Category: Transportation
The Northeast Corridor Rail Grants
The US government has just announced a large slate of grants to rail from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Amtrak has a breakdown of projects both for itself and partners, totaling $16.4 billion. There are a few good things there, like Delco Lead, or more significantly more money for the Hudson Tunnel Project (already funded separately, but this covers money the states would otherwise be expected to fund). There are also conspicuously missing items that should stay missing – But by overall budget, most of the grant is pretty bad, covering projects that are in principle good but far too expensive per minute saved.
This has implications to the future of the Northeast Corridor, because the total amount of money for it is $30 billion; I believe this includes Amtrak plus commuter rail agencies. Half of the money is gone already, and some key elements remain unfunded, some of which are still on agency wishlists like Hunter Flyover but others of which are still not, like Shell Interlocking. It’s still possible to cobble together the remaining $13.6 billion to produce something good, but there have to be some compromises – and, more importantly, the process that produced the grant so far doesn’t fill me with confidence about the rest of the money.
The Baltimore tunnel
The biggest single item in the grant is the replacement tunnel for the Baltimore and Potomac Tunnel. The B&P was built compromised from the start, with atypically tight curves and steep grades for the era. An FRA report on its replacement from 2011 goes over the history of the project, originally dubbed the Great Circle Passenger Tunnel when first proposed in the 1970s; the 2011 report estimates the cost at $773 million in 2010 prices (PDF-p. 229), and the benefits at a two-minute time saving (PDF-p. 123) plus easier long-term maintenance, as the B&P has water leakage in addition to its geometric problems. At the time, the consensus of Northeastern railfans treated it as a beneficial and even necessary component of Northeast Corridor modernization, and the agencies kept working on it.
Since then, the project’s scope crept from two passenger tracks to four tracks with enough space for double-stacked freight and mechanical ventilation for diesel locomotives. The cost jumped to $4 billion, then $6 billion. The extra scope was removed to save money, said to be $1 billion, but the headline cost remained $6 billion (possibly due to inflation, as American government budgeting is done in current dollars, never constant dollars, creating a lot of fictional cost overruns). The FRA grant is for $4.7 billion out of $6 billion. Meanwhile, the environmental impact statements upped the trip time benefit of the tunnel for Amtrak from two to 2.5 minutes; this is understandable in light of either higher-speed (and higher-cost) redesign or an assumption of better rolling stock than in the 2011 report, higher-acceleration trains losing more time to speed restrictions near stations than lower-acceleration ones.
That this tunnel would be funded was telegraphed well in advance. The tunnel was named after abolitionist hero Frederick Douglass; I’m not aware of any intercity or commuter rail tunnel elsewhere in the developed world that gets such a name, and the choice to name it so about a year ago was a commitment. It’s not a bad project: the maintenance cost savings are real, as is the 2.5 minute improvement in trip time. But 2.5 minutes are not worth $6 billion, or even $6 billion net of maintenance. In 2023 dollars, the estimate from 2011 is $1.1 billion, which I think is fine on the margin – there are lower-hanging fruit out there, but the tunnel doesn’t compete with the lowest-hanging fruit but with the $29 billion-hanging fruit and it should be very competitive there. But when costs explode this much, there are other things that could be done better.
Bridge replacements
The Northeast Corridor is full of movable bridges, which are wishlisted for replacement with high fixed spans. The benefits of those replacements are there, mainly in maintenance costs (but see below on the Connecticut River), but that does not justify the multi-billion dollar budgets of many of them. The Susquehanna River Rail Bridge, the biggest grant in this section, is $2.08 billion in federal funding; the environmental impact study said that in 2015 dollars it was $930 million. The benefits in the EIS include lower maintenance costs, but those are not quantified, even in places where other elements (like the area’s demographics) are.
Like all state of good repair projects, this is spending for its own sake. There are no clear promises the way there are with the Douglass Tunnel, which promises to have a new tunnel with trip time benefits, small as they are. Nobody can know if these bridge replacement projects achieved any of their goals; there are no clear claims about maintenance costs with or without this, nor is there any concerted plan to improve maintenance productivity in general.
The East River Tunnel project, while not a bridge nor a visible replacement, has the same problem. The benefits are not made clear anywhere. There are some documents we found in the ETA commuter rail report saying that high-density signaling would allow increasing peak capacity on one of the two tunnel pairs from 20 to 24 trains per hour, but that’s a small minority of the overall project and in the description it’s an item within an item.
The one exception in this section is the Connecticut River. This bridge replacement has a much clearer benefit – but also is a down payment on the wrong choice. The issue is that pleasure boat traffic has priority over the railroad on the “who came first” principle; by agreement with the Coast Guard, there is a limited number of daily windows for Amtrak to run its trains, which work out to about an Acela and a Regional every hour in each direction. Replacing this bridge, unlike the others, would have a visible benefit: more trains could run (once new rolling stock comes in, but that’s already in production).
Unfortunately, the trains would be running on the curviest and also most easily bypassable section of the Northeast Corridor. The average speed on the New Haven-Kingston section of the Northeast Corridor is low, if not so low on the less curvy but commuter rail-primary New Haven Line farther west. The curves already have high superelevation and the Acelas tilt through them fully; there’s not much more that can be done to increase speed, save to bypass this entire section. Fortunately, a bypass parallel to I-95 is feasible here – there isn’t as much suburban development as west of New Haven, where there are many commuters to New York. Partial bypasses have been studied before, bypassing both the worst curves on this section and all movable bridges, including that on the Connecticut. To replace this bridge in place is a down payment on, in effect, not building genuine high-speed rail where it is most useful.
Other items
Some other items on the list are not so bad. The second largest item in the grant, $3.79 billion, is increasing the federal contribution to the Hudson Tunnel Project from about 50% to about 70%. I have questions about why it’s necessary – it looks like it’s covering a cost overrun – but it’s not terrible, and by cost it’s by far the biggest reasonable item in this grant.
Beyond that, there are some small projects that are fine, like Delco Lead, part of a program by New Jersey Transit to invest around New Brunswick and Jersey Avenue to create more yard space where it belongs, at the end of where local trains run (and not near city center, where land is expensive).
What’s not (yet) funded
Overall, around 25% of this grant is fine. But there are serious gaps – not only are the bridge replacements and the Douglass Tunnel not the best use of money, but also some important projects providing both reliability and speed are missing. The two most complex flat junctions of the Northeast Corridor near New York, Hunter in New Jersey and Shell in New Rochelle, are missing (and Hunter is on the New Jersey Transit wishlist); Hunter is estimated at $300 million and would make it much more straightforward to timetable Northeast Corridor commuter and intercity trains together, and Shell would likely cost the same and also facilitate the same for Penn Station Access. The Hartford Line is getting investment into double track, but no electrification, which American railroads keep underrating.
We Gave a Talk About New York Commuter Rail Modernization
Blair Lorenzo and I gave the talk yesterday, as advertised. The slide deck was much more in her style than in mine – more pictures, fewer words – so it may not be exactly clear what we said.
Beyond the written report itself (now up in web form, not just a PDF), we talked about some low-hanging fruit. What we’re asking for is not a lot of money – the total capital cost of electrification and high platforms everywhere and the surface bottlenecks we talk about like Hunter Junction is around $6 billion, of which $800 million for Portal Bridge need to happen regardless of anything else; Penn Reconstruction is $7 billion and the eminently cancelable Penn Expansion is $17 billion. However, it is a lot of coordination, of different agencies, of capital and operations, and so on. So it’s useful to talk about how to, in a way, fail gracefully – that is, how to propose something that, if it’s reduced to a pilot program, will still be useful.
The absolute wrong thing to do in a pilot program situation is to just do small things all over, like adding a few midday trains. That would achieve little. There is already alternation between hourly and half-hourly commuter trains in most of the New York region; this doesn’t do much when the subway or a subway + suburban bus combination runs every 10-12 minutes (and should be running every six). The same can be said for CityTicket, which incrementally reduces fares on commuter rail within New York City but doesn’t integrate fares with the subway and therefore produces little ridership increase.
Instead, the right thing to do is focus on one strong corridor. We propose this for phase 1, turning New Brunswick-Stamford or New Brunswick-New Rochelle into a through-line running every 10 minutes all day, as soon as Penn Station Access opens. But there are other alternatives that I think fall into the low-hanging fruit category.
One is the junction fixes, like Hunter as mentioned above (estimated at $300 million), or similar-complexity Shell in New Rochelle, which is most likely necessary for any decent intercity rail upgrade on the Northeast Corridor. It costs money, but not a lot of it by the standards of what’s being funded through federal grants, including BIL money for the Northeast Corridor, which is relevant to both Hunter and Shell.
The other is Queens bus redesign. I hope that as our program at Marron grows, we’ll be able to work on a Queens bus redesign that assumes that it’s possible to connect to the LIRR with fare integration and high frequency; buses would not need to all divert to Flushing or Jamaica, but could run straight north-south, leaving the east-west Manhattan-bound traffic to faster, more efficient trains.
I’m Giving a Talk in New York About Commuter Rail
At the Effective Transit Alliance, we’re about to unveil a report explaining how to modernize New York’s commuter rail system (update 10-31: see link to PDF here). The individual elements should not surprise regular readers of this blog, but we go into more detail about things I haven’t written before about peakiness, and combine everything together to propose some early action items.
To that effect, we will present this in person on Wednesday November 1st, at 1 pm. The event will take place at Marron, in Room 1201 of 370 Jay Street; due to NYU access control, signing up is mandatory using this form, but it can be done anytime until the morning of (or even later, but security will be grumpy). At the minimum, Blair Lorenzo and I will talk about commuter rail and what to do to improve it and take questions from the audience; we intend to be there for two hours, but people can break afterward and still talk, potentially.
Setting Speed Zones
At the Boston meetup two days ago, I was asked about what tools I use to generate timetables, for example for my New York commuter rail posts. The answer is that I use speed zones and then run this code on them – but then the question is how to figure out speed zones. I hope that this sequence of steps will help advocates who are interested in rail modernization.
Generating curve radii
The most difficult element to fix on mainline rail is the right-of-way geometry. Most other things that can restrict a train’s speed can be fixed with more modern maintenance, but right-of-way geometry doesn’t change without physical construction, often in constrained areas – if they weren’t constrained, the curves would have been built wider in the first place.
The best case scenario is that there exist track maps with exact curve radii. I have these for large chunks of the Northeast Corridor, but not all. For example, here is Metro-North (with thanks to The Korot). Curves on such maps are denoted as circles or bumps deviating from a line, with the direction of the circle indicating the direction of the curve’s curvature. On this and other American maps, the radius is listed in degrees, and the cant (see the section below) in inches.
To convert the radius from degrees to more usual units, set one degree to be 1,746 meters, and note that degrees measure curvature and not radius, so a two degree curve has half the radius of a one degree curve. More precisely, the formula is that degrees measure the change in azimuth over 100 feet; 100 feet are 30.48 meters, and converting 30.48 from degrees to radians gives 1,746.37536… meters.
For example, on the Metro-North chart, let’s look at Harrison, New York. It’s on PDF-p. 24 of the chart; Harrison is sandwiched between two curves with opposite orientations, with the platforms on tangent (uncurved) track. The curve just west of Harrison has radius 1° 58′ 30″, which is 884.24069… meters; the curve just east has radius 2° 2′ 15″, which is 857.11674… meters.
Converting curve radii to speeds
The formula for the speed of a train, in SI units, is
I wrote about lateral acceleration, cant, and cant deficiency two and a half years ago. In short, lateral acceleration, in m/s^2, is the centrifugal force coming from the action of the train rounding the curve at speed. For the purposes of the formula, it is measured in the horizontal plane. To reduce the centrifugal force felt by the passengers (for comfort and safety) as well as that felt by the train body (for safety and maintenance costs), the tracks will typically be banked so that the inner rail is lower than the outer rail, which is called cant or superelevation, and is written in units of distance, such as mm or inches.
The speed of a train on canted track is typically higher than the perfect balancing speed, where the force of gravity counteracts that of centrifugal force; thus, on a fast train there is a residual force pointing to the outside of the train, which can be written down as lateral acceleration in the plane of the tracks (in m/s^2), but is more typically written down in the same units as superelevation, representing the additional superelevation required for the speed to perfectly balance, which is called cant deficiency or underbalance.
The conversion rate between cant (or cant deficiency) is the track gauge measured between the middle of the two rails, divided by the gravitational constant (9.8 m/s^2). Track gauge is typically given as inner rail to inner rail; standard gauge is 1,435 mm inner rail to inner rail. The relevant quantity to superelevation calculations is a few cm more; on standard gauge, it’s taken to be about 1,470-1,500 mm, so the conversion rate is 1 m/s^2 = 150 mm of cant or cant deficiency. The two quantities, cant and cant deficiency, are additive.
The American track charts that I have specify the actual cant. However, the values tend to be too conservative. Again with the example of Harrison, the slightly wider western curve has 5″ cant and the slightly tighter eastern curve has 4.125″ cant. Regulations for maximum cant depend on the country and maintenance standards. The absolute maximum cant I am aware of on any standard-gauge railway is 200 mm on the Tokaido and Tohoku Shinkansen. The reasons not to raise cant further include maintenance difficulties and the risk of a train running at lower speed or even stopping on the track. On lines that are not captive to just high-speed trains, the highest cant I am aware of is 180 mm, in Germany, and this is rare; 160 mm is more common. The American limit is 7″, but frequent inspections are required at that point to ensure that the tracks don’t get bent out of shape to produce higher cant; 8″ is a do-not-exceed level, and in practice track irregularities may lead to exceeding it if there isn’t regular track maintenance.
In practice, raising the cant is usually easy – it can be done with a track geometry machine automatically. However, in one case, it is not: that of S-curves, which have exactly the shape implied by the letter S. Our example of Harrison has two reverse curves in close proximity, but is not an S-curve, as there are hundreds of meters of tangent track between the two curves. Other places do have S-curves, and there, the maximum cant must be lowered somewhat; regulations vary on this, but in Europe, the maximum change in cant is 30-55 mm per second depending on the country (there’s a secondary regulation on mm per meter, but on the Northeast Corridor, the binding rule is mm/s, not mm/m). For example, if we take 45 mm/s, and 180 mm of cant, then it takes four seconds to reverse a curve; note that it is four and not eight, because half of the increase in cant, called a superelevation spiral, is within the curve. Harrison’s current curves impose a hard limit of about 150 km/h, at which point the hundreds of meters of tangent track make it trivially easy to have full superelevation. However, other places, most infamously among Northeastern railfans Elizabeth, there is an actual S-curve, forcing lower cant and lower speeds.
Finally, the maximum cant deficiency depends on the track, the train, and the regulations. Traditionally, American regulations limited most passenger trains to 3″ of cant deficiency, which is ridiculously conservative; in the 2000s, a waiver allowing 5″ in some cases was derided as the “magic high-speed rail waiver” because it applied not just to higher-speed tracks but also to lower-speed lines that had through-service to higher-speed tracks. Since then, FRA regulations have changed, and now the practical limit in the US, with extensive testing, is 6″, or 150 mm cant deficiency, at most speeds. European limits tend to be around 130-150 mm; high-speed trains are at the lower end of this range unless they are tilting trains, which nearly all trains are not. Cant deficiency, like cant, requires its own superelevation spiral on S-curves, but the limits are in practice looser than for cant, and in some cases trains can change superelevation abruptly, with no spiral, for example on switches.
The upshot is that in the typical case, the most aggressive assumption should be 180 mm cant, 150 mm cant deficiency, for a lateral acceleration in the horizontal plane of 2.2 m/s^2. Most lines will not have this pair of aggressive assumptions: 180 mm is only viable when it’s guaranteed that trains will not stop on a canted curve, which is a reasonable assumption on a reliable high-speed line and even on a German high-speed line. Moreover, if there is any freight on the line, superelevation must fall drastically: slower trains would be at cant excess, and freight trains have high center of mass (diesel locomotives and double-stacked containers both have higher center of mass than electric passenger trains) and therefore have tight cant excess limits. Aggressive assumptions are viable on the Northeast Corridor and on controllable commuter lines with no or almost no freight, such as the LIRR, but not everywhere else.
Finding curve radii
In some cases, curve radii are spelled out in a chart. In others, they are not, and must be figured out. Our program’s schedule writer, Devin Wilkins, tells me she has just found a track chart for SEPTA, but otherwise, I have no such charts south of New York. There, the dirty, imperfect method of estimating curve radii must be used.
For that, I use Google Earth. Nowadays, Google Earth Pro is free, and comes with a circle tool. In theory, I can fidget with the radius of a circle until I find that it approximates the arc of a curve well. This requires paying special attention to how the drawn curve compares with not just the broad outline of the curve but also the exact arc of each track or even each rail: the drawn curve should be at the same relative position to the rails, such as following one rail of one track, or right in the center of one track, or right between the track centers, and so on.
In cases of uncertainty, it’s also possible to use Google Earth line tools, which state the azimuth of each line. If I can find the exact start and end points of each curve, and the azimuths of the tangents on both side, then I can draw the chord with a line tool, verifying that its azimuth is the exact arithmetic mean of the azimuths of the two tangents; if it is not the mean, then either I made an error (more likely) or the curve is not a perfect circle (possible but less likely). The radius of the curve is approximately the length of the chord times 180/pi divided by change in azimuth; more precisely, the radius is
This method is error-prone, especially for short, sharp curves. Computing the start and end points of the curve will always have errors, and if the change in azimuth is small, then these will lead to large errors. The circle tool method suffers from the same drawback: it’s easier to use it to estimate the radius of a curve with 60 degree change in azimuth than that of one with 10 degree change.
Over time I’ve gotten this method down to the point that my errors from what I later find with track charts such as that of Metro-North are fairly small, and not very biased in the larger-radius direction. But it takes time and practice and ideally you should avoid it for short, sharp curves.
Update 10-28: Ari Ofsevit has a third method, using chord lines.
Other speed limits
Speed limits on intercity trains mostly come from curves. But there are other things to keep in mind, not all of which are fixable:
- Tunnels increase air resistance to the point that unless the tunnels are constructed with large enough radius to have a lot of free air (modern tunnels are, legacy ones aren’t), or unless the trains are pressurized, the speed limit has to be lower just to avoid popping passengers’ ears at entry and exit.
- Switches generally have low speed limits – they have tight curves and no superelevation – making all complex junctions and major stations slow.
- Terminal stations have another set of speed limits coming from the bumper tracks. American limits are very conservative – 10 mph where a ramp down from 40 or 50 km/h is more normal in Europe – but even 50 km/h is not 200 km/h.
- Some pieces of infrastructure are so shoddy that they limit the dynamical axle load of the train, which is derived from both static axle load, which is a function of train mass, and speed. As usual, American limits on this are conservative, assuming high static axle load and fixing a low speed on some very old bridges, instead of permitting lighter trains to run faster. But it is sometimes a real problem.
Boston Meetup and Consultants Supervising Consultants
The meetup was a lot less formal than expected; people who showed up included loyal blog readers (thank you for reading and showing up!), social media followers (same), and some people involved in politics or the industry. I don’t have any presentation to show – I talked a bit about the TransitMatters Regional Rail program and then people asked questions. Rather, I want to talk about something I’ve said on social media but not here, which I delivered a long rant about to the last people who stayed there.
The issue at hand is that the only way that seems to work to deliver complex infrastructure projects is with close in-house supervision. This is true even in places where the public-sector supervisors, frankly, suck – which they frequently do in the United States. It’s fine to outsource some capabilities to consultants, but if it happens, then the supervision must remain in the public sector, which requires hiring more in-house people, at competitive salaries.
Why?
The reason is that public-sector projects always involve some public-sector elements. This is true even in the emergent norm in the English-speaking world and in many other countries that take cues from it, in which not only is most work done by consultants, but also the consultants are usually supervised by other consultants. The remains of the public sector think they’re committed to light-touch supervision, but because they, by their own admission, don’t know how to do things themselves or even how to supervise consultants, they do a bad job at it.
The most dreaded request is “study everything.” It’s so easy to just add more scenarios, more possibilities, more caveats. It’s the bane of collaborative documents (ask me how I know). In the Northeast Corridor timetabling project I’m doing with Devin Wilkins, I could study everything and look at every possible scenario, with respect to electrification, which projects are undertaken, rolling stock performance profile, and so on. It would not be doable with just me and her in a year or so; I would need to hire a larger team and take several years, and probably break it down so that one person just does Boston, another just does Philadelphia, a third just does Washington and Baltimore, several do New York (by far the hardest case), and one (or more) assists me in stapling everything together. The result might be better than what we’re doing now, thanks to the greater detail; or it might be worse, due to slight inconsistencies between different people’s workflows, in which case a dedicated office manager would be needed to sort this out, at additional expense. But at least I’d study everything.
Because I’m doing this project for Marron and not for an American public-sector client, I can prune the search tree, and do it at relatively reasonable expense. That’s partly because I’m the lead, but also partly because I know what I’m doing, to an extent, and am not going to tell anyone “study everything” and then dismiss most scenarios after three months of no contact.
The behavior I’m contrasting myself with is, unfortunately, rife in the American public sector. And it’s the most common among exactly the set of very senior bureaucrats, often (not always) ones who are there by virtue of political appointment rather than the civil service process, who swear that consultants do things better than the public sector. There’s no real supervision, and no real narrowing of the process. This looks like an alternative to micromanagement, but is not, because the client at the end does say “no, not like this”; there’s a reason the consultants always feel the need to study everything rather than picking just a few alternatives and hoping the client trusts them to do it right.
It’s telling that the consultants and contractors we speak to don’t really seem happy with how they’re treated by the public-sector client in those situations. They’re happy when interfacing with other private actors, usually. I imagine that if I hired a larger team (which we don’t have the budget for) and gave each person a separate task, they’d be really happy to have come up with all those different scenarios for how to run trains in the Baltimore-Washington area, interfacing with other equally dedicated people doing other tasks of this size. When consultants are supervised by other consultants, only the top-level consultant interfaces with the remains of the civil service, hollowed out by hiring freezes, uncompetitive salaries, and political scourging; the others don’t and think things work really smoothly. This, I think, is why opaque design-build setups are so popular with the private consultants who are involved in them: by the time a country or region fully privatizes its supervision to a design-build consultant, its public sector has been hollowed so much that the consultants prefer to be supervised privately, even if the results are worse.
In contrast, the only way forward is a bigger civil service. This means hiring more people, in-house, and paying them on a par with what they would be earning in the private sector given their experience. As I said at the bar a few hours ago, I’m imagining someone whose CV is four years at the MTA, then five at a consultant, then four at the MBTA, and then six at a consultant; with these 19 years of experience, they could get hired at a senior engineer or project manager position, for which the market rate in Boston as I understand is in the high $100,000s. For some things, like commuter rail electrification, there are unlikely to be any suitable candidates from within the US, and so agencies would have to hire a European or Asian engineer.
With competitive salaries, people would move between different employers in the same industry, as is normal in American and European industries. They could move between public and private employers, because the wages and benefits should be similar. They’d pick up experience. An agency like the MBTA, with its five to six in-house design review engineers, could staff up appropriately to be able to supervise not just small projects like infill commuter rail station, which it built at reasonable cost on the Fairmount Line, but also large ones like the Green Line Extension and South Coast Rail, which it builds at outrageously high costs.
I’m Giving a Talk About Regional Rail in Boston
I haven’t been as active here lately; I think people know why and ask that you find other things to comment on.
I’m in Boston this week (and in New York next week), meeting with friends and TransitMatters people; in particular, I’m giving a talk at the Elephant and Castle on Wednesday at 6 pm to discuss regional rail and related reforms for Boston:
What I keep finding on these trips is that public transportation in the US is always worse than I remember. In Boston, I had a short wait on the Red Line from South Station to where I’m staying in Cambridge, but the next train was 13 minutes afterward, midday on a weekday. The trip from South Station to Porter Square took 24 minutes over a distance of 7.7 km covering seven stops; TransitMatters has a slow zone dashboard, there are so many. A line segment with an interstation a little longer than a kilometer has a lower average speed than any Paris Métro line, even those with 400 meter interstations; in Berlin, which averages 780 meters, the average speed is 30 km/h.
In New York, the frequency is okay, but there’s a new distraction: subway announcements now say “we have over 100 accessible stations,” giving no information except advertising that the MTA hates disabled people and thinks that only 30% of the system should be accessible to wheelchair users. There are still billboards on the subway advertising OMNY, a strictly inferior way of paying for the system than the older prepaid cards – it’s a weekly cap at the same rate as the unlimited weekly, but it’s only available Monday to Sunday rather than in any seven-day period (update 10-24: I’m told it’s fixed and now it’s exactly the same product as prepaying if you know you’ll hit the cap), and the monthly fare is still just a bit cheaper than getting weeklies or weekly caps.
The MTA 20 Year Needs Assessment Reminds Us They Can’t Build
The much-anticipated 20 Year Needs Assessment was released 2.5 days ago. It’s embarrassingly bad, and the reason is that the MTA can’t build, and is run by people who even by Northeastern US standards – not just other metro areas but also New Jersey – can’t build and propose reforms that make it even harder to build.
I see people discuss the slate of expansion projects in the assessment – things like Empire Connection restoration, a subway under Utica, extensions of Second Avenue Subway, and various infill stations. On the surface of it, the list of expansion projects is decent; there are quibbles, but in theory it’s not a bad list. But in practice, it’s not intended seriously. The best way to describe this list is if the average poster on a crayon forum got free reins to design something on the fly and then an NGO with a large budget made it into a glossy presentation. The costs are insane, for example $2.5 billion for an elevated extension of the 3 to Spring Creek of about 1.5 km (good idea, horrific cost), and $15.9 billion for a 6.8 km Utica subway (see maps here); this is in 2027 dollars, but the inescapable conclusion here is that the MTA thinks that to build an elevated extension in East New York should cost almost as much as it did to build a subway in Manhattan, where it used the density and complexity of the terrain as an argument for why things cost as much as they did.
To make sure people don’t say “well, $16 billion is a lot but Utica is worth it,” the report also lowballs the benefits in some places. Utica is presented as having three alternatives: subway, BRT, and subway part of the way and BRT the rest of the way; the subway alternative has the lowest projected ridership of the three, estimated at 55,600 riders/weekday, not many more than ride the bus today, and fewer than ride the combination of all three buses in the area today (B46 on Utica, B44 on Nostrand, B41 on Flatbush). For comparison, where the M15 on First and Second Avenues had about 50,000 weekday trips before Second Avenue Subway opened, the two-way ridership at the three new stations plus the increase in ridership at 63rd Street was 160,000 on the eve of corona, and that’s over just a quarter of the route; the projection for the phase that opened is 200,000 (and is likely to be achieved if the system gets back to pre-corona ridership), and that for the entire route from Harlem to Lower Manhattan is 560,000. On a more reasonable estimate, based on bus ridership and gains from faster speeds and saving the subway transfer, Utica should get around twice the ridership of the buses and so should Nostrand (not included in the plan), on the order of 150,000 and 100,000 respectively.
Nothing there is truly designed to optimize how to improve in a place that can’t build. London can’t build either, even if its costs are a fraction of New York’s (which fraction seems to be falling since New York’s costs seem to be rising faster); to compensate, TfL has run some very good operations, squeezing 36 trains per hour out of some of its lines, and making plans to invest in signaling and route design to allow similar throughput levels on other lines. The 20 Year Needs Assessment mentions signaling, but doesn’t at all promise any higher throughput, and instead talks about state of good repair: if it fails to improve throughput much, there’s no paper trail that they ever promised more than mid-20s trains per hour; the L’s Communications-Based Train Control (CBTC) signals permit 26 tph in theory but electrical capacity limits the line to 20, and the 7 still runs about 24 peak tph. London reacted to its inability to build by, in effect, operating so well that each line can do the work of 1.5 lines in New York; New York has little interest.
The things in there that the MTA does intend to build are slow in ways that cross the line from an embarrassment to an atrocity. There’s an ongoing investment plan in elevator accessibility on the subway. The assessment trumpets that “90% of ridership” will be at accessible stations in 2045, and 95% of stations (not weighted by ridership) will be accessible by 2055. Berlin has a two years older subway network than New York; here, 146 out of 175 stations have an elevator or ramp, for which the media has attacked the agency for its slow rollout of systemwide accessibility, after promises to retrofit the entire system by about this year were dashed.
The sheer hate of disabled people that drips from every MTA document about its accessibility installation is, frankly, disgusting, and makes a mockery of accessibility laws. Berlin has made stations accessible for about 2 million € apiece, and in Madrid the cost is about 10 million € (Madrid usually builds much more cheaply than Berlin, but first of all its side platforms and fare barriers mean it needs more elevators than Berlin, and second it builds more elevators than the minimum because at its low costs it can afford to do so). In New York, the costs nowadays start at $50 million and go up from there; the average for the current slate of stations is around $70 million.
And the reason for this inability to build is decisions made by current MTA leadership, on an ongoing basis. The norm in low- and medium-cost countries is that designs are made in-house, or by consultants who are directly supervised by in-house civil service engineers who have sufficient team size to make decisions. In New York, as in the rest of the US, the norms is that not only is design done with consultants, but also the consultants are supervised by another layer of consultants. The generalist leadership at the MTA doesn’t know enough to supervise them: the civil service is small and constantly bullied by the political appointees, and the political appointees have no background in planning or engineering and have little respect for experts who do. Thus, they tell the consultants “study everything” and give no guidance; the consultants dutifully study literally everything and can’t use their own expertise for how to prune the search tree, leading to very high design costs.
Procurement, likewise, is done on the principle that the MTA civil service can’t do anything. Thus, the political appointees build more and more layers of intermediaries. MTA head Janno Lieber takes credit for the design-build law from 2019, in which it’s legalized (and in some cases mandated) to have some merger of design and construction, but now there’s impetus to merge even more, in what is called progressive design-build (in short: New York’s definition of design-build is similar to what is used in Turkey and what we call des-bid-ign-build in our report – two contracts, but the design contract is incomplete and the build contract includes completing the design; progressive design-build means doing a single contract). Low- and medium-cost countries don’t do any of this, with the exception of Nordic examples, which have seen a sharp rise in costs from low to medium in conjunction with doing this.
And MTA leadership likes this. So do the contractors, since the civil service in New York is so enfeebled – scourged by the likes of Lieber, denied any flexibility to make decisions – that it can’t properly supervise design-bid-build projects (and still the transition to design-build is raising costs a bit). Layers of consultants, insulated from public scrutiny over why exactly the MTA can’t make its stations accessible or extend the subway, are exactly what incompetent political appointees (but I repeat myself) want.
Hence, the assessment. Other than the repulsively slow timeline on accessibility, this is not intended to be built. It’s not even intended as a “what if.” It’s barely even speculation. It’s kayfabe. It’s mimicry of a real plan. It’s a list of things that everyone agrees should be there plus a few things some planners wanted, mostly solidly, complete with numbers that say “oh well, we can’t, let’s move on.” And this will not end while current leadership stays there. They can’t build, and they don’t want to be able to build; this is the result.
High Speed 2 is (Partly) Canceled Due to High Costs
It’s not yet officially confirmed, but Prime Minister Rishi Sunak will formally announce that High Speed 2 will be paused north of Birmingham. All media reporting on this issue – BBC, Reuters, Sky, Telegraph – centers the issue of costs; the Telegraph just ran an op-ed supporting the curtailment on grounds of fiscal prudence.
I can’t tell you how the costs compare with the benefits, but the costs, as compared with other costs, really are extremely high. The Telegraph op-ed has a graph with how real costs have risen over time (other media reporting conflates cost overruns with inflation), which pegs current costs, with the leg to Manchester still in there, as ranging from about £85 billion to £112 billion in 2022 prices, for a full network of (I believe) 530 km. In PPP terms, this is $230-310 million/km, which is typical of subways in low-to-medium-cost countries (and somewhat less than half as much as a London Undeground extension). The total cost in 2022 terms of all high-speed lines opened to date in France and Germany combined is about the same as the low end of the range for High Speed 2.
I bring this up not to complain about high costs – I’ve done this in Britain many times – but to point out that costs matter. The ability of a country or city to build useful infrastructure really does depend on cost, and allowing costs to explode in order to buy off specific constituencies, out of poor engineering, or out of indifference to good project delivery practices means less stuff can be built.
Britain, unfortunately, has done all three. High Speed 2 is full of scope creep designed to buy off groups – namely, there is a lot of gratuious tunneling in the London-Birmingham first phase, the one that isn’t being scrapped. The terrain is flat by French or German standards, but the people living in the rural areas northwest of London are wealthy and NIMBY and complained and so they got their tunnels, which at this point are so advanced in construction that it’s not possible to descope them.
Then there are questionable engineering decisions, like the truly massive urban stations. The line was planned with a massive addition to Euston Station, which has since been descoped (I blogged it when it was still uncertain, but it was later confirmed); the current plan seems to be to dump passengers at Old Oak Common, at an Elizabeth line station somewhat outside Central London. It’s possible to connect to Euston with some very good operational discipline, but that requires imitating some specific Shinkansen operations that aren’t used anywhere in Europe, because the surplus of tracks at the Parisian terminals is so great it’s not needed there, and nowhere else in Europe is there such high single-city ridership.
And then there is poor project delivery, and here, the Tories themselves are partly to blame. They love the privatization of the state to massive consultancies. As I keep saying about the history of London Underground construction costs, the history doesn’t prove in any way that it’s Margaret Thatcher’s fault, but it sure is consistent with that hypothesis – costs were rising even before she came to power, but the real explosion happened between the 1970s (with the opening of the Jubilee line at 2022 PPP $172 million/km) and the 1990s (with the opening of the Jubilee line extension at $570 million/km).
Our Webinar, and Penn Reconstruction
Our webinar about the train station 3D model went off successfully. I was on video for a little more than two hours, Michael a little less; the recording is on YouTube, and I can upload the auto-captioning if people are okay with some truly bad subtitles.
I might even do more webinars as a substitute for Twitch streams, just because Zoom samples video at similar quality to Twitch for my purposes but at far smaller file size; every time I upload a Zoom video I’m reminded that it takes half an hour to upload a two-hour video whereas on Twitch it is two hours when I’m in Germany. (Internet service in other countries I visit is much better.)
The questions, as expected, were mostly not about the 3D model, but about through-running and Penn Station in general. Joe Clift was asking a bunch of questions about the Hudson Tunnel Project (HTP) and its own issues, and he and others were asking about commuter rail frequency. A lot of what we talked about is a preview of a long proposal, currently 19,000, by the Effective Transit Alliance; the short version can be found here. For example, I briefly mentioned on video that Penn Expansion, the plan to demolish a Manhattan block south of Penn Station to add more tracks at a cost of $17 billion, provides no benefits whatsoever, even if it doesn’t incorporate through-running. The explanation is that the required capacity can be accommodated on four to five tracks with best American practices for train turnaround times and with average non-US practices, 10 minutes to turn; the LIRR and New Jersey Transit think they need 18-22 minutes.
There weren’t questions about Penn Reconstruction, the separate (and much better) $7 billion plan to rebuild the station in place. The plan is not bad – it includes extra staircases and escalators, extra space on the lower concourse, and extra exits. But Reinvent Albany just found an agreement between the various users of Penn Station for how to do Penn Reconstruction, and it enshrines some really bad practices: heavy use of consultants, and a choice of one of four project delivery methods all of which involve privatization of the state; state-built construction is not on the menu.
In light of that, it may make sense to delay Penn Reconstruction. The plan as it is locks in bad procurement practices, which mean the costs are necessarily going to be a multiple of what they could be. It’s better to expand in-house construction capacity for the HTP and then deploy it for other projects as the agency gains expertise; France is doing this with Grand Paris Express, using its delivery vehicle Société du Grand Paris as the agency for building RER systems in secondary French cities, rather than letting the accumulated state capacity dissipate when Grand Paris Express is done.
This is separate from the issue of what to even do about Penn Station – Reconstruction in effect snipes all the reimaginings, not just ours but also ones that got more established traction like Vishaan Chakrabarti’s. But even then it’s not necessarily a bad project; it just really isn’t worth $7 billion, and the agreement makes it clear that it is possible to do better if the agencies in question learn what good procurement practices are (which I doubt – the MTA is very bought in to design-build failure).
Different Models of Partial Through-Running
I gave a very well-attended webinar talk a few hours ago, in which a minority of the time was spent on the 3D model and a majority about through-running and related modernization elements for commuter rail. I will talk more about it when the video finishes uploading, which will take hours in the queue. But for now, I’d like to talk about different conceptions of how through-running should work. I was asked what the difference is between my vision (really our vision at ETA, including that of people who disagree with me on a lot of specifics) and the vision of Tri-State and ReThink.
One difference is that I think a Penn Station-Grand Central connection is prudent and they don’t, but it’s at the level of detail. The biggest difference is how to react to a situation where there isn’t enough core capacity to run every line through. Tri-State and ReThink prefer connecting as many lines as possible to the through-running trunk; I prefer only connecting lines insofar as they can run frequently and without interference with non-through-running lines.
Partial through-running
To run everything in New York through, it’s necessary to build about six different lines. My standard six-line map can be seen here, with Line 7 (colored turquoise) removed; note that Line 7’s New Jersey branches don’t currently run any passenger service, and its Long Island branches could just be connected to Line 5 (dark yellow). The question is what to do when there are no six through-lines but only two or three. Right now, there is only one plausible through-line; the Gateway tunnel/Hudson Tunnel Project would add a second, if it included some extra infrastructure (like the Grand Central connection); the realigned Empire Connection could be a third. Anything else is a from-scratch project; any plan has to assume no more than two or three lines.
The question is what to do afterward. I am inspired by the RER, which began with a handful of branches, on which it ran intense service. For example, here is Paris in 1985, at which point it had the RER A, B, and C, but no D yet: observe that there were still large terminating networks at the largest train stations, including some lines that weren’t even frequent enough to be depicted – the RER D system out of Gare de Lyon visible starting 1995 took over a preexisting line that until then missed the map’s 20-minute midday frequency cutoff.
The upshot that whenever I depict a three-line New York commuter rail system, it leaves out large portions of the system; those terminate at Grand Central (without running through to Penn Station), Brooklyn, or Hoboken. The point is to leverage existing lines and run service intensely, for example every 10 minutes per branch (or every 20 on outer tails, but the underlying branches should be every 10).
Tri-State uses a map of the RER in its above-linked writeup, but doesn’t work this way. Instead, it depicts a trunk line from Secaucus to Penn Station to Sunnyside with branches in a few directions. ReThink is clearer about what it’s doing and is depicting every possible branch connecting to the trunk, even the Hudson and Harlem Lines, via a rebuilt connection to the Hell Gate Bridge.
The issue of separation
The other issue for me – and this is a long-term disagreement I have with some other really sharp people at ETA – is the importance of separating through- from terminating lines. Paris has almost total segregation between RER and terminating Transilien trains; on the most important parts of the network, the RER A and B, there is only track sharing on one branch of the RER A (with Transilien L to Saint-Lazare), and only at rush hour. London likewise uses Crossrail/Elizabeth Line trains to connect to the slow lines of the Great Eastern and Great Western Main Lines, more or less leaving the fast lines for terminating trains. Berlin has practically no track sharing between the S-Bahn and anything else, just one short branch section.
With no contiguous four-track lines, New York can’t so segregate services while keeping to the Parisian norm that shorter-range lines run through and longer-range ones terminate. Any such scheme would necessarily involve extensive sharing of trunk tunnels between terminating and through trains, which would make Penn Station’s schedules even more fragile than they are today.
This means that New York is compelled to run through at fairly long range. For example, trains should be running through on the Northeast Corridor all the way to Trenton fairly early, and probably also all the way to New Haven. This makes a lot of otherwise-sympathetic agency planners nervous; they get the point about metro-like service at the range of Newark, Elizabeth, and New Rochelle, but assume that farther-out suburbs would only see demand to Manhattan and only at rush hour. I don’t think that this nervousness is justified – the outer anchors see traffic all day, every day (New Haven is, at least on numbers from the 2010s, the busiest station in the region on weekends, edging out Stamford and Ronkonkoma). But I get where it’s coming from. It’s just a necessary byproduct of running a system in which some entire lines run through and other entire lines do not.
On the New Jersey side, this compels a setup in which the Northeast Corridor and North Jersey Coast Line run through, even all the way to the end. The Morris and Essex Lines and the Montclair-Boonton Line would then be running to the Gateway tunnel, running through if the tunnel connected to Grand Central or anything else to the east. The Raritan Valley Line can terminate at Newark with a transfer, or be shoehorned into either the Northeast Corridor (easier infrastructure) or Morris and Essex system (more spare capacity) if extensive infrastructure is built to accommodate this. The Erie lines, planned to have an awkward loop at Secaucus, should just keep terminating at Hoboken until there’s money for a dedicated tunnel for them – they’re already perfectly separated from the Northeast Corridor and tie-ins, and can stay separate.
On the LIRR side, this means designating different lines to run to Penn Station or Grand Central, and set up easy connections at Jamaica or a future Sunnyside Junction station. I like sending the LIRR Main Line to Grand Central, the Atlantic lines (Far Rockaway and Long Beach) to Brooklyn, the Port Washington Branch to the same trunk as the Northeast Corridor, and the remaining lines to the northern East River Tunnel pair (with Empire Connection through-running eventually), but there are other ways of setting it up. Note here that the line that through-runs to New Jersey, Port Washington, is the one that’s most separated from the rest of the system, which means there is no direct service from New Jersey to Jamaica, only to Flushing; this is a cost, but it balances against much more robust rail service, without programmed conflicts between trains.
And on the Metro-North side, it means that anything that isn’t already linked to a through-line goes to Grand Central and ends there. I presume the New Haven Line would be running through either via Grand Central or via the Hell Gate Line, the Harlem Line would terminate, and the Hudson Line depends on whether the Empire Connection is built or not; as usual, there are other ways to set this up, and the tradeoff is that the Harlem Line is the most local in the Bronx whereas the New Haven Line already has to interface with through-running so might as well shoehorn everything there into the system.
Pedestrian Observations 