Category: Transportation
When are Express Trains Warranted? Part 1: Regional Rail
The Regional Plan Association has a detailed regional rail proposal out. It’s the same one from the Fourth Plan that I’ve criticized here, on Streetsblog, and on Curbed, but with more explanation for how the service should run, with stopping patterns and frequency.
There are some good aspects there, like a section about the importance of electrification and multiple-units, though it stops short of calling for full electrification and replacement of locomotives with EMUs; the focus on off-peak frequency is also welcome. There are also bad ones, like the claim on p. 32 that it’s difficult to impossible to provide through-running using the existing Penn Station tracks used by New Jersey Transit. Foster Nichols told me that there are some difficulties with grades but they should be doable if NJT commits to an all-EMU fleet, and reminded me that the ARC studies judged through-running using these station tracks and new tunnels feasible. What he expressed to me as a difficulty turned into a near-impossibility in the report, in order to justify the $7 billion Penn Station South project.
But I want to focus on one particularly bad aspect of the proposal: the stopping patterns. The RPA is proposing three distinct stopping patterns on pp. 32-45, with three separate brands: Metro, in the city and some inner suburbs; Regional Express (RX), in the suburbs; and Trans-Regional Limited (TRL), providing intercity service to New Haven, Ronkonkoma, Philadelphia, and other major stations outside the built-up area. Even as the plan talks about the importance of making sure suburban trains serve urban stations in order to give them frequent service through overlay, the stopping patterns suggest the opposite.
The proposal involves trains from the suburbs expressing through most city stations (including the infill) even on two-track lines, like the Port Washington Branch. Metro trains would make all current stops plus additional infill to Bayside, and RX trains would only serve Willets Point, Flushing, and Bayside, and then run from Bayside to Port Washington. A similar pattern happens from Jamaica to Valley Stream, resulting in the Babylon, Long Beach, and Far Rockaway Branches all having to share a track pair. Moreover, the RX trains may themselves be divided into local and express trains, for example on the New Haven Line.
This is bad practice. On a two-track line, there’s no real reason to skip a handful of inner stations just to guarantee the outer ones express service. If anything, the need to schedule trains on the same tracks would lead to more fragile timetables, requiring more schedule padding. My analysis from 2.5 years ago found that the LIRR Main Line is padded 32% and the Babylon Branch is padded 19%: that is, the scheduled travel time on the Main Line (up to Ronkonkoma) is 32% more than the travel time imputed from line speed limits and current fleet acceleration performance. Patrick O’Hara, who the RPA study even quotes as a source elsewhere, investigated this issue separately, looking at best-case timetables, and found that some runs are padded 40-50%.
In Switzerland, trains are padded 7%, and I’m told that in Japan, after the Amagasaki accident showcased the safety problems of overly precise schedules, pads are about 5%. Express trains and locals mixed on the same line make it harder to maintain tight enough reliability for low schedule padding; this way, on an all-local line, trip times may match those of express trains on mixed lines, as they do in my analysis above. The best analogy is the RER B going to the north: the express trains are 4 minutes faster than the local trains, skipping 9 stops. The stop penalty on the RER B is higher, closer to 7 minutes over 9 stops, but the shared tracks with local trains (and with the RER D between Gare du Nord and Chatelet-Les Halles) means that there’s a fudge factor in the schedule, so it’s not possible to reliably do better than 4 minutes, and the trains end up visibly crawling on the mainline.
The reader familiar with technical transit advocacy in the Bay Area may interject, what about Caltrain? Clem Tillier has no trouble proposing timetables mixing local trains, express trains, and high-speed rail on the same track pair with timed overtakes, and a 7% pad. So why am I down on this concept in New York? The answer is line complexity. Caltrain is a simple two-track back-and-forth, and HSR is generally more punctual than legacy trains because it runs for long stretches on high-quality dedicated tracks, so it’s unlikely to introduce new variability to the line. In contrast, the RPA plan for regional rail in New York involves extensive branching, so that train schedules depend on trains elsewhere on the line. In this case, introducing more complexity through local/express sharing is likely to require more schedule padding, erasing the speed advantage.
In general, my questions to establish guidelines for where express trains are warranted are,
- How long is the line, measured in the number of stations? More stations encourage more express trains, because more stations can be skipped. In higher speed zones, stop penalties are higher, but at equal line length measured in km, higher speeds and fewer local stations reduce the benefit of express trains.
- How frequent are trains? At low frequency, local stations need more frequency, so express runs are less useful. At very high frequency, there may not be capacity for different stopping patterns unless the line has four tracks. On a two-track line, the optimum frequency for a local/express alternation is about 6-12 trains per hour, 3-6 local and 3-6 express, with a single mid-line overtake. Multiple overtakes on a single line are possible, but more fragile, so they are a bad idea except in special circumstances.
- What is the demand for travel? Express trains work best if there are a few distinguished stations at regular intervals, or else if the line is long and there is strong demand at the far end; if the inner stations are very strong then it’s more important to give them higher local frequency. When performing this analysis, it’s important to make sure station ridership levels reflect genuine demand rather than service. For example, Caltrain express stops have high ridership in large part because of their better service, not nearby density, as shown in Clem Tillier’s analysis. The LIRR Main Line has far more ridership at Mineola and Hicksville than the other stations on the trunk and also far more service, but Patrick explains that this is due to better highway access, so it’s genuine demand and not just a reflection of better service.
Caltrain needs express service because it has about 20 stations between San Francisco and San Jose, depending on the amount of infill and anti-infill desired; a target frequency of 8-10 peak trains per hour; and strong demand on the outer stations, especially for reverse-peak trips. In New York, none of the two-track lines meets the same standard. Some are too short, such as the Port Washington Branch. Others are too busy, such as the Harlem Line, Babylon Branch, and LIRR Main Line. Yet others have too much demand clustering in the inner stations, such as the Erie lines and the North Jersey Coast Line.
On four-track lines, it’s always easier to run express service. This doesn’t mean it should always be run: the upper New Haven Line is a strong candidate for relegating all commuter trains to the local tracks, making all stops, giving the express tracks to intercity trains. The Northeast Corridor Line in New Jersey is a dicey example: past Rahway there are four tracks, but intercity trains could run at very high speeds, making track sharing on the express tracks difficult. My service pattern map has express trains skipping Edison and Metuchen, but it’s just two stations, making it better to just run local beyond Rahway to clear the express tracks for high-speed rail.
It’s tempting to draw proposals involving intense metro-style regional rail service only serving the urban and inner-suburban stations; I’ve had to argue against such plans on some MBTA lines. The problem is that trains from the outer suburbs are still necessary and still going to pass through the inner suburbs, and in most cases they might as well stop at those stations, which need the frequency more than the outer suburbs need the few minutes of speedup.
Buses in Brooklyn: Frequency is Freedom, but 15 Minutes isn’t Frequency
I’ve recently started working part-time on a project for the Marron Institute at NYU about bus restructuring in Brooklyn; at the end of this summer, I expect to release a proposal for service upgrades and a new map. I’m working on this with Marron scholar Eric Goldwyn, who is funded by the TWU, which is worried that ridership collapse may lead to service cuts and job losses, but I’m funded directly by Marron and not by the union.
Some of what’s likely to appear in the final report should be familiar to regular readers of this blog, or of Human Transit, or of the work TransitCenter has been doing. As I wrote in Curbed earlier this year, bus operating costs in New York are unusually high because the buses are slow, as the main operating costs of buses scale with service-hours and not service-km. Thus, it’s important to speed up the buses, which allows either providing higher frequency at the same cost or the same frequency at lower cost. A bus speedup should include systemwide off-board fare collection and all-door boarding (common in the German-speaking world but also in San Francisco), wider stop spacing, dedicated lanes wherever there is room, and signal priority at intersections; the TWU is an enthusiastic proponent of off-board fare collection, for reasons of driver safety rather than bus speed.
While bus speedups are critical, their impact is not as Earth-shattering as it might appear on paper. New York’s SBS routes have all of the above features except signal priority, and do save considerable time, but are still slow city buses at the end of the day. Brooklyn has two SBS routes: the B44 on Nostrand, averaging 15 km/h (local B44: 11.3), and the B46 on Utica, averaging 13.7 (local B46 on the shared stretch: 10.8). Their speed premiums over the local routes are toward the high end citywide, but are still 30%, not the 200% speed premium the subway enjoys. Moreover, the speed premium over non-SBS limited routes is 15-20%; put another way, between a third and a half of the speed premium comes purely from skipping some stops.
I mentioned in my last post that I met Carlos Daganzo at Berkeley. Daganzo was responsible for the Barcelona bus redesign, Nova Xarxa; you can read some details on Human Transit and follow links to the papers from there. The guiding principles, based on my conversation with Daganzo and on reading his papers on the subject, are,
- Barcelona has high, relatively uniform density of people and jobs, so there’s no need for buses to hit one CBD. Brooklyn has about the same average residential density as Barcelona, but has a prominent CBD at one corner, but as this CBD is amply served by the subway, it’s fine for buses to form a mesh within the subway’s gaps.
- Nova Xarxa involved widening the stop spacing in Barcelona from less than 200 meters to three stops per km, or a stop every 300-350 meters; Daganzo recommends even wider stop spacing.
- While Barcelona’s street network is strictly gridded, the buses don’t run straight along the grid, but rather detour to serve key destinations such as metro stops. This is an important consideration for Brooklyn, where there are several distinct grids, and where subway stops don’t always serve the same cross street, unlike in Manhattan, where crosstown routes on most two-way streets are assured to intersect every north-south subway line.
- The percentage of transfers skyrocketed after the network was implemented, standing at 26% at the end of 2015, with the model predicting eventual growth to 44%, up from 11% before the redesign.
- The network was simplified to have 28 trunk routes, the least frequent running every 8 minutes off-peak.
The high off-peak frequency in Barcelona is a notable departure from Jarrett Walker’s American network redesigns; the evidence in Houston appears mixed – ridership is about flat, compared with declines elsewhere in the country – but the percentage of transfers does not seem to have risen. Jarrett says in his book that having a bus come every 10 minutes means “almost show-up-and-go frequency” with no need to look at schedules, but his work in Houston and more recently in San Jose involves routes running every 15 minutes.
Moreover, unreliable traffic in these car-dominated cities, in which giving buses dedicated lanes is politically too difficult, means that the buses can’t reliably run on a schedule, so the buses do not run on a clockface schedule, instead aiming to maintain relatively even headways. (In contrast, in Vancouver, a less congested street network, with priority for all traffic on the east-west main streets on the West Side, ensures that the buses on Broadway and 4th Avenue do run on a fixed schedule, and the 4th Avenue buses have a 12-minute takt that I still remember four years after having left the city.)
I’ve talked about the importance of radial networks in my posts about scale-variant transit. I specifically mentioned the problem with the 15-minute standard as too loose; given a choice between an untimed 15-minute network and a timed 30-minute network, the latter may well be more flexible. However, if the buses come every 5 minutes, the situation changes profoundly. Daganzo’s ridership models have no transfer penalty or waiting penalty, since the buses come so frequently. The models the MTA uses in New York have a linear penalty, with passengers perceiving waiting or transferring time on the subway as equivalent to 1.75 times in-motion time; bus waiting is likely to be worse, since bus stops are exposed to the elements, but if the average wait time is 2.5 minutes then even with a hefty penalty it’s secondary to in-vehicle travel time (about 18 minutes on the average unlinked bus trip in New York).
Unfortunately, that high frequently does not exist on even a single bus line in Brooklyn. Here is a table I created from NYCT ridership figures and timetables, listing peak, reverse-peak, and midday frequencies. Five routes have better than 10-minute midday frequency: the B12, the B6 and B35 limited buses, and the B44 and B46 SBSes, running every 7, 7.5, 8, 8, and 6 minutes respectively. In addition, the B41 limited and B103 have a bus every 9 and 7.5 minutes respectively on their trunks, but the B41 branches on its outer end with 18-minute frequencies per branch and the B103 short-turns half the buses. Another 14 routes run every 10 minutes off-peak, counting locals and limiteds separately.
The problem comes from the split into local and limited runs on the busiest buses. The mixture of stopping patterns makes it impossible to have even headways; at the limited stops, the expected headway in the worst case is that of the more frequent of the two routes, often about 10 minutes. The average ridership-weighted speed of Brooklyn buses is 10.75 km/h. An able-bodied passenger walking at 6 km/h with a 10-minute head start over a bus can walk 2.25 km before being overtaken, which can easily grow to 3 km taking into account walking time to and from bus stops. To prevent such situations, it’s important to run buses much more frequently than every 10 minutes, with consistent stopping patterns.
This does not mean that NYCT should stop running limited buses. On the contrary: it should stop running locals. The SBS stop spacing, every 800 meters on the B44 and B46, is too wide, missing some crossing buses such as the B100 (see map). However, the spacing on the B35 limited is every 400 meters, enough to hit crossing buses even when they run on one-way pairs on widely-spaced avenues. The question of how much time is saved by skipping a stop is difficult – not only do different Brooklyn buses give different answers, all lower than in Manhattan, but also the B35 gives different answers in different directions. A time cost of 30 seconds per stop appears like a good placeholder, but is at the higher end for Brooklyn.
The question of how many stops to add to SBS on the B44 and B46 has several potential answers, at the tight end going down to 400 meters between stops. At 400 meters between stops, the B44 would average 13 km/h and the B46 12 km/h. At the wide end, the B44 and B46 would gain stops at major intersections: on the B44 this means Avenue Z, R, J, Beverly, Eastern Parkway, Dean, Halsey, and Myrtle, for an average interstation of 570 meters and an average speed of 14 km/h, and on the B46 this means Avenue U, Fillmore, St. John’s, and Dean, for an average interstation of 610 meters an average speed of 13 km/h. Consolidating all buses into the same stopping pattern permits about a bus every 2.5 minutes peak and every 4 minutes off-peak on both routes.
On the other routes, consolidating local and limited routes required tradeoffs and cannibalizing some peak frequency to serve the off-peak. While it may seem dangerous to limit peak capacity, there are two big banks that can be used to boost off-peak frequency: time savings from faster trips, and greater regularity from consolidating stop patterns. The B82 is an extremely peaky route, running 7 limited and 10 local buses at the peak and just 6 buses (all local) for a four-hour midday period; but there is a prolonged afternoon shoulder starting shortly after noon with another 6 limited buses. Some peak buses have to be more crowded than others just because of schedule irregularity coming from having two distinct stop patterns. Consolidating to about 15 buses per hour peak and 10 off-peak, cannibalizing some frequency from the peak and some from the shoulders, should be about neutral on service-hours without any additional increase in speed.
The sixth post on this blog, in 2011, linked to frequent maps of Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Bronx buses, using a 10-minute standard. There has been some movement in the top buses since 2011 – for one, the B41 route, once in the top 10 citywide, has crashed and is now 16th – but not so much that the old map is obsolete. A good place to start would be to get the top routes from a 10-minute standard to a 6-minute standard or better, using speed increases, rationalization of the edges of the network, and cannibalization of weak or subway-duplicating buses to boost frequency.
I Gave a Pair of Talks in the Bay Area About Regional Rail
Thanks to the invitation of Adina Levin’s Friends of Caltrain, I came to the Bay Area for a few days, giving two talks about regional rail best industry practices in front of Friends of Caltrain, Seamless Bay Area, and SF Transit Riders. My schedule was packed, including a meeting with a world-leading expert in transportation systems in which I learned about the Barcelona bus service changes; a Q&A about both general and Bay Area-specific issues for Bay City Beacon subscribers; and several other meetings.
My two talks were in Mountain View and San Francisco, and used the same slides, with minor corrections. Here are the slides I used in San Francisco; I consolidated the pauses so that each page is a slide rather than a line in a slide. This was also covered in Streetsblog, which gives more background and gives some quotes from what I said during the presentation, not printed in the slides.
Unlike in my NYU presentation last year, I did not include a proposed map of service improvements. The reason is that in the Bay Area, there are more questions than answers about which service should use which piece of infrastructure. This makes fantasy maps dangerous, as they tend to fix people onto one particular service pattern, which may prove suboptimal based on decisions made elsewhere in the system. This is not a huge problem in New York or Boston, where the alignments naturally follow where the stub-end commuter lines are, with only a few questions; but in the Bay Area, the situation is more delicate, because big questions like “can/should Caltrain get a trans-Bay connection from San Francisco to Oakland and the East Bay?” can go either way.
The role of redevelopment in the area is especially important. Unlike New York, Paris, or other big transit cities, San Francisco does not have much density outside the city proper, Oakland, or Berkeley. Moreover, there is extensive job sprawl in Silicon Valley, which contributes to a last-mile problem for public transit; usually first-mile access is a bigger problem and high-end jobs tend to cluster near train stations. But conversely, the high incomes in the Bay Area and the growth of the tech industry mean that everywhere TOD is permitted in the core and the suburbs, it will be built. This impacts decisions about the total size of transit investment.
At present-day development patterns, San Francisco proper really doesn’t need more rail construction except Geary and the Downtown Extension, depending on construction costs. But general upzoning makes Geary worth it even at $1 billion per km and opens up the possibilities of four-tracking Caltrain within the city (which means expanding some tunnels), giving the N-Judah dedicated tracks and a dedicated tunnel under Mission, and extending the Central Subway to the north and northwest. The land use in the Richmond and Sunset Districts today supports a fair amount of transit, but not new subways if there’s no cost control.
Joe Lhota Admits Defrauding the Public About Costs
The Wall Street Journal is reporting a bombshell story about New York’s subway station renovation program. The MTA had a budget of $936 million for renovating 32 subway stations, but nearly the entire budget is exhausted after the MTA has spent it on only 19 stations. These renovations do not include accessibility, which New York is lagging on. I’m interviewing people in the disability rights community about New York’s problems in this area, but the smoking gun about Lhota is not that issue, on which he is no worse than anyone else. Rather, it’s that Lhota hid the fact of the cost overrun from the MTA board. Per the Journal:
On Monday, Carl Weisbrod, a commissioner who represents New York City, said the program was “ill-conceived,” and that he is glad it has come to an end.
“I don’t know when the MTA management realized that the program had run out of money but it would’ve been helpful to have informed the board when this matter was under discussion,” he said.
Mr. Lhota said he was aware of the increased costs last year, but he chose not to mention it until now. “I didn’t think it was relevant to the debate,” he said.
An alternative way to phrase Lhota’s own words is that he is concealing critical information from the public relevant to public spending priorities. In other words, he is defrauding the public when it comes to costs. Previously he had been merely making excuses for high construction costs (e.g. saying New York, founded in the 17th century, is old, and thus naturally has higher costs than cities founded in the Middle Ages or even in Antiquity). But now it turns out that he’s not only trying to deflect criticism, but is actively putting obstacles in front of board members, journalists, and ordinary citizens who want to discuss MTA capital expansion.
Absent democratic mechanisms for oversight of the state, the state will not engage in cost-effective projects. We know this, because the part of public policy most insulated from public criticism, the military and security in general, is the most bloated. The US is wasting a trillion and a half dollars on the F-35, and allies like Israel are wasting money buying this jet from the US military industry. It’s hard to question the costs when overconfident military commanders say “this is necessary for national security.” The intelligence community is even worse, with self-serving slogans like “our successes are private and our failures are public.”
Evidently, facing criticism over costs, domestic agencies portray their projects as necessary rather than useful, hence the weak claims that Gateway is required to avoid shutting down rail service across the Hudson. My specific criticism of the argument that Gateway is required is that the study recommending long-term shutdowns of the existing tunnels did not even attempt to provide a comparative cost of maintaining the tunnels on nights and weekends as is done today. An informed public can more easily demand an end to bad investments, and specific interest groups can highlight how they are harmed by bad spending: the Journal article mentions disability rights advocates demanding that the MTA instead spend money on putting elevators at stations to make them accessible to people in wheelchairs.
The station renovations are especially at risk of being canceled if an informed public finds their costs offensive. The benefits include better maintenance standards, but those are almost self-evidently useful but not necessary. Activists can complain about costs or demand that the money be spent elsewhere.
In Astoria, activists complain that the MTA is renovating stations at a cost of $40 million per station without even installing elevators for accessibility. In London, the cost of the Step-Free Access program is £200 million for 13 stations, or about $20 million per station, and in Paris, where only Metro Line 14 and the RER A and B are accessible, disability rights activists estimate the cost of making the remaining 300 stations accessible at €4-6 billion. This is profoundly different from the situation with tunneling costs, where London has a large premium over Paris and New York has a large premium over London. It is likely that New York can install elevators at the same cost of its top two European peers if it puts its mind to it.
However, such investments are not possible under the current leadership. If a hack like Lhota stays in charge of the MTA, there is not going to be transparency about contracting and about costs, which means that small overruns can blow out of proportion before anyone notices. In such an environment, high costs are not surprising. If New York State is interested in good, cost-effective transit, it will get rid of Lhota and replace him with an experienced transit manager with a good history regarding cost control and respect for the democratic process.
New York-Area Governments to Form a Coordinated Transportation Planning Agency
Governors Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) and Phil Murphy (D-NJ) announced that they would cooperate to form a Lower Hudson Transportation Association, or LHTA, to supersede what they described as antiquated 20th-century thinking and bring the region’s transportation into the 21st century. LHTA would absorb the transportation functions of Port Authority, which senior New York state officials speaking on condition of anonymity called “irredeemably corrupt,” and coordinate planning across the region. Negotiations with the state of Connecticut are ongoing; according to planners in New Jersey, the timing for the announcement was intended to reassure people that despite the lack of federal funding for Gateway, a lower-cost modified version of the project would go forward.
But the first order of business for LHTA is not Gateway. The governors’ announcement mentioned that LHTA would begin by integrating the schedules and fares throughout the region. By 2019, passengers will be able to transfer between the New York City Subway and PATH for free, and connect from the subway to the AirTrain JFK paying only incremental fare. Engineering studies for removing the false walls between PATH and F and M subway platforms are about to begin.
Commuter rail fare integration is also on the table. Currently, the fare on the subway is a flat $2.75. On commuter rail, it is higher even within New York City: a trip between Jamaica Station and New York Penn Station, both served by the E line of the subway, is $10.25 peak or $7.50 off-peak on the Long Island Railroad (LIRR). The governors announced that they would follow the lead of European transportation associations, such as Ile-de-France Mobilités in Paris, and eliminate this discrepancy under LHTA governance, which also includes revenue sharing across agencies. Detailed studies are ongoing, but in 2019, LHTA will cut commuter rail fares within New York City and several inner cities within New Jersey, including Newark, to be the same as the subway fare, with free transfers.
Simultaneously, LHTA will develop a plan for schedule integration, coordinating New Jersey Transit, the LIRR, Metro-North, and suburban bus agencies. In order to make it easier for suburban passengers to reach commuter rail stations, the suburban buses will be timed to just meet the commuter trains, with a single ticket valid for the entire journey. Today most passengers in the suburbs drive to the commuter rail stations, but the most desirable park-and-rides are full. Moreover, the states would like to redevelop some of the park-and-rides as transit-oriented development, building dense housing and retail right next to the stations in order to encourage more ridership.
Moreover, the LIRR and New Jersey Transit’s commuter trains currently stub-end at Penn Station in opposite directions. LHTA is studying French and German models for through-running, in which trains from one suburb run through to the other instead of terminating at city center. Planners within several agencies explain that the systems on the Long Island and New Jersey side are currently incompatible – for example, LIRR trains are electrified with a third rail whereas New Jersey Transit trains are electrified with high-voltage catenary – but reorganizing these systems for compatibility can be done in a few years, well before the Gateway project opens.
In response to a question about the cost of this reorganization, one of the planners cited the Swiss slogan, “electronics before concrete.” Per the planner, electronics include systems, electrification, and software, all of which are quite cheap to install, whereas pouring concrete on new tunnels and viaducts is costly. The planner gave the example of resignaling on the subway: the New York Times pegged the cost of modernizing subway signals at $20 billion, and this could increase capacity on most lines by 25 to 50 percent. But the cost of building the entire subway from scratch at today’s costs in New York is likely to run up to $200 billion.
But while the immediate priorities involve fare and schedule integration, LHTA’s main focus is the Gateway project. There are only two commuter rail tracks between New Jersey and Penn Station, and they are full, running a train every 2.5 minutes at rush hour. The Gateway project would add two more tracks, doubling capacity. The currently projected cost for the tunnel is $13 billion, but sources within New York said that this number can be brought down significantly through better coordination between the agencies involved. This way, it could be funded entirely out of local and state contributions, which add up to $5.5 billion. When pressed on this matter, officials and planners refused to say outright whether they expect $5.5 billion to be enough to cover the tunnel, but some made remarks suggesting it would be plausible.
Previous estimates for the costs of Gateway adding up to $30 billion include substantial extra scope that is not necessary. Sources on both sides of the Hudson report that the main impetus for the formation of LHTA was to coordinate schedules in a way that would make this extra scope no longer necessary. “With last decade’s ARC, there was a cavern under Penn Station to let trains reverse direction and go back to New Jersey,” explains one of the planners; ARC was a separate attempt to add tracks to the Hudson rail crossing to Penn Station, which Republican Governor Chris Christie canceled in 2010 shortly after his election. “With Gateway, there was the plan for Penn Station South, condemning an entire Manhattan block for the station for $7 billion. With the plans we’re developing with LHTA we don’t need either Penn South or a cavern to let trains run between stations.”
Moreover, some planners suggested reactivating plans to connect Penn Station and Grand Central as part of Gateway. They refused to name a cost estimate, but suggested that at the low end it could be funded out of already-committed state money. Under this plan, there would be through-running between not just New Jersey Transit and the LIRR but also Metro-North, serving the northern suburbs of New York and Connecticut. Sources at the Connecticut Department of Transportation said they are studying the plan and have reservations but are overall positive about it, matching the reports of sources within New York, who believe that Connecticut DOT will join LHTA within six months.
Officials are optimistic about the effects of LHTA on the region both privately and publicly. The joint press release referred to the metro area as “a single region, in which decisions made in far apart areas of New York nonetheless affect people in New Jersey and vice versa.” Planners in both states cited examples of friends and family in the other state who they would visit more often if transportation options were better. With better regional rail integration, they said, people would take more trips, improving regional connectivity, and take fewer trips by car, reducing traffic congestion and pollution.
More on Weekend Service Changes and Redundancy
I’m visiting New York again, and the subway is noticeably deteriorating in speed and frequency. But it’s not the speed I’d like to discuss (it’s been covered in the media, both by me and by others) – it’s the weekend service changes. With its 24/7 subway service, New York relies on selective closures of line segments on nights and weekends for maintenance. Expressions like “the D is running on the F and the F is running on the D” are well-known to regular subway riders. However, I don’t think the way the MTA is choosing which lines to shut down every weekend is optimal. I wrote about how different subway lines can be used to substitute for each other in Boston last year; this year, I encountered a big change in New York that, while not as destructive as what I saw in Boston in November, was avoidable.
The trip itself was between Central Harlem and Inwood. I’m staying in Harlem near the 2 and 3 trains, and was visiting friends in Inwood near the A. The most direct path would have been to walk to 125th and St. Nicholas to take the A, but this was blocked because the A was not running north of 168th. The second best option would have been to ride the 2 or 3 to 96th and change wrong-way to the 1, but this was also blocked since the 2 and 3 were not running at all on their Harlem trunk line. The route I took was to walk to 125th and St. Nicholas to take the A up to the 1, changing at 168th Street, an inconvenient transfer involving an elevator (the 1 is deep and only elevator-accessible at 168th).
It was not an especially egregious change. The trip took around 45 minutes and was all-rail; without the changes, it would have been about half an hour. In Boston, the subway shutdowns forced me onto multiple buses in mixed traffic, and a trip that should have taken 40 minutes ended up taking maybe an hour and a half. However, the extra transfer penalty and the difficulty of finding a good all-rail route are real.
In the post about Boston, I argued that even in relatively sparse rail networks, like Boston’s, rail lines are redundant with one another. In New York, this needs no argument, judging by conversations with many New Yorkers, even ones who aren’t railfans, who recognize the extent of redundancy in the system. It would be useful to design weekend service changes to take advantage of this redundancy and not shut down multiple lines that could substitute for each other. In the case of last weekend, if a full shutdown of the 2 and 3 between 96th Street and the Bronx was unavoidable, then the other north-south lines through Upper Manhattan should not be shut down.
Thus, the first principle I’d like to propose for weekend shutdowns is, if one line is shut for repairs, then parallel lines should be fully open. This should cover shutdowns as well as one-way running, in which one direction is only served by express trains and passengers wishing to access local stations are told to ride an express trains and change to a local train going in the opposite direction.
In fact, given the extent of redundancy in the core, I would propose that if local service is shut down in one direction, then it should be shut down in the other direction as well. Backtracking is cumbersome and rarely worth it: stop spacing is often close enough that walking from the express stop is faster, and in Manhattan it’s usually easier to just go on a parallel line instead.
Then, to compensate for loss of service on a line that’s being closed for repairs, there should be more service on parallel lines. Subway service changes in New York, called general orders, or GOs, fall under a labor agreement in which train operators and conductors are still paid for the time they would’ve had to work if service had run normally. The MTA should negotiate a change in which those drivers and conductors can be redistributed to nearby subway lines without this counting as overtime. If express trains on a route are closed, then there should be more local service, and if a trunk line is closed, as the 2 and 3 were last weekend, then there should be more service on parallel lines (in this case, the 1, 4, 5, A, and D) to absorb the extra ridership. With reduced service, the trains can get quite busy, more so than the crowding guidelines indicate, if my weekend trips are any indication.
Finally, the MTA should build crossovers and switches to enable more efficient single-tracking. This is unlikely to work on four-track lines, since trains would have to cross three tracks to get around a work zone, but on two-track lines, including the L, the 7, and most tails outside the Manhattan core, it would be useful, especially on lines that use island platforms rather than side platforms. On the newest lines, which use bored tunnel, it’s easy to do maintenance on one track without disturbing the other track, as long as there are crossovers at regular locations. On the older lines the situation is the opposite: trains need to slow near work zones, unless some hard barriers are built between parallel tracks, but installing new crossovers is relatively easy. More shutdowns may be required to install such switches, but the subsequent benefits to making weekend trackwork easier are substantial.
Off-Peak Subway Service in New York
New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer has a new report out about the poor state of off-peak subway service. It’s a topic I’ve talked about a lot here (e.g. here), but there’s a big difference in focus: I normally talk about midday service for efficiency reasons, and as far as I remember this is the bulk of what I discussed with report author Adam Forman, but the report itself highlights non-traditional commutes in the early morning and evening:
| Traditional commuters (depart 7-9 am) |
Early morning commuters (depart 5-7 am) |
|
| Median Income | $42,300 | $35,000 |
| Bachelor’s Degree or Higher (Age 25+) | 52% | 31% |
| Foreign Born | 47% | 56% |
| Person of Color | 64% | 78% |
| Work in Healthcare, Hospitality, Retail, Food Services, or Cultural industries | 36% | 40% |
| Growth in the Last Quarter Century | 17% | 39% |
Citywide, there are 1,888,000 commuters leaving to go to work between 7 and 9 am, and 711,000 leaving between 5 and 7. The latter group has to contend with much worse subway frequencies: the report has a table (chart 8) detailing the reduction in frequency, which is typically about half. The report does not say so, but an additional hurdle facing early-morning commuters is that some express trains run local: for example, the northbound A train only starts running express at 6 in the morning, forcing a substantial minority of early morning commuters to ride what’s effectively the C train.
The one saving grace in the early morning, not mentioned in the report, is that buses aren’t as slow. For example, the B6 limited takes 1:11 end-to-end at 6 am, compared with 1:26 at rush hour. However, this is a 16 km route, so even the faster speed at 6 am corresponds to an average speed of 13.7 km/h, which is not competitive with a bicycle. Moreover, in practice, slow circumferentials like the B6 are used in situations where transferring between subway lines is not viable or convenient, such as early in the morning, when subway frequencies are low; this means that far from a substitute for slower rush hour buses, early morning buses have to substitute for much faster subway lines.
The report has charts about subway and bus service by the time the route begins operation. As expected, there’s a prominent morning peak, and a slightly less prominent afternoon peak. In the evening there’s a dropoff: 350 subway runs begin around 9 pm compared with just under 600 subway runs in the morning peak, a reduction of 40%. For buses, the dropoff is larger: about 1,700 versus 3,700, a 54% reduction. The most worrying trend is that the buses peak at the same time as the subway in the afternoon, starting at 4:30 or so; in reality, buses are often a first-mile rather than a last-mile connector, which means that people returning from work typically ride the subway and then the bus, so we should expect buses to peak slightly later than trains, and drop off in the evening at a slower rate. Instead, what we see is the same peak time and a faster dropoff.
Some of this can be attributed to operating costs. Buses have lower fixed costs than trains and higher marginal costs, so the economics of running them at less busy times are weaker than those of running trains. However, in reality buses and trains in New York run as a combined system; running just the subway in the evening but not the buses means that people can’t come home from work if they live in neighborhoods not connected to the subway.
Evening frequencies on many routes are low enough that they are almost certainly negatively impacting ridership. Some individual subway routes run every 11-12 minutes in the evening, including the B, C, D, W, and 5; in the every 9-10 minutes category are the 2, 3, A, F, J, N, and R. Other than the J, these are all branches sharing track with other lines, but they branch off the trunks and recombine. A Bronx-bound rider on the 2 and 3 can only ride the 2, and a Flatbush-bound rider can choose between the 2 and a 3-to-5 transfer, both of which are infrequent. Without timed transfers, the effective frequency as experienced by the rider remains low, about every 10 minutes.
This isn’t how other top metro systems work – in Paris the trains on Metro Line 9, not one of the top lines in the system, come every 7 minutes at 10 or 11 at night. The RER is less frequent on individual branches, but the individual branch points are all outside the city except on the RER C, sometimes well outside it. Other than on the RER C heading west, the branch points are at worst 6 km outside the center (at Vincennes), more typically 10 km (such as Nanterre and Bourg-la-Reine), and at best 16-18 km out (Aulnay and Villeneuve-Saint-Georges). In New York, the R and W branch at Lexington and 60th, a little more than 2 km outside Times Square, and the Q and N branch even earlier; the A-B-C-D branch and recombine at Columbus Circle, and branch again at 145th Street, 8.5 km out of Port Authority. This branching affects a majority of bedroom communities in the city, including almost the entire Bronx, much of Upper Manhattan, all of Queens except the 7, and Central and Southern Brooklyn.
To my knowledge, there is no public study of the effect of frequency on ridership. Occasionally there are ridership screens that incorporate it, but the examples I know are designed around the needs of specific project studies. There can be rules of thumb about frequency at different scales (the smaller the scale, the higher the minimum frequency is), but without more careful analysis, I can only bring up some best industry practices. It does not seem common to run metro trains every 10 minutes in the evening. On the Piccadilly line, there are 22 northbound trains departing Leicester Square between 9 and 10 in the evening, of which 19 go all the way to Cockfosters. On the Central line, 24 trains depart Oxford Circus eastbound, 9 going to Epping (in Essex, 31 km from Oxford Circus and 27 km from Bank), and another 13 serving Newbury Park, in outer East London.
Evening service also has one more complication: it serves several distinct markets. There are commuters working non-traditional hours, themselves split into shift workers and professionals who work late (I spoke to several Manhattan lawyers who told me that they work from 10 in the morning to 8 in the evening). There are tourists and local leisure travelers, some coming late from work after dinner and some coming from a non-work destination. Non-work trips don’t always have the same centers as work trips: in London, non-work trips are dominated by the West End, with little contribution from the City, whereas in New York, presumably Lower Manhattan punches below its weight while Union Square punches above its weight. New York already takes care of non-work trips in the evening, with high frequencies on the 1, L, and 42nd Street Shuttle (“GS” in chart 8), but its frequency guidelines are unfriendly to commuters who are working late.
Construction Costs and Experience
The most persistent criticism I have heard of my writings on construction costs, coming from YIMBY Princeton, is the importance of gradual expertise and experience. Against my claim that Americans build subways for higher costs than the rest of the world due to poor management practices, regulations, and procurement, and scope creep, YIMBY Princeton says that high costs are a result and not a cause of the rarity of American subway investment. I believe that high US costs are endogenous and therefore the US is reluctant to fund rail transit; he believes that disinterest in transit is endogenous and if the US were willing to build more rail lines, then construction costs would naturally go down through economies of scale and steady accumulation of project management expertise. I promised last year that I would go over his argument more carefully, and am going to do so in this post.
The obvious difficulty with this debate is that we agree there is negative correlation between construction costs and the extent of construction, and disagree on causation. Wikipedia lists 55 countries with metro systems, with a handful more with under-construction metros, but this is not enough of a dataset for large-n studies. There are too many control variables – for example, it’s easier to build the first subway line than the tenth, which reduces the proper comparisons for New York to a handful of large cities. Instead, the only real way to figure out what causes what is to rely on a handful of natural experiments.
I can come up with a number of natural experiments. One is ambiguous about causation: the role of poor project management in the high construction costs in Boston and Paris. The others all suggest that high costs are endogenous to the US, rather than unwillingness to build subway tunnels. These include the history of construction costs in New York, London, and Paris in the 1930s; the construction costs in London today; and the history of construction costs in Seoul from the 1970s to the present.
Project management
I know of two overpriced rail extensions blamed explicitly on poor project management: the Green Line Extension in Boston, and Grand Paris Express. As I explained in CityLab a few months ago, the GLX was budgeted at $3 billion for just 7.5 km of light rail trench in preexisting open cuts, but the MBTA cut this to $1.1 billion in actual construction plus $1.2 billion in rolling stock and sunk costs through hiring a more experienced project manager. In Paris, one of the reasons the Cour des Comptes cited in its report about the cost overrun is lack of experience in managing such a large project; as a result, the 200 km system, with 160 km underground, is now up to €35 billion.
The problem is that even with better cost control, Boston’s construction remains pricey. At $150 million per km, GLX is expensive for a line in a preexisting right-of-way, and not far behind GPX’s $220 million per km for an 80% underground network. While both Boston and Paris can expect future construction to be cheaper if they apply the lessons of GLX and GPX cost overruns, their absolute costs remain different, with Boston spending more per unit than Paris. At best this is neutral between my explanation and that of YIMBY Princeton.
Construction costs, dieselpunk edition
New York’s subway construction costs have risen since the start. In 1900-4, the First Subway cost $32 million for 22 km of subway and 1 km of viaduct (namely, the 125th Street viaduct on today’s 1 train), and another $3 million for 9 km. In today’s money, this is $39 million per km underground and $9 million per km elevated. JRTR has some statistics for the Dual Contracts, built in the 1910s and early 20s, and the IND, built in the 1930s. The Dual Contracts cost $366 million, equivalent to around $8 billion today; the total route-length added was about 180 km, of which 70 km was underground, consistent with a cost of about $80 million per underground km. Then the IND cost $815 million, equivalent to about $14 billion today, for 97 route-km, practically all underground, or about $140 million per km.
The projected cost of Second Avenue Subway kept rising. In 1929 the projection was $86 million, or about $1.2 billion in today’s money, or $90 million per km; this was before the IND cost overruns materialized (at a time of general deflation). In 1939 it was up to $249 million, or $4.2 billion today, about $320 million per km; by 1949, it had crept up to $500 million, or $5 billion today and $390 million per km. Put another way, WW2-era America, a country that had just built massive public works in the Depression as well as the war, including the IND and Chicago’s two subway lines through the Loop, was already projecting a higher per km cost than is routine in nearly the entire world today. Moreover, the plan was to build Second Avenue Subway cut-and-cover, a technique that is cheaper today than the deep boring typical of comparable infill subways in the first world.
I have less data than I’d like for other cities’ construction costs in the interwar era, but where they exist, they are a fraction of New York’s. The London Underground extension to Cockfosters in the Depression cost £4m for 12 km, 60% underground, per Wikipedia. In today’s money it’s $45 million per underground km. In Paris, there was little growth in real costs between 1913 and 1930: according to a presentation by Pascal Désabres, construction costs in today’s money in both 1913 and 1930 were about €23 million per km, or about $29 million per km.
London’s mounting costs
In the 1930s, London built an Underground extension for $45 million per km. After the war, it could no longer do so. According to numbers in the Financial Times, the Victoria line cost £4.5 million per km in the 1960s, all underground, which is about $110 million per km in today’s money, while the Jubilee line, built in the 1970s, cost about $250 million per km.
The Victoria and Jubilee lines were more complex projects than the Cockfosters extension, going under older Underground lines. The Jubilee line also included the construction of a transfer station with the Northern and Bakerloo lines at Charing Cross, whereas previously they only connected at the next two stations, Embankment and Waterloo. However, the construction technique, the tunnel-boring machine, is one that is supposed to have a much smaller city-center premium over outlying construction, since there is no surface disruption.
But whereas the Victoria and Jubilee lines had excuses for their high costs, more recent Underground extensions do not. In the 1990s, the Jubilee line extension cost around $500 million per km in today’s money, going under a few older Underground lines and crossing the Thames four times (in an environment with not much underwater premium) but mostly extending the system to the east, to previously underserved areas like Canary Wharf. The under-construction Battersea extension, crossing under one older line and serving a relatively undeveloped area at Battersea Power Station, is about $550 million per km. The next Underground extension under discussion today, that of the Bakerloo line to Lewisham, is budgeted at £3.1 billion over 7 km, or about $620 million per km, crossing under no Underground lines and largely following a wide road.
Under YIMBY Princeton’s theory, London’s construction costs should be decreasing as it obtains more experience tunneling in a constrained urban area with millennium-era sensitivity to environmental impact like noise. But on the contrary, costs keep growing.
Seoul’s low costs
If London is the expensive city that should under YIMBY Princeton’s theory get cheaper but isn’t, Seoul is the cheap city that should have been expensive in the 1980s but wasn’t. JRTR has data from the 1970s to the 1990s: after an increase at the beginning, Seoul’s construction costs stabilized in the 1980s and 90s at about $80 million per km in constant dollars in today’s money. These costs seem to persist today, judging by the Sin-Bundang Line, which cost 1,169 billion won for 18 km, converting to about $90 million per km in PPP dollars.
Seoul is consistent with the theory that costs are endogenous to a city or country. There is high correlation between the construction costs of different lines within the same city: having set non-US records with the Jubilee line extension, London keeps building very expensive Underground extension of the Northern and Bakerloo lines; Paris is spending around $250 million per underground km on a number of Metro extensions; Seoul keeps building subways at just under $100 million per km.
Missed Connections
I’ve discussed before the topic of missed connections on subway systems, both here and on City Metric. I’ve for the most part taken it for granted that on a rapid transit network, it’s important to ensure that whenever two lines intersect, they offer a transfer. This seems like common sense. The point of this post is not to argue for this principle, but to distinguish two different kinds of missed connections: city center misses, and outlying misses. Both are bad; if I had to say which is worse I’d say it’s the city center miss, but city center misses and outlying misses are bad for distinct reasons.
A useful principle is that every pair of rapid transit lines should intersect, unless one is a shuttle, or both are circumferential. If the city is so large that it has multiple circular lines at different radii (Beijing has two, and London vaguely has two as well depending on how one counts the Overground), then they shouldn’t intersect, but rapid transit networks should be radial, and every radial line should connect to every other line, with all radial-radial transfers ideally located within the center. City center misses weaken the network by making some radials not connect, or perhaps connect at an inconvenient spot. Outlying misses often permit more central transfers, and their problem is that they make it harder to transfer to the better or less crowded radial on the way to the center. London supplies a wealth of examples of the latter without the former.
What counts as a missed connection?
Fundamentally, the following picture is a missed subway connection:
The red and blue lines intersect without a transfer. Even if a few stations later there is a transfer, this is a miss. In contrast, the following picture is not a missed connection:
It might be faster for riders to transfer between the southern and western leg if there were a station at the exact physical intersection point, but as long as the next station on the red line has a transfer to the blue line it counts, even if the blue line has one (or more) stations in the middle. Washington supplies an example of this non-miss: it frustrates riders that there’s no connection between Farragut West and Farragut North, but at the next station south from the intersection on the Red Line, Metro Center, there is a transfer to the Blue and Orange Lines. London supplies another pair of examples: the Northern line and the Waterloo and City line appear to intersect the District line without a transfer, but their next station north from the physical intersection point, Bank, has an in-system transfer to Monument on the District.
There are still a few judgment calls in this system. One is what to do at the end of the line. In this case, I rule it a missed connection if the terminal clearly has an intersection without a transfer; if the terminal is roughly between the two stations on the through-line, it doesn’t count. Another is what to do about two lines that intersect twice in close succession, such as the Bakerloo and Hammersmith and City lines in London, and Metro Lines 4 and 10 in Paris. In such cases, I rule that, if there’s just one station on the wrong side (Paddington on Bakerloo, Mabillon on M10) then I rule it a single intersection and allow transfers at the next station over, by which standard London has a missed connection (Edgware Road has no Bakerloo/H&C transfer) and Paris doesn’t (Odeon has an M4/M10 transfer).
How many missed connections are there?
In Paris, there are three missed connections on the Metro there is one missed connection on the Metro (update: see comments below): M9/M12, M5/M14, M9/M14. As I discuss on City Metric, it’s no coincidence that two of these misses involve this miss involves Line 14, which has wide stop spacing. Narrow stop spacing makes it easier to connect within line-dense city centers, and Paris famously has the densest stop spacing of any major metro system. M9/M12 and M9/M14 morally should connect at Saint-Augustin and Saint-Lazare, but in fact there is no in-system transfer. M5/M14 should connect at Gare de Lyon, but when M5 was built it was not possible to get the line to the station underground and then have it cross the Seine above-ground, so instead it meets M1 at Bastille, while M14 doesn’t serve since it expresses from Gare de Lyon to Chatelet. A fourth missed connection is under construction: the extension of M14 to the north misses M2 at Rome, prioritizing long stop spacing over the connection to the M2/M6 circumferential.
In Tokyo, there are many misses. I am not sure why this is, but judging by line layout, Tokyo Metro and Toei try to stick to major roads whenever possible, to avoid tunneling under private property, and this constrains the ability of newer lines to hit station locations on older lines. If I understand this map correctly, there are 19 missed connections: Ginza/Hibiya (Toranomon and Kasumigaseki should connect), Ginza/Mita, Ginza/Yurakucho, Ginza/Shinjuku, Marunouchi/Mita (Ginza and Hibiya should connect), Marunouchi/Yurakucho, Asakusa/Yurakucho, Asakusa/Hanzomon, Hibiya/Namboku, Hibiya/Yurakucho (Tsukiji and Shintomicho should connect), Hibiya/Hanzomon, Hibiya/Shinjuku, Hibiya/Oedo, Tozai/Oedo, Tozai/Fukutoshin, Mita/Oedo, Chiyoda/Oedo twice, and Oedo/Fukutoshin. Oedo is particularly notable for being a circumferential line that misses a large number of transfers.
In New York, there are even more misses. Here the culprit is clear: the two older layers of the subway, the IRT and BMT, have just two missed connections. One, 3/L at Junius Street and Livonia Avenue, is an outlying miss. The other is central: Bowling Green on the 4-5 and Whitehall on the R-W should connect. But the newer layer, the IND, was built to drive the IRT and BMT into bankruptcy through competition rather than to complement them, and has a brutal number of misses: ABCD/2-3, ACE/1-2-3, AC-F/2-3-4-5, AC-G/2-3-4-5-BQ-DNR, BD/NQRW, BDFM/NQRW, BD/JZ, E/1, E/F, M/NW, R/7, F/BD-NQ, F/NRW, F-Q/4-5-6, F/NW, G/7, G/JMZ. Counting individual track pairs, this is 46 misses, for a total of 48 including the two IRT/BMT misses; I’m excluding local-only transfers, such as Columbus Circle and 53rd/Lex, and counting the 42nd Street Shuttle as an express version of the 7, so it doesn’t miss the BDFM transfer.
Finally, London only has eight misses. In Central London there are three: the Metropolitan or Hammersmith and City line misses the Bakerloo line as discussed above, and also the Victoria line and Charing Cross branch of the Northern line at Euston. The other five are outlying: the Central line misses the Hammersmith and City line at Wood Lane/White City, and its branches miss the Piccadilly line’s Uxbridge branch three times; the fifth miss is Metropolitan/Bakerloo. But one more miss is under construction: the Battersea extension of the Northern line is going to intersect the Victoria line without a transfer.
The difference between the two kinds of miss
Many misses are located just a few stations away from a transfer. In New York, some misses are just a station away from a transfer, including the G/7 miss in Long Island City, the E/1 miss between 50th Street and 59th Street, and several more are a few stations away, such as the various BDFM/NQRW misses. In London, these include two of the three Central London transfers: there is an H&C/Bakerloo transfer at Baker Street and an H&C-Met/Victoria transfer at King’s Cross-St. Pancras. As a result, not counting the Waterloo and City line, only two trunk lines in the system do not have any transfer: the Charing Cross branch of the Northern line and the Metropolitan/H&C line.
On a radial network, if two lines don’t have any transfer, then the network is degraded, since passengers can’t easily connect. In New York, this is a huge problem: some station pairs even within the inner networks require two transfers, or even three counting a cross-platform local/express transfer. My interest in subway networks and how they function came about when I lived in Morningside Heights on the 1 and tried socializing with bloggers in Williamsburg near the JMZ.
In Paris the three misses are also a problem. Line 4 is the only with a transfer to every other main line. Line 9 intersects every other line, and Line 14 will when its northern extension opens, but both miss connections, requiring some passengers to take three-seat rides, in a city infamous for its labyrinthine transfer stations. Fundamentally, the problem is that the Paris Metro is less radial than it should be: some lines are laid out as grid routes, including Lines 3, 5, and 10; moreover, Lines 8, 9, 12, and 13 are radial but oriented toward a different center from Lines 1, 4, 7, and 11.
In London, in contrast, there is almost no pair of stations that require a three-seat ride. The Charing Cross branch of the Northern line doesn’t make any stop that passengers from the H&C or Met line can’t get to from another line with one interchange (Goodge Street is walking distance to Warren Street). A bigger problem is the lack of interchange to the Central line on the west, which makes the connections between the H&C stations on the west and some Central line stations awkward, but it’s still only a small number of stations on each line. So the problem in London is not network robustness.
Rather, the problem in London is severe capacity limitations on some lines. Without good outlying interchanges, passengers who want to get between two lines need to ride all the way to the center. Most likely, passengers between the Piccadilly and Central line branches to the west end up driving, as car ownership in West London is relatively high. Passengers without a car have to instead overload the Central line trunk.
The same problem applies to misses that are strictly speaking not missed connections because the two lines do not actually intersect. In Paris, this occurs on Line 7, which swings by the Opera but doesn’t go far enough west to meet Lines 12 and 13. In London, the best example is Hammersmith station: the H&C and District lines have separate stations without an interchange, but they do not intersect since it’s the terminus of the H&C line and therefore I don’t count it as a miss. But morally it’s an outlying miss, preventing District line riders from changing to the H&C line to reach key destinations like Euston, King’s Cross, and Moorgate without overloading the Victoria or Northern line.
In New York this problem is much less acute. The only outlying misses are the 3/L and the ABCD/2-3; the 3/L connects two very low-ridership tails, so the only serious miss is on the Upper West Side. There, passengers originating in Harlem can walk to either line, since the two trunks are two long blocks apart, and passengers originating in Washington Heights can transfer from the A-C to the 1 at 168th Street; at the other end, passengers bound for Midtown can transfer at Columbus Circle, using the underfull 1 rather than the overcrowded 2 and 3.
The role of circumferential lines
Outlying transfers are useful in distributing passengers better to avoid capacity crunches, but they are incidental. They occur when formerly competing suburban lines get shoehorned into the same subway network, or when two straight roads intersect, as in Queens. But the task of distributing passengers between radial lines remains important and requires good connections between as many pairs of radials as possible.
The usual solution to this is a circumferential line. In Moscow, there are several missed connections in the center (Lines 3/6, 3/7, 6/9) and one more planned (8/9), but the Circle Line helps tie in nearly all the radii together, with just one missed connection (to Line 10 to the north) and one more under construction (to Line 8 to the west). The point of the Circle Line is to allow riders to connect between two outlying legs without congesting the center. This is especially important in the context of Moscow, where there are only a handful of interchange stations in the center, most of which connect more than two lines.
In London, the Overground is supposed to play this role. However, the connections between the Underground and Overground are weak. From Highbury and Islington clockwise, the Overground misses connections to the Central line, the Victoria line, the main line of the District line, the Piccadilly line, the Hammersmith and City line, both branches of the Northern line, and the Piccadilly line (it also misses the Metropolitan line, but that’s on a four-track stretch where it is express and local service is provided by the Jubilee line, with which there is a transfer). Much of this is an unforced error, since the Underground lines are often above-ground this far out, and stations could be moved to be better located for transfers.
In New York, the only circumferential line is the G train, which has uniquely bad transfers, legacy of the IND’s unwillingness to build a system working together with the older subways. Triboro RX (in the original version, not the more recent version) would play this role better: with very little tunneling, it could connect to every subway line going counterclockwise from the R in Bay Ridge to the B-D and 4 at Yankee Stadium. On the way, it would connect to some major intermediate centers, including Brooklyn College and Jackson Heights, but the point is not just to connect to these destinations in the circumferential direction but also to facilitate transfers between different lines.
Going forward, cities with large metro network should aim to construct transfers where feasible. In New York there are perennial proposals to connect the 3 and L trains; these should be implemented. In London, the missed outlying transfers involve above-ground stations, which can be moved. The most important miss, White City/Wood Lane, is already indicated as an interchange on the map, but does not to my understanding have an in-system transfer; this should be fixed.
Moreover, it is especially important to have transfers from the radial lines to the circumferential ones. These improve network connectivity by allowing passengers to change direction (from radial to circumferential, e.g. from east-west to north-south within Queens), but also help passengers avoid congested city centers like outlying radial-radial transfers. Where circumferential lines don’t exist, they should be constructed, including Triboro in New York and Line 15 in Paris; where they do, it’s important to ensure they don’t miss connections the way the Overground does.
The MTA Genius Challenge is as Bad as Expected
A year ago, Governor Andrew Cuomo declared a competitive $2.5 million grant, to be disbursed by what he dubbed the Genius Challenge. I wrote about it at the time, expressing skepticism that it would lead to anything useful. The panel of eight judges had only one person with background in the transportation industry, a former FRA administrator. The word “genius” itself is a tech mainstay that to me mostly means “I don’t know any Fields Medalists.” And the topics within the scope of the grant seemed more about what the tech industry thought were the most pressing issues and not what the lowest-hanging actually were. I had very low expectations, and the announcement of the winning entries met them.
The grant has three topics: signaling, rolling stock (interpreted broadly), and underground mobile or wireless service. The last three is by far the least important; it also got only half a million dollars, whereas each of the other two got a full million. Each of the two main ideas shows how weak the very concept of the genius grant is, but they do so in dramatically different ways.
The rolling stock winners included a vendor asking for a grant for New York to use its rolling stock (CRRC); the problems with that idea are more akin to those of the signaling section, so I will cover them there. A second rolling stock winner was a proposal to use better data collection to facilitate preventive maintenance; this idea may or may not work, it’s hard to tell from layers of obfuscating business language. It’s the third idea that deserves the most attention, and the most scorn: lengthening trains but not platforms.
The crank Idea: lengthening trains
The genius competition gave a $330,000 grant for the idea of lengthening trains from 10 to 14 cars without lengthening the platforms. Trains would alternate between only berthing the first 10 cars and only berthing the last 10. Transit Twitter has already dumped on this idea, and for good reason: the proposal reads like a crank paper purporting to prove the Riemann hypothesis or another famous result, starting with a lot of trivial observations and then making a leap of logic buried somewhere in the middle.
The basic problem with running trains that are longer than the platforms is that passengers need to be able to move to the correct car, which takes time. The report says that this is done on the London Underground, which is true, but only at outlying stations – as is the case on the subway in New York. The conductor announcement “only the first five cars will open” is familiar to anyone riding the 3 train and was familiar to anyone riding the 1 train before the new South Ferry station opened. This is fine as long as the station in question is low-volume enough that the extra dwell time does not interfere with operations. Lengthening trains beyond the platforms at busier stations than Harlem-148th Street 145th Street or South Ferry would result in a shuffle forcing passengers to scramble within the train (if moving between cars is possible) or on the platform (if it isn’t). The dwell times would be brutal and would almost certainly reduce capacity measured in passengers per hour.
The proposal handwaves this critical flaw by saying that dwell times would decrease because crowding would decrease. This assumes that dwell times are a function exclusively of on-train crowding, rather than of the number of passengers getting on or off the train. The same number of passengers would have the same platform space, but would actually only be able to use a fraction of it: many would only be able to use the 6 cars that go to their chosen destination, and at those cars, the volume of passengers per unit of platform length would rise.
The second handwave is unlimited stations, with longer platforms. Acknowledging that the busiest stations should have all doors open, the proposal says,
[P. 20] Third, 18.5% of rides occur through just 10 stations in Manhattan. In the medium term, the platforms can, and should, be extended at these 10 stations to enable customers that embark and disembark at them to use any car at both ends of their trip. Accordingly, 9.25% of the customers that presently need to use the middle cars could instead use the end cars.
This is the equivalent of the logical leap from trivial to wrong in a crank paper. First, the number of central stations that would need to be lengthened is much more than 10, including some key origins (86th/Lex, Jamaica Center, etc.) and transfer points (West 4th, Canal, 96th/Broadway). And second and more importantly, the busiest stations are multilevel complexes, where just adding more pedestrian circulation is hard; London is spending a considerable amount of money on that at Bank. Lengthening platforms at these stations is prohibitively expensive. This problem is discussed in cities with constrained underground platforms in the CBD, such as Vancouver, where nearly all Expo Line stations are above-ground (thus, relatively easy to lengthen), but the most crowded in Downtown Vancouver are in a tunnel, where platform reconstruction costs too much to be economic.
The bigger question is why the judges did not catch the error. The proposal brings up London as an example, which serves to bring the magic of the foreign to people who are unfamiliar with best industry practices. Saying that New York does the same is equally true, and in a way more relevant to the proposal (since New York doesn’t let people move between cars, making this more challenging than in London), but would raise questions like “can the dwell times of relatively light stations like South Ferry or Harlem-145th be replicated at the top 40 stations?”. London is Anglophone and some reformist New Yorkers have used it as a source of foreign ideas the way they wouldn’t use non-Anglophone cities. But the judges didn’t do the basic due diligence of checking whether London really implements the idea as widely as the proposal implies, and if not, then why not.
The rent-seeking idea: CBTC by another name
New York State awarded four applicants $250,000 each for ideas about signaling. All four ideas boiled down to the same thing: introducing new technology for communication between trains permitting the functional equivalent of moving-block signaling, at a lower cost than preexisting communication-based train control (CBTC) installations.
The grantees all have experience in the transportation industry. Rail signaling vendors Thales and Ansaldo propose to use cameras to read automated signals; train sensor provider Metrom Rail and veteran rail manager and consultant Robert James propose ultra-wide broadband to improve train location precision. There’s nothing obviously wrong about their proposals. Nor is there anything outlandish, which is why each of the two technologies has two independent applicants behind it. Thales and Ansaldo in particular have experience in advanced signaling – Thales supplied CBTC to the L 7 train in New York and to Metro Line 13 in Paris, and Ansaldo supplied rail automation to Copenhagen and CBTC to a number of Paris Metro lines.
Even then, questions about cost remain. Robert James’ and Metrom’s proposals leave a bad taste in my mouth for their cost estimates. James has a systemwide cost estimate somewhat less than $200 million, not much more than $500,000 per km; Metrom says its system costs “$3 million per mile” and compares itself positively with legacy CBTC systems at $20 million per mile. Actual costs of CBTC without automation in Paris on Line 13 were about 5 million euros per km according to Wikipedia, and this includes modification of the railyards and not just the signaling system. So the Metrom system’s claimed figure is still cheaper, but not by quite as much. Metrom also complains that in Boston, CBTC would not improve capacity much because it would prohibit double-berthing, an issue that is only relevant to a subway-surface system and not to a full metro.
The broader problem with this part of the grant is that if the MTA put out an RFP about CBTC on the subway, it would get bids from Ansaldo, Thales, and Metrom, and James might well bid or consult for a bidder. It would be able to judge the technical merit of each proposal in much closer detail than given in the competition. Instead, the state is paying vendors to market their technology to the public, which would influence future procurement.
While the grant asks about whether the technology is proprietary, it makes no attempt at establishing a multi-vendor standards. Such standards exist: Thales and Ansaldo are both listed as ERTMS vendors. In France there’s already a discussion in the trade press about whether using ERTMS is better than using CBTC; the discussion specifically mentions New York’s uniqueness as a network with connected rather than isolated lines, and says CBTC is designed for isolated lines whereas ERTMS is designed for shared lines, such as the RER system. European experts might well recommend that New York use ERTMS for the subway, even though it’s a system originally designed for mainline rail.
New York’s highly-branched system means it must be more conservative with new technology – there’s nowhere to test it, now that the L and 7 already have CBTC. The shuttles might be useful test cases, or the 1 and 6 trains on weekdays, but without isolated lines, the cost of a mistake in procurement or technological failure is much higher. This suggests the MTA should try to reduce the complexity of branching (which is what I would’ve proposed if it had been within the grant’s scope), and until then concentrate on imitating proven technology rather than innovating. This is especially important given the potential for rent-seeking, in which the vendors use the grant to market themselves to the state over competitors selling similar product.
The judges don’t know any better
Would a panel of judges with more familiarity with metro operations around the first world have come to better decisions? Probably. Through blogs, railfan forums, and comments, I know people with great knowledge of existing operations in a number of cities in the first world, and for the most part they think highly enough of their local systems that they’d ask of any innovation, “why hasn’t it been implemented here already?”.
I wrote in 2011 that people in the US who make technical arguments in favor of public transit tend to be skeptical of many proposals, to the point of finding existing US agencies incompetent. This is US-specific: London Reconnections is a technical blog but it tends to support Transport for London’s process, Swiss and Japanese railfans seem to trust their local rail operators, and even Transport Paris is more positive about STIF’s capital investment than New York-based blogs are about the MTA’s. Experts (and not just bloggers like me) could point out innovations their cities have that can be imported into New York, as well as shoot down bad ideas for which “why doesn’t London/Paris/Tokyo do it?” is a useful sanity check.
Note that sometimes there is a legitimate reason to do something that nobody else has tried. New York’s highly branched network makes ERTMS a better deal there than on other metro systems, and an RFI would be prudent. But because the details of implementation matter more than the idea of innovative genius, it has to go through the regular procurement process.
Cuomo attempted to inject the inventions of the American tech industry into the subway. Instead, he created space for cranks to promulgate their ideas and for vendors to have a leg up over their competitors in any future bid. In effect, his attempt to improve the economic productivity of the public sector to be more in line with that of the American tech industry is going to make the public sector less productive, through weaker institutions (namely, a less robust CBTC bid) and distraction (namely, the useless train lengthening idea).
Pedestrian Observations 
