Category: Transportation
What’s a Subway/El?
The rapid transit built in New York beginning with the first els codified two characteristics that spread to the rest of the US, and are often seen in other countries’ rapid transit networks as well. First, it is separate from surface transit – even when it did still have grade crossings, they were controlled railroad crossings, rather than street-running segments as is common on light rail. And second, it is separate from mainline rail.
Not much later than New York started building els, Berlin built the Stadtbahn, also an urban elevated railroad. However, it was meant to be used for mainline rail from the start, with two local passenger tracks and two long-distance passenger and freight tracks. Part of the impetus was to connect different railroad terminals within the city, which American cities did by building union stations disconnected from local traffic. Shortly later, Tokyo built its own mainline rapid transit system – the Yamanote Line bypass in 1885 and Tokyo Station connecting the Chuo and Tokaido lines in 1914. Both cities ran frequent local commuter service early, Berlin doing so even before electrification.
Of course, nowadays US regulations locked in the separation of rapid transit from commuter rail, but at the time, there was no such separation. New York could have built its subway to mainline specifications and run trains through to the LIRR. It didn’t because of historical accidents – it preferred compatibility with the els and even when the BRT chose a wider loading gauge for its own subway network, it still opted for narrower trains than on mainline track. At the time it seemed like no big deal, although some of the subway lines built were redundant with existing commuter lines (for example, the Flushing Line with the Port Washington Line). Again due to historical practice, commuter rail did not try to operate to rapid transit standards, keeping frequency low, and so nearly all urban stations closed. In both New York and Chicago, it’s often easy to figure out where the city ends or where the subway/L network ends because that’s the point beyond which commuter train stop spacing narrows, providing makeshift local service.
In subsequent decades, the German and Japanese approach proved itself much more capable of providing good transit to growing suburbs. In Tokyo, subways are legally railroads, and most lines are compatible with at least one commuter line in order to permit through-service. German cities have mainline rapid transit (S-Bahn) and also separate subways or subway-light rail combinations (both called U-Bahn). Many other cities and countries had to adopt the same system to increase transit ridership, at much higher cost since the necessary viaducts and tunnels connecting stub-end terminals were done much later. This is what led to the Paris RER, and what’s led to Thameslink and now Crossrail in London. Any other approach would require spending even more money on extending urban lines to the suburbs, exactly what’s done now in the two big suburban-focused US rapid transit systems, the Washington Metro and BART.
The kink is that despite the above problems of subways that are separate from both mainline and street rail, there’s now a different reason to build such lines after all: they can be made driverless. Most first-world cities already have legacy rapid transit or else have so much sprawl rapid transit is inappropriate, and third-world cities aren’t saving much money by eliminating drivers, but in the few cases of new builds (Vancouver, Dubai, Copenhagen, the newer lines in Singapore), driverless trains are common, and this allows trains to run more frequently, or even 24/7 in Copenhagen’s case.
This kink aside, there’s really no reason for a city to build a new New York-style subway, i.e. disconnected from light and commuter rail and running with a driver. Extending a legacy system is fine, but for new systems, there’s no point. This could be especially bad in growing third-world cities, which could find themselves paying too much for a subway they don’t need or unable to connect a subway they do need to the suburbs once they start suburbanizing. Third-world construction costs aren’t much if at all lower than first-world costs, but wages are much lower.
Some of the world’s largest cities have made or are making this mistake. Mumbai is building a new subway, on a different track gauge from the Indian mainline network, preventing through-service to the overburdened commuter trains. Shanghai and Beijing have vast subway networks, without express tracks or any ability for trains to run fast through city center; they have widely spaced stops so that they are faster than most other subway systems, but they have nothing on the rapid commuter trains in Tokyo. (Beijing is also developing a parallel commuter rail network, running diesel trains from the exurbs to the traditional city terminals at low frequency.) It works fine now, but when Shanghai grows and suburbanizes to the degree Tokyo has, it may find itself having to spend many billions on digging new tunnels.
Since a New York-style subway is inappropriate for new builds, some cities need to ask themselves which of the three kinds is the most appropriate. A subway-surface solution is mainly an option when one underground line can naturally split into multiple surface lines, as is the case in Boston, San Francisco, Cologne, and Frankfurt; this is because there’s a big difference between on-street and grade-separated capacity.
Tel Aviv, which is building a subway-surface line without any branching, is doing it wrong. For the other choice, I believe it’s a matter of how well-developed the suburban rail network is, and how much future suburbanization the city can realistically expect. In Tel Aviv specifically there’s also a separate element, which is that for religious reasons public transit does not run on weekend. If driverless technology makes the difference between trains that run 24/7 and trains that run 16/6, then it should be used even at the cost of otherwise worse service to some suburbs and destinations easily reached by legacy rail branches.
Finally, in North America, one of the reasons to engage in strong regulatory reform is to allow the mainline option to work. Some lines, for example the Harbor Subdivision between LAX and Union Station, should ideally host a mixture of local and rapid trains on the same tracks, and also allow intercity trains; if the Harbor Sub becomes an electrified commuter line then high-speed trains could serve the airport, providing a connection from the Central Valley to a major airport in addition to SFO, which would only get a station at Millbrae.
More in general, the only real disadvantage of legacy commuter networks is that they tend to not be very dense in the center of the city, requiring new builds; most of the Tokyo subway is just lines offering the commuter lines more capacity into the CBD, overlaying itself to also provide a tight in-city network. There’s no technical reason not to just build an electrified local mainline network as its transportation backbone, and if more capacity is required then build additional lines in the mold of Tokyo.
One-Way Pairs: the Bad and the Ugly
One of Jane Jacobs’ prescient observations about bus service in The Death and Life is that one-way pairs, as practiced on the avenues in Manhattan, are bad for riders. Her argument was that one-way pairs require people to walk too long to the bus line, and this cancels out any gains in speed. (This is truer today, when signal priority is an option, than it was fifty years ago.) Jarrett Walker has formalized this in two posts using station radius as an argument; the issue is that passengers need to be within a short walking distance of both halves of the line, and this reduces coverage.
However, not all one-way pairs are created equal. An underrated reason to keep bus services on one line is simplicity: it’s easier to remember that a route follows one street than that it follows two, and also service to specific destinations can become easier. Taking a cue from proper rapid transit, ITDP’s magnum opus BRT standard treats it as a given that buses should run in the median of a street and only even lists one-way pairs as an option on very narrow streets, and even then as an inferior one. The argument revolves around service identity.
In particular, one-way pairs that preserve a semblance of service identity and simplicity are not as bad as one-way pairs that do not. For the original walk-distance reason, it’s also better to have the one-way pair closer together. Jarrett specifically praises Portland’s light rail one-way pair, located a short block apart, as an example of a good couplet. Manhattan’s one-way pairs are located a long block apart, so the walking distance is worse.
But even Manhattan’s one-way pairs are at least coherent. The First/Second Avenue bus follows First and Second Avenues for the entire length of the avenues; south of Houston, it follows Allen, the continuation of First. This is the advantage of the grid. In Providence, things are not as nice, though still somewhat coherent, if one remembers, for example, that Angell and Waterman Streets form a one-way pair (they’re treated as such for car travel, too, so anyone in the neighborhood would know, though people from outside would not).
In contrast, this is how Tel Aviv’s one-way pairs work. They’re getting worse amidst the various bus reform. The post is in Hebrew, but look at the map at the bottom of bus #5, the city’s busiest (and most frequently bombed back in the 1990s and early 2000s). The travesty is that none of those streets on which the line runs in one direction only is even one-way. East of Ibn Gabirol, the street hosting lines 25, 26, and 189 on the map, the streets are wide and two-way. The reason for the complication is lack of left turns. In order to make car traffic flow a little more smoothly, Tel Aviv has completely eviscerated its bus service.
In principle, Tel Aviv has infrastructure for consistent one-way pairs when necessary and regular two-way service elsewhere. For example, Dizengoff and Ben Yehuda, the two north-south streets hosting buses to the west, function as such for cars. They both have contraflow lanes for buses, allowing buses to use them as two-way streets; some do (for example, #5 on Dizengoff), while others still go one-way (for examples, #9 and #55). Likewise, Jabotinsky, the east-west street feeding into the big circuit, is one-way and narrow west of Ibn Gabirol, and could be a one-way pair with Arlozorov to its south; but Arlozorov is kept two-way, and so #66 is two-way, and #22 uses the two as a one-way pair. (By the way, those are fan-made maps; the official maps don’t use color to distinguish routes, and are thus completely unusable.)
The results of the mess coming from ending any service coherence are predictable. Israeli car ownership, low by first-world standards, is rising rapidly, and the social justice and affordable housing protesters are now complaining about high fuel prices. None of them is anti-transit on principle, and all who I confront tell me they’d ride transit if it were usable. I live without a car in a city with worse transit than Tel Aviv, but to me car ownership is not aspirational. When the only transit people know in their country is unusable, people this generation will get cars. The next bus reform will then take into account more left turn restrictions coming from the need to accommodate more vehicles. The next generation of people will grow up with the expectation of even worse bus service and not conceive of any alternative to automobility.
Amtrak Expects 10 Billion Passengers
April 1, 2042
Washington – the National Railroad Passenger Corporation (AMTRAK) expects ridership in fiscal 2042 to top 10 billion and net profit to top $8 billion, after an aggressive program of expansion. Ridership in fiscal 2041 was 9.8 billion, predominantly on a network of regional lines in the Northeast and California, and net profit was $7.3 billion, split about evenly between the core regional networks and the national high-speed intercity train network.
The members of the board who resigned during the shakeup of 2014 sent Amtrak President Natalie Biden a letter of congratulations for Amtrak’s achievement of its long-term goals of fiscal sustainability, network expansion, and mode shift; Amtrak is credited with spearheading the growth of mass transit use in the United States, which as of the 2040 census stands at 30% of commuters.
Although the members who resigned in 2014 and 2015 left the railroad indefinitely and pursued other interests or joined the private sector, an insider within the company who spoke on condition of anonymity explained, “The entire structure of Amtrak was put together in the reforms from 2013 on. The people who implemented them were simply unfortunate enough to get caught in the scandals about the cost overruns, but the people who took charge later just implemented the original plan.”
Amtrak had initially proposed to spend $117 billion on implementing high-speed rail on the Northeast Corridor between Boston and Washington, but backlash due to the plan’s high cost led to a scaling back behind the scenes. After the regulatory reforms of 2013, a new team of planners, many hired away from agencies in Japan, France, and Switzerland, proposed a version leveraging existing track, achieving almost the same speed for only $5 billion in upfront investment. They explained that the full cost of the system would be higher, but service could open before construction concluded, and profits could be plugged into the system.
To get the plans past Congress, President Barack Obama had to agree to limit the funds to a one-time extension of Amtrak’s funding in the transportation bill S 12, which would give it $13 billion for expansion as well as ordinary operating subsidies over six years. To defeat a Senate filibuster, the extension had a clause automatically dismantling Amtrak and selling its assets in case it ran out of money, leading to the first wave of resignations by longtime officials.
Despite assurances that both the cost and the ridership estimates were conservative, the program was plagued with delays and mounting costs, and to conserve money Amtrak needed to cancel some of its money-losing long-distance routes and engage in a controversial lease-back program selling its rolling stock to banks. The modifications required to let the Shinkansen bullet trains decided for the system run in the Northeast pushed back the completion of the first run from the middle of 2015 to the beginning of 2017. The president and most of the board as well as the engineers resigned in 2014, and many of their replacements resigned in the subsequent two years. When the reformed system opened in 2017, it was still incomplete because some of the high-speed segments had no funding yet, travel time from Boston to Washington was four hours and a quarter, rather than the promised three and a half.
2017 was also the last year in which Amtrak lost money. Ridership on the Northeast Corridor intercity trains topped 20 million, and in 2018 it operationally broke even, allowing it to use $1.5 billion in unspent S 12 money on completing the full system by 2020. To simplify its temporary deals with track owners in Connecticut and Massachusetts, it made a complex deal with the Northeastern commuter railroads in which it took over operations, with existing amounts of state money lasting until 2022. The primary purpose was to allow rapidly moving workers between divisions, away from commuter trains, which were being streamlined to reduce staffing, and toward the growing high-speed rail market. A similar deal was made in California, where Amtrak leveraged its operation of commuter trains in the Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay Areas and its fledgling profits to take control of the California High-Speed Rail system, whose initial operating segment opened in 2019.
Although industry insiders believed that the takeover was intended entirely to streamline labor issues, in 2020 Amtrak announced a reorganization, in which commuter trains within each metropolitan area would be run without respect for state boundaries or previous agency boundaries. Starting with the preexisting fare union with the MBTA, from which it bought Boston’s commuter rail operations, it entered into fare union and schedule coordination agreements with the major cities in the Northeast and California, allowing the local commuter rail lines to act as complements to the urban subway networks. Although this had been hinted in the original plans drawn up in 2013, the separation of agencies and Amtrak’s focus on building the core high-speed network delayed this.
Together with aggressive construction of extensions and long-desired urban commuter rail projections, usually at much lower cost than advertised in the 2000s and 10s, the changes led to a rapid increase in ridership. Together with the commuter lines, Amtrak’s ridership was 700 million in 2020. By 2030, it had risen to 4 billion. By then, high-speed lines opened along more corridors, connecting from the Northeast to Albany, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, and Atlanta; from California to Phoenix and Las Vegas; and in the Midwest from Chicago to Cleveland, Detroit, and St. Louis. Most, though not all, are operated by Amtrak, with seamless inter-railroad operation through trackage rights, and in many of these cities, beginning with Chicago, the local transit agencies engaged in the same commuter rail modernization afforded to the Northeast and invested in additional rapid transit or light rail lines. The effect on the share of commuters using public transportation to get to work was large. In the Philadelphia region it rose from 12% in 2020 to 36% in 2040, in the Chicago region it rose from 15% to 39%, and in the Los Angeles region it rose from 9% to 40%.
Not all commentators and transportation professionals agree with Amtrak’s role in the trend of rising public transportation use. The libertarian Reason Foundation and its associated Siemens Institute for Urban Development both note that the largest cities in the United States also upzoned to allow for taller buildings near train stations. SIUD’s statement cites 2020s development near Secaucus Junction in New Jersey, two stops away from Penn Station, as one example. The head of the Reason Foundation’s transportation program said, “Amtrak is fully unionized, and this may spell problems in the future,” adding that so far it had only been able to maintain productivity because of its fast growth, but in the future layoffs and pay cuts may be necessary.
On the left, the Mayor of Atlanta attacked Amtrak’s focus on profits and its unwillingness to help set up regional rail in the South. He said, “We have a lot of people here who think that trains are just something for rich people. I know that it’s not true – I mean, this focus on public transit began back when it was opposite – but nowadays rich cities like New York and Los Angeles have this infrastructure and Atlanta doesn’t. None of the people who set up this system intended to have this racial effect, but it’s there, and we need to address it.” Both members of Congress representing part of the city released statements agreeing with the mayor’s remarks, and one of their staffers, speaking on background, added that she finds it suspect that the revival of public transportation in the US began just as African-American motorization accelerated in the early years of this century.
In fact, Senator Katrina Schweitzer (D-MT) announced her intention to introduce an amendment to the existing Climate Change Reduction Acts, to lower the carbon and pollution taxes collected from rural states. Beltway insiders consider the friction point to be remarks made by several members of the Amtrak board in the early 2030s, taking credit for near-unanimous Northeastern and Californian support for the first such act in 2030. Sen. Schweitzer’s office released numbers showing a divergence between living standards in the Northeast, the West Coast, and the Chicago region, and the rest of the country, coming from reduced urban costs of living and increased rural costs. As an alternative, Sen. Schweitzer’s office added, Amtrak should be required to spend its profits on expanding to the South and Interior West. Amtrak ruled out such a move in the short run.
Transportation-Development Symbiosis
The RPA’s Regional Assembly has included the following idea submission: expand reverse-commuter rail service. The proposal calls for surveying city residents to look for the main available reverse-commuter markets, and for expanding reverse-peak service on the model of Metro-North. It unfortunately does not talk about doing anything at the work end – it talks about looking at where city residents could go to the suburbs on commuter rail, but not about which suburban job markets could be served from any direction.
I don’t want to repeat myself about what transit agencies have to do to be able to serve suburban jobs adequately (if “suburban” is the correct way to think of Providence and New Haven), and so I’m going to sound much harsher toward the idea than I should be. Suffice is to say that talking about development requires a lot of reforms to operating practices. With that in mind, let’s look at some suburban job centers in the Northeast: Providence, Stamford, Hicksville, New Haven. As can be seen, those stations all look very suburban, and even Providence is surrounded by sterile condos, with the mall located a short, unpleasant walk away. Compare this with the urbanity that one finds around major suburban train stations in Tokyo, such as Kokubunji and Tachikawa.
But really, the kind of development that’s missing around suburban train stations in the US is twofold. First, the local development near the stations is not transit-oriented, in the sense that big job and retail centers may be inconvenient to walk to for the pedestrian. And second, the regional development does not follow the train lines, but rather arterial roads, or, in cities with rapid transit, rapid transit lines – for example, one of Long Island’s two biggest edge cities, East Garden City, is diffuse and far from existing LIRR stations (the other, Mineola, is relatively okay).
In both cases, what’s missing is transportation-development symbiosis. Whoever runs the trains has the most to gain from locating major office and retail development, without excessive parking, near the train stations. And whoever owns the buildings has the most to gain from running trains to them, to prop up property values. This leads to the private railroad conglomerates in Tokyo, and to the Hong Kong MTR.
The same symbiosis can be done with government actors, but isn’t, not in the US, and the RPA’s attempts to change this and promote integrated planning have so far not succeeded. Hickville recently spent $36.4 million on a parking garage adjacent to the station plus some extra sum on expanding road access, but none of the relevant actors has made any effort to upzone the station area for commercial, to allow easier commuting. Providence is renovating the station, with pretty drawings, but doing far short of a redesign that would add development to the area.
The importance of this symbiosis, coming back to the original idea, is that the correct question to ask is not, “Where can city residents go to the suburbs to work?” but rather “Which suburban and secondary-urban destinations can be adequately served by rail?” In all four Northeastern cities under discussion, there is more than one direction from which commuters could come. From the commuter railroad’s perspective, a rider who takes the train in the traditional peak direction but gets off in a suburb short of the CBD is a free fare, just like an off-peak rider or a reverse-peak rider.
The task for regional planners (as opposed to service planners and railroad managers) is then a combination of the following priorities:
1. As noted above, ensuring edge city and secondary CBD development is both close to train stations and easily accessible by pedestrians.
2. Aggressively upzoning near potential station sites, with an eye for junctions, such as Sunnyside, Secaucus, and New Rochelle.
3. Examining where people working in secondary centers are living, and which rail lines could be leveraged to serve them and where new construction would be needed. For example, Providence could use rail to Woonsocket and the East Bay and more local service to Cranston and Warwick, but reviving the tunnel to the East Bay could be expensive and needs to be studied carefully. Note that north of South Attleboro, there are very few people living near the Providence Line working in Providence, and so reverse-peak service is useful mainly in the original sense of people reverse-commuting from Boston, in contrast with service to Massachusetts suburbs of Providence such as Seekonk.
The problem with doing all three is political: current regional rail traffic is dominated by suburbanites using it as an extension of driving into the city. This influences local thinking because the economics of residential development are not the same as those of commercial development. Agglomeration and density are less important. Transfers and long access distances are more acceptable. People traveling within the suburb go toward the station in the AM peak rather than away from it, and so parking availability is more important. Take all of these together and you get a powerful constituency supporting continuing to choke suburban train stations with parking and sterile development for city-bound commuters, no matter how many tens of thousands of jobs are nearby.
This is why some symbiosis is necessary. One way to do it is via market mechanisms: if a well-capitalized company gets ownership of the transit infrastructure and is free to develop with few zoning constraints, it could decide to build office towers in Hicksville on top of the train station, or develop the empty lots near New Haven and Providence. This is possible, but may well be too hard politically, even more so than direct zoning reform, because every trope used by the community to oppose the changes (namely, fear of outsiders) would apply and also there would be explicit loss of control.
The other way is the public way, which is where integrated planning comes in. Even on the level of intransigent railroads, it may work if all done together. In other words, there would be simultaneous effort to add reverse-peak service on the LIRR and the MBTA, upzone surrounding station areas and make them more walkable at the expense of some parking spaces, direct major developments such as malls and office complexes to the resulting TOD, and integrate local transit with the changed commuter service in all directions.
But whatever is done, it’s critical to integrate the two functions, of transportation and development. There’s no need for an overarching bureaucracy to take care of it all, even – just cooperation between regional planners, local planners, and transit managers. Transit needs thick markets, and if all development outside the primary CBD is diffuse and auto-oriented, there will not be any thick markets for it to serve. A transit revival necessarily requires new markets, and this means going after what are now hopelessly auto-oriented suburbs. And what needs to be done is not just figuring out where new service is required or where car-free urbanites commute to, but also what kind of TOD can be done at each secondary job center.
Quick Note: Good News Week
Via Systemic Failure, I learn that the FRA is finally reforming its train safety regulations on its own. This is an amazing development, partial as it is. This appears to derive from the FRA’s previous research into crash energy management, which concluded that buff strength alone did poorly at protecting train occupants. This development is especially good for the MBTA and Metra, as agencies that could make large orders, especially of EMUs if they electrify (and both have good reason to); this will allow them to obtain better EMUs, for example measured by weight, than currently run in New York and Philadelphia.
Unfortunately, the reforms are partial, and lack two elements. First, they start from past crash tests, rather than from good rolling stock, and may still require imports to undergo substantial modifications; this is not a problem for large orders, but tends to raise the unit cost for small orders. That said, the rules are being developed in consultation with representatives from many rolling stock vendors, not only the large ones as with Caltrain’s waiver application but also smaller ones such as Nippon Sharyo and Stadler. Second, they do nothing about operating rules as opposed to procurement rules; these include brake tests, cant deficiency rules (only partially reformed), and so on. Still, count this as a positive development for the FRA.
The other good transit news: the Florida East Coast Railway, a Class II railroad primarily carrying intermodal traffic between Jacksonville and Miami, is announcing a privately-funded $1 billion project to build a medium-speed line from its mainline to Orlando and run passenger trains between Orlando and Miami, making the trip in 3 hours. This corresponds to an average speed of about 80 mph, just under 130 km/h, or in other words the same as that achieved by the supposedly high-speed Acela between New York and Washington.
Train Weights, Bilevel Version
My previous table of train weights covered single-level trains, with the exception of the ultralight (for a bilevel) TGV Duplex. By request, here is a similar version for bilevels. Note that very light trains such as the E231 or DB’s Class 423 are inherently single-level – though a bilevel Green Car trailer version of the E231 is quite light, even at 50% heavier than a single-level trailer.
Recall that Lng is length in meters, Wt is empty weight in (metric) tons, Width is in meters, Pow is maximum short-term power in megawatts, P/W is power-to-weight in kilowatts per ton, Ld is average load per axle in tons, and Wt/Lng is weight in tons per meter of train length.
| Train | Lng | Wt | Width | Pow | P/W | Ld | Wt/lng |
| E231 series Green Car | 20 | 36 | 2.95 | 0 | 0 | 9 | 1.79 |
| 215 Series | 200 | 368.5* | 2.9 | 1.92 | 5.2 | 9.2 | 1.84 |
| TGV Duplex | 200 | 380 | 2.9 | 8.8 | 23.2 | 14.6 | 1.9 |
| Bom. BiLevel Coach | 26 | 50 | 3 | 0 | 0 | 12.5 | 1.91 |
| KISS, Regional | 150 | 297 | 2.8 | 6 | 20.2 | 12.4 | 1.97 |
| KISS, Interregio | 100 | 212 | 2.8 | 6 | 28.3 | 13.3 | 2.11 |
| E4 Series | 201 | 428 | 3.38 | 6.72 | 15.7 | 13.4 | 2.13 |
| NS DD-AR (w/ mDDM) | 100 | 221 | 2.8 | 2.4 | 10.86 | 13.8 | 2.21 |
| GO Transit MPI hauling 12 Bom. BiLevel Coaches | 332 | 734 | 3.24 | 3 | 4.1 | 14.1 | 2.21 |
| Metra Highliner | 26 | 59 | 3.2? | ? | ? | 14.8 | 2.28 |
| Caltrain Coradia | 213 | 517 | 3.2? | ? | ? | 16.2 | 2.43 |
| X40 (Coradia, Sweden) | 81.5 | 205 | 2.96 | 2.4 | 11.7 | 17.1 | 2.52 |
| Caltrain MPI hauling 5 Bom. BiLevel Coaches | 150.5 | 384 | 3.24 | 3 | 7.8 | 16 | 2.55 |
| CityRail A-sets | 78 | 201 | 3.04 | ? | ? | 12.6 | 2.57 |
| MI 2N | 112 | 288 | 2.9 | 4.5 | 15.6 | 14.4 | 2.57 |
| Colorado Railcar, bilevel | 26 | 74 | 3.2? | 0.96 | 13 | 18.5 | 2.86 |
*Caltrain claims the same weight – see pages 36 (which partially confuses the train with a heavier Shinkansen) and 45 of its document about bilevel EMUs. Japanese Wikipedia claims a much lower weight, coming from substituting 2 for the leading 3. Given everything else, the higher figure seems more likely (with thanks to Miles Bader for pointing the above link out).
The observation here is that FRA compliance no longer neatly separates trains. Part of it comes from the very heavy low-speed trains in France, of which the MI 2N is an example. I do not know whether this is caused by special regulations – on the one hand, the TGV reportedly has 500 tons of buff strength, but on the other hand, Sweden’s X40 is also quite heavy.
The reason for this is that while high buff strength adds weight, its effect is much larger on lightweight frames than on heavyweight frames. A train that is already heavy will become heavier if it is required to be FRA-compliant, but typically only by a few tons. New Jersey Transit’s ALP-46 locomotive is 7 tons heavier than the European locomotive it is based on, of which 4.5 come from FRA regulations. This applies equally well to low-power bilevels. Even lightweight, high-power products such as the KISS would be considered middleweight by single-level standards.
Observe, however, that to achieve acceptable average weight, FRA-compliant products have to sacrifice power (as is done in Toronto or on Caltrain) and also to have a heavy locomotive drag many relatively light coaches, raising axle load. For fast service, one must use a product like the Colorado Railcar, which is the heaviest train per unit of weight on both this table and the single-level table, and which also awkwardly is a high-level train with much greater height than permitted by any European loading gauge, avoiding the low-floor weight penalty.
Surreptitious Underfunding
One third of the MBTA’s outstanding debt, about $1.7 billion, comes from transit projects built by the state as part of a court-imposed mitigation for extra Big Dig traffic; interest on this debt is about two-thirds the agency’s total present deficit. Metra was prepared to pay for a project to rebuild rail bridges that would increase clearance below for trucks and cut the right-of-way’s width from three to two tracks. Rhode Island is spending $336 million on extending the Providence Line to Wickford Junction, with most of the money going toward building parking garages at the two new stations; Wickford Junction, in a county whose number of Boston-bound commuters is 170, is getting 1,200 parking spaces.
Supporters of transportation alternatives talk about the inequity between highway and transit funding in the US, but what they’re missing is that the transit funding bucket includes a lot of things that are manifestly not about transit. At their best, they are parking lots and other development schemes adjacent to train stations, which would’ve been cheap by themselves. At their worst, they are straight highway projects, benefiting road users only.
The situation in Boston, while unique in its brazenness, is not unique in concept. In the US, where there are no pollution taxes on fuel, the only way to mitigate air pollution is by regulation and by building alternatives simultaneously. Put another way, combined highway and transit construction is in most cases not really a combined project; it’s a highway project, plus required mitigation. Requiring the transit agency to shoulder the debt and the operating subsidies is exactly requiring transit users to pay for highways. It’s equivalent to charging transit multiple dollars per gallon of gas saved from any mode shift. And it may get even worse: the proposed House transportation bill includes a provision to allow spending national air pollution control funds on regular highway widening, in addition to the current practice of spending them on carpool lanes.
Historically, the diversion of funding from transit to roads took such insidious forms. For an instructive example from Owen Gutfreund’s book, roads advocates fought to get driver’s license fees and even inspection fees for fuel trucks recognized as road user fees, whose proceeds must be diverted toward roads. For another example from the same book, in Denver, the streetcar system was required to cover 25% of the cost of road maintenance on one-way streets and 50% on two-way streets, and as car traffic rose, streetcars both became slower and had to send over more money toward roads.
Another instructive case study is grade separations. It is to my knowledge universal that expressways and high-speed railroads, both of which must be grade-separated, pay for their own grade separations. In all other cases, who pays is determined by which mode is more powerful, and in the US, this is roads. As the national highway system was built in the 1920s, interurban railroads were required to pay for grade-separations, even when the rail came first. The practice continues today: in Kentucky, the railroad has to shoulder the full cost if it’s from 1926 or newer (Statute 177.110), and half the construction cost and the full planning cost if it’s older (177.170). In contrast, in Japan, grade separations are considered primarily a road project, and so the Chuo Line track elevation project was paid 85% by the national and city governments and only 15% by JR East (page 36). The segment in question of the Chuo Line was built in 1889; I believe, but do not know, that new rail construction in Japan is always grade-separated, at the railroad’s expense.
The situation in the US today is a surreptitious underfunding of transit, and at the same time a surreptitious overfunding of roads. It is not subject to democratic debate or even to the usual lobbyist funding formulas, but, like the obscure regulations that impede good passenger rail, hidden in rules nobody thinks to question. To pay for road mitigations and for parking, transit agencies will cut weekend service and reduce frequency. It’s bad enough when done in the open, but it’s done while claiming that transit is too expensive to provide.
Table of Train Weights
Here are some trains, and their weights. The headline figure is weight per linear meter of length, but also includes other metrics of interest. Not included is any feature of interior design, such as the number of seats or the number and location of doors, as those reflect choices about seated vs. standing capacity and about the relative importance of quick boarding and alighting.
Most trains on the list are low-speed commuter trains, but a few are high-speed. All are EMUs, except for high-speed trains with dedicated power cars and two DMUs that are included for comparison. All are single-deck except the TGV Duplex, which is as light as a single-deck TGV.
All figures are in metric units. Length and width are in meters, weight in tons, and (short-term) power in megawatts. Load is the average weight in tons per axle; it is not the same as the axle load, which is the maximum loaded weight per axle. To the best of my ability, I’ve tried to give dry weights, without passengers, though I believe the N700 Shinkansen number is with passengers.
For English units, 1 metric ton per linear meter equals 0.336 short tons per linear foot.
| Train | Lng | Wt | Width | Pow | P/W | Ld | Wt/lng |
| E231 Series | 200 | 256 | 2.95 | 1.52 | 5.9 | 6.4 | 1.28 |
| E231 Series motor | 20 | 28.5 | 2.95 | 0.38 | 13.3 | 7.1 | 1.43 |
| DBAG Class 423 | 67.4 | 105 | 3.02 | 2.35 | 22.4 | 10.5 | 1.56 |
| Talgo AVRIL | 200 | 315 | 3.2 | 8.8 | 27.9 | 15 | 1.57 |
| E233 Series | 200 | 319 | 2.95 | 3.36 | 10.5 | 8 | 1.59 |
| FLIRT, Swiss | 74 | 120 | 2.88 | 2.6 | 21.7 | 12 | 1.62 |
| A-Train, Japan (E257) | 185.5 | 306 | 2.95 | 2.9 | 9.5 | 8.5 | 1.65 |
| Desiro Classic | 41.7 | 69 | 2.83 | 0.55 | 8 | 11.5 | 1.65 |
| E751 Series motor | 20.5 | 34 | 2.98 | 0.58 | 17 | 8.5 | 1.66 |
| DBAG Class 425 | 67.5 | 114 | 2.84 | 2.35 | 20.6 | 11.4 | 1.69 |
| FLIRT, Finnish | 75 | 132 | 3.2 | 2.6 | 19.7 | 13.2 | 1.76 |
| N700 Series | 405 | 715 | 3.36 | 17.08 | 23.9 | 11.2 | 1.77 |
| CAF Regional | 98 | 175 | 2.94 | 2.4 | 13.7 | 14.6 | 1.79 |
| E351 Series | 252 | 456 | 2.84 | 3.6 | 7.9 | 9.5 | 1.81 |
| BR Class 357 | 83 | 158 | 2.8 | 1.68 | 10.7 | 9.9 | 1.9 |
| TGV Duplex | 200 | 380 | 2.9 | 8.8 | 23.2 | 14.6 | 1.9 |
| X60 | 107 | 206 | 3.26 | 3 | 14.6 | 14.7 | 1.93 |
| Coradia Cont., 4 cars | 71 | 140 | 2.92 | 2.88 | 20.6 | 14 | 1.97 |
| Francilien (SNCF Z 50000), 8 cars | 112.5 | 235 | 3.06 | 2.62 | 11.1 | 13.1 | 2.09 |
| Zefiro 380 | 215 | 462 | 3.4 | 10 | 21.6 | 14.4 | 2.15 |
| A-Train, UK HSR (BR 395) | 121 | 265 | 2.81 | 3.36 | 12.7 | 11 | 2.19 |
| LIRR M-7 | 26 | 57.5 | 3.2 | 0.8 | 13.9 | 14.4 | 2.21 |
| Velaro CN | 200 | 447 | 3.27 | 8.8 | 19.7 | 14 | 2.24 |
| MNRR M-8 | 26 | 65.5 | 3.2 | 0.8 | 12.2 | 16.4 | 2.52 |
| Silverliner V | 26 | 66.5 | 3.2 | 0.8? | 12? | 16.6 | 2.56 |
| Colorado Railcar, 1-level | 26 | 67 | 3.2? | 0.96 | 14.3 | 16.8 | 2.59 |
| Acela Express | 202 | 566 | 3.16 | 9.2 | 16.3 | 17.7 | 2.8 |
The table separates Japanese, European, and American trains, the latter two with hardly any overlap. I did not include too many French and British commuter trains, and those are fairly heavy by European standards, but even they are a bit lighter than the M-7, the lightest modern FRA-compliant train (British trains tend toward 2 t/m, French trains toward slightly more). I did include the lightest European trains I know of but not all the Japanese trains, selected mainly for the big Tokyo-area workhorses (E231, E233) and longer-range, higher-speed JR East trains that I thought were comparable to the needs of longer-distance American regional lines.
Eyeballing the non-American trains, I think it’s fair and unambitious to think of a train of the future that weighs 1.8 tons per meter, can achieve 15 kW/t, and is capable of 160 km/h. Multiple vendors beat that, often by a large enough margin to cushion against the slight weight increase coming from a wider loading gauge. The upshot of this is that any regulatory overhaul and regional rail revival in the US has to be coupled with a large train order replacing older, less capable trains over time, which means dropping an order for several thousand EMUs over 20 or so years. No single company can make all of these, but sharing in the order, as was done for the R160, could work.
FRA Rules Are Not Just Buff Strength
The FRA waiver approach, adopted by Caltrain, appears to be a relatively simple way for agencies to get out of the buff strength rule. Caltrain applied for and got a waiver from a number of regulations that increase train weight, including buff strength but also several others. The comments written in Caltrain’s application, as well as the experience from SMART, suggest that there are problems with the FRA bigger than just the one regulation that’s most glaringly unnecessary.
First, the regulations that Caltrain asked out of are not just buff strength, but also less sexy rules: corner posts, collision posts, anti-climb mechanism, and so on. All of these are extra work for trains, and Caltrain indicates that it’s impossible to modify European EMUs to meet these rules for a small order. It would result in “no bids,” the application said, based on feedback from the largest vendors.
Now, SMART’s experience is very high capital costs for rolling stock: $6.7 million per two-car DMU. Those are compliant DMUs; there were four other bids, some compliant and some not, all more expensive. However, even the noncompliant bids were not off-the-shelf. They were not even noncompliant in general – they needed to comply with all rules except buff strength. Off-the-shelf DMUs run on mainline tracks in North America with time separation. One positive example is the O-Train, which has spent $34 million on six three-car sets for a service expansion, using completely off-the-shelf Alstom Coradia trains for the new order; the initial order not only used off-the-shelf Bombardier Talents, but also piggybacked on a large Deutsche Bahn order.
Although the performance under a partial FRA regime can be comparable to that under a European regime, the cost of modifying small orders can be very large, as Caltrain discovered. As a result, commuter rail agencies make do with inferior products such as the Colorado Railcar (which loses 42 seconds accelerating to 60 mph, vs. about 30 for a Stadler GTW) and pay $4-5 million per car.
For large orders, the problem is less acute, and indeed, Northeastern commuter rail EMUs are fine, if not great. The M-7s are a little heavier than comparable European EMUs, and the Silverliner Vs and the M-8s are much heavier, but the cost per car is only about $2.5 million, the performance is fairly good, and the reliability is very high. Spread over more than a thousand M-7s, the modifications required to build a compliant EMU are not too expensive. The FRA or other branches of the government could theoretically try to get uniform designs for other cars to spread modification costs over multiple orders, but instead, the next-generation trains proposed for Amtrak orders are overweight and low-performance, and explicit geared toward the needs of local manufacturers rather than those of transit agencies.
Another issue is the reliance on large vendors in drafting regulations and waivers. That’s a first line of cost increase, since it could shut out smaller vendors, which can’t adapt to the unique regulations so easily. Auckland had 11 bids for rolling stock for its electrification project; Caltrain designed its waiver in consultation with 4. On top of this, note again that Caltrain said about the buff strength rule that “to require compliance would result in no bids received.” If there could be bids but they are too high, then it’s harder if at all possible to get waivers. Many of the regulations are quite small and vehicles could be modified to meet them, for some additional cost – nothing huge by itself, but added together, it makes a DMU cost $3.3 million per car and not $2 million.
Finally, while the waiver regime allows new rolling stock to get in, it says nothing about maintenance regimes. Caltrain did not ask for waivers from maintenance requirements, even though the FRA discourages multiple-unit trains by treating them as locomotives for maintenance purposes. The Talents, Coradias, etc. have established maintenance requirements, and often agencies order not only the trains but also maintenance over their lifetime, from the manufacturers, who already know how to fix them. They do not explode from undermaintenance in Europe. Neither do their counterparts in Japan.
The alternative approach is to start from service needs, rather than from bureaucratic needs. This is what I mean when I talk about FRA revolutions. A train or a train concept with a history of success elsewhere should by default be legal on mainline tracks in the US and so should the established operating and maintenance practice, and it’s up to the FRA to show that it’s unsafe rather than up for the manufacturers to prove it once again. This is to a large extent the approach used with time-share waivers, which have put Talents and soon Coradias on mainline track in Canada and GTWs and Desiros in the US. If collisions with freight trains are prevented using other means (not that FRA compliance offers much protection to begin with!), and there is a track record of normal operation absent freight trains, there should not be problems with running those trains on shared mainline track. They do it in Europe and Japan, more safely than in the US. There’s no legitimate reason not to import that practice.
Commuter Rail Stop Distribution
One of the features of American commuter rail is that it’s intended to be used by suburbanites. The propensity for making nearly every station a park-and-ride, with poor pedestrian access, is one effect of this. Another effect is stop distribution. It’s not just stop spacing – many commuter lines have tighter stop spacing than some European and Japanese lines – but rather where the stops are dense and where they aren’t. Normally, a commuter line will have densely spaced stops in the city, where the population is denser and there are more connection points and important destination, and thin out in the suburbs, where speed is more important. American commuter lines are different – in the city they make very few stops, since they don’t connect well to local transit and are treated as too special, but in the suburbs, at least the inner suburbs, they have very frequent stops.
For examples, let us compare Metra and the Paris RER. I’m choosing the RER because it’s an express system, meant to provide fast service within the city rather than comparable stop distance to the subway. Some RER lines even have a slightly American-style station distribution, if they don’t go deep into suburbia, making them more like express subway lines in New York, though even then the difference is much smaller than in the US, without even such long nonstop segments as 59th-125th Streets on the A/B/C/D. Metra is where the American stop distribution tendency is the most extreme, though the lines I picked are those for which Wikipedia lists mileage for stations. All distances in the following table are in kilometers and start from the Chicago terminus or from Châtelet-Les Halles.
| UP North | BNSF Line | Milwaukee North | RER A to Marne-la-Vallée | RER A to Cergy |
| 4.5 | 2.9 | 4.7 | 2.8 | 1.8 |
| 10.5 | 6 | 10.3 | 4.8 | 4.5 |
| 15.1 | 11.3 | 13.2 | 7.8 | 9.1 |
| 17.7 | 14.5 | 14.5 | 12.3 | 10.5 |
| 19.3 | 15.5 | 16.4 | 14.5 | 14.8 |
| 21.4 | 16.1 | 18.7 | ~15.5 | 17.5 |
| 23.2 | 17.7 | 23 | 17.6 | 18.8 |
| 24.5 | 18.8 | 26.1 | 20 | 25.6 |
| 25.4 | 19.8 | 28 | 22.7 | 29.7 |
| 26.7 | 21 | 30.3 | 24 | ~32.5 |
| 28.5 | 22.1 | 34 | 30 | 34.8 |
| 30.9 | 22.7 | 36.9 | 35 | 38.6 |
Observe that the stop spacing for the first 3-5 stops is very express, but drops to that of an average subway for the Metra line beyond that. The UP-North line is especially egregious – despite serving the densely populated North Side, it barely stops there, letting the Red Line do all the work. Meanwhile, on the RER A, this is not the case – although stop spacing tightens slightly beyond the first few stops, the effect is small. Even the long nonstop segment between Etoile and La Défense (the second and third stop on the RER A to Cergy) is not enough to create the same effect seen in Chicago, and to some extent other American cities.
Bear in mind, the RER is explicitly an express railroad, though it is fare-integrated with local transit within Paris proper. Systems called S-Bahn, as well as commuter rail in Japan, range from operationally indistinguishable to operationally barely distinguishable from wholly-urban rapid transit. Thus their stop spacing is much smaller, especially in the urban core.
Part of the issue is that there’s not much development around railroads in American cities, since development follows arterial roads and urban transit instead. This is related in both directions to the failure of commuter rail to provide good urban service: there’s upzoning around subway and light rail stations, but not around commuter rail stations. But even when there is development near commuter rail stations, such as around Forest Hills in New York, service is suburban-focused (midday LIRR frequency to Forest Hills is hourly).
Whatever the ultimate cause of this, the result is that commuter rail is not usable where people are most likely to ride transit. Thus it is not too useful for a transit revival. The present revivals proceed from the inside out, starting from the urban core and expanding to outer-urban neighborhoods and then inner suburbs. At each stage, it’s useful to expand transit a little bit beyond the reach of the revival to capture additional ridership, and perhaps hit an anchor, and so there’s room for additional transit use from farther out. This is short-circuited when urban and suburban transit are kept segregated. So far it’s not been enough to prevent some transit revival in some American cities, such as New York and Washington, but it’s a problem in such cities as Boston and Chicago and may prove a problem everywhere once cities run out of subway-accessible areas.
Pedestrian Observations 
