Category: Transportation
Plan B for HSR
Now that the California state legislature’s dragging its feet on releasing the state’s money for high-speed rail, there’s talk about a Plan B. The official Plan B, supported by the chair of the State Senate’s transportation committee, is to redistribute most of the money from the Central Valley toward the train stations of San Francisco and Los Angeles. Since the federal money was conditioned on sending everything to the Central Valley, and a last-ditch Plan B is unlikely to get USDOT to change the rules, most likely the actual Plan B is to kill California HSR and redistribute the $3.3 billion in federal elsewhere within the US. Illinois and North Carolina both want money for their medium-speed projects, and Amtrak wants money for Northeast Corridor improvements.
Because the Northeast Corridor improvements Amtrak wants are not necessarily the most cost-effective, I think it’s most paramount to look for projects that are in the intersection: part of the Master Plan, ideally as ready as possible (e.g. ones that are considered state of good repair), but also compatible with future upgrades to full HSR standards. In particular, this means no investment in parts of the mainline that should be bypassed in the future, but high investment in parts that shouldn’t.
Although the cost projected by Amtrak for these upgrades is in all cases higher than it should be, the high value of investment in the Northeast Corridor is such that they are still cost-effective. This is similar to Second Avenue Subway, which despite the immense cost has such a high projected ridership that its cost per rider is fine, if higher than it should be.
Projects that are to my knowledge still in progress, such as Portal Bridge, are excluded. The same is true of projects that are too big or too cost-ineffective at present construction costs.
Constant Tension Catenary
Cost: $1 billion for “high-speed territory,” which appears to be a small subset of the New York-Washington mainline; including related upgrades, just the 40 km between New Brunswick and Morrisville that are already funded are $450 million. For the full line, figure $2-3 billion. The non-US cost should be about $1 billion, but because of benefits, paying the premium is worth it.
Benefit: higher reliability in summer. No limit to top speed except for the curves; although present-day rolling stock can only do 150 or 160 mph (240-255 km/h), up from 135 mph (215 km/h) allowed by the existing catenary, the time savings for future rolling stock capable of higher speed are substantial. The more curves are fixed along the line, the greater the benefit.
New Haven Line Bridge Replacement
Two bridges (Devon, over the Housatonic River, and Cos Cob, over Mianus) require replacement; two more (Saga, in Westport, and Walk, in Norwalk) require rehabilitation. Except for the Walk Bridge, which can be bypassed on I-95, those bridges should carry high-speed traffic in the future.
Cost: unclear – the plan says $4.4 billion for many projects on the New Haven Line, and a separate breakdown only says that replacing both the Saga and Walk Bridges costs $600 million. For what it’s worth, replacing the (two-track) movable Connecticut River Bridge with a high-level fixed bridge is pegged at $500 million, over a wider river.
Benefit: higher reliability and capacity. No speed limit on unpowered bridges, versus the 40 mph (65 km/h) limit today. More subtly, on both sides of the Cos Cob Bridge there are short, sharp curves; rebuilding the bridge as a high-level bridge with a single very gentle curve imposing no speed limit could be done more or less within right-of-way, though the Cos Cob station platforms might have to be moved slightly. Even more subtly, more reliability means less padding on both Metro-North and Amtrak’s part, and with federal funding obtained by Amtrak this can potentially allow intercity trains to go at a higher speed elsewhere on the New Haven Line than Metro-North currently permits.
The segment between the NY/CT state line and Stamford is in my experience the slowest on the Northeast Corridor outside immediate major-station areas, and when I timed the trains on it, the northbound trains did it in about 11 minutes, for an average speed of 60 km/h. The curves immediately west of Stamford are actually fairly gentle, and letting the trains run on this segment at speed could nearly halve this travel time. While this would require higher cant and cant deficiency than the low values currently used on the New Haven Line, there’s little point in raising them while speeds are so limited on the Cos Cob Bridge.
B&P Tunnel Replacement
The tunnels immediately west of Baltimore were poorly engineered and impose a tight speed limit, slowing down trains by about 1.5-2 minutes even though they are adjacent to a station. While this is a relatively straightforward project, it may not be sufficiently advanced in the design and environmental clearance phase, making it a candidate for future funding but not for stimulus funding.
Cost: Amtrak’s Master Plan says $1 billion. The FRA’s study on the matter says $770 million. Both figures are within the normal non-US range for urban tunneling of this length, though the Amtrak figure is toward the upper end of it.
Benefit: reliability, and on the margins some extra space for intercity trains to pass commuter trains (on the margins, because for the next two stations south of the tunnels there are four tracks already). Some trip time improvement, and even more trip time improvement if there is new high-acceleration rolling stock, for which speed limits in station throats add more to trip times. Reduction in maintenance costs – curves as sharp as those in the existing tunnels (about 250-meter radius) begin to wear the wheels of trains, and the best available future rolling stock, Shinkansen trains, has the highest minimum curve radius, though it is well below 250 meters (I believe it is 190).
Pelham Bay Bridge Replacement
Cost: $500 million together with curve modifications between New York and New Rochelle. Just repairing the bridge more, which is not the same as replacement, is $100 million.
Benefit: like Cos Cob, Pelham Bay is flanked by two sharp, short curves. Replacing it even without doing anything else would eliminate a speed restriction in a zone that for a few km could support 200 km/h.
Medium-Term Future
There are additional projects that can be undertaken, in relatively small chunks. Some have been hinted at; some haven’t been studied at all that I know of, but have tantalizing benefits for future high-speed service. Because there’s no design yet, except possibly for Elizabeth, it’s unlikely anything can be done by any deadline, but design should begin promptly to make the next round of funding. At any rate, the above shorter-term projects are more than enough to soak up all funding that could become available if California fails to appropriate money for its own HSR project and returns the federal funds.
New Rolling Stock
The Acelas are heavy, low-capacity, low-performance, and high-maintenance. New trains can’t be FRA-compliant, and in practice some time (measured in years, not decades) can pass before the best rolling stock is legal on US track. But Amtrak and all involved in HSR on existing track should be at the forefront of asking for an overhaul. High-acceleration trains, capable of about the same cant deficiency as the Acela (for example the E5 Series Shinkansen and the high-speed Talgos), can achieve much faster trip times than possible today, with trivial changes to right-of-way geometry. Of course the tracks would have to be maintained to higher standards, but that’s much cheaper than moving a viaduct or carving a new right-of-way through a residential suburb.
Elizabeth S-Curve Modification
Cost: ??? The project would entail stretching the present reverse-curve, and probably demolishing all or parts of Union County College’s Elizabeth Kellogg building, a new medium-sized building that cost $48 million to build, as well as a parking garage between the college and the train station. The chief difficulty is easing a curve that’s on a viaduct.
Benefit: current speed limit on the curve is 55 mph (90 km/h), and because the limiting factor is not radius but how fast one can reverse a curve, there’s not much that can be done by raising superelevation. If only the above two buildings are removed, and some parking lots are taken, the curve appears to be modifiable to a radius of about 1,500 meters, which with cutting-edge superelevation (200 mm) and the E5 or Talgo 350’s cant deficiency (about 175 mm) corresponds to 220 km/h. This effectively extends the high-speed zone in New Jersey farther north, closer to Newark.
An express New Jersey Transit train taking a curve with radius 1,500 meters and superelevation 200 mm at its top speed of 160 km/h would have perfectly balanced cant to within a millimeter, and so there is no need to reduce cant to accommodate it.
Metuchen S-Curve Modification
Metuchen is Elizabeth’s shy, ignored sister. Amtrak’s Vision travel time simulation does not fix the curve at all. Update: as Jim notes in comments, the Master Plan does talk about some fix, calling it the Lincoln Interlocking. The total cost of this, Elizabeth, constant tension catenary, additional curve realignments in Pennsylvania and Connecticut, and other projects Amtrak identifies as immediate trip time improvements is $4 billion, of which a portion has already been allocated.
Cost: ??? The project entails straightening two reverse curves, an easier one between Metropark and Metuchen and a harder one on both sides of I-287. Some residential takings may be required, especially for the former; the latter may require partial takings at a strip mall and an industrial building. Since the railroad is not on viaduct here, structure costs should be far lower than in Elizabeth.
Benefit: current speed limit is 100 mph (160 km/h). The S-curve is not as tight as at Elizabeth and this means there’s more potential for an increase in speed, but not too much. With minor takings, the curves in the area can all be straightened to 2,500 meters (280 km/h) except the I-287 curve, whose maximum feasible radius depends on how many takings are allowed; with very superficial takings, 1,800 meters (240 km/h) is possible, and with completely taking the strip mall and industrial site there’s practically no limit. Although the existing speed is much higher than at Elizabeth, this is smack in the middle of an otherwise full-speed zone, and so the benefits of speed boost are higher.
Second update: I forgot to say – with the same assumptions as for Elizabeth, a 160 km/h NJT express would have 17 mm of cant excess on an 1,800-meter curve and 80 mm on a 2,500-meter curve, both lower than the cant excess of stopping trains on some of the curvy stations in southeastern Connecticut.
Port Chester-Greenwich Bypass
Most of the slowness of the segment between the NY/CT state line and Stamford comes from Cos Cob, but part of it comes from a sharp curve in Port Chester that can’t be modified without too many takings. As an alternative, trains should leave the existing line just south of Rye, travel along I-95 and its gentler curves, bypass Port Chester and Greenwich, and rejoin in the vicinity of the newly-raised Cos Cob Bridge. Curve radius without significant residential takings would be about 1,300 meters through the I-95 S-curve in Rye and Port Chester, and 2,000 meters elsewhere.
Cost: ??? This is about 7 km of new line, with significant portions on viaduct. Parts of the Greenwich station house may need to be knocked down or moved.
Benefit: the direct benefit is bypassing two curves in the middle of what would be, in the presence of a fixed Cos Cob Bridge, a relatively high-speed segment. The indirect benefit is that it gives intercity trains several fast kilometers to overtake express commuter trains. Not only does this boost reliability, but also, like the Cos Cob fix, it makes it possible for intercity trains to travel faster elsewhere on the line without mucking up commuter trains’ schedule. Currently permitted top speed in Metro-North territory is 90 mph (145 km/h) in New York State and 75 (120) in Connecticut, but those curve fixes would allow much higher speed on a long continuous segment. With higher superelevation, current curvature would permit a continuous 200 km/h south to Harrison and north to Stamford, 170 km/h through Harrison south to New Rochelle, and 160 km/h through Stamford.
New Rochelle Interlocking Grade-Separation
Cost: ??? Harold Interlocking, a more complex project, is about $300 million. But this project conversely would require minor curve modification between New Rochelle and Pelham Bay for full benefit, and also some takings through New Rochelle to straighten the existing S-curve. Ultimate cost depends on how much straightening is involved.
Benefit: current speed through the interlocking is 30 mph (50 km/h). The flat junction also leads to capacity constraints at rush hour, limiting intercity train movements and forcing them into slots that may be suboptimal in other parts of the line. Depending on how many takings one is willing to engage in, an S-curve with enough space to fully reverse the curve could have a radius anywhere from 700 meters (150 km/h) and up. 700 meters represents minimal takings; the point of diminishing returns is about 1,800 meters (about as much as other curves farther north can be eased to, permitting 240 km/h), which would require taking a row or two of buildings east of the tracks.
Eastern CT I-95 Bypass
Not a small project at all, but it can be broken into segments, some of which allow postponing or canceling projects on the existing Shore Line. In addition, Connecticut wants to widen I-95 in this area from 4 to 6 lanes, and since the capacity of HSR is much higher, the money can be reprogrammed without net loss of auto capacity.
This project would start right at New Haven Union Station, cross the Quinnipiac River at a new bridge near US 1 and the new I-95 bridge, follow I-95 to the state line, and then cut across barely-populated territory to the Shore Line at Kingston, where it straightens.
Cost: this is 121 km of tunnel-free route, and based on similar costs in Europe, it should be $2.5 billion. Carefully tracing through the unit costs implied by the Penn Design group, following California HSR costs, produces a figure of $2 billion. But this assumes much lower costs for the bridges over the rivers than Amtrak has produced so far; Amtrak costs are likely much higher, though not by orders of magnitude.
Benefit: New Haven-Providence in about 40 minutes, New Haven-Boston in about an hour. Current travel time can be improved using better rolling stock, but there’s a point of diminishing returns, and reliability with present-day movable bridges, especially over the Connecticut River, is low, requiring extra schedule padding.
The three basic segments of this are New Haven-East Haven (i.e. the Quinnipiac bridge), East Haven-Old Saybrook, and Old Saybrook-Kingston; the Old Saybrook point comes from the fact that I-95 and the Shore Line are close there and there’s room for a track connection. The eastern segment bypasses the curviest segment with the worst bridges, but requires difficult bridges of its own; that said, the Penn Design methodology, under which a single bridge over a river is not as expensive as multiple grade separations, makes this segment look cheaper than it probably is. The western segment offers new capacity for commuter rail in the New Haven area, because it completely removes Boston-bound trains from State Street and points north.
Commuter Rail-HSR Compatibility
Cost: ??? This involves strategic four-track overtake segments; see example for the MBTA here and here, and for Metro-North to Penn Station here. For comparison, 17 km of four-tracking the three-track gap between the Devon Bridge and New Haven is $15 million, and 8 km of three-tracking the two-track Readville-Canton segment is $80 million. The much higher cost of the latter project presumably comes from the fact that this is new track rather than what appears to be restoring a fourth track that used to exist. But since those four-tracking segments are quite short, not much longer than a station and approaches, the cost of each should be in the low tens of millions.
In addition, MARC and especially the MBTA would need to obtain more modern rolling stock, to minimize infrastructure costs. An 8-car EMU is $20 million at Metro-North/LIRR/SEPTA costs (as well as the costs of European countries; American EMU orders are hardly more expensive than European ones, in contrast with the situation for infrastructure). That said, operating costs would be reduced due to lower energy consumption and a lower breakdown rate.
Benefit: de jure only capacity, but de facto those are busy commuter lines and intercity traffic should not take absolute precedence. As a result, those overtakes are crucial for letting HSR run at the full speed allowed by right-of-way geometry, rather than at reduced speed to avoid interfering with regional traffic. The new rolling stock and more rigorous operating schedule would also speed up regional trains significantly; MBTA trains could run from Boston to Providence in 51 minutes, down from 1:10 today, even while being overtaken by HSR twice during each run and making 3 additional stops.
The Urban Geography of Park-and-Rides
The urban geography of transit cities and of car cities is relatively well-understood. In a transit city, there will be a strong CBD surrounded by residences with spiky secondary centers, all quite small geographically but dense, centered around train stations and junctions; because density is high throughout, minor trips are done on foot. In a car city, all trips are done by car, the core is weak, and most employment is in suburban edge cities and edgeless cities.
What I haven’t seen is an explanation of how urban geography works in mixed metro areas: there are those in which short trips are done on foot and long ones in cars, such as new urbanist developments, and those in which short trips are done by car and long ones on transit, such as park-and-ride-oriented commuter suburbs. It is the latter that I want to address in this post.
The first feature of park-and-rides is that of all combinations of modes of transportation, they are the fastest and enable suburbs to sprout the farthest from the center. This is because the segment of the trip done in a car is uncongested and so driving is faster than transit, while the segment done on a train parallels a congested road, and conversely makes few stops so that average speeds are high.
On top of this, because intra-suburban trips are done by car, the density in the suburbs is very low, comparable to proper car cities (see the lower end of the density profiles of the New York, Chicago, and Boston metro areas), and this forces sprawl to go outward. New York is the world’s most sprawling city measured in total built-up area; the only other city of comparable size that’s not a transit city or a bus/jitney city is Los Angeles, which is forced to have denser suburbs because of the mountains. Of course Houston and Dallas sprawl even more relative to size, but because they lack New York’s transit-oriented core, there’s an inherent limit to their size.
The other feature is that there’s a definite socioeconomic history to the development of the auto-oriented commuter suburbs of transit cities. First, people move to the suburbs and commute into the city, almost always by train due to road congestion (or, as in the earliest New York suburbs, because mass motorization hasn’t arrived yet). The mass exodus into these suburbs comes from cars rather than commuter rail, and so the local services for people living in those suburbs are built at automobile scale, rather than at the walkable town center scale of 1910.
In North America there’s also a definite class element here – the early movers are the rich rather than the poor. Historically this was partly because poor people couldn’t afford regular train fare, and partly because the impetus for suburbanization was idyllic country homes with access to urban jobs rather than cheap housing for the poor. If I’m not mistaken, this wasn’t the case in Australian cities’ suburbanization, leading to a more urban transit-style mode of running mainline rail. The result of this class distinction is that North American commuter rail styles itself as for the rich: agencies make an effort to ensure everyone has a seat and downplay comfortable standing space, and the expectation is that transit is a last-ditch mode of transportation for when cars just don’t have the capacity to get people downtown, and so nobody needs to take the trains in the off-peak or take a bus to the train.
The result is that the park-and-ride city will still have a strong core with high-capacity transportation, and the primary CBD will maintain its supremacy for high-income jobs. Establishing edge cities in the direction of the favored quarter can happen, but there’s still a congested city nearby, and so from many directions it’s impossible to drive, and taking transit is impossible. Thus jobs in White Plains and Stamford are not nearly as high-paying as jobs in Manhattan.
There can even be secondary CBDs, if the inner part of the metro area, where people take transit more regularly than the suburban commuters do, is large enough. But those secondary CBDs are frequently quite auto-oriented. Brooklyn’s mode share for jobs is only 42-39 in favor of transit (for residents, it’s 60-25), and all other counties in the New York region except Manhattan have more workers driving than taking transit, a situation that is not true if one looks at residents. Those secondary CBDs then have mixed characteristics: they are dense and fairly walkable, as can be expected based on their history and location, but also have plentiful parking and a large share of drivers demanding even more. They can accommodate multiple modes of transportation, but driving is more convenient, and from the suburbs the commuter rail system isn’t always geared to serve them.
Core Connectors and In-Between Neighborhoods
In some American cities, new or proposed transit lines are either core connectors, i.e. city-center circulator streetcars built for development purposes, or far-flung commuter rail extensions with few urban stops. Both are present in Providence, with the South County extension of the MBTA and the Core Connector, but worse circulators than in Providence are proposed elsewhere (for example, in New Haven), and exurb-focused commuter rail with parking lot stations is the standard in most Sunbelt cities and also in Massachusetts. At first I thought my opposition to both was just a matter of wonky support of a specific stop distance and service pattern that falls in between those two extremes, but recently, after attending Providence urbanist blogger meetings and also rereading old threads about New Haven, I realized there’s a political and social dimension to all this.
Recall that old American cities have a donut-shaped income distribution: gentrified in the center, poor in most other urban neighborhoods and inner suburbs, and middle-class to rich in most suburbs. Those two forms of bad transit are specifically built to cater to the rich parts of the metro area, and ignore the poor parts. The problem, of course, is that the poor parts are precisely where transit ridership is concentrated. People in the gentrified cores of smaller cities can walk; people in the suburbs own cars, and those cities have too many roads and too much parking for buses to be an even semi-reasonable alternative.
In Providence, as I recently brought up, the busiest buses follow Broad and North Main, and serve working-class and poor populations. The same is true in New Haven: the busiest line by far runs on Dixwell, connecting the Yale student ghetto, the in-between poor neighborhoods, and the strip malls in middle-class Hamden. So what service addition does a study by the South Central Regional Council of Governments (SCORAG) propose? Naturally, a circulator connecting Union Station with the New Haven Green. You could chalk this up to a belief in systemwide upgrades over building a few high-performance lines, but many outlying bus stops have no shelter, and the study says nothing about that.
When Peter Brassard first pitched the idea of a local rail shuttle service in Providence and its inner suburbs to us privately, the observation one of us made (I think it was Jef Nickerson, but I’m not sure) is that it would invert the usual relationship between infrastructure investment and income. This is mostly accidental – the mainline serves Olneyville and Pawtucket but not the East Side. But something like this is more likely than not when the focus is on serving reasonably dense neighborhoods and perhaps inner-suburban malls outside walking range.
The same is true of what I believe to be the most promising rail shuttle service in New Haven – namely, a service using the Farmington Canal Trail, which runs about 200 meters east of Dixwell, and could be reused by light rail reaching downtown New Haven on city streets or rapid transit connecting to the mainline with a very short tunnel or trench. With a stop spacing of a little less than a kilometer, modern rolling stock could average 35-40 km/h in service, double the speed of the current bus.
I suspect part of the bias against such service comes from the belief that building ten kilometers of light rail is expensive. Because there’s an implicit hierarchy in planners’ mind between services, they think a downgrade is an automatic cost saver, even when it’s not – for instance, when a bus on an abandoned railroad costs far more than most rail reactivation projects do. One of these mantras is that commuter rail infill is less expensive (and then they build infill stations at $100 million apiece, strategically located away from the intersection with the main bus corridor). As a rule of thumb, each of these downgrades just raises unit costs because of various overbuilding schemes until total cost is the same as if they’d built regular urban rail, but the benefits are much lower.
But it’s more than a technical bias; it’s also political bias. The Core Connector is explicitly a development project. It may even be a successful one, if it convinces local power broker Colin Kane to drop plans for building 7,000 parking spaces in the Jewelry District, as described in a recent paywalled article in Next American City. Development projects like this never go to extant low-income neighborhoods, unless there’s an explicit effort at gentrification, and usually locals protest against the displacement; neglect is much easier and less controversial than redevelopment.
The technical and political biases merge in one of the less challenged cost-effectiveness metrics, the cost per new rider. Although it’s presented in neutral terms – the cost is compared to the predicted total transit ridership if the project is built minus the predicted total if it is not – the results privilege adding choice riders (that is, those who already own a car and drive to work) over retaining existing riders. Although transit revivals happen, most of the world’s transit cities built out their systems before most people got cars, and people simply kept using transit instead of buying cars even as they moved into the middle class. Portland may have about the same metro area transit mode share as before it built light rail, but other cities of similar age lost ground and have even lower transit use.
It’s tricks like ignoring retention that lead Boston to downrate replacing the southern half of the Silver Line with light rail on its list of possible projects even though it would be very cheap by US standards per rider, and rate new commuter rail branches well beyond the continuous built-up area as more cost-effective. The rail bias factor implied by the computation for new riders is less than 0.5%: 130 new riders against 34,000 existing ones. A Transportation Research Board analysis finds the rail bias is in the 34-43% range. I suspect that if the Silver Line served richer areas than Roxbury, Boston would use a more reasonable rail bias than 130/34,000, bringing down costs per new rider by two orders of magnitude. New York went ahead with Second Avenue Subway; it is undoubtedly the most important subway project in the region, but the next best corridors, e.g. Utica, serving less chic neighborhoods than the Upper East Side, are ignored.
The technical reason to build urban rail a certain way – own-right-of-way, stops roughly every kilometer within the city, etc. – is of course separate. Technical characteristics do not tell you which neighborhoods to serve, not without first looking into existing demand patterns. It is just fortunate that New Haven has a right-of-way closely paralleling Dixwell, and unfortunate that Providence has none paralleling Broad. But the income donuts, and more generally the connection between density and old industrial development that is usually working-class (since gentrification in such cities is within walking distance of the core rather than within transit distance), have certain social implications. The most annoying to the planner and the government official is that they must invest in poor neighborhoods as they are, and do not have a special reason to try to foist change upon them.
Or they can just build core connectors for the cities and park-and-ride extensions for the suburbs. The FTA will fund these no matter what; its cost-effectiveness metrics are biased that way to avoid having to send every penny it has available to a few expensive but high-ridership lines such as Second Avenue Subway. The developers will like them, because of real or imagined property value benefits. The state will like them – state governments are dominated by suburbanites and urban developers and view transit as pork rather than as useful spending based on ridership metrics; Rhode Island is much likelier to find support for development in the Jewelry District than for boring rail lines in already-developed Providence neighborhoods. It’s a win-win for everyone except the riders, and they don’t count.
Commuter Rail Ridership Distribution
As a followup to my claim that the Northeast Corridor in New Jersey had a more outer-suburban ridership than the Morris and Essex lines, I decided to tabulate the ridership distribution of various commuter lines. This tells you what percent of the ridership originates within some distance of the city center. All lines in New York are included, though some are grouped together because of branching.
Explanation: the ridership numbers for New Jersey Transit come from the New York Times, and those for the LIRR and Metro-North come from files published by the MTA. To maintain comparability with the Metro-North and NJT numbers, ridership in city terminal areas is ignored for calculation purposes; thus, X% really means X% of beyond-city ridership. This means stations from Jamaica west, from Newark Penn east, and from Harlem south are not counted. All km points are calculated from Penn Station or Grand Central, even for lines that do not run through to those stations. Finally, some lines are lumped together, when they share stations beyond the excluded city terminal zone.
| Line\km | 20 | 30 | 40 | 50 | 60 | 80 | 100 |
| NJ NEC/NJC (66,997) | 4 | 14.2 | 31.3 | 44.6 | 59.6 | 78.2 | 98.7 |
| R. Val. (10,639) | 0 | 13.8 | 51.7 | 74.3 | 84.4 | 98.5 | 100 |
| M&E/MB (35,183) | 5.6 | 36.3 | 64.7 | 81 | 91.8 | 98.9 | 100 |
| Erie Main/BC (13,249) | 16 | 35.6 | 60.7 | 73.9 | 81.2 | 89 | 92.9 |
| P. Val. (3,674) | 5.5 | 39 | 70.3 | 97.3 | 100 | 100 | 100 |
| Hudson (25,442) | 5.3 | 16.7 | 30.8 | 52.6 | 66.7 | 76.2 | 88.8 |
| Harlem (45,117) | 4.7 | 27 | 68.8 | 73.9 | 82 | 91.3 | 98.1 |
| NH + NC/D/W (61,973) | 0.1 | 13.6 | 31.4 | 42.7 | 60.8 | 77 | 90.2 |
| Port W. (23,404) | 14.1 | 80.8 | 100 | 100 | 100 | 100 | 100 |
| LIRR Main (65,104) | 0 | 8.5 | 29.1 | 51.7 | 69.2 | 83.7 | 99.9 |
| Mont. + Atl. (58,835) | 0 | 10 | 52.9 | 80 | 88 | 96.3 | 99.3 |
Note that the data isn’t completely reliable. The NJT and Metro-North data sets paper this over by counting just one direction, but the LIRR counts both, and there are discrepancies, for example at Huntington. So the numbers above have a fair margin of error around them.
Observe that the ridership of the Northeast Corridor is so skewed outward that despite having twice the ridership of the Morris and Essex lines in New Jersey, the Morris and Essex lines actually beat it on ridership within 40 km of Penn Station. Similarly, the Harlem Line beats the New Haven Line up to 50 km.
Similar data exists in Boston, and, in harder to search form even if you speak the language, Tokyo (better data for Tokyo can be found here, but for most lines the numbers include only inner and middle segments, up to about 50 km outside Tokyo Station). It’s also quite easy in both cities to set a boundary of the excluded city zone, and with Boston this could allow constructing the same table.
The implication of the difference between various lines is that some lines are more local and some are practically intercity. This relates to the service decisions within each line – more stops or fewer stops – but there aren’t a horde of people in Elizabeth and South Newark who are clamoring to ride rush hour trains into Penn Station and would in large numbers if only stop spacing were narrower, or a horde of people in Sussex County who’d ride if only there were fewer stops between Dover and Penn Station.
That said, the more local lines do have potential for local service on trips that American commuter rail doesn’t serve. There’s an untapped market of people commuting from New Jersey to Jamaica and Brooklyn, or from Long Island to Newark and Jersey City, and this market necessarily needs to be served with more local trains, because most people in it live closer to the city.
Providence: Busy Versus Frequent Buses
While trying to come up with a good proposal for upgraded buses or streetcars in Providence, I tried to base route decisions on RIPTA’s most frequent buses. But as it turns out, there’s a substantial difference between the most frequent and the busiest routes, and existing policies toward investment do not reward high ridership at all.
By far the two busiest lines in the state are routes 11 (Broad Street), with 6,500 weekday riders, and 99 (North Main to Pawtucket), with 5,200. Those are also the two most frequent, with 10-minute peak and midday service, and are usually interlined. This is the only case in which frequency matches traffic: of the next batch of busiest routes – 20, 22, 56, and 60, each with about 3,000 weekday riders – only the 56 has 15-minute off-peak service, the rest ranging from 22 to 35, with the 20 and 22 having 22-23-minute frequency even at the peak. Several less busy lines have 20-minute all-day service, and the frequent network, which uses a 20-minute weekday off-peak standard, looks different from the highest-traffic network.
However, previous and proposed development-oriented transit, including the fake trolleys and now the streetcar, avoid even the 11 and 99. The fake trolleys are distinguished in branding, 20-minute frequency even on weekends and in the evenings, and consistent interlining across Kennedy Plaza. The 92 fake trolley runs from the East Side to Federal Hill without changing its number, but regular buses, including the 11 and 99, change their route number at Kennedy Plaza, and that’s if there’s a consistent route they interline with at all. (When Jef Nickerson pressed RIPTA on this issue, RIPTA said it wants to preserve flexibility.) Likewise, the streetcar is a city-center circulator, and ideas for where to extend it afterward avoid Broad Street and North Main; local transit activists I have talked to believe the preference is for Broadway, a wide street hosting two routes (27, 28) that have 4,500 weekday riders between them, still less than Broad. (The alternative route in the same direction, Westminster, has 3,500 on its two buses, but the difference comes from the routes’ respective tails west of Olneyville Square, and the segments along Westminster and Broadway look about even.)
This is not to say that the state spurns the busiest routes. After the previous Governor vetoed it six times, Governor Chafee recently signed a bill to provide bus signal priority on the busiest lines. The brand for this is called rapid bus. At best, this shows the state thinks that rich people on the East Side and the Federal Hill gentrifiers, and soon the Jewelry District gentrifiers, prefer to ride a service that’s not called a bus, even if it is one. At worst, it points to skewed priorities: the streetcar is explicitly a development tool, and much more expensive than clearly posting schedules at the top end of the bus tunnel and rearranging schedules to provide constant headways within it.
A related issue is the ability to railstitute bus routes. Among all the busy routes, route 11 is among the hardest to replace with commuter rail. Peter Brassard’s urban shuttle proposal and my Woonsocket regional rail proposal use existing railroad lines. Arguably, this could take over the longer-distance functions of the 99, whose demand primarily comes from Pawtucket rather than North Main in Providence. However, the 11 is not paralleled by any rail line. This makes it the most important corridor for any upgrade. Alternative routes, such as continuing the existing streetcar proposal farther south, do not capture the local demand on Broad, which is of moderate intensity everywhere along the corridor. The distribution of demand on Broad is linear, which is less the case for other routes, which connect various anchors spaced farther apart.
It’s not normal for the relationship between traffic and frequency to be so weak. (In New York, busy routes that aren’t frequent by a 10-minute standard are the exception, and are very close to making the cut, e.g. the B8 and Bx39 run sometimes every 10 minutes midday and sometimes every 12). RIPTA needs to be asking itself why some routes are overserved and others are underserved.
But more importantly, the city and the state need to ask themselves why they’re building special branding as not-a-regular-bus around routes that aren’t even the ones that most need it. The fake trolleys get emphasized and specially colored on the map. It’s RIPTA’s fault that the interlined buses aren’t consistently signed, but all of the investment decisions are on the city and the state. Even if it’s necessary to build a streetcar to the Jewelry District and the hospital, why not say that pending additional funds the city will extend it toward and then along Broad? The alignment wouldn’t be any more awkward than that already proposed, and it would only miss a relatively short segment of Broad.
Regional Rail for New York: What Can Be Done Now
MTA Chairman Joe Lhota recently proposed to through-route commuter rail lines in the New York area, as was proposed in the past by the RPA, the Institute for Rational Urban Mobility, and more recently myself. Lhota proposed other, less flashy ideas for integration, including better track sharing at Penn Station and lengthening platforms to accommodate 10-car trains. Although a network that looks like my proposal should still be the goal for the next 20 years, there are several things that can be done in the very short run. None is do-it-tomorrow immediate, but neither does any require very difficult modification of equipment or organization or significant infrastructure investment. Most should not require extensive studies.
Note that this is not a wishlist of the most important commuter rail reorganization projects in the region. Many of those reorganizations do not have anything to do with interagency integration, and are therefore not included. Only projects that are very cheap and would come from or benefit integration are on this list.
1. Integrated ticket machines at Penn Station. This requires the physical tickets on New Jersey Transit to look like those on the LIRR and Metro-North (and thus some modifications to the fare barriers at Secaucus and Newark Airport), and some reprogramming of ticket machines, but no change otherwise. Ideally a ticket from (say) Hicksville to Newark should cost less than the sum of tickets from Hicksville to New York and New York to Newark, to encourage reverse-peak traffic, but strictly speaking the discount is not needed. Amtrak and commuter rail machines should also be integrated, though the physical tickets can still be different if switching over is too hard.
2. Integrated concourses at Penn Station. This means treating the upper and lower concourses as belonging to all three railroads. This requires Amtrak to give up its single-file queuing and accept that people already can walk around and get to its trains from other railroads’ turfs. Trains should be announced on all concourses, and all access points to a platform should be clearly signed with the next train’s type and schedule.
3. Timed transfers. Although a clean integrated timetable is impossible, because trains interline on some inner segments to increase capacity, a partial version is still possible. What this means is that, with hourly off-peak service on each branch, Morris and Essex trains should arrive at Penn Station just before the hour, as should one of the several hourly trains on the New Jersey side of the Northeast Corridor, and then two or three branches going to the east (say, to New Haven and Port Washington, and on one additional LIRR line for service to Jamaica) should leave just after the hour, with the tightest connection done cross-platform. This would make trips from New Jersey to JFK and from Long Island to Newark easier, and the choice of services to participate in the system should be consistent with even spacing on interlined trunks.
4. Modification of rolling stock. Metro-North’s M8s can run under 60 Hz catenary and third rail, but unfortunately not 25 Hz catenary; as lower frequency requires a larger transformer, modifying the trains to run on the New Jersey side of the Northeast Corridor may be too hard in the very short term (though not in the medium and long terms). However, NJT’s ALP-46 locomotives and Arrow EMUs can run on 12 kV 25 Hz and 25 kV 60 Hz catenary, and thus modifying them to run on Metro-North’s 12 kV 60 Hz catenary is easy, allowing them to run from the NJT network to the New Haven Line. Unfortunately, because locomotives accelerate more slowly than EMUs and the Arrows are quite old, they do not have very good performance for short-stop service, for which through-running is the most useful.
5. Voltage change on the Northeast Corridor’s New Jersey side to 25 kV 60 Hz. This voltage change was done to the Morris and Essex lines and much of the North Jersey Coast Line. It is somewhere on Amtrak’s wishlist of projects, but I do not know how high it is. This allows M8s to run through, ensuring the better rolling stock is available for the service that needs it the most. It may possibly be bundled with Amtrak’s installation of constant tension catenary south of New Brunswick to reduce costs. Since this eliminates the need for 25 Hz transformers in the future, this meas future NJT rolling stock would be lighter.
6. Depending on 4-5, rolling stock sharing along interlined services. In practice this means M8s on local Northeast Corridor services, which would also allow adding and serving infill stations in New Jersey (for example, more regular service to North Elizabeth, and perhaps a station at South Street in Newark), and Arrows and locomotives on express services from Penn Station and New Jersey to New Haven.
7. Platform raising on the North Jersey Coast Line and the Morris and Essex lines, if service using M8s rather than Arrows is desired. Because of the voltage, it’s actually easier for M8s to serve the Morristown Line other than their inability to serve low platforms: it would only require 8-21 km of reelectrification rather than 88-101. The Morris and Essex lines also have a more inner-suburban distribution of ridership than the Northeast Corridor Line, which gets most of its ridership from more distant stations, and this makes them in one sense better-suited for through-service. (In another sense, the Northeast Corridor is better, since it serves downtown Newark, a secondary CBD that draws some commuters from suburbs and boroughs east of Manhattan.)
It is my belief that all of the above, possibly except #5 and #7, are feasible within months or at worst a very small number of years, and would not require additional environmental work. Even #5 and #7, which are more expensive, are still close to two orders of magnitude cheaper than a full through-running plan with new tunnels serving Lower Manhattan.
The medium term is more expensive – perhaps an order of magnitude less than the full program rather than two – and would include further modernization, allowing full through-service on every line and more efficient equipment utilization. It can also assume friendlier regulations, which a snap integration cannot, and this in particular means better rolling stock in the future and higher speeds even with existing rolling stock. Clockface schedules and frequent off-peak service would allow planning infrastructure repairs and upgrades around specific schedules. For example, the current local Stamford-Grand Central schedule is 1:06, but an express train I recently took from New Haven came to Grand Central more than 10 minutes ahead of schedule, suggesting excessive padding; minor upgrades should allow an M8 to do Stamford-New York in an hour minus turnaround time making local stops, and more ambitiously New York-New Brunswick in 45 minutes minus turnaround time.
Lhota can’t do much in the long term, because this requires an enormous investment into concrete, a political decision and a longer-term one than Lhota’s term as MTA chair. However, he can both implement the above seven points within his term, and also set in motion various work rule reforms and small-scale capital project planning and apply for the requisite FRA waivers to permit the medium-term reforms to succeed.
Followup on the Providence Regional Rail Shuttle
Peter Brassard’s proposal for a very frequent-stop mainline train in Rhode Island received comments both here and on Greater City, dealing with issues from rolling stock to station choice to scheduling. Some are fairly trivial, some aren’t. The upshot is that the project is technically feasible, but requires political head-bashing, especially with regards to scheduling.
First, the easy part: if the line is only to run between Central Falls and Warwick, then the rolling stock should be electric; this both improves performance and eliminates a political bottleneck, because the EMU market is larger than the DMU market, and in case FRA regulations do not change and obtaining a waiver is too expensive, there are M8s ready to use. The M8s are heavier than is ideal, but their performance is to my knowledge imperceptibly worse than that of noncompliant trains in the speed range appropriate for the short stop spacing, up to about 100 km/h.
Scheduling is the problem, because there has to be track sharing with something. The line is three-tracked: there are two tracks for Amtrak, also used by the MBTA north of Providence Station, and one track for freight. The line used to be four-tracked, but was reduced to three tracks in the 1990s in order to widen the track centers and allow the Acelas to tilt. Further reduction in track centers is not acceptable: at 4 meters (more precisely 13′) the distance is shorter than the standards for greenfield construction in Europe and even Japan. Track center standards are laxer on lower-speed segments, as the trackage through Providence is, but tilting becomes unsafe for an Acela-wide train. (The Pendolino is 37 cm narrower than the Acela.)
The alternative is to slightly widen the right-of-way at certain overpasses to allow four tracks, for a minimum of 20 meters with 4-meter track centers; some work, including widening, is already required to make room for platforms, and many of the most constrained locations, such as Olneyville at 18 meters, are station stop sites. It’s this construction that would most likely be the bulk of the project cost. At much lower cost, it would also allow electrification of the full corridor, making EMUs a feasible rolling stock choice for the local trains.
With four tracks, the question becomes, what regional rail should share tracks with. The choice is between intercity trains, which are currently slow but could be sped up, and freight trains. Both require political maneuvering, because neither Amtrak nor the Providence and Worcester has operating practices that are compatible with punctual passenger service. (Amtrak is more easily reformable, but an Amtrak that’s been so reformed is an Amtrak that runs trains much faster on the Northeast Corridor, increasing the regional/intercity speed difference).
I contend that it’s actually more correct to share tracks with freight. The sharpest curves are at stations, and so no superelevation is needed, but even if it were, allowing 100 km/h passenger trains could be accommodated with minimal freight train cant excess (about 25 mm at 50 km/h). More importantly, freight and local passenger rail have similar average speeds. The speed profile is different – freight is steady and slow, local passenger rail attains higher speeds but makes frequent stops – but when headways are long enough, this is not a problem.
On page 46 of the Providence Foundation study on a similar passenger line, we see that there aren’t many freight trains, so headways are determined by passenger trains. The freight schedule on page 48 of the same study suggests that freight and passenger train speeds would be very similar. It has trains doing Pawtucket-Warwick in 23 minutes; modern EMUs with a top speed of 100 km/h (losing 45 seconds to each station stop) and making the proposed stops would do the same in 25 minutes, with 7% padding. The local passenger train is a hair faster than the freight train on the Providence-Pawtucket and Cranston-Warwick segments, in both cases by less than a minute, and a bit slower on the Providence-Cranston segment, where station spacing is denser. This is close enough that I believe that 15-minute passenger train frequency is no barrier to track sharing. Potentially even 10-minute frequency can be accommodated. It requires freight trains to be somewhat timetabled, but they’d have a window of several minutes to enter between each pair of successive passenger trains, and missing their window would not delay them by more than 15 minutes. There is, then, no technical barrier to sharing tracks with freight.
The alternative, sharing tracks with intercity trains, is more dubious. Although less construction is required, the speed difference is larger. Instead of taking 23 minutes between Pawtucket and the airport, optimized intercity trains would take 8:45, including padding and a station stop at Providence. They can pass local trains at Providence, at the cost of slowing them down by several minutes while they wait to be overtaken, but even between Providence and the airport, travel time would be 5 minutes for intercity trains and 17 for regional trains.
If there’s four-tracking in Warwick, or two stops are dropped, then it’s tight but doable. Otherwise, it’s not; 12 minutes is too long a window for 15-minute service. It would require an extra terminating track at Warwick, but that would be needed anyway. The problem then is that local Rhode Island trains and MBTA trains would interfere with each other at Providence because both would dwell at the station for too long.
Interlining the two services and having MBTA trains make local stops in Providence is possible, and in conjunction with the two-overtake schedule for Boston-Providence naturally yields a three-overtake schedule. The problem is that the more overtakes there are the more reliability suffers. If an hourly freight train misses a window and needs to be delayed 15 minutes, it’s no big deal; if the goods couldn’t take a 15-minute delay, the train would be sufficiently punctual to make the window. If a passenger train misses a window, it requires the train behind it to slow down and this is not recoverable if the schedule is so tight.
When it’s unavoidable it’s best to just invest in running trains on schedule, but in this case a three-overtake schedule is avoidable. Thus track-sharing with freight is the correct option, leaving intercity trains to have a track that’s entirely theirs south of Providence, as this shuttle concept would almost certainly take over Wickford Junction service if necessary. It conveniently also allows higher regional rail frequency should the need ever arise, and because the scheduling is loose makes it easier to shoehorn another line into this system.
Netroots Nation and How the 99% Talk Hurts Consensus
For the first time since 2006, I went to Netroots Nation, as it’s held in Providence. There was one panel about public transportation, entitled “Saving Public Transportation,” whose speakers included Larry Hanley, who dominated the discussion; a moderator; and three political activists: including a local union leader, a Sierra Club representative, and a state legislative candidate who Greater City is supporting. The discussion focused on preserving bus operations rather than on expansion – in fact Hanley made the point that agencies expand capital while cutting back service because the federal government only pays for capital rather than operating funds.
Since the panel was entirely political, and dealt mostly with funding issues, when it was time for questions I asked about the saddling of transit agencies with highway debt; I specifically mentioned Massachusetts’ putting Big Dig mitigation debt on the MBTA. I wanted to see if the panelists would say anything about mode shifting or about the relative power of highways and transit.
Instead, Hanley, who took the question, ignored what I said about highway debt, and instead answered about refinancing debt at lower interest rates, as issue his union is harping about. In reality, according to his union’s own figures, the MBTA could save $26 million a year by refinancing debt; for comparison, its deficit this year, which it plugged with service cuts and a large fare hike, was $163 million, and its total debt payments in 2006 were $351 million, of which $117 million came from the Big Dig. Although the parts of this debt that are not from the Big Dig come from true transit projects, those were voted on by the state legislature, rather than by the MBTA; transit’s low position in the transportation funding food chain is thus responsible for 13.5 times as much money as could be extracted from the banks.
So at first pass, Hanley was pivoting to an issue he was more comfortable talking about, which happens to involve a fraction of the amount of money in question. But at second pass, something more insidious happened. Instead of answering a question about transportation priorities and getting state governments to assume debt they’d unfairly loaded onto transit agencies, which would require clashing with other departments with their own agendas, Hanley preferred to shift blame onto banks. He did not include figures during the panel and so I could not know he was talking about such a small amount of money; his explanation for focusing on the banks is that the MTA renegotiated deals with contractors to get lower prices, so it should do the same with the banks.
And after thinking about this, I realized how it shows exactly how despite appearances, the “We are the 99%” slogan is the exact opposite of any sort of democratic consensus. It silences any notion that there are different interests among the 99%. The auto workers and Providence’s carless residents are both members of the 99%; they have diametrically different interests when it comes to transportation. But in the Grand Struggle, the 99% must be united, and thus the leaders shift any discussion to the common enemy, no matter the relative proportions of the amounts of money in question.
After Scott Walker’s win, Matt Yglesias wrote that different industries have clashing interests just as much as labor and business do. But even within the framework of fighting big business’s influence, two of the most influential opposing interest groups, the union movement and small business, have different interests and are hostile to each other. Dean Baker wrote in The Conservative Nanny State that small businesses are being coddled because they pay lower wages and benefits on average; in general, the American union movement has not organized small businesses and supports the businesses it has already organized, and is hostile toward new companies, which are usually non-union. Small business in turn is hostile toward regulations on wages, starting a business, and so on.
The 99% framing papers over all of that. The voices that dominate the protests believe themselves to be the true representatives of 99% of the population, and by implication their own issues to be the most important. Other issues are subsidiary, or outright distractions from the primary needs. Any movement that claims to represent everyone is not consensual but nationalistic, and just as nationalism requires the elites to declare a certain archetype to be Real Americans (or Britons, or French) and everyone else to be one of many negative stereotypes, so does this 99% framing require movement leaders to coopt or downplay other groups’ issues.
Consensus comes from clashing points of view. The Swiss Socialists are farther left than what is considered serious liberal opinion in the US, and the Swiss People’s Party is about as far right as the Tea Party; they and the centrist parties are more or less in a grand coalition. The consensus comes from the realization that no single faction will ever dominate, and thus the best it can do is distill how it can advance its stated goals (poverty reduction, smaller government, greater national cohesion, etc., depending on the party). The Occupy protesters have very high supermajority requirements at their general assemblies, but they do not have this clash, this diversity in either viewpoints or demographics. They have procedural near-unanimity but not actual consensus governance, leading to a system that excludes most interest groups that comprise the 99%; unsurprisingly, the movement has severe problems with race, since its center is white and thinks it speaks for everyone.
Of course, within the union movement something similar is happening, with the dominant group being the older members. This is what New York-area transit commenter Larry Littlefield calls Generation Greed, spanning people of all political classes.
The end result is that no matter how much rhetoric is thrown around about new politics, forward-looking progressives, and so on, what ends up is a repetition of an old hierarchy, one with Real Working People and with fake ones. It has to; when it has no capability of dealing with tensions between transit users and other groups, or between whites and blacks, or between labor and small business, it cannot project any unity of the 99% otherwise. And without unity, it’s a movement without any clear policy agenda.
Commuter Rail, Urban Infill Stations, and Shuttle Train Rapid Transit
This is a proposal by Peter Brassard, who comments here and on Greater City: Providence. It was published on Greater City first, and is mirrored here as the site is experiencing server problems.
Rhode Island’s commuter rail service as currently conceived may not be conducive to encouraging ridership. Distances between existing and proposed stations are too far. Much of the focus has been on extending the system further into low-density suburbs. For Rhode Island commuter rail to succeed, more needs to be done to take advantage of existing walkable urban neighborhoods that have a high potential for passengers. Some of these areas have large amounts of commercial/industrial space or development opportunities. Due to Downtown Providence expansion, the rail system will be challenged, as long as there’s no internal downtown high-frequency transit, such as the proposed Core Connector, to directly link rail passengers to the far reaches of downtown.
Rhode Island’s commuter rail doesn’t capitalize on density variations and neighborhood assets of the Providence area. If Rhode Island’s commuter rail functioned as a rapid mass-transit system, besides increasing the number of passengers, it would help to revitalize and expand development opportunities for neighborhoods along the rail line. The implementation of medium frequency shuttle train service within the Rhode Island instate rail corridor would offer predictable headway times at regular intervals that could operate in addition to MBTA commuter and Amtrak trains. Air and intercity train travelers, commuters, and the general public would greatly benefit from this level of service.
A variation to a commuter rail or shuttle train is the German S-bahn or French RER or San Francisco’s BART. An S-bahn type system is usually the same as commuter rail in suburban areas, but differs when it’s within the central urban core, where it has characteristics of a subway or metro. Usually stations within the core zone are located close together at quarter- to half-mile subway station distances and schedule headway times typically fall somewhere in the middle of commuter rail and subway schedules. Depending on the city, central core rail infrastructure can be underground or at grade utilizing existing rail corridors. A hybrid of a shuttle train and an S-bahn might best for Rhode Island.
One way to organize Rhode Island’s rail system would be to create different station tiers allowing for various levels of service and investment in station infrastructure. Tier service levels could be thought about as intercity or express (Amtrak), regional or limited (MBTA), and local (RI Shuttle trains). Shuttle trains should be able stop at all stations and MBTA trains should have stops at major commuter and Amtrak stations. The hours of operation of a shuttle train should extend to weekends and late evening at all stations. Because a shuttle train schedule would be frequent and regular, it would relieve the need to increase the number of MBTA commuter trains for Rhode Island transit needs or having to extend MBTA weekend service south of Providence.
Shuttle train stations should require a lower level of investment. Platforms could be adjacent to the freight track. Priority should be given to constructing affordable shuttle train infill stations without automotive accommodations. An infill train station could consist of as little as a single high-level concrete platform with stairs, handicapped ramp, railings, partial canopy, lighting, and signage. Some stations might require an elevator instead of a ramp for ADA access. Without the land acquisition and construction costs for parking, drop-off facilities, station buildings, or pedestrian bridges, the cost range for a barebones single 300-foot long infill platform with modest accessories should cost between $500,000 to $1-million. A typical 900-foot long platform would be roughly $2 to $4-million. Because of increased service frequency, a shuttle train could have fewer cars and utilize shorter platforms that could be extended in the future, reducing the initial infrastructure investment. Shorter trains and platforms would allow the system to develop incrementally as ridership increases.
Infill stations should mostly be located within high-density urban neighborhoods where people can either walk or take existing bus transit to stations with limited or no automotive infrastructure. To optimize use by pedestrian’s stations should be designed so that they would have direct access from sidewalks of major streets with bus routes. Major streets and bus routes can act as siphons to funnel potential passengers from adjacent neighborhoods to stations. Bus routes that intersect the rail line corridor would effectively extend the passenger capture area of a walkable neighborhood. A passenger capture area would be the total population that’s within less than a 12-minute walk and/or a 7-minute bus ride to a train station.
Infill stations could become catalysts to renew employment opportunities in older industrial neighborhoods, reinforcing economic development. Less advantaged people from urban neighborhoods would be able to commute without needing a car. A series of stations served by frequent shuttle train service would create true rapid transit for Rhode Island passengers to quickly reach jobs or homes in adjacent cities or distant neighborhoods, not possible with the bus system. The increased use of commuter/shuttle trains would reduce traffic congestion and lower air pollution. Opportunities to concentrate additional employment and population around stations would help to limit the expansion of suburban sprawl.
There is historic precedence of having closely situated train stations within Providence documented on city maps from 1918. (Link 1) (Link 2) In addition to Union Station, previous train stations existed at Atwells Avenue, in Olneyville at Westminster Street (northbound) and Dyke Street (southbound), Cranston Street, and in Elmwood. There are likely other forgotten stations outside of Providence. I remember being told as a boy that my great-grandfather would regularly take the train to Providence from Woodlawn in Pawtucket. As late as the 1960s there were the ruins of a wooden stairway leading down to the tracks at Lonsdale and Mineral Spring Avenues.
Currently proposed urban infill stations are 300 Barton Street in Pawtucket, Olneyville, and Park Avenue in Cranston. Other potential infill stations could include Central Falls and in Providence at Reservoir Avenue, Cranston Street, Atwells Avenue, and Charles Street. Also Hunt Street, Mineral Spring Avenue, Branch Avenue, Dean Street, Union and Roger Williams Avenues could be considered. Suburban industrial infill stations could be built toward the northern end of Jefferson Boulevard and Davisville/Quonset though these locations might require additional bus shuttle service. There would be infill station opportunities with the Lincoln and Cumberland villages along the Blackstone River, for when train service would be extended to Woonsocket. A station at Route 116 with elevators and escalators reaching to the Washington Highway bridge deck would allow passengers to access buses to Lincoln and Smithfield’s office region.
For details, see this map, overlaid on a RIPTA bus map. It shows potential shuttle train stops within walkable urban neighborhoods. Distances between stops are generally at half-mile intervals.
Olneyville’s potential for a high number of passengers should be a top priority. The current proposal for Olneyville locates a platform on Harris Avenue, away from the Broadway and Westminster Street bus routes. This location was likely chosen because construction costs would be low. A direct access walkway/ramp to the Harris Avenue platform from Broadway and Westminster should be provided, which could be developed through easements with the abutting commercial property and elderly high-rise south of the proposed platform. From looking at census tract data and existing bus routes the passenger capture area for Olneyville is probably the highest with roughly 28,000 people who could reach the station in less than a 12-minute walk and/or 7-minute bus ride. If only 5% of that population used the train that would equal 1,400 people or up to 2,800 passenger trips per day. Olneyville also has over a million square feet of commercial/industrial space, much of which is vacant or underutilized, plus vacant land for new development within walking distance from the station location.
RIDOT has two alternatives, option “A” and option “B,” for a Pawtucket/Central Falls infill station. Pawtucket officials and RIDOT favor the 300 Barton Street location for a Downtown Pawtucket station. Fewer people would be within walking distance of this station, but bus service would expand its passenger capture area of roughly 13,000 to15,000 people. The lower western quadrant of Central Falls would be walkable to this station. Development opportunities would be great for Downtown Pawtucket. RIDOT/VHB’s proposed 2009 Option “A” plan would be preferable, as both proposed station platforms would have direct access to Dexter Street’s sidewalks and buses without requiring a special drop-off circle for buses within the parking lot. Option “B” should be rejected as it isolates the station creating a condition favorable to automobiles and access to Dexter Street would be indirect and circuitous for pedestrians, which might limit opportunities for smart growth development in Downtown Pawtucket. The current plans to include a parking lot and vehicle drop-off area, though expensive should probably remain, since Pawtucket is a regional center and would be a major MBTA station. In the future the current proposed parking lot could be upgraded to a multi-level structured facility.
In Central Falls a rail platform located near Sacred Heart Avenue would serve the eastern half of Central Falls and some of Pawtucket north of downtown. Roughly 8,000 people would be within walking distance of this station, which would not have pedestrian overlap with the proposed Barton Street Station in Pawtucket. The adjacent Central Falls neighborhoods that would benefit are among the poorest and highest density communities in the state. This station location should be considered in addition to Barton Street.
Other infill station possibilities include a Cranston Street station, which would have a passenger capture of roughly 13,000 to 15,000 people in Providence and Cranston. The Huntington Industrial Park on Niantic Avenue has about a million square feet of commercial/industrial space, some of which has been converted to offices. Not that it’s necessarily practical to rebuild the entire district, but the Huntington Industrial Park is built-out to a small fraction of what is permitted by current zoning. The Corliss Industrial Park at Charles Street has similarities to the Huntington Industrial Park. A Charles Street station would have an approximate capture area of about 15,000 to 17,000 people. Passengers would be more reliant on arriving by bus from the North End-Charles Street area, Wanskuck, and Elmhurst, since the potential for passengers walking to the station might be more limited.
Reservoir Avenue near Adelaide would have a capture area of about 14,000 to 16,000 people in Elmwood and the Reservoir Triangle extended by bus to parts of Cranston, South Providence, and the West End. An Atwells Avenue station might only have a capture area of 5,000 to 6,000 residents, but a station platform at this location would be a critical link to Atwells Avenue restaurant/retail tourism district, as well as, commercial and industrial space in the Eagle Square vicinity and residential neighborhoods in the Valley area, parts of Federal Hill, Lower Mount Pleasant and Olneyville. A Cranston station located at or near Park Avenue would have a rough capture area of 6,000 people from Cranston, South Elmwood, and Warwick. If a Park Avenue bus route were reinstated for the full length of the avenue, the station’s passenger capture area could be further expanded. This location would likely be a major MBTA commuter station and require automotive access and parking facilities.
To justify the construction costs for the TF Green and Wickford commuter rail stations and parking facilities, there should be as many commuters destined for Providence as for Boston. It is possible for commuters to access distant employment areas within the Boston/Cambridge area because Boston’s subway extends the reach of commuter rail stations. The expanded Downtown Providence area will be handicapped as several of the city’s employment areas are beyond reasonable walking distance and underserved by bus transit. It’s essential to build at least a portion of the Core Connector to make Providence Station viable as a destination commuter rail station.
Maximum interconnectivity to multiple stations with a large potential passenger base is the key to creating a robust rail system. The current blueprint for Rhode Island commuter rail is limited. To revive older neighborhoods and improve the state’s economic base, the rail system should serve more than just Providence and Boston commuters and intercity train travelers. Providing a handful of expensive commuter rail stations, most of which in low-density suburbs, is not enough to substantially increase commuter train ridership and insure the success of the system. It would have to be confirmed, but it’s likely that between Central Falls and Cranston there are 100,000 people that could reach the rail line by a short walk or bus ride.
It may be unconventional to propose constructing inexpensive infill train stations geared toward pedestrians and bus riders without parking, who would be served by shuttle trains, but it would transform Rhode Island’s rail system into rapid mass-transit, as well as, commuter and intercity rail. Besides being economical, urban infill stations could be built quickly. Since platforms are relatively low cost and there’s a present need to improve the regularity of train service between Providence and the airport, rather than spending years on studies, conducting a pilot program where a few or several urban infill stations could be built would be worth testing. All passenger types would benefit with this truly competitive alternative to driving within the core metro area. The passenger base for RIPTA buses would be reinforced and expanded, as would MBTA commuter trains. There may be objections from Amtrak and the MBTA or others regarding close proximity of stations and frequency of service. Since Amtrak schedules are on one- or two-hour intervals and MBTA trains run approximately on the half hour at weekday peak and less frequently at other times, urban infill stations and shuttle train service operating mostly on the freight track shouldn’t interfere with either agency. The advantages of developing a rapid-transit rail spine for Rhode Island’s people and economy would outweigh any objections.
Destination Centralization
It’s by now a commonplace that jobs are more centralized than residences, in terms of CBD concentration. But what I think is worse-known is that destinations in general are incredibly centralized, both across and within metro areas. In other words, people from out of town, especially out of country, are more likely to visit the more central metro regions, and within those regions are more likely to visit city center.
For good examples, take tourist travel to Britain and France, both conveniently capital-centric for this discussion. London has 15.6 million annual international visitors, slightly more than its metro area population; Paris has 9.7 million, slightly less than its metro area population. Most secondary cities in both Britain and France don’t even come close: the same ratio in Glasgow, Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool, and Birmingham ranges from one quarter to one half, and in secondary French cities is even lower, down to one ninth for Marseille. (Nice and Monaco, a specialized tourist region, punch above their weight; so does Edinburgh.) You can peruse the numbers and see that the same observation is true in a number of countries with one well-known global city, excepting those with a different region specializing in tourism.
For business travel specifically, one look at the distribution of four- and five-star hotels in a country and a metro region will show similar centralization. For example, consider the New York hotels shown on Five Star Alliance. Counting separately listed hotels in Connecticut, there are 56 five-star hotels, of which 50 are in Manhattan (mostly in Midtown), four in Fairfield County, and one each in Hoboken and Huntington. On hotels.com, there are 40 four-and-a-half- and five-star hotels; of those I can find information about 37, and of those 36 are in Manhattan and one is in White Plains. In Boston, Five Star Alliance shows 18 hotels, one in Cambridge and the rest in Back Bay and Downtown Boston; hotels.com shows 11, all downtown or in Back Bay. In Philadelphia, Five Star Alliance shows 8 and hotels.com 4 of which I can find information about 3, and in both cases all hotels are in Center City.
Let’s untangle what this means. Of course there’s a concentration of activity in Manhattan, Downtown Boston, and Center City. Just not that much. Manhattan has 22% of the jobs in Greater New York; it doesn’t have 50 in 56 jobs, or even 50 in 56 jobs that require commuting (it has 36% of jobs that involve out-of-county commuting).
I believe this boils down to a specialization of usages that attract visitors from far away. There is tourism in the Hamptons and the Jersey Shore, in the Poconos and the Hudson Highlands, in Vermont and Cape Cod. However, a huge fraction of it is local. I doubt anyone from California has ever visited the Northeast for the primary purpose of skiing in Vermont, unless it involved a corporate retreat with a lot of locals. The things that are special enough to attract people from far away are by definition uncommon. Moreover, unless those are obscure niches, they will be famous enough to have the resources to pay for prime location. They’ll cluster in the CBDs of the largest cities because everything else relevant to them is in the CBDs of the largest cities; the main factor that can break agglomeration economics, high cost, is less relevant to them.
It’s the same reason why CBDs so often host corporate headquarters, major law firms, and similar outfits. Once the cluster has been established, everyone wants to be in it, and as a result of competition, only the richest users, typically the ones with the most global networks (thus, most likely to bring in outside travelers), can afford it.
What this means for an intercity transportation network is that being located downtown has great value, even in very suburbanized metro areas. A station in the San Francisco CBD is more valuable than one in San Jose or Gilroy, and a station in Downtown Los Angeles is more valuable than one in the San Fernando Valley or Palmdale. The same is of course true of the intermediate cities, and this is why there’s a good reason to serve their downtowns rather than skirt them as the LGVs do. (Of course, there are other reasons – cost and noise – to not serve their downtowns. However, ignoring costs, the benefits are on the side of downtown stations, making a value engineering decision to avoid urban areas less obvious.)
This is one primary advantage of high-speed rail over flying: it gets you closer to your destination. To leverage that, operators make sure to locate their stations as close as practically possible to the CBD. In no place that I am aware of did HSR serve a city at a peripheral location, except when necessary for line geometry. Japan National Railways built Shin-Osaka because it was impossible for a through-line to get to Osaka Station above ground, and SNCF builds peripheral stations for small towns to avoid expensive urban construction; in neither case do trains pass by a CBD but stop elsewhere, and in both countries HSR builders make major effort when reasonably practical to serve city centers.
Pedestrian Observations 