Category: Transportation

Meme Weeding: Costs and Office Productivity

One of the arguments I’ve seen from time to time excusing high construction costs in English-speaking countries is that their salaries are so high, it drags all other costs up. It’s a rather bad excuse, since there is very little correlation between construction costs and GDP per capita globally: he United States and Singapore are both very rich and very expensive to build metros in, but then Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries are also very rich and fairly cheap to build metros in, and the UK is expensive without being especially rich by European standards. But then I’ve more recently seen people in the US and UK try to specialize their argument to professional services productivity, to take into account that this is a sector where London is very strong and the cities of Germany are not. However, even this doesn’t explain construction cost patterns well. The pattern in which the Anglosphere is uniformly bad has to be understood not as a matter of high wages or productivity, but as a matter of the UK and US developing bad practices for somewhat different reasons and the other English-speaking countries imitating them out of cultural cringe.

The issue here is that while London is a global financial center with high office work productivity and a wealth of professional services, this isn’t true of the rest of the Anglosphere with the exception of the United States. Dublin is not a global financial center; Ireland has high GDP per capita but most of it is profits of corporations owned by foreigners, and local incomes average the same as in Italy. Dublin has a large tech industry for its size – American tech companies have hubs there to justify setting their global headquarters in Ireland to take advantage of a mutual loophole in American and Irish tax laws – but programmers are not usually a substitute for the sort of procurement experts, planners, and overseeing civil servants who are relevant for project delivery, and barely are a substitute for the mechanical and civil engineers who design station standards. Toronto is Canada’s financial center, but Canadian banks are not especially important outside Canada, so in that sense it is substantially less important for professional services than Paris.

What connects all of those Anglosphere cities – and also ones not mentioned above, like Sydney, Melbourne, and Auckland, not to mention Singapore and Hong Kong – is that they all have branch offices of British and American consultancy firms, so they’re more visible in their roles as centers of professional services. But that is not about professional services, but about their ties to British and American global corporate cultures. This is relevant to their high costs, not because the presence of a strong professional services industry raises costs, but because those countries all pick up American and British ideas about the superiority of the international consultancy to the state and then implement a project delivery system that seeks to empower such consultancies. As a usually intended consequence, this system also empowers personalist politicians, who get to micromanage those billion-dollar contracts, and would lack the institutional capacity to manage more normal-size contracts, which they would have to outsource to the permanent civil service rather than to their own political staffers.

In fact, the stereotype that high-cost, low-income-by-first-world-standards countries like Ireland, New Zealand, and Canada are hubs of professional services is itself part of the broader problem. Paris is a giant hub of corporate headquarters and professional services. They are not specialized to finance the way London’s companies are, but the banking profession isn’t more in competition for good managers with the public procurement profession than any other professional service. France is not a particularly industrialized country, unlike Germany or Italy; the good jobs there all involve managing other office workers, as in the US and UK. It’s just a different ecosystem of professional services firms from the British and American one, so it’s worse-known to Americans and Brits.

Similarly, Dublin may be a large tech hub due to its tax haven status, but Zurich has Google’s largest foreign office, at least as of the late 2010s. Zurich is also a rather large banking center for its size. Swiss wages and prices are legendarily high, and Switzerland is almost as deindustrialized as the US or France, but this has not driven Swiss infrastructure construction costs up. To the contrary, Switzerland feels at the top of the world, with little need to privatize its rail services or delivery; not being an EU country, it does not fall under the EU open access mandate, and has not imitated it in its intercity rail planning, because from its perspective, it has the best rail network in Europe by traffic and modal split, so it has little reason to imitate British managerial practices (or, for that matter, French speed; Swiss average rail speeds are low).

So the stereotype that high Anglosphere costs come from high professional services productivity, like the myth that Anglosphere countries other than the US and Singapore are exceptionally rich, is false. It persists because it helps people in the US and UK cope: their high costs, in this schema, are not an inferiority that they should fix, but rather a regrettable but livable side effect of superiority. It’s not the only place where this coping exists; I’ve seen Americans excuse their combination of the highest health care costs in the world and the lowest life expectancy in the developed world sensu stricto by appealing to their high wages, an appeal that’s entirely invisible if one looks at the developed world omitting the US (Nordic life expectancy is high with health costs at the EU average).

In truth, high costs in the English-speaking world are not an aspect of superiority – quite to the contrary. They coexist with some other more positive aspects, in the same way that each country or cluster of countries has its own set of social problems, averaging with positive aspects to a reasonable first-world living standard. But they don’t follow from wealth, democracy, or anything else that Americans and Brits are proud of, whether or not it’s even true. They’re a genuine problem, for which the solution must be to, to an extent, de-Anglicize and de-Americanize and instead pick up the better practices of the rest of the developed world.

Quick Note: Commuter Rail Rolling Stock Costs

ETA just published a report on New York rolling stock costs for commuter rail. In the report, we talk about the need to electrify the entire system, and, if there are unelectrified tails (which there shouldn’t be), the solution for them is not more diesel locomotives. For the purposes of this post, I’d instead like to talk about the difficulties of getting some of this information; the rolling stock database that we have at the Transit Costs Project is growing, but is far from complete, and has gaps, with some information including cost missing for critical orders. What I think from the available data is that alternatives to electrification are far more expensive – the one with the most reliable cost data, battery-electric trains (BEMUs), costs close to 2.5 times as much, while dual-mode diesel-electric multiple units (DEMUs) cost less than BEMUs and more than regular electric multiple units (EMUs). But this is based on imperfect data and I’d like to discuss this issue more.

To the point on EMU costs: something is seriously screwed up with some of the orders. There’s that diva effect for large cities that I’ve talked about for years, in which large cities with old systems prefer to buy custom designs, for example the X’Trapolis in Paris, or the Berlin U- and S-Bahn orders. These are the largest orders, so the average cost Europe-wide is pulled up by these cases. In contrast, standard regional EMU orders are more routine and cheaper; two recent FLIRT orders, for Hanover and Bremen, were respectively $110,000/meter of length and $104,000/meter. But even then, there are variations, and Coradia Stream orders vary by a factor of about 2, for reasons that I don’t quite get.

Then BEMUs are not ordered in a large quantity, but when they are, the costs appear high – the database has a $249,000/m order by ÖBB; there’s an even more expensive order for NAH.SH, both FLIRT Akkus. Another fairly large order, for Pfalznetz, does not have cost data anywhere that I can see; Stadler is putting up a technical sheet for it, but not for ÖBB, but then whenever I look up costs for the Pfalznetz Akku I only get the NAH.SH one and I don’t know why.

There’s a Metra Akku order, whose costs are murky, depending on how one counts them. The procurement order lists the cost as $12.635 million for a two-car BEMU set, which is about $250,000/m, but then the option order includes trailer cars at about $2.5 million apiece. A four-car train so formed would only be around $176,000/m, but would also be severely underpowered. The Stadler technical sheet for the Metra Akku lists its power rating as 1 MWh, which is the wrong unit, but could plausibly be a typo for 1 MW; no weight is listed, but the two-car NAH.SH Akku is 96 t – but then the Metra Akku uses a power pack, which may yield somewhat different results, so the exact numbers are unclear, even if the general result that the Metra Akkus are likely to have a power-to-weight ratio in the vicinity of 6 is close enough, and damning enough. In general, American orders sometimes do that, using multiple-unit trains as locomotives with seats and diluting them with unpowered cars, just because their acquisition costs are so high that they can’t run trains with good performance specs (and, given how conservative the schedules are, they don’t think it’s important anyway).

Low Spanish Costs are not About Decentralization

An article by Ben Hopkinson at Works in Progress is talking about what Madrid has been doing right to build subways at such low costs, and is being widely cited. It sounds correct, attributing the success to four different factors, all contrasted with the high-cost UK. The first of these factors, decentralization in Spain compared with its opposite in England, is unfortunately completely wrong (the other three – fast construction, standardized designs, iterative in-house designs – are largely right, with quibbles). Even more unfortunately, it is this mistake that is being cited the most widely in the discussion that I’m following on social media. The mentality, emanating from the UK but also mirrored elsewhere in Europe and in much of the American discourse, is that decentralization is obviously good, so it must be paired with other good things like low Spanish costs. In truth, the UK shares high costs with more decentralized countries, and Spain shares low ones with more centralized ones. The emphasis on decentralization is a distraction, and people should not share such articles without extensive caveats.

The UK and centralization

The UK is simultaneously expensive to build infrastructure in and atypically centralized. There is extensive devolution in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, but it’s asymmetric, as 84% of the population lives in England. Attempts to create symmetric devolution to the Regions of England in the Blair era failed, as there is little identity attached to them, unlike Scotland, Wales, or Northern Ireland. Regional identities do exist in England, but are not neatly slotted at that level of the official regions – Cornwall has a rather strong one but is only a county, the North has a strong one but comprises three official regions, and the Home Counties stretch over parts of multiple regions. Much of this is historic – England was atypically centralized even in the High Middle Ages, with its noble magnates holding discontinuous lands; identities that could form the basis of later decentralization as in France and Spain were weaker.

People in the UK understand that their government isn’t working very well, and focus on this centralization as a culprit; they’re aware of the general discourse from the 1960s onward, associating decentralization with transparency and accountability. After the failure of Blair-era devolution, the Cameron cabinet floated the idea of doing devolution but at lower level, to the metropolitan counties, comprising the main provincial cities, like Greater Manchester or the West Midlands (the county surrounding Birmingham, not the larger official region). Such devolution would probably be good, but is not really the relevant reform, not when London, with its extreme construction costs, already has extensive devolved powers.

But in truth, the extreme construction costs of the UK are mirrored in the other English-speaking countries. In such countries, other than the US, even the cost history of similar, rising sharply in the 1990s and 2000s with the adoption of the more privatized, contractor-centric globalized system of procurement. The English story of devolution is of little importance there – Singapore and Hong Kong are city-states, New Zealand is small enough there is little reason to decentralize there, and Canada and Australia are both highly decentralized to the provinces and states respectively. The OECD fiscal decentralization database has the UK as one of the more centralized governments, with, as of 2022, subnational spending accounting for 9.21% of GDP and 19.7% of overall spending, compared with Spain’s 20.7% and 43.6% respectively – but in Australia the numbers are 17.22% and 46.2%, and in Canada they are 27.8% and 66.5%.

American construction costs have a different history from British ones. For one, London built for the same costs as German and Italian cities in the 1960s and 70s, whereas New York was already spending about four times as much per km at the time. But this, too, is an environment of decentralization of spending; the OECD database doesn’t mention local spending, but if what it includes in state spending is also local spending, then that is 19.07% of American GDP and 48.7% of American government spending.

In contrast, low-cost environments vary in centralization considerably. Spain is one of the most decentralized states in Europe, having implemented a more or less symmetric system in response to Catalan demands for autonomy, but Italy is fairly centralized (13.9% of GDP and 24.8% of government spending are subnational), and Greece and Portugal are very centralized and Chile even more so (2.77%/8.1%). The OECD doesn’t include numbers for Turkey and South Korea so we can merely speculate, but South Korea is centralized, and in Istanbul there are separate municipal and state projects, both cheap.

Centralization and decisionmaking

Centralization of spending is not the same thing as centralization of decisionmaking. This is important context for Nordic decentralization, which features high decentralization of the management of welfare spending and related programs, but more centralized decisionmaking on capital city megaprojects. In Stockholm, both Citybanan and Nya Tunnelbanan were decided by the state. Congestion pricing, in London and New York a purely subnational project, involved state decisions in Stockholm and a Riksdag vote; the Alliance victory in 2006 meant that the revenue would be spent on road construction rather than on public transport.

In a sense, the norm in unitary European states like the Nordic ones, or for that matter France, is that the dominant capital has less autonomy than the provinces, because the state can manage its affairs directly; thus, RATP is a state agency, and until 2021 all police in Paris was part of the state (and the municipal police today has fewer than 10% of the total strength of the force). In fact, on matters of big infrastructure projects, the state has to do so, since the budgets are so large they fall within state purview. Hopkinson’s article complaining that Crossrail and Underground extensions are state projects needs to be understood in that context: Grand Paris Express is a state project, debated nationally with the two main pre-Macron political parties both supporting it but having different ideas of what to do with it, not too different from Crossrail; the smaller capitals of the Nordic states have smaller absolute budgets, but those budgets are comparable relative to population or GDP, and there, again, state decisionmaking is as unavoidable as in London and Paris.

The purest example of local decisionmaking in spending is not Spain but the United States. Subway projects in American cities are driven by cities or occasionally state politicians (the latter especially in New York); the federal government isn’t involved, and FTA and FRA grants are competitive and decided by people who do not build but merely regulate and nudge. This does not create flexibility – to the contrary, the separation between builders and regulators means that the regulators are not informed about the biggest issues facing the builders and come up with ideas that make sense in their heads but not on the ground, while the builders are too timid to try to innovate because of the risk that the regulators won’t approve. With this system, the United States has not seen public-sector innovation in a long while, even before it became ideologically popular to run against the government.

In finding high American costs in the disconnect between those who do and those who oversee, at multiple levels – the agencies are run by an overclass of political appointees and directly-reporting staff rather than by engineers, states have a measure of disconnect from agencies, and the FTA and FRA practice government-by-nudge – we cannot endorse any explanation of high British costs that comes from centralization.

If the policy implications of such an explanation are to devolve further powers to London or a Southeast England agency, then they are likely to backfire, by removing the vestiges of expertise of doers from the British state; the budgets involves in London expansion are too high to be handled at subnational level. Moreover, reduction in costs – the article’s promise of a Crossrail 2, 3, and 4 if costs fall – has no chance of reducing the overall budget; the same budget would just be spent on further tunnels, in the same manner the lower French costs lead to a larger Grand Paris Express program. Germany and Italy in the same schema have less state-centric decisionmaking in their subway expansion, for the simple reason that both countries underbuild, which can be seen in the very low costs per rider – a Berlin with the willingness to build infrastructure of London or Paris would have extended U8 to Märkisches Viertel in the 1990s at the latest.

One possible way this can be done better is if it’s understood in England that decentralization only really works in the sense of metropolitanization in secondary cities, where the projects in question are generally below the pay grade of state ministers or high-level civil servants. In the case of England, this would mean devolution to the metropolitan counties, giving them the powers that Margaret Thatcher instead devolved to the municipalities. But that, by itself, is not going to reduce costs; those devolved governments would still need outside expertise, for which public-sector consultants, in the British case TfL, are necessary, using the unitariness of the state to ensure that the incentives of such public-sector consultants are to do good work and push back against bad ideas rather than to just profit off of the management fees.

The first-line effect

The article tries to argue for decentralization so much it ends up defending an American failure, using the following language:

But the American projects that are self-initiated, self-directed, self-funded, self-approved, and in politically competitive jurisdictions do better. For example, Portland, Oregon’s streetcar was very successful at regenerating the Pearl District’s abandoned warehouses while being cutting-edge in reducing costs. Its first section was built for only £39 million per mile (inflation adjusted), half as much as the global average for tram projects.

To be clear, everything in the above paragraph is wrong. The Portland Streetcar was built for $57 million/4 km in 1995-2001, which is $105.5 million/4 km in 2023 dollars, actually somewhat less than the article says. But $26.5 million/km was, in the 1990s, an unimpressive cost – certainly not half as much as the global average for tram projects. The average for tram projects in France and Germany is around 20 million euros/km right now; in 2000, it was lower. So Portland managed to build one very small line for fairly reasonable costs, but they were not cutting edge; this is a common pattern to Western US cities, in that the first line has reasonable costs and then things explode, even while staying self-funded and self-directed. Often this is a result of overall project size – a small pilot project can be overseen in-house, and then when it is perceived to succeed, the followup is too large for the agency’s scale and then things fall apart. Seattle was building the underground U-Link for $457 million/km in 2023 dollars; the West Seattle extension, with almost no tunneling, is budgeted at $6.7-7.1 billion/6.6 km, which would be a top 10 cost for an undeground line, let alone a mostly elevated one. What has changed in 15 years since the beginning of U-Link isn’t federal involvement, but rather the scope of the program, funded by regional referendum.

The truth is that there’s nothing that can be learned from American projects within living memory except what not to do. There’s always an impulse to look for the ones that aren’t so bad and then imitate them, but they are rare and come from a specific set of circumstances – again, first light rail lines used to be like this and then were invariably followed by cost increases. But the same first-line effect also exists in the reasonable-cost world: the three lowest-cost high-speed rail lines in our database built to full standards (double track, 300+ km/h) are all first lines, namely the Ankara-Konya HST ($8.1 million/km in 2023 PPPs), the LGV Sud-Est ($8.9 million/km), and the Madrid-Seville LAV ($15.4 million/km); Turkey, Spain, and France have subsequently built more high-speed lines at reasonable costs, but not replicated the low costs of their first respective lines.

On learning from everyone

I’ve grown weary of the single case study, in this case Madrid. A single case study can lead to overlearning from the peculiarities of one place, where the right thing to do is look at a number of successes and look at what is common to all of them. Spain is atypically decentralized for a European state and so the article overlearns from it, never mind that similarly cheap countries are much more centralized.

The same overall mistake also permeates the rest of the article. The other three lessons – time is money, trade-offs matter and need to be explicitly considered, and a pipeline of projects enables investment in state capacity, are not bad; much of what is said in them, for example the lack of NIMBY veto power, is also seen in other low-cost environments, and is variable in medium-cost ones like France and Germany. However, the details leave much to be desired.

In particular, one the tradeoffs mentioned is that of standardization of systems, which is then conflated with modernization of systems. The lack of CBTC in Madrid is cited as one way it kept construction costs down, unlike extravagant London; the standardized station designs are said to contrast with more opulent American and British ones. In fact, neither of these stories is correct. Manuel Melis Maynar spoke of Madrid’s lack of automation as one way to keep systems standard, but that was in 2003, and more recently, Madrid has begun automating Line 6, its busiest; for that matter, Northern Europe’s lowest-construction cost city, Nuremberg, has automated trains as well. And standardized stations are not at all spartan; the lack of standardization driving up costs is not about nice architecture, which can be retrofitted rather cheaply like the sculptures and murals that the article mentions positively, but behind-the-scenes designs for individual system components, placement of escalators and elevators, and so on.

The frustrating thing about the article, then, is that it is doing two things, each of which is suspect, the combination of which is just plain bad. The first is that it tries to overlearn from a single famous case. The second is that it isn’t deeply aware of this case; reading the article, I was stricken by how nearly everything it said about Madrid I already knew, whereas quite a lot of what it said about the UK I did not, as if the author was cribbing off the same few reports that everyone in this community has already read and then added original research not about the case study but about Britain.

And then the discourse, unfortunately, is not about the things in the article that are right – the introduction in lessons 2-4 into how the civil service in Madrid drives projects forward – but about the addition of the point about centralization, which is not right. Going forward, reformers in the UK need far better knowledge of how the low- and medium-construction cost world looks, both deeper and broader than is on display here.

Commuter Rail to Staten Island

A debate in my Discord channel about trains between Manhattan and Staten Island clarified to me why it’s so important that, in the event there is ever rail service there, it should use large commuter trains rather than smaller subway stations. The tradeoff is always that the longer trains used on commuter services lead to higher station construction costs than the smaller trains used on captive subway lines. However, the more difficult the tunnel construction is, and the fewer stations there are, the smaller the cost of bigger trains is. This argues in favor of commuter trains across the New York Harbor, and generally on other difficult water or mountain crossings.

When costing how much expansive commuter rail crayon is, like my Assume Normal Costs map, I have not had a hard time figuring out the station costs. The reason is that the station costs on commuter rail, done right, are fairly close to subway station costs, done wrong. As we find in the New York construction cost report, Second Avenue Subway’s 72nd and 86th Street stations were built about twice as large as necessary, and with deep-mined caverns. If you’re building a subway with 180 m long trains under Second Avenue, then mining 300-400 m long stations is an extravagance. If you’re building a regional rail tunnel under city center, and the surface stations are largely capable of 300 m long trains or can be so upgraded, then it’s normal. Thus, a cost figure of about $700 million per station is not a bad first-order estimate in city center, or even $1 billion in the CBD; outside the center, even large tunneled stations should cost less.

The cost above can be produced, for example, by setting the Union Square and Fulton Street stations at a bit less than $1 billion each (let’s say, $1.5 billion each, with each colored line contributing half), and a deep station under St. George at $500 million, totaling $2 billion. The 15 km of tunnel are then doable for $3 billion at costs not far below current New York tunneling costs. Don’t get me wrong, it still requires cost control policies on procurement and systems, but relative to what this includes, it’s not outlandish.

This, in turn, also helps explain the concept of regional rail tunnels. These are, in our database, consistently more expensive than metros in the same city; compare for example RER with Métro construction costs, or London Underground extensions with Crossrail, or especially the Munich U- and S-Bahn. The reason is that the concept of regional rail tunneling is to only build the hard parts, under city center, and then use existing surface lines farther out. For the same reason, the stations can be made big – there are fewer of them, for example six on the original Munich S-Bahn and three on the second trunk line under construction whereas the Munich U-Bahn lines have between 13 and 27, which means that the cost of bigger stations is reduced compared with the benefit of higher capacity.

This mode is then appropriate whenever there is good reason to build a critical line with relatively few stations. This can be because it’s a short connection between terminals, the usual case of most RER and S-Bahn lines; in the United States, the Center City Commuter Connection is such an example, and so is the North-South Rail Link if it is built. This can also be because it’s an express line parallel to slower lines, like the RER A. But it can also be because it doesn’t need as many stations because it crosses water, like any route serving Staten Island.

The flip side is that whenever many stations are required on an urban rail tunnel, it becomes more important to keep costs down by, potentially, shrinking the station footprint through using shorter trains. In small enough cities, as is the case in some of the Italian examples discussed in that case, like Brescia and Turin, it’s even possible to build very short station platforms and compensate by running driverless trains very frequently, producing an intermediate-capacity system. In larger cities, this trick is less viable, but sometimes there are corridors where there is no alternative to a frequent-stop urban tunnel, such as Utica in New York, and then, regional rail loses value. But in the case of Staten Island, to the contrary, commuter rail is the most valuable option.

Quick Note: Kathy Hochul and Eric Adams Want New York to Be Worse at Building Infrastructure

Progressive design-build just passed. This project delivery system brings New York in full into the globalized system of procurement, which has led to extreme cost increases in the United Kingdom, Canada, and other English-speaking countries, making them unable to build any urban transit megaprojects. Previously, New York had most of the misfeatures of this system, largely through convergent evolution, but due to slowness in adapting outside ideas, the state took until now, with extensive push from Adams’ orbit, for which Adams is now taking credit, to align. Any progress in cost control through controlling project scope will now be wasted on the procurement problems caused by this delivery method.

What is progressive design-build?

Progressive design-build is a variant on design-build. There is some divergence between New York terminology and rest-of-world terminology; for people who know the latter, progressive design-build is approximately what the rest of the world calls design-build.

To give more detail, designing and constructing a piece of infrastructure, say a single subway station, are two different tasks. In the traditional system of procurement, the public client contracts the design with one firm, and then bids it out to a different firm for construction; this is called design-bid-build. All low-construction cost subway systems that we are aware of use a variant of design-bid-build, but two key features are required to make it work: sufficient in-house supervision capacity since the agency needs to oversee both the design and the build contracts, and flexibility to permit the build contractors to make small changes to the design based on spot prices of materials and labor or meter-scale geological discoveries. The exact details of both in-house capacity and flexibility differ by country; for example, Turkey codifies the latter by having the design contract only cover 60% design, and bundling going from 60% to 100% design with the build contract. Despite the success of the system in low-construction cost environments, it is unpopular among the global, especially English-speaking, firms, because it is essentially client-centric, relying on high competence levels in the public sector to work.

To deal with the facts that large global firms think they are better than the public sector, and that the English-speaking world prefers its public sector to be drowned in a bathtub, there are alternative, contractor-centric systems of project delivery. The standard one in the globalized system is called design-build or design-and-build, and simply means that the same contractor does both. This means less public-facing friction between designers and builders, and more friction that’s hidden from public view. Less in-house capacity is required, and the contracts grow larger, an independent feature of the globalized system. As the Swedish case explains in the section on the traditional and globalized systems, globalized Swedish contracts go up to $300-500 million per contract (and Swedish costs, once extremely low, are these days only medium-low); in New York, contracts for Second Avenue Subway Phase 2 are already in the $1-2 billion range.

In New York, the system is somewhat complicated by the text of legacy rules on competitive bidding, which outright forbid a company from portraying itself as doing both design and construction. It took recent changes to legalize the Turkish system of bundling the two contracts differently; this changed system is what is called design-build in New York and is used for Second Avenue Subway Phase 2, even though there are still separate design and construction contracts, and is even called design-build in Turkey.

Unfortunately, New York did not stop at this, let’s call it, des-bid-ign-build system. Adams and Hochul want to be sure to wreck state capacity. Thus, they’ve pushed for progressive design-build, which is close to what the rest of the world calls design-build. More precisely, the design contractor makes a build bid at the end of the design phase, and is presumed to become the build contractor, but if the price is too high, there’s an escape clause and then it becomes essentially design-bid-build.

The globalized system that led to a cost explosion in the UK and Canada in the 1990s and 2000s from reasonable to strong candidates for second worst in the world (after the US) is now coming to New York, which already has a head start in high construction costs due to other problems. It’s a win-win for political appointees and cronies, and they clearly matter more than the people of the city and state of New York.

We Have Northeast Corridor Runtimes

After finally looking at the options, we have a main low-investment proposal; the writeup will appear soon (optimistically this month, pessimistically next month). Here is the timetable for the fastest intercity trains:

Boston 0:00
Providence 0:23
New Haven 1:04
Stamford 1:30
New York 1:56 (arrival)
New York 1:59 (departure)
Newark 2:07
Philadelphia 2:46
Wilmington 3:00
Baltimore 3:32
Washington 3:55

This timetable incorporates schedule padding, of 4% on the Providence-New Haven section (dedicated to high-speed trains except at the north end with marginal commuter traffic) and 7% on the others. All station stops except New York take 1 minute, and the times above except that for Boston denote arrival time, not departure time.

This includes some nonnegotiable investments into reliability and capacity, such as switch upgrades within footprint at the major stations to raise speeds from 10 miles an hour to around 50 km/h and grade separations of some rail junctions near New York and Philadelphia; this post describes the main ones and is largely still valid. As far as big deviations from the existing Northeast Corridor right-of-way go, there’s only one: the bypass between Kingston and New Haven, saving around 27 minutes of trip time. None of the New Haven Line bypasses and curve easements on the webtool map has made it, except at Cos Cob Bridge, which should be turned from two short, sharp curves into one wider curve as it is replaced.

The menu of options of what to do with the corridor further, with speed impacts, is as follows:

  • If the other long non-shared sections are timetabled with 4% and not 7% padding – New Haven-Stamford and New Brunswick-Perryville – then this saves, respectively, 43 and 93 seconds. But I am uncomfortable with this little timetable padding when these sections are directly adjacent to complex commuter rail track-sharing arrangements around New York and in Maryland.
  • Restoring the Back Bay stop costs 107 seconds. Restoring the Route 128 stop costs 187 seconds. These and all subsequent figures include padding.
  • There are a bunch of 1,746 m radius curves between the Canton Viaduct (which is very difficult to move) and Mansfield, all short and without difficult terrain or property on their inside; easing all of them to allow 320 km/h cruise speed saves 63 seconds.
  • A New London stop for local intercity trains, in the middle of high-speed territory, costs 3:58; this should be padded to 5 minutes to space trains correctly to Boston, under a service pattern where out of every three trains going up to New Haven every 30 minutes, one runs express to Boston, one runs local, and one goes up to Hartford and Springfield.
  • A rather destructive Milford curve easement saves 22 seconds (with 7% pad, not 4%), at the cost of four entire condo buildings near the station, 20 single-family houses, and most of Green Apartments; we do not recommend this even in a high-investment scenario due to the small time saving.
  • A curve easement in Stratford taking some back space near the Walmart would by itself save 8 seconds, but the saving grows if adjacent curve fixes are conducted, for example, if the Milford curve easement is included, the saving is not 8 but 14 seconds, with intercity trains going at 240 km/h.
  • A bypass complex for the curves of Bridgeport and Fairfield, including a tunnel under the Pequonnock, saves 2:54. The same bypass raises the time saving of the above Stratford curve by another 11 seconds, so combined they are 3:13, and the Milford easement would cut another 28 seconds.
  • Trains can skip Stamford, saving 2:15.
  • A destructive bypass of Darien would save 2:14, with trains running at 250 km/h, with around 300 properties taken, about as many as on the eight times as long Kingston-New Haven bypass. This figure assumes that trains continue to stop at Stamford. If the bypass is combined with skipping Stamford on express trains, then then are an extra 11 seconds saved.
  • A bypass of Greenwich and Port Chester’s tight curves saves 63 seconds, and also changes the way intercity trains have to be timetabled with express commuter trains; whereas the default option without this bypass requires express trains to run as today and local trains to make all stops, the bypass forces express trains to stop at a rebuilt Greenwich station to be overtaken by intercity trains that use the bypass.
  • A series of curve easements at Metuchen, not included in the plan, saves around 6 seconds and is not included.
  • Trains could stop at Trenton, at the cost of 3:52 minutes. This could potentially be padded to 5 minutes to space trains south of Philadelphia correctly, if a train in three diverts at Philadelphia to the Keystone corridor.
  • Trains could bypass Wilmington. On the current alignment, it only saves 1:44 due to sharp curves at both ends of the station, but if a bypass alignment near I-95 and the freight bypass is built, then trains would save about 3:20 compared with stopping trains.
  • A bypass of BWI or realignment, including moving the station and the access road and parking garage, would save 15 seconds.

Our Rolling Stock Database Draft is Out

Here is a link.

As mentioned in the writeup, this database is still incomplete, in systemic ways that matter to the analysis. In particular, European metros show a diva effect in which Paris and Berlin have higher costs than the rest, and the database has more trainsets from them and fewer from cities where costs are lower, like Madrid, due to data availability. (For the same reason, I would not trust the database on European tramways until we add more items.)

Help Us Write More Construction Cost Cases

At the Transit Costs Project, we’re planning to return to writing more infrastructure construction costs cases, and we need help to improve our coverage to new places – potentially, your help. See job ad here.

How many positions are you hiring for?

This number depends on the applications we get, but there will be multiple hires.

What kind of cases are you interested in?

Cases studying construction costs for urban rail in a specific city or group of cities; so far we’ve done rapid transit projects (commuter rail counts), but we will look at proposals that look at adjacent issues, for example mass expansion of light rail if it is at sufficient scale to qualify as a megaproject. We’re not going to be interested in highway-only or highway-focused studies, but a public transport-focused report could still talk about a contemporary highway megaproject in the same place to give more context – for example, at the same time that it built more than 100 km of new metro in a decade, Madrid also built motorway tunnels, and this may be relevant to understanding its decisionmaking, engineering practices, and contracting practices.

As we say in the job ad, you should be familiar with our existing cases, which can be read here. This doesn’t mean you need to memorize them (I have not memorized the one I wrote myself, let alone the others). But they should give some guidance about what issues we’re interested in seeing in each case: a sketch of the history of urban rail in the city, an explanation of the decisionmaking that led to the project, a description of the ongoing discourse about it informed by local opinions on how things should be done, engineering drawings, and similar issues leading to a synthesis of what works and what doesn’t.

Do the cases need to agree with the program focusing on decisionmaking, project delivery, and so on?

They need to be on-topic but absolutely do not need to agree with us. I’m fairly hardline against certain procurement elements that we call the globalized system in the cases, such as large contracts and design-build delivery, but also if you think I’m wrong and set out to find a case showing that design-build has actually worked and improved things, that’s entirely on-topic. Marco Chitti came to my attention after he vociferously disagreed with me on Twitter about private competition in intercity rail in Italy.

Which places are you interested in seeing reports for?

We’d like to have a wide variety of examples. So far we’ve done two American cases (Boston and New York), plus Italy, Stockholm, and Istanbul. Potentially, any example of urban rail megaproject elsewhere qualifies; that said, all other things being equal, we would prefer environments that are different from all of those, such as medium-cost places (like France or Germany), Asian examples of any kind, Latin American examples (cheap like Santo Domingo or Santiago, or more expensive like Brazilian cities), the United Kingdom with its relatively recent cost explosion, and so on.

This also, frustratingly to applicants, means that we’re going to hire based on who else we’re going to hire. What this means is that if we decide to hire three people, and then we narrow the shortlist to five good applicants with good proposals for a Paris case and then two more with good proposals for Tokyo and Santo Domingo cases, we’re not going to do two Paris cases.

What connections do I need for the interviews?

Any. You don’t need to have a list of 20 names of people to talk to in advance, but we would like to see evidence that you can get to this many interviews. This can come from connections with local advocates, politicians, civil servants, academics, contractors, union organizers, journalists, agency heads, engineers, or policy experts. Interviewees often naturally suggest other people to interview or documents to read, whose authors are then natural interview subjects; this in our experience has included both disgruntled planners eager to publicize the failures of the projects they’ve been involved in and planners who think their superiors are doing good work and would like to publicize their agencies’ successes.

I think I have enough knowledge and connections in multiple countries and can do two cases. What do I do?

Talk to us; it’s likely we’ll only be able to make you an offer for a single case, but you never know.

(Update) Where is the job?

We work fully remotely. I met Elif in person two years into the Transit Costs Project and Marco even later.

TGV Imitators: Learning the Wrong Lessons From the Right Places

I talked last time about how high-speed rail in Texas is stuck in part because of how it learned the wrong lessons from the Shinkansen. That post talks about several different problems briefly, and here I’d like to develop one specific issue I see recur in a bunch of different cases, not all in transportation: learning what managers in a successful case say is how things should run, rather than how the successful case is actually run. In transportation, the most glaring case of learning the wrong lessons is not about the Shinkansen but about the TGV, whose success relies on elements that SNCF management was never comfortable with and that are the exact opposite of what has been exported elsewhere, leading countries that learned too much from France, like Spain, to have inferior outcomes. This also generalizes to other issues, such as economic development, leading to isomorphic mimicry.

The issue is that the TGV is, unambiguously, a success. It has produced a system with high intercity rail ridership; in Europe, only Switzerland has unambiguously more passenger-km/capita (Austria is a near-tie, and the Netherlands doesn’t report this data). It has done so financially sustainably, with low construction costs and, therefore, operating profits capable of paying back construction costs, even though the newer lines have lower rates of return than the original LGV Sud-Est.

This success brought in imitators, comprising mostly countries that looked up to France in the 1990s and 2000s; Germany never built such a system, having always looked down on it. In the 2010s and 20s, the imitation ceased, partly due to saturation (Spain, Italy, and Belgium already had their own systems), partly because the mediocre economic growth of France reduced its soft power, and partly because the political mood in Europe shifted from state-built infrastructure projects to on-rail private competition. I wrote three years ago about the different national traditions of building high-speed rail, but here it’s best to look not at the features of the TGV today but at those of 15 years ago:

  • High average speed, averaging around 230 km/h between Paris and Marseille; this was the highest in the world until China built out its own system, slightly faster than the Shinkansen and much faster than the German, Korean, and Taiwanese systems. Under-construction lines that have opened since have been even faster, reaching 260 km/h between Paris and Bordeaux.
  • Construction on cut-and-fill, with passenger-only lines with steep grades (a 300 km/h train can climb 3.5% grades just fine), limited use of viaducts and tunnels, and extensive public outreach including land swap deals with farmers and overcompensation of landowners in order to reduce NIMBY animosity.
  • Direct service to the centers of major cities, using classical lines for the last few kilometers into Paris and most other major cities; cities far away from the network, such as Toulouse and Nice, are served as well, on classical lines with the trains often spending hours at low speed in addition to their high-speed sections.
  • Extensive branching: every city of note has its own trains to Paris.
  • Little seat turnover: trains from Paris to Lyon do not continue to Marseille and trains from Paris to Marseille do not stop at Lyon, in contrast with the Shinkansen or ICE, which rely on seat turnover and multiple major-city stops on the same train.
  • Open platforms: passengers can get on the platform with no security theater or ticket gates, and only have to show their ticket on the train to a conductor. This has changed since, and now the platforms are increasingly gated, though there is still no security theater.
  • No fare differentiation: all trains have the same TGV brand, and charge similar fares as the few remaining slow intercity trains, on average much lower than on the Shinkansen. Fares do depend on airline-style buckets including when and how one books a train, and on service class, but there is no premium for speed or separation into high- and low-fare trains. This has also changed since, as SNCF has sought to imitate low-cost airlines and split the trains into the high-fare InOui brand and low-fare OuiGo brand, differentiated in that OuiGo sometimes doesn’t go into traditional city stations but only into suburban ones like Marne-la-Vallée, 25 minutes from Paris by RER. However, InOui and OuiGo are still not differentiated by speed.

SNCF management’s own beliefs on how trains should operate clearly differ from how TGVs actually did operate in the 1990s and 2000s, when the system was the pride of Europe. Evidently, they have introduced fare differentiation in the form of the InOui-OuiGo distinction, and ticket-gated the platforms. The aim of OuiGo was to imitate low-cost airlines, one of whose features is service at peripheral airports like Beauvais or Stansted, hence the use of peripheral train stations. However, even then, SNCF has shown some flexibility: it is inconvenient when a train unloads 1,000 passengers at an RER station, most of whom are visitors to the region and do not have a Navigo card and therefore must queue at ticket vending machines just to connect; therefore, OuiGo has been shifting to the traditional Parisian terminals.

However, the imitators have never gotten the full package outlined above. They’ve made some changes, generally in the direction of how SNCF management and the consultants who come from that milieu think trains ought to run, which is more like an airline. The preference for direct trains and no seat turnover has been adopted into Spain and Italy, and the use of classical lines to go off-corridor has been adopted as well, not just into standard-gauge imitators but also into broad-gauge Spain, using some variable-gauge trains. In contrast, the lack of fare differentiation by speed did not make it to Spain. Fast trains charge higher fares than slow trains, and before the opening of the market to private competition, RENFE ran seven different fare/speed classes on the Madrid-Barcelona lines, with separate tickets.

Ridership, as a result, was disappointing in Spain and Italy. The TGV had around 100 million annual passengers before the Great Recession, and is somewhat above that level today, thanks to the opening of additional lines. The AVE system has never been close to that. The high-speed trains in Italy, a country with about the same population as France, have been well short of the TGV’s ridership as well. Relative to metro area size, ridership in both countries on the city pairs for which I can find data was around half as high as on the TGV. Private competition has partly fixed the problem on the strongest corridors, but nationwide ridership in Spain and Italy remains deficient.

The issue in Spain in particular is that while the construction efficiency is even better than in France, management bought what France said trains should be like and not what French trains actually are. The French rail network is not the dictatorship of SNCF management. Management has to jostle with other interest groups, such as labor, NIMBY landowners, socialist politicians, (right-)liberal politicians, and EU regulators. It hates all of those groups for different reasons and can find legitimate reasons why each of those groups is obstructionist, and yet at least some of those groups are evidently keeping it honest with its affordable fares and limited market segmentation (and never by speed).

More generally, when learning from other places, it’s crucial not just to invite a few of their managers to your country to act as consultants. As familiar as they are with their own success, they still have their prejudices of how things ought to work, which are often not how they actually do work. Experience in the country in question is crucial; if you represent a peripheral country, you need to not just rely on consultants from a success case but also send your own people there to live as locals and get local impressions of how things work (or don’t), so that you can get what the success case actually is.

Why Texas High-Speed Rail is Stuck

I’ve been asked on social media why the US can’t build a Shinkansen-style network, with a specific emphasis on Texas. There is an ongoing project, called Texas Central, connecting Dallas with Houston, using Shinkansen technology; the planning is fairly advanced but the project is unfunded and predicted to cost $33.6 billion for a little less than 400 km of route in easy terrain. Amtrak is interested, but it doesn’t seem to be a top priority for it. I gave the skeet-length answer centering costs, blaming, “Farm politics, prior commitments, right-wing populism, and Japanese history.” These all help explain why the project is stuck, despite using technology that in its home country was a success.

How Texas Central is to be constructed

The line is planned to run between Dallas and Houston, but the Houston station is not in Downtown Houston, in order to avoid construction in the built-up area. There are rail corridors into city center, but Texas Central does not want to use them; the concept, based on the Shinkansen, does not permit sharing tracks with legacy railways, and as it developed in the 2010s, it did not want to modify the system for that. Sharing the right-of-way without sharing tracks is possible, but requires new construction within the built-up area. To avoid spending this money, the Texas Central plan is for the Houston station to be built at the intersection of I-610 and US 290, 9 km from city center. Between the cities, the line is not going into intermediate urban areas; a Brazos Valley stop is planned as a beet field station 40 km east of College Station.

Despite all this cost cutting, the line is also planned to run on viaducts. This is in line with construction norms on the newer Shinkansen lines as well as in the rest of Asia; in Europe, high-speed rail outside tunnels runs at-grade or on earthworks, and viaducts are only used for river crossings. As a result, on lines with few tunnels, construction is usually more expensive in Asia than in Europe, with some notable exceptions like High Speed 2 or HSL Zuid. Heavily-tunneled lines sometimes exhibit the opposite, since Japanese standards permit narrower tunnels (more precisely, a slightly wider tunnel accommodates two tracks whereas elsewhere the norm is that each track goes in a separate bore); this works because the Shinkansen trainsets are more strongly pressurized than TGVs or ICEs and also have specially designed noses to reduce tunnel boom.

But in an environment like Texas’s, the recent norm of all-elevated construction drives up costs. This is how, in an easy construction environment, costs have blown to around $87 million/km. For one, recently-opened Shinkansen extensions have cost less than this even while being maybe half or even more in tunnel (that said, the Tsuruga extension that opened earlier this year cost much more). But it’s not the only reason; the construction method interacts poorly with the state’s politics and with implicit and explicit promises made too early.

Japanese history and turnkey projects

The Shinkansen is successful within Japan, and has spawned imitators and attempts at importing the technology wholesale. The imitators have often succeeded on their own terms, like the TGV and the KTX. The attempts at importing the technology wholesale, less so.

The issue here is twofold. First, state railways that behave responsibly at home can be unreasonable abroad. SNCF is a great example, running the TGV at a consistent but low profit to keep ticket fares affordable domestically but then extracting maximum surplus as a monopolist charging premium fares on Eurostar and Thalys. Japan National Railways, now the JR group, is much the same. Domestically, it is constrained by not just implicit expectations of providing a social service (albeit profitably) but also local institutions that push back against some of management’s thinking about how things ought to be. With SNCF, it’s most visible in how management wants to run the railway like an airline, but is circumscribed by expectations such as open platforms, whereas on Eurostar it is freer to force passengers to wait until the equivalent of an airline gate opens. With JR, it’s a matter of rigidity: the Shinkansen does run through to classical lines on the Mini-Shinkansen, but it’s considered a compromise, which is not to be tolerated in the idealized export product.

And second, the history of Taiwan High-Speed Rail left everyone feeling a little dirty, and led Japan to react by insisting on total turnkey products. THSR, unlike the contemporary KTX or the later CRH network, was not run on the basis of dirigistic tech transfers but on that of buying imported products. To ensure competition, Taiwan insisted on designing the infrastructure to accommodate both Japanese and European trains; for example, the tunnels were built to the larger European standard. There were two bidders, the Japanese one (JRs do not compete with one another for export orders) and a Franco-German one called the Eurotrain, coupling lighter TGV coaches to the stronger motor of the ICE 2.

The choice between the two bids was mired in the corruption typical of 1990s Taiwan. The Taiwanese government relied on external financing, and Japan offered financing just to get the built-operate-transfer consortium allied with the Eurotrain to switch to the Shinkansen. Meetings with European and Japanese politicians hinged on other scandals, such as the one for the frigate purchase. Taiwan eventually chose the Shinkansen, using a variant of the 700 Series called the 700T, but the Eurotrain consortium sued alleging the choice was improperly made, and was awarded a small amount of damages including covering the development cost of the train.

The upshot is that in the last 20 years, a foreign country buying Shinkansen tech has had to buy the entire package. This includes not just the trainsets, which are genuinely better than their European and Chinese counterparts, but also construction standards (at this point all-elevated) and signaling (DS-ATC rather than the more standard ETCS or its Chinese derivative CTCS). It includes the exact specifications of the train, unmodified for the local loading gauge; in India, this means that the turnkey Shinkansen used on the Mumbai-Ahmedabad line is not only on standard gauge rather than broad gauge, but also uses the dimensions of the Shinkansen, 3.36 m wide trains with five-abreast seating, rather than those of Indian commuter lines, 3.66 m with six-abreast seating. It’s unreasonably rigid and yet Japan finds buyers who think that this lets them have a system as successful as the Shinkansen, rather than one component of it, not making the adjustments for local needs that Japan itself made from French and German technology in the 1950s and 60s when it developed the Shinkansen in the first place.

Prior commitments

Texas Central began as a private consortium; JR Central saw it as a way of selling an internationalized eight-car version of the N700 Series, called the N700-I. It developed over the 2010s, as Republican governors were canceling intercity rail projects that they associated with the Obama administration, including one high-speed one (Florida) and two low-speed ones (Ohio, Wisconsin). As a result, it made commitments to remain a private-sector firm, to entice conservative politicians in Texas.

One of the commitments was to minimize farmland takings. This was never a formal commitment, but one of the selling points of the all-elevated setup is that farmers can drive tractors underneath the viaducts, and only the land directly beneath the structures needs to be purchased. At-grade construction splits plots; in France, this is resolved through land swap agreements and overcompensation of farmers by 30%, but this has not yet been done in the United States or in Japan.

Regular readers of this blog, as well as people familiar with the literature on cost overruns, will recognize the problem as one of early commitment and lock-in. The system was defined early as one with features including very limited land takings and no need for land swaps, no interface with existing railroads to the point that the Houston terminal is not central, and promises of external funding and guidance by JR Central. This circumscribed the project and made it difficult to switch gears as the funding situation changed and Amtrak got more interested, for one.

Farm politics and right-wing populism

Despite the promises of private-sector action and limited takings, not everyone was happy. Texas Central is still a train; in a state with the politics of Texas, enough people are against that on principle. The issue of takings looms large, and features heavily in the communications of Texans Against High-Speed Rail.

The combination of this politics and prior commitments made by Texas Central has been especially toxic to the project. Under American law, private railroads are allowed to expropriate land for construction, and only the federal government, not the states, is allowed to expropriate railroads. Texas Central intended to use this provision to assemble land for its right-of-way, leading to lawsuits about whether it can legally be defined as a railroad, since it doesn’t yet operate as one.

Throughout the 2010s, Governor Greg Abbott supported the project, on the grounds that he’s in favor of private-sector involvement in infrastructure and Texas Central is private-sector. But his ability to support it has always been circumscribed by this political opposition from the right. The judicial system ruled in favor of Texas Central, but state legislative sessions trying to pass laws in support of the project were delayed, and relying on Abbott meant not seeking federal funds.

This also means that there is no chance of redesigning the project to reduce its cost by running at-grade. There is too little political capital to do so, due to the premature commitments made nearly 15 years ago. California has been able to resile from its initial promises to Central Valley farmers to use legacy rail corridors rather than carve a new right-of-way, but even then the last-minute route redesign toward the latter, in order to avoid running at 350 km/h on viaducts through unserved towns, are route compromises. But California has only been able to do so because it’s a one-party state and the Central Valley farmers are Republicans; it has not been able to modify early commitments in case of conflict with Democrats or nonpartisan interest groups. In Texas, the state is likewise run by a single party, but the farmers and the opponents in general are members of the party. Thus, right-wing populism and farmer politics, while claiming opposition to government waste, are forcing the project to be more wasteful with money, in order to marginally reduce the obtrusiveness of the state in managing eminent domain; they would not accept land swaps except in a situation of extreme political weakness.

Abbott is not a popularist (in the sense of European Christian democracy, not the unrelated American term). Popularist leaders like the string of corrupt Democrazia Cristiana leaders of the First Italian Republic, or the more moderate CDU leaders here including Angela Merkel, have sometimes enacted policy that had more support on the center-left than on the right, if they thought it was necessary to maintain their own power and enact the popular will. This way, Angela Merkel, personally opposed to gay marriage, finally permitted a vote on it in 2017, knowing it would pass, because if she didn’t, then SPD would use it in the election campaign and could win on it. Republican governors in the United States do not do that, except in very blue states, like Maryland or Massachusetts. If they moderate too much, they face a risk of losing primary elections, and this is even truer of state legislators; moderation is still not going to get them Democratic support for anything. The result is what’s called majority-of-the-majority: in practice, a majority party will not take action unless it has the support of a majority of the caucus, rather than just a handful of moderate members allying with the other party. This is not the milieu for experimenting with land swaps, which are a far more visible instantiation of state power than populist farmers are ever comfortable with.

Is Texas High-Speed Rail doomed?

I don’t know. I think it’s notable that the funding the project is receiving this year is perfunctory, for planning but not construction. The promised private funding seems dead, and Pete Buttigieg’s promise of funding one project to showcase that there can be high-speed rail in the United States seems focused on funding 25% of Brightline West (which needs 50%), connecting Las Vegas with Rancho Cucamonga, 60 km east of Downtown Los Angeles.

That said, planning is still continuing, as if to keep this project fresh for when more funding materializes. This is not the era of perfunctory $8 billion bills like that of the Obama stimulus; Seth Moulton is proposing $205 billion, and presumably this would include Texas Central, depending on the political environment of 2025 and the spending priorities then.

But I’m still pessimistic. High-speed rail could work between Dallas and Houston. It’s a reasonably strong corridor, and is growing over time, even if it is not as superlative as Tokyo-Osaka or Boston-New York-Washington. But I’m not sure it’s worth it at $33.6 billion, and I don’t think anyone with the power to fund it thinks it is either. Those costs are not just what high-speed rail is supposed to cost; this is a premium of a factor of at least 2, and likely 3, over what can be done with efficient at-grade construction, of the kind that the project unfortunately ruled out over the 2010s.