s frustrating to see vast sums wasted on a military prestige project. Cairo’s congestion and overcrowding have a well-known solution, in the form of building a rapid transit network to facilitate non-car commutes, and connect not just the existing built-up area to the urban core but also to-be-built areas adjacent to it. It’s a metro area of 22 million people, about the same size as New York, but only has a three-line, 100 km metro network. These 100 km should be closer to 1,000.
To be clear, there is some development of the Cairo Metro. Line 3 is being extended as we speak, with a new section having opened this month. Overall, the third phase of the line, 17 km long, cost 40.7 billion Egyptian pounds per a statement in 2012, which in contemporary dollars is $2.6 billion in exchange rate terms and $9 billion in 2021 PPP terms. On Google Earth, it looks like 9 km of the line are underground and 8 km are elevated or at-grade; this more than $500 million/km cost is not even fully-underground. This is a line where the main contractor is Orascom – this isn’t a case of outsourcing the state to Japan, China, or both, and therefore building at high costs, as is common in Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Southeast Asia. Rather, this is entirely domestic waste. Most likely, the same contractors that are profiteering off of public money through the construction of the NAC are also profiteering off of public money for what little infrastructure the military government deigns to build in the capital that people actually live in.
American Myths of European Poverty
I occasionally have exchanges on social media or even in comments here that remind me that too many people in the American middle class believe that Europe is much poorer than the US. The GDP gap between the US and Northern Europe is small and almost entirely reducible to hours worked, but the higher inequality in the US means that the top 10-20% of the US compare themselves with their peers here and conclude that Europe is poor. Usually, it’s just social media shitposting, for example about how store managers in the US earn the same as doctors in Europe. But it becomes relevant to public transit infrastructure construction in two ways. First, Americans in positions of authority are convinced that American wages are far higher than European ones and that’s why American construction costs are higher than European ones. And second, more broadly, the fact that people in positions of authority really do earn much more in the US than here inhibits learning.
The income gap
The United States is, by a slight amount, richer than Northern Europe, which for the purposes of this post comprises the German-speaking world, the Nordic countries, and Benelux. Among the three largest countries in this area, Germany is 16.5% poorer than the US, the Netherlands 8.3% poorer, Sweden 14.3%. This is more than anything an artifact of shorter working hours – Sweden has an ever so slightly larger GDP per hour worked, the other two are 6-7% poorer per hour worked. All three countries have a much higher 15-64 labor force participation rate than the US, but they’re also older, which in the case of Germany actually gets its 15+ rate to be a hair less than the US’s. But there’s much more part-time work here, especially among women, who face large motherhood penalties in German society (see figures 5-7 in Herzberg-Druker, and Kleven et al). Germany is currently in full employment, so it’s not about hidden part-time work; it’s a combination of German-specific sexism and Europe-wide norms in which workers get around six weeks of paid vacation per year.
One implication of the small gap in income per hour is that wages for the same job are likely to be similar, if the jobs pay close to the mean wage. This is the case for tunnel miners, who are called sandhogs in the United States: the project labor agreements in New York are open – the only case in which itemized costs are publicly available – and showcase fully-laden employment costs that, as we document in our construction costs reports, work out to around $185,000/year in 2010 prices; there is a lot of overstaffing in New York and it’s disproportionately in the lower-earning positions, and stripping those, it’s $202,000/year. I was told that miners in Stockholm earn 70,000 kronor/month, or about $100,000/year in PPP terms (as of 2020-1), and the fully-laden cost is about twice that; a union report from the 2000s reports lower wages, but only to about the same extent one would expect from Sweden’s overall rate of economic growth between then and 2021. The difference at this point is second-order, lower than my uncertainty coming from the “about” element out of Sweden.
While we’re at it, it’s also the case for teachers: the OECD’s Education at a Glance report‘s indicator D3 covers teacher salaries by OECD country, and most Northern European countries pay teachers better than the US in PPP terms, much better in the case of Germany. Teacher wage scales are available in New York and Germany; the PPP rate is at this point around 1€ = $1.45, which puts starting teachers in New York with a master’s about on a par with their counterparts in the lowest-paying German state (Rhineland-Pfalz). New York is a wealthy city, with per capita income somewhat higher than in the richest German state (Bavaria), but it’s not really seen in teacher pay. I don’t know the comparative benefit rates, but whenever we interview people about European wage rates for construction, we’re repeatedly told that benefits roughly double the overall cost of employment, which is also what we see in the American public sector.
The issue of inequality
American inequality is far higher than European inequality. So high is the gap that, on LIS numbers, nearly all Western European countries today have lower disposable income inequality than the lowest recorded level for the US, 0.31 in 1980. Germany’s latest number is 0.302 as of 2021, and Dutch and Nordic levels are lower, as low as 0.26-0.27; the US is at 0.391 as of 2022. If distributions are log-normal (they only kind of are), then from a normal distribution log table lookup, this looks like the mean-to-median income ratios should be, respectively, 1.16 for Germany and 1.297 for the US.
However, top management is not at the median, and that’s the problem for comparisons like this. The average teacher or miner makes a comparable amount of money in the US and Northern Europe. The average private consultant deciding on how many teachers or miners to hire makes more money in the US. A 90th-percentile earner is somewhat wealthier in the US than here, again on LIS number; the average top-1%er is, in relative terms, 50% richer in the US than in Germany (and in absolute terms 80% richer) and nearly three times as rich in the US as in Sweden or the Netherlands, on Our World in Numbers data.
On top of that, I strongly suspect that not all 90th percentile earners are created equal, and in particular, the sort of industries that employ the mass (upper) middle class in each country are atypically productive there and therefore pay better than their counterparts abroad. So the average 90th-percentile American is noticeably but not abnormally better off than the average 90th-percentile German or Swede, but is much better off than the average German or Swede who works in the same industries as the average 90th-percentile American. Here we barely have a tech industry by American standards, for example; we have comparable biotech to the US, but that’s not usually where the Americans who noisily assert that Europe is poor work in.
Looking for things to mock
While the US is not really richer than Northern Europe, the US’s rich are much richer than Northern Europe’s. But then the statistics don’t bear out a massive difference in averages – the GDP gap is small, the GDP gap per hour worked is especially small and sometimes goes the other way, the indicators of social development rarely favor the US, immigration into Western Europe has been comparable to immigration to the US for some time now (here’s net migration, and note that this measure undercounts the 2022 Ukrainians in Germany and overcounts them in Poland).
So middle-class Americans respond by looking for creative measures that show the level of US-Europe income gap that they as 90th-percentile earners in specific industries experience (or more), often dropping the PPP adjustment, or looking at extremely specific things that are common in the US but not here. I’ve routinely seen American pundits who should know better complain that European washing machines and driers are slow; I’m writing this post during a 4.5-hour wash-and-dry cycle. Because they fixate on proving the superiority of the United States to the only part of the world that’s rich enough not to look up to it, they never look at other measures that might show the opposite; this apartment is right next to an elevated train, but between the lower noise levels of the S-Bahn, good insulation, and thick tilt-and-turn windows, I need to concentrate to even hear the train, and am never disturbed by it, whereas American homes have poor sound insulation to the point that street noise disturbs the sleep.
Learning to build infrastructure
The topline conclusion of any American infrastructure reform should be “the United States should look more like Continental Europe, Turkey, non-Anglophone East Asia, and the better-off parts of Latin America.”
If it’s written in the language of specific engineering standards, this is at times acceptable, if the standards are justified wholly internally (“we can in fact do this, here’s a drawing”). Even then, people who associate Americanness with their own career success keep thinking safety, accessibility, and similar issues are worse here, and ask “what about fire code?” and then are floored to learn that fire safety here is actually better, as Stephen Smith of Market Urbanism and the Center for Building constantly points out.
But then anything that’s about management is resisted. It’s difficult to convince an American who’s earning more than $100,000 a year in their 20s and thinks it’s not even that much money because their boss is richer that infrastructure project management is better in countries where the CEO earns as much money as they do as an American junket assistant. Such people readily learn from rich, high-inequality places that like splurging, which are not generally the most productive ones when it comes to infrastructure. Even Americans who think a lot about state capacity struggle with the idea that Singapore has almost as high construction costs as the US; in Singapore, the CEO earns an American salary, so the country must be efficient, right? Well, the MRT is approaching $1 billion/km in construction costs for the Cross-Island Line, and Germany builds 3 km of subway (or decides not to build them) on the same budget and Spain builds 6 km, but Europe is supposedly poor and Americans can’t learn from that.
The upshot is that even as we’re seeing some movement on better engineering and design standards in the United States, resulting in significant cost savings, there’s no movement for better overall management. Consultant-driven projects remain the norm, and even proposals for improving state capacity are too driven by domestic analysis without any attempt at international learning or comparativism. Nor is there any effort at better labor efficiency – management in the US hates labor, but also thinks it’s entirely about overpaid workers or union safety rules, and doesn’t stoop to learn how to build more productively.
Quick Note: What the Hell is Going on in San Jose?
The BART to San Jose extension always had problems, but somehow things are getting worse. A month and a half ago, it was revealed that the projected cost of the 9.6-kilometer line had risen to $12.2 billion. Every problem that we seemed to identify in our reports about construction costs in New York and Boston appears here as far as I can tell, with the exception of labor, which at least a few years ago showed overstaffing in the Northeastern United States but not elsewhere. In particular, the station and tunnel design maximizes costs – the first link cites Adam Buchbinder on the excessive size of the digs. Unfortunately, the response by the Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) to a question just now about the station shows that not only are the stations insanely expensive, but also not even convenient for passengers (Twitter link, Nitter link).
Cost breakdown
The March 2024 agenda (link, PDF-pp. 488-489) breaks down the costs. The hard costs total $7 billion; the systems : civils ratio is 1:3.5, which is not bad. But the overall hard costs are still extreme. Then on top of them there are soft costs totaling $2.78 billion, or 40% on top of the hard costs. The same percentage for Second Avenue Subway was 21%, and the norm for third-party consultants for the Continental European projects for which we have data (in Italy, Spain, Turkey, and France) is to charge 5-10%. Soft costs should not be this high; if they are, something is deeply wrong with how the agency uses consultants.
Large-diameter tunnel boring machines
The BART to San Jose project has long had two distinct options for tunnels and station: twin bores, and single bore. The twin bore option is conventional construction of two bored tunnels, one for each track, and then stations to be built as dedicated civil construction projects outside the tunnel; this is how most subways are built today. The single bore option is a large-diameter tunnel boring machine (TBM), with the bore large enough to have not just two tracks side by side, but also platforms within the bore, eliminating the need for mined station caverns or for extensive cut-and-cover station digs. Both options cleared environmental reviews; VTA selected the single bore option, which has been controversial.
I’ve written positively about large-diameter TBMs before, and I don’t think I’ve written a full post walking this back. I’ve written about how large-diameter TBMs are inappropriate for San Jose, but the truth is that the method is not treated as a success elsewhere in urban rail, either. This is controversial, and serious engineers still think it works and point to successes in intercity rail, but in urban rail, the problems with building settlement are too serious. The main example of a large-diameter TBM is Barcelona L9/10, which uses the method to avoid having to open up streets under multiple older metro tunnels in Barcelona; it also has high construction costs by Spanish standards (and low costs by non-Spanish ones). In Italy, whose construction costs are also fairly low if not as low as in Madrid, engineers considered using large-diameter TBMs for the sensitive parts of Rome Metro Line C but then rejected that solution as too risky, going for conventional high-cost mined stations instead.
Regardless of the wisdom of doing this in Southern Europe, in San Jose it is stupid. There are wide streets to dig up for cut-and-cover stations. Then, the implementation is bad – the station entryways are too big, whereas Barcelona’s are small elevator banks, and the tunnel bore is wide enough for a platform and two tracks on the same level whereas Barcelona has a narrower bore with stacked platforms.
Thankfully, it is administratively possible to cancel the single bore option, since the twin bore option cleared the environmental reviews as well, and in 2007 was already complete to 65% design (link, PDF-p. 7). Unfortunately, there isn’t much appetite among officials for it. Journalists and advocates are more interested, but the agency seems to stick to its current plans even as their costs are setting non-New York construction cost records.
Is it at least good?
No. Somehow, for this cost, using a method whose primary advantage is that it makes it possible to build a station anywhere at the cost of massively more expensive tunneling, the station at the city’s main train station, named after still-alive Rod Diridon, will not be easily accessible from mainline rail. The walking distance is 400 meters, which has been justified on the grounds that “The decision had to do with impacts and entitlements. It’s also beneficial for the future intermodal station.”
It is, to be clear, not at all beneficial for a future intermodal BART-Caltrain station to require such a long walking distance, provided we take “beneficial” to mean “beneficial for passengers.” It may be beneficial for a Hollywood action sequence to depict characters running through such a space. It is not beneficial for the ordinary users of the station who might be interested in connecting between the two systems. There are 300 meter walks at some transfers in New York, and passengers do whatever they can to avoid them; I’ve taken three-seat rides with shorter transfers to avoid a two-seat ride with a long block transfer, and my behavior is typical of the subway users I know. Transfer corridors of such length are common in Shanghai and are disliked by the system’s users. It’s not the end of the world, but for $1.3 billion/km, I expect better and so should the people who have to pay for this project.
On Worshiping Foreign Systems
Tucker Carlson has been wowed by Putin’s Russia as of late and is reporting about how great it is; I wouldn’t normally talk about it, except that among the things he crowed about was Kiyevskaya Station on the Moscow Metro. He described it as clean and drug-free, and showed videos that would not have looked out of place in present-day Paris or London, and all I could think about when I watched it was something that I read in Korean media, more than 11 years ago. The newspaper JoongAng criticized the construction of the infill station at Guryong, by comparing its extravagance with the much more spartan stations of the Washington Metro, without noticing how the Washington Metro’s above-ground infill stations cost substantially more than the underground infill at Guryong, the Potomac Yards station reaching four times the cost of Guryong. In both cases, and in some others, the foreign system is not really described as a real place, but as a tourist fantasy. Little learning can come from this.
In fact, there are many positive things one can learn from Russia about how to run rail transportation. Soviet metro planning was quite good, and Eastern Bloc successor states (including satellites, not just former USSR constituents) inherited it and have in some cases expanded on it even while rejecting central planning elsewhere, for example in thoroughly neoliberal Czechia. Good features of this planning tradition include all of the following:
- Clean radial metro network design, with a distinction between city center and outlying areas.
- Very high frequency on each line. Moscow peaks at 39 trains per hour, the highest number I know of on non-driverless metros. When I visited Prague, planned by the same tradition, I saw higher metro frequency than I do in Berlin, with its rigid five-minute headways.
- Central planning of routes, with integration with where housing construction is permitted.
Of note, Carlson’s video doesn’t touch on any of this. He gets the history of the station wrong – he says it was built 70 years ago, when in fact the metro station opened in 1937, and it’s only the two later lines on this three-line transfer that opened in 1953 and 1954. He says he is “just asking questions” and then takes the watcher on a short video trip of the long escalator down to the platform, the ornate details of and art on the station, and the platforms and trains. That’s not Soviet metro design; that’s just metros. The New York City Subway is atypically dirty so that the mosaic art and sculptures there are surrounded by grime, but London and Paris are clean, and some of the stations in Paris have interesting art on the platforms. Stockholm has exposed gneiss rock, which forms a natural arch, and sculptures on some of its platforms. To me, as a regular urban rail rider, all of this looks extremely ordinary, which should not surprise, as good metro planning makes the ordinary last for generations.
Much of it is the excitement of a tourist. To the American visitor, the ornate finishes of Kiyevskaya are new, but the sculptures on the New York City Subway are so familiar that they go unremarkable. I see this in how Americans speak of Europe in general, especially on matters of urbanism; Marco Chitti pointed out that Italian farmers’ markets are for tourists and politicians, while most Italians do their shopping at car-oriented hypermarkets – tourists don’t see how auto-oriented Italy is, and this influences urbanist thinking about the greatness of traditional premodern city centers.
I don’t know what Carlson thinks about urbanism in general. I doubt he’s thought about it much. There are other American right-wing populists who have; their views are common enough among architectural traditionalists that The American Conservative publishes Strong Towns and that at one point the Trump administration passed an executive order requiring all new federal buildings to use traditional architectural styles rather than postwar ones like brutalism or postmodernism.
And Soviet-style metro planning is the exact opposite of that kind of urbanist tradition. It lives off of high-density housing, which are called projects in American parlance and microdistricts in the Soviet tradition, and are ideally placed right next to metro stations so that people can get to work efficiently. In Moscow, the city is large enough to support many radial metro lines, so that districts can be fairly close to metro stations far out of the center; in smaller cities, central planning is required to ensure alternation between high-density housing near the trains and parkland far from them, for which the best examples are Nordic rather than Eastern Bloc.
Traditional architecture critics loathe that kind of housing. In Sweden, one can find right-wingers who view Million Program housing as a socialist conspiracy to depress people into being pliable subjects. Chuck Marohn is not conspiratorial like this, but still opposes spiky density and prefers uniform density, with rules about how new housing on a street should be of similar size to existing buildings (no more than 50% taller) rather than much taller as is typical of either modern redevelopment projects or project-style housing.
Carlson himself is not that influential in urbanism, in the grand scheme of things. But urbanists who go on tourist trips abroad and conflate their travelogues for intellectual insights abound. Their views are often idiosyncratic, based on whatever they liked on a trip, which could be a high-speed rail trip, a neighborhood in a tourist trap, a kind of shopping that locals rarely do, or something similar. In all cases, this is fundamentally about leisure: the (usually New Left) tourist is in the city for purposes of leisure and experiences it as such, but the local rarely is. A glimpse of this can even be seen in the video from Kiyevskaya: the Moscow Metro is very crowded at rush hour, but the video does not depict overcrowding.
It’s possible to learn from abroad, but it does not involve travelogues. It involves interacting with locals in a position of equality rather than in that of a heavyweight who uses taxi drivers as sources. It involves reading what locals say; two years ago, around when Russia invaded Ukraine, I found a list of Russian dissidents and looked at the LiveJournal of an urbanist activist, who was talking about how Russian cities undermaintain public spaces. I think highly of Seung Y. Lee precisely because he demystifies Korean and Japanese urban rail for the Western reader; one can read his complaints about the Seoul subway’s accessibility and still recognize that its 92% wheelchair accessibility is by most global standards very good. It’s possible to, from a position of learning, inform oneself and conclude that a foreign system is superior in most aspects to the domestic one. But that’s not what so many urbanists who speak of their own tourists experience do, and Carlson happens to have provided one political example of this.
Worthless Canadian Initiative
Canada just announced a few days ago that it is capping the number of international student visas; the Times Higher Education and BBC both point out that the main argument used in favor of the cap is that there’s a housing shortage in Canada. Indeed, the way immigration politics plays out in Canada is such that the cap is hard to justify by other means: traditionally, the system there prioritized high-skill workers, to the point that there has been conservative criticism of the Trudeau cabinet for greatly expanding low-skill (namely, refugee) migration; capping student visas is not how one responds to such criticism.
The issue is that Canada builds a fair amount of housing, but not enough for population growth; the solution is to build more – in a fast-growing country like Canada, the finance sector expects housing demand to grow and therefore will readily build more if it is allowed to.
Vancouver deserves credit for the quality of its transit-oriented development and to a large extent also for the amount of absolute development it permits (about 10 units per 1,000 residents annually); but its ability to build is much greater than that, precisely because rapid immigration means that more housing is profitable, even at higher interest rates. The population growth coming from immigration sends a signal to the market, invest in long-term tangible goods like housing. Thus, Vancouver deserves less credit for its permissiveness of development – large swaths of the city are zoned for single-family housing with granny flats allowed, including in-demand West Side neighborhoods with good access to UBC and Downtown jobs by current buses and future SkyTrain.
The rub is that restricting student immigration is probably the worst possible way to deal with a housing shortage. Students live at high levels of crowding, and the marginal students, who the visa cap is excluding, live at higher levels of crowding than the rest because they tend to be at poorer universities and from poorer backgrounds. The reduction in present-day demand is limited. In Vancouver, an empty nester couple with 250 square meters of single-family housing in Shaughnessy is consuming far more housing, and sitting on far more land that could be redeveloped at high density, than four immigrants sharing a two-bedroom apartment in East Vancouver.
In contrast, the reduction in future demand is substantial, because those students then graduate and get work, and many of them get high-skill, high-wage jobs (the Canadian university graduate premium is declining but still large; the American one is larger, but the US is also a higher-inequality society in general); having fewer students, even fewer marginal students who might take jobs below their skill level, is still a reduction in both future population and future productivity. What this means is that capital owners deciding where to allocate assets are less likely to be financing construction.
The limiting factor on housing production is to a large extent NIMBYism, and there, in theory, immigration restrictions are neutral. (In practice, they can come out of a sense of national greatness developmental conservatism that wants to build a lot but restrict who can come in, or out of anti-developmental NIMBYism that feels empowered to build less as fewer people are coming; this situation is the latter.) However, it’s not entirely NIMBYism – private developmental still has to be profitable, and judging by the discourse I’m seeing on Canadian high-rise housing construction costs in Toronto and Vancouver, it’s not entirely a matter of permits. Even in an environment with extensive NIMBYism like the single-family areas of Vancouver and Toronto, costs and future profits matter.
