Category: Transportation
Who are the Opponents of Transportation Alternatives?
Streetsblog has traditionally lashed at multiple factions that oppose bicycle and transit infrastructure, but reserved the harshest criticism for entrenched community groups and NIMBYs, and their representatives including most of the high-profile Democratic mayoral candidates in New York. Early community board opposition to some of Janette Sadik-Khan’s bike lanes and pedestrian plazas turned into full-fledged attacks by the livable streets community on NIMBYs, of which some were justified but some were cases without any evidence of community opposition.
But now the Wall Street Journal has run an editorial video calling New York’s new bikeshare totalitarian, adding to a Front Page article from a month ago saying that bikeshare was a failure in Paris and Montreal and that Sadik-Khan’s grandfather was a Nazi. Paul Krugman chimed in with an explanation relating the opposition to upper-class politics, New York Magazine tried to explain how bikeshare goes against conservative ideology more broadly, and suddenly there’s supposed to be a partisan realignment on the matter. When I reminded Robert Cruickshank on Twitter that Charles Schumer and Anthony Weiner were against bike infrastructure, he responded, “no, that’s not driven by values or ideology but by a search for votes.”
There’s a real danger in reducing the world to a struggle between Us and Them, in which the bad aspects on the Us side show that people on the Us side need to be nudged in the right direction while the bad aspects on the Them side show that people on that side need to be defeated. People who spend too much time in national or even state-level partisan politics think in those terms even in places where they are completely inappropriate, such as local blue-city transportation matters. Streetsblog has occasionally engaged in this as well, with the factions being pro- and anti-Bloomberg: it has let the city’s DOT off the hook for the truncation of the 125th Street dedicated bus lanes, though in past years it did attack the city for not extending 1st and 2nd Avenue’s bike lanes into Harlem despite community support.
What both of those sides – Krugman and the Streetsblog crowd – miss is that there’s considerably diversity of opinion in both the Us camp and the Them camp. Although there is something like an Us camp comprising supporters of rail, urban density, and livable streets, there are still sharp internal disagreements that shouldn’t be papered over. On the Them side there isn’t even a recognizable camp: what do Michele Bachmann, Chris Christie, Andrew Cuomo, Charles Schumer, and Anthony Weiner have in common except their opposition to bikes or transit? Instead of a binary Manichean view it’s important to understand that politics, especially urban politics, has multiple factions, of which none can obtain a persistent majority, requiring some measures of negotiation and consensus.
First, the Them sides. The easiest segment to explain is right-wing populism: as a movement, it tends to be anti-urban and pro-road, even in Switzerland, whose Swiss People’s Party opposes rail investment and supports roads. The support base of right-wing populism is rarely urban, because as a movement it tends to be against what it views as cultural deviance of (mainly urban) immigrants; since transit ridership tends to be concentrated in the cities, populists have less reason to support it.
Non-populist conservatives sometimes borrow from right-wing populism and sometimes do not. Christie canceled ARC and transferred the state money for it toward roads, but he is quite influenced by populism in style even if his actual politics is mainline conservative. But the British Tories support high-speed rail, as did the Sarkozy administration. Contrary to popular belief, Thatcher never said that bus riders over the age of 30 are failures in life; the quote comes from a writer who, far from being a Thatcherist, worked for The New Statesman. However, with exceptions such as Sarkozy’s support for Arc Express, conservatives and right-wing liberals tend to be less supportive of urban transit and of taxing cars on environmental grounds. For examples, the Skyscraper Page posters believe the BC Liberal election victory is likely to make it harder to find money for SkyTrain extensions, Boris Johnson canceled proposals to extend London’s congestion charge to other parts of the city, and the Swedish right-wing parties originally opposed Stockholm’s congestion charge and eventually implemented it but with a caveat that the proceeds go to roads only.
Among centrist liberals, opinions are more split. Bloomberg is unabashedly neo-liberal; he’s also spent $2 billion of city money on a subway extension and championed congestion pricing and bike lanes. Andrew Cuomo is less explicitly neo-liberal but ran on such a platform; he’s championed the Tappan Zee Bridge replacement, opposed including transit on the new bridge, and spent money that was supposed to go to the MTA on other things. The opposition to transit and livable streets that exists in this group is less a matter of hating what cities stand for and more a matter of fiscal conservatism that views roads as normal service used by the upper middle class and transit as wasteful and serving the poor. Charles Schumer’s opposition to bike lanes in his neighborhood should be placed in the same category, as should Richard Brodsky’s claim that congestion pricing is unfair while he represented a rich Westchester district. It’s here that the faction Krugman describes belongs, but it includes board swaths of the upper middle class rather than the top 0.5% of the population that Krugman argues is pro-road because they’re chauffeured around Manhattan.
The community boards who oppose transit and livable streets, for examples in Washington Heights and Sheepshead Bay, are a more mixed bunch. I believe Weiner falls in this category too: instead of congestion pricing he proposed a commuter tax, which would not fall on his outer-urban district, a proposal that more recently the other mayoral hopefuls supported. In the forums I spent time in, mainly The Straphangers forums, the opposition seemed to be from the left and not just from the right. It’s probably best understood as a general populism as well as personal dislike for Bloomberg; while this populism may not be leftist, it is not really right-wing either, and often comes from minorities, which right-wing populists almost universally spurn. I believe it’s Cap’n Transit who noted the disconnect between the elite even in poor neighborhoods and the average residents, who rarely own cars, leading to a kind of populism in leftist areas that is not by itself really leftist.
Now, the Us side. There is, in fact, a coherent movement that calls for more investment in rail for intercity transportation, proposes local transit and bike and pedestrian projects, and supports taxes on driving when they are politically feasible. The arguments between various factions, such as more left-wing versus more right-wing transit supporters or supporters of restoration of pre-WW2 streetcars and interurbans versus supporters of more modern technologies like light rail and high-speed rail, really are internal to a movement.
However, there really are problems, coming from the cores of the movement in supporting more spending and in having leaders who are quite neo-liberal and indifferent to issues of racism and disinvestment. New York really did take its time to extend bike lanes into East Harlem despite community support; the same neighborhood is now not getting a 125th Street dedicated bus lane. While the first five bus routes to receive Select Bus Service upgrades were chosen as one per borough for trial, the newer lines so chosen, first on 34th Street and now the M60 to LaGuardia, are not very high-ridership; the M60 in particular is at least in perception the highest-income and whitest among the buses that use 125th Street while its ridership rank is third out of four routes on the corridor.
Likewise, the transit investment decisions made not only in New York but also in cities ranging from Boston and Providence to San Francisco are development-oriented and tend to serve residents of rich suburbs and inner-urban gentrification projects at the expense of high-productivity transit routes in low-income neighborhoods in between. Bloomberg spent $2 billion of city money on a subway extension, but it was the wrong one, a development-oriented project to Hudson Yards rather than an extension of Second Avenue Subway or a new subway line following Utica, which is currently in a near-tie with First and Second Avenues for highest bus ridership in the city.
While neo-liberalism as an ideology also supports efficient government and reducing red tape, the built-in bias for prestige projects makes it hard to support vanilla improvements in efficiency. This combines with a particular leftist opposition to anything that sounds like reduced spending; the fact that it’s Christie who began the wave of cancellations adds a partisan dimension. As a result, the people who are most sensitive to costs tend to be far outside political power: Stephen Smith is not a major libertarian pundit, Aaron Renn occasionally talks to city leaders but has no real power, I am a mathematician who writes about transit and urban issues. The (neo-)liberal centrists who’d be best placed to implement a program that would reduce transit construction costs are the ones with the least political incentive to do so.
That said, despite the above essentially multi-partisan and multi-factional picture, it could be that the Wall Street Journal’s video and Krugman’s response will lead to partisan realignment. High-speed rail used not to be a partisan issue either: in 2009, Newt Gingrich said he envisioned medium-speed rail together with maglev. But after Christie canceled ARC, canceling rail projects became a test of right-wing bona fides, and conversely, defending infrastructure spending became a test of left-wing bona fides even when infrastructure was a small component of the stimulus. It is possible that the American political world will soon become bipolar on matters of local transit and livable streets issues. It’s just not there now.
Comparative Subway Construction Costs, Revised
Here is a list of subway projects in the last 15-20 years, in both developed and developing countries. It’s in addition to my initial lists for developed and developing countries, but includes projects mentioned in past blog posts not on those two lists. This is still not an exhaustive list, due to some cities for which I couldn’t find any information (Moscow), cities for which the information from different sources contradicts itself (Bucharest), and cities for which I couldn’t source numbers beyond Wikipedia (Osaka). My rule is that Wikipedia is an acceptable source for construction timelines and route length but not cost.
While the list is meant to be for urban subways, urban rail projects that are predominantly elevated are also included. As far as possible I have tried using PPP dollars adjusted for inflation to give 2010 dollars (2010 and not 2013, because when I started comparing costs that’s what I used). For core developed countries, because inflation rates are similar, I use American inflation rates, using the CPI (not GDP deflator: the two measures have disagreed for a while, and the CPI points to higher inflation). For other ones, I’ve tried focusing on more recent projects, including even some that are under construction, but I use actual inflation rates.
Bear in mind the data is only as accurate as my sources for it and my PPP conversions. Errors of 10-20% in each direction are to be expected: sources disagree on conversion rates, sometimes the years of construction are not made clear so deflating to the midpoint is not reliable, etc. Even larger errors sometimes crop up, for example if old cost figures are not updated after a cost overrun.
Explicitly, the rates I use today are C$1.25 = S$1 = US$1 = 3.8 yuan = 100 yen = 800 won; £1 = $1.50; €1 = $1.25; CHF1 = $1.65.
Singapore Thomson MRT Line: not yet under construction, expected to open 2019-21, S$18 billion for 30 km. This is $600 million/km, all underground. Included only as a lower bound of costs; costs can rise beyond budget but rarely come significantly under it.
Hong Kong Sha Tin to Central Link: a 1-km segment underground (not underwater) is £270 million, under construction with opening expected in 2018. After converting to PPP using Hong Kong’s conversion rate this is $586 million/km.
Singapore Downtown MRT Line: under construction since around 2008, to be completed in 2017; S$20.7 billion for 42 km: $493 million/km. This line is fully underground. This represents a 70% cost overrun already, announced after I previously reported the original budget of S$12 billion.
Budapest Metro Line 4: under construction since 2006, completion expected in 2014, 400 billion forint for 7.4 km. This is $358 million per km. The line is fully underground.
Fukuoka, Nanakuma Line extension to Hakata: construction expected to begin 2014 with line opening expected in 2020, ¥45 billion for 1.4 km: $321 million/km. I do not know for certain that the extension is fully underground, but this is likely, as the preexisting line is underground and the extension follows busy CBD streets.
Cairo Metro Line 3, Phase 1: opened 2012 with construction since 2006, LE4.2 billion for 4.3 km. This is $310 million/km. The phase is fully underground.
Kawasaki Subway: under construction, opening expected in 2018, ¥433.6 billion for 16.7 km: $260 million/km. The line is fully underground. Update: people in comments explain that the line was actually canceled; the link in this paragraph is just a plan.
Stockholm City Line: to open in 2017, 16.8 billion kronor (2007 prices) for 6 km of tunnel and 1.4 km of bridge: $259 million/km.
Sao Paulo Metro Line 6: construction due to begin in 2014; 7.8 billion reais for 15.9 km: $250 million/km. The line is 84% underground.
Sao Paulo Metro Line 4: construction began in 2004, first phase opened in 2010, completion expected in 2014; 5.6 billion reais for 12.8 km: $223 million/km. The line is fully underground.
Dnipropetrovsk Metro extension: under construction since about 2008, opening expected in 2015, €367 million for 4 km. After PPP conversion this is $214 million/km. It appears to be fully underground.
Malmö City Tunnel: built 2005-10, 9 billion kronor for 4.65 km: $212 million/km. This is a fully underground project.
Bangalore Metro Phase 2: to be opened by 2017, 264 billion rupees for 72.1 km. This is $164 million/km. I do not know what proportion of the project is underground; it does not seem to be large, as the extension of the phase 1 lines are all outbound, and only line 4 seems to have significant tunneling, about 14 km by pure Wikipedia eyeballing.
San Juan Tren Urbano: built 1996-2004, $2.28 billion (2001 figures, see PDF-p. 145) for 17.2 km: $163 million/km. The line is only 7.5% underground by direct inspection on Google Earth.
Lucern Zentralbahn: built 2008-13, CHF250 million for 1.32 km of tunnel: $151 million/km.
Hangzhou: I can’t find any ex post numbers, but in both 2005 and this year (Chinese) officials pegged the cost of future construction as ¥550 million/km: $145 million/km.
Sofia Metro Line 2: built 2008-12, €952 million for 17 km. After PPP conversion, this is $148 million/km. The line appears to be almost fully underground: the numbers here do not fully add up but point to 1.3-2.9 km above ground (7.6-13% of total line length) in one segment while Wikipedia’s line map shows only that segment with above-ground segments.
Thessaloniki: I can’t find any ex post numbers, but in 2005 the budget for the first phase, under construction to be opened in 2016, was €798 million for 9.6 km: $104 million/km. The second phase received bids last year and is expected to open in 2017, with an estimated cost of €518 million for 4.78 km: $135 million/km. Both phases are fully underground.
Vancouver Evergreen Line: under construction since 2012, completion expected 2016; C$1.4 billion for 11 km: $103 million/km. Only 2 km of the system, 18%, is underground, but Vancouver seems to have an unusually low underground construction cost premium.
Dubai Metro (lines 1 and 2): built 2005-11, Dh28 billion ($6.9 billion in PPP2010US$) for 75 km: $92 million/km. Only 13 km of the system, 17%, is underground.
Mexico City Metro Line 12: built 2007-2012, $1.8 billion for 26.4 km. After PPP conversion, this is $90 million/km. From a Google Earth overlay map, this line is 49% underground.
Seoul Sin-Bundang Line: built 2005-11, 1,169 billion won for about 18 km (sources disagree on whether it’s 17.3 or 18.5): $87 million/km. The line is 100% underground according to YouTube videos.
Bangalore Metro, Phase 1: built 2006-11, 8,158 crore rupees for 42.3 km: $93 million/km. Only 8.82 km, or 21% of the project, is underground. See above for Indian construction costs in a heavier-tunneling setting.
Helsinki Westmetro: under construction since 2009 with completion expected in 2015, €714 million for 13.5 kilometers: $66 million/km. The line is fully underground.
Seoul Subway Line 9: opened 2009, 900 billion won for 27 km: $43 million/km. The line is almost fully underground by direct inspection on Google Maps.
Barcelona Sants-La Sagrera tunnel: built 2008-11, €179.3 million for 5.8 km: $39 million/km. This project is intercity but fully underground.
Just from eyeballing the data, spliced together with the two older lists, the biggest correlation of each country’s construction costs is with the construction costs of other lines in the same country. When there is more than one project listed separately in a city – e.g. Seoul, Singapore, Sao Paulo – the projects have similar costs. This persists across different cities in the same country, judging by the similarity between Bangalore Metro’s Phase 2 cost and the Delhi Metro’s cost from a previous list and by the similarity between Hangzhou and Beijing’s costs.
Quick Note: Why the Focus on Penn Station?
Penn Station is in the news again: the Municipal Art Society ran a public competition for a rebuilt station house, involving proposals by four different architectural firms. This does not include any track-level improvements at all: only the concourses and above-ground infrastructure are to be rebuilt, at a cost of $9.5 billion according to one of the four firms. The quotes from the architects and other backers of rebuilding use language like “great train station” and “gateway to the city,” and this is where the subtle hate of the city’s actual residents lies: why the focus on Penn Station? Why not a subway station?
The headline figure for the ridership at Penn Station is 600,000-650,000 a day, but this is a wild exaggeration. First, this includes both entries and exits, so the real number is half that. Second, about half of the number comes from subway riders, who these discussions always ignore. And third, there is a large number of passengers transferring between commuter rail and the subway who are doubled-counted; at subway stations, passengers transferring between lines are not even single-counted, since the subway counts entries at the turnstiles. Taking an average of boardings and alightings when both numbers are given or just boardings otherwise, Penn Station has 100,000 weekday LIRR riders, 80,000 weekday New Jersey Transit riders, and 170,000 weekday subway riders between the two stations. However, people transferring between the subway and commuter rail are double-counted.
In contrast, not counting any connecting passengers, there are 195,000 weekday Times Square subway riders. Without detailed data about transfer volumes at each station we can’t compare the two, but since the proposals for a better Penn Station focus only on the mainline station, the number of passengers served is certainly less than that of Times Square passengers.
Indeed, every single problem that the architects are trying to fix with Penn Station exists at Times Square. Times Square has low ceilings. The corridors between different lines and between the platforms and the exits are as labyrinthine as at Penn Station. In my experience rush hour passenger crowding levels within the station itself are comparable. Most platforms are wider, but nobody is proposing to widen platforms at Penn Station, and the 42nd Street Shuttle platforms are narrow and curvy and have been this way since 1918. The tickets are all integrated because the trains are all run by one operator, but again nobody who proposes to replace Penn Station is talking about the separate LIRR, NJ Transit, and Amtrak fiefs.
There are some legitimate changes that could be done if Penn Station is knocked down and rebuilt: instead of a hack involving paving over platforms to increase their width, the platform level could be rebuilt, two tracks at a time, with six approach tracks in each direction each splitting into two platform tracks, giving twelve tracks on six platforms; the train box appears about 140 meters wide, enough for 15-meter-wide platforms (compare 10 meters on the Chuo Line platform at Tokyo Station, where 28 trains per hour turn on two tracks).
However, the technical issues here are a lot less important than the fact that city leaders, architects, and even transit commentators assume that it is more important for New York to have a great train station used by 200,000 suburban commuters than for it to have a great subway station used by (at least) 200,000 city residents. It speaks to the utter hatred most city leaders have of the people who live in what they consider their fief or perhaps their playground. For most people in the city, there are more important transportation facilities, and even on a metro area level Penn Station isn’t unusually important.
This leaves the argument that Penn Station is a gateway to the city. But if the point is to impress a few thousand tourists, why not spend the same money on improving tourist amenities at Times Square, building more hotels? Or maybe building free housing for tens of thousands of homeless people (both the ones at Penn Station and the ones in the rest of the city) so that they stop being homeless and disturbing the rest of the population? If the point is to have great art, why not spend the money on employing artists to produce more work or to improve the aesthetics of the city’s ordinary spaces?
Of course, none of those options involves city leaders getting together and building important edifices with plaques with their names on them. So at the end the idea is to tax actual city inhabitants $10 billion to build a monument to the vision of city leaders. Large corporations pay their executives hundreds of millions a year in stock options and bonuses; governments cannot pay top political power brokers this way, so instead they spend large quantities of money on monuments that glorify them.
Can HSR Connect Hartford and Providence?
If new high-speed rail construction has to largely follow Interstate corridors, then a new line from New Haven to Boston can serve either Providence on I-95 or Hartford on I-91/84/90, but not both. However, there’s still the possibility of building a completely greenfield alignment between Hartford and Providence; the FRA is investigating this as option 13 of NEC Future and Amtrak is proposing this in the latest update of its Vision. Since the terrain is hillier than on the coast, it requires some investigation as to whether it’s possible to connect Hartford and Providence without excessive tunneling. The answer turns out to be yes, but only at the cost of slowdowns both north and south of Hartford that impose real costs relative to following I-95: construction is likely to be more expensive and travel time including a Hartford stop is 9 minutes longer.
I believe the alignments depicted in this map are near-optimal for New Haven-Providence via I-95 and via Hartford. The New Haven-Hartford alignment is similar to that of Penn Design with two major differences: Penn Design diverges to cut off some curves near Hartford, but to guarantee sufficient curve radius it has to slice a significant chunk of downtown New Britain; and Penn Design also straightens the route in New Haven with a tunnel, which is unnecessary as the time savings do not justify the expense. Amtrak prefers getting to Hartford from Danbury, but to get there from New Rochelle requires long suburban tunnels, which my alignment avoids. I have not seen a detailed Hartford-Providence alignment, and I drew a line based on Google Earth elevation with an eye toward avoiding tunneling, which means there may be some further optimization, for example a rigorous cost-benefit analysis of viaducts versus curve avoidance.
The Hartford-Providence greenfield route has no tunnels except in Providence itself, where the line tunnels under Olneyville for about 2 kilometers. In Connecticut the route has many viaducts, but does not need to tunnel through the inland hills. Rather than giving detailed cost estimates, which are possible but not with sufficient reliability or precision, I am going to qualitatively describe construction challenges for each route and then the differences in travel time, which favor not serving Hartford. The final decision should boil down to the question, what cost is it acceptable to impose on New York-Boston travelers to allow for service to Hartford?
Tunneling
The I-95 route is zero-tunnel. The Hartford route has no tunnels in Connecticut, but requires a tunnel of 1.5-2 km in Providence. There exists an old railroad alignment going around the river and connecting Providence to the west without a tunnel, but the right of way was given away and to restore it would require some urban building demolitions as well as configuring a flying junction under Route 6 while also slowing down trains further.
River crossings
The I-95 route has significant challenges in river crossings, since it is close to the coast. Three difficult crossings are needed, of the Quinnipiac, the Connecticut, and the Thames. The Connecticut only requires a span parallel to I-95. The Quinnipiac requires a new span parallel to US 1 and I-95 and a new approach from Union Station; there is space for this approach, and the curve radius can be kept to at least 500 meters, but it requires work on active track. The Quinnipiac span can be avoided by using the existing route around the bay, which crosses the river at a much narrower point, but this adds several slow kilometers to the route. Recent construction costs for parallel bridges are $125 million for the four-lane US 1 bridge and $554 million for a signature ten-lane I-95 span; I believe the lower cost is more indicative of the infrastructure required for a two-track rail bridge.
The Thames is the hardest, since the route of I-95 and the terrain make it hard to cross anywhere except downtown New London, a constrained urban location. There is just enough space for a station between the decks, and the alignment may impose further constraints on curve radius. There is more space north of both decks, or alternatively Connecticut could build a third I-95 deck and repurpose one of the existing decks for rail.
The Hartford route has one significant water challenge: crossing the Connecticut in downtown Hartford. There is an existing bridge, but it is single-track and would require a completely new span to be used by high-speed rail. It is also used by freight, but only by a short branch line that could be bought out.
The Hartford route also needs to cross the Scituate Reservoir, adding about 3 kilometers of viaduct. However, there is a choice of where exactly to cross it and not much development on its banks, making construction easier than on I-95 or across the Connecticut in Hartford.
Terrain and viaducts
I-95 is substantially flatter than the inland route. Only two short segments require significant overland viaducts and earthworks: the transition in southern Rhode Island from I-95 to the Shore Line, and the curve west of New London cutting off curvier parts of the Interstate. The transition is in total 16 km long but only about the western 10 km of it are difficult (of which about half require viaducts and half can be done cut-and-fill), and west of New London there are 6 difficult km requiring a viaduct north of the Niantic.
In contrast, the inland route needs to be on viaduct for a significant portion of the Hartford-Providence section. Of particular note is the Quinebaug River valley, about 13 kilometers of route of which most requires extensive grading and viaducts, as well as some takings in the built-up areas of the towns of Brooklyn and Killingly. The Willimantic River-Mansfield Hollow Lake-Natchaug River complex adds another 16 kilometers, some hard and some less hard; the Willimantic itself is in a deep valley requiring a tall viaduct of about 3 km, and the total viaduct length required appears to be about 8 km. The following 12 km, on the crest heading to I-84, require some earthworks, but probably no significant viaducts.
Urban construction challenges
I-95 has an existing route into Providence. Some curve modifications from East Greenwich northward are helpful for keeping speeds up, but the grade-separated route already exists. The main challenge is fitting regional trains if Rhode Island desires to run them: the right-of-way has room for four tracks but only if track centers are narrowed so much as to preclude tilting, reducing cant deficiency to about 125 mm. At the New Haven end, the main challenge is crossing the Quinnipiac, but once the tracks are east of the harbor, suburban development intensity drops rapidly, requiring only occasional grade separations with roads crossing I-95. Conversely, if intercity trains are all routed through Hartford then no new construction is required for any Rhode Island regional rail.
The major problem then is New London. The entire complex of crossing the city and the Thames is the biggest difficulty in the route, as outlined above in the water crossing section. In addition to geometric difficulties, there are also noise abatement issues, since the track geometry still allows very high speeds (the curve drawn above just west of New London looks like it can be eased to about 3 km, allowing 310 km/h). This is what favors putting the tracks between the two I-95 bridge decks instead of to the north.
The inland route has far greater difficulties. First, it needs to carve a partially new route into Providence, hence the Olneyville tunnel; however, it also leaves the Providence built-up area much faster, within about 6 kilometers vs. 24 for the Shore Line. In New Haven and Hartford it can for the most part transition between legacy rail routes and expressway corridors, but a substantial portion of the route is in the suburbs of those two cities, which requires more grade separations and makes curve modification harder. There are also noise abatement issues, though Shinkansen trains skip some urban stations at 300 km/h, so those issues are more about cost than about speed limits.
There are several alignment choices north of New Haven. The one I used on the map follows the Providence and Worcester’s Middletown Branch right-of-way and thence I-91, but it is equally feasible to take a more westerly route via the Amtrak line transitioning either to I-91 or Route 15; both options involve grade crossings and extensive suburban construction. In all cases, the trains are almost continuously in built-up area from New Haven until 19 kilometers east of Hartford. Grade separations have the full cost of urban or dense-suburban construction, and moreover, the transition to I-384 east of Hartford requires some additional takings.
Total new construction
This is the primary advantage of I-95, cost-wise: the track already exists from Kingston north and requires only minor facelifts. The New Haven-Kingston construction is just 124 km, whereas between the splits with the legacy Northeast Corridor in New Haven and Providence the Hartford route is 167 km.
Curves
With this in mind, nearly the entire I-95/Shore Line segment between East Greenwich and East Haven can be eased to a curve radius of 4 km. New London, where noise abatement prevents running at full speed anyway, can accommodate slightly lower radius, about 3 km on the western approach. At the New Haven end, the transition to the Quinnipiac bridge right next to the station has radius 500 meters, but the speed restriction is minor since it is so close to the station.
Hartford-Providence can also be eased to quite high curve radius. In Rhode Island, once out of the Providence built-up area, the tracks can maintain a 4-km standard, and until the transition to I-384, the worst radius is 3.1 km around Mansfield. However, from I-384 west, things become far worse: the transition to the east has a radius of 1.2 km and seems impossible to increase further, the transition to the west has a radius of at most about 1 km, and the curve west of the Connecticut bridge is 500 m and is slightly farther away from Hartford than the Quinnipiac bridge curve is from New Haven.
It is south of Hartford that things deteriorate. The worst curves on the legacy lines are in Meriden and can be bypassed, but there is a 1.3-km curve in New Britain, on an S with a 2.3-km curve just south in Kensington that makes it unfixable. At the New Haven end there’s a curve on the legacy line, bypassed on I-95 by the Quinnipiac bridge, with radius about 450 m about 2.5 km out of the station.
Overall travel time
The explicit assumptions on trains are aggressive, based as always on the need to keep speeds up in big cities and on the only partially fixable New York-New Haven segment. Trains accelerate like the N700-I (26.74 kW/t, more than any high-speed train that currently exists except the Talgo AVRIL), cant deficiency is 175 mm as on the E5/E6 and on the AVRIL, cant is 200 mm as on the Tokaido Shinkansen, and initial acceleration is 0.89 m/s^2 as on the N700-I. With these performance specs, the minimum curve radius required for a full speed of 360 km/h is 4 kilometers; the Tohoku Shinkansen has such radius and JR East intended to run trains on it at 360 km/h before deciding to reduce speeds to 320 for reasons that are not track geometry.
For simplicity of computation I’m going to ignore grades. Since the I-95 route is flat, with very few grades higher than about 1%, this is justifiable there; it’s a little less justifiable through Hartford because a few segments have 3% grades, but they are also quite limited.
Without any schedule padding, we can set the following speed zones for I-95, measuring from 0 km point in Providence and going southbound:
0-0.6 km: 90 km/h (curve around Providence Station)
0.6-4.5 km: 120 km/h (two 450-m curves)
4.5-7.5 km: 180 km/h (Mashapaug Pond curve is too close to 120 km/h to matter, curve into Cranston is about 1 km)
7.5-17 km: 250 km/h (no curves, trains can achieve 270 in between curves but this would only save 5 seconds)
17-22 km: 220 km/h (curves have radius about 1.4 km and the controlling curve at km-point 17 can be eased a bit)
22-92 km: 360 km/h (full speed to New London)
92-103 km: 310 km/h (speed restriction in New London and the curve north of the Niantic River)
103-162 km: 360 km/h (full speed to East Haven)
162-167 km: 250 km/h (curve around an East Haven hill, though trains can barely accelerate fast enough for it to matter going eastbound)
167-168 km: 100 km/h (New Haven approach)
The time taken to transition between speed zones is the average of acceleration and deceleration time penalty. This gives a technical travel time of 33:40 for nonstop trains. If trains have a top speed of 300 km/h, this raises the technical travel time to 37:28.
Now, let us set speed zones for the Hartford route:
0-0.6 km: 90 km/h (curve around Providence Station)
0.6-4.5 km: 180 km/h (curve north of Hartford)
4.5-6.5 km: 200 km/h (curve into Johnston)
6.5-10 km: 240 km/h (curve west of I-295)
10-57 km: 360 km/h (full speed to the Hampton-Mansfield area)
57-86 km: 310 km/h (Hampton and Mansfield impose a 310 km/h restriction to km-point 67, and trains going eastbound can’t accelerate to 360 before they have to slow down again anyway)
86-88 km: 220 km/h (gentler curve in the transition to I-384)
88-101 km: 200 km/h (transition curve to I-384, further curves on I-384 making speedup between transition curves pointless)
101-103 km: 160 km/h (transition curve)
103-109 km: 200 km/h (minor opportunity to make up time, saves 20 seconds over 160 km/h)
109-110 km: 130 km/h (curve on eastern approach to bridge)
110-112 km: 110 km/h (curve on western approach)
Hartford Station: all trains stop since curves limit time savings from not stopping, as at New Haven and Providence
112-127 km: 250 km/h (New Britain curve, speed increase to 270 km/h in between is possible but saves only about 8 seconds)
127-153.5 km: 270 km/h (Kensington and Berlin curves preclude higher speed)
153.5-155 km: 210 km/h (S-curve precludes easy straightening, and significant speed boost requires significant residential takings)
155-169 km: 250 km/h (this requires straightening the kink around and north of the I-91 underpass, otherwise 210 km/h to km-point 162, 160 km/h to km-point 164, and 200 km/h farther south)
169-172 km: 120 km/h (New Haven approach, legacy line curve)
The travel time is 25:30 for nonstop trains from Providence to Hartford and 16:10 from Hartford to New Haven. With a minute of dwell time at Hartford, this is exactly 9 minutes longer than I-95.
Compatibility with other plans
Although I-95 requires less construction overall than Hartford and the construction difficulties are about comparable, Hartford is more compatible with other intercity rail plans for New England, which reduces the advantage of I-95. Under an I-95 option, it is still useful to serve Hartford (and Springfield), which means the Amtrak Shuttle line needs to be electrified, double-tracked, and partially curve-modified anyway. Under the Hartford option this is not required except to provide regional service to Wallingford and Meriden, so the bypassed parts of the legacy line could be built to lower standards.
That said, 60 km of 160-200 km/h electrified track is still a lot cheaper than 60 km of 250-270 km/h track, which means that this reduces the cost advantage of I-95 but does not eliminate it. Of course 60 km of 250-270 km/h track is cheaper than 60 km of 360 km/h track, but I-95 still involves much less overall greenfield track construction.Hartford is also more compatible with any plans Rhode Island might make for southward commuter rail service. The current plans are too low-ridership to bother accommodating, but future plans might involve higher service levels.
Conversely, I-95 is useful for Shore Line East service, since regional trains could use the Quinnipiac bridge as a shortcut. The tracks cross in East Haven and a track connection could be built; it is likely that there will always be enough capacity for 5 km of track-sharing between intercity and regional trains. I-95 is also useful for the New London connection in case anyone wants to build a New London-Norwich regional train serving Mohegan Sun on the way.
Phasing
Neither route is particularly expensive by the standards of what both Penn Design and Amtrak think are appropriate budgets. At French construction costs, 124 km of high-speed track with no tunnels, few viaducts, and a mostly preexisting Interstate right-of-way should be about $2.5 billion. Likewise, the cost of 167 km with only 2 km of tunnel and a fair number of viaducts should be less than $4 billion, possibly down to $3.5 billion.
However, in case there’s only enough money for part of the route, construction has to be phased. The Hartford route has no track connections to usable passenger railroads between Hartford and Providence, so the only useful partial construction there is the entire Hartford-Providence segment at once plus electrification of New Haven-Hartford(-Springfield). The I-95 route comes sufficiently close to the legacy track in East Haven and Old Saybrook, giving three segments each of which can be built separately: across the Quinnipiac, from East Haven to Old Saybrook, and from Old Saybrook to Kingston.
Station-skipping decisions
Every possible train station on a route deserves an answer to two questions: what is the time advantage gained by skipping it?, and who is served by it?. Stations very close to urban terminals, for example Back Bay, have a very low stop penalty because of low approach speeds, but don’t add much service since people can just ride to the urban terminal. Suburban stations such as Route 128 and even Stamford given necessary track upgrades impose high enough a cost that they should also be skipped by express trains even if there’s a fair number of people who’d use them on the local trains.
Between New York and Boston, there are three stations where the answers to both questions favor express stops: New Haven, Hartford, Providence. With New Haven and Providence, the time cost of serving them is so low given urban curves that the only way to skip them at speed is to build new urban tunnels, which cost a lot of money relative to how much time they save. With Hartford, the situation is the same if all trains go via the inland route that serves it.
However, on some level, the time cost of serving Hartford is 9 minutes, compared with about 2 for Providence. But this is not really comparable, so we can’t just say “9 minutes is too much,” as it would be if a station on a running line imposed a 9-minute stop penalty. If we skip an intermediate station that imposes a time penalty of 4 minutes, the express trains gain 4 minutes but there are still local trains serving it. In contrast, if we go via I-95 we save 9 minutes but have no way of serving Hartford on local trains; trains can branch off north of New Haven and serve Hartford and Springfield at lower speed, but this only connects Hartford to New Haven and points south rather than to Providence or Boston. So we lose something more fundamental than stopping train frequency.
So it’s not enough to say that Hartford should be skipped because it saves the trains 9 minutes. That cost-benefit calculation depends on how important serving Hartford is to people. It’s up to the potential users of Northeast Corridor HSR and the politicians providing the funding to decide whether it’s worth it to connect Hartford with Providence and Boston.
Infrastructure and Democracy
Two stories, one recent and one older, have made me think about the undemocratic way the US builds infrastructure. The older story is California HSR’s cost overrun coming from scope creep; the biggest overruns were in the Bay Area, where power brokers from different agencies wanted separate territory at stations, leading to additional tunnels and viaducts. The newer one is Long Island’s reaction to the MTA’s developing proposals to add Metro-North service to Penn Station, sharing the East River Tunnels with the LIRR and Amtrak; the reaction is negative on misinformed grounds, but the misinformation often comes from official sources.
In both cases, there’s a democratic deficit in US local government that’s in play. Swiss infrastructure projects require a referendum, and involve detailed benefits announced to the public. In Lucern, a recent urban tunnel was sold to the public on the grounds that it would enable certain clockface frequencies toward the south and southeast, such as a train every 15 minutes to Hergiswil and an hourly express train to Engelberg; the full cost was included in the referendum. Even much larger projects, such as the Gotthard Base Tunnel, are funded by referendum. Nothing of that sort happens in the US, even when there are referendums on infrastructure.
I’ve begun to believe that California’s original sin with its HSR project is that it refused to do the same. Prop 1A was a referendum for what was billed as one third of the cost, $10 billion. In reality it was $9 billion and $1 billion in extra funds for connecting local transit; in year of expenditure dollars the estimated budget then was $43 billion, so barely a fifth of the project’s cost was voted on. The HSR Authority planned on getting the rest of the money from federal funding and private-sector funding. Prop 1A even required a 1:1 match from an external source, so confident the Authority was that it would get extra money.
In reality, at the time the proposition was approved to go to ballot, the financial crisis hadn’t happened yet, and there was no talk of a large fiscal stimulus. Although the stimulus bill gave California $3 billion, in 2008 the HSR Authority couldn’t know this source of money would be available, and yet it assumed it would get $17-19 billion in federal funding. Likewise, no private investor was identified back then, and promises of foreign funding have been inconclusive so far and again only come years after the referendum. Put another way, Californians voted without any information about where 79% of the budget for HSR would come from. The state is now scrambling for extra funding sources, such as cap-and-trade revenues. Since there is no real dividing line between on-budget and off-budget when 79% of the budget is undetermined, costs could rise without controls. An agency that had lined $43 billion in prior funding via referendum would be too embarrassed by any cost increase requiring it to ask for more money from any source; a large cost increase could make the difference between project and no project.
In the Long Island case, there was of course no referendum – East Side Access and Metro-North’s Penn Station Access were both decided by the commuter rail agencies and the state legislature. However, even subject to the legislative decisions, there has been very little transparency about what’s going on. The MTA has provided scant details about service planning for after East Side Access opens: total tph counts for each terminal, but nothing about off-peak frequencies, nothing about which LIRR lines would have service to which terminal, and nothing about the frequency of each individual LIRR line. A major change, the end of through-service from east of Jamaica to Flatbush Avenue, is not explicitly mentioned; one has to read between the lines to see that there’s no service planned to Flatbush Avenue, which is planned to be connected to Jamaica by shuttle service (and the shuttle service is still not going to offer urban rail frequencies or fare integration with buses and the subway).
In this climate, it’s easy for people to disbelieve that the agencies involved know what they’re doing, even when they are. Penn Station Access is unpopular among Long Island politicians, who view the East River Tunnels as their turf and do not want to share with Metro-North. The MTA and New Jersey Transit keep saying that Penn Station is at capacity without further explanation, and the MTA says it will add Metro-North trains to Penn; is it any wonder that state legislators see those two statements and, in the context of past cost overruns, oppose Penn Station Access?
When there is democracy – by which I mean not just periodic elections offering two parties to choose from, but a referendum process, transparency, and community consultations – people have an incentive to be informed. It’s possible to sway many people in one’s community and have a positive effect on local state services. Local politicians who are informed on the subject will be able to lead spending and planning efforts and can count on the support of informed voters. In contrast, when there is democratic deficit, being informed is far less useful, because decisions are made independently of what people think unless they are power brokers, or perhaps wealthy, power-brokering communities.
Alexis de Tocqueville observed as much when he visited the US two hundred years ago, when it was already far more democratic, for white men, than any European country: American farmers were more informed about politics than their European counterparts. Today, everyone in the first world has democracy and universal franchise, with a few exceptional countries that are worse-run than people give them credit for. But on the local level, some countries have done much more and get rewarded with a system of accountability to the voters, leading to better governance. The US is trading on an unreformed political system, in which the check on local officials’ power comes from neighboring fiefdoms rather than from the people.
The feudal character of local government in the US is leading to the usual exasperation with the system. But instead of turning toward democracy, transit supporters cheer as governments turn toward absolutism, increasing the power of the state at the expense of other stakeholders. California is reforming its environmental protection laws in response to abuse of the system by powerful communities; in reality, one of the state legislators involved in the effort recently left politics to work for Chevron. A reformer at Cornell recently proposed to improve transportation governance by “[putting] a bipartisan committee in a locked room.” Thomas Friedman cheers Chinese megaprojects as a way to achieve progress and sustainability; he says nothing about the more cost-effective projects done democratically in Europe, even though they involve some equally impressive edifices like the Alpine base tunnels. Throughout the transit activist community, including nearly every blogger and commenter but also the main activists on the ground, there’s a tendency to view any community opposition to a project as NIMBYism and to ask for changes that make it easier for the government to get its projects done, as in the Robert Moses era. Social democrats and neo-liberals are equally complicit in the march for not just centralization, which can be done with democratic checks, but also concentration of power in the hands of state officials.
Good infrastructure does not come from autocrats. Nothing comes from autocrats except more wealth and power for the autocrats, which may or may not involve infrastructure that is useful to the public. Undemocratic systems lead to a feedback loop in which the people have no incentive to be informed while the power brokers have no incentive to make sure anyone is informed, and this way it’s easy to spend $8 billion on a train station and approach tracks, without knowing or caring how many orders of magnitude this is more expensive than the average first-world rail tunnel. A good transit advocate has to advocate for more democracy, transparency, and simplicity in government operations, because decisions made behind closed doors are almost invariably made for the benefit of the elite that’s on the right side of those doors.
The Problem with Anchoring
A major idea due to Jarrett Walker, adopted with gusto by Vancouver’s Translink, is that transit should be anchored at both ends. That is, transit lines should have busy destinations at both ends, and should strive to reorient development such that the maximum intensity is near the ends. I was skeptical about this from the start, but now that I live in Vancouver and see the practice every time I go to UBC, I realize it’s much worse.
The Translink document justifying the layout has a figure, Figure 10 on PDF-page 15, showing that if development intensity peaks in the middle, then the bus will be overcrowded in the middle and empty at the ends. In contrast, if development intensity peaks at the ends, then the bus will be crowded but not overcrowded the entire way. Or, as Jarrett says, “If a transit line is operating through an area of uniform density, about 50% of its capacity goes to waste.”
Both in theory and in practice, this argument fails to note that a bus with development at the ends will be overcrowded the entire way, because people will travel longer. If UBC were located around Central Broadway instead of at the very west end of the metro area, people would just have shorter travel time; at no point would there be more westbound a.m. crowding because at no point would there be more westbound passengers traveling at the peak. There would be more eastbound a.m. crowding, but that’s not the Broadway buses’ limiting factor. Of the top four routes for passups, which have far more than the fifth route, three are east-west with strong anchors at both end (UBC at the west, the Expo Line at the east) and one, the third worst, is a C-shaped amalgamation of two north-south routes, with peak development downtown, in the middle of the C.
On a theoretical level, development intensity is a result of high land prices justifying high density, and in an urban area high land prices come from proximity to other urban land. In cities without topographic or political constraints on development, the CBD is always near the center of the metro area, and in coastal cities the CBD is usually near the shore but near the center along the axis parallel to the shore. Major secondary nodes usually arise in areas close to many suburbs, often the richer ones, and there’s travel demand to them from all directions: see for examples La Defense near Paris and Shinjuku and the other secondary CBDs in Tokyo. Some of those nodes happen to be near the shore (UBC, Santa Monica and Long Beach, Coney Island) but most aren’t. Any newly-built anchor will sprout further development around it unless there’s very strong local resistance. To connect all those neighborhoods that lie beyond the secondary CBD, unanchored transit lines are then unavoidable.
We’re left then with anchors that are at geographic edges, such as on shores. Those raise travel distances, because people can only live at one direction from them, so for a given residential density they will have to travel longer on average. They look attractive to transit managers because they also make the buses more uniformly full, but they’re worse for passengers who have to travel longer, often standing the entire way because of overcrowding. They’re not even good for transit agency finance, because urban transit invariably has either flat fare (as is the case within Vancouver proper) or fare that depends on distance fairly weakly. Short trips generate as much or almost as much money for the agency while requiring less effort to run because of lower crowding levels. Trips in which most passengers ride end to end are the least efficient, unless they can overcome this with very high crowding levels all day.
Now, what does help finances as well as the passenger experience is bidirectional demand. Anchors are good at that. However, what’s just as useful in cases of asymmetric peak demand is destinations that are short of the most crowded points. For example, in Manhattan the north-south subways fill as they go southward in the a.m. peak. This means that commercial buildings north of Midtown, generating passenger traffic that either is northbound (hence, reverse-peak) or gets off the train before it gets the most crowded within Midtown, add ridership without requiring running more trains. The MTA’s guidelines explicitly call for matching frequency to demand at the most crowded point of each line based on uniform sets of peak and off-peak crowding guidelines. This favors not outlying anchors, but development sprinkled uniformly along transit lines outside the CBD. The same development in the North Bronx would have low transit mode share (UBC has high transit mode share, but it’s at a geographic edge, and on top of that it has a huge body of students), while on the Upper East Side and Upper West Side it would have high transit mode share. The only outer ends where heavy upzoning is appropriate are those that aren’t really ends, such as Flushing and Jamaica, preexisting secondary centers in their own right to which people take the subway from the west and drive from the east.
De facto, Translink makes cost figures available for each bus route, and we can compare costs per boarded passenger on the east-west routes and on the north-south ones. The east-west routes have an initial advantage because they have bidirectional peak demand, whereas the north-south and C-shaped ones do not, and have few destinations short of the CBD, mainly just on Central Broadway or Commercial Drive. Despite this inherent east-west advantage, cost per rider is not lower on the east-west lines. Of the top ten route numbers, there are five balanced east-west routes: 99, 9, 41, 49, 25; and four north-south or C-shaped ones serving downtown: 20, 16, 8, 3. (The 135 is east-west connecting downtown with SFU, and could be included in either category.) Going in the same order as above, the east-west routes cost $0.61, $1.21, $1.10, $1.31, $1.47 per passenger, while the north-south ones cost $1.02, $1.29, $1.09, $1.06. (The 135 costs $1.32.) The three routes that interline to UBC on 4th Avenue – the 4, 84, and 44 – cost $1.62, $1.30, and $0.78 respectively, averaging to $1.30; the 84 is anchored at the Millennium Line, the 44 is anchored downtown, and the 4 is anchored downtown but also continues farther east.
The 99 is much cheaper to run than the other routes despite its high proportion of end-to-end ridership, but it is also critically crowded and benefits from multiple peaks as it serves both a secondary CBD and a university; it is also express, which among the other routes under discussion is only true of the 44, the 84, and the 135. Among the local routes, the north-south routes are actually a bit cheaper to run than the east-west routes even if we exclude the 4 as a not fully anchored exception. The 20, the 8, and the 3 all have their maximum development intensity at the downtown end with some extra development in their inner areas, near SkyTrain and Broadway, and a lot of medium-intensity development at the tail. This provides suitable short-of-CBD destinations adding passengers at low cost.
For one measure of productivity, we can divide the number of boardings per hour by the average load. The result is the reciprocal of the average number of hours spent by each passenger on the bus; a higher number means each passenger spends less time on the bus, indicating higher turnover, or equivalently more revenue relative to crowding. The 99, 9, 41, 49, and 25 have ratios of 2.79, 3.13, 2.65, 1.93, 2.13; the 20, 16, 8, and 3 have ratios of 3.26, 2.73, 3.57, 3.24. The 20, 8, and 3 again look very good here, helping explain their low operating costs and also their low crowding (they rank 12th, 27th, and 20th respectively in passups but 2nd, 6th, and 7th in weekday ridership). The 49 and 25, both highly anchored routes, do not look as good, and indeed have many passups relative to ridership (they rank 1st and 4th in passups but 8th and 10th in weekday ridership); they have the redeeming feature that they protrude slightly into Burnaby, where zonal fares are higher, but judging by a map of the passups, the 25 seems to get a large majority of its ridership strictly within Vancouver, with Nanaimo Station as the eastern anchor rather than Brentwood.
We can extend this analysis further by looking at New York’s bus operating costs. Cap’n Transit laboriously compiled a spreadsheet of operating cost per New York City Transit bus route. Within Manhattan, the pattern is that east-west routes have much lower operating costs per passenger than north-south routes. The M15, the busiest route in Manhattan with ridership comparable to that of the 99 in Vancouver and with the best finances among the north-south routes, almost breaks even on direct operating costs; most of the major east-east routes are outright profitable counting only direct operating costs. The key difference is that the east-west routes are much shorter, so passengers are paying the same amount of money for less distance. In his own analysis, the Cap’n notes that the express bus with the best finances is also one of the shortest, and that in general the profitable-after-direct-operating-costs buses have many transfer points to the subway, which suggests short trips as well.
Having seen more evidence for the theory that good bus finances require short trips rather than endpoint anchors, we can go back to Vancouver and compare more routes. The busiest north-south route not on the above list, the 2/22, works more like the 16 than like the 20, 8, and 3: not only is the 22 C-shaped rather than terminating downtown, but also it serves corridors that are less busy than Commercial and inner Main, reducing the availability of short trips. The shorter 2, overlying the longer 22, has 3.42 boardings per hour per load, but still costs $1.43 per rider; the 22 has only 2.15 boardings per hour per load and costs $1.61 per rider, and also ranks 3rd citywide in passups versus 11th in weekday ridership. On both the 16 and the 22, the north-south legs (Arbutus and Renfrew for the 16, Macdonald and Clark/Knight for the 22) are streets that aren’t very busy by themselves, but instead act as important cross-streets for Broadway and other east-west streets. Here are Knight, Renfrew, Arbutus, and Macdonald, and here are, by contrast, Commercial, Fraser, and Main, all around the same cross avenue (near but not at 16th).
The same is true of the east-west buses. The 99, 9, and 41 have better finances than the 49 and the 25. They also do better on passups, ranking 2nd, 11th, and 10th versus 1st, 3rd, and 4th in ridership. The 99 has much better finances than all other buses, which can be chalked to its overcrowding, but ultimately comes from continuous intense development all over Broadway making it a prime corridor. 41st has some of this development as well: here is how a strip of it looks close to the cross street I live on. Compare this with 49th and King Edward around the same cross street. This is not cherry-picked: 49th and King Edward just aren’t commercial streets, and even where they act as important cross streets such as at Cambie there’s not much development there. Of course 4th does have this commercial development and is almost as expensive as 49th and King Edward, but its commercial development is discontinuous, and the relatively intense section between Granville and Balsam is short enough that people can walk it.
So what this means for transit-friendly development is that it should not worry about anchoring, but instead try to encourage short trips on local transit. In his original post about Vancouver’s anchoring, Jarrett says of Marine Drive, at the southern edge of Vancouver proper, “From a transit efficiency standpoint, it would be a good place for some towers.” This is not good transit: from the perspective of both costs and ridership any residential development south of Broadway in which people take the bus downtown is equivalent, so might as well put it immediately south of Broadway or at King Edward, 41st, or 49th to connect with the east-west bus routes and let people live closer to work. Commercial development, too, is best placed short of downtown, because if it’s on Marine Drive people will drive to it whereas if it’s along the blocks immediately south of Broadway many won’t.
Better would be to do what Vancouver hasn’t done, and encourage medium-intensity development all over the major corridors, of the kind that exists on Commercial, Fraser, Main, and 41st and allows their respective bus routes to serve productive short trips, generating low costs without excessive crowding. Towers on Marine Drive, to the extent that their inhabitants would even use transit instead of driving, would clog all the north-south buses. Mixed-use medium-rise development running continuously along Arbutus (which already has an abandoned rail corridor that could make a relief light rail line if the Canada Line gets too crowded) and the major east-west corridors would have the opposite effect, encouraging local trips that wouldn’t even show up at the most crowded point of the line. I’ve argued before that this urban layout is good for walkability, but it appears to also be good for surface transit productivity.
This is also relevant to upzoning around SkyTrain stations. There has not been so far any upzoning around Cambie, even though the Canada Line has been in operation for 3.5 years and was approved for construction over 8 years ago, but there will be some very soon. Vancouver’s draft plan, as shown on PDF-pages 26-27, permits 4 floors of residential development on the cross streets with the stations, 6 on Cambie itself, and between 6 and 12 with mixed use near the stations themselves. Continuous commercial development will be permitted only on Cambie between 41st and 49th. This will be of some use to the east-west buses because there will be more destinations at Cambie, but it will not create the same variety of small destinations available on Main, Fraser, 41st, Commercial, and Broadway, not without further upzoning near intersections that are nowhere near SkyTrain. It’s better than the towers of the Burnaby stations, but it’s still not very good. There is commercial upzoning near Marine Drive, but that can’t be very transit-oriented given the location, and it can’t do much for north-south bus productivity since in the nearby neighborhoods car ownership is high.
It’s too late to change the rezoning plan to permit more linear commercial development on the cross streets, but it’s possible to do better when Vancouver gets around to building Broadway SkyTrain. On Broadway itself, general intensification, allowing more residential density and replacing residential-only zoning with mixed-use zoning, should suffice. There is continuous commercial development from east of Cambie to west of Arbutus, with a two-block gap to Macdonald, and a one-block gap between Macdonald and Alma; both gaps are within a few hundred meters of the cross streets and can be closed easily. The Alma-Sasamat gap on 10th is probably too hard, though. The Arbutus-Macdonald gap on 4th can also be closed, though those blocks are nearly a kilometer from where the stations would be. But it’s as important to allow commercial zoning extending as far south as possible on the major north-south streets, especially Arbutus. Continuous mixed-use zoning should extend at least as far as 16th, and maximum residential density should be at a minimum 4 floors and ideally 6, as Arbutus, Macdonald, and 16th are very wide and the intersections feel out of scale to the current 1-story development.
Of course, this principle of design is true only of urban transit, both surface and rapid. Once the stop spacing increases to regional rail levels, it is no longer feasible to have continuous commercial development, and usually the street networks of the different suburbs are separate anyway without continuous arterials. In all cases it’s important to allow commercial zoning around stations, but the spiky development characteristic of the Expo and Millennium Lines becomes a better idea the longer the stop spacing is. Endpoint anchoring also becomes more justifiable at near-intercity scales, such as New York-New Haven or Boston-Providence: the fares are closer to proportional to distance, and also neither New Haven nor Providence is sprouting suburbs at such scale and distance that it’s justifiable to extend Metro-North or the MBTA with their usual stop spacing past those cities. But at the scale of urban transit, or even inner regional rail, the natural endpoint of a line is not a secondary anchor, and transit agencies should control peak-to-base ratios by commercial upzoning along corridors and near many stations outside the CBD rather than by making people ride transit kilometers longer than would be necessary if the zoning were different.
UN and Rail Operators Propose International Vacuum Train Network
The UN Development Programme, the UIC, the governments of Japan and the EU, and the Japan Railways group have issued a joint release calling for the development of an international network of vacuum tubes in which trains will travel at a kilometer per second, enabling fast, low-emissions intercontinental travel. The system will connect all continents and all major cities of the world in 145 countries. There will be about 400 station stops and 200,000 km of route, including two tunnels across each of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, which will sit suspended in the water 50 meters deep, to provide sufficient clearance for shipping.
All of the organizations and companies involved have expressed optimism that the project will take over a large majority of global airline ridership and induce additional traffic due to the faster and more convenient travel. New York-London will be reduced to a travel time of about an hour and forty minutes, and Los Angeles-Tokyo to two and a half hours. Minor cities will require a connection at a major station, but the connections will be easier than on airlines today and the punctuality will be high. In conversations on background, officials have projected about six billion annual travelers and six trillion annual passenger-km by 2040, both about twice the corresponding figures for the global airline industry today. On the highest-trafficked lines, such as between London and Paris, trains will travel every two minutes, at lower speed due to the short distances between cities.
JR Central President Yoshiyuki Kasai said that the technology used by the trains would come from decades of Japanese experiments with maglev technology; maglev trains, he explained, are lighter and more powerful than conventional trains and could travel through vacuum tubes without any friction or air resistance. The only commercial maglev line in the world, the Shanghai Maglev Train connecting Pudong International Airport with a suburb a few subway stops out of city center, uses a different and incompatible technology developed by Siemens. UN Development Programme chair Helen Clark explained that the UN had to make a choice between the JR technology and the Siemens technology, and that the choice of JR’s technology was “purely on the technical merits of very high-speed operation, without regard for financing considerations.” and that JR Central agreed to let go of the patents within five years allowing other companies to build the same technology.
The projected cost of the entire project is, in today’s money, $10 trillion, to be spent over 25 years, though the earliest segments will open by 2025. The Abe administration pledged $1.5 trillion of this, and the UN is seeking a commitment of $2.5 trillion from each of the US and the EU, of which a portion would be spent domestically on connecting the two economic superpower’s own major cities internally but most would be spent on the core intercontinental system. A German official speaking on background said that due to the EU’s precarious sovereign debt situation it would be hard to secure an early commitment; multiple EU officials, speaking anonymously and on background, added that they doubt that Japan can borrow $1.5 trillion at its current debt level and accused the Abe administration of playing politics to ensure that the UN chose Japanese technology over German technology. Chinese Premier Li Keqiang pledged another $1.5 trillion to the project, which the same EU sources attributed played a role in the UN and UIC’s requirement that JR Central let other companies produce the same technology in the future.
A senior official within the Obama administration said that he doubts the US can offer any money for the core system in the near future, but that the US could spend money on building its own domestic network and connecting it to the transoceanic tunnels if Japan and the EU funded them. The estimated cost of the 18,000-kilometer network within the US and Canada is about $900 billion, though a senior official at the Federal Railroad Administration said his agency estimates the network would cost $2 trillion.
The UIC media office, when questioned on the figures, said that the cost estimates come from past costs of European, Chinese, and Japanese high-speed rail infrastructure, inflated for the tighter engineering requirements of higher speed and vacuum tubes. An engineer at French national railroad SNCF added that American costs are higher, but international standards for contracting and supervision by SNCF and other established railroads could reduce costs to international levels.
Clark added that the financing decisions are the most complex, and so far the UN has come up with three tiers of countries: rich countries, such as the US and Japan, which will be expected to contribute money toward the core intercontinental lines as well as subsidies for lines in the poorest countries; middle-income countries, for which she specifically named China and Russia, which will be expected to contribute money only to the lines passing through their own territory and connections; and low-income countries, such as all of Sub-Saharan Africa with the exception of South Africa, which will receive subsidies. China’s pledge of $1.5 trillion is more expensive than the expected cost of the Chinese domestic network of about $800 billion, but China agreed to build connections through nearby countries, including Vietnam, Mongolia, Burma, and the states of Central Asia.
The engineering specs, according both to UIC sources and the JR group’s technical drawings, are of the highest quality, without compromise of speed, capacity, or comfort. The train mockups are wide tubes, with noses that are simple and rounded and look more like those of submarines or planes than like those of high-speed trains. The trains are also going to be wider than any train that currently exists, in order to allow 3+3 seating in economy class and 2+2 seating in first class while maintaining the high comfort levels of rail travel. Seating density in economy class will be comparable to the higher-end premium economy seats on airlines, with a meter of pitch and 55 cm of seat width; in first class, seats will recline fully flat, providing a comfort level intermediate between those of business and first class on intercontinental flights.
Trains will be up to half a kilometer long, with capacity of 2,000 passengers in two-class layout. The full-speed intercontinental lines will have a maximum capacity of a train every four minutes, but key shorter connections with short stop spacing, including London-Paris, will be run at lower speed at a capacity of a train every two minutes. The largest cities, such as New York and London, will be express stations and every train passing through will stop, but most cities will have bypass tracks.
The tracks will also be built to the highest-quality specs, driving up the cost due to the need for extensive tunneling. At a speed of a kilometer per second, the horizontal curve radius must be at a minimum 250 km; the newest conventional high-speed rail lines are built with a curve radius of 7 km. Because the technology is not compatible with conventional railroads, several key pieces of infrastructure will have to duplicate preexisting rail megaprojects, including new tunnels across the English Channel, the Swiss Alps, and the Tsugaru Strait between Hokkaido and Honshu.
However, JR Central’s ongoing project to build an open-air maglev train between Tokyo and Osaka will be folded into this project, and JR Central’s own contribution of $80 billion of private money will be in addition to the Japanese government’s contribution. In countries without preexisting high-speed rail, including the US and UK, the project will replace any domestic conventional high-speed rail program, and in the UK the Cameron administration as well as opposition leader Ed Milliband expressed support for reprogramming the cost of Britain’s planned domestic high-speed line toward a vacuum tube instead.
The passenger experience with booking and security will be more like at regular train stations than at airports. Train station locations will be in or near city centers, generally running under the preexisting train stations in most cities. The UIC confirmed there will be security theater, but only at the level of air travel before the 9/11 attacks, and passengers will not have to take off shoes or jackets; non-passengers will be permitted past security. Because all stations will be built for international traffic, with no separation of international and domestic passengers, all passengers will have to carry valid identification, but only for the purposes of immigration and customs, and passengers whose tickets are domestic will be able to walk through immigration and customs. Because the expected operating costs are low trains are expected to run less than full except at peak travel times, allowing passengers to rebook missed trains at no cost.
The fare is still tentative, but the system will be simple, as on the Shinkansen trains, without the complexities of airline fare. Each segment between two stations will have a set fare going toward paying off construction, and each station will also be able to charge an additional fare chosen freely by the station owner. The fare will be set at a lower rate in low-income countries to allow their citizens to travel. As examples, the UIC said it’s projecting a $280 one-way fare between New York and London, but only a $90 fare between Cairo and Johannesburg, which corresponds to one fifth the rate per kilometer. The projected ridership is such that the long-term financial rate of return is about 2%, making it a profitable investment for the major governments of the first world. The office of UN General Secretary Ban-Ki Moon proposed that first-world sovereign investors agree to only take 1.5% and dedicate any higher profits to foreign aid, but Japan and the EU both said they demand a full share of the profits, and Moon admitted the UN has no real way to enforce profit-sharing.
When questioned about the project’s viability, a high-ranking source at the Obama administration said, “Today we’re not going to be able to fund any of this, but with Japanese and Chinese starter funds there will be initial segments, and I believe that in ten years we’ll be able to pledge money for it, once people in both parties recognize that it’s the future of transportation.”
European officials agree. Sources close to German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande both added that once the fiscal crisis is over and the governments of southern Europe have reined in their national debt, the EU will be able to come up with its target $2.5 trillion pledge. German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble added, “Our biggest problem is the irresponsibility of Greece, Spain, and other debt crisis countries, but the crisis won’t last forever and afterward we will have a discussion about long-term infrastructure investment.”
Linear Compression: How HSR is Like Rapid Transit
A post from last month on Keep Houston Houston notes how high-speed rail transformed Japanese geography to the point that it’s faster to get from Osaka to Nagano via Tokyo than direct despite a doubling of travel distance. The same comment could equally be made about rapid transit within a city: for example, for some origin-destination pairs in Vancouver, it’s faster to go the long way around the Millennium Line than to take a direct bus, and the same principle works in every other city. For both modes of transportation, this comes from high capital costs and high capacity, which make them useful primarily on the thickest travel markets, which tend to be radial around the largest center.
The next step is to look at the effect this change in transportation on economic geography. As I’ve argued before, in both cases the result reinforces preexisting centralization. This is both feedforward and feedback: a dominant city creates enough travel demand to support an HSR network and a dominant CBD creates enough demand to justify digging subways, while at the same time the quickness of travel along the rapid lines makes people emphasize connections along them and deemphasize others.
Concretely, this means that in Manhattan, with its wealth of north-south subway lines and paucity of east-west lines north of Midtown, people identify with the East Side or the West Side. Although the Upper East Side and Upper West Side are socially and demographically similar and are geographically close to each other, the social connections I’ve seen are primarily north-south. A gaming group I participate in many of whose members have recently moved to New York concentrates on the West Side since the earliest members moved to the Upper West Side, and so more people who were living or looking to live in Brooklyn or Queens are moving to Uptown Manhattan in general and the West Side specifically. The subway helps the Greater Upper West Side project influence as far north as Inwood. In contrast, the east-west connection is deemphasized to the point that people I know talk up the cultural differences between the Upper East Side and the Upper West Side, even ones who are not from either neighborhood and are not from the usual high-income demographic (though, of course, the two neighborhoods are culturally dominant and can discuss their own issues via mass media).
I do not know if the above trend is also the case for countries with developed HSR networks. However, another corollary trend is. The importance of the CBD and areas easily accessible from it is that the CBD becomes the more or less neutral choice for where people from different sectors can meet. Midtown can be easily accessed from the Greater Upper West Side, Greater Williamsburg, Greater Bed-Stuy, and so on. This effect then not only reinforces the rapid transit lines but also their nodes, to the point of creating possible centers around accidental transfer stations. In Vancouver, the Commercial Drive area functions as a major meeting location for social groups that are too widely distributed around the metro area for a place in Burnaby or along the Canada Line to be as acceptable. Although the Commercial Drive area hasn’t turned into a CBD and most likely never will, Midtown Manhattan became a CBD largely because of subway lines leading to Uptown Manhattan and Queens. Social meetings and job centers obey similar geographic rules.
In a fractal manner, in each sector there can also be a relatively neutral meeting location when the primary CBD is too expensive or too far, based on either a highway network (for example, White Plains for Westchester) or a rapid transit network (for example, Downtown Brooklyn for all of Brooklyn except Eastern Brooklyn), or even an arbitrary choice of zoning that then becomes self-reinforcing (for example, Metrotown in Burnaby). It promotes a perverse kind of equality, one in which no sector is favored over others, and the social hierarchy is based on the ease of getting to the center, in a similar manner to how in former British colonies with few whites, English sometimes arises as the politically neutral choice of language (or French in former French colonies, etc.), replacing a hierarchy between speakers of different local languages with a hierarchy between people with varying degrees of English fluency.
The exact same node effect can be observed in HSR. Japan’s become more centralized around Tokyo since the Shinkansen was built. In France and Britain there’s heavy centralization, going back many decades; from the start, the lines connecting the capital to the major secondary cities were treated as fast main lines while the others were slower branches. In South Korea, there’s mixed evidence about the role of the KTX in promoting development in secondary cities, but there has been growth in outer exurbs of Seoul that the KTX put within reasonable commute distance, such as Cheonan and Asan, even beyond the general growth of Seoul’s suburbs in the last 30 or so years. It is likely that of the secondary cities, the one emerging the best from this development is Daejeon, both the closest to Seoul and the junction of the lines to Busan/Daegu and Gwangju; for what it’s worth, even before the KTX opened, its metro area had faster population growth than the other major metro areas, excluding satellite metro areas that should really be thought of as suburbs of larger cities.
The meaning of this analogy is that an urban rapid transit network and a national HSR network will look similar. We can now extend the analogy and think in terms of connecting transportation. S-Bahn/RER-style regional rail generally involves routing preexisting commuter lines through new tunnels to provide rapid transit-style urban service; this is analogous to making HSR use legacy lines at lower speed in parts of the system that don’t justify the construction costs of a new line. Branch regional lines and buses feed people into rapid transit stations, in the same manner that legacy rail lines feed people into HSR stations. Some of the alignment questions, such as whether to tunnel or build complex viaducts to reach secondary city centers or to go around them on easier rights of way to save money, are similar, though the answers are often different (i.e. the benefits of the higher-cost alternative are much higher for rapid transit than for HSR since more people ride local transit than intercity transit, while the extra costs are comparable).
It can even explain some of the political coalitions. Rapid transit and HSR are both high-construction cost, high-capacity, long-term investments. They scale up but not down, and therefore cannot be undertaken by a cheeky entrepreneur with a moderate amount of venture capital; they are instead built by governments or very large conglomerates or sometimes both combined, and require careful planning (for example, upzoning) to ensure economic development patterns can reorient along the new infrastructure. They are also signature investments generating a lot of press, to the point that in some cases they can pursued purely for the ribbon cutting, while other forms of rail usually aren’t unless a politician is trying to oversell them as equivalent to rapid transit or HSR but cheaper.
SkyTrain and UBC
I live about 3 minutes from an express bus stop, where I can get the express bus and be at UBC within 15 minutes, whereupon I can walk from the diesel bus loop to my classroom in 6 minutes. Since I teach at 10 in the morning, it means I should leave around 9:30 or just before and then with rush hour headways I can be guaranteed not to be late to my own class. Unfortunately, because classes start on the hour, everyone wants to ride the last bus that makes the 10 am classes, and by the time this bus gets to my neighborhood, it is full. To guarantee getting on a bus I need to be at the bus stop by 9:20 or not much later, which since I have no real reason to show up to campus 15 minutes ahead of time lengthens my effective commute to 40-45 minutes. A bus that is in principle faster door-to-door than any proposed SkyTrain extension, which would serve my area at a much farther away station, becomes more than 10 minutes slower at the time of day relevant to me.
Vancouver has a general problem with passups – that is, passengers at a bus stop who have to let a full bus go. A list of the bus stops with the most passups is dominated by UBC’s peak caused by classes starting and ending at a synchronized time: eight of the top ten stops are for east-west buses serving UBC, and at those stops the passups are concentrated in the AM peak for westbound buses and the PM peak for eastbound ones. Of those eight stops, two, on the 49, are partially connections to the Canada Line (compare passups east and west of Cambie here), but the six on the 99-B are not, since a sizable fraction of riders ride end to end and there are substantial passups west of Cambie as well.
The demand generated by a traditional CBD can be smoothed with flex-time work and with a general spread of the peak around a peak half hour. With a university this is not feasible: to ensure maximum flexibility for students’ class schedule classes should be synchronized. When I was at NUS, a commuter university like UBC, I had a similar problem with full buses heading from campus to the subway stations after classes. Because UBC is nowhere near SkyTrain, its demand has to be spread among many bus routes, and is so great that it’s clogged not just the 99-B but also parallel routes such as the 25 and relief lines such as the 84.
The only alternative for investment in the Broadway corridor that has enough capacity to meet this demand is a full SkyTrain option. Any option that relies on a connecting bus part of the way not only won’t solve the capacity problem, but might even make it worse by concentrating all the UBC-bound demand at the westernmost SkyTrain station on Broadway, at either Granville or Arbutus. Today, people who take the Millennium Line can use the 84, which is faster than the 99-B; any extension of the Millennium Line west, even just to Cambie to complete the gap from Commercial to the Canada Line, is likely to concentrate demand on one corridor, overwhelming the truncated 99-B even further.
A light rail option probably has enough capacity, but does very little for Central Broadway or for completing the SkyTrain gap, and would also require pedestrian-hostile reconfiguration of stoplights and left turn cycles, making crossing the street even harder than it already is. UBC, which doesn’t care about Vancouver’s own needs, advocates an all-light rail option, while the city, which doesn’t care about UBC’s, wants a subway initially going as far west as Arbutus with a bus transfer to the west. A combo option with SkyTrain to Arbutus and light rail the rest of the way exists (Combo A in the alternatives analysis), but is almost as expensive as a full subway. The ridership projection for the combo option is almost even with that of a full subway, but such a projection is based on optimistic assumptions about transfer penalties and passengers’ willingness to travel on slower transit: the combo option is slower by about 7 minutes than the full subway from most preexisting SkyTrain stations as well as from Central Broadway, and requires an extra transfer for people traveling from the Millennium Line or Central Broadway.
Because the project has a $3 billion price tag, various critics have already begun complaining that it’s needlessly expensive (in reality, the inflation-adjusted projected cost per rider is the same as those of the Millennium, Canada, and Evergreen Lines) and proposing inferior solutions, and I believe that this cost is why the city and Translink are thinking of truncating the extension to Arbutus and only doing the rest later. It’s fine to spend a higher sum on the combination of the Canada and Evergreen Lines, which look nice on a map and make a lot of suburban mayors happy, but when it’s just one line that more or less stays within the city it’s too expensive and needs to be chopped into phases.
The other issue is that SkyTrain extensions have been more about shaping than about serving, i.e. serving areas that can be redeveloped rather than ones that are already dense. Look at the density map by census tract here: the residential density on Central Broadway and in the eastern parts of Kits is high, comparable to that of the census tracts hosting most SkyTrain-oriented developments. Even as far west as Alma there’s fairly high residential density. However, this is low-rise density, distributed roughly uniformly in the census tract, rather than clustered in a few high-rise buildings next to the SkyTrain stations. High-rises are possible throughout the corridor – there already are a few near the future Alma and Sasamat stops – but because of Point Grey’s affluent demographic it’s easy to write it off as not densifiable. Empty or very low-density plots are easier to redo from scratch than an existing neighborhood, even if the neighborhood already has enough development to justify a subway.
I suspect part of the problem comes from the context in which Vancouver’s TOD is located in. The Expo Line follows a private right-of-way with pedestrian-hostile streets connecting to stations, and the Millennium Line is elevated over the mostly sidewalk-free Lougheed Highway. The fastest way to get from some houses that are close to SkyTrain on a map to the station is to walk through mall parking lots. The walking range of SkyTrain stations located in unwalkable parts of Burnaby is not as high as it would be at ones located in a walkable urban context. At the level of how many people would live within a kilometer of SkyTrain, Kits and Central Broadway are already outperforming most of the Expo Line’s TOD, and even at the 500-meter range they do quite well; but in Burnaby the relevant distance is much shorter, and this may affect Translink’s ridership projections elsewhere in the metro area.
The only medium- and long-term solution is to find the $3 billion for the UBC extension, just as the metro region will have spent $3.5 billion in 10 years on the Canada and Evergreen Lines. Nothing else works for both UBC and Central Broadway; the counterarguments are based on generalizing from a different urban context; the difference-splitting intermediate solutions make some of the transit problems even worse than they are. It is always wrong to downgrade projects just because of a sticker shock, and if a very large project still has a good cost-benefit ratio then it’s a good investment to raise taxes or borrow money to fund it.
The Magic Triangle: Infrastructure-Timetable-Rolling Stock
In the last month, Amtrak decided not to purchase additional Acela cars, but instead replace the Acela fleet ahead of time, and try to buy trains that aren’t compliant with FRA regulations. More recently, Amtrak and the California HSR Authority decided to bundle their orders together. The latter decision drew plenty of criticism from some good transit advocates, such as Clem Tillier, and even the former decision did. Clem explained,
The whole notion of buying quicker trains for the NEC is ridiculous– the existing Acela Express trains have plenty of oomph (16 kW/tonne) to do anything they need to do. “Lighter” and “faster” isn’t the key to anything on the NEC, and dropping in a higher-performance train will not lead to material trip time improvements. They need to speed up the slow bits first, which isn’t something you do by blowing money on trains.
Clem’s criticism got a fair amount of flak in comments, from me and others, for underestimating how important getting around FRA regulations is. What nobody said in comments, and I only realized after the discussion died out, is how the choice of rolling stock depends heavily on what Amtrak plans to do with infrastructure and service planning in the Northeast. It doesn’t make sense in any case to tether Amtrak’s plans for a corridor that’s in many ways globally unique to the California HSR Authority’s for a fairly standard HSR implementation. But what rolling stock is required, and thus how bad the tethering is, depends on a concrete plan for infrastructure and schedule.
At the highest level, the unique issue with the Northeast Corridor is that significant parts can’t be feasibly upgraded to more than 200-250 km/h or easily bypassed, while others can. This means that there’s a tradeoff between top speed and cant deficiency, and the optimal choice depends on how much investment there is into speeding up segments. In any case it’s critical to improve station throats, interlockings, and railroad junctions, but after the 50 and 100 km/h zones are dealt with, the remaining questions are still nontrivial.
The more money is invested, the less it makes sense to run a 270 mm-cant deficiency, 250 km/h Pendolino, and the more it makes sense to run a Talgo AVRIL or E5/E6, both of which are capable of 350 km/h but only about 180 mm of cant deficiency (or N700-I, which is on paper capable of 330 km/h and about 135 mm and in practice could probably be run at 360 km/h and 175 mm). If there’s one segment that tilts the decision, it’s New Haven-Providence: using the legacy Shore Line, even with heavy upgrades, limits speeds and favors high cant deficiency, while bypassing it on I-95 favors high top speeds. But even the New York-Washington segment of today has a few curves strategically located at the worst locations, which make higher tilt degree a benefit.
In medium-speed territory, the Pendolino versus E5/AVRIL/N700-I decision is the muddiest. I ran rough simulations on an upgraded New Haven Line, with bypasses including those I advocated as a first step but also additional ones in the more difficult Stamford-New Haven segment. A train with E5 cant deficiency and N700-I acceleration did New York-New Haven in 32 minutes, and a Pendolino with all cars powered did it in 30. Neither is a standard trainset, though the former is very close to standard (and the Talgo AVRIL is also quite close). The Pendolino as it is, with about half the cars powered, has low power by HSR standards, and this is a problem for accelerating back from a slow zone at medium speed. With all cars powered (which is feasible, at higher acquisition cost) it’s still far from turbocharged, but can change speed more easily. An off-the-shelf Pendolino would not beat an E5 or AVRIL or N700-I on such a corridor, and of course would not beat it south of New York or north of New Haven.
Since nonstandard trains cost more, it’s important to also decide whether they’re worth the cost. Bearing in mind that Amtrak said a new noncompliant trainset costs $35-55 million, which is above the range for 8-car trains (China pays about $4 million per 350+ km/h car), so it may already be factoring in a premium, paying more for trains is worth it whenever the benefits to passengers are noticeable enough. This, like choosing very high-speed rolling stock rather than a Pendolino, is the most effective at high levels of infrastructure investment. An off-the-shelf Pendolino is good enough for most applications. So is an off-the-shelf N700-I without tilt. It’s okay to be 15 minutes slower than the cutting edge if the cutting edge is too expensive. But the effect of 15 minutes on ridership is more pronounced if it’s the difference between 1:35 and 1:50 than if it’s the difference between 3:00 and 3:15. In addition, the faster the service is, the more revenue each train earns, and this allows spreading the extra acquisition cost among more passengers.
Another factor that’s neglected, at least in public statements, is the service plan. Amtrak service is heavily padded: the fastest northbound Acela is scheduled to do Providence-Boston in 47 minutes, but in the opposite direction it’s 34. Remove the Route 128 stop and this can get close to 30 or even below it. About the fastest trains can go with no schedule padding is 19.25 minutes, and reasonable but not onerous padding raises it to about 20.5. Clearly, more of the difference comes from operating efficiencies than from any speed raising; the Acela already goes 240 km/h between Providence and Boston and already has about 180 mm (7″) cant deficiency.
The limiting factor here is more MBTA ownership and operating culture. A good service plan would make it clear how trains can share the corridor (and the same is true on the New Haven Line, another unduly slowed commuter-owned segment), and because MBTA trains are so slow, any cooperation would involve public statements regarding upgrades to the MBTA. The Acela has level boarding at every stop except New London, which is the easiest to cut out and should be bypassed together with the rest of Shore Line East. It’s the MBTA that has non-level boarding, which remains one of the biggest schedule risks, requiring plenty of recovery time to deal with possible long dwell times coming from above-average crowds.
The problem is that Amtrak has made no statements regarding how to integrate the three legs of the magic triangle. It proposed the Vision plan, which even political transit bloggers like Ben Kabak note the extreme cost of; there’s no funding, and the first segment for which it’s trying to obtain funding, the Gateway Tunnel, is very far from the top priority for speed or even for intercity rail capacity. It now proposes new rolling stock, but is unclear about what the trains are supposed to do except be very fast. (Bundling with a new-build line like California makes sense only if all curves are straightened to a radius of 4+ kilometers, even extremely expensive ones.)
Perhaps it’s a feature of opaque government, that Amtrak refuses to say how much money it needs to meet each timetable and capacity goal. For example, it could say that if Congress gives it $10 billion it could reduce travel time from Washington to Boston from the present 6:45 to 5:45 while also running a peak of 4 long trains per hour at that speed. (I think for $10 billion it’s possible to get down to 3:30 or at worst 4:00, but this is a matter of cost control and not just transparency, though transparency can indirectly lead to better cost control.) This would involve heavy cooperation with the commuter railroads that share its tracks and joint plans, as well as detailed public plans for how much to spend on each segment and for what purpose. This is routine in Swiss rail infrastructure planning, since all major projects have to be approved by referendum, but does not happen in the US. It could be that Amtrak knows what it’s doing but acts like it doesn’t because the structure of government in the US is such that these decisions are made behind closed doors.
But more likely, Amtrak doesn’t know what it’s doing, and is just proposing new initiatives that make it seem forward-looking. Changing FRA rules is an unmixed blessing. Bundling an order with California HSR is not. The fact that Amtrak is doing so, while keeping mum about even what kind of rolling stock it thinks it needs, suggests that it reverses the usual way reform should be: instead of a need for reform producing good results and thence good headlines, a need to get good headlines about reform produces reform ideas that sound good. Some of those good-sounding ideas really are good, but not all are. It’s important for good transit advocates to distinguish the two both privately and publicly.
I feel like in the last two years, we’ve seen important American transit and railroad managers say correct things. Shortly after I started making noise in comments about New York’s outsized subway construction costs, Jay Walder said as much in a report entitled Making Every Dollar Count. Joe Lhota proposed through-running on commuter rail as a solution to improve efficiency. Scott Stringer, too, talked publicly about comparative construction costs, and for all of my criticisms of transit managers who say that, I thought it was enough for him to say that as a political candidate for a medium-term office to deserve my endorsement for the mayoral election, which he unfortunately bowed out of. The FRA proposed to start working on new rules for rolling stock last year. At Amtrak, we’ve just now seen Joseph Boardman propose noncompliant rolling stock. Perhaps I’d be more optimistic if Walder and Lhota had stayed at the MTA for longer to implement their positive reform ideas, instead of using it as a springboard to secure a higher-paying job or run for mayor, but increasingly it looks like the good reform talk is not generally accompanied by good actions.
This is, again, where good transit advocates can have the most influence. We more or less know which reforms are required and which are not. There are disagreements at times (Clem, for one, has much better credentials as a good transit activist than I do), but on most of the agenda items there’s agreement. We already know what details we might want to see from a good plan of action, and the advantage of this is that we can check proposed plans against them. That Amtrak’s gotten so many details wrong suggests that it still doesn’t know what the best practices for rail construction are, even if the basic idea of getting around FRA rules is sound. I wish I didn’t have to say it, but I’ll believe Amtrak’s improved when I see it.
Pedestrian Observations 