Category: Transportation
Low- and Medium-Hanging Fruit
The entire process I try to apply to cost-effective rail construction is to figure out the best places to spend money per unit of time saved. Obviously, this is mainly for intercity traffic – for local traffic it’s more interesting to look at cost per rider – but it’s intercity traffic that benefits most from this kind of optimization anyway.
With the Northeast Corridor, there are definitively low-hanging fruit, such as new (non-FRA-compliant) rolling stock, raising superelevation, improving platform access within present infrastructure, and adding constant tension catenary south of New York. Those are so useful, in terms of cost per benefit to travelers, that they should all be pursued immediately. The more interesting question is what to do afterward. I’ve proposed a few things before, in various posts, but it’s more useful to talk about the general process of determining where to build, i.e. which fruit are medium-hanging and which are high-hanging. I think traditionally this boils down to two parameters:
1. Cost per minute saved, including by improving reliability. This is of course adjusted for demand: New York-Philadelphia minutes are the most important, then Philadelphia-Washington, then New York-Boston, and finally other corridors.
2. Reduction in operating cost. If the rest of the network is based on hourly trains, and you need to squeeze five additional minutes to reduce your travel time including turnaround to an integer number of hours, it’s worth spending the money on it to avoid needing extra trains, or a schedule that doesn’t match up with the rest of the network. (And the same is true if the network repeats every 52 minutes – there’s nothing magical about 60 here.)
However, three additional, less obvious parameters are important:
3. Usefulness to local transit, in terms of speed, reliability, etc. This essentially reduces the cost imputed to intercity trains per minute saved.
4. How low-hanging the fruit becomes if combined with another. The issue is that eliminating two adjacent slow zones in an otherwise fast run saves more than double the time of eliminating just one of the two; another way to think about it is that eliminating the second slow zone saves more time than eliminating the first. This can result in counterintuitive phasing in a constrained funding environment.
5. How high-hanging the fruit becomes if it is delayed. If there is significant disruption to service coming from construction, then it’s better to do it earlier than would be warranted based on pure cost-per-minute-saved calculation.
#3 features prominently in Amtrak’s preexisting planning – in fact, too prominently, with its emphasis on Gateway. It’s a matter of agency imperialism more than anything, but it can lead to good results elsewhere. It’s really points #4-5 that aren’t optimized – either the costs are out of whack, or they are ignored. Washington Union Station‘s remodeling is an example of overemphasizing #5 without considering the cost or the ability to use existing infrastructure more cheaply; Transbay Terminal‘s poor column placement is an example of ignoring #5 entirely.
The reason I push concrete-heavy improvements between New Rochelle and Stamford, but not between Stamford and New Haven, comes essentially from those three points. The Cos Cob Bridge replacement is good because of points #1, #3, and #5; an I-95 bypass of Port Chester and Greenwich then interacts with it positively because of point #4, and also provides a suitable passing segment between high-speed and express commuter trains. In contrast, the projects east of Stamford don’t interact so positively: they involve constructing various bypasses, at high cost per minute saved, in separate locations so that the same increasing returns do not exist, and generally it’d not difficult to connect the bypasses to existing tracks so that the disruption effect of #5 is not in place.
Troll Rail Projects
In lieu of a real post, I want to discuss a few possible rail projects that are not completely thought-out. By this I mean rail projects that probably have critical constructibility and cost problems, but not obvious ones. They lie somewhere between true trolling – say, transcontinental HSR from New York to Los Angeles – and projects that are difficult and not yet proposed but need to be seriously considered, such as new train tunnels to Lower Manhattan or a Geary subway.
The projects are roughly ordered from most serious to most frivolous. The projects for the Northeast may well be feasible and should be at least considered, and the first was probably originally not done due to agency turf issues. The rolling stock projects are the most speculative – they suggest things to be done by competent rolling stock manufacturers that probably would’ve done them already if they could. The non-Northeastern infrastructure projects are somewhere in between. Make of this what you will. Just, please, do not use any of this as the basis for any alternative proposal, and do not link with a description like “Why have transit agencies not thought of this?” unless you know what you’re doing.
Northeast
ARC-North: the proposals for cross-Hudson tunnels that connect to Penn Station, including ARC Alt G and now Amtrak’s Gateway, would have the new tunnels connecting to the south of the main intercity through-tracks: ARC goes to the southern tracks, currently used by New Jersey, and Amtrak eventually wants to add tracks to the south. I propose that when they eventually build such a project, they build the new tunnels to the north, connecting to the existing northern pair of East River Tunnels; a connection to Grand Central could then be built from one of the two East River tunnel pairs, the one not used by intercity trains.
Right now, the northernmost tracks have the most access points and the southernmost tracks the fewest. The system would take advantage of the reduction in demand to Penn Station after East Side Access opens. In case the present-day North River Tunnel diameter is too narrow to allow for higher speeds, the new tunnel could then be used (also) by intercity trains at 200 km/h while letting commuter trains go to Grand Central without reducing capacity there.
Northeast Corridor to Market East, on the cheap: a short connection between North Philadelphia and North Broad, similar to that proposed for the Chestnut Hill West Line but used for the Northeast Corridor instead, would let intercity trains serve Market East or Suburban Station, in addition to 30th Street Station. Trains continuing down to Washington would probably not want to use such a connection, as it would slow them down because of the sharp turn in the SEPTA tunnel, but trains continuing on the Keystone Corridor would emerge from 30th Street oriented the right way. Right now trains to the Keystone Corridor have to either reverse direction (as they do today) or use a connection that skips 30th Street Station (as the fastest New York-Chicago trains did in the Broadway Limited era). It could be useful for local HSR trains if there ever were HSR from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh.
Philadelphia Bypass: also on the subject of HSR from New York to the Keystone Corridor, if express trains skip Philadelphia, it would be useful to build a bypass roughly along existing freight routes and I-276, starting at Trenton and ending somewhere between King of Prussia and Exton. The cost may not justify this in terms of cost per minute saved on New York-Pittsburgh (and New York-Cleveland, and New York-Chicago).
Providence Downcity Station: using the East Side Rail Tunnel, trains could continue west to Downcity, and then connect to the legacy tracks by hopping over I-95 in Federal Hill. For commuter trains, an underground station at Thayer Street is necessary. This is a pick-your-poison project in terms of takings: there are tradeoffs between curve radius, i.e. noise, and takings, and also between both and centrality. One option would be a curved station over City Hall Park, which would become the new Kennedy Plaza, and then what is now Kennedy Plaza would be landscaped and turned into the new City Hall Park. Another would go straight west, cutting through Citizens Plaza, and have a station elevated over Memorial Boulevard.
To troll even further, trains could use abandoned trackage starting from East Providence and then go to Fall River (reconstructing more abandoned trackage) and Newport (building new tracks through Bristol and over the Mount Hope Bridge).
Old Erie Line Revival: New Jersey Transit’s Main Line trains do not use the Erie Main Line south of Paterson, which is abandoned, but instead go along the Lackawanna’s old Boonton Branch. The right-of-way for the original Erie line is still intact, and serves the center of Passaic better. It might be useful to rebuild the tracks, which would require viaducts, and realign the Main Line. Service on all lines would probably require too many outlets – not even a dedicated tunnel to Lower Manhattan, combined, could be used for all lines serving that part of North Jersey, so some would have to be severed and turned over to light rail (maybe the Northern Branch) or the subway. The old Erie line is actually the best candidate for being part of a subway extension, since it serves dense communities and has a natural terminus at Paterson, where it would probably have to go underground.
Steinway Tunnel Widening: the Steinway Tunnel was widened from trolley loading gauge to IRT loading gauge when what is now the 7 was built. Since the rest of the 7 is built to the wider BMT/IND loading gauge, widening the tunnel is a useful capacity reliever to spend money on. It’s probably supremely expensive – I’m sure the MTA has studied it in the past; it’s also far from the most crowded Queens-Manhattan crossing point. But the cost may compare favorably with other means of providing extra capacity, and it may also be beneficial to let some Flushing Line trains serve Broadway and some Astoria Line trains serve 42nd Street.
West Coast
Subway to Burbank: Los Angeles’s Red Line does not go straight north along Vermont to Burbank, but swerves west to swerve more of Hollywood and serves Universal City and North Hollywood on the Valley side of the mountains. Since Downtown Burbank is a major secondary employment center, soon to be served by HSR, why not extend the city’s transit system in that direction? The Orange Line there should be a no-brainer, but more speculatively, the MTA could find money (another ballot measure, maybe?) and program another a subway branch off the Red Line that serves Burbank, with excessive splitting prevented by a new Vermont subway, or even (to troll further) an entirely new line that follows Western south of the mountains.
San Jose – Almaden Street Station: San Jose has a medium-sized CBD, roughly comparable to Providence or Burbank, but Diridon Station is separated from it by a freeway. Since there’s already a plan to spend large amounts of money of turning it into a multi-level train station, which the local technical activists have dubbed Diridon Intergalactic (or Pangalactic), why not also move the station? Trains could go on an alignment like this, elevated over Almaden, on a viaduct dedicated to Caltrain and HSR so that only four tracks would be needed. It would also bypass the current reverse curve between Tamien and Diridon, obviating the need for an iconic bridge. In a realistic, cost-conscious blended plan this is too expensive, but they should at least compare the cost with both a blended plan and the proposed full-fat business plan before rejecting it.
San Francisco – Embarcadero Station: with Transbay Terminal facing every planning and constructibility problem known to humanity, and the current terminal at 4th and King too far from the CBD, why not extend the trains under King Street and then the Embarcadero and build a station near the Ferry Building? Building this close to water is a nightmare, and the curve from King to the Embarcadero may be too sharp, but at least this connects to BART directly and has no station length constraints. On the third hand, the Embarcadero is wide but possibly not wide enough for three platforms and six tracks.
Rolling Stock
Tilting HSR: tilting HSR trains are either relatively low-speed (the Pendolino is limited to 250 km/h, with a few derivatives capable of a bit more) or relatively low-tilt (Talgos are capable of 180 mm of cant deficiency, and the latest Shinkansen trains have active suspension allowing up to about the same for the E5 Series. However, trains capable of 250 mm cant deficiency and 360 km/h are feasible; this is the main subject of Martin Lindahl’s thesis, which I (and others) have been quoting as a ready source of HSR track standards around the world. That said, probably the only place in the world that needs such trains is the Northeast Corridor, due to its unique combination of long straight stretches, on which very high speeds are possible or could be with minor infrastructure upgrades, and long curvy stretches, on which even major upgrades could not bring up to full HSR standards.
Catenary-free HSR: there’s new technology for catenary-free light rail, which is intended for use in historic city centers with aesthetic opposition to trolleywire. The contactless power supply is buried under the tracks, with each segment activated only when a train is completely above it. Although the technology is still low-speed, it could be useful for HSR. Pantographs generate disproportionate noise at high speeds, and Japan specifically has been squeezing every possible decibel out of low-noise pantographs. Being able to eliminate the pantograph would carry this to its logical conclusion. On the margins, it would also permit narrower rights-of-way, since no space for catenary poles would be needed.
Washington Union Station
Amtrak’s announcement that it needs $7 billion to improve Union Station, in a way that is tangential to train or passenger capacity, has gotten some deserved flak already on other blogs. What I want to discuss instead is a pair of issues relating to capacity: passenger circulation, and track capacity. Especially on the latter, Union Station does have some problems, not at current traffic, but enough that future traffic increases may require difficult at-grade merges. The core of the problem is that the terminal tracks are located to the west of the through-tracks, with an at-grade junction, rather than between them.
Fortunately, the passenger circulation capacity issue is easier. Although Amtrak claims 100,000 passengers use the station every day, in reality the number is beefed up with Metro riders, similarly to Penn Station’s 600,000 daily passengers statistic, of which nearly half is subway ridership. Total ridership on MARC and VRE is 53,000 per weekday, and Amtrak has a total of 13,000 boardings and alightings per day there (not per weekday, but intercity traffic does not have the weekday peak of commuter traffic). This is 66,000 boardings and alightings, assuming every MARC and VRE trip begins or ends at Union Station. In contrast, on just two tracks with ordinary subway platforms, Metro has 34,000 boardings at the station; page 13 of Amtrak’s announcement shows the relative scale of Metro and mainline infrastructure. The mainline half of the station’s ridership is passengers who are likelier to be carrying luggage or not be local, but the main difference between it and the Metro half is that the Metro half is using Metro turf and the mainline half is using the station above which Amtrak’s headquarters is located.
If there is a problem, it comes from Amtrak’s practice of corralling riders at waiting points, instead of letting them filter onto the platforms or the stations whenever they like, as is done every day on trains in France and Germany, or on the less busy stations of the Northeast Corridor. Stephen Smith tells me that unlike in New York or Boston, where the waiting areas are at least adjacent to the platform and the problem is one of having just one access point (or just one official access point in New York), in Washington there is another antechamber between the passengers and the train. An extra 100 meters of walking adds about a minute of travel time in a congested space, and perhaps 45 seconds in a clear one; Amtrak’s current practice adds multiple minutes to door-to-door travel time, and also forces pedestrian congestion once it clears passengers to access the platform.
Adding access points is also a good thing, but that does not cost $7 billion, and does not require redoing the entire main concourse. But possibly the most important thing to do in the near term is making all platforms high, also nowhere near a $7 billion project; the diagrams on Amtrak’s announcement suggest all terminal tracks and most through-tracks will be high-platform, but one through-platform will remain low.
Now, track capacity is where things get more interesting, because potentially there is a problem, coming from terminal layout. A not very clear, but public, diagram can be found here: look for Washington Union Terminal, and within it, Interlockings C (the outer station throat and a nearby yard), K (the inner throat and the actual tracks), and A (the connection from the through-tracks to First Street Tunnel). Note that terminating tracks 7-20 are to the west of through-tracks 22-29, and the junction is at grade, which represents a problem for easy cookie-cutter planning.
The operationally simplest but most expensive to deal with this is to build a grade separation. If it’s anything like Harold, expect a $300 million price tag. At present and expected levels of traffic, this is overkill.
I claim that if MARC and VRE trains continue to terminate at Union Station, no special work is needed: Brunswick and Camden Line traffic can be segregated on tracks 7-9 (and the turnaround capacity, easily about 12 tph for 3 tracks, is more than those lines will need between them), VRE traffic can be segregated on tracks 24-25, and Penn Line traffic can use the same tracks as the terminating intercity trains.
The only at-grade conflict would be between northbound trains originating at Washington, and southbound ones continuing through to Virginia, and even high possible traffic levels (say, 12 tph terminating including the Penn Line sprawled across 11 tracks of which 3 already have long platforms and arguably 3 more can be lengthened, 2 tph through across 4 tracks) can be scheduled in a similar manner to all-terminating stations, treating the through-trains as terminating trains that have to use specific tracks and have no limit on dwell time.
Specifically, because Penn Line (or local HSR) trains would leave immediately after express HSR trains to reduce the number of required overtakes, at worst we’d have trains originating at :00 and :02, repeating every 10 minutes, and then there’s an 8-minute window within which to schedule southbound through-trains.
So instead let us assume commuter trains run through, in which case we may as well assume they have good reliability so that they can be scheduled with 2-minute headways. Current peak traffic is 3 tph Brunswick, 2 tph Camden, 3 tph Penn, and lower combined traffic on the Virginia side. Assume that peak traffic will grow to 3 tph Brunswick and Camden and 6 tph combined Penn and through-HSR; in fact the most potential for growth is off-peak, and because multiple platforms are very long, long trains may be used if there are capacity problems.
We now have 6 tph terminating HSR, 6 tph through-traffic on the Penn Line (including HSR), and 6 tph through-commuter traffic on the Camden and Brunswick Lines; Camden and Brunswick are physically to the west of the Northeast Corridor, and so in addition to conflicts between terminating and through trains, we have conflicts between through-Camden/Brunswick and southbound through-Penn/HSR.
In this situation, we can have southbound terminating HSR and through-Penn/HSR trains clearing the throat at :00 and :02 again. Northbound terminating HSR trains have to depart 2 minutes after the arrival of southbound through-Penn/HSR trains, e.g. :04, and then northbound through-Camden/Brunswick trains can depart between :06 and :08; northbound through-Penn/HSR trains are always to the east of everything else and so do not conflict with anything.
Because southbound through-Camden/Brunswick trains conflict with terminating trains, they can be scheduled at the same time as northbound through-trains of some kind, which constrains the symmetry axis we choose but is otherwise workable. For example, if Camden/Brunswick trains both depart and arrive at :07 then with the terminating trains arriving :00 and departing :04, we have a symmetry axis ending in a 2 or a 7 (and through-Penn/HSR trains would arrive and depart at :02). But then the terminating trains also arrive just before the through-Penn/HSR trains and depart just after, implying they are slower or else there would be an overtake just north of the station. We can instead switch the trains – and then terminating trains arrive and depart :02, and through-Penn/HSR arrive southbound :00 and depart northbound :04. Note that there is no conflict between northbound terminating trains and southbound through-trains.
So it is possible to do this without extra infrastructure beside longer and level-boarding platforms, which are cheap. Let us finish by seeing what extra trains can be scheduled into the above 18 tph schedule. Scheduling 6 tph of terminating trains is easy: trains arriving :04 and departing :00, the opposite of the terminating HSR trains discussed above, will be adequately separated. The problem then is just the need to overtake the :02 through-trains along the tracks; however, at such a level of demand, 18 tph combined HSR and commuter on the Northeast Corridor, full four-tracking there would be necessary anyway.
But no extra through-traffic can be realistically scheduled into the same timetable, because the southbound :04 trains would conflict with the northbound :04 terminating trains. Changing the schedule so that it’s the terminating trains that arrive and depart at the same time is, however, possible: since we’re four-tracking the entire Baltimore-Washington line at this stage, we can have terminating trains arrive and depart :02, Camden/Brunswick trains do the same :07, and through-Penn/HSR trains arrive and depart :00 and :04. That said, this means it’s impossible to schedule more than 6 terminating tph into Union Station; I believe it’ll be easier to fill all those extra intercity trains into Washington than fill 18 tph going from Washington toward Virginia, both intercity and commuter.
Of course, the traffic levels discussed here are all very high, especially for HSR. An HSR system that fills even 6 tph is one that can pay for future capacity increases out of operating profits. The importance should be getting a starter system with reasonable capacity for the next few years and then build capacity projects as required, with immediate construction done only on the most critical segments or those that would be hard to reconstruct with more future traffic.
So we’re back to the question of what needs to be done with Union Station, and the answer is hardly anything. It’s not even Moynihan Station, which is also sold as a bigger transportation benefit than it is, but is at least billed as a grand station to be named after a politician more than anything (and is only about $1.5 billion). It’s even worse than Gateway and the Market East station, which would have positive transportation value, and are just very cost-ineffective. It’s not solving any problem for the foreseeable future; it’s just using big numbers about current traffic and growth to scare people into thinking more capacity is needed, and mostly it’s using small increases in track capacity to justify throwing billions of dollars on beautifying Amtrak’s headquarters.
The Value of New York-Boston
This post mainly responds to an argument made by Jim in comments that the core portion of the Northeast Corridor is New York-Washington, and New York-Boston is more expensive and less useful.
The Northeast Corridor has two halves: New York-Philadelphia-Washington and New York-Boston. The southern half is the more important one: according to PDF-page 41 of the Master Plan it carries 70% of the traffic, and the top city pairs are New York-Washington and New York-Philadelphia, both substantially larger than New York-Boston. Although the corridor is always treated as a single line, it is worth checking the value of upgrades separately, especially because the southern half is straighter and would take less investment to bring up to full high-speed rail standards.
However, even with such a disaggregation, New York-Boston is a valuable route, with more potential benefits than any other in the US except New York-Washington. For a first filter, we can look at city populations. New York’s size is such that even much smaller cities can be fruitfully connected to it by greenfield HSR. Seoul, of comparable size to New York, is connected to Busan, which is slightly smaller than Boston and slightly farther apart from Seoul than Boston is from New York; the intermediate cities, Daejeon and Daegu, are somewhat larger than New Haven and Providence. Total ridership on the Seoul-Busan segment of the KTX is about 30 million per year, and Korail appears to be making profits on the line, despite very high construction costs coming from heavy tunneling (about 40% of the route).
The first filter alone warrants further investigation of the route, even independently of New York-Washington. The costs of New York-Boston, while higher than those of New York-Washington, are not very high. We can put much of the New Haven Line in the “too hard” basket initially, but instead focus on high speeds between New York and Stamford and between New Haven and Boston and somewhat higher speeds between Stamford and New Haven than today. The average speed that can be squeezed with such investment is comparable to that of the KTX today, before the high-speed segments through two intermediate cities have been completed; those segments can then be compared to tackling Stamford-New Haven.
Of course, while adequate, is still nowhere nearly as good as what can be done on New York-Washington. It’s not just that this segment connects New York to two different cities the size of Greater Boston. Although today New York-Philadelphia has higher ridership than New York-Boston, this may well be reversed in the presence of full-fat HSR, since cutting a 1:05 trip to 0:38 does not provide the same competitive boost as cutting a 3:30 trip to 2:00, and Amtrak’s primary competition is highways rather than planes.
Rather, the benefits of New York-Washington are more in the distribution of the secondary centers. The biggest satellite metro area of Washington is Baltimore, on the line. Of Boston’s satellite metro areas – Providence, Worcester, and Nashua-Manchester – at most one can be served by any semi-reasonable HSR alignment. Philadelphia-Washington provides an additional market to be served. Washington’s population growth is much faster than that of the rest of the Northeast, and is comparable to that of the Sunbelt.
At the same time, there are benefits to building both lines; since under a phased program that built one first and then the other New York-Washington would be first, those benefits should be counted as benefits of New York-Boston. The biggest one is service through New York. Boston-Washington is a major air market: the O&D passenger volume between the Boston and Washington areas is 3.1 million a year; this is more than Boston-New York and New York-Washington combined, and Boston-Washington is both Boston and Washington’s busiest air city pair. In general, Boston-Washington and Boston-Philadelphia are located at more favorable ranges for HSR’s competitiveness than New York-Boston and New York-Washington, on which the trip time advantage versus cars and buses is smaller.
If we take Boston-Philadelphia and Boston-Washington and slightly more than double the size of today’s air market – the same ratio of present-day HSR traffic to pre-HSR air traffic between London and Paris – we get an additional 9 million passengers a year, small compared to the possibilities of the other city pairs but non-negligible.
The other issue is rolling stock and operating plan. Because the Northeast Corridor runs as one route, and there is no point in separating its two halves operationally, the same rolling stock that runs south of New York also has to run north of New York. In particular, we obtain the following situation:
– Traffic purely south of New York justifies rolling stock that could in principle achieve much higher speeds north of New York.
– Because of certain capacity problems, both real and imagined, a few strategic bypasses and (near Boston) commuter rail modernization can have outsized intercity trip time benefit relative to the cost. A high-speed train that gets stuck behind commuter trains pulled by diesel locomotives does Boston-Providence in about 35 minutes. One that shares tracks with punctual modern EMUs can do the same in 20.
– At low levels of infrastructure investment, the cost of new rolling stock can be sizable compared to the cost of infrastructure. Half-hourly service with 16-car trains, one possible initial service plan, costs $250 million times the one-way Boston-Washington trip time in hours including turnaround time, plus spare ratio. 15-minute service requires double that cost, naturally. None of the New York-Boston projects, not even “buy the MBTA better trains,” flips to negative cost this way, but some have lower cost as a result.
– Shared-track HSR requires very good punctuality. Coming south from Boston, trains have no reason to be off-schedule in New York – Metro-North is reasonably punctual (though not enough for HSR) and both between the Rhode Island/Massachusetts state line and New Haven and between New Rochelle and New York Amtrak owns the tracks and runs the most trains – but the bypass and junction separation will help further. Coming north from Virginia there are much bigger problems, but trains can dwell arbitrarily long in Washington for schedule buffer, which they can’t in New York.
What this means is that it’s best to phase Northeast HSR investment throughout the entire corridor. New York-Washington should have the priority because it’s cheaper and has more traffic potential, but unless for some reason there is no money (not even about $4 billion for immediate improvements plus a little more for a bypass), parts of New York-Boston should be in the first phase.
Arguably, even true branches, such as to the Keystone Corridor and Springfield, can get through-service early. Those do not have the ridership potential of the core route, but electrifying New Haven-Springfield to run trains through, and programming extra trains for Keystone, can be done within a few years. The limit perhaps is only rolling stock, or more precisely what to do with the electric locomotives that would become obsolete (they already are, but are a sunk cost, and buying new HSR trainsets now becomes an additional one-time cost).
Northeast Corridor: Dealing With Capacity
To build high-speed rail on the Northeast Corridor cheaply, intercity trains will have to share tracks with regional trains at several locations, which between them comprise a majority of the corridor. At most of these, commuter traffic is heavy enough that it must be accommodated in some way; only in a minority is it so insignificant that Amtrak can feasibly kick trains out if need be. So far I’ve only explained how track-sharing can be done between Boston and Providence and between New York and New Rochelle, both far from the busiest segments of the corridor.
I’d like to start tackling the more difficult segments, New York-Trenton and New Rochelle-Stamford. Thankfully, they are almost fully four-tracked; the one exception is the North River Tunnels and the immediate approaches, where there is little speed difference between intercity and regional trains. Unfortunately, even four tracks are not enough to provide full separation between services that do not run at the same speed, because those corridors are busy enough to warrant both local and express commuter service. This requires some scheduling creativity. In both cases, what is required is having express commuter trains weave between the local tracks and the intercity tracks.
As before, my explicit assumptions are that the rolling stock is optimized, and that speed limits except those coming from right-of-way geometry have already been eliminated. However, since unlike the MBTA, Metro-North runs good rolling stock, and New Jersey Transit runs passable rolling stock, we can’t realistically expect either to buy the most powerful regional trains on the market; that said, New Jersey Transit is looking into new trains, and we will assume those trains will be in line with the high-performance but heavy Silverliner Vs. What we can expect is better on-time performance and less schedule padding. The amount of commuter traffic is assumed to be similar to or slightly higher than today; the outer ends of both lines can be expected to lose traffic from commuter to intercity trains, but the rest will not.
Complicating all this is the requirement of making all the trains cohere into one line. In other words, unlike the situation for Boston-Providence, Newark-Trenton can’t stand on its own; the trains need to depart Newark with suitable gaps to allow trains to come in from the Kearny Connection. Likewise, New Rochelle-New Haven needs to feed into New Rochelle-New York in such a way that trains can share tracks on that segment. The most difficult portion is then combining the two commuter halves of the Northeast Corridor together to allow through-running, without holding commuter trains for too long at Penn Station. One possibility is to expand the entire route between the tunnels and Newark to a long overtake segment, and have all commuter trains stop at Secaucus to further slow them down and permit intercity trains that arrived at New York second to arrive at Newark first.
Newark-Trenton
Current peak traffic on New Jersey Transit’s Northeast Corridor and North Jersey Coast lines is 13 trains per hour. Of those, only 2 make local stops from Rahway north, and both are North Jersey Coast trains. An additional 2 trains are express North Jersey Coast trains, leaving us with 9 trains at Metropark (3 stopping from New Brunswick, 3 more stopping from Jersey Avenue, 3 super-express from Trenton).
The introduction of high-speed trains would change the distribution of demand dramatically. From Trenton, HSR would be far faster. Even from Princeton Junction, it would be substantially faster to take a commuter train south to Trenton and connect to HSR to New York. For passengers desiring a one-seat ride, trains could continue to run, but make more stops along the way. We may suppose that no commuter train will skip any stop from Metropark south, and that an additional 2 trains that currently run express to New Brunswick or Jersey Avenue will run local, providing the Rahway-Newark segment with a peak local traffic of 4 tph.
The desired ideal is that all commuter trains will stay away from the inner two tracks, with brief forays when absolutely necessary. The above rule regarding local runs ensures no overtakes among the commuter trains take place south of Rahway. We are then left with the task of ensuring all overtakes north of Rahway make use of the two existing six-track segments, around Newark Airport, and from just south of the Elizabeth curve to Union Interlocking between the mainline and the North Jersey Coast Line, the latter segment including Linden and Rahway.
Because the southern six-track segment persists through the interlocking, it provides a fully separated route between local coast trains and express mainline trains, and also between local mainline trains and express coast trains southbound. Slightly modifying the interlocking to allow a separated northbound path between local mainline and express coast trains that does not use the inner two tracks may be required.
Now, a Silverliner V running at 160 km/h appears to lose about 90 seconds to a high-platform stop. For the record, a FLIRT would lose 75 seconds. Since there are five local stops north of the interlocking, we have to deal with 7.5 minutes. With 2-minute headways, this means local trains can depart Newark 9.5 technical minutes ahead of express trains on the same branch (mainline or coast), and 6.5 ahead of express trains on the opposite branch. Since 11/9.5 = 1.16 and a 16% pad is excessive, 11 scheduled minutes of separation are enough, and we obtain the following option for departure times out of Newark:
Express :00
Express :02
Express :04
Local :06
Express :15
Express :17
…
Each local must serve a different branch from the express immediately following, since 9 < 9.5. The express afterward – for example the :17 express after the :06 local – is separated by 11 minutes, and so can run on any branch. This allows 16 tph, of which 4 are local, and at least 4 have to run on the New Jersey Coast Line. Of course not every slot has to have a train scheduled in it.
Adding local frequency at the expense of express frequency is possible, but requires tightening the gap between a local train and the express that follows it, unless we allow inconveniences such as serving the local stations at highly irregular intervals. For example, 10-minute local headways allow trains to depart Newark at,
Express :00
Local :02
Express :10
Local :12
…
The 8-minute difference means each express must serve a different destination from the preceding local, and this underserves the mainline at only 6 tph. We can add stops to the express trains (or saddle them with inferior, locomotive-hauled rolling stock), but two stops are required, unless New Jersey Transit makes sure to get cutting-edge trains, which is unlikely; with FLIRTs, the time difference shrinks from 7.5 minutes to 6.25 and only one stop is required. In either case, we might as well squeeze an :x8 express, also serving a different destination from the local ahead of it.
Another option is to use the Linden-Rahway segment for overtakes. Trains lose 3 minutes there. If we add an infill stop, they lose 4.5, which is very close to the 4 minutes required to switch the order of two trains. This means express trains need to approach Linden 2-2.5 minutes behind the locals, and thus leave Newark 7 minutes behind. We obtain,
Local :00
Express :07
Express :09 (different destination from the :00 local)
…
(12-minute clockface pattern)
Since 12-minute schedules are generally awkward and my New York-New Rochelle proposal uses 10- (below) or 15-minute schedules (in the original link), we should add a Newark Airport or Elizabeth stop to the express trains, and then they leave Newark about 5-5.5 minutes behind the locals, and we can have a 7.5-minute pattern, which divides 15 evenly. Alternatively, we can add the stop and then have a 10-minute pattern again. We either get 6 local and 12 express slots with each express serving a different destination from the local behind it, or 8 local and 8 express slots, and there is no restriction on destination:
Local :00
Express :05
Express :07
Local :10
Express :15
Express :17
…
or
Local :00
Express :05
Local :07
Express :13
Local :15
Express :20
…
Note that nowhere here does HSR share tracks with anything except maybe in the Newark Penn Station throat, under any of the options. Thus, any discussion of HSR speed zones is irrelevant, except perhaps at the final stage when some tweaks to the basic schedule are under consideration.
New Rochelle-Stamford
Like Newark-Trenton, this is a four-track segment. However, commuter traffic here is heavier, and there are no six-track segments. Instead, overtakes between express commuter trains and intercity trains must be done on bypass segments. The one that we will consider is, as I outlined before, a route from just south of Rye to between Greenwich and Cos Cob, following the I-95 right-of-way.
No HSR on the New Haven Line should be considered with New Rochelle as it is. The flat junction and S-curve together severely constrain train speed and capacity. Since the junction has to be grade-separated, and some takings are required, we might as well assume the separation allows trains to proceed without crossing opposing traffic no matter where they go. Furthermore, the station should be six-tracked if necessary.
We will also assume the curve has been partially eased, to a radius of 700 meters with appropriate superelevation spirals, permitting our example 375-mm-equivalent-cant trains 150 km/h. We will also assume that Harrison has been partially eased to 1,500 meters, permitting 220; that the curve toward the bypass around Rye is 1,500 meters, which may be slightly too optimistic but not by more than a few seconds of travel time; and that the curves farther north until the Stamford approach are 2,000, permitting 250. The approach to Stamford consists of two curves forming a wide S, the western one at 1,000 (180 km/h) and the eastern one at 800 (160). Note that these upgrades allow express commuter trains to travel at 160 on the shared segments – indeed, they require it to avoid or at least limit cant excess. Local trains have more limited cant because of the needs of freight.
We will assume the number of trains is about the same, with capacity boosted with longer trains; where New Jersey Transit runs 12-car trains because of limited capacity across the Hudson, Metro-North tends to run 8-car trains. Unlike in New Jersey’s case, there’s little point then in programming more slots for trains.
Let us now consider Easy Mode, with all Metro-North trains using the existing route to Grand Central. We have two track-sharing segments, one between New Rochelle and Rye, and one between Greenwich and Stamford. The first segment is 12 km long and has 3 stations with 2 more at the ends; the second is 8 km long and has 3 stations as well, with just 1 more at one end.
On the first segment, there are 18 Metro-North tph peak today: 12 not stopping at all, 2 stopping only at Harrison, and 4 local. Now if the express trains share tracks with HSR rather than the locals, we will want to schedule trains HSR-express-express repeating every 10 minutes, or HSR-express-express-express repeating every 15; the former allows more versatile HSR slots (local and express), and the 15-minute assumption of New York-New Rochelle has no relevance in Easy Mode.
Current scheduled time between Rye and New Rochelle is 17 minutes for local trains; judging by both rolling stock capability and the local-express schedule difference, nonstop trains take about 10 minutes, and trains stopping at Rye but not New Rochelle take 12. Sped up to 160 km/h, with 7% schedule padding, nonstop trains would take about 6 minutes. HSR would take 3:35, again padded 7%. This means that, with 2-minute headways in both directions (fast-ahead-of-slow, and slow-ahead-of-fast), and 6-minute express commuter trains, we can have (northbound times from New Rochelle, HSR passing and commuter trains passing or stopping):
HSR :00
Express :02
Express :04
HSR :10
…
This is because by Rye, the :10 HSR is still 3.5 minutes behind the :04 express Metro-North train.
Alternatively, it’s possible but very tight to have an express-express-local schedule, assuming commuter trains are not sped up but the stop penalty is reduced to 80 seconds (so, 4 minutes for 3 stops), which is feasible at the speeds of the line:
Express :00
Express :02
Local :04
Express :10
…
This requires express trains to weave effortlessly to tracks 2 and 5 of a 6-track New Rochelle station, or to stop at New Rochelle.
A mixed schedule, with half the express trains sharing track with HSR and half with the local trains, is also feasible, but is essentially like drinking half coffee and half tea: while the 8-minute local-express gap on the local tracks is fine as it is, the gap on the HSR tracks requires speeding up the express trains anyway.
Note that if the all express trains share tracks with HSR, it is trivial to add local service, or to replace express trains with locals.
The other segment is easier, because it is shorter and lower-traffic, with only 13 tph (3 local, the rest express). HSR would take 2:24 with pad; express commuter trains take 7 today and could take 3:24 with a speed-up. The speed-up would be very significant here as this is a slow segment today, with the movable Cos Cob Bridge restricting speeds. The present speed difference is already almost small enough to allow HSR-express-express, as above; we need to cut another 36 seconds from the express travel time, which we can do with improved reliability reducing padding (the pad I’ve observed between Stamford and Grand Central is 10 minutes). Local-express-express would be 7 vs. 12 minutes, and if locals could consistently take just 11 minutes, as some already do, or if expresses could easily weave to the express tracks just north of Greenwich after HSR trains diverge to the bypass, then it would be feasible.
To finish Easy Mode, let us reconcile the two segments, which after all are populated by the same trains. If we have HSR-express-express on both segments and use the bypass as an overtake, we need to ensure that a commuter train that was 2 minutes ahead of HSR before is now 4 minutes behind after: 4, and not 2, because each HSR train overtakes 2 express trains. Losing 6 minutes is difficult, as the current local travel time between Greenwich and Rye is just 7 minutes. But with approaches this is a bit more than 8 minutes, and HSR would do the segment in 2:08, padded. This has the only drawback of awkwardly making express trains make stops at Greenwich (understandable given traffic), Port Chester, and Rye.
As an alternative, we can also do local-express-express on one segment and HSR-express-express on the other. Since the HSR-express-express schedule is tighter on the southern segment, the southern segment should have local-express-express. This only requires us to avoid having trains run a mixture of local and express too much: as two of the Greenwich-Stamford locals run express south of Greenwich and three of the Harrison-New Rochelle locals only run as far north as Harrison, we can simply combine those to create more locals going all the way from Stamford to Grand Central.
Now, let us move on to Hard Mode, which includes New Rochelle-New York. A consistent 15-minute schedule does not look possible to me on New Rochelle-Stamford without reducing peak commuter traffic to 16 tph, for example by lengthening trains and platforms. If that were done, 8 tph local on the local tracks with 4 turning at or south of Greenwich, and 8 tph express in HSR-express-express pattern on the southern shared segment, would be feasible.
So let us consider 10-minute schedules. HSR and express trains run at almost the same speed, since there are few areas south of New Rochelle on which even 200 km/h is at all feasible. The difference between HSR and express 145 km/h M8s (stopping at New Rochelle and Sunnyside), as already investigated in my original post on the subject, is 3:15 without pad, and 3:29 with. This means the express needs to leave New Rochelle up to 4.5 minutes after the HSR train, so that it will arrive at Sunnyside 8 minutes after, and 2 ahead of the next HSR. With a 9-minute time difference between HSR and the express trains from Greenwich to New Rochelle, this requires the express to be at least 4.5 minutes ahead of HSR at Greenwich, which with very minor speed-up is possible. What this means is that with mixed HSR-express-express and local-express-express as in Easy Mode, the first express after each HSR will go to Penn Station and the second one will go to Grand Central.
The question then is what to do with local trains. If they only go as far north as Co-op City, then it’s easy; with the exception of Hell Gate Bridge, the tracks in the Bronx would have to be four-tracked anyway to allow some overtake, and since there’s room, there’s not much traffic now, and this represents an expansion of Metro-North service, we can safely assume four-tracking. In that case local trains, making no stops in Queens except Sunnyside, would run at the same speed as the express trains on the two-track segment south of Hunts Point, and could be scheduled anywhere. An Astoria stop would require them to be scheduled immediately after the HSR and express trains southbound, which is feasible as near Sunnyside those would be close together already, with the express just ahead of HSR.
Of course, as this is Hard Mode, we cannot assume the local trains turn at Co-op City. Instead, we will make them turn at New Rochelle, or ideally run through farther north as locals. Now, southbound HSR trains, we have established, pass New Rochelle at :00, express trains leave at :04:30 and :06:30, and local trains leave at :02:30. This means we should extend four-tracking at Co-op City such that the local goes at the exact same speed as the express, which does stop at New Rochelle, until after it diverges to the local tracks at Co-op City; alternatively, if there is room in the schedule, we can have the local trains leave at :02 and then there is enough room.
Rearrangement of trains heading toward Hell Gate should be considered a trivial problem: if locals are too far ahead, or too far behind, the number of stops could be adjusted, or they could be held at the Bronx stations longer. Because the time difference between a local and an HSR in the Bronx and Queens combined is just under 10 minutes, the first option would require an extra stop or two or longer dwell times, making the local lose a full 10-minute headway and thus come immediately after the next HSR. By then the express has shifted back to about :07-:08 and so it’s not a threat even if the local does make an Astoria stop.
Conclusion
None of this is elegant. The schedules don’t necessarily match. Local HSR trains would add extra complications, though at least they’d reduce the speed difference with commuter trains in Metro-North territory. All agencies involved need to be on the same page. Through-running would involve a multi-overtake schedule, in which the most local trains get overtaken several times, by different classes of trains (HSR and express). Punctuality doesn’t have to be Japanese, but it needs to be Swiss, or else the entire edifice collapses.
And it’s still far cheaper than trying to overbuild everything to prevent this mess. The only commuter trains sharing track with HSR in this region are Metro-North, and those are fairly punctual, though this involves heavy padding. The rolling stock assumed is already in operation or in the procurement stage. The track repairs required are straightforward, and the curve modifications required, while annoying, are not the end of the world; the one greenfield bypass follows an existing Interstate, and the takings required, while nonzero, are low.
The travel time implied for this is a little more than 17 minutes from Newark to Trenton, for an intercity train stopping only at Newark (though this requires a top speed of 360 km/h causing severe noise impact in New Brunswick and Trenton), a little more than 8 between New Rochelle and Stamford, and just less than 10 between Sunnyside and New Rochelle. Depending on how much speed can be squeezed out of narrow tunnels and a new Portal Bridge, about 11 minutes Sunnyside-Newark, including New York and Newark dwell times, could be done; this is about 46 minutes Stamford-Trenton, a segment that Amtrak currently does in 1:45 excluding the long New York dwell time. And the amount of concrete pouring required is quite small for an hour’s worth of travel time reduction. Even a top speed that’s less noisy and ambitious, and lower speeds through the existing tunnels, do not raise this travel time far above 50 minutes.
Great things are possible if we first look at what is feasible, and then demand that agencies cooperate to achieve it, instead of program everything around public transportation agencies that act like rival gangs. If everything is optimized right, travel times not much higher than those Amtrak is targeting become possible, for a small fraction of the price, and capacity constraints can be kicked down the road to when passenger rail makes enough money to pay to relieve them. Organization, electronics, and small, strategic concrete pouring can go a long way. The choice is not between HSR for a twelve-figure sum and small improvements for an eleven-figure sum; it’s between low-cost HSR and agency turf battles.
Surreptitious Cost Escalations and Spurious Cost Savings
In response to my previous post regarding the extreme cost of Amtrak’s new Northeast Corridor Vision plan, people both on forums and on blogs have said that it’s actually a cost saving coming from bundling the Vision with the earlier Master Plan. Although the original cost was $117 billion and the current one is $151 billion, the current one is still lower than the sum of the original cost plus the cost of the Master Plan, by $15 billion. This looks like a cost saving, but it’s actually not.
The explanation is that the Master Plan still contains elements that are unnecessary if large portions of the line, including nearly the entire New York-Boston segment, are bypassed. The list of projects on PDF-page 21 of the plan contains additional tracks in eastern Connecticut and a replacement of the bridge over the Connecticut, boosting capacity. However, if the intercity trains are removed from the line, there is no need to boost capacity. Low-performing branch lines – and this is what Shore Line East is without intercity trains – can be and are spun off to regional agencies: JR East abandoned the northern reaches of the Tohoku Main Line as it extended the Tohoku Shinkansen, spinning them off to the prefectures to run as it is not interested in running regional rail at the low densities of northern Japan and the intercity functions were all rolled into the Shinkansen.
So in that sense, any cost saving was spurious: Amtrak simply removed some, but not all, Master Plan projects that are obviated by the plan for a bypass. It’s no different from the fact that the Tokaido Main Line and the PLM Line are still double-tracked, as in both cases the national railroad chose to build high-speed rail parallel to them instead of to quadruple-track them to boost capacity.
But on top of that, there is at least some cost overrun implied in the plan. The cost breakdown is not detailed enough to make this clear, but the cost of the Gateway Tunnel is up to $14.7 billion, from $10-13.5 billion last year. It’s buried deep enough that it’s hard to see, or discern what the total overrun is, but it’s there. So Amtrak has a surreptitious cost escalation for the Gateway project at the same time as a spurious cost saving from partially merging the Vision and the Master Plan.
The CAHSR-SNCF Bombshell
The most important HSR news right now is the recent revelation on the LA Times, strategically made immediately after the state legislature had voted to appropriate the required money to begin construction, that the California HSR Authority had brushed off an offer from SNCF, which came with funding attached, to take over and build the project. SNCF’s offer would run trains through I-5 all the way instead of the chosen route vaguely along State Route 99, bypassing Bakersfield and Fresno.
Stephen Smith, who’s talked to the same sources who spoke with the LA Times, says that SNCF was interested in either I-5 or a greenfield alignment just west of SR 99 that would serve Bakersfield and Fresno with edge-of-urban area stations, though I-5 was “the only alignment… that private backers felt was financially viable.”
Although in 2009 SNCF submitted a document proposing to build the project along the chosen alignment, serving Bakersfield and Fresno at city-center stations, the document is stamped “Do not circulate outside government,” and the source says explicitly that the HSR Authority had pressured SNCF not to say anything about alignments, and more recently rejected its I-5 (or west-of-99) proposal out of hand. The HSR Authority responded, brushing off some of the article’s concerns and raising what is essentially FUD: HSR Authority Chair Dan Richard made sure to mention the manufactured controversy over the fact that SNCF had been forced by the Nazis to help ship Jews to extermination camps.
I do not have any access to sources, confidential or otherwise, but at least some analysis of this can be made from public information. The key cost numbers the LA Times provided are,
The I-5 route would have been the shortest, fastest and lowest-cost alignment, with a price tag of about $38 billion — sharply less than the rail authority’s current route, which has been estimated at various times to cost $34 billion, $43 billion, $98 billion and now $68 billion.
The problem: the cost of the Central Valley segment is a sufficiently small portion of the cost that it can’t possibly make the entire or even most of difference between $38 billion and the current price tag. It’s unclear to me what $38 billion should be compared to – 2010 dollars or year-of-expenditure dollars, and the Blended Plan ($68 billion YOE) or the full Phase 1 ($98 billion YOE) – but the lowest number, the Blended Plan in 2010 dollars, is $53 billion, $15 billion more than SNCF’s proposal. I have asked what exactly the comparable Authority number is and will update when I get an answer.
In contrast, the Initial Construction Segment, which includes a large majority of the Phase 1 Central Valley segment (though not the most difficult part, through Bakersfield) is $5.2 billion in 2010 dollars (see PDF-page 15 of the 2010 business plan); the actual money appropriated is just over $6 billion, but if we’re doing YOE numbers then we must compare $38 to $68 and then the difference doubles. Since the cost of construction along I-5, although lower than along the chosen route with its viaducts and grade separations, is nonzero, we get that a relatively small fraction of the cost difference, perhaps a quarter or a third, is attributable to this design choice.
So if it’s not just I-5, what is it, and what can we learn from this? I believe the results should if anything make the HSR Authority look even worse than it already does in light of this story and its lackluster response. This is because it means the entire amount of money required to build to SNCF’s specs but serve Bakersfield and Fresno, at edge-of-urban-area stations if the cities object to the noise of trains through downtown (which at least Fresno does not), is a small number of billions of dollars. This means that if service to those two cities was the true dealbreaker, the Authority could have asked SNCF to change the alignment back to the chosen route or a greenfield route just west of it, and then demanded that Fresno and Bakersfield pay for the difference.
Fresno had been hoping to use statewide HSR money to bundle its own project of grade-separating the freight tracks through the city along the Union Pacific right-of-way. The poor relationship between the HSR Authority and Union Pacific dashed the plans to use its right-of-way where it is superior to the BNSF alignment. That said, the threat of being left out of the network entirely could have induced it to come up with money for this on its own; the segment of the project through the Fresno area is $1-1.5 billion. A downtown station in Bakersfield is more difficult, especially if one gets from the Central Valley to the LA Basin via the Grapevine rather than via Palmdale, but in Bakersfield there are some complaints about the impacts that a downtown alignment would cause, and at any rate even I-5 would come close to serving the urban area.
In addition, portions of the cost savings that do not come from alignment choice have to be attributed to superior cost control. Part of the difference between American and rest-of-world construction costs has to come from more mundane issues such as proper supervision of contractors, since the difference is large and persistent and remains in place even after one controls for such issues as the percentage of the route that is in tunnel. (For example, recall that the Tohoku Shinkansen extension cost $4.6 billion for 82 km, of which a third is just one long tunnel and another sixth additional shorter tunnels).
The other lesson we can learn from this episode is political, regarding cost escalations and strategic misrepresentation. Too many political transit supporters downplay the issue. LightRailNow claims that a cost escalation that occurs before construction starts is not a cost escalation, but just a more accurate cost estimate; Robert Cruickshank did not quite say the same when the 2010 business plan for CAHSR revealed costs had doubled, but came close to it by describing the plan as more careful and thorough. In reality, large bombshell reports shortly after money has been obligated are a hallmark of secretive, untrustworthy planning, precisely the kind likeliest to lie about costs.
The main problem with megaprojects is not the dollar cost. In the grand scheme of things, a lot of them can generate enough social rate of return, and sometimes even a purely financial rate of return; at any rate, even when they are cost-ineffective, they are a small proportion of total GDP. The problem is getting politicians to vote for them. This means that issues such as institutional inertia are in play. It’s harder to get people to rescind money than to get them to vote against spending money.
If the primary cause of cost escalations is unforeseeable challenges, then we will see them come in timed with engineering developments, contract awards, and actual construction. If instead it is strategic misrepresentation, then they will be timed to come just after major political hurdles regarding funding: the passage of a referendum, legislative funding, an electoral victory by a supportive politician. The California HSR bombshells aren’t quite this clean, but they come a lot closer to the outright lying hypothesis.
Northeast Corridor HSR, 90% Cheaper
Amtrak’s latest Next-Generation High-Speed Rail plan is now up to $151 billion, from a prior cost of $117 billion. This is partially a small cost escalation, but mostly including Master Plan upgrades to the legacy line. Per kilometer of route length, this means the project has now crossed the $200 million/km mark, a higher cost than 60%-underground Chuo Shinkansen maglev. The primary cause of the high cost of Amtrak’s project is the heavy amount of deep-cavern urban tunneling: nearly a tenth of the cost is the Gateway Tunnel, a rebranded bundling of ARC into the project, and a similar amount is a similar project in Philadelphia. At least this time they’re serving Rhode Island with a stop in or near Providence rather than Woonsocket.
In contrast with this extravaganza, it is possible to achieve comparable travel times for about one tenth the cost. The important thing is to build the projects with the most benefit measured in travel time reduced or reliability gained per unit of cost, and also share tracks heavily with commuter rail, using timed overtakes to reduce the required amount of multi-tracking.
I propose the following general principles, guiding any future development in the corridor:
1. Rolling stock is cheaper than infrastructure. This is not true everywhere, but the Northeastern US and Japan both have high infrastructure-to-equipment cost ratios. A Shinkansen train today costs about $4 million per car judging by how much Taiwan pays. A 16-car train every 15 minutes from Washington to Boston, with a one-way travel time including turnaround of about 3:30, would require 30 sets, or 480 cars, or $2 billion. Therefore, it makes financial sense to demand more of the rolling stock: some tilting as present on the Talgo, Pendolino, N700, or E5; high initial acceleration as present on the N700-I; and high power-to-weight ratio as on the Talgo and Shinkansen models, or even possibly an all-cars-powered Pendolino.
The difference between an average and a top-rate train could easily amount to 20 minutes between Washington and Boston. Making up those 20 minutes with infrastructure, once the easiest projects have been completed, would cost far more than $2 billion.
2. Speed up commuter trains instead of bypassing them. The place where this is most obvious and useful is the Boston-Providence segment. I have nothing to add that I didn’t already say in my pair of posts on the subject last year. Something similar is true between Baltimore and Washington. It is more difficult between New York and New Haven, but at least there are curves that have to be bypassed anyway, and so the track sharing can be reduced to a manageable degree given the line’s heavy commuter traffic.
This requires fixing agency turf battles, which costs a lot of political capital but is almost free to the taxpayer. In contrast, long multi-track segments, often with new viaducts, easily run into the billions. Amtrak’s single biggest question mark east of New York is the string of tunnels from Penn Station to New Rochelle to Danbury, all so that it doesn’t have to share tracks with Metro-North. It could buy the commuter operations and subsidize them forever and still come out ahead of all those tunnels.
3. The regulations should be based on service needs. As a corollary of #1 and 2 and the every minute counts philosophy they espouse, the regulations should allow trains that can operate safely. Here safety is determined by actual practice and track record, rather than what the FRA thinks safety is, which has an incidental relationship with reality. That Shinkansen trains do not meet UIC standards should not be even a minor issue; trains in Japan are safer than in the UIC’s prime-mover European countries.
4. On shared segments that aren’t bypassed, build infrastructure that allows higher speeds. This is a corollary of #2: if legacy routes are to be upgraded rather than bypassed, there’s no point in assuming present-day speed limits, such as Metro-North’s 75 mph/120 km/h limit in Connecticut, will remain in place, and therefore projects should be built with high radius of curvature. Assume that large portions of the New Haven Line will host trains going at 240 km/h.
5. Make sure station throats allow full speed. Every non-geometric restriction on speed – tunnel diameter, track condition, switches – should be eliminated. Higher-speed switches are cheaper than new concrete pouring; more precise track maintenance is cheaper than most people realize, standing at about $100,000 per double-track-km on average; Shinkansen trains’ noses are designed (and European trains’ noses can be modified) to allow full speed through narrow tunnels, as Shinkansen construction standards minimize tunnel diameter to reduce costs.
The time cost of even a short segment inhibiting full-throttle acceleration in station throats is higher than most people realize. A kilometer a train has to wend at 50 km/h when it could go 200, such as the Penn Station throat, is worth 54 seconds. At stations closer to full-speed zone, this speed-restricted kilometer slows the train’s acceleration to full speed further down the line, and thus it comes at the expense of a kilometer at 300-360 km/h, raising the time cost even further.
6. Fix curves in higher speed zones. This applies mainly to the S-curve flanking I-287 in Metuchen: its curvature is not terrible, but because to its south there are no geometric speed restrictions for tens of kilometers and to its north the curves are also reasonably gentle, its bang for the buck can be surprisingly high.
7. Worry about track capacity when all other capacity factors have been optimized. An intercity railroad that runs 8-car trains is definitionally not at capacity. Running 16-car trains requires lengthening a small number of platforms, most at easy locations. Doubling train capacity across the Hudson chokepoint requires building a new tunnel under the river. Amtrak currently runs 4 trains per hour into Penn Station at the peak; if after everything else has been built it has exhausted the capacity of 4 trains per hour each with 16 cars and a thousand seats, its operating profits will let it pay for any further expansion.
With the above seven principles, one could come up with a reasonable set of projects of immediate significance. With a total cost in the single-digit billions, they’d eliminate most of the barriers to full-speed travel between New York and Washington, and leave New York-Boston with just one major problem section between Stamford and Milford. Best-practice trains, even ones optimized for a straighter route – for example, Shinkansen or the Talgo, but not the Pendolino, which is both heavier and less powerful but has a much larger degree of tilting – could go from Boston to Washington in about 4 hours, or not much more.
Getting this further down to 3 hours would require further investment according to the same principles, but even 4 hours, by virtue of the markets to and from New York, would generate the profits required to pay for them. Moreover, the contrast between fast travel on bypass segments in eastern Connecticut or straight legacy segments in Rhode Island and New Jersey and the remaining slower problem segments would create political will to complete the system. The areas with the most NIMBY resistance should be left for last, because today’s train riders as well as Amtrak itself are not nearly as powerful as they will be if the mostly NIMBY-free projects cut train travel time from 7 hours to 4.
Cost Bundling
It’s common to bundle multiple construction projects into one, either to save money or to take advantage of a charismatic piece of infrastructure that can fund the rest. For example, on-street light rail is frequently bundled with street reconstruction or drainage work, and rail lines can also be bundled with freeway construction in the same corridor (as in Denver) or widening the road they run under (as in New York). Combining different constructions into one project can be a powerful cost saver, as seen in the Denver example and also in Houston.
The problem is when it leads to scope creep. In case there is one charismatic project that carries the rest, it’s always tempting to add more features to the project to get more funding. If the funding comes from a pot specific to one use – in the examples in this post transit, but it could be anything – then it will also lead to a misleading reporting of the total cost, making it look higher than it is. Part of the surreptitious underfunding of transit in the US comes from such bundling, for example parking garages for commuter rail. More commonly the projects in question will be transit, just not necessarily cost-effective on their own.
Because one agency tends to have the lead on such projects, there is no incentive for cost control. The worst case I know of is high-speed rail construction on the Caltrain corridor; the segment from San Francisco to San Jose incurred the highest cost overrun in the system, its cost rising by a factor of nearly 3 versus a systemwide average of 2, and most of the overrun came from tunnels and viaducts reinforcing various agency turf boundaries.
The flip side is bundling projects not so that a charismatic major project can support others, but rather so that a major project can get the support of others by throwing them bones. This is essentially Amtrak’s Vision plan for the Northeast: Gateway is meant to get support from New York and New Jersey now that ARC is canceled, Market East is meant to get support from Philadelphia on the dubious idea that the city wants a Center City stop, and so on. In this case, there is a symbiotic relationship: the charismatic project, in this case HSR, gets to brand all these separate projects as necessary for a grand goal, while the presence of the smaller project ensures that local politicians, whose priorities rarely include providing intercity transportation maximally efficiently, support the project.
The Recession Won’t Last Forever
The article about New York State’s decision to discontinue studying high-speed rail between New York and Buffalo is by itself not terribly surprising. Although Andrew Cuomo likes flashy public works projects, of which HSR is one, he is consistently pro-road and anti-rail.
The study released by the state sandbagged actual HSR on cost grounds – it did not provide any further analysis, and in two ways (lower average speed than most HSR lines, and a requirement for tilting) stacked the deck against it – but instead looked into medium-speed rail, with top speed of 110-125 mph, which is frequently misnamed HSR in the US. This, too, is not surprising. State DOTs have no idea how HSR works, and tend to make mistakes, not know how to do cost control, and so on.
What’s most surprising is the explanation for why not to do anything substantial: as one of the HSR proponents quoted in the article complains, “The State of New York is worried about making ends meet; the economy is not doing so great. That’s the reason in the short term.” Taking his argument at face value, the state is refusing to advance study of an HSR line because economic conditions are bad now, a decade or more before such line could even open.
The recession won’t last forever; if it does, there are bigger things to worry about than transportation. Other than immediate reconstruction projects, for which the environmental reviews are fast-tracked, major projects take years to do all the design and environmental studies. California has been planning HSR since the late 1990s. It intended to go to ballot in 2004, and after delays did so in 2008. HSR is scheduled to break ground later this year, assuming the state does not cancel the project. An HSR project for which planning starts now will start construction after the economy recovers not from this recession, but from the next one.
The recurrent theme in the article is the state’s preference for mundane over flashy projects, but rejecting HSR shows the exact opposite.Starting planning now costs very little. In fact, the best thing any state agency can do is keep planning multiple big-ticket project contingencies pending an infusion of money; this way, it can dust off plans and execute them faster if there’s a stimulus bill in the next recession. That’s long-term planning. Refusing to advance construction because it won’t start until long after Cuomo’s Presidential run in 2006 2016 isn’t.
Of course, the same goes in the other direction. Too many people, building on Keynesian stimulus ideas, want massive infrastructure spending now as a public works program. For example, Robert Cruickshank (and in comments, Bruce McF) argues for long-term benefits coming from the stimulus effect. Although construction in 2012-3 would have an impact, a multi-decade project spanning periods of both growth and recession should not rely on estimates of job creation solely from periods of recession. On the contrary, economic costs and benefits should be based on a long-term multi-business cycle trend.
I propose the following principles for interaction between business cycles and very long-term investment:
1. Assume your project will be undertaken in a period of close to (but not quite) full employment, in terms of both funding sources and economic effects, unless you specifically intend to advance construction in a recession.
2. If you want to use a recession to lock in lower interest rates, higher job impacts, or lower construction costs, make sure you have a shovel-ready project, or else try to advocate for better staffing at the requisite regulatory agencies well ahead of time so that they can fast-track it.
3. Treat fiscal surpluses coming from an economy at full employment as one-time shots rather than an ongoing situation that can be used for regular spending or tax cuts. Growth doesn’t last forever, either.
Pedestrian Observations 
