Category: Transportation

Quick Note: Report on Electrification and Medium-Speed Rail Upgrades

Nolan Hicks has wrapped up nearly a year of work at Marron on a proposal called Momentum, to upgrade mainline rail in the United States with electrification, high platforms, and additional tracks where needed, short of high-speed rail. The aim is to build low- or perhaps medium-speed rail; the proposed trip times are New York-Albany in 2:05 (averaging 109 km/h) and New York-Buffalo in 5:38 to 5:46 (averaging 123 km/h). The concept is supposed to be used US-wide, but the greatest focus is on New York State, where the plan devotes a section to Network West, that is New York-Buffalo, and another to Network East, that is the LIRR, in anticipation of the upcoming state budget debate.

The costs of this plan are high. Nolan projects $33-35.6 billion for New York-Buffalo, entirely on existing track. The reasoning is that his cost estimation is based on looking at comparable American projects, and there aren’t a lot of such upgrades in the US, so he’s forced to use the few that do exist. A second track on single-track line is costed cheaply with references to various existing projects (in Michigan, Massachusetts, etc.), but third and fourth tracks on a double-track line like the Water Level Route are costed at $30 million/km, based on a proposal in the built-up area of Chicago to Michigan City.

In effect, the benefits are a good way of seeing what upgrades to best American industry practices would do. The idea, as with the costing, is to justify everything with current or past American plans, and the sections on the history of studies looking at electrification projects are indispensable. This covers both intercity and regional rail upgrades, and we’ve used some of the numbers in the drafts at ETA to argue, as Nolan does, against third rail extensions and in favor of catenary on the LIRR and Metro-North.

(Update 4-3: and now the full proposal is out, see here.)

Open BRT

BRT, or bus rapid transit, can be done in one of two ways: closed and open. Closed systems imitate rail lines, in that there is a BRT route along the entire length of the corridor; open ones instead take a trunk route, upgrade it with dedicated lanes and other BRT features, and let routes run through from it to branches that are not so equipped, perhaps because there is less traffic on the branches. I complained 14 years ago that New York City Transit was planning closed BRT in the form of SBS on Hylan Boulevard on Staten Island, a good route for open BRT. Well, now the MTA is planning BRT on the disused North Shore Branch of the Staten Island Railway, arguing that it is better than reactivating rail service because buses could use it as an open corridor – except that this is a poor corridor for open BRT. This leads to the question: which corridors are good for open BRT to begin with?

Trunks and branches are good

Open BRT can be analogized to a Stadtbahn system, fast in the core and slow outside it. Like a Stadtbahn, it works best where several branches can converge onto a single route, where the high traffic both requires higher capacity and justifies higher investment; just as grade separation increases the throughput of a rail line, BRT treatments increase those of a bus through greater separation from other traffic and regularity of service.

Unlike a Stadtbahn, open BRT remains a bus. This means two things:

  1. The trunk route must itself be a strong surface route. It had better be a wide street with room for physically separated bus lanes, or else a city center route that could be turned into a transit mall. A Stadtbahn system puts the fast central portion underground and could do it independently of the street network, or even run under a slow narrow street like Tremont Street in Boston.
  2. The connections from the trunk route to the branches must themselves be strong bus links. If the bus needs to zigzag on narrow residential streets to get between two wider arterials, then it will be unreliable and slow even if one of the wider arterials gets dedicated lanes. A Stadtbahn system can tunnel a few hundred meters here and there to ensure the onramps are adequate, but a surface bus system cannot, not without driving its cost structure to that of a subway but with few of the benefits of underground running.

The North Shore Branch could pass a modified version of criterion 1, but fails criterion 2. In general, former rail lines are bad for such BRT systems, since the street network was never set up for such connections. In contrast, street networks with a central artery and streets of intermediate importance between it and residential side streets emanating from it, which were never used for grade-separated rail lines, are more ideal for this treatment.

Grids are bad

Street grids eliminate the branch hierarchy of traditional street networks. There is still a hierarchy of more and less important grid streets – in Manhattan, the avenues and two-way streets are wider and more used for traffic than the one-way streets – but there is little branching. Bus networks can still branch if they move between streets, which happens in Manhattan, but it’s not usually a good idea: Barcelona’s Nova Xarxa uses the grid to run mostly independent bus routes, each route mostly sticking to a grid arterial, and the extent of branching on the Brooklyn, Queens, and Bronx bus networks is limited to a handful of short segments like the Washington Bridge.

In situations like this, open BRT would not work. Hylan is possibly the only route in New York that has any business running open BRT. For this reason, our Brooklyn bus redesign proposal, and any work we could do for Queens, Manhattan, or the Bronx, eschews the open BRT concept. The buses are upgraded systemwide, since features like off-board fare collection and wider stop spacing are not really special BRT features but are rather normal in, for example, the urban German-speaking world. Center bus lanes are provided wherever there is need and room. There is more identification of a bus route with the street it runs on, but it isn’t really closed BRT, which is a series of treatments giving the BRT routes dedicated fleets and stations, for example with left-side doors to board from metro-style island platforms like Transmilenio.

What this means more broadly is that the open BRT is not a good fit for most of North America, with its grid routes. Occasionally, a diagonal street could act as a trunk if available, but this is uncommon. Broadway is famous for running diagonally to the Manhattan grid, but that’s not a BRT route but a subway route.

Tokyo Construction Costs

Here is a list of Japanese subways and their construction costs, courtesy of Borners, who has been working on this as well as on a deep dive about London construction costs. I’d been looking for this data for years; someone in comments posted a link to a different sheet summarizing the same data years ago but I couldn’t find it.

Unfortunately, the list isn’t quite good enough to be used for all subway lines. The problem is that the numbers are given in nominal yen for the costs of constructing entire lines, including ones that opened in phases over many years during which inflation was significant. The table of lines and their construction costs in units of 100 million yen/km is as follows, with my best attempt at deflating to 2023 prices, still in units of 100 million yen/km; to convert to millions of dollars per km, the 2022 PPP rate is $1 = ¥94.93, so add 5.3% to all numbers in the penultimate column.

LineCost/kmFirst worksFirst openingFinal openingYear of pricesCost/km (real)Confidence
Marunouchi181951195419621956114Medium
Asakusa461956196019681961257Medium
Hibiya321959196119641961179High
Tozai411962196419691965181High
Mita911965196820001975182Low
Chiyoda691966196919791970236Low
Yurakucho1671970197419881979261Low
Hanzomon2551972197820031983336Low
Shinjuku2351971197819891976433Low
Namboku2621986199120011993291High
Oedo3111986199120001994343High
Fukutoshin2822001200820082005314High

The confidence level is a combination of the length of time it took to build the line and the inflation rate over that period. The Oedo and Namboku Lines opened in stages over a decade, but during that decade Japan had no inflation, and as a result price level adjustments are easy. In contrast, inflation in the 1960s was high but the Hibiya and Tozai Lines were built quickly, so that the uncertainty based on picking a year to deflate to is maybe 10%. The in between lines – Mita, Chiyoda, Yurakucho, Hanzomon – all opened in stages over a long period of time with significant inflation. This makes it hard to use them to answer the question, what was Tokyo’s cost history?

What the numbers suggest is that by the 1970s, construction costs were not much lower than they’d be in the 2000s; Japan having grown steadily in the 1970s and 80s, this means that its ability to afford new subways after the bubble burst in the 1990s was actually greater than in the 1970s. Construction costs have risen since – an extension of the Namboku Line to Shinagawa is budgeted at ¥131 billion/2.5 km and a branch extension of the Yurakucho Line from Toyosu to Sumiyoshi is budgeted at ¥269 billion/4.8 km. Toyosu-Sumiyoshi is in Shitamachi and has multiple canal crossings justifying an elevated cost, but Shirokane-Takanawa-Shinagawa is in easier topography, and while it has multiple subway crossings over a short length, so did the lines built in the 1990s and 2000s – the Fukutoshin Line has, over 9 km, five subway crossings and complex connections at both ends with through-running.

Cos Cob Bridge Replacement

The Northeast Corridor has eight movable bridges in Connecticut; other than one that was replaced in the 1990s, all are considered by Amtrak and Connecticut DOT to be both critical priorities for replacement and also major undertakings. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funded two, on the Connecticut and the Norwalk Rivers. The costs are enormous, beyond any justification: the Walk Bridge replacement is funded at $1 billion for a four-track bridge of 200 meters, and the replacement will still be a movable bridge rather than a fixed span with enough clearance below for boat traffic. The cost can be compared with an order of magnitude of tens of millions of dollars for comparable or longer bridges, for examples $50 million for one of the Rhone bridges on the LGV Méditerranée and $32 million for an 800 m viaduct on the Erfurt-Nuremberg line.

The goal of this post is to focus on the Cos Cob Bridge on the Mianus River. Among the eight bridges, it is the one with the least advanced plans for rehabilitation, such that no cost figure is given, but rumors put it in the mid-single digit billions for a viaduct of about 1 km, crossing about 250 m of water. Among the bridges west of New Haven, it is also the one with the most constrained alignment making replacement more necessary to fix the right-of-way geometry: the bridge itself is straight but flanked by two short, sharp curves, and replacement should be bundled with a wider curve.

The NEC Webtool outlines one alignment, with a wide curve, 2,400 meters in radius. The snag is the vertical alignment. The bridge needs to be high enough to clear boat traffic below; I-95 slightly upriver has a clearance below of 14.9 meters (Wikipedia says 21 meters but that’s the top of the deck, not the bottom), and with a typical deck thickness of 1.5 meters it means top of rail needs to be about 16.5 meters above sea level – but the Riverside station 450 meters east of the midpoint of the river has top of rail 10 meters above sea level and the Cos Cob station under the I-95 overpass 450 meters west of the midpoint is 8 meters above sea level. To build it as a high span thus requires rising 8.5 meters over 450 meters.

The current Northeast Corridor plans hew to a much lower ruling grade. The Walk Bridge is being replaced with another movable bridge and not a high fixed span because the standards call for a 1% grade. This is, frankly, dumb. The passenger trains are electric, either commuter rail EMUs or powerful intercity trains capable of climbing 4% grades over a short section, even the medium-speed Northeast Regionals. The freight trains are long enough that what matters isn’t so much the maximum grade as the maximum grade averaged over the length of a train, in which case peaking at 4% over a length of 450 meters is not at all problematic.

With a 4% standard, the question is not about the grade, but about the vertical curve radius. Standards for those are tighter than for horizontal curves. Vertical and horizontal curve radii both follow the formula ar = v^2, but the acceleration limit a is much tighter since there is no tilting or superelevation, and on a crest a high speed also reduces the effective weight acceleration and thus reduces train stability. In Germany, a is limited to 0.482 on a crest and 0.594 on a hallow, both requiring special permission; in Sweden, the German crest value is the minimum limit, with no special dispensation on a hallow. The upshot is that at 250 km/h, the exceptional vertical curve radius is 10,000 m and thus it takes 400 meters just to get to 4%; over a length of 450 meters, the maximum average gradient is 1.125% if the higher acceleration rate on a hallow isn’t used or 1.25% if is and the tracks can only rise respectively 5 or 5.5 meters. To make it 8.5, the speed limit needs to be reduced: at 200 km/h, the vertical curve radius is 6,400 meters and then over 225 meters the trains can get up to 3.5% and, if it’s symmetric, over 450 they can climb 7.9 meters, and if it’s asymmetric then they can climb more than the required 8.5%. It’s dirty but it does work.

The issue is then how this affects construction. I don’t know why the Connecticut bridge replacements are so expensive, beyond the observation that everything in Connecticut is exceptionally expensive, usually even by the standards of other Northeastern American rail projects (for example, infill stations), let alone European ones. The local press articles talk about staging construction to avoid disturbing the running track, and if this is the main difficulty, then building a new bridge 50 meters upriver should be much easier, since then the only part of the project interfacing with the existing track is the track connections on firma.

Whatever it is, a multi-billion dollar pricetag is not believable given the required scope. More difficult construction has been done for two orders of magnitude less on this side of the Pond. On a different mode but in the same region, the 10-lane 1.4 km long Q Bridge cost $554 million, around $790 million today, which, relative to the size of the bridge, is still around an order of magnitude cheaper than Walk and more than an order of magnitude cheaper than what Cos Cob is rumored to be.

16-Car Trains on the Northeast Corridor

The dominant length of high-speed rail platforms in China, Japan, South Korea, and Europe is 400 meters, which usually corresponds to 16-car trains. The Northeast Corridor unfortunately does not run such long trains; intercity trains on it today are usually eight cars long, and the under construction Avelia Liberty sets are 8.5 cars long. Demand even today is high enough that trains fill even with very high fares, and so providing more service through both higher frequency and longer trains should be a priority. This post goes over what needs to happen to lengthen the trains to the global norm for high-speed rail. More trains need to be bought, but also the platforms need to be lengthened at many stations, with varying levels of difficulty.

The station list to consider is as follows:

  • Boston South Station
  • Providence
  • New London-HSR
  • New Haven
  • Stamford
  • New York Penn Station
  • Newark Penn Station
  • Trenton
  • Philadelphia 30th Street
  • Wilmington
  • Baltimore Penn Station
  • BWI
  • Washington Union Station

Some of these are local-only stations – the fastest express trains should not be stopping at New London or BWI, and whether any train stops at Stamford or Trenton is a matter of timetabling (the headline timetable we use includes Stamford on all trains but I am not wedded to it). In order, allowing 16-car trains at these stations involves the following changes.

Boston

South Station’s longest platforms today are those between tracks 8 and 9 and between tracks 10 and 11, both 12 cars long. To their immediate south is the interlocking, so lengthening would be difficult.

Moreover, the best platforms for Northeast Corridor trains to use at South Station are to the west. The best way to organize South Station is as four parallel stations, from west to east (in increasing track number order) the Worcester Line, the Northeast Corridor and branches, the Fairmount Line, and the Old Colony Lines, with peak traffic of respectively 8, 12 or 16, 4 or 8, and 6 trains per hour. This gives the Northeast Corridor tracks 4-7 or possibly 4-9; 4-7 means the Franklin Line has to pair with the Fairmount Line to take advantage of having more tracks, and may be required anyway since pairing the Franklin Line with the Northeast Corridor (Southwest Corridor within the city of Boston) would constrain the triple-track corridor too much, with 12 peak commuter trains and 4 peak intercity trains an hour.

The platform between tracks 6 and 7 is 11 cars long, but to its south is a gap in the tracks as the interlocking leads tracks 6 and 7 in different directions, and thus it can be lengthened to 16 cars within its footprint. The platform between tracks 4 and 5 is harder to lengthen, but this is still doable if the track that tracks 5 and 6 merge into south of the station is moved in conjunction with a project to lengthen the other platform.

Of note, the other Boston station, Back Bay, is rather constrained, with nearly the entire platforms under an overbuild, complicating any rebuild.

Providence

Providence has 12-car platforms. The southern edge is under an overbuild with rapid convergence between the tracks and cannot reasonably be extended. But the northern edge is in the open air, and lengthening is possible. The northern edge would be on rather tight curves, which is not acceptable under most standards, but in such a constrained environment, waivers are unavoidable, as is the case throughout urban Germany.

New London

This is a new station and can be built to the required length from the start.

New Haven

The current station platforms are only 10 cars long, but there is space to expand them in both directions. The platform area is in effect a railyard, a good example of the American tradition in which the train station is not where the trains are (as in Europe) but rather next to where the trains are.

A rebuild is needed anyway, for two reasons. First, it is desirable to build a bypass roughly following I-95 to straighten the route beginning immediately north of the station, even cutting off State Street in order to go straight to East Haven rather than curve to the north as on the current route. And second, the current usage of the station is that Amtrak uses tracks 1-4 (numbered west to east as in Boston) and Metro-North uses tracks 8-14, which forces Amtrak and Metro-North trains to cross each other at grade from their slow-fast-fast-slow pattern on the running line to the fast-fast-slow-slow pattern at the station. In the future, the station should be used in such a way that intercity trains either divert north to Hartford or Springfield or go immediately east on a flying junction to the high-speed bypass toward Rhode Island, without opposed-direction flat junctions; the flying junction is folded into the cost of the bypass and dominates the cost of rebuilding the platforms, as the space immediately north and south of the platforms is largely empty.

Stamford

Stamford has 12-car platforms. Going beyond that is hard, to the point that a more detailed alternatives analysis must include the option of not having intercity trains stop there at all, and instead running 12-car express commuter trains, lengthening major intermediate stops like South Norwalk (currently 10 cars long) and Bridgeport (currently 8) instead.

To keep the mainline option of stopping at Stamford, a platform rebuild is needed, in two ways. First, the station today has five tracks, a both literally and figuratively odd number, not useful for any timetable, with the middle track, numbered 1 (from north to south the numbers are 5, 3, 1, 2, 4), not served by a platform. And second, the platform between tracks 3 and 5 can at best be lengthened to 14 cars, while that between tracks 2 and 4 cannot be lengthened without moving tracks on viaducts. This means that some mechanism to rebuild the station should be considered, to create four tracks with more space between them so that 16-car platforms are viable; this should be bundled with a flying junction farther east to grade-separate the New Canaan Branch from the mainline.

A quick-and-dirty option, potentially viable here but almost nowhere else, is selective door opening, at the cost of longer dwell times. Normally selective door opening should not be used – it confuses passengers, for one. However, here it may be an option, as intercity traffic here is unlikely to be high; traffic today is 323,791 in financial 2023, the lowest of any station under consideration in this post unless one counts New London. The only reason to stop here in the first place is commuter ridership, in which case mechanisms such as restricting unreserved seats to the central 12 cars can be used.

New York

Penn Station has multiple platforms already long enough for 16- and even 17-car trains, including the one we pencil for all high-speed intercity trains in the proposal, platform 6 between tracks 11 and 12, as well as the two adjacent platforms, 5 and 7. (Note that unlike at New Haven and Boston, platform numbers at Penn increase south to north, that is right to left from the perspective of a Boston-bound traveler.)

Thank the god of railways, since platform expansion requires a multi-billion dollar project to remove the Madison Square Garden overbuild in the most optimistic case; in a more pessimistic case, it would also require removing the Moynihan Station overbuild.

Newark

Newark Penn Station’s platforms are in a grand structure about 14.5 cars long. Thankfully, they extend a bit south of it, producing about 16 cars’ worth of platform on the west (southbound) side, between tracks 3 and 4; as in New York, track numbers increase east to west. On the east side, PATH interposes between the two tracks, which have a cross-platform transfer from northbound New Jersey Transit trains to PATH. The platform structures and their extensions do have enough length to allow 16-car trains – indeed they go as long as 18 – but the southern ends are currently disused and would require some rehabilitation.

Trenton

Trenton has a 12.5 car long southbound platform and an 11.5 car long northbound platform. There is practically no room for an expansion if no tracks are moved. If tracks are moved, then some space can be created, but only enough for about 14 cars, not 16.

However, traffic is low, the second lowest among stations under consideration next to Stamford. The suite of Stamford solutions is thus most appropriate here: selective door opening with only the middle 12 cars (naturally the same as at Stamford) open to commuters, or just not stopping at this station at all. The only reason we’re even considering stopping here is timetabling-related: trains should be running every 10 minutes around New York but every 15 between Baltimore and Washington, or else significant expansion of quad-tracking on the Penn Line is required, and so a local stop should be added as a buffer, which can be Trenton or BWI, and BWI has twice the current Amtrak traffic of Trenton.

Philadelphia

30th Street Station has 14-car platforms. Selective door opening is basically impossible given the high expected traffic at this station, and instead platform expansion is required. There is an overbuild, but the tracks stay straight and only begin curving after a few tens of meters, which gives room for extension; from the north end to the overbuild to where the tracks begin curving toward one another to the south is 15.5 cars, and there is room north of the overbuild between the tracks.

Whatever reconstruction project is needed is helped by the low traffic at these platforms. SEPTA uses the upper level of the station, with tracks oriented east-west. The north-south lower level is only used by Amtrak, which could be easily reduced to three platform tracks (two Northeast Corridor, one Keystone) if need be, out of 11 today. Thus, staging construction can be done easily and intrusively, with no care taken to preserve track access during the work, as half the station platforms can be closed off at once.

Wilmington

Wilmington is frustrating, in that there is platform space for 16 cars rather easily, but it’s on inconsistent sides of the tracks. Track numbers increase south to north; track 1 has a side platform, there’s an island platform between tracks 2 and 3, and then track 3 also has a side platform on the other side, extending well to the east of the island platform. The island platform and the track 1 platform are about 12.5 cars long, and the track 3 side platform is 13.5 cars long. Thus, an extension, selective door opening, or a station rebuild is required.

The island platform can be extended about one car in each direction, so it cannot be the solution without selective door opening. Both side platforms can be extended somewhat to the west: the track 1 platform can be extended to 16 cars, but it would need to be elevated in the narrow space between the track viaduct and the station parking garage; the track 3 platform can be extended in both directions, avoiding a new elevated extension over North King Street.

If for some reason an extension of the track 1 platform is not possible, then selective door opening can be used, but not as reliably as at lower-traffic Stamford or Trenton, and overall I would not recommend this solution. A station rebuild then becomes necessary: the station has three tracks but doesn’t need more than two if SEPTA and Amtrak can be timetabled right, and then the removal of either track 1 or track 2 would create space for a longer platform.

Baltimore

Baltimore Penn has seven tracks, numbered from south to north 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, F. Their platforms are 10 to 13 cars long. Northbound trains are more or less forced to use the platform between tracks 1 and 3, since the way the route tapers to a three-, then four-track line to the east forces all eastbound trains to use mainline track 1; this platform is rather narrow at its east end but has space to the west for a 16-car extension. Westbound trains can use either the platform between tracks 4 and 5 or that between tracks 6 and 7, with tracks 4 and 6 preferred over 7 as they reach the express westbound track (track 5 stub-ends). Both platforms can be extended, with the platform between tracks 6 and 7 requiring a one-car extension to the east where a ramp down to track level for track workers exists whereas that between tracks 4 and 5 has ample unused space to its west.

BWI

The two side platforms at BWI are just under 13 cars long. However, nowhere else on the corridor is an extension easier: the station is located in an undeveloped wooded area, with space cleared on both sides of the track so that tree cutting is likely unnecessary west of the tracks and certainly unnecessary east of them.

The station itself needs a rebuild anyway, due to already existing plans to widen it from three to four tracks. This is required to enable intercity trains to overtake commuter trains anyway, unless delicate timetabling on triple track is used or another part of the Penn Line is set up as a four-track overtake. The plans are rather advanced, but platform extensions can be pursued as an add-on, without disturbing them due to the easy nature of the right-of-way.

Washington

Washington is set up as two separate stations, a high-platform terminal to the west and a low-platform through-station to the east on a lower level. Track numbers increase west to east, the western part taking 7-20 (though only 9-20 are high and wired) and the eastern part 23-30. None of the western platforms is long enough, but multiple options still exist:

  • The platform between tracks 9 and 10 has room for an extension.
  • The platforms between tracks 15 and 16 and between tracks 16 and 17 look like they already have extensions, if not open for passengers.
  • The platforms between track 17 and track 18 and between tracks 19 and 20 are only 12 cars long, but tracks could be cannibalized in the open air to make a long enough platform, especially since the reason track numbers 21 and 22 are skipped is that there used to be tracks there and now there’s empty space.
  • The platform between tracks 25 and 26 is long enough, and could be raised to have level boarding.

The existing platforms that can be extended easily are sufficient in number, but probably not in location – it’s ideal for the platforms to be close together, to simplify the interlocking as trains have to be scheduled to enter and leave the station without opposite-direction conflicts. If it’s doable even with a split between platforms separated by multiple tracks then it’s ideal, but otherwise, the extra work on tracks 17-20 may be necessary, converting a part of the station that presently has six tracks and four platforms into likely four tracks and two platforms.

Conclusion

All of this looks doable. The hardest station, Stamford, is skippable if selective door opening is unviable after all and a rebuild is too expensive. Among the other stations, light rebuilds are needed at Boston, Wilmington, and maybe Washington; New Haven needs a more serious rebuild as part of the bypass, but the station platforms are a routine extension where there is already room between the tracks. The most untouchable station, New York, already has multiple platforms of the required length at the required location within the station.

Northeast Corridor Profits and Amtrak Losses

In response to my previous post, it was pointed out to me that Amtrak finances can’t really be viewed in combination, but have to be split between the Northeast Corridor, the state-supported routes, and the long-distance trains. Long-distance is defined by a 750 mile (1,200 km) standard, comprising the night trains plus the Palmetto; these trains have especially poor financial performance. The question is what level of Northeast Corridor profitability is required to cover those losses.

In financial 2024 (ending 2024-09-30), Amtrak finances per route category were as follows, in millions of dollars or passenger-km or in dollars per p-km:

CategoryRidershipP-kmCostCost/p-kmRevenueRevenue/p-km
NEC144,053.31,146.80.2831,414.60.349
State-supported14.52,972.61,110.70.374859.20.289
Long-distance4.33,505.81,261.20.36626.10.179

The long-distance trains don’t actually have higher cost structure than the state-supported ones. Their greater losses are because fares are degressive in distance, and so the longer distances traveled translate to lower revenue per kilometer. This is also observable on some high-speed routes in Europe – the fares on TGVs using the LGV Sud-Est are very degressive, with little premium on Paris-Nice over Paris-Lyon despite the factor of 2.5 longer distance and factor of almost 3 longer time.

Revenue per passenger-km in France and Germany is around $0.15, as I explain in this post with links, and revenue per passenger-km in Japan is $0.25, both with average trip lengths similar to those of the Northeast Corridor and state-supported trains. Getting operating costs for just high-speed trains in France and Germany is surprisingly tricky; the Spinetta report says the TGV costs 0.06€/seat-km without capital, which at current seat occupancy is around 0.08€/p-km or around $0.11/p-km.

The upshot is that Northeast Corridor profits need to be $886.6 million a year to cover losses elsewhere, and if the operating costs on the corridor were the same as on the TGV, this could be achieved now with no further increases in service.

Now, in reality, high-speed rail would both massively increase ridership and also have to involve reducing fares to more normal levels than $0.35/p-km. If the revenue is $0.15/p-km and the cost is $0.11/p-km, then traffic in p-km has to rise to 22.165 billion/year, a fivefold increase, to cover. This is less implausible than it sounds – my gravity-based ridership model predicts about that ridership. Potentially, operating costs could be lower than on the TGV, if the entire corridor is (relatively) fast, with no long sections on slow lines as in France, and if traffic is less peaky than in France. But to first order, the answer to the profits question should be “probably but not certainly.”

Amtrak’s Failure

An article in Streetsblog by Jim Mathews of the Rail Passengers Association talking up Amtrak as a success has left a sour taste in my mouth as well as those of other good transit activists. The post says that Amtrak is losing money and it’s fine because it’s a successful service by other measures. I’ve talked before about why good intercity rail is profitable – high-speed trains are, for one, and has a cost structure that makes it hard to lose money. But even setting that aside, there are no measures by which Amtrak is a successful, if one is willing to look away from the United States for a few moments. What the post praises, Amtrak’s infrastructure construction, is especially bad by any global standard. It is unfortunate that American activists for mainline rail are especially unlikely to be interested in how things work in other parts of the world, and instead are likely to prefer looking back to American history. I want to like the RPA (distinct from the New York-area Regional Plan Association, which this post will not address), but its Americanism is on full display here and this blinds its members to the failures of Amtrak.

Amtrak ridership

The ridership on intercity rail in the United States is, by most first-world standards, pitiful. Amtrak reports, for financial 2023, 5.823 billion passenger-miles, or 9.371 billion p-km; Statista gives it at 9.746 billion p-km for 2023, which I presume is for calendar 2023, capturing more corona recovery. France had 65 billion p-km on TGVs and international trains in 2023.

More broadly than the TGV, Eurostat reports rail p-km without distinction between intercity and regional trains; the total for both modes in the US was 20.714 billion in 2023 and 30.89 billion in 2019, commuter rail having taken a permanent hit due to the decline of its core market of 9-to-5 suburb-to-city middle-class commuting. These figures are, per capita, 62 and 94 p-km/year. In the EU and environs, only one country is this low, Greece, which barely runs any intercity rail service and even suspended it for several months in 2023 after a fatal accident. The EU-wide average is 955 p-km/year. Dense countries like Germany do much better than the US, as do low-density countries like Sweden and Finland. Switzerland has about the same mainline rail p-km as the US as of 2023, 20.754 billion, on a population of 8.9 million (US: 335 million).

So purely on the question of whether people use Amtrak, the answer is, by European standards, a resounding no. And by Japanese standards, Europe isn’t doing that great – Japan is somewhat ahead of Switzerland per capita. Amtrak trains are slow: the Northeast Corridor is slower than the express trains that the TGV replaced, and the other lines are considerably slower, running at speeds that Europeans associate with unmodernized Eastern European lines. They are infrequent: service is measured in trains per day, usually just one, and even the Northeast Corridor has rather bad frequencies for the intensely used line it wants to be.

Is this because of public support?

No. American railroaders are convinced that all of this is about insufficient public funding, and public preference for highways. Mathews’ post repeats this line, about how Amtrak’s 120 km/h average speeds on a good day on its fastest corridor should be considered great given how much money has been spent on highways in America.

The issue is that other countries spend money on highways too. High American construction costs affect highway megaprojects as well, and thus the United States brings up the rear in road tunneling. The highway competition for Amtrak comprises fairly fast, almost entirely toll-free roads, but this is equally true of Deutsche Bahn; the competition for SNCF and Trenitalia is tollways, but then those tollways are less congested, and drivers in Italy routinely go 160 km/h on the higher-quality stretches of road.

Amtrak itself has convinced itself that everyone else takes subsidies. For example, here it says “No country in the world operates a passenger rail system without some form of public support for capital costs and/or operating expenses,” mirroring a fraudulent OIG report that compares the Northeast Corridor (alone) to European intercity rail networks. Technically it’s true that passenger rail in Europe receives public subsidies; but what receives subsidies is regional lines, which in the US would never be part of the Amtrak system, and some peripheral intercity lines run as passenger service obligation (PSO) with in theory competitive tendering, on lines that Amtrak wouldn’t touch. Core lines, equivalent to Chicago-Detroit, New York-Buffalo, Washington-Charlotte-Atlanta, Los Angeles-San Diego, etc., would be high-speed and profitable.

But what about construction?

What offends me the most about the post is that it talks up Amtrak’s role as a construction company. It says,

Today, our nationalized rail operator is also a construction company responsible for managing tens of billions of dollars for building bridges, tunnels, stations, and more – with all the overhead in project-management staff and capital delivery that this entails.

The problem is that Amtrak is managing those tens of billions of dollars extremely inefficiently. Tens of billions of dollars is the order of magnitude that it took to build the entire LGV network to day ($65.5 billion in 2023 prices), or the entire NBS network in Germany ($68.6 billion). Amtrak and the commuter rail operators think that if they are given the combined cost to date of both networks, they can upgrade the Northeast Corridor to be about as fast as a mixed high- and low-speed German line, or about the fastest legacy-line British trains (720 km in 5 hours).

The rail operations are where Amtrak is doing something that approximates good rail work – lots of extraneous spending, driving up Northeast Corridor operating costs to around twice the fares on German and French high-speed trains, probably around 3-4 times the operating costs on those trains. But capital construction is a bundle of bad standards for everything, order-of-magnitude cost premiums, poor prioritization, and agency imperialism leading Amtrak to want to spend $16 billion on a completely unnecessary expansion of Penn Station. The long-term desideratum of auto-tensioned (“constant-tension”) catenary south of New York, improving reliability and lifting the current 135 mph (217 km/h) speed limit, would be a routine project here, reusing the poles with their 75-80 meter spacing; an incompetent (since removed) Amtrak engineer insisted on tightening to 180′ (54 m) so the project is becoming impossibly expensive as the poles have to be replaced during service. “Amtrak is also doing construction” is a derogatory statement about Amtrak.

Why are they like this?

Americans generally resent having to learn about the rest of the world. This disproportionately affects industries where the United States is clearly ahead (for example, software), but also ones where internal American features incline Americans to overfocus on their own internal history. Railroad history is rich everywhere, and the relative decline of the railway in favor of the highway lends itself to wistful alternative history, with intense focus on specific lines or regions. New Yorkers are, in the same vein, atypically provincial when it comes to the subway’s history, and end up making arguments, such as about the difficulty of accessibility retrofits on an old system, that can be refuted by looking at peer American systems, not just foreign ones.

The upshot is that an industry and an advocacy ecosystem that both intensely believe that railroad decline was because government investment favored roads – something that’s only partly true, since the same favoring of roads happened more or less everywhere – will want to learn from their own local histories. Quite a lot of advocacy by the RPA falls into the realm of trying to revive the intercity rail system the US had in the 1960s, before the bankruptcies and near-bankruptcies that led to the creation of Amtrak – but this system was what lost out to highways and cars to begin with. The innovations that allowed East Asia to avoid the same fate, and the innovations that allowed Western Europe to partly reverse this fate, involve different ideas of how to build and operate intercity rail.

And all of this requires understanding that, on a basic level, Amtrak is best described as a mishmash of the worst features of every European and East Asian railway: speed, fares, frequency, reliability, coverage. Each country that I know of misses on at least one of these aspects – Swiss trains are slow, the Shinkansen is expensive, the TGV has multi-hour midday gaps, German trains barely run on a schedule, China puts its train stations at inconvenient locations. Amtrak misses on all of those, at once.

And while Amtrak misses on service quality in operations, it, alongside the rest of the American rail construction industry, practically defines bad capital planning. Cities can build the right project wrong, or build the wrong project right, or have poor judgment about standards but not project delivery or the reverse, and somehow, Amtrak’s current planning does all of these wrong all at once.

Quick Note: Rural Drivers Aren’t Being Oppressed

A new paper is making the round arguing that Spanish rural automobility is a response to peripheralization. It’s a mix of saying what is obvious – in rural areas there is no public transportation and therefore cars are required for basic mobility – and proposing this as a way of dealing with the general marginalization of people in rural areas. The more obvious parts are not so much wrong as underdeveloped – the paper is an ethnography of rural drivers who say they need to drive to get to work and to non-work destinations like child care. But then the parts talking about peripheralization are within a program of normalizing rural violence against the state and against urban dwellers, and deserves a certain degree of pushback.

The issue here is that while rural areas are poorer than urban ones, making them economically more peripheral, they are not at all socially peripheral. This can be seen in a number of both economic and non-economic issues:

  • Rural areas are showered with place-based subsidies to deal with poverty, on top of the usual universal programs (like health care and pensions) that redistribute money from rich to poor regardless of location. This includes farm subsidies, like the Common Agricultural Policy, and infrastructure subsidies in which there’s more investment relative to usage in rural than in urban areas. The automobility of rural areas is itself part of this program: urban motorways can fund themselves from tolls where they need to, but national programs of road improvements end up improving the mobility options of rural areas out of almost exclusively urban taxes. In public transport, this includes considerable political entitlement, such as when Spanish regional governors made a botched train procurement into a national scandal and demanded that the chief of staff of the national transport ministry, Isabel Pardo de Vera Posada, resign over something she’d had nothing to do with.
  • Rural poverty is culturally viewed as the fault of other people than the residents. Poor urban neighborhoods are called no-go zones; I am not familiar enough with Spanish discourse on this but I doubt it’s different from French, German, and Swedish discourses, in which poor rural areas are never so called. A German district with neo-Nazi groups and majority public sympathy with extremism is called a victim of globalization in media, even left-leaning media, and not a no-go zone.
  • Rural areas, regardless of income, are socially treated as more authentic representatives of proper values, with expressions like Deep England or La France profonde contrasting with constant scorn for London, Paris, and Berlin.
  • Rural violence is treated as almost respectable. Political and media reactions to farmer riots with tractors as of late have been to shower the rioters with understanding. In France, the government acceded to the demands, and then-minister of the interior Gérald Darmanin forced law enforcement to act with restraint. In contrast, urban riots by racial minorities lead to mass arrests, the occasional fatal shooting of a rioter, and a discourse that treats riots as fundamentally illegitimate, for example just a few months prior.

The paper denigrates rural policies formed with “barely any understanding of how they are conditioned” and says that “an understanding of socio-spatial cohesion needs to look beyond the traditional objectives of equalizing agricultural incomes to consider how these accessibility gaps affect depopulation, young people’s skills, unemployment and low incomes.” But the issue isn’t understanding. Rural areas are not misunderstood. They are dominant, capable of steering specific subsidies their way that are not available to urbanites at equal income levels.

More broadly, I think it’s difficult for critical urbanism to deal with this issue of the permission structure for rural violence, because the urban-rural dynamic is not the same as the classical dynamic between social classes, or between white and black Americans, in which the socioeconomically dominant group is also the politically dominant one. It’s instead better to analogize it in ethnic terms not to American anti-black racism, or to European anti-immigrant racism, but to anti-Semitism, in which the social acceptance of a base level of violence coexists with the fact that Jews are often a more educated and richer group, leading anti-Semites to promulgate conspiracy theories.

The permission structure for rural drivers to commit violence in demand of government subsidies and government protection from competition is the exact opposite of peripheralization. It’s not a periphery; it’s a political and cultural center that faces a fundamental challenge in that it provides no economic or social value and is in effect a rapacious mafia using violence to extract protection money from an urban society that, due to misplaced sentimental values, responds with further subventions rather than with the full force of law as used against urban and suburban rioters with migration background.

Large Cars are a Positional Good

Americans have, over the last generation, gotten ever larger cars, to the point that the market is dominated by crossovers, pickup trucks, and SUVs and barely has sedans. Europe is not far behind, with the sedan market having collapsed and half of new sales comprising SUVs. Considerable resources are spent on these larger cars, which are more expensive to purchase, maintain, and refuel. The benefits at this point, however, are rather positional. The benefit of larger cars at this point is not about the comfort or performance of the car, but about being larger than other road users. Streets for All’s Michael Schneider described it as an arms race; this arms race that wastes resources and produces pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, without benefits even to individuals writ large, precisely the kind of problem that government regulation can solve.

The benefits of larger cars

The usual benefit drivers cite for why they want a larger car is comfort. The increase in car size from (say) the Fiat 500 or the Beetle or the 1970s Civic to modern midsize cars like the Accord and Camry has led to obvious improvements in comfort: four doors rather than two, ample front and rear passenger legroom, more trunk space.

And beyond this point, the relationship between car size and comfort saturates. Luxury sedans are still larger than midsize ones, but not by much; where the 500 had a curb weight of about 500 kg, the modern Accord is 1.4 t and the Camry is 1.6 t, barely less than a C-Class at 1.7 t and not much less than a 2.1 t 7 Series. A family car does not need to be larger than this, and when I talk to people about their vehicle purchases, at least the ones who tell me they’re getting SUVs do not cite comfort, not in the 2010s-20s.

The main selling point of luxury cars is performance. It’s this high-performance segment that Tesla competes with – electric cars have better performance specs, and where the older automakers tried to base their electric car offerings on preexisting platforms (like the Leaf, based on the Tiida), Tesla instead started by building high-performance luxury cars and expanded from there. But here there is no benefit to size – the Model 3 is around 1.7 t curb weight, and that includes batteries, which together weigh nearly half a ton.

Larger cars can also haul more goods, but the SUVs and pickups are expressly designed not to do that. The F-150’s bed has decreased with every new generation of the car; the Kei truck, specialized to have a large bed relative to the rest of the car, looks so weird to Americans that Massachusetts at one point banned it for being unsafe, while Americans on social media mocked the users as trying to prove an environmental point. The minivan, specialized to carry seven to eight passengers, has been unfashionable for at least a generation, losing out to the similarly large but lower-capacity SUV.

Instead, what I do hear from people telling me why they want a big car is purely positional: “I get to see over the other cars,” or alternatively “I can’t be the shortest car on the road because then I can’t see anything.” People are also recorded modifying their cars to be taller for the same reasons. The visibility in question does not improve if all cars get bigger; only the relative size matters. In the case of car accidents, this is even worse: in a collision between two cars the larger one is safer for the occupants, but making all the cars larger doesn’t improve traffic safety, and makes it much worse for pedestrians, and there’s some evidence of risk compensation by drivers of larger cars increasing the overall number of crashes.

The discourse on social benefits tends to exclude individual ones; thus, it’s easy to say that something that provides tangible individual benefits (such as larger dwellings) does not provide social ones. But this is something different. A purely private good does not provide positive externalities or improve the usual indicators that are usually the realm of public policy, like public health, but it improves the living standards of the owner, without negative externalities. But here, the benefit of the SUV or pickup truck to the user is purely the arms race on the road; the improvement in the quality of life of the owner is entirely about externalizing a fixed or even rising risk of car crashes to other road users. There isn’t even a social benefit here in the sense of the sum total of private individual benefits.

The costs of larger cars

While larger cars do not improve societal well-being on average, they have high individual and social costs.

The social costs are easier to explain: those cars emit much more pollution and greenhouse gases. The Camry has a fuel economy of maybe 37 miles per gallon (6.35 l/100 km) in the US; the F-150 gets less than half that, around 17.5 mpg (13.4 l/100 km). The fuel consumption ratio, 2.1, is somehow larger than the mass ratio – the F-150 doesn’t weigh 3.4 t but rather not much more than 2 t depending on model. Air pollution emissions are, for modern cars with modern petrol engines, proportional to greenhouse gas emissions; a car with twice the fuel consumption is going to also emit twice the particulate matter.

Then there is the danger of crashes. The United States has seen an increase in traffic fatalities lately, especially for pedestrians. The pedestrian fatality rate, in turn, comes from the form of pickups and larger SUVs: they have larger hoods, which hit pedestrians in the chest or (for children) the head rather than in the legs, and which also reduce visibility. Here it’s not an issue of mass but one of hood shape, but these come from the same fundemantal issue of an arms race to be larger and taller than the other cars, to the exclusion of spending on personal comfort.

Those social costs are not the tradeoff of some individual benefit. There is a benefit to the driver of the larger car, but there is no benefit to the driver of the average car on a road with larger cars. Instead, the driver of said average car incurs significant individual costs, coming from the need to buy, maintain, and refuel a larger machine. The low fuel economy costs the drivers money; most of the costs are external, but not all. The purchase price of a larger car is larger, because it is a larger piece of machinery, requiring more workers and more capital to put together; Edmunds’ price range for the F-150 is 50-100% higher than that for the Accord or Camry. Consumers routinely spend more money for better products, but here the product is not better except positionally.

The way forward

Government regulations to curb the arms race can directly limit or tax the size of cars, or instead go after their negative externalities. The latter should be preferred; in particular, a tax on car size would create a situation in which people can pay for a road that is safer for them and more dangerous for others, which is likely to lead to both much more aggressive driving by the largest cars on the road and to populist demands for large cars for everyone.

Specific taxes on large cars may still be appropriate in specific circumstances, like parking; Paris charges SUVs more for parking, justified by the fact that these vehicles don’t fit in the usual street parking spots, which are designed for the typical European car and not for the largest ones.

But outside the issue of parking, it’s better to be tighter about regulations and taxes on pollution, and about accidents. In the United States, it’s necessary to get rid of the system in which cars are perennially underinsured, with most states requiring liability coverage of $50,000 (Cid’s car accident, which was medium-term disabling but not fatal, incurred around $1 million in bills, and the insurance value of human life in the United States is $7.5 million). On both sides of the Atlantic, it’s necessary to tax or regulate pollution more seriously; the EU is ramping up fines on automakers that produce excessively polluting vehicles, but Robert Habeck, who is rather rigid on issues like nuclear power and the Autobahn speed limit, wants to suspend those fines since German automakers lag in electric cars.

On the matter of safety, it’s best to require cars to meet high standards of visibility and pedestrian safety in crashes, measured for example by survival rates at typical city speeds like 30 and 50 km/h. A car that fails these standards should not be on the road, just as cars are tested for occupant safety. If it means that the high, deep hood characteristic of the pickup truck no longer meets regulations, then fine; safety regulators should not compromise just because some antisocial drivers are acculturated to playing Carmageddon on real roads.

The key here is that regulations on emissions and personal injury liability suppress investment in larger cars, and that is good. There are other forms of capital investment in the economy competing for funding, which are not purely positional, for example housing, where German investment has been lagging due to high interest rates. Externalities are a real market failure and sometimes they get to the point that the product is, at scale, a net negative for society.

Quick Note: High-Speed Rail and Decarbonization

I keep seeing European advocates for decarbonizing transportation downplay the importance of big infrastructure, especially high-speed rail. To that end, I’d like to proffer one argument for why high-speed rail decarbonizes transportation even when it induces new trips. Namely: induced leisure trips come at the expense of higher-carbon travel to other destinations. In the 2010s discussion on High Speed 2, for example, induced trips were counted as raising greenhouse gas emissions (while having economic benefits elsewhere), and with this understanding I think that that is wrong. This becomes especially important with the growing focus on flight shaming in Europe. A 1,000 km high-speed rail link doesn’t just compete with flying on the same corridor, but also with flying to a different destination, which may be much farther away, and thus its effect on decarbonizing transport is much larger than a model of corridor-scale competition with cars and planes predicts.

Aviation emissions

A common argument for high-speed rail in the 2000s was that it would displace on-corridor flights, reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In the American version, this argument awkwardly coexisted with a separate argument for high-speed rail, namely that it would decongest airports and allow more flight slots to faraway destinations. In the 2010s and in this decade, this contradictory thinking fell away – the United States hasn’t built anything, China builds for non-environmentalist reasons, Europe gave up on cross-border rail construction and its activists became more interested in trams-and-bikes urbanism. This is also reflected in research: for all of the hype about high-speed rail as a substitute for aviation, researchers like Giulio Mattioli point out that aviation emissions are dominated by long-distance flights, with <500 km flights comprising only 5% of aviation fuel burn and >4,000 km ones comprising 39%. Activist response to policies like France’s ban on flights competing with <2.5 hour TGVs has been to mock it as the gimmick that it is.

For this and other reasons, on-corridor competition with air travel is no longer considered an important issue. This is now being taken in the direction of arguing against 300 km/h lines; the thinking is that high speed is only really needed to compete with flights, whereas competing with cars requires something else. But that argument misses the importance of off-corridor competition. Passengers don’t just choose what mode to take on a fixed corridor; they also choose where to travel, and transport options matter to that choice.

The limits of ridership models

Ridership models tend to be local. SNCF uses a gravity model, in which the ridership between a pair of cities with populations P_A, P_B, of distance d, is said to be proportional to about P_a^{0.8}P_b^{0.8}/d^2. I’ve used the same in my modeling, which predicts Tokyo-to-province ridership rather well but then severely underpredicts Taiwanese ridership.

The issue is that the model is local: if I live in Berlin and want to go to Munich, the model looks only at what’s between Berlin and Munich, and doesn’t consider that I can go to other cities instead if they’re more convenient to get to. One consequence of this is that the model probably overpredicts ridership in larger milieus than in smaller ones for this reason (the Tokyo resident can go to Osaka but also to Tohoku, etc.). But an equal consequence is that off-corridor competition is global.

The limits of leisure travel

Leisure travel is discretionary, and limited by vacation time. Building new high-speed lines does not mean that the country is offering workers more vacation days. The upshot is that every new line competes off-corridor with other lines, but also with other modes. A tightly integrated national high-speed rail system offers domestic tourism by rail, competing not just with flying on longer corridors like Berlin-Cologne, where the trains take four hours and are unreliable, but also with flying to places that the train doesn’t get to.

This has implications to a Europe-wide system as well. Right now, flights from Northern Europe to Southern Europe are on corridors where rail travel is only viable if you are an environmental martyr, really like 14-hour train trips, or ideally both. High-speed rail would by itself not compete on most of these corridors – those Spanish coastal cities are too far from Northern Europe for a mode other than flying, for one. But it would offer reasonable service to other places in Southern Europe with warm climate. Speeding up the Paris-Nice TGV means Parisians would choose to travel to Nice more and to islands less. Building high-speed rail approaches connecting to the base tunnels across the Alps means Germans, especially Southern Germans, could just go to large Italian cities instead of flying to islands or to Turkey. Even business travel may be affected, through replacement of flights to other continents.